hatred is russian culture.
And Ukraine is breaking free from it.
here is what's in store for you this week:
(estimated reading time: 8 min)
This week’s story:
The harshest homophobic slur in our languages has a manufacture date — and it isn't ancestral, it's an imperial prison-camp export russia still ships as "traditional values" to soften the ground before the imperial troops arrive.
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And in this week’s reading list:
An empire drained an entire sea to grow "white gold" — then wrote cotton into Uzbek schoolbooks, art and memory so the people would mourn the water without naming who took it.
A man couldn't order coffee in Qazaq in his own capital, posted about it, and lit a national reckoning — proof that decolonisation in Qazaqstan runs not through laws but through the resistance of ordinary people.
Soviet "indigenisation" of Crimea-Qirim looked like empowerment and worked like a census — Moscow counted the natives' strength precisely so it could erase their existence later.
This weekend, Ukraine did something remarkable. While air defences were shooting down russian suicide drones over Kyiv, thousands still marched defiantly for equality — the largest civil‑rights demonstration since the full‑scale invasion began. Queer soldiers and veterans led Kyiv Pride, carrying the names and faces of Ukrainian heroes killed fighting a homophobic empire. Similar marches had already taken place in Lviv, Kharkiv, and Odesa.
What also struck me was how both Ukrainian fringe groups and Russians online reached for the same slurs. I’ve known this since childhood: if you want to truly insult someone, you switch to russian — especially for homophobic slurs. Ukrainian speakers do it too. Even as the language of colonial occupation fades in Ukraine, its ugliest vocabulary still does the work.
The Ukrainian language has no shortage of swearing. It can be filthy, wildly inventive and has old traditions in doing so. But our curses never run on sexual abuse, and they don’t run on hating queerness. For that, you borrow.
It never once crossed my mind to ask why. The most violent thing I could say to someone came pre‑installed in another language. Someone else engineered it that way — and not just for Ukrainians.
“The Russian pejoratives pidor (fag) and petukh (turned out) in relation to non-cisheteronormative males have been fully adopted as Russisms in colloquial Moldovan Romanian. Romanian pejorative poponar, similar to the Russian petukh, is extremely rare in Moldovan colloquial speech. Perhaps the reason for this is also the yoke of the “turned out” stigma (also known as “downcast”) rooted in the prison subculture of the post-Russian colonial space... These obscene pejorative Russisms are often used in the statements of openly homophobic politicians in Moldova… Such rhetoric in the political sphere, broadcast by the media, remains the main driver of homophobic attitudes.”
This is a passage from “Russian Colonialism and Homophobia in Moldova” by Moldovan researchers Ecaterina Pislari and Maxim Totoc-Cuclev. russia colonised Moldova in 1812 and in 1835 the empire extended its ban on same-sex relations to the whole civilian population — the same year it russified the towns, made russian the only language of record, and pushed Romanian-speakers out to the villages. During the Soviet era of the occupation, mass deportations of locals to the Gulag and the criminalisation of homosexuality in 1933, as the authors put it, "gave rise to a specific prison homophobic culture." That culture didn't stay behind the wire. ‘Prison etiquette’ seeped into society's prejudices outside slave camps. “Probably a reflection of the culture of violence and its normalisation in russia that spread, as a result of colonisation," the authors note.
Of course, russia did not invent Moldovan and Romanian homophobia. The countries had their own history of church-fuelled hate, their own homophobic conservatism - long before russian occupation. But formal codification arrived only with russia. From the late 19th century until the 1930s, Romanian law treated same‑sex and heterosexual relations alike. The 1864 Penal Code — inspired by France — didn’t criminalise private homosexual acts at all. And in Transylvania after 1878, gay men were punished only for violent offences like rape or attempted rape.
So the honest verb here is not originate. It's amplify. russia found a current and built a turbine on it.
One of my favourite essays I have ever written is on the colonial roots of homophobia in modern-day Ukraine. But in this work, “What if homophobia in Central Asia is a product of colonialism?” the anthropologist Zarina Mukanova, writing about Qazaqstan, also traces the same register back to the same place I did — the imperial culture of mass incarceration.
"The concepts and norms of prison culture," she writes, "were passed on to those who interacted with the ex-prisoners in any way." However, all of this was layered with racism in the only difference from the same trend in Eastern European colonies of russia, Mukanova writes. “Homophobia in Central Asia did not emerge in the Soviet era, but much earlier – with the onset of Russian colonisation and the research of ethnographers, military officers and travellers who created an image of the Orient for the Russian Empire… European travellers perceived any practice alien to their culture with surprise or condemnation. An Orientalist interpretation of homosexuality, especially in its male variant, was common. Same-sex relations were outlawed, first by the Russian and then by the Soviet Empire – and presented as an expression of Central Asia’s pervasive morality.”
This playbook extends beyond Moldova, Ukraine or Qazaqstan and is more than the fear of queerness.
First, russia-funded actors in your country campaign on hate speech and promise to ‘protect traditional values.’ russian culture institutions fund the russian-language schooling or art events that keep the channel open. The “gay propaganda” template has been shopped - or imitated- to Qazaqstan, Kyrgyzstan, Sakartvelo, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Lithuania — and where it failed to pass, it did the other half of its job anyway, becoming the backbone of a polarised politics.
Export the hatred as language or culture, then as legislation, then as a cognitive attack that frames the neighbour’s drift toward freedom as a moral panic. All of it softens the ground; then imperial occupation arrives to defend what the panic invented. The slur and the invading imperial soldier ship from the same warehouse.
Ukrainians have a very clear understanding of this. In her study Colonization of minds, the Ukrainian scholar Galyna Kotliuk notes that while russia decriminalised domestic violence and banned "LGBT propaganda," wartime Ukraine ratified the Istanbul Convention and unanimously outlawed hate speech against LGBTQ+ people — "a symbolic separation from the values system of russkii mir." Aside from defiant pride marches and record-high public support for equality, Ukrainian women and queer people fighting the invasion, she writes, "undermine the very foundation of the colonial worldview." A society throwing off a borrowed hatred is a society announcing it is leaving the empire.
“Having been seen through a double colonial lens — the long‑standing tradition of Russian colonialism and the persistent patterns of Western Orientalism — Ukraine and Ukrainians have been (re)produced in a crooked mirror, none of the reflected images corresponding to who they truly are. Russian colonialism has constructed the figure of the exotic Little Russian: a subhuman “younger brother” to the Great Russian. The West, meanwhile, has imagined Ukrainians as underdeveloped barbarians suspended somewhere between Russia and European civilization. The resistance of Ukrainians since 24 February 2022 has challenged both of these distorted images. Since February, Ukrainian society has been undergoing an accelerated decolonizing process — one that reaches beyond social, cultural, and political spheres and penetrates deeply into gendered and identity‑forming discourses.”
Next time someone tells you russia defends "traditional values" in its neighbourhood, ask them to date it. The harshest homophobic slur in our languages here isn't ancestral — it's an imperial slave-camp import that arrived with the same russification at the expense of local languages. Whose tradition, and from what year?
Naming the manufacturer and the date of manufacture is how you ship a borrowed cruelty back to its creator.
Act up:
Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.
“I want to support Ukraine in its historic fight for freedom and independence from Russian imperial domination.”
by William E Brennan, a paying supporter of Russian Colonialism 101.
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