soviet war memorials were never for the dead.

they're live psyop portals for imperial lies.

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

(estimated reading time: 5 min)

• My granddad liberated Berlin. His name is never mentioned in Soviet war memorials in Berlin. His language has never been inscribed there. And the statues there do not look like him.

• How Soviet war memorials have never been designed to honour the dead and their sacrifice. They are depicting the empire’s idealised self, standing on the bodies of the colonised.

• How Soviet war memorials in Germany aren't ageing history — but a cognitive weapons system that imperial russia is actively using in its war on Europe.

• A recorded video of a full public talk on decolonising Soviet war memorials, which I gave in a setting unlike anything before.

• A reading list attacking russian imperial myths regarding WWII.

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Just gave a public talk like nothing before.

Ukrainian civil-society activists (Vitsche, with Poland’s Pilecki Institute) invited me to speak on the street — beside one of the Soviet WWII memorials in Berlin’s Tiergarten.

We started a tad late: another speaker, Mariam Naiem, a Ukrainian imperialism researcher and author, couldn’t find the spot — lost, first time there. Then she clocked a group of russians talking about “repeating it again — можем повторить,” the WWII slogan that turns a war of extermination into a promise. So she followed them.

“I thought: if I follow them, I’ll get to this place. And that was exactly how I got here,” she told the crowd later. “We need to acknowledge that this place partly belongs to the russian propaganda narrative,” Naiem warned the crowd, “and by ignoring that, we do exactly what they want.”

Next comes the part where I stopped calling it a memorial and started calling it what it is.

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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I spoke with my back to the thing —