russia is stealing ukrainian identity.
russia cannot exist without never-ending cultural appropriation.
Sometime before the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine, I visited one of the modern European art museums that featured ‘Russian avant-garde’ paintings. They were all impressive, but one just paralyzed me. It centered a geometrically shaped human figure running along a desert-like space. The soil under them is colored red and black. A damaged cross and a blood-soaked sword hang over the lone sack in the background. The visuals did not make any logical sense to me. But in their totality, they triggered an overpowering, primal-like reaction: a mix of existential pain, terror, and grief. That was the first and only painting in my life that made me cry.
I checked the name and the author. It said, ‘The Running Man,’ by Kazimir Malevitch. Nationality: Russian. This confused me even more: How come a work by a Russian I barely heard of made such a devastating impact on me? I dismissed it as some weird, unexplainable emotional outburst and moved on.
I should have trusted my ancestral instinct, though.
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.
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