chapter seven national identity and race in post-revolutionary russia: pil’niak’s travelogues from Japan and china alexander Bukh this chapter seeks to shed new light on the racial construction of russian identity vis-à-vis asia in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution. While the october revolution of 1917 aimed to achieve a complete reshaping of society, current scholarship shows that there were a number of significant overlaps between tsarist russia and the new regime, particularly in relation to studies of the orient. 1 the context of the present study must therefore depart from pre-revolutionary discourses on race and the place of asia within them. the notion of race in russian public and academic discourses has probably been one of the most understudied aspects of russian identity. according to one of the few comprehensive works devoted to analyzing the dominant understanding of race among physical anthropologists in the russian empire, the “liberal anthropology of imperial diversity” was one of its main features. 2 that is to say, the liberal and ostensibly objective mainstream studies of race that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century were free from attempts to discover a pure racial type and to ascribe certain inherent qualities to the peoples that inhabited the empire, including russians. 3 according to this worldview, the multiethnic empire was seen as a “huge patchwork quilt in which every scrap was painted with a number of fusing colors.” 4 the main focus, however, was on the people that resided within the borders of the empire. thus, the non-hierarchical classification of races and the rejection of pure racial categorization corresponded with the broader idea of the russian empire as a european nation-state that guided the liberal anthropologists in their analysis. 5

1 eg, tolz, 2008. 2 mogilner, 2008: 108. 3 mogilner, 2008. 4 mogilner, 2005: 300. 5 mogilner, 2005: 300.