Material Dependency: Postcolonialism, Development and Russia’s ‘Backwardness’

The central theme of this chapter concerns Russia’s material dependence on the global capitalist core. I argue that the best way of dealing with this condition is to view it as an effect of the uneven and combined development of global capitalism. I also rely on the existing studies to demonstrate that a material dimension can and must be integrated into the postcolonial perspective and that the concept of uneven and combined development can enhance our understanding of subalternity. At the same time, I view the material and the ideational not as ontologically separate layers of reality, but rather as analytical constructs that we use to make sense of the social world. Consequently, while providing a historical retrospective of Russia’s integration into capitalist modernity, I focus on both of these aspects and, first of all, on their mutual conditioning.