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ABSTRACT
In this paper, the concept of internal colonization is applied to the Soviet initiatives of re-socializing the large parts of the population and creating a socialist working class from peasantry, artisans, and residues of the bourgeoisie. The internal colonization, or the power relations between native Communists and their subalterns in Lithuania, is analyzed on the basis of Roses Are Red, a novel by Bieliauskas. Here, class is invented as substitute of race. The Soviet socialists stand for hegemonic standards of “normalcy,” whereas bourgeoisie is portrayed as subject of difference, as internal Orient and as internal colony, and the relationship between the two can be legitimately defined as internal colonialism.
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Notes
1. The policies of korenizatsiia were initiated early in 1920 by Soviet authorities; by promoting non-Russians into leading positions, the Party sought to legitimize the revolution. Similar measures were instigated in Baltic states in 1953.
2. In explaining “grammar of representation,” Stuart Hall refers to Donald Bogle’s study Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Black in American films (1973) that revealed five basic “types” of representing the blacks in American cinema.
3. These moral qualities were articulated later as “Moral Code of Communism Builder,” adopted at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1961.
4. Famous dictum by Immanuel Kant, “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage” (Kant Citation1785, 169).
5. Well-known author of love and crime books in interwar Lithuania.
6. Vytka – informal, shortened version of Vytautas or Vytas.
7. Ot fain! (Lithuanian) old-fashioned equivalent for “cool.”
8. Saartjie Baartman (before 1790–1815) Khoikhoi woman exhibited as freak show attractions in nineteenth-century Europe. For more, see Salesa (Citation2011).
9. “(…) white women typically embodied an ideal of womanhood,” see (Manganelli Citation2012, 9).
10. As Khrushchev admitted in 1959, “We believe … that there are no men beyond redemption. What is necessary is to educate and reeducate men” (Hammer Citation1963, 388).
11. Rephrased title of R. Kipling’s poem White Man’s Burden, known as an anthem to Western imperialism, where the “white man’s burden” signified superiority of the white race and their historical mission to educate and to civilize the less developed groups.
12. “Take up the White man’s burden / Send forth the best ye breed / Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Rasa Balockaite
Rasa Baločkaitė is an associate professor in sociology in the Department of Social and Political Theory, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania. She has published series of papers on Soviet and post-Soviet societies in Problems of Post Communism (2009), Slovo (2012), Language Policy (2014), and European History Quarterly (2015), among others. She can be reached at [email protected].