The “Note” of the Consul in Basra K.V. Ivanov: Problem Statement of the Study of the East in the Russian Foreign Ministry of the Early XX Century

The issues of accumulation, ordering, systematisation, and practical implementation of colonial knowledge, “knowledge of the Orient” were on the agenda of various departments of the Russian Empire, which developed their own ways of solving them. Considerable efforts in this direction were made by military circles, however, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was well aware of this task, as evidenced by the publication of two issues of “Proceedings on the Study of the Orient”, carried out on the eve and during the Great War, which contained not only factual works, but also reflections of the Foreign Ministry officials on this problem. This was reflected in the editorial prefaces and especially in the position paper of Consul Konstantin Ivanov, who believed that proper organisation of information collection about the region, reciprocal coordination of the activities of various Russian institutions, and provision for the proper role of the consulates would, firstly, make Russian policy more expedient, and secondly, achieve the tasks set with less effort, since in his terminology this sounded like “using local conditions”. Ivanov's “Note” is an interesting and vivid example of the reflection of an agent of the Empire's foreign policy on the problem of optimizing approaches to solving political problems of the state, compiled in the spirit of orientalist discourse, implicitly assuming the ideas of inequality, superiority, the need to possess knowledge for governance and domination, reconstruction and arrangement of non-European regions in the interests of the dominant power.

Near East, Middle East, Oriental studies, “Materials for the study of the East”, Konstantin Ivanov, Vladimir Minorsky, colonialism, orientalism