The Russian Colonialism 101 guidebook is now also an audio show, done in partnership between the Ukrainian legacy newsroom Ukraïnska Pravda and our Volya Hub.
If I suggest that it is a hate crime against the British, or French, or Spaniards to talk about their colonial transgressions or that it is an abuse towards an abuser to demand accountability from them, I’d be most likely universally canceled. So why is there a different standard for Russia?
In this episode, we feature the work of:
Yedige Magauin, a prominent Qazaq journalist. Check out his moving and personal essay on the intergenerational trauma of surviving the Russia-made genocide in Qazaqstan.
Diana T. Kudaibergen is a prominent Qazaq researcher of colonialism and a sociologist at the University of Cambridge. Her first book, Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature, looks into the little-known period of the emergence of the modern Qazaq identity against the pressure of Russian imperialism. The kind of history that Russia worked hard to erase. In her upcoming book “What Does It Mean to Be Kazakhstani?” Professor Kudaibergen highlights how tragically little foreigners know about the people that Russia is or used to colonize. And how much of this knowledge is still dictated and controlled by Russian imperial propaganda.
In this episode, we also used quotes from a 2023 testimony to the United Nations Security Council by Professor Timothy Snyder, one of the world’s leading historians of Eastern Europe. Check out also his legendary 2022 essay, ‘The War in Ukraine is a Colonial War.’
Viktoriia Grivina is a Ukrainian writer. In the last two years, she has emerged as one of the most important Ukrainian voices documenting Russian colonial crimes. In her upcoming book ‘Kharkiv, The War City,’ Grivina paints a powerful picture of a defiant city, where decolonial spirit thrivies in cultural events, poetry readings and gallery openings, alongside air raids and explosions - here’s a small preview. Check out her powerful decolonization essay ‘What to do with All the Russian Books.’ Also, this one on the colonial erasure of Ukrainian science in Western pop culture is a gem.
This is Matryoshka of Lies. The Russophobia Episode.
Additionally, here are some notable stories we also feature in this episode:
'My grandmother had been crying out of hunger for many days.' There are hundreds of millions of stories of colonized families that Russian colonialism tried to erase. A Qazakh scholar Madi Kapparov shares a powerful family story of survival through Asharshylyk, the Moscow-made famine in Qazaqstan.
Controlled famine is one of Russian colonialism's favorite tools of subjugation. Madi Kapparov, a Qazaq scholar, provides an important history lesson about Asharshylyk, a Russian-made genocide by famine in Qazaqstan in the 1930s.
You can listen the show on all major podcast platforms, too.
If you liked this show, please spare a minute to rate, comment and share it. The Ukrainian production team creates every new episode against all odds, amid bombings and blackouts. So this show has to trend and you can make it happen.
The empire will fall.
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