When Empire Does Not Atone: The Case of Russia

Catalog description

The seminar will introduce students to the imperial legacy context of Russia’s aggression against its neighbors that culminated in an all-out invasion of Ukraine attempted in February 2022 and now transformed into the largest-scale war on Europe since WWII. -The mainstream media discourse about the motives for the ongoing atrocities evolves between the (Kremlin’s) narrative about NATO’s expansion, ethnic rights for self-determination, and the war as a tool to perpetuate the usurpation of power by Putin’s “elite” in Russia and its neighbors. This discourse overlooks the role of failure to fully admit and qualify the crimes that the Soviet Union (and the Russian Empire before it) committed against the people that inhabited the lands it captured and controlled during its reign. There were several attempts to rectify the imperial legacy and to atone for them. Yet all of them eventually failed. One manifestation of the latest failure is the obstruction of access to swaths of state archives even at peaks of the brief democratization of Russia during the 1990s. The implications of that failure are profound. They yield fertile grounds for distorted beliefs about “historical justice” across the world and facilitate the effectiveness of a fascist-style propaganda in nowadays Russia.