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Toward a Postimperial Order? the Sakha Intellectuals and the Revolutionary Transformations in Late Imperial Russia, 1905–1917

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Toward a Postimperial Order? the Sakha Intellectuals and the Revolutionary Transformations in Late Imperial Russia, 1905–1917 Toward a Postimperial Order? The Sakha Intellectuals and the Revolutionary Transformations in Late Imperial Russia, 1905–1917 ALEKSANDR KOROBEINIKOV AND EGOR ANTONOV Abstract: Focusing on the works and intellectual activity of the Sakha intelligentsia, this article examines the development of postimperial political imagination in the region of Yakutia. The formation of the Sakha intellectuals was a result of the circulation of wider imperial discourses on nationalism, anticolonialism, socialism, and region- alism during the crisis of the Russian Empire. By discussing the Sakhas’ marginal, even colonial, conditions, the Sakha national in- tellectuals followed self-governing aspirations inherited from politi- cal exiles and Siberian regionalists, whose ideas became frequent demands for many Siberian indigenous movements. Despite the Stalinist myth that the Soviet Union (and its social engineers) created autonomy in Yakutia for the first time in Russian history, it was the Sakha intellectuals who developed the autonomist discourse during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Keywords: autonomy, decolonization, political exiles, revolution, Russian Empire, Sakha intelligentsia n April 27, 1922, a few months before the formation of the USSR, the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Oadopted a resolution “On the Autonomous Sakha Socialist Soviet Republic” as an equal part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) with its administrative center in the city of Yakutsk. The Sakha ASSR was among the first autonomist cohorts of the RSFSR and the first autonomous republic in Siberia and the Far East. In the Soviet administrative system, autonomy implied granting authority to national representatives of the region. It, in turn, meant that the titu- lar nation a priori received more political, social, cultural, and other Sibirica Vol. 20, No. 2, Summer 2021: 27–56 © The Author(s) doi: 10.3167/sib.2021.200203 ISSN 1361-7362 (Print) • ISSN 1476-6787 (Online) Aleksandr Korobeinikov and Egor Antonov rights compared to other national or ethnic groups in the region (Smith 1999, 2013: 51). By creating national autonomies, the Bolsheviks hoped to gain loyalty from natives to establish a proper post-colonial Soviet order in the postimperial space (Khalid 2016: 2-8, 179–183; Sablin 2016: 10). For natives, by contrast, it was an opportunity to officially proclaim their nations to protect national rights and promote the development of cultural and social conditions within the new authorities. Socialist autonomy became one of the forms of the postcolonial, postimperial reordering of the state. But was the concept of autonomy a widespread phenomenon in a non-Russian Siberian space (especially in such remote parts as this region) before the Soviets, and who were the main actors conducting the autonomist discourse there? This article encompasses the spheres of Russia’s postimperial transformation from a non-Russian perspective by focusing on nation-, autonomy-, and state-building during the Russian imperial crisis. It addresses the following questions: What factors (discourses and prac- tices) influenced the formation of the Sakha national intellectuals in the late Russian Empire (the imperial moment)? And what practices and dis- courses did the national intellectuals use to build the postimperial order in Yakutia? The article examines the history of a group of intellectuals, consolidated by national and regional identification, who were capable of political and social activity in Sakha (Yakutia). These individuals put forward anticolonial ideas, demanded broader representation within ex- isting power structures, imagined new political orders, defended their native language, literature, and other forms of cultural expression, as well as prepared the establishment of the zemstvo self-government and autonomy. Analyzing the Sakha intelligentsia of the first two decades of the twentieth century, we concentrate on the continuity of imperial practices and languages that were adopted by the Sakha national intelli- gentsia and then applied by the Sakha Bolsheviks during the formation of the Sakha socialist autonomy in the early Soviet period. The Russian Revolution of 1917 marked a turning point in Russian imperial and global history. It can be interpreted as a tectonic shift, which nonetheless cannot be reduced to a Russo-centric narrative. The revolution revealed the existence of multiple ideas and projects out of the imperial centers. They were initiated by local political actors in vari- ous regions of the empire. The collapse of the Russian Empire, or rather its transformation, that resulted in a long-term process of postimperial reorganization of a diverse population, was accompanied by a high level of regional self-organization, the growth of political imagination, the importance of nationalism, decolonization, autonomism, and other 28 Sibirica Toward a Postimperial Order? widespread discourses, as well as the need to regulate social and politi- cal control in many stateless regions (Siegelberg 2020). In addition to the traditionally important and widely studied cases of the Western border- lands, the Caucasus, and the Volga region (see Breyfogle 2005; Crews 2006; Geraci 2001; Sunderland 2004; Werth 2002), historiography has begun to pay more attention to the provinces of the so-called Asiatic Russia (Engelstein 2018: 414–20; Smith 2017: 1–9, 170–175; Sunderland and Wolff 2018: 1–22). Among the latest additions to Asiatic Russia, Ya- kutia takes a certain place in the postimperial transformations despite its “marginal” status within the empire. Being for many decades the freezing land of exile in the Russian Empire, Yakutia accumulated political, social, and scientific experience of exiled activists that, along with increasing mobility, cross-regional cooperation, and accessibility of university education, contributed considerably to the formation of intellectual strata among the native Sakhas by the beginning of the imperial crisis. Despite the Stalinist myth that the Soviet Union’s social engineers created autonomy in Yakutia for the first time in Russian history, it was not the Bolsheviks but indigenous Sakha intelligentsia who de- veloped the autonomist discourse in Siberia as a form of postcolonial political and administrative self-organization during the crisis and transformation of the Russian Empire (on the meaning of inorodtsy, see Bobrovnikov and Konev 2016: 167–206; Slocum 1998: 173–190; Ssorin- Chaikov 2003; see also Sablin and Korobeynikov 2016: 211; Sablin and Semyonov 2020: 543–550). In this vein, the Sakha intellectuals played a crucial role in the postimperial transformations of Yakutia. These intellectuals—for example, Vasilii Nikiforov-Kulumnur (1866–1928), Alexei Kulakovskii (1877–1926), Gavriil Ksenofontov (1888–1938), and Semyon Novgorodov (1892–1924)—are often overlooked by the modern historiography on the early Soviet nationalities policy which does not fully consider Asiatic Russia (Hirsch 2005; Kaiser 1994; Martin 2001; Smith 2013; Suny 1993). The existing literature on the early Soviet autonomy- building continues to pay a lot of attention to the exclusive role of the Bolsheviks who granted the right on national autonomies for various ethnic and national groups in postimperial Russia (Baron 2007; Pipes 1950; Saparov 2015; Slezkine 1994b; Smith 1999). At the same time, without diminishing the merits of the Bolsheviks, it is possible to consider the processes of autonomy-building with the leading role of local actors who produced the autonomist discourse even before the emergence of Soviet power (Khalid 2016; Sablin 2016, 2019). In Siberia, these processes were closely related to different widespread discourses, Summer 2021 29 Aleksandr Korobeinikov and Egor Antonov including nationalism, anticolonialism, and self-government. Because of their extreme popularity among the locals, these ideas were adopted by the new government in the context of the civil war and turned into Soviet autonomy (Schafer 2001: 173). It is, therefore, appropriate to shed light on the crisis of the Russian Empire, the 1917 Revolution, and the postimperial transformation of Russia from the regional perspective of Yakutia and to consider the role of local actors in the development of governance structures in the context of postimperial diversity management. The Russian Imperial Moment and the Formation of the Sakha Intellectuals It is still difficult to say whether Siberia was a colony or not. Although the methods of controlling territories in the continental empires differed from the overseas ones, the practices of managing Siberia had much in common with colonialism (Remnev 2012a; Sunderland 2010). Siberian natives perceived imperial power ambiguously. On the one hand, it hin- dered the free development of ethnic groups by forcing people to leave their usual places of residence; on the other hand, it promoted social mobility and the inclusion of people into broad imperial discourses and practices. The situation changed due to the strengthening of the policy of Russification as well as the spread of regionalist rhetoric, which involved more and more people in the internal problems of Siberia (Remnev 2012a: 114). Because of that, by the turn of the century, the de- mands for the decolonization of Siberia became increasingly insistent. As Cooper (2005) demonstrates, the escalation of decolonizing pro- cesses usually occurs against the backdrop of great political crises, wars, and militarized conflicts. According
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