Russian Historians Tell Kyrgyz Scholars to Replace Term ‘Colonialism’ with the Word ‘Administration’

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 18 – From a country where a current war is called “a special military operation” and those who suggest otherwise are punished, it should come as no surprise that Russians will try to solve other political problems with analogous verbal sleight of hand. But as with the case with the war in Ukraine, such attempts are likely to backfire.

            The Russian Military Historical Society which is led by Putin loyalist Vladimir Medinsky held its first meeting with Kyrgyzstan’s expert advisory council on history and tried unsuccessfully to attack discussions of Russian colonialism by calling it something else (https://amp.rbc.ru/rbcnews/politics/18/05/2026/6a0b0d679a7947e252c6f2f5).

            At the meeting, Andrey Bykov of Moscow’s Institute of Oriental Studies called for replacing the terms “colonialism” and “colonial policy” with the terms “administration” and administrative measures” in an 11^th grade Kyrgyzstan history textbook. The Russian scholar said any failure to do that was “a tribute to fashion” and at odds with the facts.

            The Kyrgyz side wasn’t having any of this. Abylabek Askanov, head of Bishkek’s Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnology, responded that doing so would be “extremely difficult” given what is generally understood by the term colonialism. Changing words won’t do anything about that.

            Bykov replied that “Russia has no intention of dictating to Kyrgyzstan,” although it is virtually certain that his audience knows that Moscow did just that in the past and that it has one so on occasion since Putin became president, most prominently in 2024 when Russian scholars attacked an Armenian textbook for “calling into question the special role of the Russian Empire.”