War by Any Other Name: Patterns of Russian Colonialism, by Anna Engelhardt – 4 July 2022

From The Funambulist

Let’s be honest, the mechanisms of Russian imperialism have been a blindspot of the magazine until now. Rather than adding to the noise produced amidst the shock of the military invasion of Ukraine, we commissioned this text by Anna Engelhardt that describes the recurrence of Russian strategy when its military is deployed in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine. In the future, we will also concentrate on the Indigenous struggles at work within what is commonly called the “Russian Federation.”

“In Chechnya, the only place which is ours is where our troops stand; troops move—and this place immediately goes into insurgents’ hands,” reported a Russian journalist of Moscow Bulletin from the front of a Russian conquest of the Caucasus in the 1840s. Going on for more of the 63 first years of the 19th century, it was one of the myriad Russian colonial wars that formed what we know today as the “Russian Federation.” Its “sovereignty” and “integrity,” the two most protected notions in Russian criminal law, is a highly volatile unity of colonized territories. The fragility of what is known as Russia is secured by endless wars of conquest waged over centuries. Their mechanic repetitiveness is daunting. What hope can one find today if Russia has annexed the Crimean Peninsula at least four times? What is it there in those four attempts at total elimination of Indigenous Crimean Tatars, with the first one dating to 1783 and the last one ongoing since 2014? No matter how successful such invasions are as a singular event, their horrific frequency reveals the inability to break down decolonial resistance and secure desired integrity.

The recursive nature of conquest hints toward the predefined course of colonial wars. Indeed, the multitude of wars waged by Russia makes them as transparent as glass, putting their hardwired structure on display. One of the qualities of this structure is the overall precarity of control it grants. No matter how violent Russian invasions are, their power shatters under fierce decolonial pressure. The fragility of Russian colonialism, akin to the one of thin sharp glass, doesn’t make it less harmful. It inflicts wounds in line with the fragile nature of its structure. Its sharp shatters stick out from the layers of invasions, occupations, and mass murders inflicted upon the same nations and lands that have never been defeated. Hence Russian conquest is endless.

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