Speaker: Alexey Golubev, Associate Professor, University of Houston
Chair: Una Bergmane, Academy of Finland Research Fellow, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
My talk will discuss the anti-colonial scholarship produced by Soviet Marxist historians in the 1920s and early 1930s, in which the course of Russian history was explained as a process that was driven by commercial capitalism and included colonial expansion, violence against indigenous people, their dispossession, assimilation, and genocide, and the erasure of their cultures and histories. These critical studies of the Russian imperial expansion, their infrastructure, and their scholars formed what I refer to as the early Soviet school of historical anticolonialism. Overlapping with interwar Soviet nationalities policy, the agenda of early Soviet historical anticolonialism was epistemologically distinct as it sought to provide a historically accurate and rigorous critique of capitalism and imperialism by revealing their past crimes. Up to this day, his scholarship remains the most consistent effort to decolonize Russian history from within the Russian academic community. I will discuss the heuristic potential of this scholarship as well as the ways through which it can contribute to the current debates about Russia’s imperial legacy.
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