132 Orientalism and Empirethey were apparently like animals, lacking even the rudiments of cul-
ture and not worthy of much consideration.
Conservative thought in the age of Russification reserved cultural
“originality” and authenticity for the Russians and offered little to the
small peoples of the empire, such as those of the North Caucasus.
Danilevskii denied the heritage of conquest that had created the em-
pire in places such as the Middle Volga, the Caucasus, and Turkestan,
argued that the state could only (and should only) represent the resi-
dent “cultural-historical type” (the Russians), advocated the
assimilation or “fusion” (sliianie) of various small peoples with the
Russians, denied that Russia possessed colonies, defended the activi-
ties of settlers, and attributed the (supposed) weaknesses of the
French national character to the historic mixing of Germanic and
Roman cultural influences.^37 Similarly, Strakhov defended the forma-
tion of the Russian Empire as a sharp contrast to European colonial
empires, British Ireland, and American slavery.^38 He also associated
the expansion of the state into numerous borderland regions and its
growing power in relation to Europe with the emergence of Russian
“originality,” and he emphasized that the state drew its sustenance
from “russkie” rather than “rossiiskie.”^39 Ivan Aksakov suggested
that any “genuine nationalities policy for Russia” must be based on a
recognition that the empire’s Slavic (by which he meant Russian) her-
itage was its true source of vitality.^40 He was suspicious of the emerg-
ing discussions about federalism in what was soon to be the Austro-
Hungarian Empire after 1867, which would not help the Czechs, for
example, who would remain “deprived of their tribal originality
[samobytnost’]” in the Germanic world.^41
Strakhov adopted many of Danilevskii’s views about the nature of
different “cultural-historical types.” Thus he was alarmed by John
Stuart Mill’s focus on culture and character formation in his work on
gender differences; instead for Strakhov, like Danilevskii, cultural
(and social) differences were the natural outgrowths of the organic
process of history itself. Different peoples represented different
“cultural-historical types,” and they were far from equal in their
“spiritual strengths.”^42 Within the context of the multi-ethnic empire,
conservative thinkers felt the need to emphasize the limits of the “re-
verse Orientalism” implicit in the rethinking of the Russian past and
its relationship to Europe initiated by the Slavophiles. Russia’s his-
toric “backwardness” was suddenly a virtue; Chechen or Abkhaz
“savagery,” however, remained just that.
The question of “world-historical types” and “historical peoples,”
which in the 1830s and 1840s was self-evidently a debate about the big
civilizations of the Hebrews, Latins, Germanic peoples, and so on,