here is what's in store for you this week:
(estimated reading time: 6 min)
The Soviet Union was Hitler’s most useful partner before 1941, so the empire built a story where Ukrainians were the collaborators. This week’s featured book has the numbers and fact-checks the alleged war crimes of the 25,000 Ukrainians drafted into the Waffen-SS “Galicia” Division. Let Ukrainians account for themselves.
The Holodomor genocide left no landscape to point at, so two artists found the evidence somewhere the empire never thought to look: their own kitchen.
A Ukrainian historian in 2000 laid out the exact mechanism russia would use to justify recolonising Crimea — and how Leo Tolstoy helped build it. The West filed it under history rather than warning. Now the historian tops every reading list abroad.
What does garbage left by russians in their overseas colonies in North America tell us about their failed 83-year-long attempt to colonise it?
Colonised indigenous people drafted by the Kremlin to kill Ukrainians: helpless victims or barbaric mercenaries? A sober and data-driven look by a Japanese researcher suggests neither. But it also doesn't expect much resistance. Yet.
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.
