Thread by Franziska Davies

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  • May 26, 2023
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I have been listening to the fantastic @BotakozKassymb1 in recent days speaking not only about (Russian/Soviet) colonialism, but also about how colonial structures and knowledge are still part of academia and how we are all part of it. A thread.

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Bota's analysis made me think about my encounters with senior scholars as a PhD-candidate, many (but not all) from Russia, who teach at top-institutions in the West and are thus very well integrated into the international scholarly community.

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In 2009 I decided to write my dissertation on Muslims in the Russian imperial army, the majority of whom were Tatars. For me it was clear, if I do this topic, I will only do it with Tatar sources alongside Russians.

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So learnt Tatar, including in the old Arabic script they used pre the Soviet period. So needless to say, it was a bit of work. In contrast to my supervisor who supported the idea from the word go (kudos!), the reaction of other senioar scholars was often quite different.

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One senior scholar from 🇷🇺 (a specialist on the Russian Empire) teaching in the US was very surpised that I bothered to learn Tatar. “You won’t find any sources,” he said. “Muslim soldiers didn’t write anything about their time in the army.” (They did – in Tatar.)

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During a workshop at a top US-institution, a different senior scholar regarded as one of the “Gods” of Russian imperial history, showed zero interest in the Tatar sources I presented. He basically said, “what do these sources really tell us? Nothing really.”

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When presenting at a different university, a (German) professor asked how many Tatars served in the Russian imperial army (about three percent) and then basically said that there were too few of them to make their history interesting.

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This was after I had presented my work on some pretty fascinating Tatar accounts of the First World War. At the time, I started questioning my research and the questions I was asking. I cried after one of these encounters, thinking my work was crap and I had wasted my time.

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Now I see more clearly, that this was also the manifestation of an imperial mindset. I later even learnt that one of these US-based scholars supported Trump, because he was the only candidate “who is not anti-🇷🇺”.

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In summer 2014 (so post-Crimea and Donbas) I was on a panel at an international conference at a top-institution in Russia next to another internationally renowned scholar from Russia. After his presentation a young woman from Ukraine was critical about his presentation on

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Ukraine during the First World War. She also asked why scholarship was often so much more critical of Ukrainian nationalism than Russian imperialism. His whole body language and his answer showed that he thought her questions were annoying and stupid.

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This was PhD candidate vs. senior scholar, woman vs. man, but also Ukrainian vs. Russian. I wish I had supported her at the time, but I was a young PhD candidate myself. As far as I remember, nobody in the room said anything in defense of this young woman from Ukraine –

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despite the room being full of top senior scholar from all other the world and Russia had just attacked Ukraine a few months before. We all failed her.
So if we talk about #decolonization, we should also ask what that means for our own behaviour and research questions.

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Thank you @BotakozKassymb1 for making me think about this and seeing things more clearly now. You are just brilliant. ❤️
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