Russia as a colonial/imperial power (“Decolonize Russia”)
The post-2022 debate over whether Russia is an unreconstructed empire
After the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, journalists and scholars (Casey Michel; Botakoz Kassymbekova) argued Russia is the “last European empire” whose imperial structure drove the war, and that its non-Russian regions should be “decolonized.” Critics (including Marlène Laruelle and Mikhail Khodorkovsky) warn that conflating decolonization with the breakup of the Russian Federation is unrealistic and dangerous, and plays into Kremlin propaganda.
What happened
Casey Michel’s essay “Decolonize Russia” in The Atlantic argued the West should finish the dissolution begun in 1991 by supporting freedom for Russia’s non-Russian peoples; the U.S. Helsinki Commission held a hearing calling decolonization a “moral and strategic imperative.”
Russia is the last European empire that has resisted even basic decolonization efforts… the West must support full freedom for Russia’s imperial subjects. (Michel, 2022)
Under each definition
Supporters say Russia is a textbook contiguous land-empire with colonized peripheries; some scholars caution that contiguous empire differs from overseas colonialism.
Russian/Slavic settlement of Siberia and the steppe displacing indigenous peoples fits the settler frame; scholars debate how cleanly.
Toward the post-Soviet “near abroad,” dependency/coercion is invoked; critics note these are now sovereign states resisting, not “directed from” Moscow.
“Empire”/“colonial” is now standard framing for Russian policy in Ukraine and beyond.
The case that the label applies
Russia expanded by conquest across Siberia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, ran a metropole-and-periphery extraction system, and continues to rule non-Russian republics (Chechnya, Tatarstan, Sakha) with little genuine self-government — a classic land-empire that never underwent decolonization. Putin’s annexationist rhetoric about Ukraine is offered as living proof.
The case against
Critics accept Russia’s imperial character but argue “decolonization = fragmentation” is a category error: it lacks internal support, could trigger civil wars over a nuclear arsenal, and functions as a Western fantasy. They favor internal federalization/democratization over dismemberment.
In their words
The West must complete the project that began in 1991. It must seek to fully decolonize Russia.
if it is used as a euphemism for the ‘collapse’ and ‘fragmentation’ of Russia… I have difficulty imagining how it might present a solution, because the odds of this happening peacefully seem slim.
The verdicts above are how each definition would most likely classify this situation — illustrative guidance, not court rulings. Colonialism has no treaty crime, so no application is a legal “finding”; every characterization is attributed to the person or body that made it. The lenses diverge most on two questions — whether there is a “metropole” and who counts as “indigenous” — and on the difference between a historical judgment and a moral analogy. See the Definition tab for each definition’s full text. Inclusion is documentation, not a finding.