On a recent afternoon in kyiv, a literature professor and a comedian met to talk about Russian colonialism, a topic that has become a concern among Ukrainian activists, cultural figures and bookstore owners.
The discussion, which was recorded for a new podcast for Ukraine’s national public broadcaster, was moderated by Mariam Naiem, a graphic designer and former philosophy student who has become an unlikely expert on the topic.
“This war is just the continuation of centuries of Russian colonization,” said Naiem, 32, referring to Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine. “It’s the same playbook.”
Russia’s long cultural and political domination of Ukraine, first through its empire and then the Soviet Union, had left an indelible mark, podcast guests agreed, as they lamented being more fluent in Russian poems and films than in the cultural treasures of their own nation.
The goal of the podcast, Naiem said, was to solve this problem and “talk about our personal and social path to decolonization.”
It may have seemed a strange moment of cultural introspection in a war-torn country with pressing problems such as how to repel Russian troops advancing along the front line.
But Naiem and many Ukrainians say that to understand Russia’s war in Ukraine – and its trail of razed cities, displaced children and looted museums – it is crucial to examine how Russia has long exerted its influence over their country.
The daughter of a Ukrainian mother and Afghan father, Ms. Naiem is emblematic of a new generation of Ukrainians who, since the invasion of Moscow in February 2022, have been trying to rebuild their identity free of Russian influence. Much of this effort has focused on examining Russia’s history in Ukraine and highlighting its colonial imprint.
Ms. Naiem has become a leading voice in this movement. She studied philosophy at the Taras Shevchenko National University, based in kyiv, and also worked as a researcher with Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University.
Last year, he hosted an award-winning podcast on the theoretical foundations of Russian colonialism. In addition to the new podcast she is currently recording, she is now writing a book to help Ukrainians “decolonize,” she said.
“She has seriously influenced me intellectually,” Stanley told Babel.ua, a Ukrainian online news outlet, last year. She added that she convinced him that Ukraine’s postcolonial history was not being studied enough and that it “should be changed.”
That is not an easy task. To call Russia a colonial empire is to challenge decades of scholarship that has avoided viewing Russian history through a colonial prism. Russia’s shared history with Ukraine is complex and less marked by the relations of racial hierarchy and economic subjugation typical of colonialism, many scholars have argued.
But Naiem and others say Russia’s centuries-long efforts to impose its language on Ukraine, occupy its territory with settlers and rewrite its history from Moscow’s perspective are all hallmarks of colonialism.
Naiem said it took the war for Ukrainians to take stock of this legacy and finally begin to “decolonize.” He cited the example of many people who have switched from speaking Russian to speaking Ukrainian.
“This is exactly a decolonial act,” he said.
While many Ukrainians have dedicated their time to raising money for the military or rebuilding destroyed homes, Naiem’s activism has been more intellectual, focused on deconstructing Russian influences, including those that shaped her.
He was born into a Russian-speaking family in kyiv in 1992. His father was a former minister of education in Afghanistan who left Kabul after the Soviet invasion in 1979. He has two brothers, Mustafa, a leading figure in the Maidan revolution in Ukraine 2014, and Masi, who lost an eye fighting Russian troops in 2022.
Growing up in newly independent Ukraine in the 1990s, the country’s cultural scene was dominated by Russian music, television shows and books.
At school, classes were in Ukrainian, but “it wasn’t cool” to speak it on the playground, he said. Russian literature was also “cooler” than Ukrainian literature, she recalled thinking, “more mysterious, more complicated.” Some of the novels he read disparaged Ukrainians as uneducated.
“Turgenev pushed me to consider myself more Russian than Ukrainian,” Naiem wrote on Instagram two years ago, referring to the 19th-century Russian novelist. “Because he didn’t want to be such a funny Ukrainian.”
It took Naiem many years and many new books to get rid of these opinions.
During the pandemic, she immersed herself in “Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism,” a book by Polish-American scholar Ewa Thompson that argues that writers like Pushkin and Tolstoy helped legitimize Russia’s colonial ambitions.
“I realized that centuries of colonialism had seeped into my mind,” Naiem said.
After the Russian invasion, she wrote about her research on her Instagram page, followed by 22,000 people, arguing that Russia’s efforts to erase Ukrainian culture and identity are rooted in a long history of colonialism.
Her posts attracted attention and persuaded her to spread the word further afield. In addition to his podcasting, he has given interviews to Ukrainian media about colonialism and filled his Instagram page with more posts, questioning, for example, the place of Mikhail Bulgakov, a kyiv-born Soviet writer who ridiculed Ukrainians, in the Ukrainian school curricula.
The response has been overwhelmingly positive.
On a recent afternoon at a music festival in kyiv, a passerby thanked him for his efforts, one of several people that day who told him they had learned a lot from his podcasts.
Still, he spends much of his time trying to convince people that talking about Russian colonialism is relevant.
Volodymyr Yermolenko, a Ukrainian philosopher, said the issue had long been viewed with skepticism.
Unlike the Western colonies, which were often distant overseas locations, the Russian colonies were adjacent territories, he said. Russian colonialism also never made racial exclusion a central policy, she added. Rather, it was based on the no less violent “idea of equality,” meaning that the colonized should give up their identity and adopt the norms of the colonizer.
Yermolenko said colonial motives were evident in President Vladimir V. Putin’s assertion that Ukrainians and Russians were “one people.”
“People for a long time did not want to hear about Russian colonialism,” Yermolenko said. “Only now are we seeing the first steps of intellectual discrediting.”
Since the Russian invasion began, some scholars have described it as a “colonial war” or recolonization. President Emmanuel Macron, who has had to confront the legacy of French colonialism, has accused Russia of being “one of the last colonial imperial powers.”
Ukrainian authorities have also launched efforts to free themselves from Russian influences, such as tearing down Soviet-era statues and banning Russian place names. But they stopped short of calling it a “decolonization” process, much to Naiem’s frustration.
“We’re making the cake without the recipe,” he said. “We need the recipe.”
Still, he is pleased that a debate about Russian colonialism has taken root.
On a recent afternoon in central kyiv, Naiem walked into a large bookstore and looked at a long table covered with recently published books.
“Let’s see how many talk about colonialism,” he said.
“This one, this one,” he said, as he took book after book (one on Russian domination of Ukrainian cultural life, another on the rebellious Ukrainian writers of the 1960s) and piled them on a corner of the table.
After a few minutes, the pile had grown to 21 books.