Decolonizing minds in the “Slavic area,” “Slavic area studies,” and beyond

Abstract

Russia’s dramatic escalation of its war against Ukraine in February 2022 compelled many people at last to realize that the Russian “Federation” is in fact an empire. Despite hope in the early 1990s that Russian citizens might transform their country into a genuinely democratic federation, conditions were not auspicious, and particularly after Vladimir Putin succeeded Boris El′tsin (Yeltsin) as president in 1999, limited achievements were gradually enervated. If there was any doubt, the imperial nature of the post-Soviet Russian state should have been obvious following Russia’s occupation and annexation of Crimea in 2014 – and it was particularly telling that Putin was reported to have been avidly reading eighteenth-century Russian history just before his little green men appeared on Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula. The problem, of course, is not just Putin. As Maksym Sviezhentsev and MartinOleksandr Kisly argue in their contribution to this forum, “de-occupation” may be achieved militarily, but decolonization is first of all a process of the mind, in which both colonizers and colonized – together with “bystanders” – must recognize and overcome imperialist patterns of thought. While Sviezhentsev and Kisly sharply criticize 240 years of Russian colonial practices in Crimea, they also warn their fellow Ukrainians that they risk reproducing patterns of imperialism if they do not recognize the claims of Crimea’s indigenous people, the Crimean Tatars, in the creation of a post-occupation order. Agnieszka Jezyk, in her contribution, likewise points out that interwar Poland – a country freshly reunited and independent after 123 years of partition – harboured a strong movement to imitate one of Poland’s former colonizers (the German Empire) and establish overseas colonies. As far as the bystanders are concerned, Andriy Zayarnyuk has forcefully argued that many Western scholars “enabled” Putin’s aggression against Ukraine by reproducing and normalizing imperialist ways of seeing post-Soviet space. It is in the hope of decolonizing minds – in Slavic and related area studies, in the areas we study, and beyond – that this forum is offered. Discussions of decolonization in the Americas have usually not imagined Europe as a space subject to colonialism, since the perspective from beyond Europe’s shores tends to elide the colonial powers of the continent’s western periphery with the continent as a whole. Denis Diderot, however, saw no essential difference between British schemes to settle Germans in America and Catherine II’s policy of settling them in the Volga valley,