Historians and experts interviewed by the BBC note that there is no difference between the “formats” of empires, and one way or another, Russia still conquered peoples and territories, as well as subjugated them.
The approach proposed by Chubaryan at least aims to “whitewash” or “erase” problematic places from history.
In addition, the formulation of the question about the “good” empire should justify the current aggressive mood in the Russian government.
The BBC investigated why the Russian authorities do not want to call the Russian state an empire.
“One of the essential approaches (in the new textbook) is what an empire is and how the Russian Empire differed from the British Empire,” said one of its authors, historian Oleksandr Chubaryan.
He noted that in the history textbooks of the former Soviet republics and countries that were part of the Russian Empire, the period within Russia is assessed as “colonial”: “They believe that these territories were under colonial dependence.”
The new textbook is designed to show that the Russian Empire is “fundamentally” different from “classical colonialism.”
“All the empires in the world had overseas territories, and there was a common space here. That is why when they were once part of Russia, they entered the common economic space, and together with Russia they became a single entity,” says Chubaryan.
There are no exact wordings on how it will be written yet – the new textbook is planned to be published by 2024.
However, this discussion continues against the backdrop of another new Russian history textbook. Its author is Putin’s adviser Volodymyr Medynskyi. His textbook deals with the history of the USSR, Russian-American relations, and a separate section is devoted to the “special military operation”, as the war against Ukraine is called in Russia.
Medinsky’s textbook has a section on national politics in the Soviet Union, which is also considered by many researchers to be the “Soviet Empire.”
In particular, the textbook says that during the Soviet period, the republics increased production on their territories several dozen times, that interethnic marriages “stitched” peoples together, and there was no xenophobia in the Union.
The national or anti-communist movements in the USSR, the textbook says, were created with the help of the CIA and the US to incite “nationalist and separatist sentiment.”
The most classic empire
“Russia was a classic land empire, as were the Mongols, the Habsburgs and, to some extent, the Ottomans. The attempt to de-imperialize Russia because it was not a maritime empire like the British or French is dubious at best,” comments the director of the Ukrainian Scientific Institute Serhii Plokhiy of Harvard University.
The very question of how the empire conquered certain territories – by sea or by land – is already “colonial and Western-centric”, notes the decolonial activist from Tuva, the author of the “republic speaks_” podcast, Dankhaya Khovalig.
“Both are examples of classic colonization, regardless of the method,” she adds.
The expert considers colonization to be the establishment of dictatorship and influence – economic, political and cultural – of one region over another. At the same time, the colonized region does not have political and economic independence, and the colonialist culture and ideology dominate.
“In this sense, the Russian Empire is the most classical empire,” – defines Khovalig.
It has already become a tradition for Russia to compare itself with Great Britain, ironizes Azerbaijani historian, head of the department of conflict studies and migration at the Institute of Peace and Democracy Arif Yunusov.
“But there were no overseas colonies in the Ottoman Empire either, but, unlike Russian historians, in Turkey no one calls the conquest ‘accession,'” says Yunusov.
He also notes that Russian documents and books of the 19th century did not use the term “accession”, but directly wrote “Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus”.
“They called the local peoples natives, wrote how and what should be done in order to conquer them. That is, the terminology that was used then is drastically different from the one that is used now,” he notes.
The term “internal colonization” was used as early as 1895 by the historian Petro Milyukov in the Brockhaus encyclopedia, historian Dina Huseynova, a professor at the London School of Economics, notes.
“This is an analytical term that means the advancement of the internal borders of the empire by promoting “free colonization” with “state power”, which was accompanied by the progressive exploitation of the majority of the population by a small ruling elite. International commentators of the Russian Empire wrote about this as early as the 19th century, and then the socialists of the imperial period “, – says Huseynova.
“The global community of historians, including ethnic Russians from Russia,” generally agrees that the Romanov Empire used colonial ideologies and practices similar to those used by Western European maritime empires, said Stefan Badalyan Rigg, a researcher of Russian and Caucasian history at the University of Texas.
According to him, the difference between the types of empires does not matter against the background that colonies are defined based on the hierarchy between communities.
“Whatever the logistical and local differences between land and sea empires, they pale in comparison to the pervasive characterization of all empires as entities that differentiate peoples from one another in ways that place not only a cosmopolitan elite but also entire religious, linguistic, ethnic communities above other groups,” says Rigg.
In his opinion, it makes no sense to measure the imperialism of Russia and Britain.
“The Russian Empire was no more and no less evil than its contemporaries. It fought and cooperated with Great Britain, Japan and other states because it saw itself and was perceived by its rivals as a participant in the global imperial competition for the resources of foreign peoples and lands.” Stefan Rigg concludes.
Armenian historian Tigran Zakaryan draws attention to Chubaryan’s argument that Russia included the conquered territories in the general “social and economic space”.
Zakaryan notes that this reference is a traditional argument for defenders of colonialism, and in general the concept of “single space” is a socially invented category.
“Before the colonization of America, the economic ties of European states with these territories were zero, but after colonization they immediately became economically integrated by European states,” the historian notes. “Pre-colonial India had active trade relations with England, and only after the colonization of Great Britain came to dominate the Indian economy. I see no reason why the same could not happen in the various regions that were part of the Russian Empire.”
He also draws attention to the fact that the argument about the “single economic space” is based on the perception of captured territories as “backward”.
“Whiten and scrub”: how colonial history works
Azerbaijani historian Arif Yunusov emphasizes that the ban on criticizing the “colonizer” and the demand to glorify “joining Russia” existed even in Soviet historical science.
“We wrote our history on the outskirts, and we were told what to write and what not to write. There was a clear framework. We had no right to criticize Russia. … And everything negative had to be associated, as they said then, with bourgeois states.” , – says Yunusov.
He also mentions that historians could not, for example, write about the Koran because of the anti-religious ideology of the USSR, and access to historical archives was censored by the KGB.
He notes that the textbook on the history of the USSR was in fact a textbook on the history of Russia – the history of the national republics was almost not in it. If a historian wanted to oppose the official discourse, he was labeled a “nationalist,” says Yunusov.
In modern Russia, the rewriting of history textbooks and the reinvention of new terminologies also did not start now, says activist Dankhaya Khovalig.
“Next year, a new textbook on the history of Tuva will be published, which will emphasize even more the connection and friendship of the “fraternal” Tuvan and Russian peoples,” she says.
“Russia has not suddenly decided to rewrite textbooks and reinvent concepts, it’s just that many people have suddenly noticed this,” the researcher emphasizes.
“Now this has become obvious due to the fact that not only the history of the colonized nations, which the vast majority of Russians and White Russians were disgusted with, is being rewritten. Now their own history is also being rewritten,” Khovalig notes. “For some, it has suddenly become apparent that Russia does, because their freedom and their history have been touched.”
Today’s idea of the Russian authorities to reinvent the empire is caused by the fact that in scientific and social discourses “empire” has become synonymous with hierarchy, exploitation and marginalization, according to Stephen Rigg.
Therefore, Chubaryan repeats the words of Russian officials that “the tsarist and Soviet empires were more integrative, more humane and more egalitarian than their Western competitors.”
However, such an approach “deliberately ignores the research and opinions of experts from the former Soviet republics,” and their views are necessary for “any discussion of what the Russian Empire did or did not do in those territories that Russians began to call their “periphery,” says the professor Rigg.
The current Russian elite uses a pseudo-anti-imperialist discourse, notes the Armenian historian Tigran Zakarian.
And this is not a new way – similar rhetoric was used during the First World War, for example, by Germany when it tried to raise an uprising in India and other British colonies. “Playing this card these days is aimed at trying to whitewash or completely deny the existence of Russian colonialism,” says Zakaryan.
History is an apology for war
Reviewing the past has become an integral part of Russian official ideology, notes Armenian historian Tigran Zakaryan.
According to him, now the official Russian history is a mixture of “late Stalinist Soviet historiography” designed to show the continuity between the Russian Empire and the USSR, and “the standard apology of the Russian Empire combined with Russian conservative thought of the first half of the 20th century.”
“This apology of the empire in the past (without calling it colonial) is an intellectual justification for the obsessive idea of returning all former Soviet republics to the Russian sphere of influence,” the Armenian historian notes.
Researcher Dina Huseynova, a professor at the London School of Economics, also draws attention to this. She notes that the new history textbook for the 11th grade, which was recently presented by Medinskyi, explains to schoolchildren “the necessity and even the inevitability of war against a neighboring state.”
“Since Russian nationalism is, conditionally, a “force of good”, Ukrainian nationalism was renamed “ultranationalism”. The struggle of the forces of the Russian Federation against Ukrainian “ultranationalism”, in turn, is directly related to the experience of the Second World War, in which somehow instead of Ukrainians , who fought as part of the Soviet army, only “Banderivites” remain, Huseynova notes.
The new textbook, which is being prepared for 2024 under Chubaryan’s authorship, is devoted to the “long” Russian history “instead of Putin’s version of the short 20th century from the Banderites to the ultra-nationalists.”
“In essence, this is the concept of a “good” empire without imperialism and colonialism, which should allow us to see the continuity between the Russian Empire, the USSR as a multinational federation, and the modern Russian Federation. This technique allows the authors to state that the problem of decolonization, which was faced, for example, by France in the Algerian War, in the post-Soviet space, it doesn’t seem to exist,” Huseynova notes.
Although Chubaryan does not directly say that the post-colonial approach is widespread in Ukraine, it is logical to think that this is exactly what he means when he comments on the opinions of historians from post-Soviet countries about Russia, according to Professor Huseynova.
“This approach to history is the agony of the imperial colonial regime,” Dankhaya Hovalig says. the generation that is growing up and strengthen the loyalty of people who support the regime.”
She says that due to the efforts of Ukrainian activists who declare Russian aggression as a colonial war and attempts to subjugate neighboring territories, as well as due to anti-war and decolonial initiatives in the Russian republics, the very term “Russian Empire” is now feared in the Kremlin.
“The textbooks promote: war is not evil for Russia,” Azerbaijani historian Arif Yunusov recounts Russian official logic. “Russia is waging wars of liberation. We are not capturing anyone. The British can capture Afghanistan or India, but we only annex.”
No one in Moscow cares how the peoples of the former USSR feel about this, the historian points out.
“The main thing is for the Russian population to believe in this legend, because the history of Russia is a history of constant wars.”
Anastasia Golubeva
BBC
