On the invisibility of Russian imperialism: Russian studies in the West

This chapter analyzes the West’s myopia on the present-day Russian government’s observed practice of (ab)using Russian language and culture for neo-imperial ends. Russian imperialism and the existence of Russia’s colonies have been stringently denied for the past three centuries in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and now in the Russian Federation. At the same time, Russian language and culture have been consistently employed for colonizing the subject peoples in an effort to replace their pre-colonial languages and cultures. In turn, abroad, teaching Russian as a single nation’s language and promoting Russian literature within Russian studies (a significant subfield of area studies) have effectively blinded the West and all the world to the past and the current mechanisms of Russian imperialism.