DRAFT: NOT FOR CITATION OR RECIRCULATION White Skin, Black Masks: Dual Domination on the Border of the Soviet Post-Colony Kevin M. F. Platt, University of Pennsylvania …In silence we cross Čaka St. on yellow. We’ll ride together for five more minutes. The driver flips on the radio... After the news, I ask Imant, sitting there silently, what he, as a veteran designer, prefers—PC or Mac? He replies, in pretty good Russian, that he stopped seeing it in such stark terms a while back, but he only works on a Mac. “We just don’t have any PCs at the agency...” “...I’ll get out by the old Rigas Modas building...” “...By they way, how do Russians... I mean...” he wants to ask something about the peculiarities of PCs, but mixes up computers with my nationality and breaks off... “Funny,” from the front seat the student jumps in on the awkward moment, “I noticed long ago, that when someone names your nationality in a different language or with an accent, it always sounds sort of insulting, yeah... Or when you yourself say, Gypsy, there’s no terminological neutrality, you know? And with Chukchis, forget about it...” :) He stops, expecting we’ll laugh... A familiar song begins in the silence. But the gang from Tallinas St. can be cheered up only by a huge Jeep, racing by in the late evening at excessive speed. —From: Artur Punte, “I know—the only thing that cheers up the gang from Tallinas St.,” 20021 I. No Terminological Neutrality In the summer of 2009, I sat in a private Russian language lending library in central Riga, Latvia, speaking with Tamara Sergeevna, the librarian to whose tireless labor the library in large part owes its continued existence. It was in conversation with Tamara Sergeevna about her status as a Latvian “non-citizen” that I first encountered a locution that I would stumble over uncomfortably many times again in other such conversations in Latvia: “Look,” she told me, “negr is written right there in my passport.” The Latvian term “nepilsonis” (“non-citizen”) is rendered “ne grazhdanin” in Russian, and may be abbreviated “ne. gr.” (And, for the record, “negr” is not written in the Latvian passport for non-citizens). For Tamara Sergeevna, and many other noncitizens of Latvia, this happenstance bureaucratic pun provides an ironically inflected means to

describe the social position of non-citizens—a sui generis Latvian legal status that I will discuss in detail below—by comparing it with regimes of racism and discrimination towards darkskinned people of African origin. Now, it is no simple matter to make sense of this utterance. For one, the meaning of the word “negr” in Russian is the subject of some debate—does it carry derogatory and racist connotations, or is this merely a projection of a different linguistic coincidence—its phonic and etymological relationship to the unambiguously offensive English racial slur? And let me add here that the etymology, meaning and contestation of “negr” is paralleled in Latvian in connection with the word “nēģeris.” However, rather than attempt to legislate the meaning of these words here, a better starting point for analysis of Tamara Sergeevna’s use of the word “negr” will be to observe the shared syndrome of indistinction that ties “negr” and “nēģeris” to “nepilsonis,” not only in this series of bilingual puns and translations, but on a conceptual level. For “nepilsonis” is no easier to define or to evaluate than “negr” or “nēģeris,” and in each case this definitional problem arises from the historical and political conditions that have conspired to place these terms and the populations that use them, especially Latvia’s non-citizen population, in a series of nested, halfway positions between Russia and Europe, the Russian Federation and Latvia, Russian, Latvian and, importantly, European linguistic regimes and matrices of social identity. What, after all, does it mean to carry a nepilsonis passport in Latvia? But by a similar token we may ask: in the discursive and linguistic intertidal zone between Russia and Europe, who can dictate whether the term “negr” is a neutral descriptor or a derogatory slur? Yet considering that the term “negr,” a borrowing from western-European languages, is itself a reflection of the colonial constructions of racial identity, hierarchy and subalternity, we might identify Tamara Sergeevna’s locution as

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positing a version of one of the questions that animate our conference: is her status best described as a post-Soviet condition—“nepilsonis”—or a postcolonial one—“negr”? At the most basic level, the application of postcolonial terms of analysis to post-socialist and post-Soviet contexts hinges on an identification of the socialist/Soviet organization of political life as one of imperial domination. If the relations of the USSR to the Soviet republics and to satellite states may be described as a form of empire, in Mark Beissinger’s account “nonconsensual control over culturally distinct populations,” then by simple logic the post-Soviet is a variety of the post-colonial.2 Without going too deeply into the historiographical debates concerning the application of the term “empire” to the USSR, let us note that in his groundbreaking 2001 article on the post-colonial and the post-Soviet, David Chioni Moore, who is here with us today, unwinds his argument from the observation that “these nations, some young and some quite old, were unquestionably subject to often brutal Russian domination (styled as Soviet from the 1920s on) for anywhere from forty to two hundred years.”3 More recently, and more proximate to the specific areas that concern me in today’s presentation, a 2015 manifesto essay by Annus Epps treats the imperial character of Soviet rule in the Baltics as a settled question in order to apply colonial and post-colonial terms and categories to the Soviet and post-Soviet history of the region in a systematic manner: “It is rather easy to classify the Soviet regime in the Baltic states as a colonial regime.”4 I am inclined to agree with these accounts, despite all possible caveats relating to the peculiarities of Soviet nationalities policy or the implications and applicability of the internal colonization model to the USSR. Clearly, there was enough of the empire to Soviet political structures and forms of domination to legitimate our use of postcolonial categories in work on this region.

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Yet it should also be noted that the frequent emphasis in scholarship that adopts these positions on a demonstration of Russian imperial domination of cultural others runs the risk of supporting reductive terms of analysis that attribute historical guilt and victimhood on the basis of national identities and their natural claims to territory and “sovereignty.” As Dirk Uffelman, also here with us today, has argued, a claim that ‘the Polish, Latvian, etc. nation should be viewed as a post-colonial one’ often serves to weaponize these analytical terms for use in memory wars.5 In a profound theoretical irony, a critical apparatus that was articulated by thinkers such as Franz Fanon and, later, Homi Bhabha with the express aim of staking out positions opposed to essentialist accounts of racial and national identity is turned into a tool for essentializing national projects. My own position, as I will explain below, is that the tools of post-colonial analysis are most apt when applied not as descriptive categories to denote victims and perpetrators of imperial violence, but as overarching categories of critique that allow us to make sense of the complex legacies of empire that persist in defining identities and the relationships between them in the post-colonial moment. Application of the terms of post-colonial analysis to Latvia’s non-citizen population allows us to undertake this task. As I will show, Tamara Sergeevna and others like her, caught in the reality and the aftermath of complex imperial interweavings of domination and subordination, allows us to trace certain of the characteristic features of post-Soviet post-coloniality.

II. Non-Citizens and Compatriots In order to sort out this situation a bit, let us retrace the history of the category of “nepilsonis” in Latvia. In 1989, as a result of decades of intentional and/or happenstance Soviet social engineering, 48% of the Latvian SSR population consisted of non-Latvians, including 34%

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Russians, as well as smaller but still significant numbers of Ukrainians, Belorussians, Poles and others.6 In the liberalizing conditions for public discourse and activism of the USSR of the late 1980s, this demographic reality brought contradictory results. On one hand, ethnic Latvians had long been experiencing a sense of alarm regarding the threat to their cultural, linguistic and political identity posed by assimilation into russophone/Soviet society—an alarm that they expressed in intellectual protest, the founding of nationalist political organizations such as the Latvian National Independence Movement (Latvijas Nacionālās Neatkarības Kustība), mobilization against new economic development projects that threatened to bring still more nonLatvian workers to the republic, such as the Riga metro, etc.7 Yet these same statistics explain why Latvians, nearly a minority in the republic, could not effectively mobilize for independence without the participation of the other nationalities present in their society. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the dominant organization for Latvian autonomy and eventually independence was the Latvian Popular Front (Latvijas Tautas Fronte), which united all nationalities under a common umbrella and expressly endorsed a vision of a future Latvia in which minority cultural, linguistic and educational rights would be enshrined. In March, 1991, widespread opposition to the increasingly delegitimated Soviet state brought seventy-two percent of Latvia’s electorate—including what was likely a significant majority of the ethnic Russian contingent—to support a referendum on independence from the USSR.8 Undoubtedly, some cast their votes in opposition to Moscow, pure and simple, while others opposed Russians, also pure and simple. However, this moment of apparent coincidence of purpose was not destined to persist for long. In September and October of that same year, the Latvian Supreme Council, the successor body to the Supreme Soviet of the Latvian SSR, articulated independence as a restoration of the interwar Latvian Republic, extending citizenship only

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to those who had been citizens of that state or could trace their ancestry to citizens, and leaving some three fourths of a million people, more than a quarter of the total population of Latvia, comprised mostly of Russians, but with significant numbers of other Soviet nationalities as well, without rights in the new/old republic. The end of the Soviet order inaugurated a new era of overt contestation—a contestation that concerned, at the pragmatic level, who was entitled to enjoy the fruits of independence, and at the conceptual, the nature of Latvian polity and of the very groups that were struggling to define it. Key in this conceptual struggle, yet relegated to the status of political object rather than agent, was the population of those who had not gained citizenship in 1991. When the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist in the following year these large numbers of men and women became de facto stateless. Their rights, not only political rights, but also economic rights, were severely curtailed. They remained in this uncertain status until 1995, when the “Law on the Status of Former USSR Citizens Who Do Not Have the Citizenship of Latvia or of Any Other State” applied the new category of “nepilsonis” or non-citizen to them. This novel status is expressly not the same as that of stateless person, as Latvia’s Constitutional Court has consistently affirmed, for although it includes no rights to political participation and bars employment in certain professions, it does grant other rights usually associated with citizenship, such as rights to permanent residency, to hold property, to work, etc. As legal scholars Dimitry Kochenov and Aleksejs Dimitrovs have recently written, analysis of this status and its history suggests that “we are dealing with a classical nationality, only with no voting rights.”9 Perhaps the most scandalous implication of the law on non-citizens concerns their children, who inherit the status from their parents.

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The law on non-citizens offered a path to naturalization to this population (at first organized by “windows” that restricted the process by age group over a number of stages, which were eliminated in 1998). Undoubtedly, the category of non-citizen was designed as a temporary filter, that was to sort the wheat, who were to naturalize, from the chaff, who were to emigrate or perhaps expire, falling away from the properly proportioned polity like flashing from a newly cast monument. In the course of the quarter century that has elapsed since the collapse of the USSR, the number of non-citizens has indeed dwindled to around 250,000 individuals in an overall population that has also shrunk, by nearly a third, to 1.8 million. Yet the category has persisted. On the one hand, this derives from the apathy or active protest of non-citizens. As a gold-chained, black-t-shirted, former musician son of an “illusionist” car dealer named Dima told me, “They should have sent me a citizen’s passport in the mail!” It was 2009, 18 years since independence, and he was still angry. I have had countless conversations of this sort, including with Tamara Sergeevna, the librarian with whom I began this essay. On the other hand, the category reflects the lack of any incentive to resolve the matter on the part of the political establishment. While some pressure towards social integration and normalization for this population was applied by European international organizations during the run-up to EU accession, those institutional pressures have by now become muted and routine. Now, this situation has been critiqued by international bodies and the representatives of other states, including the Russian Federation. In the 1990s, when the new law on non-citizens was adopted, Russian diplomats complained, not without reason, that the status had a “half-way” (polovinchatyi) character.10 Yet an account of the terminological indistinction afflicting this population would be incomplete without a consideration of parallel developments in the Russian Federation itself. Putin, in his much-cited Address to the Federal Assembly of 2005, announced

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that in the wake of the Soviet collapse, “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century…, tens of millions of our compatriots and fellow citizens found themselves beyond the borders of Russian territory.”11 The term “compatriots” is, in fact, defined by Russian legislations. Since the late 1990s, a multiply revised law has granted special privileges with regard to travel, emigration, access to medicine and education to the category of “sootechestvenniki za rubezhom,” “compatriots abroad,” former Soviet citizens in neighboring states who might, in some calculation, “belong” more properly to the Russian Federation.12 Since the early 2000s, with increasing attention and resources from the Russian state, the compatriots, their identity and their rights have been the subject of media discourse in and out of the Russian Federation; they have been gathered into congresses; publications and websites have been created to address them; they have been recognized with literary prizes. Yet the question of who, in fact, the compatriots are has remained unresolved. As the law specifies, “compatriots abroad” includes representatives of all “peoples who have historically resided on the territory of the Russian Federation.”13 Yet clearly, this is not really about Finns, or Latvians, for that matter. In public discourse and common parlance, as in Putin’s address, the term primarily evokes Russians who remained outside “Russian territory” following the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, given the complexity of ethnic Russian identity following centuries of social and cultural assimilation—in which a proud Russian might well be the grandchild of a Pole, a Jew, an Ossetian and a Ukrainian, or in which an “ethnic Russian” might well consider himself a Ukrainian and enlist in the fight against separatist formations in Donbas—determining which former Soviets are the “real” Russians is not so easy, either. Successive revisions of the law have attempted, without much success, to resolve this conceptual incoherence. The current redaction specifies that “compatriots abroad” are those

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persons who, beyond historical roots in Russian lands, have additionally “made a free choice to be spiritually, culturally, and legally linked to the Russian Federation.” This choice can be demonstrated by: An act of self-identification, reinforced by social or professional activity for the preservation of Russian language, the native languages of the peoples of the Russian Federation, the development of Russian culture abroad, the strengthening of the friendly relations of the states of residence of the compatriots with the Russian Federation, the support of social organizations of compatriots, and the defense of the rights of compatriots or by other evidence of the free choice of the persons in question of spiritual and cultural linkage with the Russian Federation.14 Here, as in the case of the non-citizens, we see the collision of the complex social and ethnic identity formations inherited from the Soviet and Russian imperial past with contemporary problems of “disaggregation” of citizenship that have been observed as a global phenomenon.15 As the above makes clear, “being Russian” boils down to free choices of “spiritual and cultural” affiliation. To spell out the implications fully: questions of political belonging and collective identity—questions that, as we have seen in the course of 2014 and 2015 in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, have a direct bearing on territorial claims, on the establishment of political borders and, in extreme moments, on the murderous operations of armies and non-state armed formations— depend on cultural life. Or we could pose questions regarding the poem offered as epigraph to this essay. Does writing poems in Russian in Riga automatically render one a “compatriot abroad”? Can one write in Russian without making a “free choice” to be spiritually and culturally linked to the “Russian Federation”? Can one write in free verse? Does that fact that Artur Punte, a founding member of the Riga based poetry group Orbita, is a Russophone poet of mixed heritage have any bearing on this question?

III. Negry

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In a previous essay, I argued that among the specificities that differentiates the Latvian situation, as well as that of other post-Soviet societies like it, from “classic” post-colonial cases, deriving from European imperial domination of “non-western” peoples, is that post-Soviet historical discourse describes the former as the return of European societies to their civilizational roots following decades of domination by a non-western other. This conception of history and civilizational identity works to render the claim to modern forms of statehood and social life seemingly legitimate and non-problematic in such societies, in distinction from the crisis that is often precipitated by the apparent contradiction between non-western legacies and modern forms of political life that is variously expressed in post-colonial histories of the non-west and theorizations of them.16 As Chioni Moore has pointed out, a similar logic might explain why postcolonial solidarities and intellectual aggregations have been slow to form between post-Soviet situations in Europe and post-colonial ones elsewhere: “Because of this discursive line between the ‘East’ and ‘West,’ the post-Soviet region’s European peoples may be convinced that something radically, even ‘racially,’ differentiates them from the postcolonial Filipinos and Ghanaians who might otherwise claim to share their situation.”17 So what, then, are we to make of this curious case: the non-citizen of Latvia who points to her passport and says “negr”? This seeming exception allows us to excavate the specificity of post-colonial relations in Latvia. The overlap and coincidence of “non-citizen” with “compatriot abroad” is an incomplete one. This is to say, being a non-citizen does not make one automatically a compatriot abroad. That, one imagines, is the fantasy of nationally inclined political actors on either side of the border, who dream of a world in which unequal national collectivities are coextensive with their legitimate political territories, making possible a final reckoning of historical debts and civilizational differences. Rather, these are two half-way statuses that do not add up to a whole, and

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that cover the populations they describe unevenly and raggedly by means of terms of negation and partiality—non-citizens, like compatriots, are defined by their exclusion from Latvian citizenship, from Russian citizenship, yet by their partial correspondence in location, rights, culture or identity to these known and defined categories. One may compare this condition to the hybrid identities of subaltern post-colonial subjects, as described by Homi Bhabha in the Location of Culture: The subaltern or metonymic are neither empty nor full, neither part nor whole. Their compensatory and vicarious processes of signification are a spur to social translation, the production of something else besides which is not only the cut or gap of the subject but also the intercut across social sites and disciplines. This hybridity initiates the project of political thinking by continually facing it with the strategic and the contingent, with the countervailing thought of its own ‘unthought.’ It has to negotiate its goals through an acknowledgement of differential objects and discursive levels articulated not simply as contents but in their address as forms of textual or narrative subjections — be they governmental, judicial or artistic.18 Truly, the categories of collective identity and social belonging available in the intertidal zone between Latvia and Russia are hybrid, yet they do not always initiate the project of political thinking in quite the manner described by Bhabha. Some Russian speakers in Latvia—poets like Artur Punte, for instance—do indeed articulate a cosmopolitan project that bridges between spaces, languages and societies by means of a critical investigation of the “lack of terminological neutrality.”19 Yet the political thinking involved in self-identification as a “negr” is something else entirely. In Russia, they tell us, the term “negr” is a neutral term describing a dark-skinned African person. “No offense intended.” Be that as it may, this is a word that sits uncomfortably on the border between east and west. Borrowed from western European languages, it came pre-loaded with conceptions of racial hierarchy and colonial subordination that are evident in the range of Russian idiomatic expressions in which it is commonly found: “to work like a negr,” “find

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yourself another negr,” “I’m not your negr,” and so on. Certainly, Americans have their own baggage in relation to this word, deriving from the racial slur that it its near homophone. But one suspects that Russians’ protestations that negr is not a derogatory term reflect not the “neutrality” of the term but the absence of any broadly socially accepted critique of racism in Russian society. Furthermore, in the usage of Tamara Sergeevna and other non-citizens in Latvia, we are self-evidently no longer in Russia. Here, as a result of the historical processes that have delivered a half-million Russians into a European country, the term “negr” found itself returned as well— or half-returned—into the western discursive regimes whence it originated. And Europe organized an official welcoming committee. From 2003 onwards, in preparation for, and then as a consequence of, accession to the European Union, which took place in 2004, the Latvian state and a range of supporting NGOs pursued projects intended to increase social tolerance in Latvia under the auspices of the Special Tasks Minister for Social Integration and the EU funded National Project for Social Integration, bringing social and official scrutiny to bear on categories of racial, gender, ethnic and religious identity and terms associated with them, including “negr” and “nēģeris.” As Dace Agnese Dzenovska has explained on the basis of intensive field research among tolerance workers in Latvia in those years, these projects were fraught with categorical confusions. Many in Latvia “consider that the discourses and practices of tolerance misrecognize the demands that the injurious past, as well as the power relations that structure the process of European integration, place upon the present. Latvians’ relationship with the past in the European present thus emerges as an object of recognition and misrecognition in arguments about tolerance.”20 In other words, tolerance work in Latvia exposed the disjunction, the ill fit, of categories of tolerance and social being designed to ameliorate the injustices of western

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European histories in a society consumed with its own architecture of collective injustice and discrimination, derived from a different history. Among the pressure points that laid plain this category mismatch were the Latvian and Russian terms “negr” and “nēģeris.” One of Dzenovska’s informants, an activist for social tolerance, recounts an exchange with a member of the African Latvian Association that is paradigmatic in this regard: “I was talking about something, perhaps telling a joke, I do not remember, and I said the word nēģeris (negro) and John’s eyes get big and he tells me that I cannot say that word in front of people. And you know that in Latvian and Russian language the word nēģeris is not a bad word, it has no negative connotations. It is rather the word ‘black’ that has negative connotations. He says, I will understand, but my friends will not understand. I was terrified and was afraid to speak from being all shook up.”21 Here, the tolerance activist recounts her interpellation into a new regime of European social being in which a word that formerly was thought to have “no negative connotations” is revealed as unacceptable, and with such affective impact that she becomes afraid to speak at all. Tamara Sergeevna, in contrast, has no fear of using this word: “Look, negr is written right there in my passport.” The locution articulates a complex set of claims and refusals. “Negr” here proposes that non-citizens are subjected to discrimination and denigration comparable to that which is directed against Africans. The non-citizen lays a claim to her own subalternity and abjection. Here, in other words, we have found someone willing to articulate solidarity between the post-colonial and the post-Soviet—and not the supposed perpetrator of imperial injustice, but the ostensible victim of post-Soviet injustices. Yet this is a fishy sort of negative solidarity—for the locution also refuses to renounce the regime of discrimination that it references. There is brazen racism here, a suggestion that abjection has been misplaced or misapplied. “Negr is

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written right there in my passport” revises the Russian idiomatic expression “I’m not your negr” (“ia tebe ne negr”). The actual “negr,” though—by implication, he deserves his lot. The embrace of the term as such leans against the European revelation of the racist implications of the term, yet simultaneously signals a refusal of the regime of tolerance, of European linguistic conventions, of European amelioration of the colonial legacy of racism. Perhaps, in a generous speculative expansion on Tamara Sergeevna’s locution, we might say that its negativity may be read as a protest against the mismatch of social programs with historical and biographical actualities: why is the state concerned with ameliorating legacies of western empire, when I am right here, the subaltern subject resulting from a categorically distinct history? Where is social tolerance for me?

IV. Who’s Post-Colonial Now? In my earlier attempts to account for the population of Latvian’s non-citizens, I focused on the relationship to Russian institutions and categories of belonging such as compatriot abroad and even “Russianness” itself, that exert a certain force to shape human lives across political borders, applying an inversion of Ranajit Guha’s term “dominance without hegemony.” In places like this, I proposed, we have a case of hegemony without dominance—where direct state power is absent, but cultural and discursive modes of influence are potent forces.22 Yet I now have come to think that to treat this population as anomalous, as out of place in Latvia, is to miss an opportunity to understand the manner in which the non-citizens are symptomatic of the manner in which histories of domination and subordination have a hold on this landscape, and are perhaps even paradigmatic in their illustration of what may be called either the post-colonial or postSoviet condition. To define this condition more precisely, a more apt term is that of “dual

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domination,” which I borrow from L. Ling-Chi Wang’s description of the cultural situation of Chinese Americans, that has recently been extended to apply to Chinese populations in other locations in the sinophone world, such as Malaysia, by Shu-Mei Shih.23 As Wang wrote: “the conditions for Chinese assimilation are reconceived as racial exclusion or oppression and the demand for loyalty to the homeland as extraterritorial domination. Both are seen as omnipresent and omnipotent powers or forces dominating all aspects of Chinese American life.”24 As both Wang and Shih recognize, dual domination is a dynamic regime that at times imposes a doubling of exclusion and abjection, but at times creates slippages and cleavages productive for action and theorization. The non-citizen population of Latvia is similarly caught between the irreconcilable imperatives of assimilation to the Latvian context and loyalty to the Russian one. This is dominance without hegemony, in the context of Latvian society, plus hegemony without dominance, with regard to the Russian Federation. Yet perhaps this is simply another name for the post-colonial condition itself: caught between the poles of modern social forms and national collectivities and identities that are thought to precede or at least exceed those forms, distributed in unmanageably complex manner across populations and territories. What does it mean to term the non-citizen status as a form of “post-colonial, post-soviet” subalternity, anyway? The “post” in these locutions suggests that we consider the temporal complexity of the categories applied to this population: “non-citizen” and “compatriot.” As cited above, in 2005 Putin explained that that “tens of millions of our compatriots and fellow citizens found themselves beyond the borders of Russian territory.”25 In 2014, in his address announcing the annexation of Crimea, Putin recounted how “millions of Russians went to sleep in one country and woke up in another, as national minorities,” with the result that “the Russian people became one of the largest, if not the largest, divided people in the world.”26

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The subtle distinctions between these utterances are telling: in what temporal dimension should one consider the compatriots … as compatriots? What and when is the relevant patria: the USSR, when the people in question were in fact citizens—perhaps unequal citizens—of a single polity, or the Russian Federation, when they are sundered from by a border—or perhaps this is some superhistorical patria of the “Russian people’? Turning to “nepilsonis,” the legislative act that brought this category into being also begins with history. Nepilsoņi are “former USSR citizens who do not have the citizenship of Latvia or of any other state.” An even more blunt articulation of the temporal condition of this population is to be found in the term of abuse that is often applied to them in Latvian: “okupants” or “occupier.” In all of these terms, the definitional force relates to post-ness, to the belated presence of this population in the wrong time and place, to their categorical dependence on a purportedly finished and closed history that reaches forward to infect the present, a history that the non-citizen cannot escape. How was this half-way house of juridical and identity categories constructed? The last years of the Soviet era were a scene tense with contradictory possibilities and counterpoised potentials. As I remark above, the dominant force in anti-Soviet mobilization, the Latvian Popular Front, was characterized by inter-nationality solidarity. Yet despite the fact that in the contested elections of 1990 the Popular Front gained the majority of seats in what was to be the last Supreme Soviet of the Latvian SSR, the ethnic makeup of this body was heavily tilted towards representatives of the titular nationality, in typical fashion for the governing structures of the Soviet republics (139 out of 201 members were ethnic Latvian).27 This situation laid the groundwork for the foundational decisions that defined the category of non-citizens, depriving them of political representation in the future republic. Now, this may be viewed as simply a pragmatic explanation for the contingencies that led to this outcome. But it also points to a

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certain historical irony: post-Soviet policies regarding citizenship in Latvia are a reflection not of the political impulse of anti-Soviet mobilization, but rather of the Soviet practices of governance and nationalities policy that dictated the constitution of the Latvian Supreme Soviet of 1990. This, in turn, points to the limits, or perhaps the true extension, of the analytical terms associated with post-colonial critique. Post-Soviet post-coloniality emerged at the point where the Soviet period was written out of history as anomaly, as occupation, inscribing into history and into the present population of Latvia distinctions between categories of belonging based on nationality, history and happenstance. Paradoxically, it was at this moment of writing the Soviet period out of the national past that the Latvian state inherited the sins of empire, creating for the population that was to become the non-citizens “a system of governance based on the non-consensual rule over people of a different cultural base.”28 Yet other accounts of empire are also ironically applicable here—such as that of Ann Stoler, who has written that: Ambiguous zones, partial sovereignty, temporary suspensions of what Hannah Arendt was to call ‘the right to have rights,’ provisional impositions of states of emergency, promissory notes for elections, deferred or contingent independence, and ‘temporary’ occupations – these are conditions at the heart of imperial projects and present in a broad range of them.29 These conditions “at the heart of imperial projects” sum up well, if this is possible, the partial and ill-defined situation of Latvia’s non-citizens, who are subject to the mismatched dual domination of regimes of belonging extending from Riga and Moscow. I will not write that “Latvia is an empire”—this would be to play a strange, scholastic game with terminology. But it is clear that it is haunted by ghosts of empire. As decolonial theorists have posited, the term “post-colonial” is most wanting when it is imagined as a historical category that places colonial conditions of domination into a superseded past. To the contrary, the forms of modernity that define the contemporary global order—its

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hierarchical organization of political space, economic opportunity and cultural hegemony—are predicated on the racial and ethnic exclusions inherited from the age of empires. The corollary to this proposition, in terms of the post-Soviet and post-socialist territories under consideration at our conference, is the observation that imperial political domination and national exclusions came into being in a shared history during the Russian Imperial and Soviet eras. Collective identities took shape simultaneously as the tools of governance of empire and modes of resistance to it, that were eventually to inscribe national identities and territories in the form of political independence and national sovereignty. These categories are to this day tied together, defined via a conceptual opposition that masks deeper conceptual unities. The postcolonial in this space is the conflict of frames: the lingering realities and symbolic capacities of the injustice of empire that was, at least in part, predicated on inter-nationality relations of subordination, and which may be translated into new systems of subordination and exclusion that always leave an uneasy and unassimilated excess. Someone, it seems, always winds up as subaltern, and often enough, she contests this assignment not via solidarity, but via further displacement of inequity. “Negr is written right there in the passport.” In conclusion, then, let us return to the highest level of abstraction concerning post-Soviet postcoloniality. As the situation of Latvia’s non-citizens shows, the post-colonial is best conceived not an exclusive condition, but a set of relations inscribed into the present by a history of empire and domination. It makes little sense to think in terms of “this is a post-colonial subject” or “this is a post-colonial territory,” in distinction from some other subjects or territory. The whole world is post-colonial. To name it as such is to make it analytically available for the articulation of a critique of the form of modernity associated with colonial domination and exclusion as productive of polity, and for the imagination of a world in which this will no longer

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be the case. The truly non-colonial era, when the colonial will be over and done with, will be neither imperial nor national, but something else entirely—something not characterized by categorical exclusions and hierarchies, but by a different, yet to be imagined linkage of community and particularity with the human and the political. 1

Timofejev, Sergej, Artur Punte, Semyon Khanin and Vladimir Svetlov, Hit Parade: The Orbita Group, ed. by Kevin M. F. Platt (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), 88-91. 2 Mark Beissinger, “Rethinking Empire in the Wake of Soviet Collapse,” in: Zoltan Dennis Barany and Robert G. Moser, eds., Ethnic Politics After Communism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 14–45, cit. on 17. 3 David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” PMLA 116:1 (2001): 111-128, cit. on 116. For critical concerning the application of the term empire to the Soviet Union, see: Terry Martin, “The Soviet Union as Empire: Salvaging a Dubious Analytical Category,” Ab Imperio 2 (2002): 91–105; Beissinger, “Rethinking Empire in the Wake of Soviet Collapse.” 4 Epp Annus, “The Ghost of Essentialism and the Trap of Binarism: Six Theses on the Soviet Empire,” Nationalities Papers 43:4 (2015), 595-614, cit. on 605. 5 Dirk Uffelmann, “Theory as Memory Practice: The Divided Discourse on Poland’s Postcoloniality,” in: Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind, and Julie Fedor, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 103-24. 6 Nils Muižnieks, “Government Policy and the Russian Minority,” in: Nils Muižnieks, ed., LatvianRussian Relations: Domestic and International Dimensions (Riga: LU Akadēmiskais apgāds, 2006), 921. 7 Annus, “The Ghost of Essentialism and the Trap of Binarism,” 603-4. 8 Ginkel, “Identity Construction,” 422–26. See also Oxana Shevel, “The Politics of Citizenship Policy in New States,” Comparative Politics 41:3 (April 2009): 273–91. 9 Dimitry Kochenov and Aleksejs Dimitrovs, “EU Citizenship for Latvian ‘Non-Citizens’: A Concrete Proposal,” Houston Journal of International Law 38:1 (2016): 55-97. 10 Anna Stroi, “Rossiia priznala pasport negrazhdanina Latvii v kachestve proezdnogo dokumenta,” Diena, July 7, 1997, 2. 11 Vladimir Putin, “Poslanie Federal’nomy sobraniiu,” April 25, 2005, on site: “Prezident Rossii,” http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/22931 (accessed November 7, 2015). 12 “O gosudarstvennoi politike RF v otnoshenii sootechestvennikov za rubezhom,” 2013, on site “Konsul’tant Plius,” www.consultant.ru/online/base/?req=doc;base=LAW;n=102935 (accessed November 7, 2015). 13 “O gosudarstvennoi politike RF,” stat’ia 3. 14 “O gosudarstvennoi politike RF,” stat’ia 3. 15 Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 16 Kevin M. F. Platt, “Occupation vs. Colonization: Post-Soviet Latvia and the Provincialization of Europe,” in: Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind, and Julie Fedor, eds., Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 125-46.

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Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet?,” 117. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, Routledge, 1994), 64-65. 19 Kevin M. F. Platt, “Lyric Cosmopolitanism in a PostSocialist Borderland,” Common Knowledge 21: 2 (2015): 305-26. 20 Dace Agnese Dzenovska, “Provoking Tolerance: History, Sense of Self, and Difference in Latvia,” dissertation, (Berkeley, CA.: University of California, Berkeley, 2009), 165. 21 Dzenovska, “Provoking Tolerance,” 83-84. 22 Kevin M. F. Platt, “Gegemoniia bez gospodstva/ diaspora bez emigratsii: russkaia kul’tura v Latvii, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 127 (2014), 195-215. 23 L. Ling-Chi Wang, “The Structure of Dual Domination: Toward a Paradigm for the Study of the Chinese Diaspora in the United States,” Amerasia 21:1 & 2 (1995): 149-69; Shu-mei Shih, “The Concept of the Sinophone,” PMLA 126:3 (2011): 709-18. 24 Wang, “The Structure of Dual Domination,” 158. 25 Putin, “Poslanie Federal’nomy sobraniiu.” 26 Vladimir Putin, “Obrashchenie Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii,” March 18, 2014, on site “Prezident Rossii,” http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20603 (accessed November 7, 2015). 27 See: “History of the legislature,” on site Latvijas Republikas Saeima, http://www.saeima.lv/en/aboutsaeima/history-of-the-legislature (accessed May 5, 2016). 28 Beissinger, “Rethinking Empire in the Wake of Soviet Collapse,” 17. 29 Ann Laura Stoler, “Considerations on Imperial Comparisons,” in: Ilya Gerasimov, Jan Kusber, and Alexander Semyonov, eds. Empire Speaks Out: Languages of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire (Leiden: Brill., 2009), 33–55, cit. on 42. 18

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