When we speak of colonialism, we often imagine the classic model: the colonizer dominates by asserting difference. The colonized is deemed "other," "inferior," or "uncivilized," in need of "civilizing." But in the case of Russia and Ukraine, the mechanism is far more intricate - it is not difference, but sameness, that becomes the foundation of violence (see, for example, Volodymyr Yermolenko's "Rethinking Imperialism" podcast episode or the article on The Ukrainians). And it is this sameness that enables the most brutal forms of erasure, because it denies the colonized even the right to be different. This is a form of colonialism that does not separate, but absorbs.
Here we analyse five core manifestations of Russian cultural imperialism: the suppression of language, primitivization of culture, ideologization of time, ideologization of space, and the paradoxical truth that Russian history is in key moments secondary to Ukraine's. These are not independent traits but interwoven patterns of symbolic domination.
Russian imperialism has long denied the independent existence of the Ukrainian language. Beginning with the Valuev Circular (1863) and even harshier the Ems Ukaz (1876), the Tsarist state outright banned not only the publication of Ukrainian-language texts but also its use in schools, churches, and public life. The Valuev decree's infamous phrase - "There never was, is not, and never can be a separate Little Russian language" (Little Russian was an euphemism used in the Russian empire to denote the Ukrainian language and culture) - encapsulates the logic of assimilation: the decree declared Ukrainian not as a distinct language, but as a dialect of Russian (clarified in Ems Ukaz), which was framed as illegitimate.
This policy continued in the Soviet era under the guise of "friendship of peoples," where Ukrainian was pushed out of science, administration, and technical fields, surviving only in private life or as officially sanctioned folklore. Soviet language policy cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the initial period of korenizatsiya (indigenization) and ukrainization in the 1920s and early 1930s, which actively promoted the development of national identities and the use of local languages, including Ukrainian. This early phase saw a significant expansion of Ukrainian-language education, literature, and administration, marking a complex and often contradictory approach to nation-building within the USSR.
However, this policy was dramatically reversed in the 1930s, regime shifted toward repression. Ukrainian cultural and linguistic autonomy was curtailed; nationalist movements were violently suppressed, and the Ukrainian language was forcibly modified to align more closely with Russian linguistic norms. The 1938 decree mandating Russian language instruction in all Soviet schools further solidified Russian as the dominant language of state power, marginalizing non-Russian languages and reinforcing a hierarchy that persisted through the remainder of the Soviet era. By the 1980s, in universities most departments taught in Russian.
In the 21st century, the same policy persists in updated form. After the annexation of Crimea, Ukrainian-language schools were completely eliminated, and in the Russian-occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Ukrainian instruction has been systematically erased. This is not mere language policy - it is a denial of cultural sovereignty.
Another tool of imperial control is to reduce the culture of the colonized to something naïve or secondary. Ukrainian culture in the Russian imagination is either folklorized (embroidered shirts, dancing Cossacks, quaint rural humor), or framed as peasant, emotional, and underdeveloped.
The Ukrainian Baroque - a defining moment of early modernity - is excluded from the European canon and reframed as a marginal footnote to Moscow's rise. Key thinkers like Meletiy Smotrytsky are labeled "Russian," while their Ukrainian intellectual context is erased. Moreover, a number of writers, poets, and other cultural figures were executed, others were granted the right to express themselves by the ruling party through official unions of artists, musicians, and writers.
This is a deliberate strategy of cultural dissolution: to prevent Ukrainian culture from standing as a sovereign tradition with its own voice, rhythm, and authority, and instead reduce it to a decorative subgenre within the Russian whole.
Imperial logic works through teleological time - it constructs history as a linear path culminating in the imperial center. In Russian historiography, Kyiv is the beginning, but Moscow is the culmination. The baptism of Kyivan Rus'? Russia steals it as the "birth of Russian statehood." The Cossack state? Russia fabricates it as merely a precursor to "reunification" with "elder brother", Russia. Independent Ukraine? Russia claims it as a historical mistake.
This framing denies Ukraine's future by allowing it only a past - a source, an origin, but never a subject. Meanwhile, Russia claims the future: the cosmos, power, the "Russian world."
Imperial writers - from Karamzin to Dugin - have consistently cast Ukraine as a stepping stone in Russian destiny. In this view, Ukraine is permitted to have been, but not to be.
Control of space is not only physical but also symbolic. Changing place names, renaming streets, or erecting monuments are key tools of imperial power. After 2014, Russian authorities replaced Ukrainian toponyms in Crimea with Russian ones. In occupied territories, streets were renamed in honor of Lenin.
This is more than signage - it is the rewriting of mnemonic space. The empire asserts ownership through its "heroes," displacing local memory. In Mariupol, Russian forces erected statues in tribute of Pushkin legacy atop ruins they themselves created - a ritual of imperial marking.
This is the colonization of space not just by force, but by naming - by controlling what can be remembered, and by whom.
Perhaps most disruptive to the imperial myth is this fact: Russia was not the origin, but the derivative. The Christianization of Rus' came to Kyiv in 988 - Moscow was not founded until over 150 years later. The intellectual elites that reformed Russian church and education - from the 17th to 18th centuries - were formed in Ukraine, like Theophan Prokopovych.
Russia's imperialism is not only expansionist - it is a violent war against its own denied origin. That is why its cultural imperialism is so aggressive - because it is directed against the very thing from which it historically borrowed.
Russian cultural imperialism works not through exoticization, but through simulated kinship. Ukraine is not framed as an enemy, but as a part of Russia - as something that should never have separated. This is not domination by exclusion - but domination through imposed sameness.
Decolonization, in this context, is not only geopolitical liberation. It is an ontological and epistemic act: the reclaiming of time, space, language, and difference. Ukraine is not Russia's periphery. It is what Russia refuses to admit as its origin - and that is precisely what makes the violence of its imperialism so cruel.
But it is also what makes Ukraine's resistance so powerful. In reclaiming its own narrative, Ukraine is not inventing itself from scratch - it is resurrecting what was buried, and in doing so, transforming both itself and the world's understanding of postcolonial sovereignty in Europe.
This article was produced in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute, Ukraine's major cultural and public diplomacy institution, and NGO Cultural Diplomacy Foundation.