Technologies of Russian Colonialism: Occupation, Persistence, Implication

Following on from our recent articles on Russian colonialism, we continue our examination of a subject we know little about at The Funambulist. Within this issue, this text by Svitlana Matviyenko, Sitora Rooz and E. Vincent proposes a method for reading Russian colonial and post-colonial domination from the Sami country in the West to Sakhalin Island in the East, including the former Soviet republics.

For a long century, Russia has been misrepresented as an exception to the order of colonial modernity. After the Soviet Union was formed in 1922, this exceptionalist claim was initially put forward to accompany the Soviet-envisioned transition from imperialism to socialism. Yet, already by the end of the 1920s, the “union” of Soviet republics, came to be driven by a radically different idea of state-building that, despite the formal quality of the members, replicated rather than overcame the colonial practices of Tsarist Russia. The continuous territorial expansion of the USSR eventually reproduced and reinforced the Russian imperial hierarchical order by forcefully adding new territories and violently suppressing any anti-colonial resistance.

Today, the claim of Russian exception to the order of colonial modernity is used in Vladimir Putin’s history lessons when he insists, as he did during the St Petersburg international cultural forum in November 2023, that unlike many countries, “especially European ones and the United States, whose wealth was largely based on the injustices of colonialism and slavery,” the wealth of the Russian state is of a different nature. At the same time, the entire Russian governmental and military elite is openly subscribed to the imperialist ideology where expansion at any cost is considered a higher value that overrides even the value of life – human and particularly non-human – made resource for the empire’s “greatness.” As Indigenous and decolonial activists from Russia-occupied lands state in the “Nothing about us without us” manifesto, the Moscow-centric Russian liberal opposition is equally comfortable with the unprocessed imperial legacy despite their vocalized or silent opposition to the current Russian military expansion in Ukraine.