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Russian Colonialism and the Asiatic Mode of Production: (Post-)Soviet Ethnography Goes to Alaska

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Abstract

This article discusses the concept of politarism (politarizm), developed by die Soviet ethnographer Iu. I. Semenov as an elaboration on Marx's Asiatic mode of production. Presenting both its origin in the revisionist debates of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras and its recent application in an innovative analysis of Russian colonialism in Alaska by the ethnohistorian A. V. Grinev, Sonja Luehrmann attempts to grasp the intellectual complexity of Semenov's work. While the Soviet debate on the Asiatic mode of production has been read as Aesopian criticism of the USSR, it may more fruitfully be seen as an argument against a strict five-stage scheme of historical evolution that opened up new possibilities of concrete empirical analysis and a new theoretical role for ethnography as the science of noncapitalist societies. Grinev's use of politarism in the 1990s shows the lasting explanatory value of the concept as well as the need to understand the origins of Soviet intellectual traditions in order to critically engage with them.

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Articles
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2005

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References

For comments and suggestions during research and writing, I am indebted to Christian Feest, Aron Crowell, William Rosenberg, Ilya Vinkovetsky, and two reviewers for Slavic Review, as well as to participants in the conference “TransFormations of the Disciplines,“ University of Michigan, February 2004, and the panel “The Soviet Disciplines: Academic Cultures of the Brezhnev Era” at the 2004 National Convention of AAASS, Boston.

1 I use the term ethnography as a translation of Russian etnografiia, to designate the academic discipline roughly equivalent to cultural anthropology in the U.S. Since the early 1990s, Russian colleagues have also used terms like etnologiia or kul'turnaia antropologiia.

2 Examples include Slezkine, Yuri, “The Fall of Soviet Ethnography, 1928-38,” Current Anthropology 32, no. 4 (1991): 476–84;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Slezkine, Yuri, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, 1994);Google Scholar Hirsch, Francine, “The Soviet Union as a Work-in-Progress: Ethnographers and the Category of Nationality in the 1926,1937, and 1939 Censuses,” Slavic Review 56, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 251–78;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Grant, Bruce, In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Peres troikas (Princeton, 1995);Google Scholar Meurs, Wim van, “Sovetskaia etnografiia: Okhotniki ili sobirateli?Ab Imperio, 2001, no. 3:2633;Google Scholar Skalnik, Peter, “Soviet etnografiia and the national(ities) question,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 31, no. 2–3 (1990): 183–93;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Sokolovskii, Sergei V., “Men'shinstva v rossiiskikh regionakh: Otechestvennaia etnografiia i politicheskaia praktika,” Etnometodologiia, 1997, no. 4:82100.Google Scholar For a different approach, see Humphrey, Caroline, “Some Recent Developments in the Ethnography of the USSR,” Man 19, no. 2 (1984): 310–20;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Gellner, Ernest, State and Society in Soviet Thought (Oxford, 1988).Google Scholar

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4 In the period between 1800 and 1820, the total number of Russians in all settlements hovered around four hundred. This leaves no more than two hundred people for Kodiak Island, where Russian estimates give the Native population at four to five thousand at the beginning of the nineteenth century, albeit with a falling tendency due to disease. Fedorova, Svetlana G., Russkoe naselenie Aliaski i Kalifornii: Konets XVIII veka-1867g. (Moscow, 1971), 248;Google Scholar Lisianskii, Iurii F., Puteshestvievokmgsvetana korable “Neva” v 1803-1806 godakh, abridged ed. (Moscow, 1947), 178;Google Scholar Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, Bemerkungen auf einer Reise urn die Well in denfahren 1803 bis 1807, vol. 2, Reise von Kamtschatka nach der Insel St. Paul, Unalasha, Kodiak, Sitcha, Neu-Albion, Kamtschatka, Ochotsk und durch Sibirien nach St. Petersburg (Frankfurt, 1812), 53.

5 An early Soviet view of ruthless exploitation by the Russian colonial company is in Semen B. Okun', Rossiisko-amerikanskaia kompaniia (Moscow and Leningrad, 1939). For the kind of portrayal of Russian cruelty that was common in American histories of Alaska up to the 1970s, see Hulley, Clarence C., Alaska: Past and Present (Portland, 1958), 61.Google Scholar

6 Lydia Black, a scholar who has done much to make sources on Alaska's Russian past available to anglophone readers, has emphatically championed this view. See Black, Lydia T., “Ivan Pan'kov—An Architect of Aleut Literacy,” Arctic Anthropology 14, no. 2 (1977): 79108;Google Scholar Black, Lydia T., “Creoles in Russian America,” Pacifica 2, no. 2 (1990): 142–55;Google Scholar Black, Lydia T., “The Russian Conquest of Kodiak,” Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska 24, no. 1–2 (1991): 165–82.Google Scholar

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8 Grinev, Andrei V., “'Kolonial'nyi politarizm’ v novom svete,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 1996, no. 4:5264;Google Scholar Grinev, Andrei V., “Tuzemtsy Aliaski, russkie promyshlenniki i Rossiisko-amerikanskaia kompaniia: Sistema ekonomicheskikh otnoshenii,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 2000, no. 3:7488.Google Scholar

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10 Gibson, James R., “Russian Dependence on the Natives of Alaska,” in Haycox, Stephen W. and Mangusso, Mary Childers, eds., An Alaska Anthology: Interpreting the Past (Seattle, 1996), 2142;Google Scholar Winston Lee Sarafian, “Russian-American Company Employee Policies and Practices, 1799-1867” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1970).

11 Crowell, Archaeology and the Capitalist World System, 52, 219, 221, 230; Knecht, Richard A. and Jordan, Richard H., “Nunakakhnak: An Historic Period Koniag Village in Karluk, Kodiak Island, Alaska,” Arctic Anthropology 22, no. 2 (1985): 1735;Google Scholar Gibson, James R., Imperial Russia in Frontier America: The Changing Geography of Supply of Russian America, 1784-1867 (New York, 1976).Google Scholar

12 Crowell, Archaeology and the Capitalist World System, 10-16; Gibson, James R., “Russian Expansion in Siberia and America: Critical Contrasts,” in Starr, S. F., ed., Russia's American Colony (Durham, 1987), 3240.Google Scholar

13 Grinev, Andrei V., “Russkie kolonii na Aliaske na rubezhe XIX. v.,” in Bolkhovitinov, N. N., ed., Istoriia Russkoi Ameriki, vol. 2, Deiatel'nost’ Rossiisko-amerikanskoi kompanii 1799-1825 (Moscow, 1999), 1552.Google Scholar

14 Gedeon, Hieromonk, The Round the World Voyage of Hieromonk Gideon, 1803-1809, ed. Pierce, Richard A., trans. Black, Lydia T. (Kingston, Ontario, 1989), 65.Google Scholar

15 Lisianskii, Puteshestvie vokrug sveta, 191.

16 Andrei V. Grinev, “Russkie promyshlenniki na Aliaske v kontse XVIII v.: Nachalo deiatel'nosti A. A. Baranova,” in Bolkhovitinov, Istoriia Russkoi Ameriki, 1:177-78.

17 Grinev, “‘Kolonial'nyi politarizm,’” 54.

18 Ibid.

19 Grinev, “Tuzemtsy Aliaski,” 84.

20 Grinev, “‘Kolonial'nyi politarizm,’” 61; Grinev, “Tuzemtsy Aliaski,” 85.

21 Moseley, K. P. and Wallerstein, Immanuel, “Precapitalist Social Structures,” Annual Review of Sociology 4 (1978): 259–90;Google Scholar Anderson, Perry, Lineages of the Absolutist Slate (London, 1974), 487.Google Scholar

22 Grinev, “‘Kolonial'nyi politarizm,’” 53-62.

23 Andrei V. Grinev, “Russkaia Amerika i SSSR: Udivitel'nye paralleli,” Klio, 1999, no. 1:119-27; Grinev, “‘Kolonial'nyi politarizm,”’ 54; Grinev, “Tuzemtsy Aliaski,” 83.

24 Istomin, Aleksei A., “O ‘kolonial'nom politarizme,’ latinoamerikanskom ‘feodalizme' i nekotorykh aspektakh otnosheniia k aborigenam v Russkoi Amerike,” Etnograftcheskoe obozrenie, 2000, no. 3:89108.Google Scholar

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26 The notion of the state as an undifferentiated, centralized locus of power is of course a familiar trope in the historiography of Russia. For a critique, see Kivelson, Valerie, Autocracy in the Provinces: The Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Stanford, 1996).Google Scholar

27 Gedeon, Round the World Voyage, 69; Davydov, Gavriil I., Dvukratnoe puteshestvie v Ameriku morskikh ofitserov Khvostova i Davydova, pisannoe sim poslednim, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1810–1812), 1:196-99, 2:6067.Google Scholar

28 See Davydov, Dvukratnoe puteshestvie, 2:75; Ioann Veniaminov, Zapiski ob ostrovakh Unalashkinskago otdela, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1840), 53-54; Vinkovetsky, “Native Americans,“ 175-76.

29 The original chapter appeared as “How Did Mankind Acquire Its Essence? or The Paleolithic October or The Marxist Book of Genesis” in Gellner, State and Society, 18-38. The Russian translation is entitled “Marksistskaia kniga bytiia,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 1992, no. 2:35-51. The works by Semenov reviewed are the chapters he contributed to Bromlei, Iu. V., Pershits, A. I., and Semenov, Iu. I., eds., Istoriia pervobytnogo obshchestva: Obshchie voprosy; Problemy antroposotsiogeneza (Moscow, 1983 Google Scholar

30 Gellner, “How Did Mankind,” 34.

31 Semenov, Iurii I., “O pervobytnom kommunizme, marksizme i sushchnosti cheloveka,“ Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 1992, no. 3:3738.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 38.

33 For very negative evaluations of Semenov’s work and of the respect in which he was held by some of his western colleagues, see Plotkin, Vladimir and Howe, Jovan E., “The Unknown Tradition: Continuity and Innovation in Soviet Ethnography,” Dialectical A nthropology 9, no. 1–4 (1985): 278–81;Google Scholar Kabo, Vladimir, Doroga v Avstraliiu: Vospominaniia (New York, 1995), 254–56.Google Scholar

34 Gellner, Ernest, “The Sovietand the Savage,” Current Anthropology 16, no. 4 (1975): 595617;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Dragadze, Tamara, “A Meeting of Minds: A Soviet and Western Dialogue,” Current Anthropology 19, no. 1 (1978): 119–28;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Fortes, Meyer, “Introduction,” in Gellner, Ernest, ed., Soviet and Western Anthropology (London, 1980), xixxxv.Google Scholar

35 Shlapentokh, Vladimir, Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power: The Post-Stalin Era (Princeton, 1990), 156.Google Scholar

36 Primitive communism, slave-owning society, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism/ communism.

37 On the 1930s debate, see Fogel, Joshua A., “Debates over the Asiatic Mode of Production in Soviet Russia, China, and Japan,” American Historical Review 93, no. 1 (1988): 5679;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Bailey, Anne M. and Llobera, Josep, eds., The Asiatic Mode of Production: Science and Politics (London, 1981), 49106.Google Scholar

38 Slezkine, “The Fall of Soviet Ethnography“; Plotkin and Howe, “The Unknown Tradition,” 275-77; Humphrey, “Some Recent Developments.“

39 On history, see Markwick, Roger D., “Catalyst of Historiography, Marxism and Dissidence: The Sector of Methodology of the Institute of History, Soviet Academy of Sciences, 1964-68,” Europe-Asia Studies 46, no. 4 (1994): 579–96;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Markwick, Roger D., Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: ‘Hie Politics of Revisionist Historiography, 1956-1974 (New York, 2001);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Sevost'ianov, G. N., Akademik P. V. Volobuev: Neopublikovannye raboty - Vospominaniia - Slat'i (Moscow, 2000);Google Scholar Gefter, Mikhail la., Iz tekh i etikh let (Moscow, 1991).Google Scholar On sociology, see Vladimir Shlapentokh, The Politics of Sociology in the Soviet Union (Boulder, Colo., 1987).

40 Spechler, Dina R., Permitted Dissent in the USSR: mir, Novy and the Soviet Regime (New York, 1982).Google Scholar

41 Slezkine, “The Fall of Soviet Edinography,” 479; Kabo, Doroga v Avstraliiu, 248; D. D. Tumarkin, “Chetyrnadtsat' let v ‘Sovetskoi etnografii’ (Iz vospominanii zamestitelia glavnogo redaktora zhurnala v 1966-1980 gg.),” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 2001, no. 4: 20-26.

42 Tumarkin, “Chetyrnadtsat' let,” 20; V. 1. Kozlov, “Ob akademike Iuliane Vladimiroviche Bromlee—uchenom i cheloveke,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 2001, no. 4:3-14; Iu. I. Semenov, “Razrabotka problem istorii pervobytnogo obshchestva v Institute etnografii AN SSSR v ‘epokhu’ Bromleia (Vospominaniia i razmyshleniia),” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 2001, no. 6:3-20. For a dissenting view, comparing Bromlei'sera to “enlightened absolutism,” see Kabo, Doroga v Avstraliiu, 257.

43 Iulian V. Bromlei, Elnos i etnografiia (Moscow, 1973).

44 For a summary of a discussion that had been arranged to show that Bromlei's supporters outnumbered his critics, see “Obsuzhdenie stat'i Iu. V. Bromleia ‘Etnos i endogamiia,'“ Sovetskaia etnografiia, 1970, no. 3:86-103. See also Tumarkin, “Chetymadtsat' let,” 21.

45 S. E. Rybakov, “Sud'by teorii etnosa: Pamiati Iu. V. Bromleia,” Elnograficheskoe obozrenie, 2001, no. 1:3-22; van Meurs, “Sovetskaia etnografiia.“

46 Iurii Semenov and N. Ter-Akopian were among the edinographers who presented papers in the seminar of the Sector of Methodology at the Institute of History in 1964-67. Markwick, “Catalyst of Historiography,” 582.

47 Semenov, “Razrabotka problem istorii pervobytnogo obshchestva,” 13. The book in question was Iu. I. Semenov, Vozniknovenie chelovecheskogo obshchestva (Krasnoiarsk, 1962).

48 Semenov, “O pervobytnom kommunizme,” 39.

49 Shlapentokh, Politics of Sociology, 33.

50 O. A. Afanas'ev, “Obsuzhdenie v Institute istorii AN SSSR problemy ‘aziatskii sposob proizvodstva,'” Sovetskaia etnografiia, 1965, no. 6:122-26; Zhan Siure-Kanal', “Traditsionnye obshchestva v tropicheskoi Afrike i marksistskaia kontseptsiia ‘Aziatskogo sposoba proizvodstva,'” Narody Azii i Afriki, 1965, no. 1:101-2; Moris Godel'e, “Poniatie aziatskogo sposoba proizvodstva i marksistskaia skhema razvitiia obshchestva,” Narody Azii i Afriki, 1965, no. 1:102-4. The full papers were published in French asjean Suret-Canale, “Les societes traditionelles en Afrique tropicale et le concept de mode de production asiatique,“ and Maurice Godelier, “La notion de ‘mode de production asiatique’ et les schémas marxistes devolution des sociétés,” in Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Marxistes, ed., Surle “mode de production asiatique” (Paris, 1969).

51 Danilova, Liudmila V., “Diskussionnye problemy teorii dokapitalisticheskikh obshchestv,” in Danilova, L. V., Bakhta, V. M., Vasil'ev, L. S., Gefter, M. la., and Ter-Akopian, N. B., eds., Problemy istorii dokapitalisticheskikh obshchestv (Moscow, 1968), 53.Google Scholar

52 See Markwick, ReiirrilingHistory, 89-97; compare Claude Meillassoux, Femmes, greniers et capitaux (Paris, 1975).

53 Sadomskaya, Natalia, “Comment on Ernest Gellner, ‘The Soviet and the Savage,'“ Current Anthropology 16, no. 4 (1975): 611–12;Google Scholar Markwick, “Catalyst of Historiography,” 587.

54 Sevost'ianov, Akademik P. V. Volobuev, 38-39.

55 The book in question was A. I. Pershits, ed., Stanovlenie klassov i gosudarstva (Moscow, 1976).

56 Gellner, State and Society, 50.

57 Fogel, “Debates over the Asiatic Mode,” 61.

58 Danilova, “Diskussionnye problemy,” 42.

59 M. A. Vitkin, “Problema perekhoda ot pervichnoi formatsii ko vtorichnoi,” in Danilova, Bakhta, Vasil'ev, Gefter, and Ter-Akopian, eds., Problemy istorii dokapitalisticheskikh obshchestv, 435.

60 Leonid S. Vasil'ev, “Sotsial'naia struktura i dinamika drevnekitaiskogo obshchestva,“ in Danilova, Bakhta, Vasil'ev, Gefter, and Ter-Akopian, eds., Problemy istorii dokapitalisticheskikh obshchestv, 511.

61 This would place them in a similar position to the natural scientists discussed by Loren Graham, many of whom, he argues, found materialist philosophy genuinely useful for their work, but resented the politicization of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, which made it more difficult for individual scientists to develop their own creative reformulations. Graham, Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior, 16.

62 Trotsky, Leon, “The Class Nature of the Soviet State (October 1, 1933),” in Breitman, George and Scott, Bev, eds., Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1933-34 (New York, 1972), 101–22;Google Scholar Djilas, Milovan, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York, 1957).Google Scholar

63 Bailey and Llobera, Asiatic Mode, 182-94; Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals, 134.

64 Minutes of discussion, cited in Markwick, “Catalyst of Historiography,” 593.

65 Semenov, Iu. I., “Ob odnom iz tipov traditsionnykh sotsial'nykh struktur Afriki i Azii: Pragosudarstvo i agrarnye otnosheniia,” in Rastiannikov, V. G., ed., Gosudarstvo i agrarnaia evoliutsiia v razvivaiushchikhsia stranakh Azii i Afriki (Moscow, 1980), 102–30.Google Scholar To my knowledge, this article is the first time Semenov uses the term politarism in print. In earlier publications, he used the terms kabala (debt servitude) or “Asiatic“formation. For the former, see Iurii Semenov, “Problema sotsial'no-ekonomicheskogo stroia drevnego Vostoka,“ Narody Azii i Afriki, 1965, no. 4:69-89; for the latter, Iurii Semenov, “Teoriia obshchestvenno- ekonomicheskikh formatsii i vsemirnyi istoricheskii protsess,” Narody Azii i Afriki, 1970, no. 5:82-95. A longer version of the latter paper was published in English as “The Theory of Socio-economic Formations and World History,” in Gellner, Soviet and Western Anthropology, 29-58.

66 Semenov, “Ob odnom iz tipov,” 104.

67 Ibid., 115.

68 Polanyi's dieory itself draws on the ethnographic research carried out by Bronislaw Malinowski on the Trobriand Islands in the 1910s. See also Sahlins, Marshall, Stone Age Economics (Chicago, 1972), 132–48.Google Scholar

69 Wolf, Europe and the People vnthout History, 96-99.

70 An English translation of this article appeared as “Theoretical Problems of ‘Economic Anthropology,'” trans. Ernest Gellner, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 4, no. 2-3 (1974): 201-31.

71 Semenov, “Theoretical Problems,” 226.

72 Ibid., 225.

73 Semenov, Iu. I., “Rossiia: Chto s nei sluchilos’ v dvadtsatom veke,” Rossiiskii etnograf 20 (1993): 5105.Google Scholar

74 Ibid., 105.

75 Semenov, “O pervobytnom kommunizme,” 39.

76 Semenov, “Razrabotka problem istorii pervobytnogo obshchestva,” 10. See also the exchange between Semenov and Valerii Tishkov, Bromlei's successor as director of the Institute of Ethnography (renamed Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology in 1991), about the applicability of Anglo-American concepts of diaspora and ethnicity to Russia: Tishkov, Valerii A., “Istoricheskii fenomen diaspory,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 2000, no. 2:4363;Google Scholar Semenov, Iu. I., “Etnos, Natsiia, Diaspora,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 2000, no. 2:6474.Google Scholar

77 Grinev is considerably younger than Semenov. He published his first book in 1991 and taught at Altai University in Barnaul before coming to the University of the Humanities in St. Petersburg in the 1990s.

78 Grinev, “Russkaia Amerika,” 121-26.

79 Grinev, “Nekotorye tendentsii v otechestvennoi istoriografii rossiiskoi kolonizatsii Aliaski,” Voprosy istorii, 1994, no. 11:163-67.

80 Humphrey, Caroline, Marx Went Away—But Karl Stayed Behind, (Ann Arbor, 1998), 118–19;Google Scholar Verdery, Katherine, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next“? (Princeton, 1996), 25;Google Scholar Verdery, Katherine, The Vanishing Hectare: Property and. Value in Postsocialist Transylvania (Ithaca, 2003).Google Scholar

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82 Semenov, “Ob odnom iz tipov,” 121.

83 Ibid., I l l ; Semenov, “Rossiia,” 17.

84 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3., trans. Ernest Untermann (Chicago, 1909), 919.

85 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Werke, vol. 25 (Berlin, 1964), 799.Google Scholar

86 K. Marks and F. Engel's, Sochineniia, vol. 19, part 2, trans. I. I. Skvortsov-Stepanov (Moscow, 1947), 353.

87 For a Weberian rather than Marxist approach arguing explicitly that ownership of the means of production does not provide the key to political authority in precapitalist societies, see Vasil'ev, Leonid S., “Fenomen vlasti-sobstvennosti,” in Alaev, L. B., ed., Tipy obshcheslvennykh otnoshenii na Vostoke v srednie veka (Moscow, 1982), 6099.Google Scholar

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89 Gedeon, Round the World Voyage, 44; Davydov, Gavriil I., Two Voyages to Russian America, 1802-1807, trans. Bearne, Colin (Kingston, Ontario, 1977), 149;Google Scholar Holmberg, Heinrich Johann, “Ethnographische Skizzen über die Volker des Russischen Amerika,” Acto Societatis Scientarium Fennicae 4 (1856): 358;Google Scholar Grigorii I. Shelikhov, A Voyage to America, 1783— 1786, trans. Marina Ramsay, ed. and introduction, Richard A. Pierce (Kingston, Ontario, 1981), 43.

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