The 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine reignited longstanding tensions over ethnic minority rights within the Russian Federation. In the early months of the invasion, disproportionately high casualty rates among ethnic minority soldiers drew scrutiny to conscription practices that appeared to target marginalized populations (Lenton Reference Lenton2022).Footnote 1 These developments have fueled accusations that Russia is waging a neo-imperial war on two fronts: abroad, through military aggression, and at home, through the structural subjugation of its minority communities to fill the army ranks. The state’s increasingly repressive turn – evidenced by the 2024 designation of many ethnic minority organizations as “terrorist” (Moscow Times 2024) and the racialized policing of its own ethnic minority and migrant communities (Human Rights Watch 2025) – has further intensified grievances over regional autonomy, language rights, religious freedoms, and protection from ethnic discrimination (Baranova and Darieva Reference Baranova and Darieva2023).
Against this backdrop, decolonial rhetoric has been moving from academic and activist circles into the wider Russian-speaking public sphere. Four interconnected developments have driven this shift. First, from the early months of the large-scale invasion, the Ukrainian government has consistently framed its resistance to Russian aggression as an anti-colonial struggle (Kurnyshova Reference Kurnyshova2024; Ruyters Reference Ruyters2024; Rossokhatska Reference Rossokhatska2026), reinforcing the understanding of Russia’s current regime as neo-colonial. Second, a section of Russia’s ethnic minority diasporas has discursively aligned with Central Asian and Ukrainian activists – many of whom had already been applying postcolonial frameworks to examination of post-Soviet transitions prior to 2022.Footnote 2 Third, intensified calls from European and North American policy circles to “decolonize Russia” – often framed in terms of “de-federalization,” as a strategy to undermine its geopolitical power – have further legitimized and amplified this discourse (Lenton et al. Reference Lenton2025, 52–64). Finally, the Russian state itself has co-opted anti-colonial rhetoric in its soft power campaigns targeting the so-called “Global South,” further complicating the rhetorical field (e.g., Audinet Reference Audinet2024).
This diffusion of decolonial language has enabled minority actors to bring together critiques of Russia’s asymmetrical federalism, colonial past, and contemporary treatment of minority regions within a shared conceptual frame. Since 2022, this framework has been functioning as a unifying vocabulary through which diverse ethnic minority groups – with divergent political goals, organizational forms, and historical reference points – advance their demands.
This article maps three clusters within the decolonial discourse through which minority claims are articulated. By doing so, it also interrogates the shifting meanings and political functions of “decolonization” within contemporary Russian-language public discourse. It examines how decolonial vocabulary, largely adapted from postcolonial theory and transnational activist movements, intersects with long-standing demands for language rights, political autonomy, and historical justice in Russia. Thereby, the article contributes to a broader scholarly discussion of minority identity and minority ethnic nationalism in contemporary Russia, as well as the enduring legacies of Soviet modernization and nation-building.
The analysis proceeds as follows. The next section defines “decolonial rhetoric” and examines how it has come to function as an umbrella framework that absorbs and rearticulates earlier discourses on minority rights in Russia today. The Data section outlines the types of data and methodological approach on which the analysis is based. The Description section introduces three clusters and conceptual tensions within them; while the Discussion explores these clusters’ strengths and limits in gaining visibility and support in current mediatized environments. The Conclusion suggests avenues for further research on these developments.
Decolonial rhetoric in the Russian-speaking sphere
By “decolonial rhetoric,” here I refer to the appropriation and adaptation – within non-academic settings – of concepts and epistemologies originally developed in postcolonial studies to critique and reframe historical and contemporary power relations. In the Russian context, this rhetoric reinterprets relationships between non-Russian and Russian, non-Slavic and Slavic, non-Christian and Christian populations, as well as between central authorities and regional elites, through the analytical lens of colonial domination. In its politicized usage with relation to contemporary Russia, decolonial rhetoric is grounded in the proposition that the Russian Federation continues to function as a colonial empire, preserving structures of exploitation and subjugation, particularly toward minority groups historically incorporated through successive waves of territorial expansion since the sixteenth century. This perspective emphasizes the continuity of state institutions, elite formations, knowledge systems, and power hierarchies across the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, the post-Soviet state and President Putin’s regime, thereby challenging narratives that treat these regimes as politically or ideologically distinct.
Whether this unifying approach – treating Russian imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet histories as a continuous structure of colonial domination – is analytically productive remains a subject of ongoing scholarly debate (for an overview, see Lenton et al. Reference Lenton2025). This article builds on a growing body of scholarship that examines the proliferation of decolonial and postcolonial discourse across Central and Eastern Europe, and, by extension, Central Asia, where postcolonial and postsocialist analytical frameworks frequently intersect in complex and at times contradictory ways. Within this field, I align with scholars who call for a nuanced yet critical engagement with the socialist past – one that recognizes both its emancipatory claims and its entanglement in hierarchical and imperial modes of governance (e.g., Slačálek Reference Slačálek and Petkovska2023; Lewis and Lall Reference Lewis and Lall2023; Kirmse Reference Kirmse2023; Degot′ et al. Reference Degot’, Riff and Sowa2021).
This approach requires acknowledging that the socialist period contained “a number of moments in the material, social, and political history of the socialist countries [that] disrupt the totalizing reach of the colonial orders of (Western capitalist) modernity” (Karkov and Valiavicharska Reference Karkov, Valiavicharska and Bjelić2019, 59). Building on this perspective, I situate current debates over Russia’s status – whether as a colonial empire, a subaltern vis-à-vis Western Europe, or as an empire that “colonized itself” – within a broader analysis of Eastern Europe’s position as a semi-periphery in global capitalist and colonial hierarchies. Crucially, semi-peripheral positioning does not exempt the region from exercising its own forms of imperial domination; rather, it highlights how spaces historically marginalized by Western powers can themselves reproduce colonial logics toward internal others, i.e., ethnic, religious, and territorial minorities within their borders.
This perspective, however, also calls for a closer examination of the contemporary legacies of the socialist experiment, particularly its efforts, however inconsistent and problematic, to address the relationship between class and minority status (e.g., Hirsch Reference Hirsch2005; Martin Reference Martin2001). Likewise, it calls to examine universalist projects, which, despite their significant ideological contradictions, imagined and, to a considerable extent, fostered cross-regional and cross-ethnic solidarities on a scale increasingly rare in today’s fragmented political landscape (e.g., Ghodsee 2019; Prashad Reference Prashad2019).
The intersection of class and minority status, together with the vision of transnational solidarities, is central to understanding contemporary Russian-language decolonial rhetoric advanced by minority actors for two reasons. First, the rhetoric is inherently transnational and oriented toward building solidarities beyond the borders of the Russian Federation. This rhetoric has been influenced by the mass emigration of minority activists following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the politicization of long-standing Russian-speaking diaspora communities in the West (Western Europe, the United States, Australia), and these actors’ reliance on recognition, resources, and political support from host societies. This positioning inevitably has shaped the ways in which minority rights claims are articulated, often privileging discursive repertoires that resonate with Western audiences and institutions.
Second, developing in decentralized, diaspora settings and reflecting broader trends of the 2020s, this discourse is, by default, mediatized. While traditional, embodied forms of connection – such as in-person meetings, language learning courses, commemorative events, demonstrations, and cultural or transnational forums – remain important for diasporas that emerged after 2022, the digital sphere has fundamentally reshaped the operational landscape of Russia’s ethnic minority communities abroad and their connections to those inside Russia. Platforms such as Telegram, Instagram, and YouTube facilitate rapid communication and the cultivation of shared belonging across geographic boundaries. They also serve as arenas for identity articulation, historical narration, and mobilization of international support.
As Udupa and Dattatreyan (Reference Udupa and Dattatreyan2023, 2–3) observe, digital communication “enable[s] new participatory cultures and potentials for disruption, while reproducing colonial-modernity’s foundational structures of extraction and dispossession in novel, twenty-first-century arrangements,” with “a recognition that these formations cannot be undone so easily.” These digital arenas are therefore double-edged: they expand the reach of decolonial rhetoric, but they are also shaped by the logics of market capitalism, aspirations for individual uplift, erasure, and the potential for right-wing co-optation (Udupa and Dattatreyan Reference Udupa and Dattatreyan2023, 11).
Data and Methodology
The analysis in this article draws on an exploratory reading of public-facing digital materials produced between 2022 and 2024 by representatives of ethnic minorities in Russia, many of whom were forced to relocate after 2022 or had been living outside the Russian Federation before the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. These materials include content published on individual dedicated webpages (e.g., Beda Media 2022; Oparin and Shumilova Reference Oparin and Shumilova2025), but is primarily composed of materials from Telegram channels, Instagram, and YouTube accounts that articulate regionally grounded perspectives (e.g., New Tuva; Asians of Russia),Footnote 3 claim a transnational scope (e.g., Free Nations of Post-Russia),Footnote 4 or are hosted by organizations based in neighboring countries with substantial Russian-speakers’ participation (e.g., ABN: Anti-imperial Bloc of Nations,Footnote 5 headquartered in Ukraine; the YouTube channel BashtaFootnote 6 run by activists from Kyrgyzstan). Most of these initiatives have functioned as nodal points for consolidating dispersed groups and have endured despite sustained state pressure and a prolonged period of the large-scale invasion.
The selection of Telegram, Instagram, and YouTube as core source platforms reflects their central role in post-2022 Russian-language diasporic activism. Telegram functions primarily as a space for coordination and the rapid circulation of statements; Instagram foregrounds visual, narrative, and affective modes of identity articulation; and YouTube enables longer-form interventions and public statements in audiovisual formats.
The choice of an exploratory rather than a systematic (codified) reading of the data is shaped by the functioning and accessibility of the platforms under study: these platforms have been highly active, yet unstable over the period analyzed. Beyond routine algorithmic fluctuations in visibility, numerous Telegram channels of ethnic minority groups have been blocked and, in some cases, re-established under new names (Seales and Sanz Pascual Reference Seales and Pascual2025, 23–24); several webpages and associated organizations have been criminalized and blocked within the Russian Federation; and access to YouTube has been deliberately slowed in Russia, likely contributing to shifts in platform use and content strategies among activists. While some efforts to document these evolving digital ecosystems exist (Raspad 2023), methodological approaches for the systematic analysis of such volatile Russian-language digital environments remain costly and underdeveloped (e.g., Limonier and Audinet Reference Limonier and Audinet2025).
For this article, the approach adopted necessarily results in material that is uneven in scope. As the article aims primarily to map key discursive clusters, it should therefore be read as a conceptual intervention rather than as a comprehensive or representative inventory. The organizations and initiatives referenced below are illustrative: they are selected because they exemplify distinct discursive orientations, but the list is not exhaustive.
In analytical terms, the reading of the digital material was guided by attention to: types of claims articulated (such as demands for political autonomy, calls for cultural or linguistic revitalization, or critiques of historical erasure); the conceptual apparatus used to formulate and legitimize these claims (appeals to indigeneity or to religious or ethnic minority status); and the stance adopted toward Russian imperial and Soviet legacies (ranging from outright rejection to ambivalence or selective appropriation of Soviet-era modernization and nation-building projects).
Based on this data, I identify three broad discourse clusters: 1) ethno-political self-determination discourse, 2) indigeneity-centered cultural discourse, and 3) Islamic epistemic discourse. As noted above with regard to the limits of the analyzed material, this clustering is necessarily generalized, with porous boundaries and significant cross-fertilization between discourses. Nevertheless, it provides preliminary ground for examining how decolonial rhetoric is articulated and mobilized by minority activists today.
Finally, I would like to emphasize that the discussion in this article proceeds from a position of critical engagement with the epistemological foundations of the identified discourse clusters. Questioning the assumptions that underpin these discourses should not be read as an attempt to disempower or delegitimize their authors, whose work is both significant and often carried out with considerable personal risk in defiance of transnational repression (Kłyszcz Reference Kłyszcz2025). Rather, the critical stance adopted here is motivated by care: care for conceptual clarity, for the risks faced by those involved, and for acknowledging the complexity of the political imaginaries. The aim is to situate these discourses within the broader geopolitical and technological contexts that simultaneously enable and constrain political possibilities; as well as to open an interpretive “third space” that resists both uncritical celebration and dismissive critique of minority activism – dynamics often amplified by the immediacy of digital platforms.
Description of Discourse Clusters
1 Ethno-political self-determination discourse
The first discourse cluster, here termed “ethno-political self-determination discourse”, speaks to a continuation of political projects that originated during the Perestroika era and the early post-Soviet period. These projects, prominent in the 1990s and early 2000s, have been well documented in earlier scholarship under the umbrella term of Russia’s “ethnic minority nationalism” (e.g., Gorenburg 2001; Hale Reference Hale2003; Balzer and Vinokurova Reference Balzer and Vinokurova1996). However, as academic and policy attentionFootnote 7 over the past two decades shifted toward Kremlin-centric politics and quantitative analyses (La Lova Reference La Lova2023), the trajectories of these nationalist movements – particularly their transformations since the 2010s – have received comparatively less scholarly engagement, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Zamyatin Reference Zamyatin2017; Lenton Reference Lenton2023; Smyth and Yusupova Reference Smyth, Yusupova and Morris2023; Stewart Reference Stewart2024).
This discourse cluster rearticulates long-standing grievances – once framed in terms of federalism, decentralization, or autonomy – through the contemporary vocabulary of decolonization. While the substance of these claims has remained largely stable, their framing has shifted: nationalist aspirations today are strategically recoded in decolonial terms, where opposition to Moscow’s overcentralization, consolidated under Putin’s “vertical of power” and the dismantling of locally elected bodies (Busygina Reference Busygina2024), is cast as resistance to colonial domination.
This discourse privileges constitutionally enshrined rights and formal political subjectivity. It engages only marginally with intersectional perspectives or transnational solidarities and offers little sustained critique of Eurocentric state models. At its core lies a binary opposition between ethnically non-Russian groups and ethnic Russians as the dominant population. Minority language, cultural heritage, and often religion (understood primarily in cultural rather than spiritual terms) function as key identity markers of non-Russian groups. The central concern articulated within this discourse is the avoidance of assimilation into the Russian majority, rendering the preservation of ethnic and linguistic boundaries fundamental to political and cultural survival.
A prominent example of such discourse is the rhetoric by the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum. The Forum presents its agenda as an “anti-colonial and national liberation struggle against the Kremlin imperialism of Muscovy” (Free Nations 2022b). The “Declaration about Decolonization of Russia”, issued in 2022, calls on “all citizens of indigenous peoples and colonized regions to immediately begin active actions for peaceful decolonization, liberation and proclamation/restoration of sovereignty and independence of their own countries”. It further urges “national and regional elites to immediately begin the creation of National Transitional Governments” and calls on “the parliaments of republics and regional legislative assemblies to defend the interests of their peoples” (Free Nations 2022a).
Within this discourse cluster, some actors advance positions that explicitly challenge the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation. These claims, in some cases, are accompanied by references to historical armed resistance or by rhetorical invocations of militant struggle as a legitimate response to imperial domination (e.g., Free Nations 2025a; 2025b; DRD 2025). While such positions do not characterize the discourse as a whole, their presence contributes to the perception of this cluster as particularly radical in comparison to other strands of minority activism. This radical edge helps explain why ethno-political self-determination discourse circulates relatively easily in Western policy and media spaces, where separatist imaginaries are often read instrumentally as tools for weakening Russia amid the war against Ukraine (e.g., Michel Reference Michel2022).
This discourse draws on the Soviet ethnonational model – one with clear imperial connotations – to articulate minority identity–territory claims. Historically, this model rested on top-down processes of essentialization, standardization, and, at times, the invention of histories and traditions, privileging certain groups over others (Martin Reference Martin2001; Hirsch Reference Hirsch2005). Recent efforts within this discourse cluster to move beyond the Soviet established definitions have been sporadic, producing new categories on the basis of imagined geographies. The result is a set of analytically awkward juxtapositions in which regions with radically different historical trajectories are treated as equivalent “post-colonial states” in waiting. Ingushetia, for example, with a long history of violent resistance to Russian expansion, Stalinist mass deportations, and ongoing political repression is placed on an equal footing with entities such as the Zalesye Federation – a loosely imagined central Russian region associated with the Muscovite core, with a predominantly ethnic Russian population (Free Nations 2025b).
A rather uncritical adoption of Soviet categories also flattens the Soviet legacy itself, foregrounding nationalist claims while stripping much of the socialist content. As a result, class-specific dimensions of prospective independence transitions, structural inequalities between economically advantaged and disadvantaged ethnic regions within the Russian Federation, and emerging dependencies in globalized markets remain largely unexamined. This tension points to a broader phenomenon in post-socialist decolonial discourse: despite many observers’ expectations, its circulation does not necessarily align with progressive or leftist politics. As Slačálek (Reference Slačálek and Petkovska2023, 208) observes, in Central and Eastern Europe decolonial language is often mobilized to reframe ethnonationalist agendas as anti-colonial resistance, rendering them more palatable to Western audiences (or simply appropriating the vocabulary of the political Left). The Post-Russia Forum also exemplifies this dynamic: ethno-exclusionary tendencies persist within its minority nationalist imaginaries and become particularly visible in debates over the legal status of ethnic Russians – who in some republics constitute a demographic majority (e.g., Gabbasov Reference Gabbasov2023).Footnote 8
If one looks at a broader scale, this discourse cluster situates Russia’s minority communities within the contested field of memory politics in Central and Eastern Europe, where narratives of Soviet repression and colonial victimhood frequently overlap and intertwine (Lim Reference Lim2021). As noted in the existing literature, framing the national Self exclusively as a victim of Russian/Soviet imperialism and colonialism risks producing simplified memory scripts that are readily co-opted by political elites; whereas claims to “pure victimhood” are rarely sustainable and require critical engagement with the roles played by ethnic elites and ordinary citizens in building imperial structures, participating in repression, or perpetrating violence against other minorities (e.g., Khlevnyuk Reference Khlevnyuk2023; Tlostanova Reference Tlostanova2024; Barton Hronešová Reference Barton Hronešová2024).
Despite the heightened media visibility of this discourse cluster, Namzhil and Tuktash (Reference Namzhil and Tuktash2024) caution that reducing all contemporary decolonial activism among minorities in Russia to ethnonationalist projects is both analytically misleading and politically constraining, as it obscures alternative and less exclusionary forms of decolonial practice.
2 Indigeneity-centered cultural discourse
The second cluster emerges from a somewhat distinct genealogy, rooted in grassroots activism around language revitalization, cultural memory, and heritage – understood as practices of restoration and preservation rather than as claims to formal political sovereignty or the creation of independent states (e.g., Suleymanova Reference Suleymanova2018; Graber 2020). These initiatives gained momentum in Russia in the 2010s, often in response to the increasing repression of overt political organizing in Russia’s minority regions. They are articulated primarily by post-Soviet generation activists, many of them women, whose political imaginaries are shaped by intersectional understandings of identity, in which gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity are recognized as interlocking axes of structural inequality (e.g., Asians of Russia 2025).
Religion plays a marginal role within this discourse, treated – if at all – as a personal or symbolic dimension rather than as a central marker of collective identity.Footnote 9 Instead, race and racialization are increasingly mobilized as key analytical tools, particularly to foreground distinctions between Slavic and non-Slavic bodies and lived experiences. This emphasis enables the articulation of broader coalitional identities, such as “Asians of Russia” (Asians of Russia 2021), which cut across specific ethnic affiliations – especially among communities in Siberia and the Russian Far East – and give political expression to shared experiences of racialized marginalization.
The central concern animating this discourse is not assimilation, as in the previous cluster, but erasure – understood as the obliteration of indigenous presence through destruction of minority culture, land dispossession, and ecological deterioration. Activists foreground “indigeneity” as an explicitly anti-colonial positionality grounded in historical relationships to land disrupted by conquest and extraction. Correspondingly, the rights articulated within this framework are primarily ecological (e.g., Beda Media 2025; Republics Speaking 2025), linguistic (e.g., Rasuleva Reference Rasuleva2024; Sakha Speaks 2025), and epistemic (Bashta 2023; Tuujin 2025). Soviet legacies are subjected to explicit critique, particularly the imposition of rigid national categories that activists regard as distorting or erasing more complex historical formations of identity. In their place, activists call for a normalization or “return” to fluid, hybrid, and pre-national forms of belonging. Actors behind this discourse engage in recovery and re-interpretation of culturally significant sites, artistic and performative interventions, and everyday forms of cultural transmission such as language use, craft, and storytelling. Although many of these practices are by definition grounded in local, physical settings, they often enter digital spaces, where they are documented and shared with diasporic and transnational audiences (e.g., Tuujin 2025; Republics Speaking 2025).
This form of activism shifts attention away from demands for statehood or legal sovereignty and instead foregrounds cultural memory and historical trauma. Conceptually, it draws on the second-wave postcolonial and decolonial thought, particularly what Walter Mignolo has termed “epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo 2009). Whereas Mignolo’s original formulation targets the dominance of Western modes of knowledge production, in the Russian context it is mobilized to signal a break from Russo-centric epistemic frameworksFootnote 10 and a reclamation of locally grounded ways of knowing. The Western “coloniality of knowledge” remains seldom acknowledged (e.g., Beda Media 2024) and is rarely challenged explicitly.
An illustrative example of this discourse is the work of a collective promoting “Indigenous Vision,” which explicitly refuses to articulate a singular or unified vision for the future, emphasizing instead the distinct histories, geographies, and aspirations of different regions within Russia (Garvey Reference Garvey2025). Their 2024–25 report (Indigenous Vision 2025) highlights the multiplicity of what undoing colonization entails today: campaigns against ethnic and racial discrimination; efforts to revive endangered languages and artisanal traditions; the collection of oral histories and the processing of intergenerational trauma; the creation of care infrastructures within diaspora communities; advocacy for political prisoners; and expressions of solidarity with Ukraine.
Conceptually, this discourse overlaps with the first cluster in its emphasis on victimhood (for the critique, see the previous section), yet its orientation is not toward nation-building but toward claims for justice and recognition. A further tension – one that is simultaneously a vulnerability and a source of strength – lies in this discourse cluster’s strong emphasis on diversity. Within this discourse, existing shared understandings and value systems are challenged in the process of critical evaluation, often in favor of more particularist cultural frameworks. While this move enables the articulation of previously marginalized experiences, it can also complicate the formation of broader solidarities, especially where the discourse does not articulate political arrangements capable of sustaining such degrees of fluidity. A similar ambivalence characterizes the reliance on artistic and cultural practices as tools of decolonial engagement. Although these practices are highly effective in producing affective responses to repression and subjugation, they also carry the risk of reinforcing tokenization and generating new forms of cultural essentialization of minority identities (Pavlov Reference Pavlov2024; Sokolovskii Reference Sokolovskii2025).
Probably the most important tension, however, lies in the use of the notion “indigenous”. On the one hand, the term offers a way for activists from Russia to connect with global Indigenous movements and strengthen transnational solidarity. As an anti-colonial stance, indigeneity also holds the potential to transcend the (neo-)liberal frameworks that often underpin nationalist movements – such as statehood, market participation, or integration into democratic institutions – by grounding political agency in alternative relationships to land, ecology, and community.
On the other hand, indigeneity in the global discourse is already a deeply contested and ideologically charged category. There is an inherent tension between its universal appeal and its actual grounding and use in specific contexts, making debates over legitimacy and criteria for recognition inevitable (Canessa Reference Canessa2014). For minorities in Russia, disassociation of “indigeneity” from the Soviet connotations represents an additional challenge, which has been discussed in scholarly literature to some extent (see Osipov Reference Osipov2025). While small-numbered peoples of the Subarctic, Siberia, and the Far East of Russia often both meet international legal criteria and have been formally recognized in Soviet and Russian law as malochislennye korennye narody (‘small-numbered indigenous peoples’), larger minority groups – particularly in Central Russia – have to articulate their claims to “indigeneity” more explicitly.
On the international arena, claiming indigenous status is essentially a political process, involving efforts to reshape prevailing views on the origins and current status of Russia’s ethnic composition, and negotiating the application of legal criteria, not least through access to and participation in organizations that confer political weight to such minority claims (e.g., the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe [PACE 2025]). At the same time, international understandings of indigeneity often place particular emphasis on a group’s historical attachment to ancestral lands and dependence on local ecosystems and resources for livelihoods. As a result, some communities are better positioned than others to advance claims to indigenous status. This is a long-term and volatile process, highly dependent on sustained European and broader Western support. Given the high number of minorities involved, some – particularly those with better-known histories of Russian state oppression – are more likely to receive such recognition (earlier) than others (e.g., Yurchyshyn Reference Yurchyshyn2025).
Within Russia, hierarchies among non-Russian ethnic groups remain largely shaped by Soviet legacies in the definition of, and rights accorded to, titular nations, minorities, and indigenous peoples. Transforming these hierarchies likewise requires sustained, multilevel efforts (including questions of layered settlement and domination – who colonized whom, and who can plausibly claim indigeneity in a given territory), further complicated by the fact that substantive legal change ultimately depends on state support.
In an attempt to move beyond the limited connotations of the Soviet vocabulary of korennye (‘rooted,’ pl.), the indigeneity-centered cultural discourse cluster has mobilized, alongside korennye , the term indigennye (‘indigenous,’ pl.) (e.g., Shanggyangg 2023). The use of both terms remains politically and semantically charged: korennye carries a wide range of connotations, both positive and negative, shaped in part by Soviet modernization discourse in which it could imply ‘aboriginal’ and, by extension, ‘less civilized,’Footnote 11 while indigennye – an anglicism with a jargonistic tone – has yet to gain broader traction.
3 Islamic epistemic discourse
The third cluster is smaller and more regionally concentrated, articulated primarily within Muslim communities of the North Caucasus and Volga–Ural regions. Unlike the other two clusters, religion here is not merely a cultural marker or component of heritage but constitutes the foundation of an alternative epistemic framework. This framework – developed since at least the nineteenth century as a critique of Western colonialism and modernity – encompasses diverse Islamic ideological traditions with differing views on relations with the state, the legitimacy of political institutions, and the desirability of an Islamic polity (for a brief summary on Sunni Islam, Soage Reference Soage2025).
In the Russian-speaking context, this discourse is explicitly critical of the violent Christianization practices of the imperial period, the secular modernity of the Soviet state, and the diffuse dominance of secular–Christian norms in the post-Soviet order. The principal concern here is not assimilation or erasure, as in the other clusters, but the preservation of righteousness over corruption – where the “Other” is associated with godlessness, materialism, and moral decay.
From a theoretical perspective, Islam-inspired decolonial discourse faces distinctive challenges. Epistemically, “claims of splendid (theoretical) isolation vis-à-vis the dominant political-epistemological-theological paradigms become less tenable upon closer scrutiny” (Azad Reference Azad2017, 19), raising questions about whether Islamic critique can truly stand outside Western modernist framework while still engaging with its categories. This impossibility of fully separating, for instance, nationalist and Islamic decolonial discourses is exemplified by the discourse of Hizb-ut Tahrir, a transnational Islamist movement founded in 1953. The group has gained followers in post-Soviet states such as those in Central Asia and Ukraine (Karagiannis Reference Karagiannis2009; Shestopalets Reference Shestopalets2024), though research on its Russian branch remains limited and largely framed through the lens of “Islamic extremism” and security risk: Hizb-ut Tahrir has been designated as a terrorist organization in Russia since the 2003 ruling of the Supreme Court.
Even in the discourse of transnational bodies such as Hizb-ut Tahrir – and in more region-specific articulations of Islamic critiques of colonialism and coloniality in Russia – there is a consistent emphasis on ethnicity, land, language, and rights (e.g., Galgay 2024; 2025). These themes create points of connection with the ethno-political self-determination discourse. However, the horizon differs: whereas the first cluster frames secession and the creation of independent states as the ultimate endpoint of decolonization, the Islamic epistemic discourse situates sovereignty within the broader vision of the global ummah. A 2017 Hizb-ut Tahrir text captures this dynamic: “[After the fall of the Soviet Union], it was easy to deceive both the population and activists and leaders of national movements striving for independence and secession by promising various kinds of benefits, ‘autonomy,’ the status of ‘presidents of the republics,’ and allowing the creation of local Constitutions, legislative bodies, courts, and to keep them thereby from the requirement of complete independence, separation and the creation of a separate independent state. After all, otherwise all Muslim regions would have split off from Russia – Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Karachay-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Adygea, and they would have been followed by all those Muslims whose territories ended up in the so-called ‘Russian’ regions, more precisely, artificially populated by the Russian population after the occupation – Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk, Orenburg, Saratov, Krasnodar Territories, etc.” (HT 2017).
In diaspora settings, research shows that the interplay between ethno-nationalist and religious identities persists (Souleimanov and Schwampe Reference Souleimanov and Schwampe2017) – not least due to the legacy of the Chechen wars, which combined ethno-territorial secessionist claims with Islamic narratives of jihad against the Russian state (e.g., Hughes Reference Hughes2013). However, the high level of securitization surrounding Islam-inspired political thought – both in Russia and in Western contexts – restricts the social media visibility of discourses that foreground Islam over ethnicity.
Like both the nationalist ethno-political self-determination discourse and the indigeneity-centered cultural discourse, the Islamic epistemic discourse seeks legitimation in elements of the past, at times selectively reinventing traditions to reinforce its narrative. Yet its political horizons remain fraught. Practically, the viability of restoring the Caliphate has been undermined by recent embodiments such as ISIS, which have discredited the project and alienated potential allies (Al-Rasheed et al. Reference Al-Rasheed, Kersten and Shterin2012; Pankhurst Reference Pankhurst2013). Normatively, there are legitimate anxieties that Islamic liberation struggles may reproduce or intensify patriarchal hierarchies. In these cases, the revival of tradition functions less as a resource for emancipation than as a justification for reintroducing exclusions, placing this cluster in frequent tension with the more intersectional discourse.
Despite these limitations, discourses in this cluster remain important in legitimizing non-liberal articulations of political agency – particularly those rooted in piety, submission, and divine law. They also maintain a critique of both Western imperialism and Russian hegemony – a position less available to the other two clusters given their geopolitical and institutional positionalities. For instance, already prior to 2022, Hizb-ut Tahrir drew parallels between Russian and Western approaches to Islam, highlighting the shared categorization of Muslims into “radical” (political, undesirable) and “moderate” (apolitical, secularized, and tolerated only upon demonstrations of loyalty) (HT 2017).
Discussion
The analysis of the three clusters shows that while all are rooted in opposition to the current regime in Russia, they differ sharply in their political imaginaries, epistemic orientations, and strategies for gaining visibility. Across these differences, several common tensions emerge, centered on the categories used to define marginalized communities, the scalar politics of solidarity, the mediatization of activism, and the politics of memory and trauma. These tensions emerge from a context in which post-Soviet minority activism is shaped simultaneously by imperial and Soviet legacies, by differences in domestic audiences and those outside of Russia, and by the selective (algorithmic) logics through which attention and recognition are given.
The first source of tension is that all three clusters operate within, and sometimes against, the inherited categories of the Russian imperial–Soviet order. The first cluster (ethno-political self-determination discourse), even as it rebrands its claims in the language of decolonization, largely retains the Soviet ethnonational model used to organize hierarchies of ethnic groups on the territory of present-day Russia, with fixed identity–territory linkages. The second cluster (indigeneity-centered cultural discourse) attempts to move beyond these categories, grounding belonging in relationships to land, ecology, and alternative epistemologies. Yet, as the discussion on indigeneity shows, alternative, often already globalized concepts can obscure local hierarchies and still reproduce exclusionary logics. The third cluster (Islamic epistemic discourse), while rooted in a distinct religious framework, also still draws on markers such as ethnicity, land, and language, often defined through Russian and Soviet imperial governance models.
This comparison underscores that no single conceptual vocabulary – whether based on ethnicity, indigeneity, or a religious–moral framework – can fully capture the multidimensional exclusions faced by minority communities in Russia today (Seales and Sanz Pascual 2025). The discourse in the second cluster is more attuned to the intersections between gender, race and ethnicity in shaping marginalization; however, no established vocabulary yet exists that is both recognizable and meaningful across different audiences.
A second source of tension lies in the divide between “domestic” audiences (diaspora and in-country communities) and “international” audiences (Western institutions, media, and advocacy networks) – with the latter often prioritized, given the limited political and economic resources of diaspora communities. The ethno-political self-determination discourse tends to orient its message toward Western policy circles, where separatism is framed primarily as a strategy for weakening Russia geopolitically. The indigeneity-centered discourse engages more directly with global Indigenous movements and human rights organizations, mobilizing a transnational vocabulary that resonates within UN and NGO frameworks. By contrast, the Islamic epistemic discourse primarily addresses transnational Muslim publics and remains largely absent from Western liberal forums, both because of securitization and because of ideological incompatibilities – though the ongoing Palestinian struggle may confer a degree of renewed legitimacy to such rhetoric. The differentiated strategies to target the “domestic” and “international” audiences are not always complementary. The need to “speak the language” of external audiences risks sidelining grievances that are less internationally legible, particularly those of lower-class communities in Russia who remain excluded from digital platforms and English-language advocacy spaces.
Moreover, post-2022 minority activism operates under what scholars have called conditions of “double hegemony” (Banaszewski and Jacobs Reference Banaszewski and Jacobs2022; also Tlostanova Reference Tlostanova2015): it is shaped by both Russian domination and Western interests. This dual positioning limits the scope of critique available to different clusters, reinforcing the audience-oriented strategies outlined above. The ethno-political self-determination and indigeneity-centered discourses often frame the West as a strategic ally against the current regime in Russia, which facilitates visibility in international policy and advocacy spaces but leaves Western geopolitical and epistemic dominance largely unexamined. This positioning also places them at odds with parts of the Global South, where Russia, China, or Iran are imagined as counter-hegemonic allies against US-led imperialism – mirror-image alliances that instrumentalize decolonial rhetoric in ways that dilute its original emancipatory intent. The Islamic epistemic discourse, in principle, has the tools to critique both Russian and Western hegemonies, yet its reach in Western forums is constrained.
An additional epistemic constraint comes from the rise of “civilizational nationalism” (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2017) on both sides – in Russia, through the Russkii mir (‘Russian World’) ideology, and in the West, through narratives of a shared Judeo-Christian civilization. This form of nationalism thrives in the current climate of geopolitical confrontation, narrowing the political space for minority claims. In Russia, the Kremlin uses the civilizational nationalism to delegitimize minority activism by framing it as foreign-influenced dissent; in the West, it feeds into “anti-woke” mobilization, where migration and minority rights advocacy are increasingly stigmatized.
A third source of tension lies in the role of digital platforms, which have been indispensable for building transnational connections, particularly for actors in exile, yet also reproduce the constraints of the global attention economy. As with other activist movements, the imperatives of visibility and marketability shape the forms of expression most likely to gain traction. The indigeneity-centered discourse, especially through visual culture, artistic performance, and the representation of traditional practices, has effectively leveraged digital media to increase the visibility of minority communities. In this respect, it shares certain continuities with the first discourse cluster through Soviet ethnonational model, in which folklore, ethnography, and cultural distinctiveness played a central role in articulating ethnic identity. At the same time, these forms of representation remain vulnerable to essentialization and to the Western appetite for “ethnic exoticism.” The ethno-political self-determination discourse employs digital media to promote cartographic and geopolitical imaginaries of post-Russian futures (e.g., Wikimedia 2026), which attract policy interest but risk flattening local complexity. The Islamic epistemic discourse analyzed here is comparatively less visible in Western public digital fora, reducing its exposure to these dynamics. Across all clusters, competition for funding and recognition in the global “marketplace” of activism inevitably pushes actors toward identity branding, privileging forms of expression that are most consumable by external audiences.
Because the politics of historical memory is central to all clusters, these dynamics intersect with the commodification of suffering and victimhood (e.g., Nayar Reference Nayar2009): online platforms reward emotionally charged narratives, incentivizing performances of victimhood. This “weaponization of trauma” is particularly detrimental to unpacking the complex histories of Russian and Soviet imperialism beyond binary perpetrator–victim frames, and it makes translation of nuanced academic scholarship on the Russian empire into broader audiences especially challenging.
Conclusion
This article has mapped three distinct yet intersecting strands of decolonial rhetoric among Russia’s minority activists in the wake of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine: the ethno-political self-determination discourse, the indigeneity-centered cultural discourse, and the Islamic epistemic discourse. Each offers a different vision of what decolonization entails – ranging from the pursuit of statehood, to the revitalization of Indigenous epistemologies, to the revival of religiously grounded political orders. Despite these divergences, all three confront the enduring legacies of imperial and Soviet systems of minority governance, operate within transnational networks shaped by exile, and navigate digital environments that amplify visibility while incentivizing marketable identity performances.
Taken together, these dynamics point to the need for a multi-layered analysis of post-2022 minority activism that keeps class–minority relations, transnational positioning, mediatization, and imperial legacies in the same frame. Decolonial rhetoric in the Russian context is neither monolithic nor inherently emancipatory: it can reproduce inherited hierarchies even as it challenges others, and it can (re-)create solidarities while reinforcing existing boundaries.Footnote 12 The interplay between inherited structures and contemporary global conditions – double hegemony, attention economies, and audience politics – shapes both the scope and the constraints of what decoloniality can mean in the semi-periphery.
This snapshot of discourse clusters should be revisited through longitudinal research that tracks how they evolve under conditions of geopolitical turbulence. Equally, more granular, region-specific studies remain crucial to capture the diversity of political imaginaries across Russia’s minority communities. On a larger scale, situating these discourses within longer histories of anti-imperial struggle – whether nationalist, leftist, or Islamic – would help to contextualize them as continuations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century projects rather than as entirely novel phenomena.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the discussants of an earlier draft presented at the ASEEES 2024 convention, and in particular Ilya Kukulin for his valuable feedback.
Financial support
There are no funders to report for this submission.
Open access funding provided by University of Amsterdam.
Disclosures
I acknowledge the use of Grammarly and ChatGPT 5.2 to identify improvements suggested to the writing style.
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