RUSSIAN WORLD The decolonization of Russia

In mid-April, the first course on the “decolonization” of Russia concluded, taught on the Internet by professors from various parts of the world, in which dozens of “students” and activists from the independence movements of Buryatia, Kalmykia and Udege (a indigenous people of southeastern Siberia), Chechnya, Ingushetia, Karelia and many others. Among the “docents” are the Ukrainian historian Sergyj Gromenko, the Ukrainian culturologist Oksana Litvinenko, the Polish dissident Petr Mintser, the Russian-Ukrainian art historian Konstantin Akinsha, the American literary critic Eva Tompson and several experts on the subject, such as Aleksandr Etkind (famous Soviet psychologist and later American culturologist) and Sergei Abashin, Moscow anthropologist. One of the organizers of the course is the Russian philosopher Mikhail Judanin, born and raised in Novosibirsk, in central Siberia, who later moved to Israel and later to the United States, where he teaches at the University of Georgia. It is the “other Russia” that the Russian-Georgian writer Boris Akunin speaks of, the one that is outside the borders, but that also fulfills an important function for those who live in Putin's imperial Russia and hope for a completely different reconstruction of “all the Russias” in the years to come.

The question of postcolonialism in Russia is the great underlying issue that the war has imposed on Ukraine, one of the adverse effects that the delusions of grandeur of the “collective Putin” have had. Behind the demands of the “Russian world” are the aspirations of the “non-Russian world”, of the numerous peoples who for centuries have been subject to the imperial domination of different ideologies, from the tsarist to the Soviet, and today of the Eurasian vision of Kirill-Putin, who by attacking Ukraine has in fact opened the Pandora's box of all Russian history. No one can predict how the world war unleashed by the Kremlin will end, but many imagine that many different States could be born from the Russian Federation and its hundred regions, some speak of ten and others of fifty. Of 145 million citizens, Russians are at most 80 million (of very mixed ethnicity), and the rest range from the Finno-Ugrians to the Caucasians, from the Turanians to the Mongols, passing through Eastern Europeans of various strains to the Chinese. , which increasingly occupy the territories of the Far East.

In these lands there has always been a confrontation between the oppressed and the oppressors, on a scale that has no equal in the world. If in the United States feelings of guilt are only emerging today for the marginalization of the natives by the colonists who arrived from Europe, in Russia from its origins the dominant people have imposed themselves at the expense of the minor ethnic groups, as medieval chronicles narrate from the times of Kievan Rus'. At that time the decision to choose Byzantine baptism was the result of the confrontation between the Islam of the Volga Bulgarians, the Judaism of the Khazars of the Caucasus and the Latin Catholicism of the nemtsythe “mute” deprived of slovo, the “word” of the Slavs, a term that today is applied to the Germans and that at that time referred to all Westerners. However, these variants discarded to choose the “great beauty” of Christianity of Saint Sophia of Constantinople, always remained linked to Russia in subsequent centuries, and later the Asian variants of the “Tatar yoke” and the conquest of Siberia were added, between the end of the Middle Ages and the modern and contemporary centuries.

Colonialism, on the other hand, is not an invention of the Russians, in fact, in a certain sense it is the true root of all the empires and states of the Mediterranean and Europe, from the Greeks of Alexander the Great to the Romans of Julius Caesar. which were later replaced by successive attempts to translatio imperii of almost all European and American peoples. Ancient Greece sought fertile lands to cultivate, while in modern times the dominance of the metropolises of the masters over vast territories that they exploit economically and control militarily is affirmed, and in this sense Russia has remained in the variants of the second millennium. Outside of the two centuries of Western-leaning St. Petersburg rule, Russia remains dominated by the Eurasian capital, Moscow, a world away from the rest of the country, and the Putin years have largely revitalized that model: Moscow lives in luxury, in peace and harmony, and the rest of the country and the entire world only has to feed its arrogance, which it shares to a certain extent with Saint Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk and a few other metropolises.

According to Judanin, colonialism arises “not from competition between merchants, but when an outlaw meets the merchant in the yard, breaks his head with a club and steals all his money… colonization is an effect of use of force”. Then, over time, the colonizers begin to believe that they deserve the dominant position due to some of their particular qualities, and thus “the myth of the world hierarchy of peoples is born, considering it normal and legitimate for those who wield the rifle to rule over those who They only have bow and arrows”, as in the narrative of the Far West of North America and even before, that of the Siberian Far East, where the Cossacks already represented in the 16th century what would be the cowboys of the 19th, and today they are the armies Russians in Ukraine. The rhetoric of “superior fighters”, on the other hand, has fueled the ferocity of the various companies of invaders, from the Wagner company of the “cooked cook” Yevgeny Prigozhin to the Akhmat division of the Chechens, under orders of the Caucasian colonizer Ramzan Kadyrov, the heroes of Putin's “special operation.”

Judanin explains that “the colonial economy always goes hand in hand with various forms of racism,” such as the requirement that was imposed on Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan to grow only cotton, excluding all other crops, and that still today imposes slave harvests in which Even students from these countries are required to participate. The subdivision into production sectors is a project that had already begun during the empire of the tsars, and was then perfected by the Soviet regime to carry out the “participation of the people” in the great project of universal socialism, without thinking about the disastrous consequences on the ecology of all of Central Asia and other territories. It is no coincidence that today Uzbeks, Turkmens and Tajiks organize large “weaving festivals” to make up for centuries-old humiliations, when the harvested cotton was taken to Belarus to make the “masterpieces” of which Asians were considered incapable. .

To justify their own colonial vision, Russians today recover old arguments and imagine new ones. Russia has always had a complex to resolve: that of being a landlocked empire, and she has envied the British, Spanish, Dutch and other dominions that stretched across the oceans. In the current war in Ukraine, more than in the Donbass, the Russians were interested in Crimea (a place that has always been symbolic) and the coasts of the Black Sea, and, more than the conquest of kyiv, they try to reach to Odessa, to then prevail all the way to the Mediterranean. Another dream that predicts future catastrophes is the control of the Arctic Ocean, which with global warming is becoming less and less glacial, and could release new “colonies” to conquer; After all, since the 17th century the Russians had crossed the Bering Strait to conquer Alaska, and reached California, which was later sold to the Americans, in a short circuit between the Eastern and Western empires.

According to the classic approaches of Russian colonialism, today revitalized by the idea of ​​the Orthodox “Russian world”, Russia does not oppress minor peoples, but rather protects them and helps them grow in their economic, cultural and religious integration. In the recent Nakazthe decree of the World Council inspired by Patriarch Kirill, underlines the importance of the work of the Orthodox Church in relations with Islam, Buddhism and other local religions, and even Asian shamanism, which thanks to patriarchal Christianity are assimilated to the great bribes patriotic, the education of people to defend themselves against invasions and heresies. Resistance to Western “moral degradation”, the spiritual reason for the war in Ukraine, highlights the superiority of the “traditional values” that the patriarch also proclaims for other religions, because they are “universal values” that Russians have the right and duty to affirm in all latitudes. A colonization that becomes evangelization, the bribes ecumenical of de-Nazification and Russification. These are the refrains of Russia's imperial revival.

Another term used in Soviet times was korenizatsija (from koren = root), an ethnic policy that was imposed under Stalin, the Georgian dictator who wanted to be more Russian than the Russians, although he spoke with a strong Caucasian accent. At that time the anti-religious ideology was in force, and instead of the metropolitans and muftis, the party secretaries and high officials joined together to form an elite of “new men” of Soviet nationality and no longer linked to the origins of the blood. But today the “roots” do not seem to have the fertile soil of the former colonies, and the numerous peoples of Eurasia tolerate the imperial dictatorship of the Russians less and less. After having invaded Ukraine and threatened all the countries of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia and all of Asia, Russia runs the risk of being forced to invade itself, leaving only the possibility of self-colonization.

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