This contribution was written as part of the research project Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace & Conflict [grant number 01UG2205A], funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
Though decolonial thinking has existed for as long as colonization itself, a “more profound shift towards a decolonial turn” took place in the twentieth century after World War II and the “second wave of decolonization” in Africa.¹ A decolonial turn, according to Nelson Maldonado-Torres, represents “a family of diverse positions that share a view of coloniality as a fundamental problem in the modern (as well as postmodern and information) age, and of decolonization or decoloniality as a necessary task that remains unfinished.”²
Coloniality survives settler colonialism, that is, coloniality remains, even if visible colonial structures and administrations cease to exist and after the control over land has been relinquished by the colonizer. Coloniality refers to “long-standing patters of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations.”³ Decolonial thinkers designate complex forms of coloniality, such as coloniality of being and imagination through dehumanization and “systematic repression.”⁴ Multiple levels of coloniality exist. One way of categorizing it is to think of it in terms of four layers of control. The first layer is control of the economy, the second is control of authority, the third is control of sexuality and gender, and the fourth is control of knowledge and subjectivity.⁵ Maldonado-Torres argues that coloniality of power refers to all “forms of exploitation and domination (power),” coloniality of knowledge refers to the questions of how knowledge is produced, and coloniality of being relates to “the lived experience of colonization and its impact on language.”⁶ Coloniality is entangled with hetero-patriarchal structures and capitalism and is deeply embedded in the violence of borders and the existence of modern nation-states.
A “decolonial turn,”—an attempt to rethink and delink from the standards of modernity—has gained momentum in academia and practice in recent years. As with any fashionable concept, various actors have hijacked the decolonial agenda for ulterior motives that depart from or stand in contrast to the goals of decolonization. People who genuinely fight for liberation and decolonization, “the wretched of the Earth,” “whose future is mortgaged,”⁷ rightly criticize “colonization of the decolonization,” that is, the use of decolonization as an empty signifier and the hijacking of decolonial praxis for promulgating colonial mindsets and policies.⁸
The Kremlin has adopted this trend of misappropriating the language of decolonization for its own colonial ends. Russian President Vladimir Putin resorts to decolonial language for securitization purposes through “polemic discourse and humiliation narratives,”⁹ particularly after Russia’s aggressive full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin claims that Russia ‘”led the anticolonial movement” in the twentieth century and “helped to fight colonialism” in African states.¹⁰ Juxtaposing the European and North American coalitions, Putin touts the Global South, stating that BRICS¹¹ and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization should now shape the international agenda.¹² Putin states that Russia promotes an “anti-hegemonic position,” claiming that ‘“the West cannot unilaterally manage all of humanity,” and, rather “a solidarity between humans should be created.”¹³ Putin contended that the international relations system needs to be changed gradually, positioning Russia as a pluralist state that opposes a unipolar world that Europe and the United States sustained and ingrained.¹⁴
This “easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization” in Putin’s rhetoric represents what Tuck and Yang argued to be, “yet another form of settler appropriation.”¹⁵ This is an example of what they described (following Mawhinney) as “moves to innocence,” or “strategies to remove involvement in and culpability for systems of domination.”¹⁶ The goal of “moves to innocence” is “to provide a framework of excuses, distractions, and diversions from decolonization” despite alleged claims that the actors follow decolonial agenda.¹⁷ It is not up to Russia to “decolonize,” not only because the struggle of decolonization is not in the hands of states, but also because Russia’s colonial war in Ukraine goes against the very idea and ideals of decolonization. Decolonization is not rooted in the logic of “war, conquest, and genocide,” which, on the contrary, characterize coloniality.¹⁸
At the same time, seminal decolonial scholars, such as Walter Mignolo, defend Russia and justify Russia’s war in Ukraine, enraptured by the half-truths they believe about the Soviet Union and discounting the colonizing and imperialist agendas of both the Soviet Union and Russia. Mignolo’s position with respect to Russia is characteristic of some segments of the Western left’s enduring enchantment with Soviet propaganda, which ignores the darkest aspects of the histories of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc. Russia is not what Mignolo and those who share his views claim it to be—a decolonial ally. Mignolo contradicts himself. On the one hand, he argues that the decolonial agenda belongs to people, not the states, and that decolonization and nation-states are “bad bed fellows.”¹⁹ At the same time, he argues that by engaging in the invasion and occupation of Ukraine, Russia is “only defending itself” from the “harassment of Western designs.”²⁰ This contribution aims to unravel the internationalist and liberatory historiography that some misguided scholars continue to attribute to Russia and the Soviet Union and to show that the notion of Russia as a decolonial ally lacks both historical accuracy and engagement with contemporary decolonial scholarship.
First, decoloniality rejects the adoption of the “non-ethics” of war, genocide, subjugation of other people, and forceful domination over them.²¹ Secondly, the notion of Russia as decolonial is particularly ironic, as Russia was and still is a colonizing and imperial state. Whereas the soundness of the Kremlin’s arguments is widely questioned, the misuse of decolonial language still distracts from and misappropriates the decolonial agenda. Rebutting Russia’s instrumentalization of the decolonial agenda is important as there are those who: (1) still subscribe to the Soviet Union’s “pseudo-internationalism” myth, discounting the Soviet Union’s “transmuted racism,”²² (2) assume that Russia’s aggression is a reaction to an alleged provocation (following Noam Chomsky’s stance on the war in Ukraine),²³ or (3) consider Russia a “disobedient” state that rejects modernity by acting as a “de-Westernizing” force.²⁴ Decoloniality represents the struggle of people rather than the states or sovereigns; it showcases the fact that imperial attitudes promulgate war, and that de-Westernization does not always equate to decolonization.
Mignolo’s reliance on the Kremlin’s rhetoric is dangerous because it conflates de-Westernization with decolonization, which results in left-leaning advocates promoting denialist and warmongering narratives. Walter Mignolo considers the fall of the Soviet Union and “the neoliberal celebration of the end of history” to reflect “modernity’s darker side.”²⁵ Russia, alongside China and Iran, are the “disobedient” states, in Mignolo’s view, that did not embark on settler colonial project prior to their establishment, and which, nevertheless, adopted a capitalist model without neoliberalism.²⁶ In the quest for de-Westernizing rhetoric, Mignolo steps into the trope of assuming that “non-Western” countries are free from colonizing inclinations or colonial history. Even in the attribution of which countries count as colonial and post-colonial we see Eurocentrism, despite pretensions to the contrary, and despite numerous calls in the literature to consider those countries that were part of the Soviet Union or under its sphere of influence as postcolonial.²⁷ The “Second World” avoided the attention of many Western post-colonial scholars, too, including Edward Said, who was not did not know how to categorize the Soviet Union.²⁸
The Soviet Union, which is sometimes still viewed as a counterexample of colonialism and racism, was not, in fact, free of nationalist and colonial ideologies. The Russian proletariat assumed for itself the role of the liberator of “backward nations,” with ethnic Russians being the “main ethnic glue of the new Soviet state, even if only as carriers of the universal communist message.”²⁹ The Soviet national anthem adopted in 1943 had this intention enshrined in its text: “The unbreakable union of free republics was welded forever by Great Rus.’’ Culture and literature were one of the most entrenched tools of colonization – “Having colonized its multiple territories, Russia applied typically colonial regimes of indirect rule – coercive, communal, and exoticizing – to its population.”³⁰ We have a phenomenon of civilizational communism—where the communist message was distributed through erasure of people, their worlds, cultures and cosmologies, in the name of utopian promise the benefits of which were to be reaped by the few selected elites. The re-Stalinization and the appeal of such figures as Stalin is connected not only to the admiration of violent paternalistic figures but also because Stalin laid down the foundations of Russia’s nationalism and the Soviet civilizing mission.³¹
As Alexander Etkind argues, Russia (the pre-1917 Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union) has been engaged in both external and internal colonization that involves an expansionist mandate and promulgation of colonial policies within its borders.³² Even after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia still was left with more territory than other European states in the postcolonial era, as the Russian empire was both “the largest in space and the most durable in time of all historical empires.”³³ This “boomerang effect,” (a concept Etkind borrows from Hannah Arendt), involved bringing back “home” the colonial policies of violence and oppression from the “laboratories of modernity.”³⁴ Whereas Etkind’s reference to the internal colonization is useful, his analysis does not engage the questions of race, an omission that is common among Russia’s liberal intelligentsia, most notably, within such celebrated organisations as International Memorial. International Memorial’s otherwise laudable quest for historical justice nevertheless failed to account for the structural inequalities in the country, and most importantly, the colonial policies of the Soviet Union against indigenous people and peripheral states.
Madina Tlostanova refers to Russia as a “Janus-faced empire” that was involved in self-orientalization that applied its colonial policies to its peripheries.³⁵ Tlostanova, a native Circassian, whose “local indigenous languages and cosmologies” were eliminated “by Russian and Soviet colonization,”³⁶ argues that in the Soviet Union, “the actual dominance of racial discourse was always masked by more intricate ethnic and religious configurations.”³⁷ As Tlostanova contends, “[I]n relation to its colonies the Soviet tactic became more cruel and refined, based on methodical elimination of all alternative thinking and being.”³⁸ Oksana Zabuzhko, in her book Field Work in Ukrainian Sex, argues that the objective of Russia’s colonialism is “assimilation as the imposed categorical imperative of coexistence.”³⁹ The Russian and Soviet colonizing missions are entangled. Coloniality in its multiple forms delineates experiences of those who live and lived under Russia’s or Soviet Union’s auspices or sphere of influence; it is embodied and existential, touching all sides of being, but at the same time, it is concealed by the promises of civilizational communism and the global standards of modernity. As Tlostanova argued, “In post-Soviet postcolonialism a more complex intersectionality is at work, where ideological Soviet discourses are superimposed on more straightforward imperial or colonial ones. This specific meaning of mind colonization always works against the background of global coloniality through the discourses of modernity (including socialist ones).”⁴⁰
Decolonial politics and decolonial praxis are rooted in the resistance of the people. Decolonial struggle drives the Ukrainian people’s resistance now. Their resistance became a catalyst for a new conversation about Russia’s colonization within what is currently considered Russia’s territory. One example of such conversations is a letter entitled “Nothing About Us Without Us,” by Indigenous People of Russia (IPR), those whose voices were historically erased, who demand to be included in decision-making beyond superficial representation, and who are wary about the “sudden interest” in decolonization by Muscovite elites.⁴¹ Indigenous artists, in solidarity with Ukraine, engage through such initiatives as the Berlin-based exhibition Өмә, “which aims to be a platform for examining russian colonialism and anti-colonial resistance.”⁴² The initiative is an outcry by those whose land was expropriated, who were forcibly removed and relocated, and who were consistently discriminated against due to Russian and Soviet colonialism.
Supposed decolonial scholars who deny Ukraine’s agency and support Russia’s hegemonic position fail to meaningfully engage with the present conversation and scholarship on decoloniality. Russia is not now and has never been a decolonial ally, and its anti-Western rhetoric does not make it any less of a colonial and imperialist country. If Russia is ever to become a “decolonizing force,” this will not come about through “disobedience” against the West, nor will it be accomplished through the empty promises of Russian elites. Decolonial struggle belongs to indigenous people and those impacted by Russian colonialism who seek repair for their stolen land, colonized minds, and destroyed livelihoods.
References
[1] Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Thinking through the Decolonial Turn: Post-Continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique—An Introduction,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1, no. 2 (2011), 2, https://doi.org/10.5070/T412011805.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 240–70, 243, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548.
[4] Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 168–78, 169, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353.
[5] Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, “Decoloniality as the Future of Africa,” History Compass 13, no. 10 (2015): 485–96, 489, https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12264.
[6] Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 240–70, 242, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548.
[7] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 2001; first published Présence Africaine, 1963), https://archive.org/details/thewretchedoftheearth/The%20wretched%20of%20the%20earth%20%20%20/mode/2up.
[8] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (1), 1-40, 3 (2012), https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.n38.04.
[9] Dawid Aristotelis Fusiek, “Putin’s Great Patriotic War: Russia’s Securitization of the West and Humiliation Narratives Surrounding the 2022 Invasion of Ukraine,” HAPSc Policy Briefs Series 3, no. 1 (2022): 105–13, 106, https://doi.org/10.12681/hapscpbs.30999.
[10] “Valdai International Discussion Club Meeting,” President of Russia, October 27, 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/69695.
[11] An acronym for “emerging economies”: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
[12] “Valdai International Discussion Club Meeting.”
[13] “Valdai International Discussion Club Meeting.”
[14] “Valdai International Discussion Club Meeting.”
[15] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (1), 1-40, 3 (2012), https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.n38.04.
[16] J. Mawhinney, “‘Giving up the ghost’: Disrupting The (Re)production of White Privilege in Anti-Racist Pedagogy and Organizational Change,” as cited in Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (1), 1-40, 3 (2012), https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.n38.04.
[17] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (1), 1-40, 10 (2012), https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.n38.04.
[18] Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 240–70, 246, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548.
[19] Walter Mignolo, “It is a Change of Era, No Longer the era of Changes,” Postcolonial Politics, January 29, 2023, https://postcolonialpolitics.org/it-is-a-change-of-era-no-longer-the-era-of-changes/.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11.
[22] Madina Tlostanova, “Postsocialist ≠ Postcolonial? On Post-Soviet Imaginary and Global Coloniality,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48, no. 2 (2012): 130–42, 136, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2012.658244.
[23] See, for example, V. Mosiichuk B. Tkach, and V. Lunov, (2023). How Ukrainian Scientists Help American Elites Understand the Discourse of War: The Response of Ukrainian Intellectuals to US Intellectuals Regarding the Media Effect of Noam Chomsky about the Russian War in Ukraine (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. 4333017). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4333017.
[24] Walter Mignolo, “It is a Change of Era, No Longer the Era of Changes,” Postcolonial Politics, January 29, 2023, https://postcolonialpolitics.org/it-is-a-change-of-era-no-longer-the-era-of-changes/.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid.
[27] See Oksana Lutsyshyna, “Postcolonial Herstory: The Novels of Assia Djebar (Algeria) and Oksana Zabuzhko (Ukraine): A Comparative Analysis,” (2006). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations, https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/3931.
[28] Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Internal+Colonization:+Russia’s+Imperial+Experience-p-9780745651293.
[29] Veljko Vujacic, “Stalinism and Russian Nationalism: A Reconceptualization,” Post-Soviet Affairs 23, no. 2 (1 January 2007): 156–83, 161, https://doi.org/10.2747/1060-586X.23.2.156.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid, 7.
[33] Ibid, 4, emphasis added.
[34] Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Internal+Colonization:+Russia’s+Imperial+Experience-p-9780745651293.
[35] Madina Tlostanova, “Postsocialist ≠ Postcolonial? On Post-Soviet Imaginary and Global Coloniality,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48, no. 2 (2012): 130–42, 135. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2012.658244.
[36] Madina Tlostanova, “Of Birds and Trees: Rethinking Decoloniality through Unsettlement as a Pluriversal Human Condition,” ECHO, no. 2 (2020): 16–27, https://doi.org/10.15162/2704-8659/1205.
[37] Madina Tlostanova, “Postsocialist ≠ Postcolonial? On Post-Soviet Imaginary and Global Coloniality,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48, no. 2 (2012): 130–42, 135. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2012.658244.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Oksana Lutsyshyna, “Postcolonial Herstory: The Novels of Assia Djebar (Algeria) and Oksana Zabuzhko (Ukraine): A Comparative Analysis,” (2006). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations, p. 17. https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/3931.
[40] Madina Tlostanova, “Postsocialist ≠ Postcolonial? On Post-Soviet Imaginary and Global Coloniality,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48, no. 2 (2012): 130–42, 136, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2012.658244.
[41] ‘Nothing About Us Without Us. An Open Letter from russia’s Indigenous and Decolonial Activists,” April 3, 2023, https://indigenous-russia.com/archives/32373.
[42] “Exhibition Өмә, Saturday, March 11, 2023 — Monday, May 29, 2023,” neue Gesellschaft für bildende kunst [New Society for Fine Arts], https://ngbk.de/images/stories/Projekte/2023/OME_BROCHURE-ENGLISH.pdf.
