Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Geographies of imperial identity
the Petrine imperial image incorporated and internalised this juxtaposition
like the other European empires, and it understood it in the same way. The
Russians developed their own elaborate ideology of ‘Orientalism’, which
adopted the Western sense of the absolute superiority of Russia’s notion-
ally European culture and civilisation over the collective peoples of Asia and
accepted the corresponding moral imperative to bring Western enlightenment
and progress to these benighted masses.
5
As in Europe, the Russians typically
understood this enterprise to be a providentially assigned mission, and as
such it immediately became a matter of national destiny. Dmitrii Romanov,
a government official involved in wresting the territorial concessions in the
Far East from China that were codified in the Treaty of Peking in 1860, waxed
enthusiastic at the prospect of the opening of the Middle Kingdom to Western
influence. ‘Fully one-third of the human race, which up to this point remained
as if it were non-existent for the rest of the world, is now entering into contact
with the advanced nations, and is becoming accessible for European civiliza-
tion.’ Romanov clearly saw Russia as a bearer of the latter, and spoke explicitly
of the evropeizm or ‘Europeanism’ which his compatriots were now in a posi-
tion to disseminate across East Asia.
6
The essential Europeanness of Russia’s
civilising mission, moreover, was not limited to such philanthropic concerns
for ameliorating the public welfare of its Oriental minions, and could easily
be appropriated for the purposes of an aggressively forward policy of imperial
conquest and expansion. Here as well the essential similitude with European
empires was stressed very heavily. It was in just these terms, for example,
that the foreign minister, Alexander Gorchakov, justified to the rest of Europe
Russia’s thrust into Turkestan in the mid-1860s. As a fully developed Western
country, he explained in a now-famous diplomatic circular, Russia shared in
the general European responsibility of civilising the backward regions of the
globe. Drawing explicit parallels with the United States’ pacification of the
indigenous population of North America, the French in Algeria and Britain
in India, Gorchakov identified Russia’s own ‘special mission’ as the bringing
of an enlightened social and political order to those ‘barbarous countries’ and
‘half-savage nomad populations’ that it confronted in Central Asia.
7
5 S. Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); A. L. Jersild, Orientalism and Empire:North
Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845–1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2002)
6 D. I. Romanov, Poslednie sobytiia v Kitae i znachenie ikh dlia Rossii (Irkutsk: Irkutskaia
gubernskaia Tip. 1861), p. 3.
7 Quoted in Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia. A Record and a Study 1558–1899 (London: Grant
Richards, 1899), pp. 224–5.
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