Internal colonization

In Western Europe of the 11th – 13th centuries, massive internal colonization was a consequence of population growth and manifested itself as agricultural development of fallow lands, forests, and marshes. Its success was a testament to the overall growth of productive forces. ^[one]

Prominent Russian historian V. O. Klyuchevsky considered the internal colonization of Russia to be a key factor in the history of the country: “the history of Russia is the history of the country that is being colonized” ^[2] .

A number of modern researchers ( A. Etkind , D. Uffelman , etc.) consider not the economic, but the ideological and mental side of internal colonization in Russia. Questions are being raised about the antagonistic relations of the imperial center and the periphery, about the mutual representations of the authorities and the people about each other. The Center, under the conditions of imperial internal colonization, considers the periphery as "natural" and wild, in need of cultivation and civilizational transformation. The revolution in this vein is seen as an attempt to overcome the contradictions of internal colonization, but soon its new stage begins - the Soviet one .

A. Etkind writes:

Colonization always has two sides: active and passive; the side that conquers, exploits, and benefits, and the side that suffers, suffers, and rebels. But the cultural distance between the metropolis and the colony does not always coincide with the ethnic distance between them.
The situation we are interested in is just at the point of transition from an agrarian society to an industrial one . For agrarian societies, which Russia was before Peter and to a great extent remained after him, the main differences are built between the cultures of rulers and people - linguistic, ethnic, religious, even sexual. Industrialization gives rise to nationalism as a “marriage between the state and culture,” the result of their mutual attraction and alignment. The nationalization of agrarian culture, many times divided into classes, provinces, communities, dialects, estates, sects, is always self-colonization : people turn into a nation, peasants into French. The process goes from capitals to the borders, stopping only where it encounters an oncoming process of equal strength. The peculiarity of Russia was only its geographical extent and underpopulation, which hindered the movement of people and symbols, as well as the special configuration of cultural signs to be mixed. The primary factor remained the cultural distance between the upper and lower classes, inherited from the agrarian society. Two worlds (the state and the rural community ) were divided by the abyss, but all the resources of the state, financial and human, came from the communities. Communication between them, if possible, turned out to be distorted, risky and limited. ^[3]

• Etkind, Alexander. Internal Colonization: Russian Imperial Experience. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2011.282 p.
  • Etkind A. Internal colonization. Imperial experience of Russia / Authorization. per. from English V. Makarova. M.: New Literary Review, 2013. 448 c.
• There, inside: the practice of internal colonization in the cultural history of Russia / Comp. I. Kukulin , D. Uffelman, A. Etkind. - M .: New Literary Review, 2012. ^[4]

• Internal colonization of Russia
• Internal colonization: a model for development (conversation with A. Etkind)
• Heinrich Kirschbaum. Conference “Internal Colonization of Russia” (Passau, Germany, March 23–25, 2010)
• Kevin Platt. Internal colonization: borders of empires / borders of theories (about the book of A. Etkind)