Lavrov says Russia has not stained itself with colonialism. Is it so?
- Grigor Atanesyan
- BBC
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Since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian authorities have explained their actions in different ways and sometimes contradicted themselves. Vladimir Putin formally acknowledged his actions as Peter I, the founder of the Russian Empire, but also denounced Western colonialism. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation also actively uses anti-colonial rhetoric, denying this colonial past of Russia.
But if this history of the war has not yet been written, then there is a consensus about the past: by annexing new lands, the Russian authorities physically destroyed and Russified peoples and exploited natural resources.
“A country that is being colonized”
“Our country, which has not stained itself with bloody cases of colonialism, has always sincerely supported Africans in their struggle for liberation from colonial oppression,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov wrote in a column published in the newspapers of Egypt, Congo, Uganda and Ethiopia on the eve of his visit to these countries. countries.
These words are not just an attempt to play on the incidence of topics. Such rhetoric is regularly found in the speeches of the minister and without reference to pedestrians. In May, for example, he claimedthat the West conquered colonies, but the Russian Empire “did not submit to its aesthetic, physiological reserves of the people when it spread its influence.”
“Everyone keep your language, believe, traditions,” said Lavrov.
Historians think otherwise.
“Russia throughout history has colonized the surrounding areas,” says historian Alexander Etkind, professor at the European University in Florence.
This does not mean that the path of the Russian Empire was identical to the British, French or territorial – in contrast to them, the Romanov power did not develop overseas territories, but the seizure of land.
“All the former colonial empires have collapsed, and the former mother countries have worked through their colonial past and are apologizing for it. And Russia not only does not apologize, but continues the same colonial and imperialist practices,” says historian Georgy Kasyanov, head of the Memory Research Laboratory at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Poland.
About colonialism against even pre-revolutionary specialists.
“The history of Russia is the history of a country that is being colonized. The area of colonization expanded along with its state territory,” wrote Vasily Klyuchevsky, a classic of Russian trauma.
In Inland Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience, Etkind quotes Kazan University professor Afanasy Shchapov as explaining the conquest of Russian Siberia by the pursuit of furs, Russia’s key export, comparable to oil today.
In Siberia, “local centers of destruction on a scale that was impossible in India; Indigenous content often meets what is recommended in North America,” writes Etkind.
Among other examples cited by historians is the Caucasian War, the longest in Russian history (1817-1864). Its goal was the conquest of the North Caucasus, inhabited by free mountain peoples.
The words of the tsarist General Yermolov, who promised, for example, to lock up the Chechens “in their only deaf hungry slums” speak of a check in health care: the famine was one of the means of “pacification”.
Researchers note that even the name for the Russian outpost in Chechnya – the Groznaya fortress, which later became the city of Grozny – had a colonial character.
Yermolov practiced punitive raids to “pacify the highlanders”, and his successors are returning to this line. The result of the conquest of the Caucasus was the spread of widespread among the mountain peoples, known as “Muhajirism” – the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Circassians from their lands.
“Circassians hate us. We exclude them from free pastures; their auls are devastated, entire peoples are infected,” Pushkin wrote in Journey to Arzrum. The poet saw the decision in the conflict of the mountain peoples in Orthodoxy, but he himself immediately recognized that this process was doomed.
A number of historians consider the genocide of the Circassian people to be the Caucasian War. The authorities of three Russian regions – Kabardino-Balkaria, Adygeya and Karachay-Cherkessia – several times appealed to Moscow with the possibility of a Circassian genocide, but so far only Georgia has recognized it.
Russian and Ukrainian peasants moved to the place of the evicted Caucasian peoples in Siberia, Kazakhstan and other colonized territories.
Already at the end of this 19th century, the Main Resettlement Directorate under the Ministry of Internal Affairs was created, which led the process and gave the journal “Issues of Colonization”. The resettlement became an abrupt part of the plans to solve the land question in the late empire.
As in the Caucasus, historians have no doubt that they are associated with the colonial character in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Russia began to annex Kazakh lands even before it formally became an empire, but the process of gaining the region was completed only in the 1890s.
Competing for influence with the British Empire, with the capture of Russia in the 19th century, the entire Western Turkestan, as the region was called then, to the border with Afghanistan, India and China, submitted to itself the local khanates and suppressed the overwhelming influence of the frequency of peoples.
One of the final episodes of the conquest of the region was the assault on the Geok-Tepe fortress during the Akhal-Teke campaign of General Skobelev. According to various sources, several thousand Turkmen were killed in Geok-Tepe.
In St. Petersburg, the campaign was perceived as a triumph, but not by everyone. The poet Semyon Nadson, the future idol of liberal youth, and then a cadet of a military school, dedicated a poem to Skobelev, in which he accused him of the cruel ruin of a world country: “Your path is a shameful path!”.
Soviet historians cite Skobelev’s letter, where he recalled: “Calm in Asia is in direct relation to the mass of people massacred there.”
“We killed many Turkmens in Geok-Tepe; the survivors will not forget this lesson for a long time: they chopped with sabers everything that came to hand, ”he wrote.
In 1916, a large-scale uprising began in Central Asia against the Russian colonists and the tsarist government, the reason for which was the decree on the “requisition of foreigners” for rear work. It was brutally suppressed and led to an exodus of Kyrgyz and Kazakhs in China.
The colonial commission, which was accompanied by the “hard opening of the unification of the people”, the appointment of the empire in the ministry textbook The history of St. Petersburg University – despite the fact that the Russian government brought civilization to the people of the people.
This is a classic imperial argument – the spread of culture and familiarization with the benefits of civilization, belonging to the heritage of France, Britain and other European powers.
Was Ukraine a colony?
The war in Ukraine has exacerbated the controversy surrounding its history. Ukrainian thoughts at the beginning of the 20th century were murders about the fact that their country is a Russian colony. However, Georgy Kasyanov believes that the territory of modern Ukraine was not a classical colony of historians.
“They were part of the metropolis, often formed the metropolis, and were something like the West for Russia in the 17th and early 18th centuries, when immigrants from such territories formed the imperial elite,” says Kasyanov. Until 2021, he worked as the head of the department of modern history and politics at the Institute of the History of Ukraine of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
The government in St. Petersburg did not consider Ukraine a colony that opened the way for recognition of the Caucasus and Central Asia. The imperial authorities seized the large Russian nation, which included Ukrainians and Belarusians, and carried out a “Russification” check, banning the publication of books in the Ukrainian language and seeking language assimilation.
Georgy Kasyanov that Russification is perhaps not the best term, because the power is on the territory of the Russian Federation. In their view, they opposed Ukrainization and the spread of the Ukrainian language as a written culture.
This concept was fought not only by the Ukrainian intelligentsia, but also by a number of Russian liberals and socialists, opponents of imperial power.
The contradictions only intensified with the house of the empire. An independent Ukrainian state was created, but already in 1919 the Bolsheviks seized power in Kyiv, again dependent on Russia in Ukraine.
At the beginning of the Soviet regime, a criminal case was initiated on “indigenization”, encouraging the development of national languages and cultures. But under Stalin, Russification and elements of imperial ideology returned.
The main tragedy was the Holodomor of 1932-1933 – a famine in Ukraine that claimed the lives of about 3.9 million Ukrainians. In Ukraine, it is officially recognized as genocide, and most Ukrainian historians came up with the definition. This is how Rafael Lemkin, the author of the term genocide, described his character, arguing, among other things, that the Ukrainian elites and the Ukrainian church were destroyed simultaneously with the famine, and Russian peasants settled in the devastated villages.
Russian historians have mostly not come across this concept. They do not deny the organized nature of the tragedy, but consider it the Stalinist policy of dispossession and collectivization, which in the same years led to famine in Kazakhstan, the Volga region and other regions.
Studying the relations between Soviet Ukraine and Moscow, the historian Ivan Lysyak-Rudnitsky in 1972 predicted the collapse of the USSR. He believes that the Soviet Union was essentially a colonial empire, although it proclaimed an anti-colonial ideology. “A regime that is entangled in irresolvable contradictions with the principles from which it derives its legitimacy cannot exist for too long,” wrote Lysiak-Rudnitsky.
Etkind that even now, in Ukraine, Russia considers a colonial war – but of a specific kind. In his opinion, the goal of the Russian government is not to seize resources; she is driven by revanchism: “They will conquer this land not with radial gold or coal, but simply because she is already watching them.”