A Brief History of Russian Imperialism – with Donnacha Ó Beacháin
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Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion has once again brought to light an old topic, the cruelty of Russian imperialism, both past and present. In this episode, we explore the major historical periods and defining features of Russian imperialism since the 16th century. This conversation will help you understand that Ukraine's experience is one of the most visible examples, but by no means the only one. You're listening to the Explain Ukraine podcast.

Explaining Ukraine is produced by Ukraine World, an English-language media outlet about Ukraine run by Internet Ukraine. My name is Volodymyr Kirmolenko. I am a Ukrainian philosopher, the chief editor of Ukraine World and the president of PEN Ukraine. My guest today is Donoha Obahoin, an Irish political scientist, professor at Dublin City University and author of the recent book Unfinished Empire, Russian Imperialism in Ukraine and the Near Abroad.

Before we start, let me remind you that you can support our work at patreon.com/UkraineWorld. Your support is crucial as we rely heavily on crowdfunding. You can also support our regular volunteer trips to the frontline areas in Ukraine, where we provide assistance to both soldiers and civilians. Donations are welcome via PayPal at ukraine.resistinggmail.com. So let's begin. Donoha Obaho and welcome to this podcast. Thank you for inviting me, Vladimir.

So it's very interesting to talk to you in particular around your book, which is called Unfinished Empire, Russian Imperialism in Ukraine and the Near Abroad. Tell me about the name first. Why you call it Unfinished Empire? I devoted some thought to coming up with an appropriate title. And what I liked about Unfinished Empire is it encapsulated in a simple phrase the

I think how Russia perceives its own agenda, that it's somehow a truncated country after the collapse of the Soviet Union and that it wants to regain many of those territories which used to be under Kremlin control. And it doesn't have a clear sense of where its international roots.

boundaries or borders are. It just has blurred margins. And, you know, that is, of course, very clear with the current full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But, you know, if you listen to the neighbors, which I try to do in Russia's neighborhood, whether they be in the Baltic states or in Central Asia, the Caucasus, they feel a similar apprehension about Russia's territorial designs and

And of course, there's a whole literature out there of how Russians perceived their place in the world and their history. And of course, we've seen that kind of bombastic version recently on the 9th of May victory parade. So all of this, I think, led me to kind of Unfinished Empire. I liked the idea. I wanted Empire to be in the title.

As you know, Russia tries to avoid the description of being an empire. So I felt it was really important to have empire in the title. But it's not a typical empire because, as you know,

There's many empires in world history. I mean, the Irish know this well, having been an involuntary part of the British Empire. But, you know, you don't find people in Britain nostalgically thinking that they're one day going to get Egypt back or Nigeria or even India, which was the jewel of the empire. They know that that's in the past, whereas in Russia, this is an ambition for the future. And that's where, again, it is an unfinished empire.

That's very interesting because you said that it's an atypical empire in the sense how it looks into the time. But at the same time, we Ukrainians find it difficult to sometimes to go to the people colonized by the West, like you mentioned, people from Africa or people from Asia. I just recently had a conversation with a wonderful Indian journalist and he

This is the point where we tend to disagree because these people are telling us, look, we don't buy this argument that Russia is colonial power, Russia is an empire, because they have in mind their way of, you know, the Brits came to India or the French came to parts of Africa. What would you tell to these people why you think that Russia is an empire?

Well, I would simply say, look at the evidence. I think your explanation of why the Indians don't see it the same way as Ukrainians do, or indeed Irish people do, is well put. I mean, that it's down to their own personal history. There is that old expression that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

So, for example, in Irish history, we often look to Germany as a supporter because Germany was always at war with Britain. We look to France as a supporter. But Germany had territorial ambitions in Europe. France had an empire. And before that, we were looking to Spain, which had a huge empire. But they were another Catholic country. They had a big naval fleet, which was opposed to Britain. So we look to them.

And that's a long way of saying that, you know, people look at the world to the prism of their own national story. And that's what Indians are doing when they look at Russia. And that's what many in Africa are doing. They forget that, you know, Russia not only, you know,

expanded at such a rate, it's unprecedented. On average, between the 16th century, say, to 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist Empire, Russia was growing at an average rate of 80 square kilometers per day, going from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, 11 time zones. You don't do that

you know, from, from the Duchy of Moscow, which was the size of Albania today to the biggest country in the world. You don't do that without, uh, you know, invading your neighbors, uh, you know, taking over the, the, the land of, of, of, of those who are the indigenous people. So it's, um, what, what Russia has done, especially through this kind of memory diplomacy, um,

is try to give a certain view of the Soviet story, which is the one that people can remember in places like India and in Africa. And they've kind of instrumentalized anti-colonialism and misappropriated its language to pursue what is a transparently colonial agenda. So it's kind of laughable, but there you go, that you have someone like Sergei Lavrov doing tours of Africa saying, we've never been involved in colonialism. That's why we're Africa's friend. It's only...

you know, other states in Europe that have been engaged in that. So, you know, but as I demonstrate in the book, I mean, Russia did try to have imperial possessions in Africa in the 19th century. They tried to acquire Abyssinia. That ultimately didn't work out because of the revolution in 1905, which weakened Russia. And of course, Africa was always just

that bit further away and, and more difficult to get to. They had lower hanging fruit in places like Central Asia, uh, and, and, and the Caucasus. But even as late as 1945, uh, after, you know, the defeat of Nazi Germany and, and fascist Italy, Stalin was looking for, uh,

those colonies in Africa, which Germany and Italy had acquired. And he was asking through Molotov, he was asking for colonial possessions. And it was only because the trend of world history was moving towards decolonization

Which is why you see the decolonization of Africa and most of Asia in the 1950s and 60s, that he didn't get those, but he actually sought them. He wanted Libya, for example. They were looking even at Palestine, but they didn't manage to get it. But they've managed to rebrand this failure to extend their empire to Africa as a vindication of their false values.

anti-imperial credentials. Um, but that's what it is. It is false. And even with, you know, when I'm, when I was growing up, you know, the cold war, uh, was, was, was there and people used to look at the Soviet union as Russia. Uh,

Um, they, they, they didn't think of the Uzbeks or the Georgians or the Armenians when they were thinking of, of Russia. And we make the same mistake, of course, today, when we look at Russia, we don't think of the, the many nations, the Chechens, the, the Buryats, the Tuva who have the Bashkirs who over the years have been colonized, defeated and, and, and, and abused. And, and now, as you know, well in Ukraine, I mean, some of those nations are to the forefront.

of Russia's imperial project in Ukraine. So that if you're Buryat, for example, you're much, much more likely to die fighting in Ukraine than if you're, you know, a white Slavic Moscovite. You know, they have kind of recruited these. There's a colonial dynamic even within Russia in how it actually projects its imperial designs abroad.

And it was always the story of empires when you basically used the population of the colonized territories to capture new territories. And it was also the story of Ukrainians, how Ukrainians were used in the Russian Imperial Army on multiple occasions. Let me come back to this question of border and boundaries. Because we see how Russia defines itself. It often defines itself in terms of infinity.

in terms of a country that doesn't have borders, a culture that doesn't have borders, a spirituality that doesn't have borders, etc. So this metaphor of having no borders is very important for Russians. And Putin said repeatedly that Russia doesn't end anywhere. It was a famous public event when a young boy asked him, where does Russia end? And Putin replied, nowhere.

I usually try to explain to this saying that look, Russia indeed built its empire very quickly.

before even building the nation-state. So it's remarkable how it was basically, it based its possessions first in the 15th and early 16th century on conquering the fragments of the Golden Horde of the Mongol Empire. But then it expanded so quickly, as you said, from Moscow to basically to the Pacific. To explain it like that, to explain it also that historically this empire

It is precisely the fact that Russia has not been a nation state and started building its empire, which was very, very dynamic and very expansionist from the very beginning, that it has this expansion drive today.

Well, that's true. And, you know, there are senior figures in the Tsarist administration who make that point as well, who say that, look, it's their destiny. And they appeal to Europeans who have similar, of course, imperial ambitions in their neighborhoods at the time. It's their destiny, for example, to dominate those weaker people. There's this notion of terra nullius, that the kind of the barren land, that there is land there.

out there that is being insufficiently utilized by the fact that there's either nobody living there, uh, usually there is of course, or those peoples are so backward, um, or pagans or whatever that they must be civilized or Christianized. Um, so there is that kind of civilizing mission and, and that kind of pushes them onwards. And the problem is, as, as one veteran Russian foreign minister said in the 19th century, the problem is knowing where to stop. Um,

And really, of course, what that means is that you stop when you meet some kind of resistance after which you can't go any further. So for Russia, for example, that meant essentially when they met the Chinese kind of in the southeast, that was kind of the expansion stopped going south. But they kept going until the Pacific Ocean. Of course, they went onwards to the Americas. I mean, it's.

largely forgotten now, of course, but, uh, you know, Alaska of course used to be part of the, uh, the Russian empire and, uh, California, California until 1841, you had Fort Ross. Um, but you know, Alaska in, in classic Imperial fashion, um,

the land of Alaska and the people who lived in it were sold for $7 million to the Americans in 1867. And so there was no, you know, respect for the local cultures, the people they met. And those who resisted, they were treated extraordinarily harshly. Again, the notion was by, you know, put forward by Russian generals at the heart, or you hit these kind of

barbarians, as they called them, you know, the quieter they would be and that you saved Russian lives in particular by killing as many people as possible because it kind of quietened down any temptations towards resistance. And so that's why so many different parts of, you know,

the Russian empire have these kind of bitter memories, which are now being told often for the first times after the Soviet collapse. I mean, one of the things that struck me is that how the Russian Academy of Sciences commissioned a huge investigative work recently on how Russia's perceived in the textbooks of peoples in Central Asia and in Azerbaijan. And to its,

surprise, astonishment, and fear. They claimed that Russophobia was being promoted in the school books of these countries because, you know, amazingly, they didn't see the Russian Empire as a progressive force which brought civilization, that it was acquiring land through violence and destroying languages and people. So,

You know, this is another story as well as about how people remember. It goes back to your question about the Indians looking at Russian history. I mean, there's such a battle going on about history and the history of the Russian Empire. And that was another reason that motivated me to kind of put that large section aside.

at the beginning of the book to contextualize where we've got to, because there is that tendency, of course, as you know, to try and see everything through the prism of 2022 or 2014 or even 1991, 1992. But, you know, the Russian empire has been, you know, something that has been going on for centuries. There's a long historical pattern. What we're seeing today is not an aberration. You know, the eraser of national identities, silencing of languages, you

subjugation of entire peoples, all in the service of empire. This is something that has been going on for centuries. And as I also argue, I mean, it didn't end as many people think it did with the Soviet Union. What we see is it taking on new forms. And Ukraine, of course, knows that well because it's bearing the full weight of that kind of revenge, irredentist kind of Russian imperialism. Tell me about the role of violence, because we Ukrainians, of course, know how violent Russians can be.

But we very often focus on our history and you show in your book how violence was really a pattern of this imperial expansion. So you, for example, tell a story about the battle for the Caucasus and the genocide of what Russians were calling Cherkessians.

which are mostly people, Adygeans, as I correctly remember. And you say that over the 90%, 95% of these people in this region are

were either killed or were forced to leave their land to emigrate to the Ottoman Empire. So only about 5% has stayed. And you also described the battles in Central Asia which were very, very cruel and lots of mass killings and genocide. Tell me more about this, about the role of violence in this expansion.

Sure. And I guess I benefited from the fact that I've lived for a couple of years in the Caucasus and for a couple of years in Central Asia. So these were kind of passed down to me over the years. And then I did my own kind of independent research. I was always struck, for example, by meeting the descendants of Crimean Tatars in...

in Central Asia and their stories about how their grandparents usually had been forced to leave during the course of one weekend in 1944 and just simply uprooted. You know, that kind of idea of having an enemy people, not just a person being an enemy of the people, but an entire nation being an enemy of the state, of the empire, was remarkable. And the Caucasus in Central Asia were

places of, yeah, particular, uh, brutality. I mean, they've been trying to conquer the caucuses, um, which is sometimes referred to as the mountain of languages because it's so diverse, so heterogeneous, so many people, so many languages. Um, you know, they've been trying to, to capture that since Ivan the fourth in the 1550s, it took them three centuries. So this wasn't an overnight success. Um, but they, they were particularly brutal and eliminationist. I mean, where they couldn't absorb or assimilate, uh,

they simply, uh, executed, uh, entire peoples or sent them into exile. So you mentioned the Circassians, that's a particularly sad case. Of course, they, uh, they were living, uh, in the area around what is now Sochi, of course, a Russian resort. Um, and they were particularly strong in defending their, their, their liberties and their lands. They appealed to the international community. This is an old story, sent out delegations to London and to Turkey, but, uh,

Ultimately, they were removed, 97% of the population essentially, and large amounts died in passage to the Ottoman Empire. A similar fate kind of awaited the Kabardines. They were 350,000 strong at the beginning of the 19th century, and about 90% were wiped out

in the course of little more than a generation. A lot of this, of course, happens during the Caucasus Wars, which are generally considered to be between 1817 and 1864. And you have to imagine then that kind of counterfactual. What would the history of the Caucasus have been like had the Russians not intervened? I mean...

People speculate that the Circassian population in the Caucasus would be something in the region of 30 million people today. So you would have had a nation in the Caucasus, 30 million strong, if the Circassians hadn't been invaded, occupied and expelled and killed by the Russian Empire.

In Central Asia, you had that additional kind of... In the Caucasus, people were always considered to be barbarians. Interesting as well that in recent times, people like Zhirinovsky and even Alexei Navalny referred to people from the Caucasus as cockroaches.

Back then, of course, they were seen as heathens, barbarians, even though, of course, some of them were Christians. This was the irony that the Russians sometimes used religion as a reason for invading, even though some of the nations that were being invaded had already adopted Christianity. But in Central Asia, they had, of course, a variety of factors. These were Asiatic peoples. There was certainly that notion of racial hierarchies. This was very much the white man's burden.

and again coming to barren lands. But they actually were very densely populated places in Central Asia. You had the Khanates of Samarkand and Bukhara and Kiva. And of course, they were driven by the desire for raw materials, particularly cotton, which is still, of course, a big factor in the Central Asian economies, the so-called white gold. So they, you know, there were massacres. Like the last bloody stand of Central Asians occurs in what's now Turkmenistan in 1881 with the Teke tribe, as many as 20,000 people

men, women and children are killed. And of course, those that survive are considered the spoils of victory. And then you have a large scale colonization. You get, you know, Russians moving from Western Europe, not Western Europe, but the Western part of the empire to Central Asia. They're given land and that builds up a lot of tension because, of course, they're they're they're

exploiting the local population. And you have this huge uprising in 1916 during World War I, where 3,000 settlers are killed by very Central Asian groups who are acting in an uncoordinated fashion. But the

The violence that's meted out in response is really apocalyptic for the people who are living there. As many as 270,000 Central Asians were killed in a very short space of time. The Kyrgyz, in particular, it's estimated that as many as 40% of the Kyrgyz population were killed. And of course, they were mainly men, which led to a demographic crisis. And as I was saying about the Turkassians, I mean, the Kyrgyz population was

could possibly be double its current size were it not for these kind of genocidal attacks a century ago. And there's a certain kind of sad irony. I mean, we see it with the current regime in Chechnya, but there are some, there are many people in Central Asia, I know this well, who are so Russified, who've so internalized the imperial project that they

They have kind of an affection for Russia or they have a respect for Russia or they have an understanding for Russia. That's really difficult to reconcile with how brutally their ancestors were treated in the past. I mean, you might remember that Volodymyr Zelensky had to admonish the Kyrgyz president early on after the full scale invasion for comments that he made, which were obviously somewhat supportive of the Russian position.

It's all part, I think, of, again, that kind of, as I said, internalization of colonialism, which we had in Ireland as well. I mean, the vast majority of people in Ireland speak English. A lot of people in Central Asia and the Caucasus speak Russian. But they've also, by virtue of that, they've lost touch with their own histories by losing their own languages. And they sometimes try to therefore imitate the colonizer and see that as kind of a benchmark of progress.

This is also something that's common to colonial projects throughout the world. So even though they've suffered and suffered harshly because of the violence that your question implies, it's not always fully understood, even in those countries themselves.

Yeah, it was not always understood in Ukraine. It's never fully understood in Belarus. And of course, because there are lots of practices of this erasing the memory. Interesting that you said how Russians are trying to portray the nations they're trying to colonize.

as less civilized and of course we see the echo of the typical 18th and 19th century European colonialism which was based upon this idea of civilization versus barbarism. But the paradox is that the lands that Russia was colonizing were very often the lands where there were high culture and much more earlier than culture in Russia. Like Ukraine is a typical example because

Ukraine, if you take the Northern Black Sea and its integration into the ancient Greek culture and of course the Christianity comes through Kyiv

in the 10th century and only afterwards it goes further north to the present Russian territories. If you take the Caucasus, Christianity was much earlier in the Caucasus, in Armenia for example, right, or in Georgia than it was in Russia. Maybe we can say even 1000 years earlier. If we take Central Asia, well,

When we ask for example where the great thinkers like Avicenna were living, they were living in the current, in particular in the Kavita Uzbekistan or Tajikistan. So it's this interesting, and of course it also relates to how the British were colonizing India while they were going into a very, very old and profound and sophisticated civilization.

But let me ask a question about the periodization. If you were asked just to have a brief history of Russian expansionism, like how it all evolved and what stages it had and what backs and forth it had, what story would you tell me?

Well, I would say it starts around the duchy of Moscow, as I was saying, and you have the first czar, of course, Ivan IV, better known as Ivan the Terrible, his kind of early achievements in expanding. Then you have going to... You have the time of troubles, of course, that comes not long afterwards. It's worth kind of emphasising that because it's an important part of kind of the Russian...

So it's 16th century. Yeah, essentially when Theodore dies without an heir in 1598 and you have the Polish invasion as well. And the message is...

you know, when they create this kind of strong Romanov dynasty is that, you know, and it's a mantra that's kind of preserved by all their successors, is that you need a strong authoritarian government to protect you from invasion and anarchy. That pluralism essentially leads to volatility and that can be exploited by external foes. So, you know, once you have the Romanov dynasty in place at the beginning of the 17th century, that also, of course, is something that facilitates imperial expansion and

I mentioned to you, of course, Siberia. I mean, that's kind of something that the Russians moved through Siberia throughout the 17th century. You know, by 1647, for example, they've already reached Lake Baikal. Shortly after that, they're at what we now call the Bering Strait, separating what is now Russia from Alaska. And

you know, it's a very kind of going back to our thing about violence. I mean, it's, it's a very sad tale. Of course, the, the peoples that they meet in places like Alaska, uh, 90% of the population, uh, are gone within a generation and it's driven completely by the desire for, you know, furs and skins pellets, which make up a huge part of the czars revenue. Um,

but, uh, they completely exploit the people. They, they, they send out the men to, to capture these animals, give them quotas, which are unrealizable, ever dwindling numbers. And then they, the women are staying at home and they're sexually exploited. And then when they've exploited that village beyond the point where no further profit can be made, they move on to the next one. So it's, it's, it's a very sad tale throughout much of Siberia. And, and, uh, as I said, I kind of can include a North America in, in, in that tale. Uh, and then you have, um,

The big kind of next punctuation mark, you might say, in the Russian imperial narrative is Peter I, who is, of course, Russia's most celebrated czar and is known to Russians, at least, as Peter the Great. I mean, his victory over the Swedes at Poltava in 1709 was,

puts Russia into the premier league of imperial powers. Um, they now are kind of firmly embedded in, in Europe because up until that point, really their big successes had been in Asia. Um, so you might say indeed their place at the European table is kind of brought, uh, by virtue of, of their acquisitions in, in, in Asia. Um, they're not particularly militarily successful in these advances. This is an old Russian story as well. It's their numerical superiority, um,

you know, in denying the use of capture territory, this kind of tactic of destroy and retreat that kind of allows them to defeat their enemy, Sweden,

in particular, Poltav in 1709. So they then begin to marry into the European dynasties. They get a kind of a better class of spouse for their progeny. And Peter the Great, therefore, is remembered with particular affection in Russia. He's cited regularly, of course, by Putin. I mean, only a few months after Russia's full-scale invasion, Putin, you know, referred to Peter the Great. And he was saying that, look, you know, the territory that he acquired at the time had never really been

you know, acknowledged as Russian, but he took it and now it is Russian. So there's kind of a lesson there that, you know, we just go and take what we think is ours. And ultimately the rest of the world will come around to acknowledging that fact. After that, of course, you have the movements under Catherine the Great into, you know,

into Eastern Europe, into Ukraine, into Poland, into Belarus, the partitions, of course, in Poland, which wiped Poland off the map for 123 years. That's particularly challenging for the reasons that you give. I mean, the populations that they are defeating and absorbing are more educated. They are, you know, therefore very, very...

susceptible to the kind of revolutionary sentiments in Europe, particularly around 1848. There are various uprisings in kind of Poland, Belarus, Ukrainian territory in the 1830s. Very interestingly as well, and I quote this in the book, is Alexander Pushkin admonishing French society

in his poem after the Tsar suppresses the Polish rising of 1830-31. And I mention this because it was one thing that struck me when I started living in the post-Soviet Union was how the image and the statues of Pushkin were everywhere. And people sometimes say, oh, you know, you shouldn't be attacking Pushkin. This is kind of

He's a writer. He's not hard Russian power. But it's interesting how his sentiments really echo with how Russia projects itself today. So he admonishes the French for supporting the Polish. And he says that, look, you know, this is a domestic squabble. You know, what's going on with the Lithuanians and the Ukrainians and Belarusians, this is just between ourselves. We are all part of the same Slavic family. This is an ancient quarrel which you have nothing to do with. And there's plenty of room for your graves in Russia should you decide to come and help Russia.

So, you know, he was essentially saying that the Russian river would dry up without the Slavonic streams of Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians. And that's something that's an important part, I think, of Russia's official narrative, that it's not acquiring new territories. You have this notion of Russia colonizing itself, that it's essentially all the parts of Russia today and indeed the parts that it has ambitions in,

are rightfully theirs. And you can date that back to things like the writings of Alexander Pushkin in the 19th century. Then, of course, you have the move south. They've been trying for some years to acquire territories in the south. Of course, the need for warm water ports,

Crimea, of course, is a big prize here. And finally, as you know, Catherine the Great seizes that in 1783. So around the same time she's partitioning Poland, she's acquiring Crimea. And, you know, you know this story, of course, better than I, but it reverses, of course, the whole...

Crimean Khanate, which has existed for centuries. And they bring Russian settlers. And of course, Ukrainians, of course, move into Crimea as well. And there is this notion, of course, that again, the people that have been uprooted were an inferior people. But what's interesting to me, and I don't think a lot of people realize this, is that, you know, the Russians only became a majority,

a numerical majority in the Soviet census of 1959. And that was after, of course, the Crimean Tatars had been moved to Uzbekistan, as I mentioned earlier. So then they constituted 71% of the population, according to the census. But, you know, there is this kind of, you sometimes hear it again in the Russian historical narrative, that this is kind of an almost an ancient Russian territory,

when it's within the lifetime of many when Russians became the greater number in the peninsula. So that goes back, though, again to the 18th century. And it's at that time when Crimea is transformed in the kind of Russian imagination from some kind of exotic outpost to an integral part of the empire.

And then there's that ill-fated quest to acquire territory in Africa, which I mentioned. Abyssinia, it doesn't work out. Instead, they go for the Caucasus and Central Asia, which I've already discussed. So really, the 18th and 19th centuries is largely about moving into those territories. And as I said, we've already discussed those at great length, so I won't revisit that. And then we kind of bring ourselves up to the

The collapse of the Russian Empire, I mean, you have that one census in 1897 where it demonstrates that the Russian Empire is now 23 million square kilometers and 125 million people. Russians are not a majority in the empire. They're only 44 percent, or Russian speakers rather. They don't actually ask people their nationality. They ask what language they speak.

Ukrainians, or they don't actually say Ukrainian language, of course, it's little Russian, as far as I remember. They make up 18%. Poles are 6%. So it's a very multi-ethnic empire, despite the fact that it's the Russian Empire. And that has even expanded further. There's a huge...

you know, rise in the birth rate in the early 20th century. So by the time of the Bolshevik coup in 1917, the population has risen to about 170 million, of whom about 30 are Ukrainians. And when, you know, we're onto the Soviet period, and that's a particularly, of course, important period because it's seen as a complete break from the czarist

enterprise. And of course, in terms of the socioeconomic system and guiding ideology, there is a difference. There's no question there. But in terms of its hyper-centralized dictatorship and its imperial objectives, there's a huge amount of continuity between the Kremlin rule of the Soviet Union and its Tsarist predecessor. And indeed, under Joseph Stalin's

the Kremlin is dominating more territory than at any time in Russian history. I mean, it moves further west. It moves as far as, as you know, Berlin and Czechoslovakia. And you have that notion that

after, you know, there's a chaotic breakup of the empires there was in 1917, the natural thing to do is to acquire those territories as quickly as possible. So after the Bolshevik Revolution, of course, as you know, there's a Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, a large amount of territory is lost, but it's quickly regained. They reinvade Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, come a generation later. You know, Bessarabia is taken and becomes part of Soviet Moldova. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, you get a kind of similar notion of,

that we're going to get that territory back quickly. This is a truncated state.

And we know that these are not natural boundaries and that the natural boundaries of Russia, as we've already discussed, are not clearly defined, but we know that it's not what they are now. And we're going to try and get back as much as we can as quickly as we can. I know that's a long answer to your question, but of course, it is a big question about Russia's history. It's one that spans five centuries and it's one, as we know, that's ongoing. But it's a very, very brief and brilliant history of Russia and

imperialism. So thank you for doing that. I'm glad that you mentioned Pushkin because it's quite a difficult task for Ukrainians right now to prove to our colleagues around the world that, let's say, Russian culture and Russian literature is not innocent. It doesn't mean that it is guilty of

Russian imperialism, but it's certainly not innocent. And when I read this poem of Pushkin, "Klevitnikam Rossi" to the slanderers of Russia that you quoted, it really strikes me how basically you can see Putin's rhetoric as repeating it, while what Pushkin was thinking about the Poles, now Putin is really applying to Ukrainians.

Let me ask you this thing: when I think about different types of imperialism and colonialism,

I think of two major strategies. One strategy I would call the strategy of racism where you say that I'm the colonizer, you're the colonized, you are inferior than me, you're barbaric, I'm civilized and you're from a different race therefore biologically you will never become as civilized as me and therefore you will be always inferior than me.

And it's imperialism by difference, by creating an insurmountable difference. While there is another type of imperialism and it is more present in the continental empires, not maritime empires.

And this is an imperialist bias simulation when the colonizer says to the colonized, you are the same as me, you are basically the same, you have no right to be different and therefore you should be the same, you should be approaching me. So it's not the idea of difference which is the tool of colonization but the idea of sameness. And it is certainly this idea that was applied by Russians to Ukrainians and to Belarusians

Slavic people to the Poles as well. But I have the feeling that it is also applied to, let's say, non-Slavic nations. And there is kind of this interplay between the racism that you mentioned, which is clearly present with regard to the

Asian people with regard to Central Asia, with regard to Siberian people and others, and with regard to Caucasian people. So there is a clear element of racism, but there is also this element of assimilation, and the major vehicle of this assimilation is language. So basically the Russians are saying, look, if you speak Russian, you can write in the passport that you're Russian, and that's it. So this logic of assimilation is...

no less important than the logic of racism. How would you place these two logics in the history of Russian imperialism? Well, there's a lot to unpack there, Vladimir, and it's a fascinating question. And I do kind of touch on those issues in the introductory chapter, saying that there were different ways that the Russian Empire expanded and assimilated and invaded. And

Some of it was eliminationist, as we discussed with the Jercassians, for example, but much of it was assimilationist in a very pernicious way. Indeed, one would argue almost the most pernicious way. It reminds me a little bit of the current...

inhumane, outrageous actions that are being taken where children are being kidnapped from Ukraine and taken to Russia and re-socialized, to use the euphemism, so that they become young patriotic Russians completely divorced from their own families and cultures and backgrounds and histories and indeed languages.

So imagine this on a society, that's on an individual level, but imagine it on a societal level. That's essentially what we have for a lot of the Russian Empire. In Central Asia, you're right, that kind of racial dynamic is always there. And as we know, there's a lot of racism in Russia today. Central Asians are looked down upon. They're viewed as cheap labor, menial workers. They're disposable. They're treated appallingly. And I know I have so much, you know, you might say information gathered on this subject, having lived in Central Asia over the years. But

as I mentioned, they are quite Russified in large part. So they become Russified without becoming Russian, which is a particular limbo to be in. So they'll never be fully accepted as Russian. But at the same time, they've divorced themselves from the only place they can really be at home, which is their own culture. And even in places like Kazakhstan, and I always noted that there was as much a division between Russophone ethnic Kazakhs

and and those kazakhs who only spoke kazakh or kazakh was their first language as there was between often russians who were ethnic russians who had been born in kazakhstan um i i mentioned some of the the the writers that are relevant to this and i try and reclaim them because you know again russia has tried to put it out there that it's not an imperial nation and it's tried to there it it gains some currency particularly in left-wing circles in politics in western european countries so

I quote people like Paulo Freire, for example, and how he talks about how the invading power alienates people, the invaded, from the spirit of their own culture and from themselves. And that the more the invader succeeds, the invaded wants to talk like the invader and to walk like them. And in that sense, imitation is the highest form of imperialism. When you not only colonize the territory, but you colonize the mind.

And that's something that Franz Fanon, for example, mentions in his seminal work, Black Skins, White Masks, which you can certainly apply to Ukraine. Because in the case of Black Skins, White Masks, I mean, he's saying that, look, you know, people in Africa were, despite their black skins, trying to act like the white colonizer. But of course, there was always that obstacle there.

that they could never change their skin color. But in a country like Ukraine, as you rightly hint at, or indeed in Ireland when it came to English, you could make that leap from being colonized to being some kind of accepted part of the regime if you just simply change language.

So you were no longer speaking this backward bumpkin language of Ukrainian or Irish, as the case may be, or Kazakh. By speaking Russian, the imperial language, you could potentially rise to the ranks. I mean, the world was your oyster. I mean, Russian was the only language that you could travel throughout the Russian Empire, or indeed the Soviet Union, without having to learn any other. So if you were a native Russian speaker, that was great for you. But every other nation had to learn Russian if they wanted to have any chance of

of similar success. And so it is there, but the Russians never really, I think, understand what it's like to be in that situation. They have this notion again of,

Russia colonizing itself so that it's one happy kind of imperial family. It's just that these nations that had been conquered, they didn't realize that they were destined to be Russian before they were invaded. And that's why we have, you know, not only colonialism, but we have now as well neocolonialism

And you see Russia policing its neighborhood, you know, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Estonia, and looking at how Russian is taught in schools, how Russia is presented in textbooks. And if Russian isn't given an elevated status within the schools, or if Russia is perceived to be a hostile force in the textbooks, this is considered to be evidence of Russophobia. When as we know,

All evidence demonstrates that it's Russia has a lot of phobias about its neighbors and its inability to accept them as fully sovereign states that can determine their own destinies and interpret their own histories and pasts and cultures in their own way. I mean, Russia, it seems, never feels secure unless its soldiers are on both sides of the border. And that's, again, bringing us back to the core problem of where we find ourselves today.

That's very interesting what you say about this imitating and imitation as a tool of imperialism. That's really something very important to reflect upon.

Tell me how you perceive the situation right now, because definitely all these things are playing out right now. And we can say that Russia is not only unfinished empire, but a revanchist empire. It wants to reestablish its empire and not necessarily the Soviet Union, because for Putin, the Soviet Union is a step back. And he said this numerous times. And you rightly said that, you know, at the beginning of the Soviet Union, at least Russia

Lenin was trying to play this idea of self-determination of nations. And of course, it was all cancelled by Stalin starting from 1929 and especially 1930. So what would you say about Russian imperial ambitions now? We have talked about the 18th century and it seems that the war against Ukraine is an attempt to return to this 18th century, to the epoch of Catherine II.

And if this is true, then I'm always telling this to the Europeans, like you should be very worried about the Baltics, because if Putin wants to implement the Catherine II project of conquering the Black Sea region, the northern Black Sea, then the next project is the Baltics, which was basically conquered by the Peter I at the beginning of the 18th century.

And then, of course, the Caucasus and the Central Asia that you described, the story of the 19th century. So we have seen it already on Georgia, and we might see it on Armenia, for example. What about Central Asia? So should we be worried about the fact that

Russia's war against Georgia and then against Ukraine can be just the beginnings of a much bigger project of re-imperialization of this region. What would you say?

Again, there's a lot to unpack there. And just before I address that, just one addition to what I said earlier about imitation. I just thought of afterwards about the whole issue of names and how important names are. And there's a wonderful Irish play, for example, that I would recommend people look up called Translations. And it's the period in the 19th century when the English military come first, they conquer the territory, and then they start renaming the territory.

And people are not only being alienated from their own languages, but they're even being alienated from the places that they live in because now it has a new name. And this is something I think people in Ukraine will identify well, because there is that kind of battle of the names and what you call things. And that also extends if you go to places like Central Asia to surnames.

And there's been that process in recent years of de-Russifying names. We've even seen that at the elite level. Somebody like the president of Tajikistan, dictator as he is, Rachmanov, as he was before, has been for many years now Rachman. And I've noticed that with a lot of people I know in Central Asia, that they're reclaiming their names.

that were, you know, they were imposed with these Russian endings. And so it's not only place names, but also, as I said, the names of people. And that's part of the resistance, you might say, to the colonial project, which I find quite inspiring in many respects. And we've seen, again, happen in Ireland as well. So it's one thing that having lived in the periphery, you might say, of Ireland,

Russia or the Russian Empire for many years. I lived in Georgia and Moldova and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and places like that. I've always been struck by the kind of commonalities between their own kind of anti-imperial struggles and those of my own native Ireland. But going to your question about how much we should fear

you know, Russia and it's, it's, you know, it should be taken at its word that it's, it's kind of trying to relive the greatness of Peter the first and Catherine the second. And I, I think that we have to judge Russians and the Kremlin by its words and by its actions. You know, I mean, Putin has been saying for many years, for example, that Ukraine was an artificial nation and an artificial state and,

I remember talking to, for example, Stefan Fule, the EU commissioner for enlargement, who was in the room in 2008 at the NATO summit when, you know, Putin said that, look, you know, what is Ukraine? Ukraine was looking for NATO membership at the time. He was saying, look, half of it was kind of taken from Poland, half of it we donated ourselves. It's not a real state. It's not a real nation.

And Stefan Fule says, you know, the room was kind of like stunned into silence and we didn't know whether he was joking or whether he was serious. But now we know, you know, years later after what we've seen from 2014 onwards that he wasn't joking, that he meant what he said. And every time that Russia, I mean, you have to imagine as well that before the invasion of Ukraine in 2014, on the other hand,

Putin was on record as saying that he had no territorial designs in Ukraine, that he respected Ukrainian territorial integrity, no ambitions in Crimea. So Russia lies. That's it. I mean, like it's when it comes to the Budapest memorandum, you know this again as much as I. I mean, Ukraine gave up its its nuclear weapons in return for security guarantees from Russia, which were not honored.

So even when Russia says it doesn't have territorial ambitions, we have to be wary. We have to listen to the neighbors. This is one thing that we never do enough of. We don't listen to people in the Baltic states or in the Caucasus or Central Asia when they express their fears about Russia. We wait until something happens. I say by we, I mean people in the European Union and in the West generally. And then, of course, it's usually too late. I

I remember, for example, visiting in Estonia in 1992, six months after the Soviet Union collapsed, and the sense of euphoria that existed. People never thought they would see this day coming. And of course, even a year or two before, it seemed very unlikely. And they'd already just introduced their currency, the Kroon, and their new constitution. And now you can feel a generation later, here we are in 2025, that

People are beginning to wonder, you know, are they back to where they were in the late 1930s? You know, they had already got a generation of independence after World War I, but the Russians came back and they retook Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and condemned them to two generations of Soviet occupation.

You know, you look at how the debates in Finland and Sweden somersaulted overnight. I mean, Sweden, I mean, we are also in Ireland traditionally a neutral country for various reasons. Sweden was two centuries a neutral country and it completely changed its position and joined NATO overnight because of its fears of Russian expansionism. Finland, similarly, Finlandization was a synonym for being neutral because of having a strong, powerful neighbor who you didn't want to provoke. And again,

they changed that debate overnight after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. So, you know, we...

It's not even a matter of what I think Putin will do or Russia will do in the neighborhood. We have to listen to what people in the neighborhood think. Moldova has completely changed its national security strategy. I mean, in the early 2000s, Russia was described as one of many potential partners for Moldova. Now its new national security strategy describes Russia as an existential threat, which Moldova has to seek partners with to contain.

Moldova, of course, has applied to join the European Union, as has Ukraine. So we have to be worried about Russia. And the question is then is what can be done about Russia? I mean, whether there's some way of living with Russia. And unfortunately, I don't see how there can be any sustainable, enduring resolution with Russia.

with the current type of regime in Russia. Russia has to be, in that sense, defeated. I mean, Russia has had many chances of reforming itself. I mean, you have 1917 as a seminal one, but it reverted to a new authoritarian template in the form of the Soviet Union. It had a similar chance in 1991.

And after a brief experiment with all sorts of chaotic political measures and economic measures, it reverted again back to the authoritarian template under Vladimir Putin and imperial expansion. So one can only hope that Russia will get an opportunity, and of course, military defeat would be the best way to secure that, to go.

go on a different trajectory. Because what is Russian history when we look at it? We've discussed this during this podcast. Russian history is long periods of authoritarian rule, and I'm using that very euphemistically, but long periods of authoritarian rule punctuated by brief times of troubles, as they euphemistically call it. And that's when you have the possibility of something else, but they always revert back to the authoritarian template. And

I don't want to sound too pessimistic because I don't want to say that we're condemned to live with this adversarial expansionist Russia. It's possible, and I've seen it in my lifetime, where things can change very quickly for the better. I was in East Germany in 1989. As a student, I don't want to overestimate how are people to think that I'm in my 70s or something like that. I was a young student at the time, but I was lucky enough to get there as part of a collective trip. And I remember meeting with the, you know,

young leaders and whatnot. And they were convinced that East Germany was the best country, the best regime that had been there for 40 years. And it was going to endure for much longer.

And then a few months later, the Berlin Wall was penetrated and the whole regime came tumbling down. And then there was a domino effect throughout all of Eastern Europe or most of Eastern Europe or a lot of Eastern Europe. And regime after regime came tumbling down very quickly, which had seemed very secure a short time before. So my hope is that we'll see something similar with Russia. I mean, because, of course, Putin has taken a huge gamble with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Because dictators, their rule depends on

the perception that they're invulnerable, that they enjoy a monopoly of force. And war is unpredictable. And the way that this war ends will determine a lot of different realities, not just for, of course, Ukraine, which is most important, but also for Europe generally and for Russia. And that's why, again, it's so vital that Russia does not emerge from this conflict with a victory, but it has to be defeated. And that may lead to, as I said, more fundamental change in Russia, which would be good for everyone, not least Russians.

Absolutely. I agree with you that the history of Russia is a history of long decades of consolidation and very short days of collapse. And this happened numerous times because basically the system, which is based upon cruelty, upon violence, upon strict verticality, if this vertical axis is gone, nothing can hold it.

My last question, Donoha. It's probably a personal one. How does your Irish identity help you understand better Russian imperialism? I do think it gives me

A different insight. I know that from talking to Americans and British and French, you know, because they have their own imperial histories. And, you know, we see this even with the elevation of Donald Trump in the United States. And let's face it, a lot of Americans voted for him and the way that he seems to have this kind of.

common way of speaking with Putin, this common way of looking at the world. Look at how he's threatening Denmark over Greenland and threatening Canada and threatening Panama. And Putin threatens his neighbors. This is kind of the symptomatic of a big country mentality, a country that has this kind of imperial attitude. When you come from a small country as I do, you look at the world very differently. You know that in the jungle, you'll be the first to be eaten. You don't want a Darwinian international order.

you want international law because international law is your only security. It's one of the reasons why the Irish are the most enthusiastic about the European Union, because the European Union is a club. We have equal rights. We have our commissioner. We have international law. And that is the best deal a small nation, a small state can get. And we know what it means to be invaded. We know what it means to lose our language effectively. The Irish language is still taught in schools today.

But we know that there's a certain point beyond which a revival seems unlikely. That's where, I mean, Ukrainian language is so much stronger in Ukraine, even though I know there are worries about it in some quarters. But in Ireland, we've gone, I think, past the...

the stage where we could realistically revive the language on a par with English. And therefore, we don't wish that upon anybody else. I mean, of course, it is an advantage to speak the English language. Don't get me wrong, but we didn't have to lose our own language to acquire English. Look at the Swedes, you look at the Danes, you look at the Dutch. They are completely bilingual.

And there was a lot of violence. Our population in Ireland was almost twice what it is now 150 years ago. Imagine, I mean, our population was almost the same as England 150 years ago. England is now almost 60 million people. Ireland is about 6 million people. That was because, again, of the economic subordination, the political subordination, the military subordination of Ireland. So when I first moved to Georgia in 2000, 25 years ago now,

I immediately found myself able to appreciate the debates that were taking place

about language, about culture, about religion, about separatism, about how to deal with the neighboring imperial power. And, you know, I, as I said, lived in Central Asia as well. And I found, you know, again, the same types of debates. And my sympathies, I have to say, were immediate and obvious. I was always going to be on the side of the smaller nation against the larger nation and always on the side of those who were trying to

you know, progressively advance cultural rights, or rights of all kinds, against those who would like to impose their own vision of the world. And so, no, I think it definitely has played a major part. And not just for me, I should say. I mean, I think I was surprised because I always had an interest in Ukraine and in what's generally called, and I know a lot of people don't like the expression, post-Soviet space,

and I understand why they don't like it. We're trying to find substitutes. But what I was surprised was how instinctively Irish people reacted to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. My daughter, for example, who's recently passed 12, so she was nine when the Russians invasion, she got a sewing machine and she started making Ukrainian flags. We couldn't buy any Ukrainian flags in Ireland. They just didn't exist. We didn't even have any Ukrainians in Ireland.

And so she started sewing lots and lots of these flags. And I remember just going to the university, just trying to raise some money and selling the flags.

I mean, I made, I'm not exaggerating, I made €5,000 from saving the flags within a week just from what we made at home and sent them on to a place in Poland which was looking after Ukrainian refugees. But just the willingness of people to contribute, the emotional reaction, it wasn't rational. I mean, people, of course, it's one thing to see a nation invaded, but people felt that they were

they could empathize on an emotional level. And I think that you can only do that if you have some sense of what people are experiencing. I think that comes from our colonial history. We know what it's like. And to see it happening in real time in Europe in the 21st century, it really did shock people. And now approximately 2% of the Irish population is Ukrainian.

You know, there's a lot of Ukrainians have found homes in Ireland. Of course, many will go back. I wouldn't be surprised. I'd love to live in Ukraine myself. But but many will stay. They've they've already, you know, it's and I think it's I don't want to say it's a positive, but I don't. It's it's something that certainly has emerged that Ireland and Ukraine are much better connected now than they were before the war. Of course, we would love if that had happened without the war.

But I think there's a bond there now between Ireland and Ukraine, which I don't think will ever break. And it wouldn't have happened. And it happened very quickly, as I said, because of this. There were visa restrictions, for example, for Ukrainians to visit Ireland before the war. They were immediately lifted and they'll never be put back. You know, I mean, it's and I think that when the war concludes and I hope it concludes sooner rather than later, of course, I think we're going to see a lot of that interaction flourish again.

as well. And there's a real foundation there. And of course, we're hoping that Ukraine will be in the European Union as a partner for Ireland in the near future as well. So yeah, again, a very long, meandering, discursive answer to your question about whether being Irish has influenced my approach to these things. I would say absolutely. I think it would be impossible for it to be otherwise. Donnachal Bachoyn, thank you so much for this conversation. You're welcome, Vladimir. Thanks very much for the invitation.

This was a podcast explaining Ukraine by Ukraine World, an English language media outlet about Ukraine. My name is Volodymyr Yermolenko. I'm a Ukrainian philosopher and journalist, chief editor of Ukraine World and the president of PEN Ukraine. My guest today was Donoha Obahoin, an Irish political scientist, professor at Dublin City University and author of the recent book, Unfinished Empire, Russian Imperialism in Ukraine and the Near Abroad.

You can support our work at patreon.com/UkraineWorld. Your support is crucial as we rely heavily on crowdfunding. You can also support our regular volunteer trips to frontline areas in Ukraine, where we provide assistance to both soldiers and civilians. Donations are welcome via PayPal at ukraine.resistinggmail.com. Stay with us and stand with Ukraine.