ABSTRACT
This chapter considers more closely the dominant discourses of Soviet modernity and will relate these to questions of coloniality, especially in the context of the Baltic borderlands. It argues that Soviet society inhabited a colonial matrix of modernity—that is to say, a system of discourses and practices where coloniality was inseparable from modernity and vice versa. In the Soviet Western borderlands, a popularly shared understanding of Western superiority complicated the colonial matrix. The chapter investigates discourses of modernity and coloniality, where 'discourse' is understood as a network of interconnected ideas, beliefs and subject-positions. In the 1970s the topic of the Soviet subaltern modernity vis-a-vis the more highly developed Western borderlands was even acceptable for novelistic expression. Soviet colonial modernity generated a discourse of progress with pre-established telos: the final accomplishment of the era of true communism. In the discourse of Soviet enlightenment, the chapter can discern a coloniality‒modernity paradigm without epistemological difference.
