Communists like us: Ethnicized modernity
and the idea of `the West' in the Soviet Union
ABSTRACT
This article offers a portrait of communism in the USSR as an
ethnicized form of modernity; a form defined in relation to the idea of ‘the West’.
First, I introduce the ‘racialized modernity’ thesis and suggest that notions of race
and racialization are neither adequate nor appropriate categories to apply to the
reification of modernity in the USSR. I then turn to western views of Russia, emphasizing the role accorded to Russians of the ‘not quite European’ Europeans. These
two sections provide the background to a discussion of the development of an
ethnopolitical form of communist modernity – a form in which the proletariat was
simultaneously an ethnic and political category – which is introduced in the rest of
the article. Section six is somewhat different, charting the abandonment of the
communist vision. The so-called ‘return to Europe’, although a supposedly stalled
and certainly an ambiguous process, is presented here in terms of the reanimation
of western and Russian myths of communism as a non-European ‘hiatus’ in Russian
history. Central to this process is the ethnic othering of communism through its
representation as an Asian contamination of western tradition.
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