Western empires crossed oceans to find their colonies. Alexander Etkind's argument is that Russia never needed to — it found one at home.

The standard story of European colonialism runs outward: ships crossing oceans, flags planted in foreign soil, distant populations subjected to extraction, administration, and the systematic dismantling of their own self-understanding. Alexander Etkind's book proposes a different version of the same story, one in which the direction of travel is reversed. Russia, he argues, colonised itself — directing toward its own interior populations the same combination of resource extraction, administrative control, and cultural condescension that Western empires directed at their overseas territories. The colony was not across an ocean. It was already there, inside the borders, speaking a different language in all but the literal sense.

The subject population was the peasantry — the vast majority of Russians, living in conditions of serfdom until 1861 and of acute poverty long afterward, governed by a state apparatus that regarded them with the mixture of anxiety, incomprehension, and extractive appetite that characterises colonial relationships everywhere. The Europeanised elite that ran that apparatus had more in common, culturally and intellectually, with their counterparts in Paris or Vienna than with the peasants living a hundred miles from Moscow. The distance between them was civilisational — and it was managed, Etkind argues, through colonial instruments: surveys, categorisations, reform programmes designed as much to control as to improve, and a persistent inability to imagine the peasant as a full political subject rather than a problem to be administered.

This is why the nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals who tried to "go to the people" — leaving their studies or salons to live among the peasantry, to learn from them, to close the distance — were doing something structurally similar to what Western anthropologists and missionaries were doing in Africa or India at the same moment. They were crossing a cultural frontier that existed within their own country, driven by the same mixture of guilt, romanticism, and genuine curiosity. Russian literature of the period is saturated with this dynamic — the educated observer encountering the peasant world as simultaneously familiar and utterly foreign, and not quite knowing what to make of either feeling.

The resource logic runs continuously through Russian history, from the fur trade that financed the early empire to the oil and gas revenues that have sustained its more recent iterations. Territories and populations have been valued instrumentally — for what they yield — in ways that have left behind, Etkind argues, a pervasive residue of alienation and mistrust. The state has never quite made the transition from colonial administrator to accountable government, and ordinary Russians have, over centuries, developed the relationship to authority that colonised populations tend to develop: a mixture of resignation, suspicion, and the private preservation of whatever cannot be reached from above.

Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan (2014) is a portrait of that relationship at its rawest. Set in a small coastal town in northern Russia, it follows an ordinary man whose house and land the local authorities have decided to take. The film is not primarily about corruption — though corruption is everywhere in it — but about the specific texture of powerlessness in a society where the state has always been something that happens to you rather than something you participate in. The man is not simply unlucky. He is experiencing something with a very long history: the colonial subject's encounter with an administration that is technically his own government and that treats him, in practice, as an obstacle to be cleared. Etkind's framework doesn't make the film easier to watch. It makes it harder to look away.