A Country is an Empire Only if Its Colonies are Non-Contiguous, Russian Writer Insists

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 8 – Almost all countries at one time or another have sought to expand their territories, but unless they seek to take control of separate and non-contiguous lands, they cannot be described as empires, Moscow journalist Sergey Leskov says present-day political science holds.

            What that means is that Russia was not an empire in the ways that France or England were in that it expanded into contiguous lands and did not occupy non-contiguous ones which then became colonies, the writer says. Instead, it opposed such imperial colonization and does so to this day (rosbalt.ru/blogs/2022/08/08/1969313.html).

            Leskov acknowledges that Russian claims in this regard are somewhat compromised by the resistance of some non-Russians to Russian expansion and by fact that Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky described the incorporation of Siberia as an act of colonization and that Russia today now celebrates its origins in the Russian Empire of the past.

            But resistance was spotty, citing Klyuchevksy is just as inappropriate as citing Ptolemey’s view that the sun goes around the earth, and the meaning of empire in earlier centuries was very different from what it is now, the Moscow writer insists. And then he puts forward as two ultimate arguments the following points.

            On the one hand, Leskov says, in a classic example of “what-about-ism,” he says that everyone else has done what Russia has done and refuses to call itself an empire for doing so and thus Russia should not be singled out.  And on the other, Russia poured aid into its supposed colonies, an example of an empire turned inside out.