russian colonialism 101: the first step towards ending russian colonialism.
the simplest way to start is also the most symbolic.
Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter educating you about Russian colonialism. The opening essay is public; the rest is behind the paywall. Your paid subscription will power my mission to mainstream Russian colonialism awareness.
I switched from Russian and English to Ukrainian as my first language just over a year ago. But the strangest things started happening.
Conversations with my Ukrainian-speaking dad became shorter but more meaningful, as if our mental maps suddenly synced. Suddenly I have a much better memory of my late grandparents, who used to speak only Ukrainian to me. Some books in Ukrainian that I have already read many times now speak to me as if I picked them up for the first time. Even my dreams come in Ukrainian sometimes too - and they are bizarrely different from the ones I have in English or Russian.
Language is everything. It helps form our mental maps and our perception of the surrounding environment. That’s why using the right vocabulary when you talk about complex issues is like using the right key to open a lock — it unlocks previously hidden nuances and connects the dots between what used to look like unrelated stuff.
Good propaganda makers know this all too well. You can construct an entirely new ideology and inhibit an artificial reality by just using a set of the right words and linguistic constructs. Like a programming language for coders.
Why am I talking about it? Some foreigners seem to believe that Ukrainians and other Russian neighbors are just being petty and hateful. We blame Russia for everything. We are never satisfied with what even anti-Putin Russians say or do. We police every word. And while it is true that almost every conversation about Russia triggers and annoys me, but hate has little to do with it. I am just irritated by specific language that some foreigners, and almost all Russians, use to describe the reality of living next to the Russian empire.
It is often ‘Putin’s wars’, not Russian wars. It is often ‘Soviet terror,’ not Russian terror. It is often ‘post-Soviet,’ not post-occupation or post-colonial. The problem with these language shortcuts that they whitewash and minimize centuries of continuous Russian colonialism and imperialism.
Unlike other colonial empires in modern human history, Russia developed one of the most effective PR strategies ever existed. From when Moscow stopped being a god-forsaken colonial outpost of Kyiv and became a colonizer itself, the second things go south — the system just rebrands, offloads toxic publicity on specific individuals, and reinvents itself.
That’s why it is Catherine II who drowned the first Ukrainian democracy in blood and cultural erasure, not millions of Russians who ensured it happened. When the Russian empire started collapsing, the system reinvented itself as the Soviet Union and carried on. That’s why it is Stalin who conducted several genocides, slaughtering entire nations, not millions of Russians, who ensured it happened and benefited from the privileged social class it created. When the Soviet empire started collapsing, the system reinvented itself as the Russian Federation and carried on. Now it is Putin who personally gasses Syrians, genocides Ukrainians, and kidnaps Ukrainian children, not millions of Russians, who ensure the daily work of these terrorist operations.
Generation after generation, Russians do nothing when these unspeakable crimes are done in their names. But they keep hitting the publicity reset button when consequences come too close to a payback point. Their entire culture of talking about Russian history and mass murder campaigns is based on language constructs devoid of any idea of collective responsibility or accountability. (And here it is important to underline that by Russians I don’t mean ethnicity but an identity.)
This all might be pretty new for many foreigners. Still, Ukrainians and other neighboring nations to Russia have been hearing the same excuses and watching many Russian regimes hitting the same PR reset button, generation after generation. And now the Russian opposition has picked up the torch with their ‘Putin’s war’ narrative and overall minimizing of Russian imperial legacy.
‘Insistence on “Putin's War” narrative is misleading since it hides the role of Russian imperial revanchism in the war. It is especially disheartening to see Russian opposition members do it. When Russia’s best and brightest refuse to acknowledge the problem, it is hard to be optimistic,’ writes Azamat Junisbai, a Qazaq scholar. ‘As long as Russian society continues to view itself as a benevolent power that gifted modernity to societies it once controlled and view the collapse of the USSR as a tragedy to be reversed, it will continue to be a menace for its neighbors and peace will remain elusive.’
That’s why we do so much language policing and narrative dissection work — for the rest of the world to see what we’ve been witnessing for centuries: a serial imperial behavior reinforced by the daily language of supremacy.
In one of the recent viral case studies, a Ukrainian researcher of decoloniality, Mariam Naiem, zeroed in on just one comment by a prominent Russian opposition figure and showed how it casually manifested the ingrained culture of imperial innocence (other terms are imperial blindless or imperial arrogance). That comment was in Russian and addressed to the domestic audience. Most foreigners do not witness the same due to the Russian culture of code-switching when communicating with foreigners. Please scroll through; it is brilliant.
“It is very painful and difficult for us Ukrainians to explain why we have so much distrust to all Russians. It isn't easy because there are many nuances that non-Ukrainians do not know and have not experienced,’ Naiem concludes. ‘We see that it is our responsibility to use such examples to explain what is wrong. And we will continue to do it, hoping that one day it will help us understand what Russian imperialism is and that the problem is not only Putin's.’
I finish writing this as Ukraine survives another night of genocidal Russian terror. Once again, Russians sent their missiles to our homes at night, slaugheting peacefully sleeping people and their kids right in their beds. Uman, Dnipro, Ukrainka. This tactic hasn’t been invented by Putin. It has been perfected over centuries and became a staple of Russian colonial terrorism. And it remains so for a simple reason - Russia has never faced any consequences. And victims of Russian aggressions have never seen any justice served.
Do you want to help? Start policing your language when you talk about Russia — ensuring you use the victim’s vocabulary, not the abuser’s.
here is what's in store for you this week:
Researchers and storytellers about Russian colonialism are often pushed out of global decolonization conversations. How exactly is this wrong?
How exactly does Ukraine have more in common with Global South than most realize?
“Who else do you know in the world that lives under the paths of rockets, where pieces are designed to fall from the sky, or blow up entirely, and are told that things are ok?” Colonial debris quite literally keeps falling on the heads of Qazaqs.
Why ‘good Russians’ are dangerous, too.
There’s no such thing as a ‘neutral’ Russian culture. It always benefited from Russian colonialism.
curious for more? let's go.