Episode 30: Anti-Colonial Bolshevik Historiography with Alexey Golubev

Reimagining Soviet Georgia

In the 1920s and 1930s, Bolshevik historians actively took part in building Soviet socialism. As militant scholars, one of their main tasks was (broadly speaking) to reconceptualize and rearticulate the history of the political entity they had just overthrown - the Russian Empire.

The multinational Bolsheviks were not only committed to building a socialist state, but believed this must be done through the dismantling of what Lenin called the Russian "prison house of nations". Writing History was a critical tool in this process. Through the analytical lens of Marxism and a political commitment to anti-imperialism, Bolshevik historians from across Eurasia spent the 1920s and 1930s writing new materialist histories of imperial Russia. Historians like Mikhail Pokrovskii sought to wholly overturn the narratives of Imperial historians by explaining Russian colonization and imperial expansion as material processes, subject to forces like capital, class conflict and the quest for raw materials rather than the abstract notions of imperial rights, religion or civilizational benevolence. Militant historians from Central Asia, the Caucasus and elsewhere also began rewriting national histories, using materialist explanations of national development and colonialism in areas of Eurasia often for the first time.

Because the writings of early Soviet historians critically engaged with nationhood, imperialism, capital and colonialism, they offer many lessons about writing History today. Currently, many studies and discussions about Eurasia are focused on the concept of "decolonization". However, unlike early anti-colonial Bolshevik historiography, the current decolonial discourse about post-Soviet countries tends to reinforce narrow national-historical narratives and nationalisms, and are entirely divorced from the revolutionary modernization, internationalism, universalism and socialist construction that were key features of anti-colonial Bolshevik historiography in the early 20th century.

On today's episode we discuss all this and more with historian Alexey Golubev.

Alexey recently wrote an article entitled "No natural colonization: the early Soviet school of historical anti-colonialism" which discusses Soviet Marxist historical narratives of the 1920s and early 1930s that sought to reframe Russian history as a process driven by commercial capital and analyzed Russian territorial expansion and its historical scholarship in terms such as settler colonialism and indigenous erasure.

Alexey is a professor of History at the University of Houston.