russian colonialism 101: russia is stealing ukrainian identity.
russia cannot not exist without never-ending cultural appropriation.
Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism. The opening essay is public; the curated reading lists and an advice column are behind a paywall. This newsletter is part of the Volya Hub network, expanding global awareness of Russian colonialism.
This edition will be free for everyone in the spirit of the New Year holidays. Please send your appreciation to a fundraiser for Ukrainian queer soldiers run by the Ukrainian organization 'LGBTIQ Military and the Kyiv Pride.
Sometime before the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine, I visited one of the modern European art museums that featured ‘Russian avant-garde’ paintings. They were all impressive, but one just paralyzed me. It centered a geometrically shaped human figure running along a desert-like space. The soil under them is colored red and black. A damaged cross and a blood-soaked sword hang over the lone sack in the background. The visuals did not make any logical sense to me. But in their totality, they triggered an overpowering, primal-like reaction: a mix of existential pain, terror, and grief. That was the first and only painting in my life that made me cry.
I checked the name and the author. It said, ‘The Running Man,’ by Kazimir Malevitch. Nationality: Russian. This confused me even more: How come a work by a Russian I barely heard of made such a devastating impact on me? I dismissed it as some weird, unexplainable emotional outburst and moved on.
I should have trusted my ancestral instinct, though.
Forcefully Russified in a Russian-language school and raised in a Russified culture full of imperial lies, I grew up having zero idea that the real, non-Russified name of this artist was Kazymyr Malevych. That he was not Russian but a Ukrainian. That ‘The Running Man’ was his coded cry of grief over the Moscow-committed Holodomor genocide of the Ukrainian people in 1931-1933 — the one that devastated my own family, too. And that his legacy became a hostage to a much larger cultural appropriation heist committed by Russia.
Malevych was born to a Ukrainian-Polish family within the borders of the Russian empire, but he never identified as anything but a Ukrainian. Facing increasing persecution by Moscow for his growing anti-colonial resistance, he arranged for most of his art collection to be shipped abroad. While being hailed as a modern arts superstar outside the Empire, he died trapped inside the Empire from ill health inflicted by persecution and torture in 1935.
Once silenced, Russia appropriated Malevych's outsized impact on global culture as ‘Russian.’ Together with the Ukrainian newsroom SHOTAM, we featured this story in a beautiful visual for the Volya Hub storytelling network.
However, Malevych was not the only indigenous talent whose legacy was stolen by Russia.
Look at this 1922 picture below. It is from a Belarusian city, Viciebsk, and it features some of the artists from UNOVIS, a local avant-garde collective headed by Malevych, which will revolutionize the art world in the following decade.
There are just two Russians in this picture. Yet, today, this entire generation of Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Jewish avant-garde artists are mostly known abroad as ‘Russian’ thanks to a Russian propaganda effort. Artists like Ukrainians Oleksandra Exter and Anatol Petrytskyi, Jewish Belarusians Marc Chagall, David Yakerson and Leu Yudzin, and El Lissitzky, who identified as exclusively Jewish. To make their art spectacularly authentic, they all would tap into indigenous and authentic folklore that had zero connections with Russia - moreover, it existed in resistance to Russian imperial oppression.
This cultural appropriation campaign is also not that old and happened barely 30 years ago. When the Soviet era of Russian imperialism collapsed in disgrace in the 1990s, Moscow desperately needed a PR damage control to revitalize its tarnished ‘civilizational greatness’ image. In the tactic tested and deployed an endless number of times throughout Russian imperial history, the legacy of the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Jewish avant-garde legends became an easy appropriation prey. Here’s a quote from an amazing long-read by an Estonian journalist, Eero Epner.
The Ukrainian avant-garde from the 1910s and the 1920s, a splendid period in the art history of the world which was imitated, copied, and used as a role model from Paris to Berlin. Only, nobody knew that it was all made in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Lviv. They thought that it was the world-famous „Russian avant-garde,“ made by Russians in ancient Russian territories in accordance with Russian tastes.
During the Soviet era, appropriation occurred through killing, prohibiting, destroying, and hiding Ukrainian artists and their art. Then in the 1990s, Moscow quickly understood that culture always equals politics. The taps were turned on and large exhibitions were organised in Europe, catalogues were published and grants were generously handed out to researchers from Russia and abroad. This led to the understanding that the avant-garde contained certain axes: Moscow-Berlin or Moscow-Paris, but Kyiv… well, you know, there they baked pies. The „Russian avant-garde“ brand was skilfully established and the world art market, which is one of the main creators of cultural memory, lapped it up greedily.
This Russian colonial heist is not limited to indigenous culture, either.
Some short time after that museum incident that I shared earlier, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, and the Russian theft of Ukrainian identity went supernova. In early 2015, Russians installed a ginormous 25-meter-tall monument to Volodymyr the Great in downtown Moscow, claiming that this Kyiv ruler from the 10th century ‘created a single Russian nation.’ The fact that this pagan Ukrainian prince lived several centuries before Kyivan Rus founded Moscow as a borderland colonial outpost on the outskirts of Europe would not matter to Russian imperial propaganda. It defaulted to its primary appropriation mode to rally public support for another colonial war.
To claim the status of a ‘great’ empire, you need ‘great’ history — and Russia is too young of an empire to have one. That’s why stealing the ancient history of the closest neighbor became Moscow’s coping strategy.
What is now known as Russian history and what is generously served by Mr. Putin to Tucker Carlson and all the other gullible Westerners, as a one-and-only version of the sacred history of Mother Russia, a millennium-old history, it's all was written in 1674, in Kyiv, by one of our baroque thinkers of the time Innokenty Gizel. The Russian Empire appeared as a brainchild of Kyiv intellectuals who had been working for nearly a century on the concept of an Orthodox empire.
We Ukrainians or the little Russians, as we were calling ourselves back then, were on a mission to the north to bring them education, culture, church, reforms, books. When the University of Moscow was opened in the late 18th century, not only professors, but most of the students came from Kyiv, from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, the oldest Eastern European school of high university of the time. So, yes, it's been the Ukrainization of the Moscow Czardome, and that was its European face that our forefathers gave it. So, without the proper vision of the beginnings of the Russian Empire, Russian studies will never be decolonized.
This is a quote by a prominent Ukrainian thinker and writer, Dr. Oksana Zabuzhko, for Volya Hub’s Matryoshka of Lies audio show. It highlights a still little-known fact abroad that the mythology excusing Russian civilizational mission was actually written by Ukrainian intellectuals in the 17th century — after Russia colonized Ukraine for the first time. A relatively young state desperately needed a PR story to move away from Muscovy to Russia, presenting itself as ‘ancient’ as an excuse for imperial expansion. They stole Ukraine’s original name, Rus, and newly conquered Ukrainians helped to shape the myth of Russian civilizational superiority. Ukrainians like Theophan Prokopovich and Olexander Bezborodko, for example.
A former colony of Kyiv that colonized its former metropole and stole its history to craft its own imperial supremacy myth. Honestly, this aspect of Russian colonialism is one of the thickest to drill through. But it is not impossible to get. Ukrainian filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski was the first person to help me understand it in a digestible way. Here’s a quote from our chat with him for the Ukrainian Spaces show.
Contemporary Ukraine and Russia do not have a very long shared history, dating back to 350 years. But Russia uses this historical, mythical thinking to connect itself to Kyiv via the medieval Kyivan Rus’ history. The foundational myths of the Russian Federation say that “Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities” because it existed as the capital of that medieval state long before Moscow was even founded. It allowed Russia to lay claim to Kyiv as the city that had to be reoccupied and connected to Russia. But if you take this myth really seriously, then it's clear that what we now refer to as the Russian Federation, or basically every iteration of the Russian state, could be seen as a kind of bastard child of the colonial process of the eastward expansion of the Kyivan Rus’.
Lastly, why am I talking about all of it all of a sudden?
Because of these two stories from this week. The first one concerns Russian colonial authorities banning Kolyadky in the occupied territories, an ancient Ukrainian tradition of Christmas caroling that dates back to Pagan times. Simultaneously, Russian TikTok influencers were promoting something called ‘Kolyada’ in Moscow, using stolen images of Ukrainian carol singers and appropriating a tradition that has few local roots.
The second cringe of the week is gifted to us by the New York Ballet. It published an opulent video visual that heavily referenced Ukrainian filmmaker Serhiy (Sarkis) Parajanov (without crediting him), as well as Chagall and Madame Karinska without ever mentioning their respective Jewish Belarusian and Ukrainian roots. All of this was repackaged as a celebration of Russian visual aesthetics. Considering that Russians sent Parajanov to a concentration camp for being unapologetically Ukrainian and queer and that they keep doing the same with Ukrainian artists today, this visual checked all the boxes of obscene colonial appropriation. Only this time, it was done by a wealthy Western institution on behalf of Russian imperialism.
All of this makes for another reminder that the Russian colonial empire stealing indigenous art and identities (directly or through proxies) is not just a history lesson. It is our daily reality in 2025. And the only reason why this obscene injustice is still being perpetrated in broad daylight is because we have been failing to call out the heist for way too long.
Let’s ensure we change that.
Check out these additional reads that will illuminate you on the topic:
Is Ukraine the real Rus? A visual explainer by Ukraine Explainers.
Ukrainian artists, appropriated by Russia. A visual by the Ukrainian Institute.
How Russia steals and rewrites Ukrainian history to justify its claims in Ukraine. A video explainer by the Kyiv Independent.
'Decolonising culture: Ukrainian artists, banned and stolen by Russia,’ an explainer by Ukraïner.
“Russia’s colonial policy was aimed at restraining and controlling cultural development in the colonies — the sphere where identity is formed and communicated for a particular community, people, or nation. This is precisely why culture is seen as a ‘dangerous’ thing. At the same time, the empire always feeds off its colonies, usurping and depleting their resources, including talent. Undoubtedly, the Russian Empire sought to take the most talented, intelligent, and progressive individuals into its metropolis, and this pattern has recurred across generations — even during Ukraine’s years of independence.”
REMINDER: founding subscribers to my Substack and members of the highest tier on my Patreon have access to the Russian Colonialism 101 micro-website — the only live-updating database with the most relevant sources about Russian colonialism.
This is all, folks. Chat soon.
The empire will fall.
m.