This article challenges historians’ recent Russian-Ukrainian war-related claims that the field of Russian history in the west, and in the United States in particular, has overlooked the imperial and colonial dimensions of Russia’s past. It argues that far from overlooking Russian and Soviet imperialism and colonialism and marginalizing the histories of non-Russian peoples in that context, Anglophone historians have been documenting and explaining them for almost a century. It shows that as early as the 1940s and 50s, Michael Karpovich and his former Harvard University students emphasized the need to pay greater attention to the history of Russian imperial expansion and colonization, Russia’s borderlands and its non-Russian peoples. By tracing the ways in which Anglophone historians over the next fifty years sought to make sense of Russian and Soviet empire, it becomes possible to see the so-called “imperial turn” in Russian historiography as a return to research agendas that had been established decades earlier and helped make possible the production of historical accounts of Russia arguably free from what Mykhailo Hrushevsʹkyi famously dubbed the “traditional scheme of ‘Russian’ history.”

Since the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine in 2014, a view that interprets Russian-Ukrainian relations as colonialism has gained ground in historical scholarship. However, based on an analysis of the terms “colonization” and “colonialism” and a comparison between Ukrainian territories and the Governorate-General of Turkestan in late imperial Russia, this article argues for a more cautious use of the term “colonialism” in relation to Ukraine. It shows that contemporaries rarely viewed tsarist rule in Ukraine through the prism of colonialism, while in the case of Central Asia this perspective was pervasive. Moreover, tsarist policy toward Central Asia and its predominantly Muslim population was much more in line with colonial practices than it was in the case of Ukraine. While colonial rule is generally based on the institutionalization of difference, the opposite was the case in Ukraine: Ukraine was appropriated as part of the Russian nation. Therefore, this article argues that Russia’s claims on Ukraine, which deny Ukraine’s right to national self-determination and statehood, are not an indication of colonial subjugation, but rather of nationalist usurpation.

This essay examines how blackness is lived, perceived, and negotiated in (post)socialist Kazakhstan by placing the experiences of two “dual heritage” women—Aminata Uėdrаogo, a contemporary media personality, and Yelena Khanga, a Soviet and Russian-era journalist—in conversation. Prompted by a visit with Uėdrаogo in Almaty, I use autoethnographic and Black feminist methods to explore how blackness functions as both a limit and a possibility within shifting frameworks of race, ethnicity, and national belonging. While scholarship on intermarriage and ethnic mixing in Soviet Central Asia exists, contemporary experiences of people of African descent—particularly women—remain largely absent.1 Through their narratives and embodied experiences, I argue that blackness in Central Asia complicates the presumed rupture between socialist and post-socialist periods and unsettles dominant Eurocentric paradigms of race. This analysis calls for further inquiry into African diasporic presence and theorizations of blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian contexts.

“Blackness” in the meaning under discussion here is too elusive to consistently discern because it defies clear definition. For instance, it was not Africans who designated themselves as “black,” nor even as Africans, since their self-identification was with their own respective cultures. The concepts the term “blackness” evokes are mainly what others have associated with Africans and other people of Black African descent. In many respects the purveyors of the trans-Saharan and Atlantic slave trades committed the greatest identity theft in world history. When the concept of “blackness” is brought to earth, a common thread that runs through it is a struggle over personal and group identities. It is also at times cloaked in other cultural behavior such as xenophobia. The original European attitudes evincing “blackness” were significantly influenced by Christian tradition surrounding the so-called Curse of Ham, an age-old myth concerning human beings of darker complexion that was shared by the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religious traditions and came to foster racist concepts positing inherent inferiority of Black Africans in many modern societies. Especially pertinent here, the Russian Primary Chronicle of the early twelfth century begins with an overview of the genesis of nations based on this Hamitic myth.1 Therefore, because of shared Christian traditions, Russians and other Slavs spread this concept alongside western Europeans even in the period before close direct contacts with the west were established. This is the broader historical background of the themes treated in this timely collection of essays “Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies.”