russian colonialism 101: language as a colonization tool.
colonialism is about money, first. it is about economic domination and exploitation. the most efficient types of western colonialism aimed at maximizing profits from the looting of indigenous resources while maintaining a minimum presence on the ground. ethnic cleansing, genocides and cultural erasure would make sense for westerners only up to the point when it served their extraction rackets. however, for russian colonialism economic exploitation and full cultural assimilation always go hand-in-hand. think of russian colonizers as more of the borg of colonialism, rather than the cardassians of colonialism (apologies for extra nerdy reference, but i waited years to use it!)
now, this is all high-brow talk about concepts. but how exactly this russian colonialism assimilation manifests in our everyday life as ukrainians? this week i share a personal story about the use of russian language in our family and how it keeps manifesting hundreds of years of systemic erasure of our ukrainian identities by russian colonialism.
here is what’s in store for you this week:
how #russiancolonialism manifests in the daily life of ukrainians. the language edition
footnotes on russian colonial re-conquest of central asia in 1916-1930
#UkrainianSpaces latest looks at the western intellectual blindness when it comes to russian colonialism
russian classic literature and art are choke-full of colonial and imperial ideology
like it?
then slava ukrajini and let’s go.