here is what's in store for you this week:
(estimated reading time: 12 min)
A reader asks who actually documented the indigenous nations russia erased across the Arctic and North Asia, and whether the empire simply forbade anyone from trying.
My answer is on an island at the end of the earth — and the two people who recorded it — not russians, and not foreigners either. The empire came for their work, too.
In this week’s reading list — the Estonian school of North Asia research, a unique anthology on indigenous North Asia, a Scottish historian who called North Asia a colony in 1992, and the anti-colonial films about North Asia you can stream.
RUSSIAN COLONIALISM INFO DESK.
In this space, my paid readers ask their questions about russian colonialism, request reading suggestions, or seek advice on where to look for insights and what to pay attention to. This week’s question comes from John:
“In many parts of the world, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists and writers have spent a lot of time mapping cultures that colonialism hurt or destroyed. Recently I connected with the history of the First Nations who used to live on the Japanese islands the Russian Empire conquered at the end of WW2. While the Japanese colonised them too, what I'm really wondering is whether you can name two or three important writers or researchers who tell the story of those destroyed First Nations across Siberia and further east towards Asia. Have films been made? We can see countless "Westerns," but everything that happened in the East is something we never hear about in the West. Spanish or Portuguese colonialism, British, Belgian, German — we have many resources. But Russian? Maybe they were simply never made, because the USSR forbade it and sent anyone trying to map the truth to the Gulag.”
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 am a big fan of your work and find it accessible for seeing the larger picture that people seem to be misunderstanding—without this digestible explanation of the history—to appreciate empire strategy and mindset at play currently.”
by Jessica Bee, a paying supporter of Russian Colonialism 101.
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Dear John,
The record exists; other colonised people inside the same empire made it as an act of anti-colonial solidarity, and the West has never seen it because those documentarians were themselves subject to imperial erasure.
Let me share with you an example.