by Stefano Caprio

Since 1991 and the Chechen Wars, Russian policy has been an unconditional continuation of what was essentially left unfinished in the 19th century: a form of territorial colonialism (unlike Western maritime colonialism) that continued with the war in Georgia (2008-2011) and the war in Ukraine (since 2014), using the same methods.

Colonialism is traditionally associated with maritime empires – Great Britain, France, Spain – but another model also existed, a land-based model without oceans or overseas territories.

Over the course of several centuries, Russia expanded at the expense of neighbouring peoples and regions, forming its own centre-periphery system.

Can Russian colonialism be considered an ongoing policy? What are its characteristics, and how does it differ from Western imperialist practices? The Idel.Реалии news outlet discussed these issues with Anton Saifullayeu, PhD, assistant professor at the University of Warsaw (UW), Poland.

Of Uzbek origin, Saifullayeu heads the Decolonial Research Initiative at UW’s Institute of Intercultural Studies of Central and Eastern Europe and is deputy director of the Institute of Central Europe in Lublin, Poland.

He specialises in postcolonial and decolonial theory applied to Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space, and his expertise appears more essential than ever to understand the current course of events in the Eurasian space and beyond.

He notes that "colonialism is a fairly familiar phenomenon; it exists in everyday life, in our daily political, social, and cultural vocabulary." Colonialism is usually associated with subjugation, with large empires establishing themselves in "less developed" territories to exploit them.

In reality, colonialism has many versions. In addition to the traditional settler colonialism, there are also various manifestations and discursive tools, such as Orientalism or racism.

Orientalism is a perception and representation of the Orient in Western Europe, which emerged during the Enlightenment and Romanticism, characterised by exoticisation, stereotypes, and an intellectual justification of colonial rule. It is a cultural discourse that presents the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa as a mysterious, sensual, yet "backward" world, in contrast to the rational West.

Russian, or Russo-Soviet, colonialism has its own specific characteristics, Saifullayeu points out, and these are, among other things, the reason why Russia's colonial influence on neighbouring territories and its current global behaviour are difficult to understand and describe within the traditional categories of colonial analysis to which we are accustomed.

In the Russian case, the expert explains, colonialism has a distinctive feature: it is land-based, and this distinguishes it from the great Western imperialist colonialisms.

Land-based colonialism is more structural, more focused on subjugation, more vertical, because the logic of this subjugation (even if only military or economic) is more explicit and evident.

For example, in Eastern Europe, it is primarily based on knowledge, ideology, and the policy of national delimitation that exists everywhere. But in this context – for example, in Belarus, Ukraine, or Moldova – racial or Eastern markers do not apply. Everything works somewhat differently.

One of the key characteristics of Russian colonialism is that it manifests itself differently in different parts of the world. Land-based empires are vast (for example, China and Russia itself, which occupies most of Eurasia), and, consequently, each direction has its own specific strategy.

There is so-called internal colonialism, which, according to Saifullayeu, is “somewhat misunderstood in the context of Russian historiography.”

In the Russian intellectual space, it is understood in terms of caste and economics: it is assumed that "some Russians colonised other Russians," but in essence, internal colonialism has never ceased within the borders of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation since the 16th century, affecting the numerous peoples and ethnic groups that have been part of Russia for more than 500 years.

The capture of Kazan in the mid-16th century by the first tsar, Ivan the Terrible, was the starting point of Russian expansionism, which soon began to transform into colonialism.

Interestingly, this coincides with the global Age of Discovery, so it could be said that Russia followed some of the global trends of the 16th century, also attempting to develop and implement an expansionist policy, discovering new territories and simultaneously seeking new economic opportunities.

The main centres of the former Tatar-Mongol Empire, both political and economic, were subjugated by Moscow: Kazan, Astrakhan, and then the Siberian Khanate, which opened the way to the east.

Colonial policy within the entity we now call the Russian Federation never ceased, and only later did the state begin to take an interest in it and introduce a more structured policy, one that could be called colonial and "sedentary”.

Looking at a modern map of the Russian Federation, and of the Asian territory commonly called Siberia, we see that cities began to appear around the same time, in the 17th-18th centuries, when the state began to penetrate these territories more intensively and consolidate them through sedentary colonialism.

The next phase was in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the policy of sedentary colonialism continued, including the model that developed significantly in the Soviet Union, where colonisation was implemented, among other things, through the Gulag prison system.

The entire economic infrastructure created in the Far North and the Far East was largely built in the 1920s and 1930s by concentration camp prisoners.

Looking at modern Russia, the Russo-Chechen wars at the turn of the century are absolutely a colonial story.

Russian policy since 1991, with the Chechen wars being the prime example, has been an unconditional continuation of what was essentially left unfinished in the 19th century, namely the war in Georgia from 2008 to 2011 and the war in Ukraine from 2014 to the present, using the same methods.

A United Nations commission of inquiry has called Russia's deportation of Ukrainian children to its territory a war crime, while Russian officials proudly speak of transferring children from Ukraine to "re-educate" them in the spirit of love for Russia.

Russian occupation authorities in Ukraine's Luhansk region have created an online “catalogue” of Ukrainian children, offering them for forced "adoption" through the Department of Education.

One of the key elements of the colonisation process is the imposition of language, which is not coincidentally one of the most important factors in the hostility between Russians and Ukrainians, long oppressed by processes of Russification imposed by the tsars and the Soviets, which resulted in the marginalisation of the Russian language in independent Ukraine over the last 30 years, in what Moscow calls “the Donbass genocide”.

Strong tensions along these lines also exist in Central Asia, especially in Kazakhstan, with large Russian-speaking areas in the north, and to varying degrees in all the former Soviet states, all the way to the Baltics.

Yet Putin's Russia presents itself as the champion of the “global South” fighting against the "globalist colonialism" of the global Northwest, to defend the sovereignty of the weakest peoples.

This is a legacy of Soviet ideology, in which it was mandatory to declare oneself anti-colonial and anti-racist, placing all the historical blame for the backwardness of the "Third World" on West.

In 2022, it became clear that Russian policy is colonial to the core, and the invasion of Ukraine raised an issue that Saifullayeu and many other commentators believe will become particularly critical in Russia, if and when, fighting ends: the resurgence of the identity of “minor peoples”, with the risk of the disintegration of the entire Federation.

Since the end of the Soviet Union 35 years, a real notion of nationhood has not emerged in Russia; in fact, as Orthodox Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov), Putin's “spiritual father”, put it, “Russia can only be imperial”.

If the Yeltsin decade was oriented towards a globalist vision, Putin's quarter-century is a hybrid of the many Tsarist and Soviet imperial narratives, and the military actions of Donald Trump's US colonialism are further exposing the contradictions of this ever-unfinished “Russian world”, incapable of affirming the greatness of its own empire without the power to colonise.

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• russia
• moscow
• ukraine
• colonialism
• tzar
• vladimir putin
• anton saifullayeu