Russia’s colonial legacy and the war in Ukraine

Colonialism does not come in one flavour. In Britain we think of colonialism as the conquest of distant lands and empires as fragmented assortments of foreign territories. Russian colonialism and the Russian empire are different. Rather than sailing to far-off shores, Russia expanded – east, south, and west – and absorbed its neighbours.

This has proved an enduring model. We look at the map of the world today and see Russia reaching all the way to Vladivostok. Few pause to wonder how Russia got so large. In fact, its eastern expanses are the legacy of colonialisation. From the late 16th century onwards Russian armies advanced east, overwhelming the Siberian Khanate and reaching the Pacific in 1639. Conquest was followed by extensive settlement.

The Russian model of colonialism by absorption confuses the divide between colonised and colonialists that was so stark in the British and French empires. In some ways Russia’s expansion was less destructive. The transatlantic slave trade and the kind of mass extirpation of indigenous people seen in the Americas have no direct parallels in Russian history. But the recent invasion of Ukraine points to another way of reading Russia’s colonial history. One of the consequences of absorption is a lack of recognition that any conquest has taken place and, hence, an almost impermeable sense of entitlement. The result is a firm conviction that contiguous lands are not real countries, but mere annexes of Russia. For pro-Putin Russians, it is almost impossible to imagine the military take-over of Ukraine as an invasion; it’s more akin to taking back mislaid property.

For Russian ultra-nationalists, Ukraine is still framed by its old imperial label of ‘Little Russia’ (and the Ukrainian language is just ‘Little Russian’). We might also be reminded of the curious imperial decree from 1863 which banned Ukrainian-language publications on the grounds that ‘no separate Little Russian language has ever existed, exists, or can exist’. Banning something that you claim does not exist might seem unnecessary. It speaks of a combination of defensiveness and dismissiveness.

Russia’s colonial relationship with Ukraine can be encapsulated in one word: Novorossiya, or New Russia. Novorossiya, was first established in the mid-eighteenth century in what is now southern and eastern Ukraine. It was a Russian equivalent to the claims other European powers were making on so-called ‘virgin’ or ‘empty’ territory such as New England or New Spain. But unlike settlements in the New World, which saw native people pushed out of the picture, New Russia was always a site of many voices. The lands of New Russia were handed out to a mix of settlers and they formed a lively multicultural community, with Ukrainians and Russians joined by Serbs, Jews, Romanians, Greeks, Italians and many others besides. People came from all over Europe to settle here, and some lent their names to the newly founded towns. The coal mining city of Donetsk, today an epicentre of pro-Russian militancy, was founded by a Welsh immigrant called John Hughes and used to be called ‘Yuzovka’ (or ‘Hughes-town’; ‘Yuz’ is a Russian transliteration of ‘Hughes’).

Novorossiya was never meant to be an ethnic enclave for any one group and its history is not all about conquest and oppression. However, large-scale Russian migration and the suppression of the Ukrainian culture and language by the imperial government meant that, by the end of the nineteenth century, all of Ukraine’s cities were Russian-speaking, and Ukrainians who wanted to get ahead had to learn Russian. Novorossiya existed up to 1918, when it was parcelled up into the new Ukrainian Soviet Republic.

The Ukrainian-Soviet War of 1917–21 crushed nationalist forces and was followed by the relentless persecution of ‘Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism’. Although there was a period of cultural pluralism in the 1920s, old attitudes and prejudices soon came to the fore. In a 1932 telegram Molotov and Stalin demanded that all school instruction and ‘Ukrainianized newspapers, books and publications’ switch to Russian. This was also the period of what Ukrainians calls the ‘Holodomor’, a policy of famine that appears to have been designed to extinguish resistance and killed about three million people.

Ukraine, like imperial Russia’s other colonial possessions, did not achieve freedom with the revolution of 1917, just another phase in its colonial history. The notion that Ukraine is not a real country but an extension of Russia, a ‘little Russia’, is particularly ingrained in the Crimea and in the Donbass. Provoked by the conviction that their culture and language was being marginalised by the Ukrainian authorities, on 7 April 2014 fighters occupied government buildings in Donetsk and declared the creation of an independent pro-Russian ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’. The Ukrainian army’s ‘antiterror’ campaigns did little to stem pro-Russian sympathy and soon other towns and cities fell under separatist control.

All sorts of Russians, ordinary citizens as well as soldiers, made their way to fight for the cause. Public recruitment rallies seeking willing men to fight in the Donbass were held in many Russian cities. However, pro-Russian volunteers also came from further afield. They included Chechen fighters and so-called ‘new Cossacks’, who proclaim it a sacred duty to retake Russian lands and defend the Russian Orthodox Church.

A week or so after the Donetsk People’s Republic declared independence, Vladimir Putin broadcast some telling remarks. ‘I would like to remind you,’ he told his radio audience, ‘that what was called Novorossiya back in the Tsarist days – Kharkov, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolayev and Odessa – were not part of Ukraine back then.’ Warming to his theme, Putin then began musing on the vagaries of history: ‘These territories were given to Ukraine in the 1920s by the Soviet government. Why? Who knows? They were won by Potemkin and Catherine the Great in a series of well-known wars.’

A few days after Putin’s historical speculations were broadcast, the second of the eastern Donbass regions, Luhansk, was declared to be an independent ‘People’s Republic’. Keen to seize the ultimate prize without delay, the leaders of both new ‘People’s Republics’ proclaimed their intent to federate as Novorossiya. Chairman of the New Russia Parliament, Oleg Tsarev, proclaimed that New Russia was ‘ready to absorb all the other republics of the South-East of Ukraine and, it is possible, in the West too’.

The ‘new’ New Russia did not last long. It limped on for several months, and in December 2014, it issued a renewed claim to sovereignty, this time proclaiming itself to be a direct descendant of the USSR. But on 1 January 2015, New Russia’s leadership threw in the towel and announced that the new nation had been ‘suspended’. I doubt those activists imagined that seven years later, not only would the Luhansk and Donetsk republics be recognised by Russia (as happened in 2022) but that their separatist campaign would inspire a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Today the open-ended querying of Ukraine’s political status has become Russian state ideology. In February 2022 Putin declared that ‘Ukraine has never had its own authentic statehood. There has never been a sustainable statehood in Ukraine’.

The deep alienation of Russian speakers in the Donbass from Ukraine has been forged by years of fighting. Their plight deserved more interest and attention from the outside world. Putin’s war has turned a regional tragedy into a global crisis. In many ways it is baffling for it appears to have no long-term winners and evidences a worrying absence of strategic foresight. It is not rooted in foresight but nostalgia. It does not look forward but back: to the days of ‘Little Russia’ and a time when Russia’s colonial ambitions – to the east, south, and west – went unchecked, absorbing and assimilating numerous territories. But Putin is not Russia. And I suspect that he is underestimating the numbers of Russians who do not share his sentimental attachment to the past.