The Empire Within: Why Ukraine’s Decolonization Cannot Be Subcontracted to Edward Said and the Classical Postcolonial Canon

Introduction: The War Within and Without On February 24, 2022, the world witnessed a conventional military invasion. But for Ukraine, this was merely the most violent phase of a war that has lasted centuries. This is a war of archives, of language laws, of church independence, and of history textbooks. It is a war of decolonization. As Ukrainian soldiers defend the country’s borders, Ukrainian scholars, writers, and cultural workers are engaged in a parallel, arduous task: dismantling the русский мир (Russian world) within—a structure of imperial consciousness embedded in institutions, cities, and even the intimate spaces of family and memory. The works of Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Frantz Fanon have been translated into Ukrainian and discussed in academic circles and public forums. The metaphor of the “colony” resonates deeply with a nation that was subjected to centuries of Russification, famines (Holodomor) engineered by a colonial center, and the systematic suppression of its language and culture. On the surface, the parallels seem apt: the colonizer (Russia) imposes its language, denies the sovereignty of the colonized, and extracts resources. However, ot posits that the wholesale adoption of the classical postcolonial canon, particularly that of Edward Said, represents a profound intellectual misstep. It is an attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole. Said’s Orientalism (1978) was a specific critique of Western—French, British, American—constructions of the “Orient.” It dissected how a hegemonic West created a discursive image of the East to dominate it. To apply this framework to Ukraine’s relationship with Russia is to ignore the fundamental fact that Ukraine is not the “Orient” to Russia’s “West.” Ukraine and Russia share a common origin myth (Kyivan Rus’), a deep entanglement of kinship, and a history of being co-constructed within the same imperial polity. I will argue that relying on Said and the classical postcolonial canon for Ukraine’s decolonization is problematic for three primary reasons. First, it misdiagnoses the nature of the imperial relationship, forcing a binary that does not account for Russia’s self-identification as an anti-colonial “empire of difference” or Ukraine’s historical role as a “colonized metropole.” Second, it imposes an alien temporality and geography that subordinates Ukraine’s unique experience—including the Holodomor and the Soviet system—to a narrative primarily concerned with maritime empires and racial difference. Third, it risks a form of epistemic dependency, replacing one master narrative (Russian imperial) with another (Western postcolonial), thereby delaying the urgent work of developing an endogenous Ukrainian philosophical tradition of liberation. Decolonization for Ukraine, this article ontends, is not about applying a ready-made theory but about excavating its own philosophical genealogy. It must look not to the banks of the Nile or the campuses of Columbia University, but to the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, to the underground dissidents of the Soviet era like Vasyl Stus and Viacheslav Chornovil, and to the contemporary thinkers who grapple with the specific trauma of being a “young-old” nation fighting a “elder brother” who refuses to acknowledge its existence. 2. The Said Framework: A Canon of Maritime Empire To understand why Said’s framework is ill-suited for Ukraine, we must first precisely delineate what his project entailed. Edward Said’s Orientalism is a magisterial work of Foucauldian discourse analysis. Its central thesis is that Orientalism is not merely a scholarly discipline but a “corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it.” For Said, this was a system of power that created an ontological and epistemological distinction between the “Occident” (rational, masculine, modern) and the “Orient” (irrational, feminine, static). This binary was not just intellectual; it was the handmaiden of empire, enabling the French occupation of Algeria, the British Raj in India, and later American hegemony in the Middle East. The Said framework is predicated on several key characteristics that define its object of study: 1. Geographical and Civilizational Distance: The colonizer and colonized are perceived as distinct civilizations, often separated by vast oceans. The “Orient” is a faraway place, exotic and fundamentally other. 2. Racial and Religious Hierarchy: The justification for empire is often built on overt racial hierarchies (the white man’s burden) and civilizational missions (bringing Christianity or modernity to the “heathen”). 3. Economic Extraction via Plantation or Resource Colony: The colony exists to serve the metropole’s economy through raw materials, cash crops, or strategic trade routes. 4. The “Native” as a Subject of Study: The colonized is silenced, represented by the colonizer in ethnographies, administrative reports, and literature. The colonizer speaks for the colonized. When Ukraine looks into this mirror, it sees a distorted reflection. Where is the ocean separating Kyiv from Moscow? The two capitals are connected by a millennium of shared history. Where is the racial hierarchy? Russians and Ukrainians were classified in the Russian Empire as “all-Russian, ” sharing the same “Slavic” race, with differences often dismissed as dialectical or provincial. Where is the clear-cut economic model of extraction? Ukraine was the industrial heartland of the empire, not merely a source of raw cotton or sugar. The relationship was one of absorption, not just exploitation. Furthermore, Said’s focus was overwhelmingly on the Western imperial powers. In his later work, Culture and Imperialism, he acknowledged other empires but maintained a Euro-American focus. Russia, despite its own expansive imperialism, occupies a liminal space in Said’s world. It is both a European power that engaged in Orientalist projects within its own borders (the Caucasus, Central Asia) and a semi-peripheral empire that saw itself as a liberator of Slavs from the Ottomans and Austrians. To apply the grammar of Said to Russia-Ukraine is to ignore the specific ideology of Russian imperialism, which is not classical Western Orientalism but a politics of kinship absorption. 3. The Ukrainian Exception: The Colonized Metropole and the Denial of Otherness The fundamental problem with applying Said to Ukraine is that Russian imperialism does not construct Ukraine as its “Orient.” It constructs Ukraine as itself. The central tenet of Russian imperial ideology, from the 17th century to Putin’s 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, ” is the denial of Ukrainian ontological existence. In this view, Ukrainians are not a colonized people; they are “little Russians, ” a regional sub-ethnic group of a greater triune Russian nation. The goal of Russian imperialism has never been to rule over a distant, exotic other; it has been to absorb the self into a larger, homogenized imperial self. This is a critical distinction that postcolonial theory, rooted in the experience of British and French empires, struggles to articulate. Theoreticians of settler colonialism, like Lorenzo Veracini, offer more nuance, but the Ukrainian case requires a conceptual innovation that some scholars call the “colonized metropole” or “imperial sibling.” 3.1. The Politics of Kinship In his seminal work Ukraine: A History, Orest Subtelny describes the relationship as one of an “elder brother” (Russia) to a “younger brother” (Ukraine). This fraternal metaphor is not a casual simile; it is the operational logic of the empire. The empire does not say, “You are inferior because you are different.” It says, “You are inferior because you are a younger, less developed version of me.” This familial discourse makes resistance uniquely painful. When the Ukrainian language was banned by the Ems Ukaz of 1876, it was not framed as the suppression of a foreign tongue but as the correction of a regional dialect back into the bosom of the all-Russian literary language. Edward Said’s framework assumes a fundamental difference that justifies domination. The Russian imperial framework assumes a fundamental sameness that justifies domination. The colonizer in the Said model must create a myth of the other. The Russian colonizer must destroy the myth of the other—any evidence of Ukrainian distinctness is a threat to the imperial ontology. This is why Ukraine’s very existence is a “metaphysical threat” to Putin’s regime. To decolonize using Said would be to adopt a framework that accepts the premise of separation that the empire fights; it is useful for asserting difference. However, it fails to explain the internalization of the colonizer’s identity, where generations of Ukrainians were raised to believe they were part of a larger, superior Russian civilization. 3.2. The Semi-Peripheral Empire Ukraine’s role within the Russian Empire and the USSR was not simply that of a passive victim. For centuries, Ukrainians were not only colonized but also served as agents of empire. Ukrainians populated the Tsarist administration, served as Cossack elites who helped expand the empire into the Wild Fields and the Caucasus, and later formed a significant portion of the Soviet nomenklatura. This duality complicates the neat colonizer/colonized binary. Mykola Riabchuk, a leading Ukrainian intellectual, has described this as a “postcolonial syndrome” with a unique twist—the “colonized metropole.” Ukrainians were simultaneously the builders of the empire and its subalterns. This creates a psychological complexity that Said’s model, which often posits a clearer moral and geographic distance, does not adequately address. The “native intellectual” in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is often presented as having to reclaim a pre-colonial identity that was systematically destroyed. For Ukraine, the pre-colonial identity (Kyivan Rus’) is also claimed by Russia. The process of decolonization is not just about throwing off the colonizer but about a forensic, archaeological disentanglement of a shared historical patrimony. It is a divorce, not a rebellion of a slave against a master. 3.3. The Holodomor: A Colonial Famine The Holodomor (1932-33), the man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians, is a central event in Ukrainian national consciousness and a key test case for postcolonial theory. Was it a colonial genocide? Most Ukrainian scholars argue yes. But how does it fit the Said-Fanon framework? Classical colonial famines (like those in British India) were often a result of neglect, laissez-faire economics, or extraction of grain for the metropole. The Holodomor was different. It was an active, deliberate, and targeted use of starvation as a weapon of state terror to break the back of a peasant-based national movement. It was not merely economic extraction; it was anthropological engineering. The Soviets did not treat Ukrainians as a separate race to be exploited; they treated them as a distinct nation that had to be liquidated as a political category. Said’s discourse analysis, focused on representation and epistemology, lacks the tools to fully grasp the Stalinist technology of mass starvation, which combined class warfare with national subjugation. To fit the Holodomor into a Saidian framework would require flattening its unique mechanics—the totalitarian state’s capacity for internal colonization, the denial of food based on passport nationality—into a generic story of imperial exploitation. This does a disservice to the specificity of the Ukrainian tragedy. 4. The Limits of Classical Postcolonialism: A Critique from the Periphery Beyond the specific misalignment of Russia-Ukraine relations, there are deeper philosophical problems with the application of the classical postcolonial canon to the post-Soviet space. These problems relate to temporality, geography, and the politics of intellectual authority. 4.1. The Problem of Soviet Modernity Classical postcolonial theory was largely developed in response to empires that ended in the mid-20th century—the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese. These empires were characterized by a colonial encounter that, while brutal, was often followed by a clean political break: the flag came down, the capital moved, and the former colony achieved nominal independence. The Russian Empire transformed into the Soviet Union, which was not a classical empire but a hybrid entity: a communist state that maintained imperial structures through the language of internationalism and the ideology of socialist brotherhood. The Soviet experience introduced a unique form of colonization that was modernist and utopian. It promised liberation from capitalism while practicing cultural Russification. It created national republics with titular languages and flags (a form of “national form, socialist content”) while ensuring that the center—Moscow—controlled all levers of power. This “internal colonization” is poorly theorized by Said, whose focus remained on the imperial relationship between a Western European power and a non-European “other.” The Soviet Union was a “self-colonizing” empire. It industrialized Ukraine at a breakneck pace (the Donbas), but it did so by imposing a colonial hierarchy where Ukrainian was the language of the village and Russian the language of the factory, the party, and the future. The trauma of Soviet modernity—the destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the 1930s, the forced collectivization, the Chernobyl disaster—is a trauma of a colonial relationship that wore the mask of fraternal union. To analyze this using a toolkit designed for the British Raj is to miss the insidiousness of a colonialism that denied it was colonialism. 4.2. The Orientalization of Eastern Europe There is a latent irony in using Said to decolonize Ukraine. Said’s Orientalism famously included a chapter on how Europe constructed the “Orient.” But as Larry Wolff demonstrated in Inventing Eastern Europe, the very concept of “Eastern Europe” was an 18th-century Enlightenment invention—a Western European intellectual construction of a backward, semi-civilized region lying between Europe and the “true” Orient. Ukraine, and by extension Russia, were often objects of this Western Orientalist gaze. When a Ukrainian intellectual adopts Said to critique Russian imperialism, they are simultaneously adopting a framework that was created to critique Western imperialism—the same Western imperialism that historically looked down on Ukraine as part of a wild, uncivilized Eastern periphery. There is a risk of epistemological displacement: using the language of the former colonizer (the West’s postcolonial theory) to critique a different colonizer (Russia), while remaining blind to the fact that the very intellectual categories one is using originate in a power center that historically denied Ukraine’s European agency. This creates a dependency. Ukrainian scholars become adept at translating their experience into the language of Columbia and Harvard—speaking of “subalternity, ” “hybridity, ” and “alterity.” While this may gain traction in Western academia, it does not necessarily serve the internal work of decolonization. It risks transforming a specific, local, and bloody struggle into a metaphor for a global academic trend. 4.3. Fanon and the Pitfall of National Consciousness Frantz Fanon, another titan of postcolonial thought, is often invoked for his psychological analysis of the colonized and his advocacy of revolutionary violence. Yet Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth ends with a famous warning about the pitfalls of national consciousness, arguing that the national bourgeoisie after independence merely takes the place of the colonizers, becoming a corrupt, self-serving elite. This warning is valuable, but its uncritical application to Ukraine can be pernicious. Fanon was writing about countries like Algeria, where a native elite was largely excluded from the colonial administration. In Ukraine, the “national bourgeoisie” was systematically destroyed by Stalin. The contemporary Ukrainian national project is not the rise of a native elite to replace a foreign one; it is the reconstitution of a nation that was subjected to a genocide of its intellectual class (the Executed Renaissance). To apply Fanon’s caution against bourgeois nationalism to Ukraine today is to ignore the fact that Ukrainian nationalism, for centuries, was a form of anti-colonial resistance in itself. While all nationalism requires critical self-reflection, to frame Ukrainian nation-building as a “pitfall” echoes Russian propaganda that labels Ukrainian identity as “bourgeois nationalist” and, therefore, illegitimate. 5. The Philosophical Imperative: Towards an Endogenous Decolonization If Ukraine cannot rely on the classical postcolonial canon, what should it rely on? The answer lies in turning inward—toward a critical re-engagement with Ukraine’s own intellectual history and the forging of a philosophical framework that speaks to the specificities of the post-Soviet, post-imperial condition. This is not an argument for isolationism; it is an argument for intellectual sovereignty. 5.1. The Rediscovery of the Kyiv School of Philosophy Long before Said, Ukraine had its own philosophical tradition grappling with the relationship between personhood, nation, and empire. The Kyiv School of Philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s, including thinkers like Ivan Dziuba, Mykola Popovych, and the dissident poet-philosopher Vasyl Stus, developed a sophisticated critique of Soviet imperialism from within the Marxist framework. Ivan Dziuba’s Internationalism or Russification? (1965) is arguably one of the most important decolonial texts of the 20th century. Dziuba did not rely on Said (who was just beginning his work). Instead, he turned Lenin’s own principles of national self-determination against the Soviet state. He demonstrated, using Soviet data and Marxist logic, that the USSR was not fostering internationalism but systematically Russifying Ukraine. This was a form of endogenous critique—using the master’s tools not just to dismantle the master’s house, but to expose the master’s lies within his own blueprint. Similarly, Vasyl Stus, a poet and dissident who died in a Soviet labor camp, embodied a philosophy of resistance rooted not in Western post-structuralism but in a fierce, existential humanism. His famous declaration—that to “remain oneself” was an act of heroism—offers a philosophical anchor for decolonization that is about authenticity and ethical defiance, rather than discursive analysis. Stus’s work provides a model of decolonization as a spiritual and existential struggle against the totalitarian erasure of the self. 5.2. The Post-Colonial vs. The Post-Soviet A crucial step for Ukrainian decolonization is to theorize the “post-Soviet” as a distinct category. The post-Soviet condition is not merely a sub-set of the postcolonial. It carries the burden of 70 years of socialist modernity, the trauma of a collapsed utopia, and the sudden, chaotic transition to capitalism in the 1990s—a transition that oligarchs, many of whom had roots in the Soviet nomenklatura, hijacked. Ukrainian thinkers like Oksana Zabuzhko have explored this. In her philosophical essays, Zabuzhko articulates the “post-Soviet” as a state of psychological “splitness” where the colonized subject is trapped between a mythical imperial past and an uncertain future. Her work moves beyond the Saidian binary to explore the internal empire—the way the imperial language (Russian) functions as a language of intimacy, power, and even love, making the act of linguistic decolonization (switching to Ukrainian) a deeply personal and traumatic event. This is not a matter of representing the “Other”; it is a matter of reconstructing the Self. 5.3. Decolonizing the Canon: The Necessity of Nuance A truly Ukrainian decolonization must also involve a critical engagement with its own ambiguities. It must confront the fact that Ukraine’s relationship with the Russian Empire was not only one of victimhood. The Cossack state, the Hetmanate, enjoyed periods of autonomy and even participated in imperial expansion. The 20th century saw complex figures like Symon Petliura and Stepan Bandera, who fought for independence but whose legacies are contested due to alliances and actions that complicate a simple narrative of heroic anti-colonial struggle. Decolonization, in this sense, is not about constructing a pristine national myth to replace a Russian imperial one. It is about a rigorous, often painful, historical accounting. This is a different intellectual task from the one Said set for the Arab world, where he sought to dismantle a Western construction of identity. For Ukraine, the task is to construct a coherent national narrative while simultaneously deconstructing the imperial one that has been internalized for centuries. This requires a philosophical approach that is hermeneutic—focused on interpretation and meaning—rather than purely discursive and deconstructive.