colonialism and decolonization || colonization and decolonization in the soviet union

Colonization and Decolonization in the Soviet UnionAuthor(s): Alexandre BennigsenSource: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 4, No. 1, Colonialism and Decolonization (Jan.,1969), pp. 141-151Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/259797 .

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Colonization and

Decolonization in the

Soviet Union

Alexandre Bennigsen

Discussion of the controversial problem of the relations between the Russian people and the peoples of many different races, languages, and cultures which from the middle of the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth century were incorporated, for the most part by force of arms, into the multinational Empire dominated by the Russians, presents many difficulties. A passionate and now long-standing polemic on this subject divides not only opponents and supporters of the Soviet regime, but also Russian communist and foreign historians. On the one side are to be found western anti-communist authors, native emigres, and even a few communist non-Russian writers; on the other, Russian or foreign supporters of the Soviet system, joined, paradoxically, by non-communist Russians who refuse to admit the existence of 'colonialism' in old Russia. According to the first group, the relations between the Russians and the native peoples since the days of Ivan the Terrible even to the present day have always been of a more or less marked colonial nature, that is, the Russians exerted political and economic pressure on the conquered peoples. Disagreement arises only on the score of which were the 'colonized' nations in old Russia and which are still 'colonized' today in the USSR. Some authors1 do not hesitate to include in one group all the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union, that is, the Slav peoples: Ukrainians and Belorussians; the Balts: Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians; the Caucasians: Georgians and Arme- nians, all peoples with an ancient civilization whose cultural and economic level is in no respect inferior to that of the Russians and

1 For example, Walter Kolarz in his work, Russia and her Colonies (New York, I952).

141



CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

who are neighbours of the primitive peoples of northern Siberia. Others, more cautiously, limit the concept of 'colonized' strictly

to peoples whose culture is in fact very different from Russian culture or to non-Christian peoples of the former Russian Empire: Muslims, Buddhists, and animists.

Others again use the term 'colony' only in regard to territories conquered by Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century, when it had become capitalist; and from the beginning of the twentieth century its economy could be considered of the colonial type. Central Asia is the most characteristic example of this sort of colony.

The defenders of the Russian experience, whether communist or not, reply to their opponents that not only is the Soviet system in no way 'colonial', but that for the first time in the history of humanity it has made possible the establishment of genuine and irrevocable equality and fraternity between the dominant nation and the subject peoples. All the supporters of the Soviet Union without exception declare that the political, cultural, and economic relations between the Russians and the non-Russian peoples of the USSR, including the smallest units of primitive Paleosiberian people, cannot be considered as 'colonialist' but rather in the frame- work of the 'elder brother' (starshy brat) surrounding his younger and less fortunate brothers with tender care and leading them along the path to socialism.

However, if there is unanimity in firmly rejecting the charge of Soviet colonialism, there is no such unanimity regarding pre-g9I7 Russia. How should Tsarist policy in the peripheral territories of the Empire be defined? In other words, is it possible to speak of colonies in Central Asia, Siberia and the Caucasus, the Crimea or the Baltic States ? Since 1917, the attitude of official Soviet historiography has constantly wavered between two extremes. From 1917 to 1928, and sometimes even to 1936, Tsarist policy in the Asiatic territories of the Empire was regarded as definitely colonial; that is, Turkestan, the Governorate-General of the Steppe Region (present-day Kazakhstan), Siberia, sometimes even the Caucasus, were termed 'colonies' on the same basis as the overseas colonies of the western European powers.2

2 Turkestan-Koloniya (Tashkent, I935), and G. Safarov, Kolonyalnaya Revolyutsiya - opyt Turkestana (Moscow, I92I). This attitude, moreover, is in accordance with Lenin's view that 'the Russian colonial policy in Bashkiria can bear comparison with any action whatsoever of the Germans in Africa'. Works, III, 194, quoted in The Big Soviet Encyclopedia, first ed., vol. 33, 446.

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COLONIZATION AND DECOLONIZATION IN THE SOVIET UNION

After 1928, the unmitigated hostility towards the Tsarist regime which characterized Soviet historical scholarship began to decline. Indeed, the Soviet leaders claimed to be the heirs of their pre- decessors, especially in regard to the definition of their position in the age-old process of the consolidation of the Russian state. The Soviet Union appears as the last stage, the culmination of an historical development which started with the foundation of Moscow and the first successful campaigns of Ivan the Terrible against the Muslims of the East in 1522, and which was continued by the Romanovs until the end of the nineteenth century. From this point of view, the unconditional condemnation of the Tsarist expansion policy was no longer opportune.

From being 'an absolute evil',3 the conquest of the Caucasus and of Central Asia becomes in the later I930s 'a lesser evil',4 and then at the end of the second world war 'an absolute good'. During the last years of Stalin's regime, there was no longer any mention of the 'colonies' of Tsarist Russia. The Big Soviet Encyclopedia (2nd edition, 1953), a strictly official publication, under the heading Kolonii, enumerates all the European and Asiatic imperialist states possessing colonies between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Tsarist Russia does not appear in this long list.5

After 1954 another change is noticeable. A more critical approach to Tsarist policy appears in Soviet historiography. Henceforwards, the conquest and exploitation of the Asiatic territories of the Empire, as well as Tsarist policy in Persia, Mongolia, and Man- churia, are regarded as 'colonial operations' in the same way as the American conquest of the Far West.6

3 This was the approach of the historical school of Pokrovsky which dominated Soviet historical scholarship for many years.

4 This formula appeared for the first time on 22 August I937 in a resolution of the State Commission on historical questions: according to this, the annexation of various peoples by Tsarist Russia should be analysed from the point of view of an alternative, i.e. union with Russia or the annexation by another 'imperialist' power, Turkey, Iran, or Great Britain. This alternative must always be decided in favour of Russia since only the Tsarist conquest enabled the subject peoples to profit by the I917 Revolution and achieve the dictatorship of the proletariat.

5 Cf. the contrary view in the first edition of the same Encyclopedia (vol. XXXIII, I938, 423-83), in an article by G. Dashevsky 'Kolonii i Kolonialnaya Politika', which is very critical of Tsarist colonialism.

6 This is the thesis developed by Galuzo (see Note 2) in a recent article which recognizes that Siberia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus were Tsarist 'colonies'.

143




These variations in Soviet historiography may be partly ex- plained by the absence of a precise definition of the terms 'colony' and 'colonialism' in Russian historical literature. Soviet authors for the most part are satisfied with a vague and equivocal definition, as in the second edition of the Big Soviet Encyclopedia: 'A colony is a country subjected to the power of another country (the metropolis), which does not have equal right in law (ravno- pravnaya) with the metropolis, which is deprived of national sovereignty, and which is governed by a special regime'.

Soviet authors have recently added some equally vague com- ments to this far from precise definition: 'the colonial territory was conquered by force of arms, it remains a supplier of industrial raw materials and a market for industry of the metropolis, which attempts to oppose the establishment of local industry, insists on the specialization of agricultural production, and supports the maintenance of feudal relations of production as well as the survival of an archaic culture. Colonialism means the pauperization of the rural masses, the ruin of the artisan class and the decline of the towns'.

In fact, all the Soviet definitions of 'colony' and 'colonialism' reflect the traditional absence in Russia of a precise distinction between the problem of nationalities and the colonial question. In the Tsarist empire, a continuous land area, the colonized peoples were situated both in the centre and on the periphery, and the Tsarist state, like the socialists who opposed it, spontaneously confounded the two concepts. As Marc Ferro recalls in a recent work: 'Over a long time Lenin's attacks on Tsarist imperialist policy were aimed at its actions outside its frontiers . . . and what the Russians in 1912 called "their" Moroccan affair was neither Turkestan nor the Caucasus, but the Mongolian problem and their relations with China.'7

As for the imperial administration, it made no distinction either legally or politically between the different non-Russian citizens of the Empire. The indigenous inhabitants of the Governorate- General of Turkestan, the nomads and some groups in the north Caucasus alone were favoured by a special administrative statute, but the fact of this special legal statute did not mean that the

7 Marc Ferro, 'Le mouvement socialiste devant le probleme national et colonial', in G. Haupt and M. Roberioux, eds., La Deuxieme Internationale et l'Orient (Paris, I967), 249.

I44




territories in question were regarded as 'colonies'. Actually, the Jews of the Ukraine or the Finns, the Georgians of the Caucasus or the Tatars of the Volga, presented similar national problems for the Tsarist state and were treated in much the same way.

Thus, willy-nilly, the Soviet Union inherited national problems from its predecessor, the Tsarist regime, and, before discussing the delicate question of the existence or absence of colonies in the USSR, the real nature of the non-Russian possessions of the Russian Empire before I917 must be defined.

In the first place, our investigation must exclude from its survey territories inhabited by Slav peoples, like the Ukrainians and Belorussians, professing the Orthodox religion and whose cultures and historical traditions are scarcely distinguishable from the Russian. The same is true of the Baltic States, Moldavia, and the Christian nations of the Caucasus, Armenia and Georgia, Poland and Finland before I917. The problems confronting the Russian State from these peoples were certainly numerous but they cannot be regarded as 'colonial' problems. In these territories there was no massive Russian rural colonization which might be resented by the native population as a threat to their national existence, neither was there any real economic pressure or systematic attempt to restrict the cultural evolution of these peoples. On the other hand, colonialism existed in Siberia and in the Muslim territories of Central Asia, the Volga-Ural lands, the Caucasus and the Crimea. All these regions had been conquered by force of arms and administered by military governments for more or less lengthy periods.8 Their historical traditions and their cultures differed greatly from those of the Russians and prevented any real union between the indigenous peoples and their conquerors, while the latter formed rural or urban colonies without contacts with the native world. Everywhere the Tsarist authorities attempted with more or less success to preserve the archaic structures of indigenous society and to restrain modernization. But there the similarities end. Of all the Muslim territories, it is the Volga-Ural region

8 The fact that most of the Muslim territories of the empire were conquered before Russia entered the capitalist stage (i.e. before I865) does not affect the substance of the problem. Soviet authors actually admit (cf. P.G. Galuzo's article) that colonies could exist even before capitalism. They appear once a centralized state embarks on an expansionist policy.

I45 10




which had least in common with the classic definition of a 'colony'. Conquered in the sixteenth century, this region was incorporated in the Muscovite state, the unitary Great Russian state, and its inhabitants were subject to the same obligations as the Russians. If the native Volga peoples were deprived of equal rights it was by reason of their adherence to a religion regarded as 'impure'. The severe oppression, religious, cultural, and political, to which the Volga Tatars were subjected for more than three centuries, had as its ultimate aim to force them to 'denationalize' themselves and, by adopting Orthodox Christianity, to become assimilated to the Russians.

This Muslim territory was very densely colonized by Russian peasants and at the end of the sixteenth century the Russians formed about 50 per cent of the total population (a proportion which remains unchanged to the present day),9 but this foreign presence did not have a 'colonial' character. Nothing in fact differentiated the Russian peasants from their Tatar neighbours. They employed the same production techniques, had the same standard of living, and culturally the Tatars were even, strange to say, somewhat superior to their 'conquerors'.10 Moreover, when the industrialization of the Volga region started, the native community profited by it to the same extent as the Russians. The Tatar industrial proletariat reached the impressive figure of I5o,ooo workers in I914.11 The Tatar industrial and commercial bourgeoisie could well compete with its Russian rival.

There was certainly nothing backward about Tatar culture; on the contrary, the Muslim towns of the Volga-Urala area: Kazan, Orenburg, Astrakhan, Troitsk, were among the most brilliant centres of the most modern Muslim culture. Moreover, neither on the Russian nor on the Tatar side was there that feeling of ethnic or cultural superiority or inferiority which characterizes

9 At the end of the eighteenth century there were 52 per cent Russians compared to 40 per cent Tatars on the territory of the present Tatar Republic of the Volga; cf. Istoriya Tatarskoy ASSR (Kazan, I955), I87. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the percentage was the same: 52-7 per cent Russians, 38-2 per cent Tatars (same source, 236).

10 In 1897, the percentage of Tatars able to read and write was 20-4, compared to only I8-3 per cent of Russians; cf. H. Gubaydullin, Tatarstan za sem let (Kazan, 1927), 24.

11 This placed it fourth in the Empire after the Russians, the Poles, and the Jews. Cf. M.K. Korbut, 'K voprosu ob izuchenii istorii proletariata Tatar- stana', in Istoriya Proletariata USSR (I930), I42.

146




colonial society. The Volga Tatars, the most advanced of all the Russian Tatars, undoubtedly created serious national problems for the government of St Petersburg, but they were not of a 'colonial' nature.

The Caucasus was another example also remote from the colonial model. The high mountainous region conquered in the first half of the nineteenth century, when Russia had already entered the capitalist stage of development, was a country difficult of access, with poor soil and too densely populated to lend itself to rural colonization. It thus remained practically unpenetrated until the 1917 revolution. The situation was the same in Muslim Trans- Caucasus (present-day Azerbaidzhan), where the native peasant population was too dense to permit of Russian rural immigration. On the other hand, Baku at the end of the century became a great industrial centre where the large numbers of native workers lived side by side on an equal footing with their Russian fellow-workers, and the city's growing importance favoured equally the native bourgeoisie - a dynamic and advanced class - and its Russian or Armenian rivals. Moreover, politically and culturally, the Muslim Trans-Caucasus, a country with an ancient civilization, looked rather towards Turkey and Iran than to distant Russia. And there also the climate was not at all 'colonial'.

The case of Siberia is more difficult to decide and there are many writers, pre- and post-revolutionary Russians and others, who assert the colonial character of that immense territory. In fact, even if Siberia of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be termed a colony, from the middle of the nineteenth century it was merely an extension of Russia proper. The autochthonous population was reduced to tiny islets lost in the purely Russian mass.

The situation was quite different in Central Asia, that is, the former Governorate-General of the Steppe Region (present-day Kazakhstan) and the Governorate-General of Turkestan, which on the eve of the Revolution were a classic example of an exploited colony whose sole wealth was cotton. The Russians administered this country with small numbers of officials and military garrisons which formed colonies of 'whites' in areas specially laid out for them. There were no Russian peasants; this oasis country was not at all suitable for rural colonization, and the workers (mostly on the railways), who were far from numerous, did not mix with the

I47




natives. In fact, the Russians had no long-term native policy. They were satisfied to keep them out of the administration and to isolate the country from any outside influence so as to keep it in a state of medieval stagnation. Contrary to their policy in other Muslim regions, they did not try to 'civilize' the natives - the Koranic schools of the most conservative type were protected against any modernist influence and the most fanatical Muslim clergy were favoured and supported in their struggle against the reformers. The climate there was clearly colonialist, consisting of contempt for the native and a racial attitude on the part of the Russians (including the workers) to which the Muslim responded with hatred of the spoliatory 'infidel'.

Such on the eve of the Revolution were the complex relations between the Russians and the natives in the non-Russian territories of the Tsarist Empire. What is the position today, after fifty years of effort on the part of the Soviet regime to break down the differences between the Russian metropolis and the non- Russian periphery ?

The basis of Soviet policy as executed in these territories is the Bolshevik leaders' firm belief that the establishment of a socialist system of production will ipso-facto terminate the inequality between the dominant nation and subject peoples. Thus during fifty years Soviet policy was guided by this aim of establishing genuine equality between Russian and non-Russian workers by bringing the latter to the level of the Russian proletariat in all fields, economic and political, technical and cultural. It is impossible here to ana- lyse even briefly the immense and praiseworthy achievements of the Soviet authorities in all these fields, which have made it possible to give all the peoples of the Union, including the most backward and dispossessed, an autonomous territory, a written literary language, a network of educational establishments, and technical and cultural, administrative and political cadres of their own. At the same time the Soviet authorities tried to unite all the nationalities of the Union round a 'proletarian culture', in theory supranational but in reality the traditional Russian culture. This effort has certainly been successful. The peoples of Central Asia, formerly of the 'colonial' type, today have national cadres which neither in quality nor in quantity are inferior to the Russian. But it is useless to claim, as do some unconditional champions of the

148




Soviet experience, that all the problems thrown up by the co- existence of the native peoples and the Russians - who willy-nilly remain the dominant nation - have been solved. In particular, some obstacles exist which prevent the achievement of genuine equality between the two groups.

In fact, economic equality between the periphery and the Russian metropolis was not possible unless industry was redis- tributed and allocated to essentially agricultural Muslim areas. This redistribution, desired by the first Bolshevik leaders, came up against insurmountable technical difficulties. Central Asia still remains today a rural area of monoculture, heavily dependent on the industrial regions of Russia proper; the Muslim peoples are still mainly collective farm peasants whereas the Russian people are tending more and more to become a nation of workers, employees, and technicians.

In I959, for example, of the Russian population falling into these categories, 2I per cent were collective farmers and 79 per cent workers and employees; the corresponding figures for Uzbeks were 64 and 36, for Azeris 62 and 38, and for Turkmens 32 and 68.12

Another factor capable of exacerbating relations between the communities by emphasizing the dependent position of the indigenous peoples was the massive influx of Russians who, since the war, tend in certain areas, and notably in Central Asia, to reduce the indigenous population to the status of a minority. In 1926 Muslims accounted for 78 per cent of the population of Central Asia and Kazakhstan; by I959 this figure had dropped to 59-4 per cent, and by 1965 to 55 per cent. In certain regions, the natives are already definitely in a minority. In Kazakhstan, for example, they formed only 35 per cent of the population in I959. The big cities of Central Asia have become purely Russian centres; the Russians actually form 57 per cent of the population of Tashkent, 64 per cent of Ashkhabad, 82 per cent of Alma-Ata, and 84 per cent of Frunze.13

Nor has administrative and political equality been achieved either. In the government apparatus, the chief posts remain -

12 Cf. A.A. Isupov, Natsionalny Sostav Naseleniya USSR (Moscow, 1961), 44-45.

13 Cf. A. Bennigsen and Ch. Lemercier-Quelquejay, Islam in the Soviet Union (London, 1967), 170.

149




as forty years ago - in the hands of the Russians. It is the same in the army: the large units stationed in Muslim republics and the frontier guard units are commanded almost exclusively by Russian officers. Above all, the Communist Party, the supranational organization and repository of supreme power, is still dominated by Russians.

Finally, human contacts between Russians living in Central Asia and Muslims are still limited except at the top and bottom of the social scale, among intellectuals and the higher ranks of the party and Soviets at one end, and among workers at the other. Ethnic separation of the classic colonial type still exists both in the country and the towns. Mixed marriages between the two communities are still rare.14 Linguistic Russification, the first essential step towards the cultural assimilation of the most advanced elements of the indigenous society, is scarcely noticeable, and even today the influence of the Russian language is incom- parably less strong among the Turkic peoples of Central Asia than was formerly the influence of French on the Algerian intellectuals or of English on the Indian elite.15

As a result of the obstacles to the penetration of Russian culture existing in the indigenous communities, of the persistence of political and cultural traditions inherited from the past, and of the adherence of an important section of the population (probably an overwhelming majority) to the Muslim religion and to Islamic social customs, the assimilation of the Russian Muslim to the standard Soviet type is far from complete. The entire Muslim community from top to bottom continues to present numerous problems to the Soviet government, some of which seem rather serious. The most serious are created by the Muslim intelligentsia. It has many groups concerned either with the preservation of the distinctiveness of their national culture, or with the search for a purely 'Muslim' path to socialism and the hope of seeing a

14 A certain number of marriages between Muslims and Russian girls do take place. In such cases, the young woman is generally accepted by her hus- band's family and is absorbed into the indigenous society. The opposite case of the marriage of a young Muslim girl to a Russian is an extremely rare pheno- menon because of the opposition of the Muslim community, which regards such a marriage as 'national treason'.

15 In I959, the percentage of Muslims in Central Asia who regarded Russian as their national language was extremely small: 3 per cent Uzbeks, I-2 per cent Kazakhs, 0o5 per cent Tadzhiks, o-6 per cent Turkmens, 0-2 per cent Kirgiz, 0-2 per cent Karakalpaks (Cf. Bennigsen op. cit., 233).

I50




liberalization of the regime, perhaps even the demand for greater freedom of thought and expression. These are general phenomena of Soviet life today. But it would be absurd to claim that these demands constitute a nationalist opposition or that they reflect 'decolonization' aims.

Undoubtedly, the Soviet Muslims show a certain resentment about the political and administrative superiority of the Russians, but this attitude can in no wise be interpreted as that of'colonials'. All minorities of multinational states have always had similar attitudes. In the case of the Muslims of the Soviet Union, moreover, resentment is mitigated by the satisfaction of having attained a level of material well-being equal to and sometimes even higher than that of the Russians.

Nevertheless, if the nationalism of the Asiatic peoples of the Soviet Union does not seem to imply, at the present stage, an actual rupture with the Russians - 'the elder brothers of the Soviet peoples' - or with communism, some indications of resentment, admittedly exceptional, can be observed which are rather similar to the demands made by colonized peoples to their colonizers. For example, the desire to reduce Russian rural colonization or the refusal to give posts in the administrative apparatus in some Muslim republics to Russian and other non- indigenous cadres.16

This refusal is not new. It was already loudly proclaimed by the Muslim intellectuals in the thirties, but it has all the more signi- ficance today when the native peoples possess the technical and political cadres necessary to take over the entire responsibility for the direction of their national territories.

16 Notably in Kazakhstan, where the attitude of the Kazakh intelligentsia has been described by a leading communist as 'a most dangerous manifestation of nationalism'. Cf. Dzhiandildin, Kommunizm i razvitie natsionalnykh otnoshenii (Moscow, I964), I72.

15I



colonialism and decolonization || colonization and decolonization in the soviet union

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