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.
What if I told you that Russia wasn't just an observer on the sidelines of the Western colonial scramble for Africa? Despite what the Kremlin says today, Russia's own colonial ambitions weren’t that much different from Western colonialism.
For almost a century now, Russian propaganda has been pushing out there a myth of Russia being an anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism champion. A liberator of the oppressed. Almost every foreign speech by today’s Kremlin contains these explicit references. But there’s a massive gap between what Moscow says and what it does. For this episode, we tackle the myth that Russia is a bystander to Western-style colonialism.
This is Matryoshka of Lies. The Confusion episode.
For this one, I invited one of the most brilliant thinkers exposing Russian colonialism.
Oleksandr Polianichev, a Ukrainian historian of Russian imperialism at Södertörns högskola. His essay on a little-known and failed Russian attempt to colonize Africa became viral in 2023. I also love his essay on Imperial Russia being obsessed with cosplaying Western colonialism and creating its own version of colonial tropics realness.
Dr. Botakoz Kassymbekova (University of Basel in Switzerland) is the most important voice on Russian colonialism. She is a prominent Qazaq scholar who studies Russian and Soviet empire-building. Dr. Kassymbekova co-authors the upcoming "Imperial Innocence," a book that will become a must-read on Russian colonialism. A brief explanation of this term, coined by her, is here.
Dr. Azamat Junisbai (Pitzer College, California), a Qazaq sociology professor and author of the most powerful and moving essays on decolonization and Russian colonialism. Here’s one of my favorite on Dr. Junisbai’s decolonization awakening.
You can listen the show on all major podcast platforms, too.
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The empire will fall.
Matryoshka of Lies: The Confusion.