Toward a Postimperial Order?

Abstract

Focusing on the works and intellectual activity of the Sakha intelligentsia, this article examines the development of postimperial political imagination in the region of Yakutia. The formation of the Sakha intellectuals was a result of the circulation of wider imperial discourses on nationalism, anticolonialism, socialism, and regionalism during the crisis of the Russian Empire. By discussing the Sakhas’ marginal, even colonial, conditions, the Sakha national intellectuals followed self-governing aspirations inherited from political exiles and Siberian regionalists, whose ideas became frequent demands for many Siberian indigenous movements. Despite the Stalinist myth that the Soviet Union (and its social engineers) created autonomy in Yakutia for the first time in Russian history, it was the Sakha intellectuals who developed the autonomist discourse during the first two decades of the twentieth century.