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Layers of Colonial Rule in the Baltics: Nation-Building, the Soviet Rule and the Affectivity of a Nation Epp Annus

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Layers of Colonial Rule in the Baltics: Nation-Building, the Soviet Rule and the Affectivity of a Nation Epp Annus This article will be published in: Dirk Goettsche and Axel Dunker (eds), „(Post-) Colonialism Across Europe.“ Aisthesis: Bielefeld (forthcoming) Layers of Colonial Rule in the Baltics: Nation-Building, the Soviet rule and the Affectivity of a Nation Epp Annus What is the status of postcolonial studies in the twenty first century? As several recent discussions in the field indicate,1 postcolonial studies is standing at a crossroads. It is more than clear that the field has not been exhausted; rather, new geopolitical realities raise new issues for postcolonial studies. The most recent wave of European research in the field has shown the potential of comparative approaches. The urgency of multidimensional and comparative postcolonial studies has never been so clearly manifest. This article tries to position the Baltic experience by way of recent developments both in postcolonial studies and in critical thought more generally, with a special emphasis on strategies of nineteenth-century nation-building and on the Soviet rule of the post-WWII period. While Estonians and Latvians have shared developments in many ways similar over past ten centuries, Lithuanians have experienced a significantly different colonial history. This article outlines the main features of the Estonian and Latvian colonial experience and it provides some links to the Lithuanian experience in the modern era, when the trajectories of these three states began to converge. Postcolonial approaches offer certain narrative tools for telling one’s story: the story of a nation, the story of a personal experience. The complexity of this story is dependent upon the richness of one’s “thinking tools”, and one of the strengths of postcolonial narratives has been its openness to different modes of analysis. In the wake of recent developments in critical thought, this article poses a critical model that would also include elements of Jacques Rancière’s understanding of politics and Brian Massumi’s stress on the importance of affect in contemporary thinking. Yet let us start from contextualising the field. Postcolonial research must stretch out along both the diachronic and synchronic axes; it needs to be conscious of its situatedness in a wider geopolitical and historical context, and of the discursive limitations of telling one’s story. Hence this article will first delineate the recent history of postcolonial thinking in the area where Estonians and Latvians have historically been placed from the birth of their national consciousness: the successive Russian empires (first tsarist, later Soviet) and their sphere of influence. We thus first consider developments in the field of Russian, Slavic and Soviet studies. In the main part of the paper we turn toward the Baltic question more specifically and offer a postcolonial (yet multidimensional) narrative sketch of the area. Here, our aim is to grasp fully the complexities of colonial encounters in these regions – thus our story necessarily also sketches the prehistory of the region, proceeding to national formations and culminating in the Soviet era. 1 See discussion in the journal New Litearary History 43 (2012) and Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory? A Roundtable with Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel. In: PMLA 122, 3 (2007), 633-681. I. The possibility of postcolonial critique in Slavic and Soviet studies. Critical research of colonial systems, in recent works in Russian, Slavic and East European studies, has developed in four directions: a) tsarist colonialism, b) Soviet colonialism; c) post-Soviet postcolonialism, d) contemporary neocolonialism. The least controversial has been work in the field of tsarist colonialism, that is, research in the Russian empire of the pre-Soviet era. Here, Andreas Kappeler’s brilliant work Rußland als Vielvölkerreich: Entstehung - Geschichte – Zerfall (1992), on multiethnic nature of tsarist Russia, opened many doors for further research, Ewa Thompson’s monograph Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (2000) introduced postcolonial studies’ perspectives and vocabulary. In the wake of these foundational works, postcolonial perspectives have become well established research strategies. The post-Soviet era has also seen a wide interest in postcolonial approaches, with regard to both in former Soviet areas as well as to Eastern Europe. Here, one can use postcolonial vocabulary in the comparative sense, without necessarily making claims for the colonial nature of the Soviet regime. Postcolonial approaches to the Soviet era have developed more slowly. The topic emerged in the early 1990s, found some recognition around 2000, and has become disseminated during the last several years.2 By the year 2010, many, perhaps most, critics writing about the former Soviet Union or about post- Soviet countries, make some kind of critical gesture toward the discourse of colonialism. It seems that an important shift has happened: scholars working with a Soviet past – historians, geographers, social scientists, literary and cultural critics – have started to have a sense that the question of Soviet colonialism is a valid one. Yet this sense hasn’t fully led to the formation of a Soviet postcolonial studies. If indeed Soviet studies are in the middle of a paradigm change, this change hasn’t yet fully taken place. Clearly, postcolonial analysis of the Soviet and post-Soviet era is a task of great importance. Yet researchers must work with or work around a set of vexing complications in the field. First of all, the Soviet Union was a vast empire which encompassed many distinct nations and ethnic groups, with remarkable cultural, economic, racial and geographical differences. Imagine a veiled Central-Asian muslim woman, one of several wives of her husband – and now imagine her Latvian counterpart. In 1932, for example, the muslim woman in the Soviet sphere was torn between the Soviet demand to unveil herself and the local danger of beating, rape and possible death, for violating local veiling customs.3 In 1932, the Latvian woman was not yet a Soviet woman, but instead lived in the independent Latvian republic. Most likely she didn’t go to the university, but if she happened to belong to the middle class, she lead an active social life, shared local gossip at the cafés, checked out celebrities at concerts and showed off new outfits in the theatre. Fifteen years later, the Soviet rule had hit her hard, too: if she had survived the war and the first Soviet purges, she was likely malnutritioned and desperate. Yet her mindset, where the traces of cafélife, easy gossip and the pleasures of non-political artistic spectacles never completely disappeared, still differed greatly from the colonized Muslim women at the other side of the Soviet empire. 2 For an overview of literature on Soviet colonialism see Epp Annus: Paradigm Change and the Question Of Soviet Colonialism: An Attempt at Passionate Thinking about Soviet Scholarship. Submitted to Slavic Review. 3 See Douglas Northrop: Veiled Empire: Gender& Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2004. Obviously, the strategies of the Soviet rule differed in different parts of the empire, as also did local responses to Soviet rule.4 Also, the status of the colonizers varied greatly within the borders of this empire. In Central Asia, the Soviet colonizers were considered Europeans;5 in the Baltics, they were understood to be opposed to European civilization. As a result, any attempts to describe something like Soviet colonialism are doomed to fail – since, instead of a coherent field, we have a field of differences. Soviet colonialism can only be understood in comparative terms, with an emphasis on differences, clashes, and disruptions. Comparative studies of Soviet colonialism also need to face the complex histories of the pre- Soviet era. This includes consecutive systems of dominations and oppressions, different colonial eras and rules. Here arise questions of tsarist colonialism in relation to Western models of colonialism, the influence of the Ottoman empire, the earlier Mongol rule in many parts of what became the Russian empire, and previous local layers of colonialism like the relations between Lithuanians and Poles or the history of Baltic German rule over Latvians, Livs and Estonians. Do we need to add theoretical complexities, caused by the tension between the communist ideology of the Soviet Union and the Marxist roots of the critique of colonialism? And the extreme difficulty of manoeuvring inside the ideological labyrinths of the Soviet official language, where it is in retrospect almost impossible to differentiate between the ‘empty rhetoric’ – Soviet formulations that were written down almost mechanically – and ‘significant speech’, words that actually had a relationship to everyday actualitites? Anybody in the public field had to adapt his or her speech to the Soviet parlance, yet, at least in the Baltic areas (and surely in many other parts of the empire), this was generally considered by speakers and auditors to be mere noise, like radio static – unavoidable and unsignifying. Especially in retrospect, distinction between ideological noise and authentic belief is hard to make. What is worse, the same uncertainty pertains to internal Soviet statistics: for example, how can one trust official economic data in a society, where industrial leaders commonly falsified numbers and bribed higher-level administrators?6 And, finally, what some might describe as a persisting imperial impulse in contemporary Russia’s politics, makes the question of Soviet colonialism an unwelcome topic in Russian political centres. Additional difficulties are related to the particulars of the critical culture in different parts of the Russian empire. Let us add a certain unwillingness of the European parts of the Russian empire to consider themselves as colonized, as if they were not themselves Europeans, as if they were on a level with Filipinos or Ugandans. Scholars working with the Russian side of the Soviet experience move in the 4 Elena Zubkova provides ample evidence of the Kremlin attitude towards the Baltics as a separate and somewhat exceptional case.
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