ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relevance of colonial difference to Russian and Soviet gender history. The territory of the contemporary Russian Federation inherited many territories of the former Russian Empire, while the contemporary state, in spite of its official federalism, is characterized by Russian cultural dominance. Theoretical discussions on the contradictions and interdependencies between the postsocialist and postcolonial began some twenty years ago. A significant amount of discussion has also taken place with respect to evaluating the Soviet Union from the perspective of imperial/colonial history and post-colonial thinking. In contrast to the theoretical perspective of the “posts,” the decolonial approach stresses the importance of colonial legacies for contemporary politics, identities, and epistemology and claims the need to “delink” from colonial thinking. The gender contract turned the state into the most important patriarch. The “backward” “woman of the Orient” in the 1920s and 1930s was an important administrative category that was connected to the allocation of resources and to new power hierarchies.
