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.
During my book shows abroad, there’s always a question with a concern for ‘Russian great culture.’ Many foreigners experience cognitive dissonance: they witness horrific crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine and elsewhere, and at the same time, most of them were brought up thinking that Russian culture is ‘cool, mysterious, edgy.’ I am not naïve to expect most to send their Russian books to garbage bins and pick up indigenous authors from Russian ex-colonies, instead. However, would you agree that the program minimum should be at least a critical consumption of Russian art with anti-imperialism lenses?
In my guidebook, I list 48 Russian invasions of the neighbors in the last 111 years alone. Despite targeting very different and distant communities, Russians would follow the same formula. And Russian civilizational greatness was an integral part of the excuse to do them. In this episode, we tackle the myth of Russian cultural supremacy and how it enables Russian colonialism.
This is Matryoshka of Lies. The Supremacy Episode.
For this one, I booked two anti-colonial legends of Eastern Europe:
Ewa M. Thompson, Professor Emerita of Slavic Studies at Rice University. She is also a bestselling author with the most popular book about the imperial nature of Russian culture, ‘Imperial Knowledge,’ where she explains how Russia weaponized its literature to build its empire.
Oksana Zabuzhko is the most famous Ukrainian writer and probably the most recognizable Ukrainian abroad after President Zelenskyy. She has a strong academic background, having worked as a Research Associate for the Institute of Philosophy of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Zabuzhko also shared her expertise by lecturing on Ukrainian culture in the US at prestigious universities like Penn State University, Harvard University, and the University of Pittsburgh.
Additionally, we also feature the works of:
‘Was Tolstoy a colonial landlord?’ by Edyta Bojanowska, an award-winning writer and thinker of Polish descent, professor of Slavic languages and literature, and chair of the affiliated history department at Yale University.
‘Martians on Khreschatyk’ by Vira Aheieva, one of the most celebrated Ukrainian scholars. The book is one of the biggest bestsellers in Ukraine since the 2022 full-scale invasion. It tells the story of Ukrainian intellectual elites silenced and erased by the Russian re-colonization of independent Ukraine in the early 20th century.
You can listen the show on all major podcast platforms, too.
Ukrainian voices and media face lots of censoring and gatekeeping, both online and offline. Please rate and leave comments under this podcast wherever you listen to it — it will help it to break through the filters to the widest audience possible.
The empire will fall.
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