Anti-Colonialism vs. “Self-Colonization”

This chapter examines how the ongoing Ukrainian disentanglement from its past provokes the Russian obsession not only with Ukraine’s territory but also the minds and souls of the Ukrainian people. In this Russian pursuit of the unachievable, the war represents a notorious case of “self-colonization,” in which Russia has emotionally aligned itself with a cultural and geographical space to which it has no right. The term was explored by literary scholar Alexander Kiossev and originally described a power hierarchy in which one country follows another by means of symbolic domination of the latter, and not as a consequence of actual conquest. Russia’s obsession with Ukraine is an example of such self-subjugation to the imaginary power of the neighboring country and pursuing self-destructive actions through military escalation. In the case of Ukraine, the anachronistic necessity of anti-colonial resistance emerged as a reactive response to the Russian attempts at the neocolonial revival based on misinterpretations and propaganda-led manipulations of the common imperial past. The cultural production in Ukraine reflected this shift in decolonial dynamics with more direct and radical works of art and literature aimed at opposing the intentions of cultural domination by Russia. This self-colonization is a logical consequence of Russia’s imperial “double consciousness,” pointed out by Madina Tlostanova: when Russia, as a “second-rate empire,” was historically forced to look at both more powerful Western empires and its subordinated territories. The culmination of this process came three decades after the dismantling of the political mechanisms that supported this subordination in the Soviet Union and remained in a purely symbolic field—which Russia intended and ultimately failed to actualize through its unfolding military action. This resulted in Russia’s notorious self-colonization through the “Ukrainian question.” This chapter discusses the core notions of “anti-colonial resistance” and “self-colonization” through selected examples from literature, contemporary art, and mass media.