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Crucifying the Orient. Russian Orientalism and the Colonization of Caucasus and Central Asia. By KALPANA SAHNI. Bangkok and Oslo: White Orchid Press, 1997. 344 pp.
Kalpana Sahni's Crucifying the Orient is only the second monograph in English (after Susan Layton's Russian Literature and Empire. Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994]) to deal with Russian orientalism in the ramified sense which the word has acquired since Edward Said's path-breaking study Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). Said's operative premise, we recall, was the necessary if complex connection between orientalism as (1) a scholarly discipline, (2) a more diffuse set of popular ideological assumptions about the orient, and (3) a discourse of domination, an ideological correlative to European imperialism.
Given the absence of any substantial discussion of Russia or the Soviet Union in the work of Said or of those writing in his wake, the emergence of what might be called Russian or Eurasian postcolonial studies is certainly welcome. The brutalities of Tsarist and Soviet history provide an extreme instance of the relationship between orientalism and empire, and Sahni's book is a summary account of precisely this nexus.
Over nine chapters and covering principally the last two centuries of Eurasian history, Crucifying the Orient reads as a powerful survey of the effects of Russian domination in its colonies, from the derivative European model of the civilizing mission prevalent in the nineteenth century to the strikingly original blend of internationalism, paternalism, and systemic violence that characterized Soviet power. Sahni is most effective at instantiating the reductive and dehumanizing schematism of Russian-Soviet Orientalist stereotypes, and at showing their overall continuity. Notions of Asiatic backwardness and immobility, she tells us, served to empty out what was a richly varied cultural landscape, from the oral traditions of the steppe nomads to the great Central Asian centers...