Empire Looks Outward

In the last 20 years, the "imperial turn" has transformed the way we understand the Russian Empire's relationship with its non-Russian subjects. It has shown that Russian imperialism was unusual, rooted in a drive for dynastic loyalty more than ethnonational or religious homogeneity. Yet for the most part the field has focused on the empire's internal politics—the way its imperial visions, discourses of difference, and practices of accommodation were deployed in the Caucasus, Siberia, and Central Asia.¹ Denis Volkov's Russia's Turn to Persia and Edyta Bojanowska's A World of Empires are among a number of recent works that seek to shift this perspective outward, into the vast portion of the world that Russia could not or would not control directly. They show how Russians learned from other empires, but also how they developed a sense of their own distinctiveness. Both processes shaped how Russia deployed hard and soft power to compete with its rivals (especially Britain) in its vast Asian periphery.

The two books complement each other, each one taking up themes the other pushes into the background. Volkov focuses on the institutional structures that made it possible for the Russian Empire to gather intelligence and shape policy in Qajar Persia, from the late imperial to the Soviet era. Bojanowska draws out the imperial ideology and personal preoccupations that shaped the writing of one of 19th-century Russia's most influential works of travel literature, Ivan Goncharov's Fregat "Pallada" (The Frigate Pallada), in the 1850s.² Where one book is diachronic, the other is centered on a particular moment in time; where one deals with organizations, the other deals with ideas. Ultimately, both books represent significant advances in our understanding of Russia's encounter with the world, though each would have benefited from incorporating some of the perspectives embodied in the other.

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Volkov's work is grounded explicitly in the theoretical approach of Michel Foucault. Put crudely, Foucault saw society as constituted by discourses incorporating thought, action, and power relations. From this standpoint, the term "power-knowledge" refers to the idea that knowledge cannot be conceived separately from power, since knowledge requires and reflects power, while power always involves interventions in knowledge. For Volkov power-knowledge is the key point of departure for his analysis of Russian Orientalism.³ Though many scholars, including Russian historians, have deployed various aspects of Foucault's thought since the 1980s, Volkov is perhaps unique in the patience and thoroughness he brings to explicating the Foucauldian view of knowledge, which forms the subject of his first chapter.⁴ His central figure is the "Foucauldian intellectual," the academic or diplomatic disciplinary expert whose practices are discursively regulated and shaped by institutions. Though critical theorists may find his readings of the French maître unexpectedly literal, for Volkov this framework serves an essential purpose: he wants to preserve an account of Russian Orientalism centered on individual practitioners, but without ascribing to them an autonomy that they did not possess either in theory or in practice. Thus Russian Orientalists were not simply tools of imperial power, but neither were they independent of it, even in moments when they tried to assert that independence. The constraints on them changed after 1917 but not in ways that fundamentally altered the nature of the relationship; if anything, the revolution redoubled the utilitarian aspects of imperial knowledge-production.

The remaining four chapters of the book follow two levels of imperial knowledge-making in Persia, the institutional and the individual, with one chapter in each stream rooted in the late imperial and one in the early Soviet era. Chapter 2 signals the overall approach, as Volkov poses his answer to the long-running scholarly debate about Russian Orientalism. Although he sees it as similar to French and British Orientalism, Volkov's overall view is...