What stops us from seeing Russia as a 21st century colonial metropolis? After the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, Ukrainians began asking this question, researching the indigenous peoples oppression in Russia, and calling for the global recognition of crimes committed by the Russian Federation against those people, including genocides. However, the global community still seems hesitant to acknowledge the problem. Why should we broaden our understanding of colonialism? Why shouldn’t we fear using the word ‘genocide’ in the plural form, and how to make it relevant?
Cantons and canons
We are walking through the streets of Bern, the de facto capital, but de jure Switzrland’s ‘federal city’. According to local Swiss laws, the country has no capital, and it doesn’t even have national holidays, except the Swiss National Day, commemorating the alliance between three cantons in 1291, which, according to the national tradition, marked the beginning of the Swiss Confederation.
Two months earlier, Russia, another federation, celebrated its main national holiday. One of the key celebrated figures (and the one vital for the national myth in general) is Alexander Nevsky — a prince who lived and actively expanded his possessions several decades before the inhabitants of future Switzerland were about to sign the union agreement. These are geographically separate events happening in rather opposite contexts. Today, however, we are more concerned with how modern states use historical narratives to achieve their goals.
Indeed, our mindset is formed through the holidays we celebrate. These holidays shape us as people. And if anything had historical importance and continuity, it was the practices of colonialism which haven’t been analysed and reflected on.
Indeed, colonialism as a phenomenon is associated with the hegemonic states’ annexation and ‘discovery’ of sovereign territories for the future exploitation of their resources. Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands, all of these countries bear the legacy of their colonial past. However, Russia, which was actually the largest empire with 65 million square kilometres of territory, is often skipped from this list. Why does the anti-colonial or post-colonial vision remain blind towards Russia’s past? Generally speaking, the classical canon of what constitutes colonialism is the main issue. Challenging this canon is also influenced by the articulation of colonial policies by the subjugated nations themselves. For over a decade, the tone in this discourse has been set by European museums returning ‘stolen’ art and politicians offering their apologies from the nations of Africa, India, Oceania, and North America. But how much does the average Briton know about the Yakuts, Buryats, and Altay people? How many Chechen women have the feminist organisations in Europe managed to help?
Another reason is the geographical proximity of the conquered territories. The simple lack of separation by the sea (which sounds absurd) conceptually hinders us from seeing Russia as a coloniser. Oleksiy Radynsky rightly noted that, paradoxically, the West’s anti-colonial policy has grown to be explicitly Western-centric and “partially blind to other forms of colonial domination that do not fit into already established patterns”. The position of the metropolis itself also plays a significant role.
If Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States, not always willingly but with the help of public activists, are working on addressing their colonial legacies, Russia stubbornly denies and has consistently denied any oppression of non-Russian peoples on its territory.
Miki-mike665, a Ukrainian artist, created a piece named “Russian Colonial Alphabet” for those who need an explanation that Russia is indeed a colonial empire. Source: the author’s Instagram page.
One can clearly define several vectors of Moscow’s expansion carried out throughout the centuries. They are still relevant today: Siberia and the Far East, Central Asia, and Europe. In other words, Moscow was seeking to expand its territories along its entire borders.
This expansion doctrine (common in the 16th-19th centuries), it seemed, had to end with the overthrow of the tsarist regime and the formation of the USSR, founded on the explicitly anti-colonial idea of ‘liberating the oppressed’. However, this was just a lot of talking – despite the promised emancipation and the self-determination of peoples, the Soviet government, from the very beginning, pursued an expansionist and colonising (in its most radical manifestation, genocidal) policy towards the indigenous population of annexed territories. The National Liberation Struggle of Ukrainians from 1917 to 1921 comes to mind first. Similar events unfolded in Central Asia: there was Alash Autonomy (1917–1920), which was supposed to become the first independent Kazakh state; Azerbaijan (Azerbaijani Democratic Republic, 1918–1920); Armenia (Democratic Republic of Armenia, 1918–1920); Georgia (Democratic Republic of Georgia, 1917–1924); Bashkortostan (1917–1921). Attacked by the Soviet forces, the Chechens, Ingush, and Ossetians were unable to maintain their independence. The newly formed empire was expanding not only to the south and east: the Belarusian People’s Republic and the Moldovan Democratic Republic were also liquidated. Thus, almost all the nations that became part of the Soviet Union were actually in the process of forming their own statehood and could have appeared on the world map much earlier if not for the so-called ‘union’ with Moscow as its centre.
The next wave of resistance came when indigenous peoples resisted the policy of collectivisation and the brutal collective farm system, as well as the overall Sovietisation (or, rather, Russification) of their lives, which did not go along with the ethnic groups’ desire to preserve their identity. Resistance began in the Left-Bank Ukraine and Kuban; the Khanty and Nenets rose in the Kazym Uprising; the Dolgans in the Taymyr Uprising; and the Yakuts in the Bulun Uprising. Resistance was brutally suppressed, causing numerous human casualties, particularly among the civilian population.
To satisfy its colonial ambitions, the Soviet government not only annexed territories but also eradicated local customs, language, rituals, religion, and writing systems. Here are just a few examples. In 1939, Stalin initiated a campaign to ‘Cyrillicise’ the writing systems of the peoples of the USSR. As part of this project of what was announced as ‘bringing the nations together’, the traditional alphabets based on Arabic script, which were earlier Latinised into the new Turkic alphabet (Yañalif) in the 1920s, were ultimately replaced with the convenient Cyrillic script, favoured by Moscow. Dozens of languages and dialects used by indigenous peoples that did not have a written form before were also Cyrillicised, disregarding the specifics of their oral languages, leading to the permanent loss of some. Compulsory sending of children from national minorities to Russian schools, imposition of new rituals, and persecution of local religions (Islam, Buddhism, etc.), led to the loss of identity (and often, mass destruction) of indigenous ethnic groups.
All these crimes were silenced in the Soviet Union and have never been recognised by modern Russia. When speaking of ‘Russian people’, Russia still predominantly refers only to ‘people with white faces’ (for example, the advertising campaign of the Yves Rocher brand in Russia this year), despite the fact that there are at least 190 other ethnicities living on its territory.
Russia’s colonial attitude towards its indigenous people is still evident today in the disproportional mobilisation: it is the small ethnic groups such as Buryats, Dagestanis, and Tuvinians who make up a significant number of conscripts for the war in Ukraine.
Here, the difference between colonialism and the state’s genocidal policies is evident: while the former involves the exoticisation and a certain degree of ‘appropriation’ from the colony (patronising attitudes towards ethnic groups, a perverse fascination with their culture and art, and sometimes punishment), the latter does not even allow a chance for survival, it kills and annihilates. While Europe and North America have been working on addressing their colonial past over the past 50 years, providing space for the voices of national minorities, Russia, in the 21st century, continues to annex foreign territories and nations residing there. Impunity with regard to one’s troubled past enables the crimes of the present.
A ‘template’ genocide
As a pretext for its invasion of Ukraine, Russia cited the so-called ‘genocide in Donbas’, accusing Ukraine of it. Historians and legal experts call such tactics “mirroring accusations”: the perpetrator accuses the victim of what he himself intends to do. Of course, there is never any evidence, and these accusations sound particularly absurd coming from Russia, a country which expanded its borders throughout its history mainly through wars and genocides. On September 27 of this year, the first stage of hearings at the International Court of Justice under Ukraine’s lawsuit against Russia for illegal invasion concluded.
The term ‘genocide’ was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1953 during commemorative events in the United States for the anniversary of the Holodomor. He called the extermination of Ukrainians a “classic example of Soviet genocide”. What is Soviet genocide, and how does it differ from conventional genocide? The UN Convention of 1948 defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The group’s destruction does not have to happen through physical killing only.
This is the uniqness of Soviet (and Russian) genocidal policy. Repression of elites, intelligentsia, deportations, and ‘enforced settlement’ of Russians or their representatives among oppressed nations, famine extermination, and mass killings—these are the methods which Russia has used and is using to commit genocides and build its empire.
Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhs, Crimean Tatars, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians—all of these nations experienced the impact of Soviet and imperial Russian policies.
A distinctive feature of Soviet and Imperial Russian policy is that Russification has always accompanied these actions. During the Soviet period, all nations were merged into one ‘Soviet nation’ through genocide. The international language was Russian. In other words, everyone who survived, for example, the Holodomor, had to adopt a so-called Soviet identity and adhere to Russian rules, where the Russian language was the language of the proletariat and progressive city, while the national language, Ukrainian, was associated with the backward village. Physically, these people were not killed, but their Ukrainian identity was eradicated. This is the origin of Russian-speaking Ukrainians today.
Today, Russia appeals to the dubious achievements of its Russification policy, something that Russia doesn’t want to lose. The ‘Russian world’ ideology has become Russia’s national idea during Putin’s rule, aiming to create a civilisation where people speak and think in the Russian language, share historical memory and its future with Moscow, appreciate Russian culture, and fear Russian weapons. The UN Convention’s definition of genocide doesn’t mention the destruction of a group’s culture. However, in the Russian variant of genocide, the destruction of a nation’s culture is a mandatory component of destroying the nation. You can see this in the territories of Ukraine currently occupied by Russia: they immediately change street names to Pushkin, Tolstoy, etc.; they switch education, media, and businesses to the Russian language. They kill and imprison representatives of the local intelligentsia and anyone capable of resisting Russia. This is how Ukrainian identity is displaced without physically killing each person, and throughout centuries, these methods have been polished to perfection by the Russian empire.
Raphael Lemkin considered the destruction of culture as part of genocide and emphasised that erasing cultures and nations, even without physical harm, must be condemned by the world community.
For all the blind admirers of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, it is particularly challenging to condemn Russia’s crimes and label them as genocides because it’s difficult to separate Russian culture from the mass killings that Russia has been consistently committing. Meanwhile, Russia defends itself with the grand ‘Russian language’ and culture, simultaneously using them as weapons for the destruction of nations.
21 May 2023, the Circassian people commemorate the victims of the genocide near the Tree of Life memorial. Source: Tamara Ardavova, OC Media.
The Soviet Union was a revised form of the Russian Empire, and in the methodology of genocide, it did not stray far from the imperial period. For instance, Russia’s annexation of Caucasian lands involved wars, deportations, mass killings, and famine-induced decimation of local nations. The fate of the Circassians during 1763–1864 serves as an example. In their imperialistic war in the Caucasus, the Russian army faced resistance from the local people. The Circassians repeatedly reclaimed seised territories or fortifications. Russia, as is the custom now, broke the resistance through genocide. Russian forces burned entire settlements, destroyed the harvests and food supplies of the Circassians, shot civilians with cannons, and carried out massacres. Systematic acts of genocide led to a reduction of the indigenous population in this territory to 10%. Russian Emperor Alexander II responded to this: “Thank God.”
In Russian history, they call this ‘reunification’. Similar to the annexation of Crimea, the partial occupation of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.
The Russian opposition, represented by intellectuals opposing the Russian war in Ukraine and Putin, supposedly represents a “different Russia, a democratic and non-imperial” one. Are they prepared to grant freedom, for example, to the Republic of Tatarstan, which in 1992 supported state sovereignty in a referendum? Not to mention that some of them are unable even to acknowledge Crimea’s annexation as an international crime or recognise Russia as the legal successor of the USSR, legally responsible for its crimes, especially genocides.
The revelation
Dealing with one’s own past is a complex and lengthy process. Since becoming independent, Ukraine has been working on acknowledging the genocide of Ukrainians in the 1930s and the deportation of Crimean Tatars as crimes. However, it was only after Russia’s full-scale invasion that Ukrainian society showed a noticeable interest in the historical experiences of indigenous peoples within the territory of Russia. Some may argue that Ukrainians already have enough on their plate. However, learning about the tragedies of others does not diminish our traumas but rather allows us to see it more broadly and trace parallels. Moreover, solidarity with activists from oppressed indigenous peoples will allow the global community to finally see Russia for what it is – an empire, perhaps the last one in the 21st century.
The West finally, very slowly, embraces this anti-colonial understanding of Russia. The world’s most renowned universities and their programmes are slowly and very reluctantly revised as Eastern European, anti-colonial, or at least post-Soviet studies instead of simply Russian ones. For Russia’s policy of genocides to finally stop, the world must understand the true roots of Russia’s ‘so-called glory’.
