part of Central Asia. The settled and nomadic populations of Turkestan (as the area was then called) spoke Turkic languages and were faithful Muslims who looked to the Ottoman Empire, not Russia, for cultural and religious leadership. The Russian colonial administration was deeply divided on the proper treatment of their unwilling new subjects. Some preferred to rely on the old policies of authoritarian rule, restrictions of the Muslim religion, and the encouragement of Russian colonization. Others took their inspiration from Catherine II’s colonialist policies. The latter argued for progressive colonial policies including religious toleration of Islam, respect for the ethnic customs and moral practices of Turkestan’s peoples, and the development of new crops (especially cotton) and commercial trade with Russia. They hoped that, as the powerful Minister of Finance Sergei Witte argued in 1900, full equality of rights with other subjects, freedom in the conduct of their religious needs, and non-intervention in their private lives, would ensure the unification of the Russian state.
This progressive colonialist program was notable by according (in theory) “equality of rights” to these imperial subjects. Colonial officials of this persuasion believed that they could extend, within their autocratic state, a sort of imperial citizenship to all the colonial peoples. They withheld, however, the full implementation of this reform until these peoples were “ready,” that is, proved themselves loyal, patriotic subjects of the emperor-tsar. Opposition to their policy came from influential civilian leaders who judged that the state’s need to support Russian peasants colonizing Turkestan territories had to come first. Their reckless decision led to the seizure from nomadic tribes of vast regions of Turkestan given to the peasant pioneers. Colonization meant violating the right of these subjects to the use of their land, which led directly to the Turkestan uprising of 1916. Coming before the 1917 revolution, this rebellion revealed that the empire’s colonialist policies had failed to unify its peoples. periority and often expressed itself in disdain for colonial peoples. Yet not all of these subject groups were treated with equal disregard. In the territories of the Caucasus Mountains (between the Black and Caspian Seas), imperial rule won the support of some peoples, but faced repeated revolts from others. Resistance came especially from Muslim mountain tribes, who bitterly opposed domination by this Christian state. They sustained a half-century war until their defeat in the 1860s, when many were forced into exile or emigrated willingly to the Ottoman Empire. The conquest of the region produced an abundance of heroic tales of exotic adventures pitting valorous Russians against barbaric, cruel, and courageous enemies. These tales created enduring images of “oriental” peoples, sometimes admired for their “noble savagery” but usually disparaged for their alleged moral and cultural decadence.
Russian colonialism had a powerful impact on the population there. The Christian peoples (Georgians and Armenians) of the region found particular benefits from the empire’s economic and cultural policies. Armenians created profitable commercial enterprises in the growing towns and cities of the Caucasus region, and were joined by large numbers of Armenian migrants from surrounding Muslim states. Some Georgians used the empire’s cultural window on modern Western culture to create their own national literature and history. These quickly became tools in the Georgians’ nationalist oppositional movement. In the Muslim lands along the Caspian Sea where Azeri Turks lived, investors from Russia and Europe developed the rich oil deposits into one of the first major sources of petroleum for the European economy, a source of immense profit to them. The port of Baku became a boomtown, where unskilled Azeri laborers worked in the dangerous oil fields. They formed a colonial proletariat living among Russian officials and capitalists, and Armenian merchants and traders. The new colonial cities such as Baku were deeply divided both socially and ethnically, and became places in the early twentieth century of riots and bloodshed provoked by the hostility among these peoples. Nationalist opposition to empire and ethnic conflict among its peoples were both products of Russian colonialism.
ORIENTALISM IN THE CAUCASUS REGION
To the end of the empire’s existence, colonialism rested on the assumption of Russian cultural suCOLONIALISM IN THE SOVIET UNION The fall of the empire in 1917 ended Russian colonialism as a publicly defended ideal and policy. The triumph of the communist revolutionary
;EAN Chukchi Sea
V
Bering East
By 1914, the Russian Empire controlled more than one-sixth of the Earth’s landed surface. XNR PRODUCTIONS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION OF THE GALE GROUP movement in most of the lands once a part of the empire put in place a new political order, called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The communist leaders of the new Soviet state preached the Marxist-Leninist program for human progress. They persecuted all religious movements, and denounced imperialism and colonialism, in Russia as elsewhere in the Western world. Their promise was liberation of all colonial peoples. But they did not permit their own peoples, previously in the empire’s colonial lands, to escape their domination. Their idea of “colonial liberation” consisted of organizing these peoples into discreet ethno-territo-rial units by drawing territorial borders for every distinct people. The biggest of these received their own national republics. Each of these nations of the Soviet Union had its own political leaders and its own language and culture, but the “union” to which they belonged remained under the domination of the Communist Party, itself controlled from party headquarters in the Kremlin in Moscow.
The empire’s eastern peoples experienced a new, communist civilizing mission, which proclaimed the greatest good for backward peoples to be working-class liberation, national culture, and rapid economic development under state control. Colonization reappeared as well when, in the 1950s and 1960s, millions of settlers from European areas moved into Siberia and regions of Central Asia to cultivate, in enormous state-run farms, most of the remaining lands of the nomadic peoples. Colonialism within the lands of the former Russian Empire did not disappear until the Soviet Union in its turn collapsed in 1991. See also: CATHERINE II; CAUCASUS; CHRISTIANITY, COLONIAL EXPANSION; ENLIGHTENMENT, IMPACT OF THE;
COMMAND ADMINISTRATIVE ECONOMY
Brower, Daniel. (2003). Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire. London: Routledge/Curzon. Brower, Daniel, and Lazzerini, Edward, eds. (1997). Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Jersild, Austin. (2002). Orientalism and Empire: The North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845-1917. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Khodarkovsky, Michael. (2002). Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800. Bloom-ington: University of Indiana Press. Layton, Susan. (1994). Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Slezkine, Yuri. (1994). Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Martin, Terry, eds. A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. New York: Oxford University Press.
DANIEL BROWER
COMINFORM See COMMUNIST INFORMATION BUREAU. COMINTERN See COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL.
The term command administrative economy, or often administrative command economic system, was adopted in the late 1980s as a descriptive category for the Soviet type of economic system. Throughout its history, the Soviet Union had a mobilization economy, focused on rapid industrial expansion and growth and the development of economic and military power, under the direction of the Communist Party and its leadership. This command administrative economy evolved from the experiences of earlier Soviet attempts to develop a viable socialist alternative to the capitalist market system that prevailed in the developed Western world. Thus it was built on the lessons of the non-monetized pure “command economy” of Leninist War Communism (1918-1921), Lenin’s
