摘要：While the concepts like ‘multiple modernities’, ‘the Second world’ and ‘the third way’ often provoke intense political debate in the Russian social studies, an interdisciplinary approach to the country’s cultural history would provide new framings for these controversial concepts and open alternative directions in postcolonial studies of Russia. Alexander Etkind’s latest book Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (2011a) employs a fruitful metaphor of ‘internal colonization’ in a creative reconstruction of the Tsarist Russia’s colonialism and aims to fit the ‘Russian case’ into the ‘classical’ postcolonial theory. Internal colonization is not a scrupulous historical review of colonial practices and institutions; neither is it a comprehensive account on colonialism as seen in the Russian literature (Etkind, 2011b). Instead, it is a vivid depiction of the Russian empire’s colonial mentality that is masterfully deconstructed and reconstructed through the book’s diverse multidisciplinary cases.
