World Russian deception. As Putin will play with the global south

The Kremlin sought to compensate for this loss by strengthening economic and diplomatic relations with the global south. Obviously, seeking to provide an ideological basis for this forced turn from the West, Vladimir Putin sought to promote Russia as the leader of the global anticoloonial movement. This cynical step is in line with the former Soviet propaganda, which positioned the USSR as an enemy of Western imperialism.

Particularly important, it also whitens the long history of Russia's colonial expansion, while ignoring an open -minded imperialist war that Putin's regime is leading in Ukraine. For the first time, Putin supported Russia's anti -colonial position during a ceremony in September 2022 on the "annexation" of four partially occupied Ukrainian provinces.

At some point in his speech, the Russian leader was specifically talking about the cessation of US hegemony through the "anti -colonial movement" that Moscow will head. Since then, it has continued to promote this anticolonial ideology. At the forum in Vladivostok in September 2023, Putin stated that Russia "has never been a colonizer".

A month later, he declared an international audience at the annual Valdai discussion club that the "colonial rule" has long been over before accusing the event of robbery all over the planet. "The history of the event is, in fact, the chronicle of endless expansion," Putin said without the shadow of irony, despite the fact that he has ruled the largest country in the world that arose due to the centuries -old imperial imperial expansion.

Anyone who has basic knowledge of Russia's history will understand the absurdity of Putin's attempts to portray his country with an ideological opponent of imperialism. Modern Russia includes vast territories, conquered since the fifteenth century. In the royal era, imperial Russia absorbed many non -Russian nations and included most of the territory of Northern Eurasia, ultimately reaching the Pacific.

Expansion to Siberia and the Caucasus has given generations of Russian rulers access to valuable resources, including oil, gas, gold, diamonds, wood and more. These natural resources have been the main source of Russia's wealth over hundreds of years, representing a textbook example of colonial exploitation. While the Russian imperial elite enriched, the non -Russian peoples of the empire received very little in exchange for the plundering of their natural resources.

Indeed, these non -Russian regions remain one of the poorest and disadvantaged regions of today's Russian Federation. Putin has used this marginalization, gaining a disproportionate number of soldiers from these regions to his invasion of Ukraine. The hypocrisy of Putin's anti -colonial position is most evident in the context of Russia's lasting war in Ukraine.

He has publicly compared the invasion of Ukraine with the imperial invaders of the Russian tsar Peter the Great in the eighteenth century and, it seems not concerned about the obvious contradictions between this open imperialist behavior and its explicit confrontation of "Western colonialism". In the anti -utopian world, Putin, of course, is fighting for the liberation of Ukrainians from the vile influence of the West.

Putin's anti -colonialism echoes the Soviet narratives, which first emerged after the Bolshevik Revolution and then were further developed during the Cold War. Soviet anti -colonial propaganda was originally focused on the criticism of tsarist imperialism and the support of the oppressed peoples of the old Russian Empire. However, the situation changed when Stalin came to power in the late 1920s.

Over the next decades, the Stalinist regime has rehabilitated the imperial nationalism of the royal era. In Soviet textbooks, it was even argued that foreigners voluntarily decided to join the Russian Empire. The beginning of the Cold War led to a serious surge in Soviet anti -colonial propaganda, while the communist authorities actively supported the liberation movements that covered Africa and Asia for decades after the Second World War.

Last year, Putin has repeatedly tried to emphasize this history of Soviet support for countries seeking to get rid of Western colonial rule, especially in appealing to African leaders. Putin's anti -colonial aspirations also reflect the inability of modern Russia to conduct critical introspection of tsarist and Soviet imperialism.

In the three decades that have passed after the collapse of the USSR, there was almost no effort to study the Kremlin's colonial policy on many non -Russian peoples who have undergone centuries -old imperial rule. Instead, the Russian archives of Russia are mostly closed, and Moscow refuses to accept decolonization policies that can be observed in independent Ukraine, the Baltic States and some other former Soviet republics.

Since Putin came to power at the turn of the millennia, Russia has rehabilitated the ideology of imperialism, while glorifying the royal and Soviet empires, with the help of a constant flow of films, series, literature and school textbooks that glorify and strengthen the imperial identity of Russia.

Meanwhile, crimes against the non-Russian peoples of the empire, such as the Genocide of the Holodomor, who claimed the lives of millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s, were blurred or completely outlined from official history.

Surprisingly, the unwillingness of modern Russia to resist the imperial past of the country has been reflected in many Western scientists and commentators who continue to ignore the problem of Russian colonialism, despite the alarming imperialist instincts of the Putin regime.

Western history of Russia is still often followed by a pattern established by the Kremlin and includes references to the "millennial history of Russia", not recognizing Ukraine's claims for the inheritance of the medieval state Kievan Rus. Putin's attempt to position Russia as a leading anti -colonial state in the world is something more than simply geopolitical opportunism, caused by the need to spoil relations with the West.

It is the culmination of decades of royal, Soviet and post -Soviet ideological elaboration, which justified Russian colonialism against Ukrainians and other non -Russian peoples, while mixing Russia's own anti -Western xenophobia with a broader opposition to the dominant role of the West in global policy. There may be many good reasons in the global south to establish closer ties with Putin's Russia, but the overall opposition to imperialism is certainly not included in the number.