10 Orientalism and Empirethe imperial community. A more distant but also important source of
inspiration for the rethinking of empire was the general Great Reform
effort to reconceive the character of the social order in Russia. The en-
counter with the Caucasus and Central Asia happened to coincide
with this crucial period of social and cultural exploration in Russia.
But the most important notion, distant in location yet somehow ever-
present in the minds of both Russians and non-Russians, was that of
“Europe” itself as an idea. Notions of enlightenment, progress, and
Russia’s relationship to Europe were especially important among
multi-ethnic educated society on the frontier. Perhaps this is not sur-
prising, given that “educated society” was by definition a community
marked by literacy and varying degrees of education.
The preoccupation on the frontier with Europe’s notion of progress
reminds us of two different issues related to the work of Said and the
interdisciplinary scholarship increasingly known as “post-colonial”
studies of the history of colonialism. In the Russian context it is clear
that the corpus of ideas, attitudes, and policies identified by Said as
“Orientalist” were indeed significant and especially crucial to under-
standing the incorporation of eastern borderland regions such as the
North Caucasus, the Volga-Urals, and Turkestan. The problem of
Russia’s torturous relationship to the West was especially complex
and also especially promising on the frontier, as Mark Bassin has re-
cently emphasized. The East, in his rendition, was a location where
Russians might prove their worth as promoters of Europe’s enlighten-
ment and civilization, and where they might even alter the playing
field. The “original Russia-Europe juxtaposition – so unfavorable for
the former – could be reconsidered and, ultimately, readjusted.”^35
“The historical tasks of Russia lie to the East,” announced a Batumi
newspaper on 1January 1900, “which itself is eager to meet us.”^36
Russia’s greatness might be revealed and exhibited in the process of
imperial expansion. The “second Renaissance,” as Raymond Schwab
liked to refer to Europe’s discovery of the East, offered Germans the
opportunity to “recapture the first Renaissance from the Latins by un-
disputedly possessing oneself of the Orient.”^37 Russia too was offered
a unique field upon which to develop its emerging nationalist con-
sciousness, a matter closely tied to the process of imperial expansion.^38
On the other hand, the Russian imperial experience also illustrates,
in a way similar to the conclusion of numerous scholars studying the
Western empires, that Said’s “Manichean opposition between East
and West” inadequately captures the experience of “cultural hybrid-
ity that necessarily informs both colonizing and colonized
cultures.”^39 Shared experiences and ideas made the level of “entan-
glement” so significant as to often obscure ethnic differences among