the empire’s wardrobe of control.

when culture functions like a missile: russia's soft tools of colonial control.

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

(estimated reading time: 7 min)

• How russia replaced indigenous clothing traditions with imperial caricature — and why Ukrainian fashion is now a frontline of anti-colonial resistance.

• russian deportation of nearly half a million Chechens and Ingush - reconstructed from archival documents and survivor memoirs. From secret planning through "special settlement" exile to partial rehabilitation in 1956.

• a russian director’s Cannes “anti-war” speech that never mentioned Ukraine once — Ukrainians explain why erasing the colonised victim is not courage, it’s imperial logic.

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These days, you hear russians talk about a small Ukrainian village called Mala Tokmachka more than Ukrainians do.

It’s in my home region. It has become one of the longest-held defensive positions in the ongoing Ukrainian war for independence — an embarrassment for the russian empire, whose leader promised the whole thing would be over in a few days. The village itself is now gone. But Ukraine’s public broadcaster republished a 2002 archival recording from Mala Tokmachka this week: local women and the folk ensemble Tokmachanochka singing Ukrainian folk songs on a winter evening in what used to be one of the most brutally colonised stretches of land in the former russian empire.

I loved the defiance in it. But then something else rubbed me the wrong way.

The clothes.

The satin skirts, the kitsch embroidery, too busy with colours.

When I was growing up in Zaporizhzhia, just a couple of hours from Mala Tokmachka, a few students at our school wanted to wear the Ukrainian national dress. I would not, either. It was years after the end of the russian occupation. But we still felt about it as the leftover role, the costume you got stuck with. Everyone wanted to be a russian aristocracy, or a Victorian explorer in a pith helmet — something “civilised.” Being Ukrainian on stage meant a shiny, cheap costume, a plastic flower crown with poppies and guelder-roses.

Only later did I find out that the empire had crafted this caricature design decades before I was born. And it did not represent centuries-old traditions of Ukrainian indigenous clothing.

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 supported your work because I am also familiar with the long-term adverse effects of imperialism, in Ireland, where I live, and in Lithuania, where I have worked and frequently visit.”

by Jack O’Sullivan, a paying supporter of Russian Colonialism 101.

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