Imperial Mindset

In the UK and the West, the words ‘colonialism’ or ‘Imperialism’ are hardly associated with Russia. These are concepts of distant places of distinctive difference: it is obvious that India is not part of Great Britain, and that slave trading or exploitation of the Congo was wrong. But the former Russian Empire or Soviet Union seems contiguous, connected by land and with an apparent gradient of culture and history (a contrived construct much celebrated in Russia) to mask the parallel abuses of colonial rule, steeped in racist chauvinism and a cultivated disconnection from its own extreme violence.

In Georgia, Ukraine and the rest of the former Empire, colonialism is at the very heart of the problem they face. It is not a secret: this neo-Imperialism is the open policy of the ‘Russkii Mir’ (Russian World) official ideology adopted by Putin and the Russian Orthadox Church, and encouraged by the population.

The fight against the threat of this externally imposed oppression, violence and control is the prime driver behind the extreme desire to join the EU and NATO. Ignorance of this ongoing colonial experience, Western people and press talk cynically of financial betterment and emigration opportunities as their motivation, something deeply patronising, offensive and wrong when understood in this context. Like Trump promising financial gain to the Kremlin, it totally misunderstands the values and histories of these societies.

Using the work of an Imperial photographer documenting his territories and its peoples, we can revisit the history of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union and compare the overt colonialism of the 16th to the 20th centuries to the present Russian obsession with cultural, ethnic and violent hegemony. Shooting in Ukraine, I will explore the ways in which the Ukrainian people have overthrown their colonial masters’ expectations Using his same early colour process, I will look the ways in which Ukraine has resisted this oppression through the ages and the ways in which it can be seen in modern life.

Both our viewpoint and that of the Russian people have been systematically distorted by the reinterpretation and curation of history and the effects of Russia’s long oppression of its neighbours. This chauvinist, revanchist, habitual and conditioned thinking has enabled thousands of Russians to take up arms willingly. In the west, we have often presented this as ‘Putin’s war’, but it is not. It is supported and enabled by a people who see the world through a different filter, one of Russian dominance as a civilising and unifying benevolent force over their backward neighbours. It is the nature of colonial Empires that they result from decentralised ideology and interaction, coercion and cooperations with native people, just as was the case in the British Empire. It is this

Much has been written to support this, but the topic is necessarily long, often indigestible to the uninitiated, and frankly, from a Western point of view, is utterly baffling, stretching credulity to the point of farce. It is also desperately important that we in the West understand this.

I propose a visual method by which to succinctly encapsulate this, link the modern effects and signs of colonialism to their historic and ideological past. A photographic method makes the complexity of the issue much more accessible and opens the door to further understanding the worldview that glorifies the Ukrainians losing limbs and lives daily in the modern conflict and allows us in the West to understand why they fight so hard for an independence actively denied to them for centuries by their Russian Imperial masters. My conversations with people in the UK indicate that they have absolutely no idea why the Georgians and Ukrainians believe so strongly in the accession to the EU, a symbol of free and fair democracy, truth, respect and equality. It comes from the indignity and injustice of their own cultures taken over and defined by their subjugating neighbour for generations.

My illustration of this will use the aesthetic and methods of Prokudin-Gorsky, an Imperial Russian photographer, to flip this narrative. Using his historic imagery, a visual link to the history of colonial repression can be readily conveyed in the resulting photographs and thus shed light on the driving force of the troubles in the former colonies, from the Baltics to the Black Sea and Caucasus in a readily understood format.

Similar traits to those of Russian Imperial dominance can also be found in other authoritarian states around the world. Recognising them in Russia’s regions of abuse makes us more immune to them elsewhere.