POSTCOLONIAL THEORY FOR POST-SOVIET COUNTRIES: POSSIBLE MISCONCEPTIONS

Annotation

The article throws into question the idea that post-Soviet states should be considered as post - colonial ones. Postcolonial discourse tends to underestimate the specificity of the (post)Soviet experience.First of all, the postcolonial framework does not take into account radical nature of the Communist utopia. Forced modernization of national "borderlands" was just a part of a larger project of forging a "new man"; in the same vein Bolshevik cultural revolution was addressed not only to «Orient peoples» but to the "backward masses" as such. Secondly, the postcolonial discourse presents inhabitants of national republics as вЂ?subalterns', passive victims of вЂ?Communist experiment'. Actually, the Soviet project came into being as a result of joint action of the вЂ?center' and вЂ?periphery' and many people from national republics successfully integrated into Soviet institutions. Thirdly, the Soviet Union was fundamentally different from the "classical" empires by its efforts to integrate various territories, to impose uniform social and living standards, etc. Thus, the paper comes to conclusion that postcolonial discourse can be addressed to post-Soviet countries with significant reservations.