The history of Russian Oriental studies seems to be becoming more and more fashionable in foreign Russian studies. Last year 2011 was particularly fruitful in this regard. In winter, Routledge published a collection edited by German orientalists Michael Kemper and Stefan Konerman, dedicated to the heritage of Soviet Oriental studies [The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies, 2011]. A few months later, in the spring, Oxford University Press published a monograph by Professor Vera Tolz of the University of Manchester ,entitled " The Russian East: Identity Politics and Oriental Studies of the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Times." Tolz was supposed to be one of the authors of the volume under the editorship of Kemper and Conermann, but chose for the first time to describe in detail the contribution of classical orientalism of the early twentieth century to imperial and Soviet nation-building in the Russian East in her monograph.

* Tolts V. Russkiy Vostok: politika identichnosti i vostokovedenie imperskogo i rannego sovetskogo vremya [Russian East: Identity Politics and Oriental Studies of the Imperial and Early Soviet Times]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. X, 203 p. (Oxford Studies on Modern European History).

The Baron W. R. Rosen school that Toltz is studying needs no introduction. Its founder, his students, and even their" native " correspondents and followers are well known in the history of science. Of course, this trend does not represent all the diversity of the palette of Russian orientalism in its heyday in the 1880s and 1920s. In addition to scientists of the academic Petersburg-Leningradsky direction, who were not related to Rosen's students, but were close to them in their views (among whom it is enough to mention the Sinologist V. M. Alekseev and the Japanese scholar N. I. Konrad), there were also graduates of the centers of Oriental studies in Moscow (Lazarevsky University) and Kazan (Kazan University and the Theological Academy) and other university cities. Along with academic orientalism at the time under study, Russia also had military translators from Eastern languages and Orientalist missionaries who greatly helped the government in the task of integrating the non-native population into the empire. Among them, we can recall the Koran translators D. N. Boguslavsky and G. Sablukov, who do not appear in the reviewed book. I will also mention the military orientalist V. P. Nalyvkin, who did a lot in the field of studying the culture of Russian Turkestan, and N. Ilminsky, the initiator of Orthodox education of non-native peoples of the Volga region in their native languages, whose activities caused a lot of criticism from orientalists of the academic school. In Tolz's book, they are a contrast to her main characters, defenders of the ideals of pure objective knowledge, free from politics and ideology (pp. 73-79).

The history of St. Petersburg academic orientalism has been written about many times. What's new here? Some scope for study is provided by the lively, albeit sad theme of political repression in orientalism, the prospects of which are clearly visible from the dictionary "People and Destinies" (Vasilkov and Sorokina, 2003) ^.1 But Vera Tolts chose to study a different, unusual aspect of academic Oriental studies. The era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rich in social experiments and upheavals, did not allow Orientalists to remain far from politics as armchair scientists. Its heroes often found themselves in the position of objects and participants in national projects of the state, and even attracted their "native" correspondents and students from the outskirts to them (p. 111-167). In the 1920s, V. V. Barthold, F. I. Shcherbatskoy, and N. Ya. Marr helped the Soviet government to build culture among the "natives" of the Russian East. Tolz describes in detail their contribution to the nation-building of Buryats-Mongolia, Turkestan and Abkhazia. Sometimes Rosen's students took the initiative to help the" natives " of the outskirts, as evidenced by the Latin-based alphabet project prepared by Marr in 1926 for Abkhazia (p. 149-151, 158-159), but later left unrealized. However, this and other initiatives of the classics of Oriental studies, with the participation of "native" elites and authorities, form an integral political language, or discourse, of the imperial and Soviet arrangement of national minorities in the empire and early Soviet Russia. He became the core around which the narrative in the book is built.

Tolts correctly notes the critical pathos of the classics of Russian academic Oriental studies in relation to the legacy of colonial knowledge (p.88-101). In many ways, their ideas echo the revisionist approach in Western science in the 1970s and 1980s, which sought to decolonize history. Here it is tempting to see the continuity of the revisionist critique of colonial knowledge. However, this connection is not so direct and obvious. Indeed, the postcolonialism of the last third of the twentieth century was to some extent one of the ideological heirs of the critique of colonial knowledge in early Soviet historiography2. Tolz probably exaggerates the influence of the early Soviet representatives of the Rosen school on the creator of the concept of orientalist discourse, E. Said [Said, 2003], through the third-rate Arab Marxist A. Abdel-Malek, who borrowed criticism of Western orientalism from the review article "Oriental Studies" published in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Much more obvious is Said's borrowing of the Marxist critique of imperialism, which comes not at all from his Soviet, but from the Western tradition, through A. Gramsci and M. Foucault, whose influence on Said's concept no one denies. Said has significantly more than ³ links to them.

¹ There is an extended online version of the dictionary available at: http://mcmory.pvost.org/pagcs/indcx2.html. Last visited on 28.12.2011.

² Another legacy of this critique of the Western perception of the East was the post-war Soviet science, which had admirers of Marr, such as the influential researcher of the ethnography of the peoples of Central Asia, S. P. Tolstov. I am grateful to S. N. Abashin for this remark.

³ Orientalism has 5 references to two articles by Abdsl-Malek [Said, 2003, p. 96-97, 105, 108, 325, 327]. Gramsci's works are cited 6 times in the book, and Foucault - 14!

Moreover, Marxism (in its Soviet and liberal Western European forms) divided rather than connected the revisionists of Said's time and the Russian Classical Orientalists of the turn of the tsarist and Soviet eras. While Said reinterpreted the Marxist thesis of hegemony and class struggle, the orientalists of Rosen's school were not proficient or interested in Marxist rhetoric. Rosen himself did not live to see the obligatory introduction of Marxism into Oriental studies. The 1920s in Soviet Russia were a relatively liberal time, when old academic masters were not yet forced to retrain according to the unified Soviet model. Even Barthold, who of all Rosen's students showed the greatest interest in socio-economic subjects, did not use Marxist phraseology at all in his writings, including "Lectures on the History of Oriental Studies in Europe and Russia", which Tolz relies on in his book. Rosen's followers remained staunch positivists. Therefore, postcolonial scholars (including Said) saw the Rosen school of Orientalists as their own material rather than their ideological predecessors. Both sides lived and worked in completely incompatible coordinate systems.

The history of endless debates over the legacy of postcolonial science in general and orientalism in particular shows the dangers of its relativistic nature. Said's "orientalism" has often been misunderstood, sometimes as a revelation of the true East, sometimes as a justification for the Arab intifada and Islamic terrorism. Not without reason, shortly before his death, Said had to make long and tedious excuses, explaining his position to incomprehensible readers [Said, 2003, p. XI-XXIII, 329-354]. Therefore, I would not be surprised if Toltz's book is misunderstood by some as an apology for academic Oriental studies or evidence of the uniqueness of the Russian path between the West and the East. Nevertheless, the author should not be particularly upset. A thoughtful and prepared reader will understand and understand everything correctly.

However, given the likelihood of a Russian translation of the book, which is so much needed in Russia today, we can do something else to better understand the work. The problem of the contribution of Orientalists of the academic school to the integration of foreign elites, including their students and collaborators, into the Russian imperial and later Soviet space is extremely important. But this topic, unfortunately, is often hidden behind "deaf" references to archival affairs, unknown (and inaccessible) to the vast majority of readers of the book. Why not quote in the text itself or in the links from letters exchanged in the late imperial and early Soviet times by S. F. Oldenburg, F. I. Shcherbatskaya, Ts. Zhamtsarano, and B. B. Baradiin? The author's argument would only benefit from this.

In recent years, the problem of continuity and gaps between tsarist and Soviet Russia has been actively discussed in science. A major breakthrough in this area was made with the publication of T. Martin's classic monograph on the empire of national minorities (Martin, 2001) ^.4 The essence of Martin's thesis, as we know, was that the continuity between the late empire and the early Soviet state lay in Soviet projects to root the administrative apparatus on the outskirts, to construct and institutionalize national minorities within the territorial framework of tsarist Russia. The Bolsheviks believed that the minorities reinforced in this way were able to cement the country and avoid its fragmentation, which began during the years of the revolution and civil war after the fall of the old regime. Tolz defines this project as nation-building within the imperial state framework (sub-state nation-building, p. 169).

Another dimension connecting the two regimes is through the imperial ethnographers who participated in the construction of ethnic communities and territories in the Soviet Union, proposed in her book Frensin Hirsch (Hirsch, 2005). In Toltz's book, we also find another link between the two empires: the workshop of Oriental scholars of the St. Petersburg academic school (and not orientalists in Saidov's sense of the term!), which formed a single social network with their correspondents of non-Russian origin. Along with the imperial practical Oriental studies of military translators and Orthodox missionaries, the academic school of Orientalism contributed to the creation of the Russian East and ideas about it from the era of colonial empires and socialist internal Russian nation-building.

⁴ A long-awaited Russian translation of the book has recently been published [Martin, 2011].

list of literature

Vasylkov Ya. V., Sorokina M. Yu. People and destinies. Biobibliographical dictionary of Orientalists-victims of political terror in the Soviet period (1917-1991). St. Petersburg: Peterburgskoe vostokovedenie, 2003.

Martin T. The Empire of "positive Activity". Nations and Nationalism in the USSR, 1923-1939. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2011.

The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies. Ed. by M. Kemper, S. Concrmann. London-New York: Routlcdgc, 2011.

Hirsch F. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, N.Y.-L.: Cornell University Press, 2005.

Martin T. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.

Said E.W. Orientalism. 3^rd cd. L.: Penguin Books, 2003.

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