Terminology

From a linguistic point of view, the term kolonizatsiia is part of a word family that exists in a similar form and with largely identical meanings in many European languages. This word family centers on the term koloniia, or “colony” in English. In Russian as well as in English and many other languages, koloniia has a double meaning: On the one hand, it designates a settlement of a specific group of peoples. These can be migrants from another country, but also professional groups, such as artists, or people under guard, such as prisoners. In its other main meaning, the term koloniia relates to the realm of geopolitics and refers to a country that is politically subordinated to a foreign conqueror. This double meaning of koloniia extends to some of its derivations, including, most importantly, kolonizatsiia or “colonization,” which denotes the process of establishing colonies in both senses of that word. Thus, each of the two dictionary entries referred to above builds on one of these meanings, respectively: Europe’s kolonizatsiia was seen as a geopolitical act, identified with the conquest of foreign countries and the subjugation of alien peoples, while kolonizatsiia Rossii was associated with the establishment of peasant settlements in peripheral regions. These two main meanings of kolonizatsiia, however, sometimes overlapped in late imperial discourse on Russia’s peripheries. Even when kolonizatsiia was used synonymously with “resettlement,” the term could convey associations with western colonialism, whether intended or not. Kolonizatsiia therefore often blurred the line between the development of internal territories and the appropriation of foreign ones.Footnote ¹⁰

In contrast to the double meaning of kolonizatsiia, the Russian adjective kolonialʹnyi, like its English counterpart “colonial,” refers only to colonies in the sense of dependent countries. The term was initially employed in reference to exotic commodities, designated as kolonialʹnye tovary (from German Kolonialwaren). Since the early twentieth century, its scope broadened to encompass all matters pertaining to colonies in the geopolitical sense. The English form “colonial,” in turn, gave birth to the expression “colonialism” in the mid-nineteenth century. This term was later translated in many other languages and came into use in Russian around 1900. After World War II, “colonialism,” like its Russian equivalent kolonializm, became a key term for international politics. Describing a power relationship between different peoples, it also has an exclusively geopolitical meaning and has no direct relation to the colony in the sense of a settlement of a specific group anymore. In line with the loss of legitimacy of colonial rule in the course of the twentieth century, this term, in addition to its analytical significance, has become a highly charged political term used to describe a system of rule as illegitimate.

References to Colonialism in the Pontic Steppe and Ukraine

First documented in 1693, the term koloniia established itself in Russian during the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹¹ This was the period during which the educated elite of the tsarist empire increasingly viewed Russia as an empire and developed an explicitly imperial self-confidence.Footnote ¹² Even though Russia had long been an empire in the sense of a hierarchically organized multiethnic realm, it was only at that time that Russian elites began to compare their country to west European colonial empires.Footnote ¹³ They did not yet develop any elaborate concepts of colonialism, and they certainly did not employ any distinctive term for it, but they identified certain similarities between the role of the tsarist empire in its peripheries and that of the western European empires in their overseas possessions. Among the first who did so was the renowned geographer Ivan I. Kirilov in the mid-1730s. When he suggested in a memorandum to Empress Anna Ivanovna that Russia should take possession of the Kazakh steppe, he pointed to the example of the Spanish and Portuguese in America and the Dutch in the East Indies, who had spared no efforts to conquer distant lands and were finally richly rewarded.Footnote ¹⁴ Proposing that Russia should emulate the European powers, Kirilov made clear that colonial ventures were not only a matter of economic consideration but also of prestige for the newly Europeanized empire. Such references to colonialism became more prevalent in the second half of the century, during the reign of Catherine II. Comparisons with Europe’s overseas possessions made clear that Russia’s educated elite regarded the empire’s expansion to the east and the south as an equivalent to Europe’s colonial conquests. References to the colonial world were common for Siberia and Russian America, but especially for the steppes north of the Black Sea. The designation of the recently established Governorate of New Russia was an obvious allusion to the colonial expansion of Europe, which at that time had already resulted in the formation of New Spain, New France, and New England.Footnote ¹⁵

In the course of the nineteenth century, however, references to the Pontic steppe as a colony became rare, and if they occurred, it was often unclear to which meaning of “colony” they related: to the subordinate foreign country, or simply to a space for settlement. As Willard Sunderland has argued, the European steppe lost its air of a newly conquered colonial possession during this period and was increasingly perceived as a genuine “Russian” territory. The imperial components of Russia’s expansion into the steppe were now largely elided, and it was instead seen as the natural appropriation of hitherto unused land.Footnote ¹⁶ Late nineteenth-century Russians thus perceived the area north of the Black Sea not as a theater of colonial conquest, but rather as a space of kolonizatsiia Rossii.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, a different perspective emerged that referred to colonialism in a strikingly new way. While during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries allusions to European colonialism had been used by imperial officials to express pride in the newly conquered possessions, they were now increasingly employed by critics of imperial rule in the Ukrainian territories. As Stephen Velychenko and Oleksii Yas have shown, Ukrainian intellectuals now criticized the lack of prosperity in the southern territories of the tsarist empire and drew parallels to European overseas colonialism, which was increasingly associated with national oppression and economic exploitation.Footnote ¹⁷ Among the first who did so was Ukrainian economist Mykola P. Iasnopolʹsʹkyi in 1890. Arguing that the Russian government extracted considerably more in taxation from Ukrainian provinces than it returned in expenditure, he compared the uneven development of various regions within the Russian empire with the conditions of west European overseas colonies.Footnote ¹⁸ Even more forthright hints to colonialism in a disparaging sense were published after the 1905 revolution, when censorship was relaxed in the tsarist empire. In 1908, historian Mykhailo Hrushevsʹkyi compared the situation of Ukraine to African colonies, and he was echoed the following year by literary critic Serhii Iefremov, who compared “Little Russians” loyal to the tsarist empire with native leaders of West Africa, who collaborated with the colonial rulers.Footnote ¹⁹ Mykola Stasiuk, a Ukrainian economist and politician, explicitly referred to Ukraine as a colony of Russia and Poland in 1911 in a detailed essay examining the economic relations between the three countries.Footnote ²⁰ According to Velychenko, this was the first time the term “Russian colonialism” was publicly used in reference to Ukraine.Footnote ²¹

All in all, however, such comparisons to Europe’s overseas colonialism remained scarce in Russian and Ukrainian discourse until 1917, as Velychenko has shown.Footnote ²² The colonial paradigm was even rejected by parts of Ukrainian society, as many Ukrainians described themselves as “Little Russians” and thus part of an overarching all-Russian people. They saw no contradiction between a Ukrainian and a Russian identity and could hardly identify with a colonial classification of Ukraine.Footnote ²³ It was only with the outbreak of the revolution that the colonial paradigm gained greater favor in Ukraine. Numerous Ukrainian politicians on the left now compared Ukraine to the colonized countries of Asia and Africa and presented themselves as part of a global anti-colonial movement. Initially aimed at delegitimizing tsarist rule in Ukraine, this argument quickly took on a thrust that was also directed against the Bolsheviks, who took over the legacy of the tsarist empire. Soon after the establishment of the Soviet Union, however, Ukrainian national communists were silenced, and any allusions to western colonialism were only allowed to refer to the tsarist empire.Footnote ²⁴ From the 1930s, this representation also came under increasing pressure, as historians were expected to emphasize the similarities between Russians and non-Russians rather than the differences between them. The depiction of Ukraine as a colony only lived on in exile, where it was applied to both the tsarist empire and the USSR. This representation did not gain wider recognition outside exiled Ukrainian circles, however.Footnote ²⁵

This only started to change in the 1990s, when literary scholars looked at Ukrainian culture and literature from a postcolonial perspective and again identified the tsarist empire and the USSR as colonial powers.Footnote ²⁶ Initially, this approach met with a mixed response from historians. Stephen Velychenko, for example, stated that although Ukraine may well have some similarities with formerly colonized states, this insight does not explain much:

In 2015, Yaroslav Hrytsak also expressed his doubts about the idea that Ukraine could be described as a colony. He argued that Ukraine was economically and ideologically part of the core of the empire in both tsarist and Soviet times and that Ukraine therefore had a dual political role as both a center of power and a center of resistance. He added that as a significant part of the Soviet elite came from Ukraine, the colonial dichotomy of colonizer and colonized was not sufficient to describe Ukraine.Footnote ²⁸ A similarly sceptic position was taken up by Andreas Kappeler in 2017. Recognizing that postcolonial literary studies make a significant contribution to understanding the relationship between empire and Ukrainian culture, he cautioned that Ukraine was certainly not a “classic colony that was spatially and culturally separated from the motherland and economically exploited.”Footnote ²⁹

Since 2014, however, when Russia started its war against Ukraine and annexed Crimea in violation of international law, the colonialism paradigm has gained traction among experts of Ukrainian history. In the introduction to a 2014 forum of the journal Ab Imperio, Ilya Gerasimov described the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity as the “first postcolonial revolution,” and Mark von Hagen postulated in the same year that the Russian-Ukrainian relationship can be understood and examined as Russian colonial rule over Ukraine.Footnote ³⁰ In an essay in the Slavic Review in 2015, Timothy Snyder proposed overcoming the historiographical division between continental and maritime empires and integrating the history of Ukraine and east central Europe into the history of colonialism.Footnote ³¹ Velychenko has also adopted this view in the meantime. In 2020, he argued in detail that the history of tsarist and Soviet Ukraine had numerous parallels to the history of colonized societies. These included the experience of conquest, mass deportations, economic exploitation, selective modernization oriented towards the needs of the metropolis, and the cultural denigration of the indigenous population. Admitting that there were also differences in detail—for example, Ukrainians had the opportunity to make a career in the colonial administration—Velychenko argued that these differences were not sufficient to exclude Ukraine from the concept entirely.Footnote ³²

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the question of the colonial legacy in Russian-Ukrainian relations has gained even more momentum, as the violence of Russian warfare and the occupation regime recall the experience of colonial wars.Footnote ³³ This includes, above all, the terror against the civilian population and the attempts to destroy Ukrainian culture in the occupied territories by silencing or murdering its representatives, by Russifying public space and the education system, and by deporting children to Russia. All this has led historians and politicians alike to search for classifications that correspond to the extent of the brutality. Therefore, the perspective on Ukraine as a Russian colony is becoming more and more established.Footnote ³⁴ A particularly eloquent advocate of a colonial classification continues to be Timothy Snyder, who has described the war as a colonial war and stated that Ukraine is threatened by “national extinction represented by Russian colonialism.”Footnote ³⁵ Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also drew parallels to the age of colonialism when he described the war as an assault by “the brutal colonial past” in his speech to the UN General Assembly.Footnote ³⁶

We can thus identify two different trends how references to European colonialism were used in relation to the Pontic Steppe and Ukraine. In the eighteenth century, the Russian government used the language of colonialism when dealing with the Pontic Steppe in order to emphasize the European and progressive character of the tsarist empire. However, as the steppe became increasingly interpreted as a primeval “Russian” landscape and thus lost its foreignness, the associations with colonialism disappeared. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the vocabulary of colonialism returned, but now by different actors and with opposing implications. It was taken up now by critics of imperial rule in order to denounce the economic exploitation of Ukrainian territories. This view became more widespread around the time of the revolution but was soon suppressed again by the Bolsheviks. For a long time, colonial comparisons remained limited to Ukrainian exile circles, but in view of the Russian war of aggression, this interpretation is now gaining ground again.

References to Colonialism in Central Asia

The history of the portrayal of the Pontic Steppe and Ukraine as a Russian colony overlaps somewhat with how the Central Asian territories of the tsarist empire and the USSR were described, though the differences in the representation of the two regions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are more significant. In the case of Ukraine, the depiction as a colony was largely limited to opposition circles, while in the case of Central Asia references to colonialism have a much broader tradition.

Formally, Russia’s Central Asian territories, with the Governorate-General of Turkestan at their core, were not designated as colonies. Even though Turkestan was administered by the War Ministry, it was declared an indivisible part of the empire, while the protectorates of Khiva and Bukhara remained formally independent countries. Yet, in view of the direct rivalry between the tsarist empire and the British in the region, the colonial context of the conquests was obvious to contemporaries. References to European colonialism were therefore a standard element of Russian intellectual and political discourse on the subject, and rarely did any review of Russian governance in the region fail to relate it to western colonial rule.

Such comparisons had various functions in Russian discourse and appeared in different ideological framings. For official diplomacy, references to the example of western colonialism served to legitimize Russia’s conquests in a region where Russia had no historical claims. In this vein, the famous 1864 circular dispatch by Foreign Minister Aleksandr M. Gorchakov stated that Russia had no other way of securing its borders than by subjugating its raiding neighbors. Being forced to constantly expand its territory, Russia was in the same position as “the United States in America, France in Algeria, Holland in her Colonies, England in India,” Gorchakov argued.Footnote ³⁷

For nationalist publicists, comparisons with Western European colonialism served to assign the territories in Central Asia to a subordinate position within the tsarist empire. Mikhail N. Katkov, for example, argued in 1867 that instead of an ocean, “immeasurable deserts” separated Russia from Central Asia. He continued that “Turkestan cannot be regarded as an integral part of Russia… . Turkestan should benefit Russia and not burden it, for example as a dependent and distant dominion, as a colonial territory, or as what England calls its ‘dependencies.’”Footnote ³⁸ Although Katkov’s proposals were never officially adopted, they shaped the ideas of Russian intellectuals and administrators about Turkestan. In the last years before the revolution, they also found recognition in the highest government circles.Footnote ³⁹ Thus, Aleksandr D. Krivoshein, the influential director of the Main Administration for Land Management and Agriculture, called in 1912 for Turkestan to be considered a colony and made more profitable for the empire.Footnote ⁴⁰

For western-oriented observers, it was a matter of prestige to compare Russia to western colonial powers. Just as it had been the case under Catherine II, drawing colonial analogies provided a means to emphasize the progressive and European character of the tsarist empire. In this spirit, the journal Vestnik Evropy proudly announced in 1868 that England and Russia were “two great European powers” who shared the “great historical task” of spreading European civilization by jointly conquering Central Asia.Footnote ⁴¹ Thus, Russia’s and England’s rule in Central Asia were presented as closely related phenomena.

Yet, listing Russia together with western colonial powers served not only propaganda purposes. Among tsarist officials, there was general agreement that the Russians in Turkestan were indeed in a similar situation as the British in India or the French in North Africa, and that Russia could learn from British or French experiences.Footnote ⁴² Therefore, tsarist administrators traveled to India and North Africa to study how the British and French dealt with their colonial possessions, and numerous publications sought to draw lessons for Central Asia from European colonial rule.Footnote ⁴³ Military orientalist Mikhail A. Terentʹev openly summarized the purpose of these efforts in 1875: Russia could make use of England’s failures in India by “using their final conclusions without having to repeat the unpleasant experience.”Footnote ⁴⁴

By emphasizing the similarities between the tsarist empire and western colonial powers and attempting to learn from their experiences, tsarist officials and intellectuals indicated that for them the relationship between Russia and Central Asia resembled colonialism. However, Russia’s relationship with Europe was too contradictory for the tsarist empire to be classified as a European colonial power without qualification.Footnote ⁴⁵ In public discourse, European colonialism was often associated with the exploitation and oppression of foreign peoples and, moreover, with secessionist movements aimed at separating the colony from the motherland. To rule out the possibility of independence for Russia’s borderlands, tsarist officials maintained that the empire’s Asian territories were an inseparable part of Russia itself. Thus, in 1914, when the Main Administration for Land Management and Agriculture published its pompous volume on “Asiatic Russia,” it called Russia’s Asian regions not only “our sole colony,” but also “an integral and indivisible part” of Russia.Footnote ⁴⁶

Other ideologues of Russian expansion went even further and claimed that the tsarist empire was fundamentally different from the western colonial powers. Instead of highlighting the contemporary colonial context of Russia’s rule in Central Asia, they pointed to its historical roots, which they located in Russia’s defense against the Mongols. They presented the conquest of Central Asia as part of kolonizatsiia Rossii, the gradual and seemingly non-violent expansion of Russia, and rebuffed all equations with European colonialism. For example, the publicist and government critic Dmitrii I. Zavalishin spoke in 1865 of a “fundamental difference” between the expansion of the Europeans and that of the Russians. While Europe’s colonial conquests were “completely arbitrary” and driven by “a mixture of religious fanaticism and greed for glory and profit,” Russia’s rule in Central Asia was “morally justified,” as it was a consequence of the defense against the Mongols and the only possible way to secure the borders of the empire.Footnote ⁴⁷ For other observers, the primary distinction between the European colonial powers and the Russians was the former’s perceived distance from the colonized populations and a lesser inclination to interact with them on a personal level. Publicist Mikhail I. Veniukov thus distinguished the allegedly “friendly” practice of Russian rule from that of the British:

Claiming Russians’ special affinity for Asia, Veniukov and other authors crafted the notion of a Russian “Sonderweg” among the European Great Powers. Yet despite their ostentatious rejection of the European colonial model, their arguments implicitly acknowledged the similarity between Russia’s position and that of western powers. Even when Veniukov and Zavalishin emphasized the difference between Russia and the colonial powers, they regarded them as the closest relatives of the tsarist empire and as its natural yardstick. By contrast, Russian politicians and intellectuals hardly ever referred to the contemporary continental empires when discussing Russian rule in Central Asia. Neither the Habsburg or Ottoman empires, Persia, nor China were more than sporadically mentioned in Russian discourse.Footnote ⁴⁹ Western colonialism, however, was an obvious and regular reference for most observers of Russian rule in Central Asia. This distinguishes Russian discourse on Central Asia from that on Ukraine, where allusions to colonialism were rare and mostly driven by political considerations. In relation to Central Asia, both representatives of the tsarist regime and its critics constantly sought the comparison with western colonialism, and even for those authors who highlighted alleged Russian peculiarities in ruling Central Asia, western colonialism was the natural object of comparison.

This was also true for Muslim Central Asian activists and intellectuals until 1917. The vocabulary of colonialism did not play an important role in their writings, but typically they regarded Russia as one of several European powers that had brought a large part of the Islamic world under their control.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet unlike Ukrainian government critics, Central Asians did not invoke western colonialism to criticize tsarist rule or to portray it as illegitimate.Footnote ⁵¹

The situation changed only with the revolutions of 1917. After the Bolsheviks took power, intellectual and political discourse on Central Asia converged with that on Ukraine. In the 1920s, both Russians and Central Asians used the vocabulary of colonialism to accuse the tsarist empire of exploiting and oppressing the indigenous population of Central Asia.Footnote ⁵² As in the case of Ukraine, however, this narrative was pushed into the background from the 1930s onwards, as the positive consequences of Russian influence were now emphasized, which became dogma after the Second World War.Footnote ⁵³ In western historiography, the colonialism paradigm continued to be applied by historians, but only since the collapse of the USSR has it become widely accepted in western historiography that the tsarist empire acted as a colonial power in the region. Tsarist Central Asia is now studied predominantly from the perspective of colonialism.Footnote ⁵⁴

The paradigm of colonialism was and is much more widespread in relation to Central Asia than it is to Ukraine. To a certain extent, the reluctance of most observers and politicians in tsarist times to refer to colonial examples when discussing Ukraine can be explained by political circumstances. For a long time, censorship suppressed critical public discussion of the situation in Ukraine, and it was only after 1905 that it became possible to address economic exploitation using the vocabulary of anti-colonial critique. However, the example of Central Asia shows that references to colonialism were not necessarily linked to criticism but could be made in a wide variety of contexts, including affirmative ones, to highlight the benevolent character of tsarist rule. In Russian discourse on Ukraine, however, neither positive nor negative references to western colonialism played a significant role. Not just in official portrayals, but also in the perception of most contemporaries, Ukraine was not a colonial territory but rather a central part of the empire.

Colonialism as Rule of Difference

When we ask why contemporaries and historians alike have come to such different conclusions about colonialism in Ukraine and Central Asia, we are led to the problem of what we understand by the term “colonialism.” There are many different concepts of colonial rule, and many of them take a political or moral stand. In a famous resolution of 1960, the United Nations identified colonialism as “the subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation” and called for a “speedy and unconditional end” to it.Footnote ⁵⁵ Historians, on the other hand, have proposed analytical concepts that aim to describe colonial rule as a historical phenomenon. In recent decades, a definition by Jürgen Osterhammel has become widely accepted:

Even though this definition strives for universal validity, it is based on modern European colonialism, especially as it existed before 1914, when European colonial expansion reached its peak. A crucial point in this definition is the aspect of foreignness. This criterion, which is also mentioned in the 1960 UN Declaration (“alien subjugation”), is part of all common understandings of colonialism. Postcolonial theorist Partha Chatterjee even identified foreignness as the decisive element of colonialism. Based on examples from nineteenth-century British India, Chatterjee characterized colonialism as “rule of difference,” showing that this difference has been described in various ways, with religious, civilizational, linguistic, or physiological differences being alternately brought to the fore.Footnote ⁵⁷ Osterhammel also elaborated on his understanding of foreignness by giving an example of the limits of this term. According to him, Ottoman rule over Egypt between 1517 and 1798 cannot be considered colonialism because the two societies shared a commitment to Islam and thus a common understanding of legitimate rule, while colonialism, on the other hand, does not have such a common cultural basis.Footnote ⁵⁸

At the same time, historians of colonialism have argued that the meanings of “difference” were contested and unstable and that they had to be persistently renegotiated within discourses and institutions. Focusing on administrative procedures in the Netherlands East Indies, Ann Laura Stoler has demonstrated how difficult it was to define and maintain clear boundaries between rulers and ruled in practice, as the criteria for European identity were often inconsistent and subject to change.Footnote ⁵⁹ Frederick Cooper has therefore modified Chatterjee’s formula from “rule of difference” to “politics of difference.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Moreover, in addition to “rule of difference,” most colonial societies were also characterized by an opposing trend, namely the enforcement of uniformity. Saliha Belmessous has shown that assimilationist ideas were a constant feature of colonial history for more than four hundred years. At times, the notion that indigenous peoples should undergo a radical transformation of their identity became a decisive force in colonial power relations. In seventeenth-century New France and other colonies, various means were employed to this end, including schooling, baptism, and intermarriage.Footnote ⁶¹ Nevertheless, even when the colonial state pursued such assimilation policies, the essence of colonialism remained “rule of difference.” The official focus on what it took to become an acceptable member of the metropolitan society usually emphasized the cultural gap between colonizers and the colonized even more. In addition, inclusive approaches were generally not sustained for long.Footnote ⁶² Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, social segregation became prevalent in all colonies, with the result that mixed marriages gradually emerged as illegitimate.Footnote ⁶³ When the French Third Republic officially declared the assimilation of the indigenous population the goal of its colonial policy, this was more lip service than actual policy, and assimilation was soon replaced by the more conservative approach of association.Footnote ⁶⁴

Since “rule of difference” is a defining element of colonial rule, it is clear that not all forms of foreign rule can be summarized under the term colonialism. It describes but one very specific variety of foreign domination, one that is essentially based on the notion of difference. Moreover, it is important to note that colonial rule is not identical with oppression and exploitation. Even clearly repressive and exploitative forms of foreign rule do not qualify as colonial rule if they are not based on a notion of difference.

If we look at tsarist Central Asia, difference was a central feature of the political, economic, and social system. It was based on the confrontation of the so-called Russians, which in fact included Germans, Ashkenazi Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and many other Europeans, with the “natives,” defined either by their Central Asian origin or by their Islamic faith. Most “Russians” perceived the native population as the typically colonial “other”: They described the nomads as backward and primitive and denounced the settled native population as Muslim fanatics. The differentiation between “Russians” and “natives” was the main organizing principle of tsarist rule in Central Asia: Central Asians were not included in the general system of estates, but rather subsumed under the new category of tuzemtsy, meaning that they had special rights and duties, distinct from all other subjects of the tsar. They were subject to a special administration and specific judicial systems, and during elections they were included into separate curia with less representatives. Segregation also prevailed in daily life: There were virtually no intermarriages between these groups, and in the towns and cities, there were distinct quarters for “Russians” and “natives.” “Rule of difference” between Europeans and natives was thus a central feature of tsarist rule in Central Asia. True, segregation was never completely enforced, and, as in all colonial empires, there were numerous exceptions and intermediate groups that could not be clearly identified as either colonizers or colonized.Footnote ⁶⁵ Moreover, as in most other peripheral regions of the tsarist empire, there were also unifying tendencies in Turkestan. Especially during the 1880s and 90s, leading colonial officials promoted the long-term cultural, linguistic, and religious Russification of Central Asia’s Muslim population.Footnote ⁶⁶ However, since the legal integration of Central Asians would have meant that the “Russians” would have had to relinquish their privileged political position, colonial differentiation prevailed until 1917.Footnote ⁶⁷ Thus, the main organizing principle in tsarist Central Asia remained the segregation between “Russians” and “natives,” which made tsarist rule closely resemble west European colonialism.

To be sure, there were also elements that set the tsarist empire apart from its west European counterparts. Continental empires like Russia do not have a clear boundary between metropolis and colony, but rather geographical and cultural transition areas. In the tsarist empire, this transition zone was inhabited by Turkic-speaking groups such as the Tatars and Bashkirs, who had long been Russian subjects but were closer to Central Asians in language and religion. As with many other non-Russian peoples of the empire, it was difficult to determine whether these groups belonged in the category of national minority or colonial subject. They thus formed a middle group that did not exist in this form in other colonial empires.Footnote ⁶⁸ Furthermore, there are additional factors that distinguish the tsarist empire from other colonial powers: Russians had a long shared history with the steppe nomads, and under the Mongols they were even united under a common system of rule. Nevertheless, the cultural difference between “Russians” and “natives” in Turkestan was pronounced enough to classify tsarist rule as colonialism.

Colonialism in Ukraine

While tsarist rule in Central Asia largely resembled west European colonial practices, in the case of Ukraine a different picture emerges. First, the concept of colonialism does not apply to people who share a close cultural affiliation, such as Russians and Ukrainians, and secondly, there was no “rule of difference” as the main organizing principle of society.

The cultural affinity between Russians and Ukrainians is an issue that is heavily distorted by Russian propaganda, which unduly emphasizes the similarities between the two groups. In his manifesto “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Russian President Vladimir Putin cast the social and cultural proximity between Russians and Ukrainians back into past centuries.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, this proximity is to a certain extent the product of imperial rule and the Russification measures it promoted. It is therefore not without a certain cynicism that Putin anachronistically projected the results of the imperial coercive measures back to the pre-imperial era in order to disguise the coercion and retrospectively give Russian rule the appearance of greater legitimacy. When Putin claims that the Ukrainian nation has no deeper historical roots and was only invented by the USSR, he is obviously wrong. The Treaty of Pereiaslav of 1654, which saw the Cossacks under Hetman Bohdan Khmelʹnytsʹkyi swear an oath of allegiance to the Tsar of Muscovy, was by no means the “reunification” of two peoples which belonged together, as Soviet historiography claimed.Footnote ⁷⁰ The two contracting parties were representatives of different entities with no sense of political affinity. The idea that the so-called Great Russians and Little Russians belonged to the same political family was only later put forward by imperial propagandists. How alien Muscovites and Ukrainians were to each other is shown by the fact that Moscow demanded that Ukrainians from Poland-Lithuania be baptized again and that negotiations in the run-up to the Treaty of Pereiaslav had to be conducted with the help of translators.

Despite all the foreignness, however, the difference between Russians and Ukrainians was not nearly as pronounced as that between the British or French and the natives of their overseas colonies. Ukrainians and Russians were surely not just two branches of one common people, but they were also not exotic strangers to each other. Rather, they were something like old acquaintances. Although there existed separate ecclesiastical hierarchies in Kyiv and Moscow, Khmelʹnytsʹkyi was able to refer to the common Orthodox faith in his letter to the tsar, as Cossack delegations had done before him.Footnote ⁷¹ The languages they spoke had developed differently during the preceding centuries, but both originated from Old East Slavic.Footnote ⁷² When Russians and Ukrainians developed competing national histories in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they referred to common political roots: Both Hrushevsʹkyi and Solovʹev traced their nations back to Kievan Rus.Footnote ⁷³ Ukrainians and Russians have such close linguistic, religious, and cultural ties that Andreas Kappeler famously referred to them as “unequal brothers.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Anna Veronika Wendland has criticized this characterization, arguing that Russia should be rather compared to a violent ex-husband who stalks and terrorizes his former wife.Footnote ⁷⁵ But whether we speak of a pair of brothers or a divorced couple: Ukrainians and Russians share a common past untypical for colonialism.

The second argument against classifying Ukraine as a Russian colony is that the ethnocultural difference between Ukrainians and Russians was generally not decisive for political and social practice in the tsarist empire. While the policy of the western colonial powers since the mid-nineteenth century largely relied on “rule of difference,” segregation never became the guiding principle of tsarist policy in Ukraine. In contrast to the Governorate-General of Turkestan and the tuzemtsy, neither the territory of late-imperial Ukraine nor its population were subject to their own legal regimes.Footnote ⁷⁶ The tsarist government even aimed to level the differences. The Hetmanate’s autonomy was more and more restricted over the course of the eighteenth century, and the forceful liquidation of the Zaporozhian Sich by the troops of Catherine II led to the full administrative integration of the Cossacks’ territories into the empire.Footnote ⁷⁷ These measures deprived Ukrainians of their traditional self-determination but did not follow a colonial logic of segregation. While they reduced most Ukrainians to the same powerless status as the ordinary Russian population, they nevertheless promoted integration. It was autocracy, not colonialism, that took away the freedom of Ukrainians.

The same holds true for the individual level. Ukrainians were regarded as a sub-group of the overarching all-Russian people, and they did not have to convert or otherwise renounce their previous identity to be accepted as members of the ruling nation. If they spoke Russian, they could make careers in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and in some phases, Ukrainians were even able to exert decisive influence on government policies in a way unthinkable in west European colonialism. There were also no efforts to segregate Russians and Ukrainians in daily life. Generally, the cities were not divided into Ukrainian and Russian parts. More important than nationality in everyday life were other identity markers such as estate, gender, or age, and marriages between Ukrainians and Russians remained common throughout the imperial era. Certainly, the rulers in Moscow and St. Petersburg assigned Ukraine a subordinate position within the empire, and Ukrainian culture was never recognized as of equal value by Russia. Ukrainian peasants were derided as harmless khokhly and Cossacks were exoticized in a way reminiscent of colonial discourses. Still, the cultural devaluation of Ukrainians was not accompanied by general political and economic exclusion.Footnote ⁷⁸ Moreover, it has been convincingly argued that the Russian peasantry was subjected to orientalist stereotypes by educated Russians in much the same way. Alexander Etkind’s concept of “internal colonization” risks obscuring the imperialist aspects of Russian expansion by retroactively labeling conquered territories as “internal,” but it is correct in pointing out the enormous cultural gap between elites and peasants even in core Russia.Footnote ⁷⁹ There is no doubt that the relationship between Russians and Ukrainians was imperial, in the sense that Ukrainians were ascribed a lower hierarchical level in the multi-ethnic empire. Nevertheless, when viewed in its entirety, tsarist rule in Ukraine was not colonial because it was not predominantly shaped by the notion of difference.Footnote ⁸⁰

Rather than by colonial differentiation, tsarist politics toward Ukraine were shaped by the nationalist appropriation of Ukraine by Russia. The imperial state did not recognize Ukrainians as a distinct national group; instead, they were classified as “Russians,” and any expressions of a separate Ukrainian identity were silenced. A telling example is the famous 1863 circular by Interior Minister Petr A. Valuev, which bluntly denied the existence of a separate Ukrainian language: “A separate Little Russian language has never existed, does not exist and cannot exist, and their dialect, used by commoners, is just the Russian Language, only corrupted by the influence of Poland.”Footnote ⁸¹ This demonstrates that the justification for Russian rule over Ukraine was not an alleged religious, civilizational, or racial otherness of its inhabitants but, on the contrary, their cultural kinship with the Russians. Ukrainians were not exposed to the colonial policy of “othering” but rather seen as one more variety of the all-Russian nation. Instead of “rule of difference,” there was a “denial of difference.”

The binary scheme of colonizer and colonized does not fully fit Ukraine in other respects, either, for Ukrainians would have to be considered colonized as well as colonizers. By pushing the boundaries of Eastern Slavic settlement farther south and east, Cossacks and Ukrainian peasants helped establish a form of imperial rule in the steppe that resembled European settler colonialism. Many Ukrainians were agents of kolonizatsiia Rossii, the only apparently non-imperialist appropriation of foreign lands. Much of present-day Ukraine became part of Ukraine only through imperial conquest, at the expense of the region’s earlier inhabitants, who did not speak an Eastern Slavic language and did not adhere to Christianity. Crimean Tatars and Nogays suffered the most from devaluation and exclusion under tsarist rule. They were subjected to marginalization and expulsion, and thus correspond much more to the archetype of a colonized population than the sedentary, Orthodox, and East Slavic Ukrainians, who in this respect were more likely to be assigned the role of colonial masters.Footnote ⁸²

Furthermore, the sense of superiority typical of any form of colonialism does not fully come into play in the relationship between Russians and Ukrainians. In Central Asia, Russians always presented themselves as Europeans, but this was far less obvious in relation to Ukrainians. After all, Ukrainians could point to closer historical ties to Europe than Russians, who always had an ambivalent relationship with Europe and were themselves subject to accusations of backwardness.

Above all, however, it is the “denial of difference” that speaks against the idea of defining the relationship between Russia and Ukraine in terms of a colonial dichotomy. The history of European colonialism knows of no (other) case in which colonizer and colonized were so culturally and linguistically close that the colonizers could simply deny the difference.Footnote ⁸³ To a much greater extent, Russia’s policy of forced cultural homogenization is characteristic of European nation-building projects. The ban on Ukrainian publications is reminiscent of similar measures in France, Italy, and Spain against subordinate Romance languages from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Former written languages such as Occitan, Sardinian, and Catalan were thus marginalized and sometimes banned. In all these cases, the suppressed language was treated like a mere dialect of the dominant language, or as proof of excessive influence of neighboring languages. Like Ukrainians, the speakers of these languages were expected to learn the language of the metropolis in order to correct “historical wrongs.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The suppression of the Ukrainian language in the tsarist empire, therefore, more resembles the politics of a national state, aiming to homogenize its population, than that of a colonial empire.

It is important to note that the denial of difference is not necessarily less painful for the affected population than colonial rule. A telling example of this is Greenland, which experienced both periods of colonial differentiation and civic integration. Here, the most painful interventions of the metropolis took place after 1953, when the country had been formally decolonized and declared an integral part of Denmark. The new policy of modernization demanded much greater sacrifices from the indigenous population than the former policy of colonial difference.Footnote ⁸⁵ Historically, there are cases where colonial rule involved comparatively little interference in the daily lives of the colonized, while the homogenizing policies of a nascent nation-state entailed violent assimilation campaigns. This is exemplified by the transformation of the Ottoman empire into the Turkish nation-state with its dramatic consequences, as Armenians, Greeks, Kurds and others were subjected to forced assimilation, deportation, and physical destruction.Footnote ⁸⁶

Instead of considering independent Ukraine as a former colony, it has been suggested to compare it to other post-imperial European states such as Greece or Ireland, which also remain in the shadow of their more powerful neighbors. In these countries, too, the respective elites had had the opportunity to integrate into the imperial structures but opted for independence. Under colonialism, by contrast, indigenous elites had no comparable opportunities to help shape the politics of the metropole.Footnote ⁸⁷ Comparing Ukraine with Ireland in particular can be very fruitful.Footnote ⁸⁸ Both territories were considered part of the metropolis of the respective empire, and yet they occupied a subordinate position and were exposed to exploitation and forced assimilation. Moreover, Ukraine and Ireland share the experience of a catastrophic famine, in which the specific ethnicity of the peoples most affected played a significant role in the decisions made by the metropolis. Because of the structural similarities between the two countries, Ireland was a frequent point of reference for the Ukrainian national movement in the late tsarist and early Soviet periods.Footnote ⁸⁹

Why Does this Difference Matter?

There are certain dangers in classifying Ukraine as a former colony. If we define all forms of foreign rule as colonialism, we might overlook the specifics of the individual cases. One area where the difference between colonial and non-colonial rule is particularly important is the question of independence. In modern colonialism, imperial officials always nurtured the idea that colonial rule might one day come to an end—whether as a worst-case scenario of a bloody uprising or a vision of a distant future in which the natives are finally ready to lead the destiny of their country themselves. As early as 1833, Lord Macaulay spoke of the Indians one day being ready for European institutions and claimed that this would be “the proudest day in English history.”Footnote ⁹⁰ This day was generally only seen in the remote future, and for most actors such references were little more than rhetorical justifications for their present rule. Nevertheless, such remarks show that colonialism was not intended to last forever. In fact, when the global colonial system collapsed in the 1950s and 60s, the European public very quickly came to terms with the new situation. Typically, decolonization was supported by the most important political groups in the metropolises when it reached that point.Footnote ⁹¹ This illustrates that colonialism can ultimately be abandoned when the time is right.

However, if the imperial elites regarded the subordinate country not as a colony but rather as part of the metropolis, it was much harder for that country to break away. Algeria, which did not have the status of a colony but was defined as an integral part of France, was only able to gain its independence after a long and bloody war, which also led to serious upheavals in France itself.Footnote ⁹² From the point of view of the rulers in the metropolis, it is easier to release a colony into independence than a secessional part of the motherland. This pattern is also evident in post-Soviet Russia: While the independence of the quasi-colonial Central Asian republics does not appear to be a major problem from the Russian perspective, the Russian leadership is bitterly clinging to its claim to rule over Ukraine, as well as Belarus. These two republics are not allowed to leave Moscow’s imperial orbit precisely because they were not considered colonies but are seen by many Russians as part of Russia. Putin’s essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” is only the most prominent example of how the existence of a Ukrainian national identity is denied in Russia. Likewise, Joseph Brodsky’s infamous poem “On the Independence of Ukraine” shows how little the separation of Ukraine from Russia was accepted by the Russian intelligentsia.Footnote ⁹³ To a certain extent, Ukraine shares the fate of Ireland or Catalonia: Due to its historical and cultural ties to the center of the empire it was never defined as a colony, but always as an inseparable part of the motherland, which made it difficult to break away.

With regard to Ukraine, there is another factor that comes into play: The cultural proximity and close social ties between Russians and Ukrainians mean that developments in Ukraine are particularly relevant for Russia. It has been convincingly argued that successful democratization in Ukraine could set an example for Russia, and that the Russian leadership therefore wants to prevent Ukraine from developing into a stable, prosperous, and democratic country at all costs.Footnote ⁹⁴ It is therefore not Ukraine’s status as a former colony that makes the country so important for Russia but its historical and cultural proximity, which Putin is exploiting for his imperial ambitions.

It is also problematic in an epistemic respect to regard Ukraine as a former Russian colony. This would significantly extend the boundaries of what historical scholarship has understood as “colonialism” thus far. Of course, it would be possible to propose a new concept of colonialism that includes power relations between neighboring peoples with a common cultural basis. In this new concept, the politics of difference would no longer be a central criterion. However, this would mean that essentially all forms of foreign rule could be considered colonialism. In that case, a separate term would no longer be available to analyze those forms of rule based on the cultural and discursive divide characteristic of modern colonialism. Therefore, it is unlikely that historians working on regions other than eastern Europe would accept such an expanded concept of colonialism. Extending the concept of colonialism to Ukraine could even have undesirable consequences. While proponents of a colonial view of Ukraine aim to place east European history more firmly in the context of global history, they may actually achieve the opposite. To integrate the tsarist empire into comparative colonialism research, we need to agree on the terms used. However, if historians of eastern Europe use a concept of colonialism much broader than the commonly accepted one, communication between different branches of historical research would be more difficult. For decades, Russia was not included in surveys of colonialism, and when mentioned, it was only as a marginal phenomenon. Only in recent years has a consensus emerged that the tsarist possessions in Central Asia should be considered colonial territories as well. However, introducing a new concept of colonialism specifically for eastern Europe could marginalize Russian colonialism in historiography once again, which would ultimately reinforce the Russian self-image of a non-imperialist power.

Yet this does not at all mean that any comparison of Ukraine with colonial rule is generally invalid. The opposite is the case. As a recent essay by Moritz Florin has shown, it is quite fruitful to look for traces of “coloniality” in the Russian practice of rule, defined by Florin as “forms of thought and state action that are based on the conviction of one’s own cultural and civilizational superiority and that derive the claim and the right to rule from this.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The thinking and actions of Russian actors in relation to Ukraine do indeed exhibit striking parallels to western colonialism in several areas. Moreover, as research over the last three decades has convincingly shown, examining Ukraine from a postcolonial perspective can yield fruitful insights. It is also worth going beyond comparison and asking about exchange processes between different regions of the world, regardless of the colonial character of the region in question. Mark von Hagen, for example, has shown how closely the revolutionary movement in Ukraine in the early twentieth century was intertwined with global anti-colonial activism.Footnote ⁹⁶ However, neither the comparison nor the examination of interdependencies presupposes that the relationship between Russia and Ukraine can be equated with colonial rule.

This article is an attempt to bring more conceptual clarity to discussions of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. To this end, it argues for a terminological distinction between colonization and colonialism. “Colonization” has a broad meaning that encompasses the establishment of agricultural settlements, migration processes, or the subjugation of foreign lands. “Colonialism,” on the other hand, is a narrowly defined technical term that refers to a specific form of rule over foreign peoples, often characterized as “rule of difference.” If its use is broadened to such an extent that it also includes relationships between culturally cognate countries such as Russia and Ukraine, it threatens to lose its analytical value. An undifferentiated equation could lead to the peculiarities and complexities of Russian-Ukrainian relations being overlooked. As the comparison with Central Asia has shown, Russian rule was not uniformly organized in different parts of the empire. Turkestan and Ukraine mark two very different points in the broad spectrum of imperial rule under the tsarist empire. While the imperial government in Turkestan established a regime whose backbone was the omnipresent distinction between “Russians” and “natives,” the situation in Ukraine was quite different most of the time. Here, the difference was not institutionalized but denied for long stretches, and Ukrainians were increasingly subjected to attempts at forced Russification. Therefore, it is not Ukraine’s status as a colony, but rather the lack of recognition of Ukraine as an independent nation with its own language, political tradition, and identity that has underpinned Russia’s full-scale war of aggression since 2022. Even though Ukraine was a site of Russian kolonizatsiia, this did not result in colonialism.