Was Ukraine a Colony of Russia

The myth

“Show me the colonies” is the typical objection: the British, it runs, had overseas colonies, a navy, the East India Company, whereas Russia had nothing of the kind — therefore there was no colonialism, and Ukraine was no colony at all. The argument sounds convincing because it rests on the familiar image of empire — ships, ocean, overseas possessions.

Colonialism can be political, not only economic

The weak point of this argument lies in the assumption that colonialism is always economic and always maritime. In reality it can also be political. The British Empire was economic and maritime: its logic was the extraction of resources from the colonies for the benefit of the metropole (India was called “the jewel in the crown”). Continental political empires, by contrast — the Russian, German, and Italian ones — operated differently: the priority was not profit but glory, prestige, and domination^[1].

Russia was never primarily an economic power — it was a political one. That is why the “classic” templates of maritime-economic empires do not fit it, and it is for this very reason that the West misjudges it, trying to contain it with purely economic levers^[2]. Tellingly, the colonial character of these relations was acknowledged by the Russian imperialists themselves: Ukraine was directly called Russia’s “East India” — that is, what India was to Britain^[2].

The “Russian world” as an imperial instrument

The contemporary continuation of this imperial logic is the concept of the “Russian world”. In essence it is a modernized version of Minister Uvarov’s triad (“autocracy, Orthodoxy, nationality”): at its base lie the Russian language, a “shared culture,” and a managed “shared historical memory”^[3]. It is no coincidence that the “Russian World” foundation, created in 2007, is headed by Vyacheslav Nikonov — Molotov’s grandson: the continuity between Soviet and present-day Russian elites has not gone anywhere^[3].

A key element of this “shared memory” is the cult of the “Great Victory”: carefully cultivated symbolic capital, convenient both for exerting influence across the post-Soviet space and for reminding Western partners that “we, after all, defeated Nazism.” Even the grassroots “Immortal Regiment” initiative (2012) was co-opted by the Kremlin and hollowed out into a state-run pobedobesie (“victory frenzy”)^[5]. The mechanics of this cult are examined in more detail in the article “The cult of the ‘Great Victory’”.

Hierarchy instead of equality

The colonial character is also visible from within. The USSR operated a hierarchy of ethnicities: Russians were “first among equals,” Ukrainians were “younger brothers” (from 1954), and the rest of the peoples followed by rank; ethnicity was politicized and recorded in the “fifth line” of the internal passport^[4]. Ukraine abandoned this model in 1991, taking the path of a civic rather than an ethnic nation.

Not a “quasi-state”: the Ukrainian SSR at the UN

The colonial thesis is often pushed to the extreme by denying statehood itself: the Ukrainian SSR, it is claimed, was not a state but a “quasi-state” without agency. But international law tells a different story. Soviet Ukraine was a founding member of the UN — one of the 51 states that signed the Charter in 1945^[14]. Moscow secured for the USSR effectively three votes in the General Assembly: the USSR, the Ukrainian SSR, and the Byelorussian SSR each voted separately, and the Allies of the anti-Hitler coalition accepted this compromise^[15]. The signature of the Ukrainian SSR’s representative Dmytro Manuilsky stands on the UN Charter — he led the Ukrainian delegation at the San Francisco Conference and chaired its First Committee, which prepared the preamble and the first chapter of the Charter^[16].

What is more, the Ukrainian SSR was even elected a non-permanent member of the Security Council — for a two-year term in 1948–1949 (in the video the date is given uncertainly, “46–47, I may be wrong” — it was in fact 1948–49)^[17]. Of course, the real decisions were taken in Moscow, not in Kyiv, and these were votes under Soviet control. But the very fact that the Kremlin deliberately fought to obtain separate representation for Ukraine at the UN demolishes the thesis “it was not a state at all”: a colony is not put forward for the Security Council. Soviet Ukraine was a subject whose subjecthood the metropole simultaneously recognized on paper and hollowed out in practice — which fits entirely within the logic of political, not economic, colonialism.

The myth of “forced Ukrainization”

The colonial optics are also clearly visible in one of the most enduring Russian narratives — that of the “forced Ukrainization” of the 1920s, supposedly an oppression of Russian-speakers. The academician Larysa Yakubova exposes the sleight of hand: russification was always presented as a boon — an introduction to a “higher” culture — whereas the ordinary requirement to know the language of the local population in order to hold state and leadership positions (korenizatsiia, “indigenization,” which applied not only in Ukraine but also in villages and national districts) was declared “violence”^[6]. In reality this “violence” was not repression but the indignation of a colonizer who, for the first time, had to learn the language of those he was used to ruling over.

An empire built by conquest, not defense

There is yet another narrative the colonial thesis loves to refute — a mirror image of it: that Russia never seized anyone, that it was “constantly being attacked.” Here it is useful first to ask what is to be understood as “Russia” and from what moment — and it immediately becomes clear that this state was built not by defense but by the consistent absorption of its neighbors. The Principality of Moscow subjugated Tver and Ryazan; in 1471 the army of Ivan III defeated the Novgorod Republic — a distinct independent state — at the Battle of the Shelon, and in 1478 it abolished the veche and annexed it for good^[7]. Then came roughly 80 years of Muscovite–Lithuanian wars, in which Moscow seized the lands of old Rus’, and under Ivan IV — the conquest of the Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556) Khanates^[7].

The same logic operated in the 20th century: in 1939 the USSR, together with Nazi Germany, partitioned Poland, then tried to subjugate Finland, annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia (1940), and took Bessarabia from Romania^[8]. In other words, the overwhelming majority of wars between Russia and its neighbors were not defense but attack on the part of Moscow, the Russian Empire, the USSR, and present-day Russia^[8]. “Constant attacks on Russia” is the same inverted template as “Russia had no colonies”: the aggressor portraying itself as the victim.

Hence a useful frame for the current war — the “unfinished collapse of empire.” Drobnytsia describes the present-day Russian Federation as an empire that has not completed its collapse: the Russian Empire fell apart at the start of the 20th century, the USSR at its end, and the Russian Federation remained “under-collapsed” — and the war against Ukraine is in essence the third wave of this collapse (1917 → 1991 → now)^[28]. In this optics the colonial thesis becomes a logical consequence rather than a metaphor: a state that for centuries grew by conquering its neighbors, and which still does not recognize Ukraine as distinct, behaves not like a nation-state within its own borders but like an empire holding a colonized periphery by force.

Deportation as a method of control

If Russia’s colonialism was political, then its working instrument was not trade but deportation. As the historian Serhii Hromenko shows, the entire history of Russian statehood is a history of the forcible resettlement of the disobedient: it begins with that very conquest of Novgorod in the 1470s, after which the Novgorodians were dispersed across Moscow and assimilated, and the survivors were “finished off” a century later by Ivan the Terrible^[9]. Deportations accompanied every expansion of the empire.

This is seen most vividly in Crimea. Even before the annexation of the peninsula, in 1778, Catherine II — through Suvorov — resettled some 31,000 Christians from Crimea to the mainland — Greeks and Armenians — mostly into the territory of the future Mariupol; the Crimean Khanate was annexed in 1783^[10]. (In the video the figure is rounded to “33,000”; the documented figure is about 31,000, with the resettlement overseen by Metropolitan Ignatius.) The culmination of this logic was the deportation of the Crimean Tatar people, which began on 18 May 1944: in a matter of days some 200,000 people were removed (the documented NKVD count was about 191,000)^[11]. Deportation was not the excess of a single regime but the means by which, for centuries, the metropole held its colonized lands.

Crimea: not “originally Russian” but annexed in 1783

A separate knot of colonial mythology is the thesis that Crimea was “always Russian.” The peninsula’s own chronology demolishes it. Already in the 8th century BCE, Greek settlers settled along the coast — on the sites of present-day Sevastopol and Kerch, alongside the Tauri tribes^[18]. Later the south of Crimea became part of Byzantium, and Chersonesus remained a Byzantine city^[19] — a continuity in which Moscow does not figure at all.

After the disintegration of the western part of the Mongol Empire (the Ulus of Jochi) in the mid-15th century, the Crimean Khanate arose, headed by the Giray dynasty; it lasted until 1783, in a relationship of dependence on the Ottoman Empire, with the khans elected at the kurultai and confirmed by the Ottoman sultan^[20]. Economically the khanate rested on the slave trade: the largest slave market was Kaffa (today’s Feodosia), subordinated directly to the Ottomans, while the raids reached as far as Moscow — as in the campaign of 1571^[21].

The character of the khanate’s relations with Moscow is also telling. Down to the times of Peter I, Moscow paid the Crimean Khanate “pominki” — effectively a tribute, in order to avoid raids (Peter sent the last “pominki” to Bakhchysarai in 1721, by which time he had already renamed the Muscovite Tsardom an empire)^[22]. That is, it was not Crimea that was a province of Moscow but the reverse — Moscow bought itself off from the Crimean khans for centuries. And in 1648 Khan Islyam Giray became the first ally of Bohdan Khmelnytsky at the start of the Cossack revolution^[22].

Crimea came under Russian rule only in 1783: after two Russo-Turkish wars won by Catherine II, the last khan was summoned to Saint Petersburg, the khanate was liquidated, and its lands became the Taurida Governorate^[23]. This was precisely the annexation — following exactly the same logic of political colonialism as the rest of the imperial acquisitions.

That Crimea was not “Russian by definition” is also clear from 1917: after the collapse of the empire, the Crimean Tatars convened a kurultai and proclaimed a Crimean People’s Republic headed by a directory, which was led by the young mufti Noman Çelebicihan — author of the Crimean Tatar anthem^[24]. The Bolsheviks, on coming to power, dissolved the kurultai and on 23 February 1918 shot Çelebicihan, throwing his body into the sea off Sevastopol^[25]. As elsewhere, the metropole held Crimea not by right of antiquity but by armed suppression of another people’s statehood — first Crimean Tatar, then Ukrainian.

The flip side: the Ukrainian Green Wedge

There is also a mirror side to colonization by land — Ukrainian settlers on the outskirts of the empire. Under the Stolypin agrarian reform, which gathered pace from 1906, Ukrainians settled en masse in the Far East and Transbaikalia — lands that came to be called the Green Wedge — as well as in northern Kazakhstan and the Orenburg region — the Grey Wedge^[12]. This too is part of imperial history: peasants were moved to new lands within a single state, and compact Ukrainian communities grew up there. This world was immortalized by the writer Ivan Bahrianyi in the novel The Hunters and the Hunted (1944), set precisely in the Green Wedge — though already in the Soviet era, among those fleeing Stalin’s repressions, rather than in imperial times^[13].

An even closer example is Eastern Slobozhanshchyna, the lands of the present-day Kursk region, in particular Sudzha. Until the mid-17th century this was a borderland wasteland ravaged by Tatar raids; it came under Muscovite control under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, and was peopled during the era of the Ruin — by Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants fleeing the wars on the Dnipro lands. They were not settled there by chance: this was the Muscovite defensive line against Crimea, and Moscow needed a population to garrison it, having no free people of its own owing to serfdom^[26]. That is why the settled population here long remained predominantly Ukrainian: by the census, the share of Ukrainians (“Little Russians”) in the rural population of the Sudzha district exceeded 60%, and at first these lands even belonged to the Kyiv Governorate; Sudzha became “Russian” only at the end of the 18th century, when it was assigned to the newly created Kursk Governorate with its Russian majority^[27]. (In the video Drobnytsia dates the census to the “end of the 18th century” — the Ukrainian majority of the Sudzha district is documented above all by the first general census of 1897, by which about 61% of the population in the town of Sudzha itself spoke Ukrainian.) That is, here too the metropole settled its “defensive outskirts” with Ukrainian hands — and later, by administratively redrawing the governorates, turned their land into something “originally Russian.”

What this means

The question “were there colonies” does not reduce to the presence of a navy and overseas possessions. The Russian Empire colonized by land and by political methods — through language, the church, a hierarchy of peoples, and managed memory. In this optics Ukraine was indeed a colony — not an “East India” with spices, but a territory the metropole held for the sake of prestige and domination. The “Russian world” is not a cultural initiative but a direct continuation of this imperial logic in our own day.