‘New Russia’ and the Legacies of Settler Colonialism in Southern Ukraine

Abstract

Russia’s conquest of the northern shores of the Black Sea in the late eighteenth century and their renaming as ‘New Russia’ contributed to a wider movement of colonisation, settlement, and re-signification of territories worldwide under the aegis of imperial ideology. The adoption of the new name was also a way to erase the memory of the former inhabitants of the region—in the case of Southern Ukraine, its Tatar and Cossack populations, as well as its Greek and Jewish minorities. However, the coloniality of ‘New Russia’ was always up for debate in Russian official discourse: because the conquests happened in contiguous territories, Southern Ukraine was both an object of colonisation and an agent of further conquest, especially in the direction of the Caucasus. Inventing ‘New Russia’ thus asserted the colonial and ‘oriental’ significance of the Black Sea steppes, while entrenching Russia’s own imperial status and suggesting a place where Russia’s future might be.