A CASE OF CONTINUOUS REORIENTATION: ASIAN STUDIES IN RUSSIA

By R. Rybakov

First of all I would like to thank IIAS for inviting me as a representative
of Russia to this very important meeting, which may become a landmark in the
history of Asian Studies in Europe. Till the day before yesterday the
possibility of coming here to Leiden at your kind invitation had not
materialized into an opportunity and I am happy that the opportunity was able
to become a reality. Thank you all, the organizers in particular, for your
interest in Oriental Studies in Russia. Russian Orientalists have always
considered themselves and their work as part of a pan-European scientific
tradition, although there have always been some difficulties with recognizing
this fact...but I shall elaborate on this issue at some length a little later.
Before doing so, allow me to congratulate the staff and the board of IIAS on
the occasion of the opening of the Institute, born de facto several months
ago, being born de jure today in our presence.

PETER THE GREAT
Incidentally, IIAS and the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow were born
under the same stars. We just happen to be a little older - next Friday we
celebrate our 175th anniversary in Moscow. Of course, neither event was the
beginning of Asian Studies in either country. The history of Orientalism as
a branch of science goes back much further into the past in both The
Netherlands and Russia. In our case the beginning of Oriental Studies can be
traced to one person to whom all the reformers of our society, including the
present ones, owe so much and who you in Holland probably know much better
than any Russian, I refer to Peter the Great. It was he, the "revolutionary
tsar", who initiated the so called 'Kunstkammer', in the then newly built city
of St. Petersburg. Founded in 1713, the 'Kunstkammer', comprised both a museum
and a library. Both were taken over a dozen years later by the Academy of
Sciences, which was founded in St. Petersburg.

THE PHILOLOGICAL 19TH CENTURY
The 19th century witnessed a rapid growth of institutions, organized for the
pursuit of Asiatic Studies, mainly of a philological nature. The Asiatic
museum and library in St. Petersburg, which became the main centre for the
whole of Russia, were assisted by many institutions in Moscow and elsewhere.
Some of them, extremely important ones, were situated quite far away from the
capitals of imperial Russia - St. Petersburg and Moscow. One of the most
prominent was situated in Kazan on the Volga where students were taught a
number of Oriental languages like Arabic, Chinese, Sanskrit, Persian, Buryat,
and Turkish. In 1833 the first European faculty of Mongolian languages was
opened in Kazan. Other centres could also be mentioned - in Vilnius, Kiev, and
Kharkov. Apart from universities, the orientalists had special institutes at
their disposal, like the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages (1827) in
Moscow, which was founded by the Lazarev brothers who came from a rich
Armenian background. With the development of communications, the world was
becoming smaller and more easily accesible, and gradually the geographic scope
of Russian oreintalism became wider including Africa, New Guinea and other
regions not bordering on Russian territories.
As I have already noted earlier Oriental Studies were predominantly
philological in nature. The language was the alpha and omega of the student's
training, the text in this 'exotic' language the main object of knowledge, the
interpretation of this text being the final goal of the orientalist's work.
For what reason ? To bring home something unknown, unusual, exotic -from the
point of view of Europeans - to satisfy the curiosity of the general public
and, as it were, to banish the strangeness of Asia. There were sound practical
reasons for doing so. Russia was moving East, conquering Caucasia and Central
Asia, trading with China, fighting one war after another with Turkey. The vast
majority of her boundaries were in Asia, even India was not so far away from
Imperial Territory. And what is equally important, is that Russia was (and
still is) not only an European country, but to a great extent she is Asiatic
and the winds of influence from say The Netherlands or Germany were not the
only ones to spread their influence in her. So when studying Asia we were and
are to some extent studying ourselves, trying to arrive at some sort of
self-understanding and self-realization. This trend was not only visible in
the first half of the 19th century but was just as prominent in much later
periods right up to the present day. 


THE POLITICAL 20TH CENTURY
After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 Oriental Studies became a part of
communist international foreign and national domestic policy. This shift in
interest from ancient civilizations and original manuscripts towards
contemporary political situations and current local newspapers was accompanied
by the practical implementation of Marxist dogmas (the struggle between
classes for example) in the research endeavour. Noting the existing atmosphere
of prolonged bloody terror in the country, the extreme suspiciousness of party
leaders, and the constant readiness of party members to denounce everyone
deviating from the so called party line, I must say that our Orientalists
could have passed these years with much less dignity. In fact, the majority
of them survived without committing themselves to crude dogmatism. 
After Stalin, Oriental Studies took a new direction under the influence of
Kruschev's policy of 'peaceful co-existence' and then by the liberalization
policy of Breshnev. Of course, these domestic developments coincided with the
end of colonial era, the emergence of new states in Asia and Africa, the
spreading of political, economic and cultural ties of Russia with the "Third
World", and last but not least with the political confrontation between Russia
and China. This was the period of a new shift in the 'Orientalist's
orientation' in our country. A new type of scholar emerged and occupied a
privileged position in the old institutions - not so much a specialist in
Eastern languages but somebody rather like an official from the Foreign Office
who was not so much interested in traditions and history, or in applying
Marxism to Asian Studies (whether in accordance with the notorious party line
or just carefully ignoring it), but in practical questions of Russian-Eastern
international relations.

LEARNING FROM THE EAST
Recently a new generation of scholars has arrived on the scene and has become
probably the dominant strata of our orientalists- those who are mainly
interested in interpreting the history and culture of Asia in the context of
the world history and the culture of mankind. Their approach comprises the in
depth study of local and regional peculiarities of each country, their
traditions and their way of tackling innovations posed by development, by
modernization, by multi-facetted contacts (past as well as recent ones) and
the attempts to analyse these local and comparatively limited ways of life in
the light of the underlying unity of mankind as a whole. This approach is
probably more readily explicable by an Indian saying "unity is diversity". All
of what I have just said clarifies not only the present situation in our
Oriental Studies but also the extremely  complicated organizational structure
of the Institute which I have the honour to represent and which is the
indisputable centre of all Oriental Studies both in the Russian Federation and
in the Commonwealth of Independent States.