Central Asians and All Others Must View Russian and Soviet History as ‘a History of Colonialism,’ Kazakh Historian Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 31 – Moscow continue to promote the myth that Russia was never an empire but a liberator and provider of assistance and that, if it had some aspects of an imperial state, these reflected authoritarianism rather than imperialism and were minor compared to the aid it gave to the people it absorbed, Botakoz Kasymbekova says.

            The Kazakh historian who is now at the University of Zurich says the facts of the case show that the Russian Empire and the USSR were imperial states who behaved like other colonial empires and that this must be recognized (azattyqasia.org/a/rossiya-i-tsentralnaya-aziya-ot-tsarizma-i-bolshevikov-do-nashih-dney/33842464.html).

            Russia to this day has “a state-forming myth that Russia has not advanced into countries but that they have voluntarily wanted to become part of Russia,” despite all the evidence of the ways Russia used military force to impose its discriminatory rule and then run the lives of the people in its colonies, Kasymbekova says.

            Not only do Russians not talk about these facts honestly, the Kazakh historian says; but they become angry when Central Asians or others who are members of the communities the Russian state has conquered and suppressed and seek to maintain a classical “post-colonial” situation in which the colonized do not recognize the truth.

            As she points out, “the great Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov wrote about this with his story of the myth about the mankurt, an individual who loses his memory and comes to love the colonizers.” Such people exist in Central Asia and many other places, and much must be done to disabuse them of these falsehoods.

            “The most successful colonial project,” Kasymbekova continues, “is one in which the dirty work of colonialism is carried out by the colonized who have in fact taken over the colonial narrative” of the imperial regime. That is a clear sign of “the semi-colonial imperial consciousness in which they find themselves.”

            The roots of Russian colonialism today are less in the tsarist past than in the Soviet one, she suggests. “The Bolsheviks believed that if they established communism anywhere, they are “resolved all problems” and were not prepared to accept that their actions directed from Moscow were depriving others of the right to choose for themselves.

            As result, despite all the communist verbiage, the Soviet Union was “a colonial empire.” Today, the leaders of the Russian Federation are pursuing the same goal and justify themselves by the same denials. Sadly, many others have bought into the idea that the USSR was not so much a brutal empire as one that sought to promote a better life for all its subject peoples.

            This commitment to providing assistance, she continues, has given rise among Russians a certain “imperial innocence,” the sense that because they were on occasion promoting social development, they were not and thus could not be held accountable for the imperial nature of their state.

As she puts it, Russians and their followers continue to insist that “Russia was not and is not an empire; and if it is in some ways, it was and is a positive empire, something that brough civilization and developmemtn rather than force, inequality, repression, and the suppression of cultures and nations.”

That has unfortunately been accepted by many in the region and beyond as has its corollary that Russia’s problem is “authoritarianism but not colonialism.” The empire’s subjects can criticism actions as authoritarianism but any suggestion they flow from imperialism is something Russians consider highly offensive, she concludes.