Description
Book SynopsisDefining the Others, “them”, in relation to one’s own reference group, “us”, has been an essential phase in the formation of collective identities in any given country or region. In the case of Russia, the formulation of these binary definitions – sometimes taking a form of enemy images – can be traced all the way to medieval texts, in which religion represented the dividing line. Further, the ongoing expansion of the empire transferred numerous “external others” into internal minorities. The chapters of this edited volume examine the development and contexts of various images, perceptions and categories of the Others in Russia from the 16th century Muscovy to the collapse of the Russian empire.
Trade Review“This timely volume brings together exciting new research on the perception of ‘others’ during four centuries of Russia’s imperial history. While older research often highlighted adherence to Orthodoxy as the main marker of Russianness, this volume’s case studies provide a far more nuanced picture. They demonstrate that different—and often contradicting—markers of identity existed side by side and that perceptions of internal and external ‘others’ were inextricably interwoven. Processes of incorporation and differentiation took place simultaneously and led to a constant shifting of borders between those perceived as ‘Russians’ and the ‘others.’ Ultimately, this book indicates that these contradictions resulted from the ambiguities of Russia’s own identity as a multiethnic state oscillating between empire and nation, with consequences to the Soviet era and beyond.”
— Ulrich Hofmeister, University of Munich
“From pre-Petrine depictions of steppe dwellers to eighteenth-century categorizations of foreigners and non-Orthodox people, from Pushkin’s encounters with Circassians to imagined Crimean Tatars, from early photographs of the multi-ethnic Caucasus to zoomorphic depictions of the enemy around 1900—this book has it all. Starting in the sixteenth century, it provides a rich tableau of images and imaginations that populate the extensive canon of Russian perceptions of otherness, exoticism, xenophobia, and plain national stereotypes before 1917. At a time when Russian concepts of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ loom large again and dehumanization of the ethnic or religious other has become daily currency, this collection of articles provides historical depth to how Russianness was construed through the ages.”
— Hubertus F. Jahn, Professor of the History of Russia and the Caucasus, University of Cambridge
“Hegel wrote that subjective Spirit comes to recognize its existence outside itself by meeting itself in the minds of others. More recently, Axel Honneth has examined the construction of our social world as a sequence of recognition relations, often protracted and contentious, some achieving mutual recognition through the acceptance of difference and the according of respect, some refusing such recognition. This is one of the most important subjects for the writing of cultural history, and Images of Otherness in Russia, 1547-1917 engages it directly. The book is impressive in its breadth: it deals with a half-millenium of the successive image construction of a wide range of peoples encountered in the course of expansion of the Russian Empire—Crimean Tatars, indigenous Siberians, Central Asian Turkic peoples, Caucasus mountaineers, the Jews, the political and racial ‘enemies’ of the late Empire (such as the Germans and the ‘Yellow Peril’). It is also attentive to the successive cultural and legal categories used to classify these Others (inozemtsy, inorodtsy, inovertsy), the interests such classification served, and how it shaped Imperial policy.”
— Brian Davies, University of Texas at San Antonio
Table of ContentsPreface
Kati Parppei and Bulat Rakhimzianov
Introduction: Images, Otherness, and Images of the Others
Kati Parppei and Bulat Rakhimzianov
Part One: Creating Prototypes
Section Summary
David M. Goldfrank
Varieties of Otherness in Ivan IV’s Muscovy: Relativity, Multiplicity, and Ambiguity
Charles J. Halperin
The Depiction of “Us” and “Them” in the Illuminated Codex of the 1560s–1570s
Jaakko Lehtovirta
The Image of the Other: The Perception of Tatars by Russian Intellectuals and Officials in the Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries (Chroniclers, Diplomats, Voivodes, and Writers)
Maksim Moiseev
From Inozemtsy to Inovertsy and Novokreshchenye: Images of Otherness in Eighteenth-Century Russia
Ricarda Vulpius
Part Two: Categorizing the “Internal Others”
Section Summary
Michael Khodarkovsky
From “Sovereign’s Strangers” to “Our Savages”: Otherness of Siberian Indigenous Peoples in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Russia
Yuri Akimov
The Russians and the Oirats (Dzungars) in Asia in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Contacts and Images of the “Other” in the Era of Empire Building
Vladimir Puzanov
“In a Menagerie of Nations”: Crimean Others in Travelogues, c. 1800
Nikita Khrapunov
Visually Integrating the Other Within: Imperial Photography and the Image of the Caucasus (1864–1915)
Dominik Gutmeyr-Schnur
Perception of Others within One Ethnic Minority: Jewish Ethnographic Studies in the Late Russian Empire
Marina Shcherbakova
Part Three: The Other in Times of Conflict and Crisis
Section Summary
Stephen M. Norris
The Russian Imagological Bestiary: The Zoomorphic Image of the Enemy (“Other”) at the Turn of the Century, 1890–1905
Anna Rezvukhina, Alena Rezvukhina, and Sergey Troitskiy
Hungry and Different—“Otherness” in Imperial Famine Relief: 1891–1892
Immo Rebitschek
“Agitators and Spies”: The Enemy Image of Itinerant Russians in the Grand Duchy of Finland, 1899–1900
Johanna Wassholm
The Self and the Other: Representations of the Monarchist Foe and Ally in the Satirical Press of the Russian Right (1906–1908)
Oleg Minin
The Construction of the Image of the “Other” in the Discussion of the “Yellow Peril”: Chinese People in Late Imperial Russia
Andrey Avdashkin
“Own” and “Other”: Soldiers, Officers, and the Fatal Zigzags of the Russian Revolution in the Last Year of the Life of General L. G. Kornilov (1870–1918)
Il'ia Rat'kovskii
Contributors
