Russia’s Postcolonial Identity: A Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World by Viacheslav Morozov (review)

Research on Russian foreign policy has until recently been dominated by conventional descriptive studies based on politicized and moralizing either pro-Russian or anti-Russian narratives. Some constructivist researchers have tried to produce more reflective studies grounded in modern theories of international relations. Much has been written about Russia’s uneasy relations with Europe both in Russia and the West. However, there has been a noticeable lack of intellectual effort to apply postcolonial analysis to this problem. The book by Viacheslav Morozov is an interesting attempt to bridge international relations with postcolonial theory in Russian studies.

Chapter 1 of the book makes a case for the application of postcolonial theory to gain a deeper understanding of the tensions and contradictions of Russia’s international standing. Specifically, it advances the thesis of Russia as a “subaltern empire.”¹ The concept of subaltern is borrowed from postcolonial theory and refers, according to Morozov, to an oppressed nation deprived of subjectivity and ability to articulate its own narrative. By combining the two concepts, “subaltern” and “empire,” the book argues that the country is simultaneously part of both the global imperial core and the Western periphery. This mixed experience has resulted in a unique state of Russian identity, which Morozov defines as “hybrid subjectivity,” another term borrowed from postcolonial studies.

Hybrid subjectivity, according to Morozov’s interpretation of postcolonial studies, is a situation when the colonized subject is able to mimic the discourse of the colonizer, thus subverting it and making colonial domination a profoundly ambiguous phenomenon. To illustrate this condition, Morozov uses the example of the group of Hindus, who study the Gospel but refuse to accept that it was introduced to them by Europeans. Similarly to Indians, who accept the universality of Christian values, but refuse to acknowledge their origin in the European culture, Russia, even when it opposes the West, nevertheless frames its own demands in the “Western” language (Pp. 23–24). Drawing on this frame of analysis, the chapter concludes that the added value of the postcolonial perspective is its ability to explain uneasiness in Russian–European relations and to demonstrate that the only subject on the horizon of Russian politics is the West itself (Pp. 6, 157–164).

Chapter 2 of the book provides a critical overview of several strands of the reflectivist international relations literature (postcolonial, constructivist, and critical revisions of the English school). In particular, the book argues that a variety of constructivist scholars, especially those who explicitly pursue the task of theorizing Russian schools of international relations, eventually end up analyzing their own identity rather than the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of the field. Furthermore, the book argues that even though separate constructivist studies identified similar patterns of the discursive landscape in Russia, China, Iran, and Japan, most of them still pursue a case-focused approach, which does not allow generalizations about the nature of identity, discourse, and othering mechanisms. Postcolonial theory, according to Morozov, allows a comparative perspective and can account for this pattern (P. 44).

Another limitation of the constructivist school, namely, its in-ability to take into account material factors, is addressed in chapter 3. In describing Russia’s economic dependency on the West, Morozov combines approaches by Alexander Etkind, Boris Kagarlitsky, and Vsevolod Sergeev. He concludes that external economic rationale (demand for fur, hemp flax, timber, grain, and currently gas imported by Russia to Europe) reveal the interrupted pattern of the country’s uneven and combined development as a semiperiphery of the capitalist core over the past several centuries (P. 89). The persistence of this extractive economy model leads to identification between the security apparatus and the state per se. The preponderance of a centralized and militarized state with its grip over the economy, as well as the persistence of resource-oriented economic development has constituted the two main distinctive features of Russia up to today (P. 94). The...