Monday, January 04, 2021

 

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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