Paul Goble
Staunton, Apr.
15 – “Besides everything else,” US-based Russian historian Mikhail Yudanin
says, “the civil war in Russia was a war for the recovery of colonies which had
separated from Russia in 1917-1918” and the Bolshevik victory in it allowed the
Kremlin to continue the imperial tradition of the past.
Failure to
recognize that continuity, one that lies behind what Putin is trying to do in Ukraine
now, gets in the way of understanding that Russia remains an empire and is why,
Yudanin says, he created the first academic online course about Russian decolonization
(sibreal.org/a/filosof-mihail-yudanin-o-perspektivah-dekolonizatsii-rossii/32906492.html).
(That
course is described in detail at https://decolonisation-ru.com/ and features more than 20 lectures by academic specialists
about colonialism and decolonialization as well as by avariety of ethnic and
regional activists from the various parts of the Russian Federation is
available on YouTube at youtube.com/@decolonisation-ru).
Yudanin, a native of Siberia who now teaches in the US,
shares some of the ideas that he and other speakers in the course presented in an
interview he gave to SibReal’s Sergey Chernyshov. Among the most
important are the following:
·
The Russian empire in all of its guises is “a
completely typical empire” and not a unique one as many of its defenders try to
suggest.
·
It is based on force by the metropolitan center
over the periphery, but as in all empires, both the center and the periphery
suffer although in different ways, with the center suffering because its
residents come to believe in hierarchies of peoples and the periphery suffering
from that as well as from direct oppression.
·
“One of the clearest signs” of the continuity of
colonialism is when Moscow or Russians living abroad assume that they have the
right to speak for the periphery. The latter must insist on the principle of “nothing
about us without us.”
·
The decolonization of the Russian Federation
like that of the USSR faces the problem of borders that were artificially created
by Moscow to spark conflict and make it easier for the center to engage in
divide-and-rule tactics.
·
But borders need not trigger wars in the course
of decolonization because borders now are not what they were a century or more
ago.
·
The number of variants of decolonization in
Russia is extremely large and it is a mistake to assume that the future will be
the product of only one of them or that anything is irreversible.