Imagine how surprised Russia’s indigenous peoples must be to read that the Global South has decided to show solidarity with Vladimir Putin’s Russia rather than with them, despite their shared struggle. Marina Solntseva takes this contradiction as a starting point to deconstruct the appropriation of decolonial discourse by colonial powers and to ask what it means to be on the left and in solidarity with the oppressed.
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Are authoritarian regimes appropriating decolonial discourse? What is BRICS-Postcolonialism? Have you ever asked yourself these questions? No? A colleague provided useful feedback on why almost no one in Germany wants to hear about decolonization from Russia, Central Asia, and the so-called ‘post-Soviet space.’ He believes that one reason for this is that the public has not yet been explained the basic concepts.
Is an ‘anti-Western narrative’ necessarily anti-colonial?
Just a month ago, at a meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, Vladimir Putin reiterated that Russia had never divided peoples into ‘those who are equal and those who are more equal.’ Also, addressing participants at the inaugural meeting of the international forum of supporters of the fight against modern practices of neocolonialism, ‘For the Freedom of Nations!’, Putin stated that ‘our country has done a lot to destroy the foundations of the colonial system.’
It is simply ridiculous and absurd how Russia continues to espouse Soviet pseudo-internationalist discourses about ‘friendship between peoples’ while in reality continuing to engage in colonial practices, which it has never actually abandoned. Accusing Western countries of colonialism while concealing its own colonial practices is a consistent theme in Putin’s politics and rhetoric, with the actual aim of promoting an ‘anti-Western narrative.’ Although let us not focus solely on Putin himself, and acknowledge that support for broad imperial or colonial ideas is often found even in opposition and Kremlin-critical circles.
However, we must ask ourselves a difficult question here: Why has the agenda on Russia’s colonial policies been blocked in Westerns countries such as Germany for years? How is it possible to use gas from Russia without even asking where it comes from, how it affects the local population, what the indigenous regions within Russia look like, and what colonial practices are used to extract this gas? Even when there were people in Germany who sympathized with this decolonial perspective on the Soviet Union in the 1980s (see: “The destruction of nature in the Soviet Union” by Boris Komarov (1980)), this perspective simply disappeared from the media landscape afterwards. The process of distancing ourselves and building facades likely resembles the experience of using iPhones without considering how the resources are obtained in the Congo.
When I taught a seminar on Russia’s imperial thought and its decolonial critique to students at the Bavarian university, one of the most frequent questions on Russia and decoloniality was: Is this about Russia’s colonies in Africa? No, not in Africa. And colonialism is not always just about Africa, and not just about criticism of the West. All these misconceptions make conversation difficult. Even Audre Lorde traveled to the USSR in 1976 and titled her essay “Notes from a Trip to Russia,” although she actually went to Tashkent, and got caught up in this misleading narrative at the height of Cold War propaganda on both the USSR and US sides (see: “Audre Lorde: through dreams to sobering insights (annotations)” by Kolas, Esakov, Solntseva, 2025). Tereza Hendl and Selbi Durdieva also engage with the figure of Angela Davis, exploring her legacy from the perspectives of societies with lived experience of Russia’s imperialism and colonialism (see: Tereza Hendl and Selbi Durdiyeva, ‘On Collateral Damage, Selective Anti-Imperialism and the Path to Liberation’).
Is there such a thing as ‘leftish’-wing imperialism?
It turns out there is such a thing as ‘leftish’-wing imperialism. Just as there is liberal imperialism (as exemplified by the United States), we can also talk about leftish-wing imperialism (as exemplified by the Soviet Union). In that sense we may argue that no decolonial governments exist, this is simply not possible, decoloniality cannot become a state project. It is also important for us to be able to distinguish between sub-empire and sub-colonialism: the state may be oppressed, and at the same time reproduce practices of oppression towards other communities. We need to acknowledge them as well and criticize them.
Advocating for a left-wing agenda while ignoring the issues facing Indigenous peoples in Russia is a contradiction of left-wing solidarity practices that should be acknowledged. A leftist agenda covered with declarative slogans about ‘friendship between peoples’ or facade-internationalism is similar to propaganda for democracy in a state that is simultaneously complicit in genocidal practices. To be on the left: to show solidarity with those who are oppressed, that may be women*, BIPOC people, migrants, queer people, or people living in a lasting colonial situation.
When decoloniality is an emancipatory struggle from the bottom
Media and knowledge reproduction biases did not emerge from thin air. For years the system of covering Russia’s colonial practices was established, also reflecting itself in language, how we speak about it. For example, when we call non-Russian people ‘minorities,’ we do not question 1) from what perspective we are calling them like this and 2) why do they become such.
While using diminutive language towards them, we take away their agency to be present, visible, active, loud and available for solidarization. Even when the issues facing indigenous peoples in Russia receive media attention, they are often reduced to language or cultural activism. They are either exoticized or demonized, which does not help build translocal solidarity. This creates the perception that ‘something strange and incomprehensible is happening over there.’ On the debates about ‘the great Russian culture we are losing,’ I can only ask: What if ‘Russian culture’ is not ‘Russian’ at all?
When we talk about extractivism, we should remember the Mir crater in the Republic of Sakha, one of the largest holes on the planet, which Russian/Soviet colonialists dug in search of diamonds. Just imagine, Soviet power dried up the whole Aral sea in Central Asia, to amplify the military machine (see: How to Turn a Sea Into Qum*? by Shaxrizoda Ergasheva). Guess what was produced from cotton? No, not clothes, that’s an industrial fairy-tale in the style of ‘we will catch up and overtake.’ And by the way, these factories in Uzbekistan are still operating today, and this gunpowder is being used right now in the war in Ukraine. Then imagine how indigenous people from Russia are surprised, when they read the news, that the Global South chooses to solidarize with Putin’s Russia, ‘in so-called emotions against the West’ or otherwise believing in ‘fake-internationalism and friendship of people,’ and not with them, sharing basically the same struggle (see: Gulnara Shuraleeva, Indigenous Vision).
On fear of talking about the problem
Why did we suddenly find ourselves in a situation where it became difficult to talk about decolonization in the so-called ‘Russian Federation’? I myself witnessed such events when I was invited to moderate round tables in Germany. Before the events I was quietly asked not to say the d-word (decoloniality), because many people don’t understand it, or perhaps consider it controversial, or problematic. It is not only the appropriation of this discourse that is important, it is also the suppression and silencing of the discourse. We need to understand that a decolonial debate does not necessarily lead to secession (independence of a country), and vice versa there are cases when secession happens, but it does not mean the end of the colonial relations.
Now let us consider the responsibility of academia in all these debates. Just imagine: From 1970 to 1980, US universities produced 900 books (roughly 90 per year) in the so-called field of Soviet and Slavic studies (colonial name, of course), and only 3% of them focused on non-Russians. And that was within the Soviet Union! All the other books were devoted to those sitting in the Kremlin or those lying in the mausoleum (See: “Unfinished Empire” by Donnacha Ó Beacháin (2025), p.10). We urgently need a different and accessible archive.
At the same time, 172 organizations in Russia that are engaged in language practices, decolonial work, and often simply fighting everyday racism, have been labelled as ‘terrorist.’ Among them are also media organizations, and this is the first time that media organizations have been labeled as ‘terrorists,’ instead of ‘foreign agents.’ But again, this news hardly made the headlines of European media outlets, and will likely be avoided due to the fear of talking about it.
The ‘narrative trap,’ campism and the ‘emptiness’ of words
While ‘German guilt’ towards the Jewish people has turned into support for genocide, Walter Mignolo’s term ‘epistemic disobedience’ suddenly begins to be applied to Russia’s resistance against the West, in the context of justifying the war in Ukraine. And solidarity with the Global South has turned into Alexander Dugin’s ‘multipolarity.’
All this is accompanied by the attention economy, a new form of exploitation, amplifying the campist problems and building the distance between solidarity groups, rather than connecting them (See: Internationalism, Anti-Imperialism, And the Origins of Campism by Dan La Botz). This narrative trap is often used by ideological propaganda or conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories work in exactly the same way: They create a narrative structure (a kind of grid or cloud) within which there are conflicting opinions, and people can connect with the conspiracy theory in their own way.
Russia’s war against Ukraine is a decolonial issue and cannot be described as ‘epistemic disobedience’ or an ‘attempt to transition to a new world order.’ Colonial practices have not disappeared: They have simply moved from the visible to an invisibilized realm (which is actually even more harmful), and adding prefixes such as neo- or post- will not help us. We need to be able to look for hidden colonialism or something Botakoz Kassymbekova calls “imperial innocence.” How to navigate inside this narrative trap, as well as among terms of postcoloniality, decoloniality, anticoloniality? These words no longer help us. It has become very easy to flip the semantic meaning. Therefore, we need to look not for solidarity behind words, but for solidarity on the ground.
Rather than building chains of solidarity against ‘the empire,’ we should build them around empires. Why does Putin speak to the Global South, but we don’t? ‘Nothing about us without us’ applies here, too. Like litmus paper, the intersection of discourses – queer, feminist, migrant, class, and environmental – helps us avoid appropriation. Decolonial theory can avoid exploitation and find its productive purpose by focusing on practices of solidarity with the oppressed rather than mere declarations.
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