Russian Colonialism and Imperialism: The Paradox of the 1917 Revolution
A radically new reading of Russia’s political and cultural history was proposed about ten years ago by Alexander Etkind, Professor of Russian Literature and Cultural History at the University of Cambridge. He traced how the Russian Empire conquered foreign territories and domesticated its own heartlands, thereby colonizing many peoples, Russians included. This view of Russia’s vast expanses as internal colonies is not widespread in historical literature. However, this vision of colonization as simultaneously internal and external, colonizing one’s own people as well as others, is crucial for scholars of empire, colonialism and globalization.
Often the language of historical documents, free from modern political stereotypes, allows us to understand deeper and clearer the most complex aspects of social and political history. Russian history is no exception. In this short article I will offer you several historical documents on the specifics of Russian imperialism in the early 20th century, which allow to look at the problem in a new way.
Since the end of the 19th century, the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Empire had advocated the idea of creating an interdepartmental commission to consider ways of solving agrarian problems. But this proposal was implemented only in 1902, when the Special Commission on the needs of the agricultural industry appeared. Headed by the Minister of Finance S.Y. Witte, the Special Commission in its activity was focused on the solution of agrarian problems, based on economic priorities.
Most of the participants in the Special Commission criticized the economic and financial policy of the government. Their resentment was due to the wrong prioritization of economic issues by the Russian imperial authorities. This allows us to talk about the existence in Russia of a very strange type of imperialism, quite unlike the “classical” imperialism in Europe and the USA. Some of the documents of the Special Commission were immediately classified by the tsarist government. Here are some of the most important quotes from these documents.
“Russia is the exact opposite of other countries in its attitude to the outskirts. All states expand their possessions for well-defined purposes: either the newly annexed territory can provide a new source of taxation and revenue for the metropolis, or it is needed as a new market for the sale of products, but in one way or another the colonies and annexed territories of all states feed the metropolis and serve as a rich source of income for it. England is a striking example in this respect. In Russia, on the contrary, there is no territory which does not cost a great sum of money. Even Finland costs the government a lot of money, and there is nothing to say about the Asian possessions.”
“Central Russia bears the greatest burden of taxes, while expenditure from public funds is made most in the outskirts, which is one of the main reasons for the impoverishment of the center. The peripheries are sucking out the wealth of the center. The country is turning into a funnel: the welfare of its individual parts is lower the further they are from the periphery, the closer they are to the center.”
“The outflow of vital forces and material resources to the outskirts and industrial areas created a special oppressive situation in the heart of Russia, especially among the nobility landowners.”
“The outskirts are put in a particularly privileged position not only with regard to the expenditure of public funds on them. The factory industry develops mainly on the outskirts or in the capitals.”
“The marketing of agricultural products from the periphery was also encouraged and facilitated by differential tariffs, which created extremely burdensome competition for the old-cultivated agricultural center. The abundance of fresh land and the ease and cheapness of production due to the favorable tariff made it possible for the periphery to put bread on the market at low prices, to the direct detriment of the indigenous regions of Russia.”
The Special Commission concluded that the peasantry in central Russia was in dire straits, taxed and subjected to unequal economic conditions. The situation looked paradoxical – the Empire was oppressing its titular nation to a far greater extent than the territories on the outskirts including national minorities. The presence of several tens of millions of economically inefficient people in the center of European Russia was discovered. The economic inequality was complemented by political inequality: in Finland, which was an integral part of the Russian Empire, universal suffrage was introduced already in 1907. Finland became the first country in Europe and the second in the world where women could participate in elections. The inhabitants of central Russia were deprived of these advantages. The demographic explosion in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries only exacerbated the situation. As a result, the territories of central Russia in 1905–1917 became the base for the Russian Revolution and later the backbone for the totalitarian Bolshevik regime established in October 1917.
