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Contemporary decolonial scholarship has conducted many studies on the nature of imperialism, considering it in the context of geopolitical projects as a struggle for spheres of influence, resources or power (Hobson 1902; Morgenthau, 1978; Mommsen, 1982; Cox, 1983; Said, 1994; Shumpeter, 1995; Howe, 2002; Said, 2019; Sanghera, 2021; Callinicos, 2009). The interaction between colonial powers and their former colonies is analysed in the International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
The geography of colonialism studies focuses on territories that include the Americas, Africa, Australia, the Middle East and Asia, excluding European colonies, namely those states that were under the protectorate of the Soviet Union and were known to the civilised world as the ‘Second World’. First of all, these are the countries located to the west of modern Russia, they are Ukraine and Belarus.
In Western academic discourse, the Soviet empire, and later its successor, the Russian empire, were not considered in the context of imperialism and colonialism, which created the false impression that Russian colonialism never existed (Pease, 2005; Said, 2019). The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2007), edited by John McLeod, and the Postcolonial Studies Reader (2006), edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, debate nationalism, hybridity, and imperialism, but completely ignore the imperial nature of the USSR and its successor, Russia.
The reasons for this exclusion were the classical tradition of interpreting imperialism as the colonisation of states that were mainly overseas or far from the metropolis, and this practice was associated with the struggle of metropolises for exclusive rights to own new territories. Unlike the Western European world, Russia colonised neighbouring territories by land, not by sea, and consequently it was not seen as a colonial empire. And after the World War II, the discourse changed to justify the competition between two socio-political and military blocs: capitalist (Western European countries, NATO members) and socialist (Warsaw Pact countries, the USSR). After the collapse of the USSR, and the consequent emergence of a number of sovereign states in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Asia, there was no thought in academic and political circles that empires could still exist or arise. The researchers of Soviet heritage had a tacit taboo against using the terminology of colonialism in their research.
Another reason was that initially the Soviet Union and then Russia promoted the imperialist myth of three ‘brotherly nations’ - Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians (Great Russians, Little Russians and Belorussians) - forming ‘one Slavic nation’, the cradle of which was Kyivan Rus (’Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities’). This makes it seem as if Russia was collecting lands and peoples that already belong to it. ‘Such rhetoric places the desired outcome of colonisation - assimilation and homogenisation - first of all history. Russia’s constant appeals to the idea of historical territories, Slavic unity, one state, etc. fit well into this concept’ (Ablialimova-Chiihoz, 2022).
This factor influenced the tendency of Western historiography to view these countries not as colonies of Russia, but as an empire. For example, in ‘Culture and Imperialism’, Edward Said writes that Russia tried to conquer any land and people near its borders, and in the procesAs the Ukrainian scholar Galyna Kotliuk rightly points out, ‘Said overlooks an important historical reality: the Russian Empire occupied and then colonised the lands west of its borders, i.e. the territories of present-day Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the Baltic states’ (Kotliuk, 2023). In other words, from the point of view of postcolonial studies, Ukraine was not seen as a colony, but rather as a kind of Russian people, which ‘reinforces the artificially created idea that the Ukrainians living in this territory are no different from the indigenous Russians’ (Kotliuk, 2023).s it continued to move further and further east and south’ (Said, 1994: 10). All these factors contributed to the fact that Russia did not fit the paradigm of colonial models and it was considered incapable of colonising other nations and keeping them under its control.
However, even before the outbreak of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, there were doubts about the existing colonial paradigm in the academic discourse, and within it there is ambivalence, which does not indicate a stable approach to the problems of colonialism (Bhabha, 1990; Thompson, 2006; Patel, 2020; Mignolo, 2021). And the war that began on 24 February 2022 intensified the debate on the nature of imperialism and generated different opinions on the causes of military aggression (Foley & Unkovski-Korica, 2024; Mearsheimer, 2022; Yurchenko, 2023; Kotliuk, 2023; Kögler, 2023; Kotišová & Vander Velden, 2023; Egedy, 2023).
Since Russian imperialism has not been considered in postcolonial discourse for a long time, its nature requires scientific study and debate. This article attempts to identify the factors of its formation, which, in our opinion, are rooted in the cultural and historical narratives of Russian society, social and psychological attitudes, and political concepts. Their combination formed the ideology of the ‘Russian world’ and influenced the formation of the Russian imperial identity.
