how 1854 korea explains 2025 ukraine.

A 170-year-old Russian bestseller, but few abroad paid attention to its imperial cringe.

It is a joy to be back. Thank you so much for your unwavering patience, support and solidarity while I was taking this newsletter on hiatus to get my life in a bit of order. Following your wishes, I’ll be posting more often with an improved, shortened format. To make this work more sustainable, I will be taking most of the stories behind the (minimally-priced) paywall. If you love it, please support my work and upgrade. You will get access:

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Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism. Part of an opening essay is public; the rest, including curated reading lists and the Reader Q&A column, are behind a paywall. Paying subscribers also gain access to a chat with me and the RC101 micro-website, featuring curated sources on Russian colonialism. This newsletter is part of the Volya Hub network, expanding global awareness of Russian colonialism.

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This morning looked nothing extraordinary in this coastal village.

Fishermen left for the sea before sunrise, but the rest of the community were only starting their day. Crisp air from a cold night would be filling up with warmth very slowly: in this climate, Spring usually takes time to settle. The village also looked nothing extraordinary: people here lived off their hard work, earned little and enjoyed much less comfort than more affluent cities inland. There was one silver lining, though: serenity. The sea would bring little surprises. And definitely no aliens - this part of the world lived in self-enforced isolation for a long time.

But today everything would change.

Suddenly, those living further from the coast witnessed their neighbours running away from the shore in utter panic. Behind them was a large group of heavily armed aliens invading the village. After the initial panic subsided, locals approached the invaders: they touched their hair, white skin, and unusual clothes. They also asked them to leave and stop their unsolicited visit.

The invaders would hear none of it, looking at the locals with a mix of disgust and arrogance. Everything surrounding them felt ‘primitive,’ ‘uncivilised.’ They wouldn’t even consider locals full humans. ‘They have a chance of becoming proper humans in the future, if they learn more civilisation from us,’ one of the invaders writes in his travel log.

The ‘sightseeing’ continues: they barge into local homes as if it were an open-air museum, go through villagers’ possessions. When someone tries to stop them, they slap them or shoot in the air — as if trying to scare off annoying animals. “They would instantly quiet down and cower like dogs running after passersby: eager to bite but not daring,” one invader recollects later.

When these villagers decide to fight back, managing to abduct one sailor and pummel him, the invaders respond with birdshot, leaving several locals bloodied. They behave as if it’s their God-given right to do anything, anywhere. They even start renaming local bays, rivers and islands, dead sure they have no proper names because no ‘civilised’ person ever ‘discovered’ them before.

The year is 1854. The place is Korea. And the invading aliens are Russians.

Two self-portraits, in Western and traditional clothing (1915) by Go Hui-Dong, the first Korean artist to adopt Western-style painting. This work is often seen as a metaphor for Korea’s struggle to define itself under colonial rule of Japan and Western colonial pressure.

Russian Bestseller Nobody Abroad Really Read. Too Bad.

This scene wasn’t a freak accident. It was so common and normal at the time that Russians would just laugh about it as if it was a cute anecdote. Just 20 years before Russians disembarked in Korea, a travelogue, ‘A Journey to Erzurum,’ by the famous Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, described exactly the same situation: when Pushkin enters an indigenous hut in Türkiye uninvited, the master of the house pushes him out, cursing. “I replied to his welcome with a whip,” the poet rejoices.

I discovered the Korean story in Edyta Bojanowska’s absolutely badass work, ‘A World of Empires.’ In it, she digs into ‘The Frigate Pallad’, a book that has been a Russian bestseller for almost 200 years. Many Westerners heard about American Commodore Matthew Perry’s ‘gunboat diplomacy’ expedition to ‘open’ Japan in the early 1850s. But the Japanese actually consider the Russian expedition that followed as the one that managed to convince Japan to allow foreign trade. It was the Pallada frigate. Naval secretary and novelist Ivan Goncharov documented the journey in what became one of the most popular books in Russian history.

The Korean part of Pallada’s journey launched almost a century-long Russian obsession with colonising Korea. Once the Russian empire chopped off a massive Far Eastern chunk of China in the 1860s (equivalent to all of the United States east of the Mississippi), it wouldn’t let go of the idea of stealing Korea, too. A century of failed attempts ended in the Russian-fueled Korean War of the 1950s, cutting the country in two, with North Korea becoming a Soviet satellite tyranny.

‘A World of Empires’ is a great must-read, exposing the Russian historical FOMO of being constantly frustrated about lagging behind other empires. Flexing both “overt swagger and concealed insecurity,” as Bojanowska puts it herself.

Funny fact: ‘The Frigate Pallada’ wasn’t really known abroad until Russia published English translations during the Soviet era of Russian imperialism. Moscow did extensive ‘editing’ and marketed it as great Russian ‘anti-colonial’ literature to boost Russia’s PR pivot as an anti-colonial hero. Bojanowska was the first Western scholar to dare come back to the original Russian travelogue and expose its inherent racist and imperialist nature - something that Moscow of today doesn’t want you to know.