De-Colonization Broader and More Important than Other Terms Used to Discuss Russia’s Future, Orlova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – De-Colonization subsumes de-imperialization, sovereignization, federalization, and decentralization and allows for addressing all the questions they raise at one and the same time, Vasilina Orlova says. It is thus the most useful term to employ in discussing the future of the peoples now within the borders of the Russian Federation.

            “De-imperialization,” an anthropologist from Vladivostok now in the US says, “is about the abandonment of empire and imperial domination. Sovereignization concerns the acquisition of political subjectivity. Federalization focuses on a certain way of distributing power within a common state; and de-centralization is about the emergence of new centers of power” (wschody.net/federalizacziya-ili-dekolonizacziya-kto-reshaet-gde-periferiya/).

            According to her, de-colonization involves not only all of these issues but “also calls into question why a number of meanings have a culturally established and unquestioned primacy, one that can be explained only by established traditions, norms and values as dictated by colonial history.” As a result, de-colonization is the best framework to think about the Russian Federation.

            “De-imperialization,” Orlova continues, “is probably closest to the concept of de-colonization” given that as Russia arose as an empire, “it is natural to assume that the dismantling of the empire and its imperial implications should take place” to allow for all the peoples of the region, including Russians, to find a new place in the sun.

            She argues that it involves “the state’s rejection of imperial claims from the right to establish the boundaries of foreign subjectivity, from the idea of neighboring countries being within a sphere of its special interests, and from viewing some peoples as parts of a single historical whole which as a result of misunderstandings were split apart by state borders.

            De-imperialization is thus “a necessary part of de-colonization;” but it is far from all that is covered by the later term. That is because “the empire may disappear as a political struggle but the relations and perceptions it created will continue to exist.” That has certainly happened in Russia since 1991.

              Sovereignization is also close to de-colonization, Orlova writes; but it too is not the same thing. It is about who has the right to make decisions and thus may or may not involve the pursuit of independence by a group but also consider possibilities of federation or confederation.

              Those two concepts are also involved in such discussions especially as the Russian state is “already called ‘the Russian Federation.’” But most of those who advocate this do not challenge Moscow as the center of that state that will make the decisions for all other centers.

              Instead, she says, “federalization usually begins within the context of an already pre-existing map, one that says here is the Russian Federation and its subjects. Now, it is necessary to distribute power more fairly among them. The de-colonial view allows us to see that this map itself is the result of colonial history.”

              “Federalization can give the periphery more power,” Orlova continues; but “declonization calls into question the very right of the center to determine who is the periphery” and insists that “the center does not have some natural right to decide the fate of the territories because it has been able to govern them historically.”

Russia’s Parliamentary Parties Attract Different People Not So Much by Different Programs as by Different Emotional Appeals, INSOMAR Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 1 – INSOMAR, the Moscow Institute of Social Marketing on the basis of a survey says that Russians divide in their votes for the country’s parliamentary parties not because these parties offer radically different political programs than because they appeal to very different emotions.

            Using INSOMAR’s findings (t.me/insomar/499), the Club of the Regions identifies what it says are the differences among the parties in terms of the emotional appeals they have made to voters (club-rf.ru/theme/733). Here is how the Club’s experts describe the basic voters of four of these groups:

·       United Russia voters have enormous pride in their country and most of them expect positive changes in the country in the coming years.

·       KPRF voters in contrast are unhappy with the state of things in the country and a majority believe that worse times are ahead.

·       LDPR voters are proud of their country but say they are fed up with government news and are more likely than any of the others to articulate local and regional identities.

·       The New Peoples Party voters are the only party a majority of whom does not consider themselves supporters of any political powers. They are more economically active and want the state to stop interfering with the internet and let people work.

Neither INSOMAR nor the Party of the Regions talked much about Just Russia, a reflection of the fact that that party had a less clearly defined emotional content and thus was unable to set itself apart and attract voters on that basis than were the other four.  

Another Revenant from Soviet Past – Private Plots Provide Half the Potatoes Russian Eat

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – In Soviet times, much of the food Russians consumed was grown not in the fields of state and collective farms but on the small private plots that rural residents were allowed nominally for personal use but in fact to feed not only the rural population but to keep urban residents from starving.

            At that time, this was a source of shame in the Soviet Union; but it was regularly pointed to by commentators in the West as a sign that the collectivist approach to agriculture didn’t work and that capitalism would lead to expanded production and a better life for those who raised this food and those who consumed it.

            But today, despite the spread of capitalism throughout rural Russia, it is not the enormous farms controlled by large corporations but the small private plots that farmers and dacha owners maintain that is delivering a disproportionate share of food for residents of the Russian Federation.

            According to new research by the To Be Precise portal, a large share of the foods Russians consume comes not from the big farms but from private plots owned either by those with dachas or who work for the big agricultural firms (tochno.st/materials/bolse-poloviny-kartofelia-v-strane-vyrashhivaiut-na-licnyx-ucastkax-razbiraemsia-kak-ustroeny-ogorody-v-rossii).

            It reported that “more than half of the potatoes, about half of the vegetables and most of the berries in the country are now being produced not by agricultural holdings but by people on their personal plots” as private plots are now known. These figures are in fact less than they were in the 1990s when the private plots were responsible for up to 90 percent of such production.

            In some federal subjects – Dagestan, the Altai Republic, Karelia, and Kirov Oblast – more than 90 percent of all vegetables are produced on such plots, while in others the figures are much smaller. There and elsewhere, some of the private plot production comes from small farms; but most of it comes instead from dacha lands or gardens of agricultural workers.

            This pattern reflects the fact that large but now private farms produce mostly for export and the kind of output that Russians actually consumes requires the personal involvement and commitment of farmers rather than just a change in the formal ownership of the property that so many have claimed will give rise to more food production by itself. 

Having Closed Thousands of Rural Libraries before 2022, Putin is Now Purging the Shelves of Those Still Operating, ‘Veter’ Journalist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – Having closed an average of 1,000 rural libraries a year even before he invaded Ukraine in 2022, Vladimir Putin is now overseeing the purging of the books those still hanging on have on their shelves, an action that is a tragic echo of what Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya did in the first years of Soviet power.

            That action, described by the late Bertram Wolfe in his classic 1969 Survey article “Krupskaya Purges the People’s Libraries” describes how the Bolsheviks put a straightjacket on intellectual life in the USSR. What Putin is doing now is at least as instructive and reprehensible but not yet nearly as widely condemned.

            An important exception to this restrained reaction is provided by Veter journalist Yulia Kulikova in an article which quotes one rural librarian as saying Putin is removing from the shelves “all of our classics” (veter.info/posts/eRnmWyJBAJb6 reposted at novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/10/02/my-takimi-tempami-izbavimsia-ot-vsekh-nashikh-klassikov).

            Unlike Krupskaya’s attack, Putin’s is easily hidden from prying eyes because money is still going to libraries, albeit from businesses working in the area rather than the state but for furniture and computers but not books and because the censorship is not imposed all at once but rather gradually as more and more authors are deemed foreign agents or worse.

            Rural libraries in the Komi Republic which Kulikova examined remove books the state doesn’t approve of, don’t buy books that it fears will get them in trouble such as anything about LGBT+ people, but also doesn’t buy even what the regime wants disseminated such as books about Putin’s war in Ukraine.

            As a result, the intellectual life of rural Russia is being strangled. And it is not just books: most rural libraries aren’t connected to the internet and so the computers businesses help pay for can’t be used to access the broader world that the web promises, limiting their educational role to preparing local people to work for businesses rather than broadening their horizons.

            These actions are typically justified by the Putin regime as “optimization,” the reduction in funding to libraries and schools which service relatively few people; and that justification is accepted by all too many people in Russia and the West. But the reality is worse: optimization in this case is simply a euphemism for destruction.

Academician Says Almost All Peoples in Russian Federation are ‘Indigenous,’ Raising Questions about Special Legal Status of ‘Indigenous Numerically Small Peoples’

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 2 – Academician Andrey Golovnyov has called for identifying all the peoples of the country “indigenous” if they have historical and ethno-genetic roots on its territory regardless of their memory, an idea that will please Russian nationalists who resent the fact that in law, ethnic Russians are not “indigenous.”

            The director of the Kunstkammer Museum made that proposal at a session of Federation Council’s Committee on Federal Structures, Regional Policy, Local Self-Administration and the Affairs of the North on September 28 (indigenous-russia.com/archives/50603) and thereby opened a can of worms with potentially far-reaching consequences.

            Golovnyov was careful to say that he did not want to see any change in special rights the 47 numerically small peoples of the north, Siberia and the Far East now enjoy under Russia’s legal system. But by suggesting that almost all peoples in the country are indigenous, he is whether he intends to or not challenging that arrangement.

            Under current Russian law, the numerically small indigenous peoples are those 47 peoples who live on the territories of their ancestors, preserve a traditional way of life and economic activity, number fewer than 50,000 peoples and recognize themselves as distinct ethnic communities.

            Russian law does not define indigenous any other way; but of course, indigenous in the everyday meaning of a people long settled on a particular territory and in the Russian legal code defined as the numerically small peoples of the north, Siberia and the far east are not one and the same thing.

            But insisting, as Golovnyov has done, that all peoples who are indigenous in the common sense meaning of the term raises questions about whether the status of the numerically small indigenous peoples as a special legal category won’t be affected even if he would leave their status untouched.

            The issue of the definition of who is indigenous and who is now has been percolating for some time and not only among Russian nationalists. First, there is the question of number. One numerically small people – the Nenets – is close to the 50,000 figure. If it passes that, will it lose its status? Or will others gain that status if they fall below that number in the future?

            Second, the numbers question has both a domestic and an international component. Within Russia, there is a very real issue of what government level should have the right to determine who is and who is not a numerically small people. And abroad, Russia’s indigenous peoples deal with their counterparts in other countries who do not think in the same categories.

            In almost all of them, governments and activists stress the traditional way of life rather than the number of people pursuing it. That means many of those who define themselves as indigenous abroad are far larger than the Russian communities with whom they interact and thus have larger agendas than most of the Russian ones do.

            And third, will calling almost everyone including ethnic Russian indigenous undermine the existing government programs for the numerically small indigenous peoples and put even more of them on track to disappear in the future, something Golovnyov is against but that Putin’s support for exploitation of their territories makes increasingly likely?

            That is far more likely than many are willing to recognize. Already, of the 47 nations identified as indigenous, only three have majorities who know their national language, a clear sign of just how much pressure they are under (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2026/08/in-only-three-of-47-numerically-small.html).

            It should be obvious that indigenous and numerically small indigenous nationalities are not equivalent terms, but in the Russia of Vladimir Putin, that is likely to be forgotten and those who are called indigenous now are almost certain to suffer the most just so some Russians offended that the state doesn’t call them indigenous now can gain such official recognition.

 

Except at Official Functions, Russian Soldiers Fighting in Ukraine Never Refer to Themselves as ‘Liberators,’ Russian Philologist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 30 – Putin and his propagandists routinely refer to Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine as “liberators,” but Aleksey Tikhonov, a Russian philologist, says that he has found no cases where the soldiers call themselves that except at official propaganda functions where they have to hew the line.

            That is just one examples of the way in which official terms have not caught on, the scholar who now teaches at the University of Zurich says. But the failure of propaganda to be accepted is also highlighted by the way in which those who do use these terms given them radically different meanings (svoboda.org/a/nazvatj-voynu-voynoy-kak-i-pochemu-menyaetsya-yazyk-rossii-i-ukrainy/33865662.html).

            Some Russians and many Ukrainians are now using the word “liberator” in a highly ironic sense, with some even suggesting that before the Russian soldiers can liberate anyone else, they must liberate themselves and their own country, something that hasn’t happened and doesn’t appear likely to.

            In the course of a lengthy interview, Tikhonov describes the way soldiers on both sides of the line have adapted language to make their suffering easier to take; but perhaps most important, he discusses not just how war affects language but how language has an impact on war – and thus why rulers care so much about the language used.

            For governments, especially those which are engaged in aggression and violation of human rights, the philologist says, using bureaucratic language helps them to project the idea that war is in fact “part of ordinary life and nothing particularly different from it. But this acquires new meaning when the leaders start talking about war and fighting a war.

            During the first several years of his war, Putin insisted on calling it a special military operation and punished those who called it a war; but now the Kremlin leader and his propagandists call it a war because they can no longer hide from those taking part and others affected that it is precisely that.

            But when leaders start talking about war, Tikhonov says, they are showing that they are committed to fighting to the death, a position that is superficially attractive as far as they are concerned but one that opens the door to doubts among the population and often in the past the defeat of those who decide to talk about war all the time.

From Times Immemorial, Russian Leaders and Their Populations have Been Bored When They aren’t Fighting a War, New Moscow Comic Book Suggests

Paul Goble

              Staunton, Oct. 1 – While many would suggest that Putin’s presentation of Russian history has many comic-book-like elements, a real comic books has now appeared in Moscow suggesting that Russian leaders and the Russian people have been bored when they aren’t fighting a war.

              The Bombor publishing house has now issued a comic book, The History of Russian in Comics. From the Ancient Slavs to Vladimir Putin, which in frame after frame carries that message (nemoskva.net/2026/10/01/vyshla-istoriya-rossii-v-komiksah-ot-drevnih-slavyan-do-putina/).

              Many times Russian leaders as presented in this comic say they are “bored” when they are sitting at home rather than going to war, although to be fair, a few, including Nicholas II, are less than pleased with what happens after they take up arms against someone. Only when Russian leaders fight and win wars do the Russian people enthusiastically support them.

              The comic book which echoes Putin’s own line isn’t winning from Russian readers. All those who left reviews at the Labyrinth book store were negative, with one typical description of the comic being that it is “a terrible propaganda product” and not worth "more than a kopek."