Crisis in Russian Studies? Nationalism (Imperialism), Racism and War

Western academia has misunderstood Russia for far too long. The extent and problematic nature of this misunderstanding have solidified an unsustainable policy attitude that has certainly failed the test of time. This policy attitude has been largely driven by questioning and pondering the essence of the “mysterious Russian soul,” appeasing the appetite of an insatiable beast with a hundred heads, and hand-shaking (benefiting from the abundance of resources that the empire has secured through the subjugation of indigenous peoples) while, at the same time, fearing the beast, and the hellfire it might unleash upon the whole world if triggered, or—to put it in less phantasmagorical and more realist terms—if the geopolitical interests of the beast are to be disregarded.

However, all this polemic merely attests to the symptoms, and not the underlying causes of the Russlandversteher-disease that has plagued the polished—mostly Washington-, Berlin-, and London-based—Western offices, from the comfort of which it has proven to be unsurprisingly easy to produce numerous volumes of distorted stories that neatly align with what Moscow asserts to be objective notions of history. After all, sticking with a slightly repackaged and easily digestible grand discourse of the metropole, and translating it to admittedly well-informed and peer-reviewed research on Eastern Europe might for many reasons seem more practical and resource-efficient than engaging in the fieldwork and trying to make sense of the states which have been in colonial dependency on that metropole. For Western intellectuals on the right-wing spectrum, engagement with the said discourse was made possible through the prism of offensive realism; for many leftists, on the other hand, it was normalized with the help of poststructuralism-inspired toolkits that enabled the search for meanings in the empire behind the iron curtain for they feel betrayed by the empire at home.

Dealing with the causes of the disease broadly described above is an ambitious endeavor, one nevertheless taken up by Taras Kuzio in his book Crisis in Russian Studies? Nationalism (Imperialism), Racism and War. The five key issues he addresses in the monograph are indeed not easy to approach, considering that there is virtually no real sense of crisis in the academic community dealing with Eastern Europe regarding how knowledge is produced about Russia and its neighbors. Contrary to my expectations—informed primarily by the brutality of the ongoing full-scale war of Russia against Ukraine and my assumption that the war has served as a catalyst for the re-evaluation of Western knowledge production about Russia and the atrocities it has been implicated in from the (only) historically accurate perspective of the colonized–colonizer relationship—such critical assessments remain dangerously marginal in the current scholarly debate.

For many, the primary empirical issue resulting from the war is the limitation of data collection abilities (opinion polls, survey data, etc.) on and in Russia, as well as collaboration with local scholars. Thus, the main problem identified by the “insiders” lies within the realm of data collection rather than questioning the very standpoint from which data analysis is conducted. While some, for instance, Tomila Lankina in her 2022 article published in the Post-Soviet Affairs journal, recognize the failure of mainstream scholarship to acknowledge that Russia has largely “remained a mirror of Tsarist society” and criticize the conceptualization of the 1917 revolution as a “break with the past” and a starting point for analyzing a so-called post-imperial Russia, they do not explicitly advocate for adopting a postcolonial lens to make sense of Russia’s policies toward its neighbors. On the contrary, when the notion of Russia’s imperialism as the core of its foreign policy is mentioned, it is often denounced—by scholars such as Andrei Tsygankov—as one of the alternative and inaccurate approaches, indicating a vicious circle of debunking the Russian neo-imperialism thesis with a Russian neo-imperialist line of argumentation.

Alongside calling out academic orientalism in the Western approaches to studying Russia and Eastern Europe, another dimension the book operates within is substantively addressing and debunking two major misconceptions that emerged in the aftermath of the 2014 invasion. Firstly, it challenges the idea that Crimea has historically belonged to Russia and that its “re-capturing” was justified. Secondly, it disputes the false perception that the events in Eastern Ukraine (Donbas) since 2014 constitute a civil war among Ukrainians. Prior to reading this book, I firmly believed that these narratives had found safe haven in official Kremlin rhetoric and a couple more autocratic governments that had their own primarily greed-driven reasons to align with the Kremlin. However, the author’s extensive literature review of the arguments made by people widely considered experts in the field, which he uses to illustrate the claims he is refuting, has provided me with a new perspective. Though, even without prior knowledge of how Western scholars have framed Russian-Ukrainian relations, the fact that in 2020 (the year of the book’s publication), six years after the start of the invasion, a renowned expert—among the very few who possess a deep understanding of the local context due to their extensive field experience—felt the need to emphasize that Crimea was wrongfully annexed and Donbas was invaded by Russia, is itself a deeply troubling revelation about the status quo.

So, what is the crisis in the mystical realm of Russian studies all about, according to Kuzio? First and foremost, the author discusses the biased Western historiographies of Russia and Ukraine, which serve as the foundation for producing inaccurate knowledge about the region and the peculiarities of the Russia-Ukraine relationship. These narratives contribute to viewing Ukraine as an object of scientific inquiry “through Moscow’s eyes.” As Kuzio demonstrates, Western narratives fail to acknowledge the implicit concept of triedinstvo russkogo naroda—the trinity of “Russian peoples” consisting of Russians (“the big brother”), Ukrainians (“little Russians”), and Belarusians (“white Russians”)—which forms the backbone of what is considered “Russian” identity. This perspective does not recognize Ukrainians and Belarusians as separate peoples and is based on a fabricated (during Tsarist Russia) historiography of the “Russian folk” originating from Kyivan Rus. The subsequent key problem is the portrayal of Russia as a nation-state that emerged from the ruins of the USSR, rather than recognizing it as a multinational empire that did not dissolve either in 1917 or in 1991.

Secondly, the author highlights the prevalent double standard in Western academia when it comes to the colonization of indigenous peoples by European powers compared to Russia’s colonization of Crimea, starting with its initial occupation in 1783. This double standard reflects a broader issue in the post-2022 context. It is worth noting that many leftist Western intellectuals either silently align themselves with Russia through rhetoric promoting peace over war—a stance often supported by pacifist sentiment that overlooks the context—or actively advocate for “alternative” interpretations of the conflict. In my view, these attempts are desperate efforts to deconstruct the admittedly corrupt and malicious actions of the West in order to portray it as exploiting the struggle of the underprivileged (in this case, Ukrainians and Russians), employing the familiar argument that governments fuel the war while innocent people suffer. The dangers of such arguments become evident through the rhetoric used to undermine the allies’ armed support for Ukraine.

A third significant theoretical contribution is the application of Said’s notion of orientalism to the analysis of Western scholarly narratives about Ukraine, Russia, and, notably, Russia’s war against Ukraine. Kuzio explicates how imperialist (Tsarist) narratives of Russia’s history were adopted by Soviet historians and later incorporated by Western academics as an “objective” account of history, in contrast to a backward and “nationalistic” Ukrainian perspective. He further illustrates how this dynamic unfolds in terms of competing discourses, noting that orientalism consistently portrays nationalism in colonies in a negative light while favorably depicting the nationalism of the imperialist hegemon. Kuzio then traces the origins of Russia’s nationalism (imperialism) and Ukraine’s nationalism, showing that these are inseparable from the colonizer–colonized relationship. It becomes evident from the analysis that this dynamic is the only accurate depiction of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine.

To conclude, Taras Kuzio’s book constitutes an exemplary and unprecedented postcolonial intervention into the multidimensionality of the shortcomings of Western sense-making of Russia. While not without limitations, the book provides a much-needed insight into the prevailing misconceptions and flawed narratives that have hindered Western academia’s understanding of Russia and, subsequently, Ukraine. By challenging biased historiographies and debunking misconceptions about Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, and Russian-Ukrainian war in general, it sheds light on the underlying causes of the crisis in Russian studies and paves the way for more nuanced research on Eastern Europe.