Collectivization as Colonial Mimicry: Indigenous Population and the Creation of Modernity in the Yenisei North in the 1930s

Abstract

The article analyzes the colonial discourse, which took the form of colonial mimicry in the process of collectivization of indigenous farms in the North of Russia. Following the theses of the theoretician Homi Bhabha, I attempt to show this mimicry in terms of double ambivalence: 1) Soviet politicians tried to make an indigenous “other” like themselves, and the indigenous people pretended that they became such; 2) mimesis was carried out through the representation of two opposite imaginations – otherness and modernity. In the Yenisei North, this order of colonial mimicry began to take shape after the Taymyr Uprising of 1932. Kolkhozes existed exclusively on paper, and party members recognized the established tribal groups of hunters, fishermen, and reindeer herders as the simplest collective farms. Under the technocrats of the Glavsevmorput, a course was taken for the sedentarization of the indigenous population and the creation of statutory artels, which led to the formation of a new technocratic canon of modern mimicry.