the empire’s favorite muslim — until he saw through russian lies.

The name that Moscow has spent a century erasing.

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

(estimated reading time: 8 min)

• A century ago, the russian empire's most dangerous indigenous critic learned firsthand that every Moscow peace deal is only a piece of paper. His memoir reads as if it were written this year.

• Essential sources on the Bashqort anti-colonial struggle, and why it is one of my favorite chapters in the Russian Colonialism 101 guidebook.

• A must-read on decolonisation in Central Asia documenting the region's accelerating break with russian imperial lies — evidence, in real time, that the empire is losing ground in territories Moscow has held for centuries. Useful for anyone arguing against the "russia is too big to push back on" line.

• The 1927 trial in Paris, where a French court effectively legitimised the russian imperial narrative about Ukrainian "antisemitism" — and where much of the Western Ukrainophobia you encounter today was first laundered into respectability.

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Ahmedzeki Velidi Togan, a Bashqort national liberation leader and one of the greatest Turkic thinkers of the 20th century. A picture taken sometime in the early 1920s.

There is one name in particular russia would hate for the rest of the world to learn and appreciate. Ahmedzeki Velidi Togan.

Another Bashqort national liberation leader, Abdülkadir Süleyman İnan, left an account of a firefight near Samarkand in June 1922: “When a Russian imperial unit, detailed to liquidate us, opened fire, we took refuge in a nearby cemetery. As we began defending ourselves, I noticed that Togan had taken out his ever-present notebook and was busily scribbling. The circumstances were so critical that some of those among our ranks even thought that he was hurriedly recording his last will and testament. He kept writing, seemingly oblivious to the flying bullets aimed at him and the accompanying sounds of war. I shouted at him from behind the tombstone that was protecting me, and asked why he was not fighting. Without looking up, continuing to write, he shouted back: "You continue firing. The inscriptions on these headstones are very interesting.''

That is the figure the Kremlin has spent a century erasing.

Togan was a founding father of the Bashqort independence movement and a major figure in the early movement to federalise the russian empire. When federalisation failed, he led his nation — at the western edge of North Asia — to independence in 1917, after almost two centuries of russian colonial rule. Bashqortostan became one of the first democratic Muslim republics in the world in 1917, before Atatürk's Turkey, before Pakistan, before anything that gets named first in Western histories.

He was also an international anti-colonial figure. He fought in the ranks of the Turkestan National Liberation Movement from 1920 to 1923, the largest anti-colonial uprising in Central Asian history.

But that is not the biggest reason the Kremlin spent decades smearing and erasing his name.

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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