Stephanie Cronin. Iranian Studies. Volume 48, Issue 5, 2015.
In 1978 the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism changed forever the terms of the debate about the nature of western scholarship on the non-western world. Indeed the very words “West” and “East” were from then on irredeemably problematized. Profoundly unsettling, Said’s work had a transformational impact on many academic disciplines in western Europe, the Americas and across Asia. Although drawing on older ideas and research, including critiques of western scholarship formulated in the Soviet Union, Said’s book, along with Said’s own public persona, came to represent and symbolize a broader rejection of existing power-political relationships between the imperial metropoles and the colonial world. A work of committed scholarship, Orientalism’s polemical style invited engagement and attracted opposition from both right and left and has, since its publication, been embraced, criticized, contested and rejected, and interpreted and re-interpreted in the light of new empirical research and theoretical refinement. There is, however, general agreement that it constitutes a founding text in the study of the politics of knowledge.
Although the full meaning and implications of Said’s work are subject to continuing evaluation and argument, certain key ideas have been recognized as fundamental. Drawing freely on Foucault’s discourse theory and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, Said developed the notion of Orientalism as a style of thought based on constructed binaries of Orient and Occident, as an ideological mechanism for the self-definition of European identity through the creation of an inferior and subordinate “other,” and, most famously, “as a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it.” Writing about the Orient, whether academic, literary or any other kind, was accordingly inextricably bound up with relationships of power in which the Occident always had the upper hand.
In Orientalism, Said was principally concerned with deconstructing a discourse. The rather facile notion that members of cultural, literary and scholarly elites acted as handmaidens of empire he took for granted, seeking to analyze rather the specific character of a particular ideological mission, the elaboration of Anglo-French Orientalism, through which European intellectuals made an essential contribution to the extension of western hegemonic power over the East. Taking case studies drawn from Iran and the wider Persophone region, we pose in this collection the question whether a similar intellectual construction may be discerned within nineteenth century Russian, or post-1917 Soviet, discourses on the Orient. Were tsarist Russian scholars and administrators concerned with the Persophone world Orientalists in the Saidian sense? What was the significance of the rupture of 1917 in Russian discourses on the Orient? Did Soviet Iranology continue or break with traditional imperial Orientology? What was the relationship between knowledge of the East and power over it for imperial Russia and in the Soviet Union? Most controversially, did imperial Russian or Soviet Iranology display the same predisposition as Anglo-French discourses to essentialize Orient and Occident, to impose profound ontological oppositions between them and to conclude with the inherent superiority of the latter?
Said understood Orientalism, as he made clear at the beginning of his book, mainly as a British and French cultural enterprise. He dealt with Germany only in passing and with Russia hardly at all. This may partly explain the perhaps unique degree of indifference shown by scholars in Russia towards his analysis which, across most of the globe, has itself achieved the status of a hegemonic discourse. Orientalism was not translated into Russian until more than fifteen years after its publication, the translations were partial, clumsy and inaccurate, and the little attention they received was uninformed. Undoubtedly, too, post-Soviet scholarship resisted the Saidian critique because it continued to be deeply influenced by the long Soviet tradition of contextualizing study of the East within a discourse of liberation.
Scholarship in the West about the Russian imperial and Soviet traditions has, by contrast, engaged more seriously, if somewhat belatedly, with the Saidian discourse. The best known example of this engagement is the debate which took place in the journal Kritika in the autumn of 2000. Provoked by an article published a few months earlier by Nathaniel Knight on the Russian Orientalist and tsarist administrator, Vasilii Grigor’ev, the Kritika debate contained sharp exchanges between Adeeb Khalid, Knight himself, both writing on tsarist Central Asia, and the Balkanist Maria Todorova, regarding the applicability of Said to the Russian case. Since then, scholars working on Russian and Soviet approaches to the East have been obliged, often rather reluctantly, to incorporate some discussion of Said into their theoretical frameworks.
Several different categories of objection have been raised regarding the relevance of the Saidian perspective to both pre- and post-1917 Russian Orientalism. It has been argued, firstly, that Said failed to appreciate fundamental differences between British and French discourses and those of nineteenth century German Orientalism, which flourished in a country with quite different political, cultural, intellectual and religious traditions and which became the parent of the Russian school.
Secondly, and especially importantly, Said is sometimes deemed irrelevant to the Russian case because of an alleged uniqueness, or at least “distinctiveness” possessed by Russian history and geopolitics. In his article on Grigor’ev, Nathaniel Knight, for example, put forward a widely held view rejecting the applicability of the Orient/Occident dichotomy to Russia, arguing instead in favor of an “awkward triptych” in which Russia was neither fully western nor eastern but was rather inserted between West and East. Such a notion of Russian uniqueness has its origins in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century, having been provoked by a negative reaction to the reforms of Peter the Great, reaching a crescendo in the Slavophil-Westerner debates of the mid-nineteenth century. It contained the specific idea of a fundamental difference between Russia and the West and sometimes too the sense of a particular Russian affinity with, and therefore understanding and appreciation of, the East. Indeed, this latter sentiment took formal shape in the theory of Eurasianism, a type of pan-Eurasian nationalism in which culturally distinct peoples would be bound together under Russian leadership, a theory and political project which underwent a dramatic revival after the collapse of the Soviet order and which endures until today. According to this approach, whereas for Britain and France the imperial project was located far beyond the national territory, for Russia the Orient consisted in the first instance of territories physically incorporated into the state, especially the Caucasus and Turkestan. Europeans and non-Europeans accordingly mingled more naturally and closely within the Russian than within the Anglo-French imperial spaces, and integration and assimilation might be encouraged and rewarded, any parallel to the contribution of the Russified Tartar elite to Russian culture, for example, being unthinkable in the Anglo-French experience. Yet even within Eurasianist tendencies classical Orientalist motifs of eastern savagery and violence might be found, expressed most famously by the pro-Bolshevik poet Aleksandr Blok in “The Scythians,” published in January 1918. Ideological Eurasianism was capable of producing a wide variety of political positions, Blok and the Scythianists, for example, embracing the Bolshevik revolution. It was most likely, however, to provide ammunition for imperial apologists. As Adeeb Khalid’s rejoinder to Knight pointed out, during the nineteenth century any alleged affinity with the East was largely a product of Russians’ own complicated and problematic identity, especially their inferiority complex vis-à-vis other, more self-confidently European, Europeans. He quotes Dostoyevsky: “In Europe we were hangers-on and slaves, but in Asia we are masters. In Europe we were Tatars, but in Asia we too are Europeans.” In this sense, the Russian experience of deploying an imaginary East in order to clarify and bolster its own Western identity seems a perfect fit with Said’s Orientalist paradigm. Furthermore, as the quote from Dostoyevsky shows, any supposed affinity for Asia was often primarily an apology for conquest.
Rather more minor objections to Said and in defense of Russian exceptionalism have also been proposed. It has been argued, for example, that a certain Russian distinctiveness may be found in the much greater interpenetration of the worlds of scholarship and colonial rule in the Russian than in other empires. Many tsarist officers and administrators became authorities in the field of Oriental studies while Orientalists found employment in the administrations of Central Asia and the Caucasus and in the Russian foreign ministry. This interpenetration would, however, again seem to make the Saidian paradigm more rather than less relevant. Alexey Khismatulin describes how, as Iranian and Persian studies incubated within the wider field of Orientology in Russia, a number of products of this nineteenth century imperial-scholarly nexus began to play important roles. Alexander Tumanski (1861-1920), for example, was a scholar both of the Bahais and of Persian manuscripts more generally, and a major-general in the Russian army. Nikolai Pantusov, editor of a Persian history of Kokand, worked for the military administration in Central Asia, as did Alexander Kuhn, whose archival exploits while on the campaign trail with the Russian army in Turkestan are described below by Olga Yastrebova and Arezou Azad. Nikolai Khanykov and Alexander Chodzko were tsarist scholar-diplomats while the diarist and ethnographer Vladimir Kosogovski was a colonel in the Iranian Cossack Brigade. Basil Nikitin (1885-1960), an authority on the Kurds, also combined scholarship with service in the pre-revolutionary foreign ministry as did the most famous of this group, Vladimir Minorsky.
It has also been argued that the Saidian dichotomy is inappropriate to the Russian case because key figures of imperial Russian Orientalism were themselves not European but Oriental. The Iranian-born Mirza Alexander Kazem-Bek was one such. Kazem-Bek, a colorful figure who awaits an English-language biography, was born in Rasht, converted from Islam to Protestantism (not to Orthodoxy), and became professor of Arabic and Islamic law at Kazan university. Kazem-Bek himself, although his academic status was undeniable, seems to have joyfully internalized some stock Orientalist tropes, revelling in the attention he attracted while promenading in the streets of Kazan wearing a silk turban and colorful robes. The crucial role of the many representatives of non-Russian ethnic minorities, “natives” (inorodtsy), acting as research assistants in the production of Russian imperial knowledge about the East has also been stressed. Yet, as Alexander Morrison has pointed out, other empires, notably the Raj, also experienced such a “collaborative enterprise of knowledge formation,” with British Orientalists profoundly reliant upon their Indian interlocutors, while the nature of any “dialogue” between imperial scholar and native, in the context of profound inequalities of power, remains problematic.
These debates about the role played by Russian Orientalism in legitimizing tsarist imperial conquest first emerged in relation to the vast polyglot areas incorporated into the Russian empire, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Here the influence of Persian/Iranian languages and culture was profound, and links between urban centers, Tiflis, Baku, Bokhara, Tashkent and Samarkand, and cities in Iran manifold and enduring. However, the possible role of an Orientalist discourse in legitimizing tsarist imperial policies towards still independent but territorially contiguous and coveted states, Iran and Afghanistan, and also the Ottoman Empire, has attracted much less attention. The most substantial work to date directly to address the role of Orientalism in shaping imperial Russian attitudes towards Iran itself, an external and sovereign state, is Elena Andreeva’s exhaustive trawl through nineteenth century Russian travelogues. Andreeva, rejecting the qualifications and exceptionalism discussed above, illustrates the mentality expressed in the quote from Dostoyevsky, seeing the Russian variety of Orientalism as an exaggerated, even grotesque version of its western European prototype. The prejudices of the Russian travelers whom she discusses were inflated by their own insecurities and were both extreme and freely expressed, although they have a familiar ring to anyone acquainted with the writings of their British counterparts. These prejudices included a deep hostility towards Islam, a prurient obsession with the allegedly degraded position of women, an admiration for the ancient past, the better to denigrate the present, and a preference for religious and ethnic minorities, supposedly more receptive to the imperial embrace.
But what then of Iranian views of Russians? Said began Orientalism with a quote from Marx: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” His insistence on the exclusion of Orientals themselves from the construction of the Orientalist discourse, which thus consisted of a conversation that Europe was having with itself, has been much criticized. These critiques have produced some of the most interesting and productive developments of Said’s original argument, a focus on the never equal but necessarily reciprocal colonial encounter and an attention to the agency of the colonial subject. For Said, discourse was a reflection of power, modern Orientalism born towards the end of the eighteenth century, its arrival an ideological corollary of Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt. In Iran, the evolution of an Occidentalist discourse on Russia, which clearly mimicked the changing configurations of power, has recently been excavated. The Safavids despised the Russians, seeing them as primitive barbarians, the Uzbegs of Europe. By the eighteenth century, this contempt was becoming tinged with respect for Russian military success and by the early nineteenth century Peter the Great had become a model to be emulated in the Qajar quest for authoritarian modernization. By the end of the nineteenth century the complicated struggle among Iranian reformers, Caucasian radicals and Turkestani Jadids over how to understand Russia was strikingly illustrated in the cartoons which filled the pages of the journal Mulla Nasr al-Din. These cartoons, sometimes shockingly graphic, seem at first sight to represent the internalization of contemporary European views of the backward East and the progressive West. Yet the Russians they depict are just as imaginary as any pantomime Oriental, and serve not to describe Russian reality but rather to highlight deficiencies in local Muslim societies, Russian imperial power remaining all the while a menacing geopolitical presence. The schizophrenic attitude typified by the cartoons of Mulla Nasr al-Din persisted after 1917. As James Pickett describes below, the Soviet Union continued to represent both an idealized vision of modernity to the Iranian intelligentsia and a threat to national independence.
Whereas many imperial Russian Orientologists appear to conform very neatly to Said’s paradigm, and even perhaps to illustrate its central tenets more perfectly than their Anglo-French progenitors, the position of Soviet Orientology and Iranology is more complicated. To what extent, then, did Soviet scholarship represent a rupture with the past, and to what extent did it merely continue to provide ideological mechanisms for the assertion of Russian imperial power, albeit using a different vocabulary? Denis Volkov addresses this question directly, as he traces the discursive continuities and epistemological shifts which characterized late imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet Orientology.
The infant Soviet state presided over two separate, and even opposed, sites of Orientological knowledge production. One such site consisted of the St. Petersburg/Leningrad school of philological and historical scholarship, inherited from tsarism and regarded as bourgeois by the Bolsheviks but tolerated and employed in the service of the new state. Indeed, some products of this tradition, especially the ethnographic work, were utilized by the new authorities to an extraordinary extent. The other, based in Moscow, was made up of several new institutions designed to produce cadres, party workers and administrators, whose role would be to provide practical and politically relevant knowledge and act as functionaries for the Soviet government’s avowed intention of encouraging the East to act to liberate itself from imperialism and colonialism. These institutions included the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies, intended mostly for Russian students and headed between 1923 and his death in 1927 by Mikhail Pavlovich (Mikhail Lazarevich Vel’tman), and the famous KUTV, the Communist University of Toilers of the East, described below by Lana Ravandi-Fadai, for students from the Middle East and beyond.
The St. Petersburg school of Orientology and its role in shaping late imperial and early Soviet understanding of the East have been studied in depth. Nurtured in the late nineteenth century by the professor of Arabic at St. Petersburg University, Victor Rozen, himself an authority on the Bahais, among the most famous of this group were Vasilii Bartold and Nikolai Marr. Many of these scholars, aided by their inorodtsy assistants, played a crucial role, before and after 1917, in promoting the idea of certain ethnic groups across the Caucasus and Turkestan as distinct national communities, fostering the development of national consciousness, and incubating local national leaderships. Their theoretical and empirical work was thus foundational to Soviet nationalities policies in the 1920s, as is illustrated by Matthias Battis’ study of the former tsarist official and Orientalist Alexandr Semenov. Together with allies among the local intelligentsia, Semenov played a key role in championing the Persian language and Tajik statehood in a Turkic-dominated region, and delineating a version of Tajik history which not only buttressed Tajik statehood throughout the Soviet period, but was to emerge even more strongly in the post-Soviet ideological vacuum. Michiel Leezenberg’s account of Soviet Kurdology also looks at early Soviet nationalities policy and nation-building, this time though a linguistics lens. Here too a member of the Leningrad school, Nikolai Marr, was prominent. Marr’s controversial linguistic theories, which rejected the racist assumptions of contemporary Indo-European linguistic scholarship and emphasized the value of spoken subaltern vernaculars like Kurdish, shaped and encouraged the creation by Kurdish scholars of an alphabet for Kurdish and a written Kurdish literature.
Another quite distinct site of Orientological knowledge production was to be found in Moscow and was principally represented by the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies and the KUTV. These institutions were explicitly devoted to working for the revolutionary transformation of the East and subordinated all intellectual work to this goal. One of their leading figures, Mikhail Pavlovich, head of the Moscow Institute and founder of the journal Novyi Vostok (The New Orient) is of particular interest to Iranian studies. In exile in France in the early years of the century, Pavlovich, then a Menshevik, began to take an interest in the Orient partly as a result of his study of European imperialism, but also due to the revolutionary upheavals then convulsing both Iran and the Ottoman Empire. In several articles, published between 1909 and 1911, Pavlovich developed an analysis of the political situation in Iran which was both acute and prescient, the contours of which may still be found in much academic writing on the Constitutional Revolution. According to Pavolovich, the turmoil in Iran had been provoked by the penetration of the Iranian economy by Russian and British capitalism and the consequent emergence of an indigenous bourgeoisie capable of leading demands for reform. However, Pavlovich also noted the connection between the emergence of revolutionary movements in the Caucasus and in Iran, and the crucial role of labor migration, migrants bringing back to Iran ideas and organizations to which they had been exposed in the Baku oilfields. Foreshadowing subsequent Soviet debates, Pavlovich also commented upon the contingently progressive role of the Shi’i mujtahids and of Islam itself in the Constitutional Revolution. In more general terms, Pavlovich, in his 1912 article in Revue du Monde Musulman, “Zelim Khan et le brigandage au Caucase,” also anticipated, by half a century, Eric Hobsbawm’s “social banditry” thesis.
After the 1917 revolution, Pavlovich joined the Bolsheviks and in 1920 began to work on the organization of the Congress of Peoples of the East, which took place in Baku in September 1920, Pavlovich cooperating closely with the Iranian revolutionary Avetis Sultanzadeh. From this time on, Soviet theoreticians were to focus increasingly on attempting to understand, using the tools of historical materialism, the historical trajectory of pre-capitalist societies and the potential revolutionary role of the peasantry. Analyses of Iran were to be deeply embedded in this wider ideological project. The resulting theoretical framework was to be a decisive factor in shaping not only Soviet and Comintern policies towards Iran, but also the outlook of generations of Iranian intellectuals who were profoundly influenced by translations of Soviet works and their propagation inside Iran by the Tudeh party. Indeed, the power of the Soviet analysis of Iranian historical development over the Iranian intelligentsia far outstripped the actual political influence of the Tudeh.
Before 1917 Marxists had held to a universally applicable theory according to which every human society must pass through the same process of historical development. This process was characterized by five distinct stages, each stage marked by the dominance of a particular mode of production. The stages were primitive communism, classical/slavery, feudalism, capitalism and finally socialism, the motor for change being the struggle between classes. Scattered comments by Marx and Engels had also introduced into this general theory the notion of an Asiatic mode of production but before 1917 this notion remained undeveloped and largely dormant.
The October revolution itself called sharply into question this classical Marxist schema. Germany, with its mature capitalism and large, well-organized and politically advanced working class, had been envisaged as the likeliest candidate for socialist revolution. Instead, industrially backward, politically autocratic, peasant Russia had taken the lead. Even before the Bolshevik seizure of power, Lenin, in his 1917 April Theses, had already implicitly challenged the classical schema. After October the need was urgent to find a theoretically satisfactory explanation for this completely unexpected new reality. Debates about the necessity of every society passing through all five stages, particularly the capitalist stage, were especially sharp in relation to the Orient. Most Oriental countries, including Iran, were certainly pre-capitalist, with little or no true working class, but might they pass, as Russia appeared to have done, directly to the socialist stage? Did the Asiatic mode of production actually exist and where in the schema of development might it be located?
These debates were of more than theoretical significance. Indeed they had political implications of the most serious nature. The correct identification of a society’s mode of production was essential. If feudal, then a political alliance with the rising bourgeoisie would be an appropriate strategy, if already capitalist, then clearly the bourgeoisie could only occupy the role of antagonist. Similarly, if there was no necessity to pass through the capitalist stage, then again there was no necessity for an alliance with the bourgeoisie, which might indeed prove not only unnecessary but fatal.
In the context of the global political crisis resulting from the First World War and still engulfing the former Russian empire and much of Asia, the 1920 Baku Congress of Peoples of the East came down firmly against the necessity of the colonial world passing through the capitalist stage. Since the context was now transformed by the existence of a workers’ and peasants’ republic (the USSR), congress resolutions called for countries to fight directly for the Soviet system, even where there was no independent working class. For Iran, this strategy meant support for the Jangalis and the declaration of a Soviet republic in Gilan. But as the new Soviet state, unsupported by revolutions in the more advanced West, began in the early 1920s to accommodate itself to the emerging international status quo, strategy towards Iran retreated from advocating revolution to winning allies in the struggle against western imperialism. Figures like Reza Khan, Mustafa Kemal and, most disastrously, Chiang Kai-shek in China, were hailed as progressive representatives of bourgeois democratic forces and local communist parties were instructed to lend them support.
Notwithstanding the realpolitik which increasingly came to determine Soviet, and therefore also Comintern, policy from the 1920s, debates about the nature of historical development in the Orient continued in relatively free and sophisticated terms. Between the mid-1920s and 1934 the question of the existence of an Asiatic mode of production became center stage. Although the strategy to be pursued by the Chinese Communist Party in relation to the nationalist Kuomintang was the most pressing political question underlying this debate, its conclusions had potentially serious implications for the colonial world in general. According to this theory, societies characterized by the Asiatic mode of production, ruled by an all-powerful and despotic state and without private property in land, lacked the dynamism of true feudalism. Economically stagnant, they were incapable of generating the economic surplus required to produce a bourgeoisie and therefore revolutionary change, if it were to occur, must be grasped by proletarian and peasant elements. Iran, as well as China and Egypt, was an obvious candidate for the Asiatic mode of production. This theory came perilously close to Trotskyism, and although the controversy was intense, with several conferences being held, most notably in Leningrad in 1931, by 1934 the so-called Aziatchiki had been both politically and ideologically defeated and the theory removed from the Soviet Marxist canon. Nonetheless, the idea of an Asiatic exceptionalism continued to possess a resonance for some Iranian scholars.
The now stabilized Soviet interpretation of Iranian history, which followed Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism and which became immensely influential in Iran itself, proposed the following periodization. The Median, Achaemenid and Parthian periods corresponded to the classical/slave stage, with feudalism beginning under the Sasanids. The development of feudalism in Iran was interrupted by the Arab conquest but resumed under the Saljuqs, and was exemplified by the generalized existence of the form of land grant known as iqta‘. Iranian feudalism was again disrupted by the Mongol invasions but reached a fully mature form under the Safavids. During the nineteenth century Iranian feudalism began to disintegrate, and capitalism began to develop, stimulated by Iran’s increasing integration into the international economy. The bourgeoisie that thus emerged made a bid for power in the Constitutional Revolution. The Pahlavi period which followed was characterized by a dependent capitalist economy, geared to the needs of the West but serving also the interests of an indigenous but dependent bourgeoisie.
This then was the theoretical tool which the Tudeh used in its attempts to assess the historical role of the Pahlavi monarchy, and to devise strategies for its relations with other political forces, including Khomeini and the Islamic Republic. The belief that the 1979 revolution was bourgeois-democratic, possessed the potential to move Iran towards a non-capitalist path, and that the clerical leadership contained progressive elements, led the Tudeh to adopt a disastrous strategy of support for the more radical factions in the Islamic Republic. Throughout the 1980s, Soviet scholars, the exiled survivors of the Tudeh and the remnants of the secular leftist Iranian intelligentsia continued to try to understand the entirely novel phenomenon of the Islamic Republic from a class perspective, and by searching for an explanation based on the economic interests of precisely defined social strata. Such analytical perspectives, similarly derived from their Soviet mentors, also guided the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the younger sibling of the Tudeh, in its formulation of both theory and policy before and after their seizure of power in 1978.
In its ideological work in general, and especially in relation to the post-1979 regime, the Tudeh and other leftist circles in Iran were also influenced by Soviet debates about the role of Islam. Like the modes of production debates, for about a decade in the 1920s discussions about the origin and class character of Islam were conducted in a relatively free atmosphere and produced a range of theoretical positions. In general, Soviet scholars treated Islam as an ideology which, like other ideologies, emanated from and represented specific class interests. Disagreement therefore centered on the nature of the class whose ascendancy was expressed through the rise of Islam. Among the contenders were the merchants of Mecca, the peasants of Medina and the nomadic Bedouin. One theory which was marginal at the time but which, in its broad outlines, was later to become immensely appealing in Iran was first formulated by Z. and D. Navshirvanov, Volga Tatar communists, who argued that elements of communism might be found in early Islam, and that early radical Shi’i and Sufi movements were actually popular revolutionary uprisings which, lacking any other vocabulary, used that of Islam. This formulation rapidly found its way to Iranian leftists seeking to reconcile socialism with popular religious feelings, who were even tempted to use an Islamic vocabulary to mobilize the masses. The rise of political Islam in the 1970s forced Soviet and leftist scholarship to confront the perplexing reality of the undiminished, indeed ever-growing, power of Islam, and variants of the Navshirvanov theory were much in vogue.
In summary, then, is it possible to sustain the accusation of “Red Orientalism” against figures like Pavlovich and Soviet Iranology in general? One of the key notions of the Orientalist critique, whether formulated by Said himself or by others working along similar lines, is that of essentialism. According to this notion, Orientalism depends on an assumption that Islam is “a coherent, homogenous, global entity” which determines all the key features of Muslim societies, to the exclusion of all other material factors, whether economic, social or political. In this respect, as the description above indicates, Soviet Iranology and Orientology in general was rather anti-Orientalist, Soviet scholars consistently seeing Islam as a reflection of material circumstances, not a causal factor. For them Islam was an ideology and it was class interest which produced ideology, not ideology which shaped social and economic relations. Secondly, was the application to Iran of the concept of historical development based on changing modes of production Eurocentric? Can we find in Soviet scholarship the ontological opposition between East and West which the Saidian critique asserts as a feature of Orientalism?
Certainly Soviet academics often used linguistic tropes of backwardness and darkness familiar from Anglo-French Orientalism to describe “the East,” as Ulfatbek Abdurasulov shows in his quotes from Olga Chekhovich. But it was the specific class character, the feudalism, of these societies which they were criticizing, and indeed academics as well as ideologues habitually employed similar language to characterize Russia under the tsars. Marx and Engels originally derived their analytical categories from their knowledge of Europe, which was the knowledge mainly available to them. However there is, in their approach, and in that of the Soviet scholars who followed them, no privileging of the European experience over that of the Orient. Historical development through specific stages is a universal pattern, and the agent of change is a class, not a race, nation or ethnos. The dichotomy at the heart of the Marxist analysis was not between Europe and the Orient but between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Thirdly, was the function of Soviet Orientology to elaborate a discourse which would contribute to the establishment or reaffirmation of imperial power relationships between Russia and the Orient, whether inside the Soviet Union or between the Soviet Union and the wider Eastern world? An answer to this question ultimately depends, of course, on a broader discussion of the USSR than is possible here. However, some concluding comments may be taken into account. Firstly, just as on the ideological level, the key Soviet contradiction was between classes, so on the political level, the actual existing dichotomy was not between Russia and the non-Russian republics but between the authoritarianism of party and state and the mass of the population, and was experienced across the Union as much by European Russians as by the Caucasian and Central Asian republics. Secondly, many of the post-1917 generation of Soviet scholars were primarily Marxist ideologues who approached their subject through the prism not of Islamic studies but of historical materialism. They had, furthermore, been formed in the struggle to overthrow tsarism in both East and West. For a figure such as Mikhail Pavlovich, revolutionary success in Russia and the liberation of the Orient were one and the same. Indeed Pavlovich, in his social origins, his political activities and his ideological formation, provides a stark contrast to both tsarist Russian Orientalists and their British and French counterparts. The product of the Jewish petit bourgeoisie in Odessa, Pavlovich joined the revolutionary movement while still at school. Imprisonment and exile inevitably followed. His interest in the Orient was awakened not by any impulse to defend European hegemony, but by the Orient’s potential to challenge imperialism and thus European power. His arrival in high office in the 1920s was entirely predicated upon this personal history.
Thus the circumstances of the genesis of the new Soviet state, and its ideological parentage, explain the discourse within which Soviet Orientology and Iranology developed and which provided its theoretical framework until the very end. This discourse, as Ulfatbek Abdurasulov and Harun Yilmaz demonstrate below, made no claim that academic work was or ought to be independent of ideology and class interest. Even before 1917, Russian Orientalists like Nikolai Marr had begun to develop a critique of the relationship between scholarship and imperial power, but their attacks sharpened and acquired a new, overtly political, relevance in the context of the 1920s. This critique was, however, articulated most strongly by ideologues such as Pavlovich who, four decades before the publication of Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge, and fifty years before Said’s Orientalism, formulated an uncompromising comprehension of the links between knowledge and power. Writing in Novyi Vostok in 1922, Pavlovich declared that for British, French and German Orientalists, scholarly study of the East was “merely secondary”; their primary goal was to help their governments conquer Asia. A few years later he wrote that colonial belles-lettres had “become a weapon of the European ruling classes’ political propaganda in their colonialist aggression.” These ideas remained central to Soviet writings and were transmitted to generations of students from the colonial world studying in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. One such, Anwar Abdel-Malek, author of the 1963 work “Orientalism in Crisis,” deeply influenced Edward Said and gave as its first citation the 1951 Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Here the entry on Orientology (other than the class perspective) might have been written by Said himself:
Reflecting the colonialist-racist worldview of the European and American bourgeoisie, from the very beginning bourgeois orientology diametrically opposed the civilizations of the so-called “West” with those of the “East”, slanderously declaring that Asian peoples are racially inferior, somehow primordially incapable of determining their own fates, and that they appeared only as history’s object, rather than its subject. Bourgeois orientology entirely subordinates the study of the East to the colonial politics of the imperialist powers.
Far from sharing the essentialist oppositions of Anglo-French Orientalism, then, Soviet scholarship has, on the contrary, been identified as a key progenitor of the lineage that actually produced Said’s critique, and indeed the field of post-colonial studies in general.
Soviet scholarship on Iran and the Persian-speaking world has bequeathed a valuable intellectual legacy, but one which remains largely inaccessible to those working outside the former Soviet Union. Little has been translated and Russian is not seen as an important research language for Iranian studies, while Soviet archives have hardly been used for Iranian history. The articles in this collection perhaps offer some preliminary pointers to the potential of Russian sources and research, indeed to the insights which may be gained from seeing the Persian-speaking world “through Russian eyes.”