Humouring imperialism

Since the Cold War, Western literary and educational establishments have reproduced Moscow’s chauvinist view of Ukrainian culture as a derivative of Russian. That attitude is now politically and morally untenable. Ukrainian culture must be liberated along with the multitude of other Slavic languages and cultures belonging to the post-Soviet space.

Following Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine in early 2022, the novel term ‘rashism’ (рашизм) rapidly coalesced for referring to and negatively assessing the mixed-bag fascist-inflected ideology of neo-imperialism that the Kremlin deploys for justifying and promoting its actions. Yet, in the West too little attention is paid to the Russian language’s role in this ideology. In English-speaking countries, governments leave language use to citizens and their choices. Language politics is not actively pursued as a goal in itself or as an instrument for furthering a specific policy. In contrast, this is a norm and even the fundament of politics in central and eastern Europe, where the nation – in line with ethnolinguistic nationalism – is defined as all speakers of a language (or speech community).