Creating the Peasant as Other: Self-colonisation in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union

The text discusses Alexander Etkind’s controversial work,Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience(2011), andproposes a way to study the Russian Imperial structures interms of self-colonisation without diminishing theimportance of Russia’s colonisation and subjugation ofindigenous peoples in Siberia, Central Asia or the Caucasus.It proposes to study the colonisation of the self, not assimilar to the colonisation of peoples deemed in colonialdiscourse to be other, but rather as the subjugation ofpeople belonging to the Russian self. As such, it is not tobe conflated with the colonisation of others. Drawing uponexamples from Russian literature, the article then offerssome examples of how representatives of the Russian self,particularly the peasant class, were othered and subjugatedby reforms and by discourse that show how discriminatoryand arbitrary laws were when it came to the treatment ofpeasants in both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Unio