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Where is the Post-Soviet in the “Post” of Post-Colonial? - Anna Englehart




Where in the frictions of post-colonial identity lies post-Soviet space? Can post-colonial and decolonial approaches help to account for histories of Russian colonialism and futures of its decolonisation?

Excerpt from the article originally published in Strelka Mag, New Urban Conditions
Post-colonial theory and Russia have existed for a long time as two almost parallel universes. Even though there were researchers in the post-Soviet space who were tackling post-colonial problematics—Ihar Babkov, a post-colonial scholar from Belarus, and Oksana Zabuzhko, a Ukrainian feminist writer, to name a few—Russian academia was successfully rejecting the mere possibility of questioning the status quo. Marko Pavlyshyn, a rare example of the earliest attempts (1992) of a Ukrainian-Australian scholar to start the conversation, was “ignored or ridiculed by the overwhelming majority” of researchers both from Russia and the West, according to Ukrainian post-colonial scholar Vitaly Chernetsky. If post-colonial work originating in the post-Soviet space could be silenced easily, post-colonial theory coming from the West was too trendy to be totally disregarded. In his article “On Some Post-Soviet post-colonialisms” Chernetsky shows how in the 1990s Russian intellectuals conferred various euphemisms to central figures of post-colonial theory to disguise their connection to post-colonialism itself. One instance is how seminal post-colonial thinkers such as Edward Said, whose book Orientalism became the foundational text for post-colonial theory, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose Can the Subaltern Speak? is the opening text for any post-colonial reader, were presented in Russia. In 1998, philologist Ilya Ilyin described them as a “well-known literary scholar of a leftist-anarchist orientation” and a “socially engaged feminist deconstructionist,” respectively. Such “strategic appropriation of post-colonial discourse,” as Chernetsky put it in 2006, hasn’t been radically questioned since then.

It is important to note at the same time that to transpose post-colonial theory on post-Soviet space is not a solution of any kind. The conversation that was started by US scholar David Chioni Moore in 2001 with the key article “Is the Post- in Post-Colonial the Post- in Post-Soviet?” made very clear the impossibility of taking any shortcuts when it comes to the topic of decolonization in post-Soviet space. Moore, Spivak, Ram, Tlostanova, and Chernetsky formulate the continuity of the argument that warns against the direct substitution of “post” in “post-Soviet” by “post” in “post-colonial.” Post-colonial theory has almost nothing to say about the Second World—it was born in the struggle of the Second World against colonization by the First World—or in new-old terms, the Global South against the Global North.

Its analytical tools cannot be used as universally applicable, as they were not meant to be universal in the first place. Post-colonial studies perpetuated the exclusion of the Second World, navigating through three main “post-” subjects.

Madina Tlostanova, a notable decolonial scholar from the south of Russia, describes it like this in her 2011 article “The South of the Poor North”: The “post” in “post-modernism” signifies the First World, and the “post” in “post-colonialism” the Third World. Meanwhile, the Second World is left with the “post” in “post-communism.” What might be the place of post-communism in the colonial North-South divide?

Instead of viewing the North and the South as homogeneous spaces, Tlostanova proposes a new complexity in the division. She offers the notion of differences—colonial and imperial ones.



Colonial difference substitutes the conventional division between the North and the South—an example would be the British Empire and India, which has been thoroughly reviewed by post-colonial studies and its subaltern strand as one of the most influential subdivisions.

The imperial difference sheds light on the distinction between the roles that different empires play in colonial relations. The imperial difference can be internal—such as the division between the North and South of Europe—and external. The external imperial difference goes between the First World and Second World empires. Russia, being part of the Second World, has always been the outsider of the First World or the “rich North,” as Tlostanova puts it. “Russia has never been seen by Western Europe as its part, remaining a racialized empire, which feels itself a colony in the presence of the West and projects its own inferiority complexes onto its colonies, particularly Muslim ones, which today have become precisely the South of the poor North,” she writes.

Tlostanova provides a fundamentally different view on the way Russian colonialism functions. In The Darker Side of Modernity, Walter Mignolo—one of the core Latin American decolonial thinkers—speaks of coloniality as the dark side of Western modernity which is inseparable from the whole. Enriched by Tlostanova’s analysis that the South produced by the poor North has no direct connection to Western modernity—versus the South of the Rich North that is connected even against its own will—this thesis leads to a conclusion that the space colonized by Russia is even darker than the darker side portrayed by Mignolo.

Being considerate of imperial and colonial differences one must learn with, not from, post-colonial theory. Instead of using post-colonial theory as the only valid reference point, post-colonialism is productive as part of the more substantial project of decolonization that mindfully points towards imperial similarities. Tlostanova points out these similarities: even though the Russian/Soviet empire aimed to position itself as an independent alternative to the West’s modernization through the Bolshevik experiment, the Soviet model was inseparable from it. Therefore, a post-colonial critique of Western imperialism must be treated as a tradition on which we can act to produce our heterogenous reflections. Post-colonialism is a struggle that doesn’t have ready answers, but which might inspire how we can search for them.

One of the points from post-colonial theory that resonates with post-Soviet space questions the limits of the “post-Soviet” or “post-communist” itself. Arjun Appadurai, a post-colonial scholar of globalization, who is of Indian origin, outlines the West’s “endless preoccupation” with itself. Chernetsky adds to Appadurai’s statement: “whether positive or negative value judgments are attached,” meaning that Western scholars tend to either praise the West or criticize it, but never speak about other geographies and contexts—so the West will always remain the centre of attention. Looking at Soviet modernization and its consequences, we see a similar preoccupation.

“Many memoirs and accounts have been produced since the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, and mine wants simply to ask the question ‘where are we now, after 23 years?’” Agata Pyzik, a cultural critic from Poland, states in her 2014 book Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West. “If the Soviet Union 23 years into its existence wasn’t called post-tsarist, why are we still defined as “post-communist,” and why is it relevant? Did history take a slower pace, or was it finished, as Fukuyama said, after 1989?”

How can we call our ongoing future that starts with the decolonial resistance rather than monstrous regimes of state violence?