A Window onto the East

This chapter shifts to the immediate post-revolutionary moment to discuss the beginnings of the Soviet consolidation of the empire. In particular, it takes up the construction of an idea of an Eastern International developed by Russian/Soviet orientalists as central to Soviet agitprop. Much of the chapter focuses on the role played by avant-garde poetics in the imperial imaginary, contesting the notion that socialist realism was the only strategy applied to Soviet nation building.