my self-decolonisation started with russians refusing to say my name right.

Maybe a year before this genocide, a russian colleague, a prominent anti-putinist, asked me if it was okay if he kept pronouncing my name in a russian manner because Ukrainian pronunciation of 'Maksym' didn’t 'feel right or natural' for him. My first reaction was not an insult, but embarrassment. I shit you not. I just nodded. Not my finest hour.

Later, I reflected a lot on why hearing someone mispronounce my Ukrainian name made me embarrassed, rather than enraged. As Ukrainians, we are spending so much time educating and enlightening others about Ukraine's anti-colonial struggle these days that we often put another important task on the back burner: self-decolonisation. Every single Ukrainian I know is on this journey these days. Including myself. Naïve to think that hundreds of years of russian subjugation, ethnic cleansing and genocide wouldn't affect how we connect with our Ukrainian identity and how it manifests itself. That debacle with a 'good Russian' is a stellar example of the Menshovartist (inferiority from Ukrainian) complex.

Needless to say, haven't heard a word from that colleague in the last 83 days since the genocide started — despite my everyday assistance to his team for six years.

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here is what’s in store for you this week:

• The many ways the russian empire managed to disguise its colonialism as something else. My interview with the biggest daily in the Netherlands.

• How corruption in Ukraine is a russian colonial legacy. My interview with the GaslitNation team.

• How the Soviet Union was just another stage of russian colonialism.

• How some westerners are forcing Ukrainians to 'forgive and reconcile' with russians is the grossest colonial trope of them all.

Like it?

Then Slava Ukraïni and let's go.

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Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network.

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