Why does the West consistently overlook Russian imperialism while scrutinising its own colonial past? Edward Lucas exposes how Western media and academia’s Moscow-centric worldview undermines Ukraine and perpetuates centuries-old imperial blind spots that still shape geopolitics today.
‘Ukraine? Isn’t that a bit 2022?’ This dismissive response from an impresario when asked by a performer to light a festival stage in blue and yellow colours, seemingly epitomises the moral and intellectual laziness of the custodians of Western culture. In a sense, the story, reported by my Times colleague, Richard Morrison, could have been far worse. Westerners may have a short attention span. But at least some decision-makers, for a while, thought it worth doing something to highlight their solidarity with Ukraine and their opposition to Russia’s full-scale invasion. Where a flicker of interest has once existed, it is easier to try to revive it.
Even worse were those who saw no reason to do anything, or who see the priority as not promoting Ukraine, however spasmodically or lethargically, but instead seek to protect Russian culture, language, literature (and, whisper it, influence) from the latter-day bloodthirsty invaders trying to erase it.
My old employer, the Economist, is among those in the line of fire here. A piece in the Christmas issue was titled ‘Ukraine’s Cancel Culture: What happens in Odesa will determine what kind of country Ukraine becomes’. It argued that the port city’s cultural-historical roots were being erased or defaced by Ukrainian nationalists. This became part of a pattern. Earlier this summer a piece on the paper’s website about Estonia, called ‘Putin’s Next Target’ also unthinkingly recycled outdated and inaccurate stereotypes (Estonia is ‘a little nation’, entirely flat, with a restless minority of ethnic Russians). Earlier, a leading article warned European decision-makers of adopting the ‘extreme’ position of the Baltic states, Poland, and the Nordic countries, who supposedly over-emphasise Russia’s imperialist roots.
These pieces — and there are many other examples in other outlets — represent both a general and a particular problem in Western political culture, and the media, arts, and entertainment worlds that influence it. This thinking privileges Russia’s cultural, linguistic, and political hegemony as normal; they treat attempts to challenge it as ‘cancel culture’ or ‘extreme’ views — in other words the activities of an ‘other’ that upsets the natural order of things.
I have been battling this since the 1980s. As a young BBC producer, I found the news agenda shaped by the ‘Moscow’ story. I tried in vain to highlight the idea of the ‘captive nations’, the unwilling subjects of the Soviet empire, as real places, with histories of their own, where people spoke other languages and had other ideas. It was an uphill struggle. I remember an editor, who spoke immaculate Russian, explaining that she had learned it in ‘Kiev’ where ‘I didn’t hear anyone speak Ukrainian the whole year I was there’. The same boss reprimanded me for putting Polish dissidents on the airwaves. ‘Solidarity doesn’t exist any more’, she told me firmly. Three years later it was negotiating the regime’s demise.
The captive nations gained attention as the empire began cracking visibly. Demonstrations, declarations, and speeches in long-forgotten places began gaining a toe-hold in the news. The same editor told me firmly that whatever the ‘nationalists’ in the ‘tiny Soviet Baltic republics’ might think, they were never going to be independent. They are just too small. Ukraine was never going to be independent either. It was too big. The Soviet Union would collapse, and we would have a dreadful civil war.
These arguments were infinitely elastic. The ‘nationalists’ in the Baltics, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and elsewhere were, supposedly, irrelevant, and their ideas were pointless nostalgia. But they also posed a dreadful threat to the wonderful prospect of a friendly Kremlin and Gorbachev’s reforms. They were both too weak to matter, and a grave danger to things that did. What really mattered was the big picture: economic reforms to make the Soviet Union prosperous, geopolitical changes to make it friendly.
After 1991, the rhetoric changed. Instead of keeping Gorbachev in power, it was Boris Yeltsin who needed protecting. This was no time to put pressure on the beleaguered ‘reformists’ in the Kremlin. The Baltic states were playing with fire in their attempts to get the occupation forces to go home, and to implement their language and citizenship laws.
Contradictory impulses are at work here. One is the instinctive sympathy of big countries for other big countries. As the British conservative commentator, Peter Hitchens, says, ‘There will always be empires […] and on the whole it is better to have your own than to be in someone else’s.’ Yet the perception of Russia as not only vast by land area and in natural resources but hugely important in all other respects is misleading. How many realise that Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan each have much bigger populations, or that in income per head, adjusted for purchasing power, Russia ranks between Oman and Cyprus?
We accept credulously recycled Soviet wartime myths, for example that 27 million ‘Russians’ died defeating the Nazis. But by far the biggest losses as a share of population were from what is now Belarus and Ukraine. Most of the fighting and destruction took place outside what is now Russian territory. And the Soviet regime killed many of its own.
An elaboration (also lacking factual support) of this point of view is that big countries act more sensibly than small ones. There are too many small countries, which clutter up the map and the world stage. One could call this the ‘overdog’ approach; its counterpart is the ‘underdog’ instinct, which sees Russia as mistreated and misled. What country in history gave up its empire so peacefully? (Actually: many). After this magnanimous retreat from empire the West trashed Russia’s economy with ‘neo-liberal’ advice, and then expanded NATO despite promising not to. This (also fact-free) approach leads to the odd spectacle of left-wing and liberal commentators, who are hypersensitive to the lasting evils of past Western colonialism, overlooking the blood-stained nature of current Russian imperialism.
Russia, in short, gets a free pass because it is big, and another one because (supposedly) it is weak. A further element in this is the idea that Western mischief-makers and meddlers are conspiring to break up Russia. Putin himself has highlighted this supposed plan, which will, he says, lead to the destruction of the Russian people, and its replacement with Muscovites, Uralians, and other oddments. No such plan exists, but conventional wisdom among most Russia watchers is that a break-up of the Russian Federation is both unrealistic and potentially disastrous: loose nukes, economic dislocation, refugees, and quite possibly civil war. (Sounds familiar? The same arguments featured in the dying days of the USSR).
What all these outside approaches ignore is that Russia’s centralised state is the result of centuries of imperialism, backed by ‘Great-Russian’ chauvinism and politicised Russian high culture. Even the word ‘Russia’ is loaded with overlapping layers of linguistic, territorial, political, and historical meaning, particularly in what may, at first sight, seem politically innocent cultural studies. Many of the great names we think of as Russian (Tchaikovsky, Chekhov, Gogol, Kandinsky), for example, have Ukrainian roots. The British poet, Rudyard Kipling, is damned for his imperialist flaws, but how many fans of Russian poetry know of Pushkin’s venomously polonophobic poem ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’ and Joseph Brodsky’s similarly offensive (but unpublished) ‘On the Independence of Ukraine’? Other examples abound.
Russia’s cultural heights contrast implicitly with the perceived backwardness of ‘non-Russia’, exemplified in the Borat films, featuring a fictional Kazakhstan of comical squalor. Its inhabitants are scruffy and vulgar by turns, with loose morals, dim wits, and thick accents. Gangsterism and lethal tribal hatreds enliven the mix. We would be ashamed and outraged by any such sloppy, hateful depiction of Africans and Africa.
The same eagle-eyed Western cultural critics who scrutinise their own countries’ history for latent racist, colonialist, and hegemonic characteristics are extraordinarily unwilling to see the same features — arguably far more pronounced — in Russian culture, and in their own media’s depiction of the former Russian empire. Why is this? Perhaps a kind of colour-blindness, an unwillingness to accept that white Europeans can also be the victims of colonialism, perhaps a lingering belief that a country that proclaimed anti-imperialism and other left-wing mantras could practise something so different from what it preached, perhaps a sense of Western guilt for the supposed mistreatment of post-1991 Russia, or perhaps a mixture of all these and other factors.
Whatever the reason, this skewed view of Russia affects the political mainstream, because it is in the academic and cultural environment that decision-makers’ intellectual frameworks take shape. The top American liberal arts college, Middlebury, for example, has for generations produced foreign-policy experts. It recently advertised for a tenure-track position in comparative politics, ‘with a regional focus on the politics of Russia and Eastern Europe’. Studying European politics through the lens of an East–West divide makes as little sense as using a North–South one. The Soviet version of communism was a shared historical catastrophe, but imposed in different ways in different places, and on countries where identities, history, and culture varied hugely. It makes even less sense to lump democracies together with Russia’s autocracy, with its naked power struggles, routine murder of opponents, the fungibility of power and wealth, the personality cult of Vladimir Putin, and ingrained imperialism.
The immediate victim of all this is Ukraine. But the shadow of Russia’s past and current imperialism still imprisons imaginations in countries that have never felt its physical touch. Ukraine pays the price for this cultural and moral blindness right now. But the cost will land on us all eventually.
Edward Lucas is a Times columnist and non-resident senior adviser at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). His expertise includes energy, cyber-security, espionage, information warfare, and Russian foreign and security policy. Formerly a senior editor at The Economist, he is a regular contributor to the BBC’s Today and Newsnight programmes, and to NPR, CNN, and Sky News. For many years a foreign correspondent, he was based in Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Moscow, and the Baltic states. In 1992, he co-founded the Baltic Independent, an English-language weekly in Tallinn, Estonia. He was also the first foreigner to receive an Estonian electronic identity card. An acclaimed author, his books include The New Cold War (2008), a prescient account of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and an investigative account of East–West espionage, Deception (2011). Lucas speaks at high-level international events, and has lectured at Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and other leading universities.
Image: Sevilâ Nariman-qızı, büyükler küçüklerden qorqalar (the big fear the small) from the series menim – seniñ (mine – yours), 2025
