A lifelong lie: escaping Russian colonialism
Why we must stop justifying Russia’s crimes and help Ukraine win — for all our sakes.
The year was 1998. Walking down Pushkin Boulevard in my native Donetsk, I listened to English lessons on my Walkman and dreamed of America — a country I would soon call home. At age 20, I couldn’t form a sentence in the language of the USSR’s arch-enemy; my teachers, who didn’t speak English themselves, made sure of that.
Born and raised in Ukraine, I had just graduated from Donetsk State Tech University, but I couldn’t speak Ukrainian either. Russian was my native language; though it wasn’t me who chose it, Russian colonialism did just as it chose to plaster the names of Russian chauvinists, like Pushkin, all over my city.
I was gaslit by the evil empire, and so were you. Let me correct this. So are you.
In the fall of 1982, I remember the nannies at my kindergarten weeping over the death of “our dear leader,” Leonid Brezhnev. Perhaps I cried, too. The earliest childhood memories are notoriously faulty. But in 2024, I hold no illusions about Russia: what it has done, what it seeks to do, and what will happen if the Free World fails to stop it.
Rewriting History: A Soviet Mirage
It took me a lifetime to un-dim the metaphorical lights — to escape the unreality Moscow constructed for the peoples and lands it colonized. It all started with a perverted version of history that provided all the answers but left no room for questions. For example, when did World War II start? Sorry, my mistake — the ‘Great Patriotic War,’ as it’s called in Russia. Everybody knows it began in 1941 when Nazi Germany invaded the USSR. Except it didn’t. Hitler’s betrayal of Stalin didn’t start the war — their secret pack to invade Poland did.
What the world remembers, and what Russia tries desperately to forget, is that Europe’s worst calamity began with the unholy alliance of two evil regimes hellbent on colonization.
When the Berlin Wall came down, many in the West mistook it for a victory. But who exactly did we defeat?
Growing up in the USSR, doubt and skepticism, at the heart of the Western intellectual tradition, were out of reach. It took me decades to understand that the Soviet Union was never truly a country, but rather an oppressive Russia Empire by another name. When the “brotherhood” of 15 nations is praised and celebrated all around you, it is almost unimaginable that one of those “brothers” was prepared to kill, rape, and torture in a zealous pursuit of its imperialist ambitions, which, in Russia’s case, always took categorial precedence over human life.
The Victory That Wasn’t
When the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War order crumbled before our eyes, many in the West mistook it for a victory. But who exactly did we defeat? During the seventy years of the USSR’s existence, the evil of communist ideology was merely layered atop the evil of a Frankenstein state, one that desperately wanted the world to see it as a nation.
By 1991, Communism was gone, the USSR fell apart, but the revanchism and a deep-seated fear in Moscow — that the Russian Federation would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions — remained.
Pick up a map, and you’ll easily spot a vast country called Russia. But make no mistake — this is no nation; it has no national interests, only imperial ambitions
Empires thrive on perpetual expansion, as vividly demonstrated by Russia’s invasion of Ichkeria, Georgia, and now Ukraine. Caught in a relentless cycle of conquest and domination, Moscow’s legitimacy and stability hinge on the constant acquisition of new territories, the appropriation of other nations’ histories, and the subjugation of their peoples.
Suppressed history is always a harbinger of more violence
In seventh grade, we studied the “Great Famine” of 1932–1933 and learned about the “kulaks” hiding grain and how the righteous Red Army was fighting the imperialists who wanted the Soviet project to fail. But did I know what role Stalin’s monstrous and deliberate policy to starve millions of Ukrainians by engineering Holodomor had to do with my own life story?
Why did everyone around me speak Russian in Ukraine at the tail-end of the twentieth century? How did my Armenian father, born and raised in Georgia, end up coming to Donbas — the Soviet Union’s promised land of his youth? Colonialism is the answer. Moscow knew that to bury the Ukrainian dream — escaping the empire’s yoke — required repopulating the land with outsiders to prevent even a possibility of a grassroots national movement rekindling. Finding myself both complicit in Russia’s imperial project and its victim was as confusing as it was unsettling.
the policy of “with Ukraine as long as it takes” has failed. From the start, it was grounded in our misunderstanding of Moscow.
Raphael Lemkin, the man who introduced the concept of genocide to the world, recognized Moscow’s Holodomor as a systematic effort to destroy the Ukrainian nation, culture, and people through starvation and repression. Yet, as I grew up, his name and his views existed in a separate realm of knowledge and awareness from the one I inhabited. The two were meant never to cross. Had I not escaped the morass of endless lies sustaining the evil empire, I would’ve never understood that we are witnessing another genocide attempt and that history is indeed repeating itself.
A breath of fresh air
The year was 1998. Walking down 900 East Street in Salt Lake City, Utah, as a fresh-off-the-boat American, I had much to look forward to and little to reflect on. Between naïveté and arrogance, I managed to strike both with the thought that my individual journey was forerunning the path Ukraine was to inevitably take: from the dark past of oppression and suffering all the way to freedom and prosperity. I didn’t think much about Russia at the time. Surely, it must have wanted the same thing for itself, but it was for the Russian people to decide their future.
When I swore allegiance to the U.S. flag in 2005 and began my career in international relations, the rose-colored glasses started to come off. The straitjacket of lies that had enveloped my mind since childhood showed signs of wear and tear as it came into contact with history books that weren’t Russian propaganda.
The two paths: Russia’s imperial resurgence and Ukraine’s fight for freedom
Not only did I start to understand the past, but Moscow was also unmasking itself fast in real time — murdering thousands of Chechens for defying their colonizers, meddling in the affairs of Ukraine and other neighboring states, and reverting to ruthless authoritarianism after a brief flirtation with democracy in the nineties.
Meanwhile, Ukrainians were rejecting a rigged election and uniting in what became known as the Orange Revolution, demanding accountability from their government. It was evident that Russia and Ukraine were on different paths, but I was unprepared even to imagine the magnitude of this difference.
What remained obscured to me at the time, however, was the extent to which Russia would resist and sabotage Ukraine’s progress at every turn. The heir to the bloodthirsty tsars and commissars, the Russian Federation was firmly set on a trajectory toward totalitarianism, oppression, and, ultimately, fascism.
With hindsight, I realize that my gaslit mind mistook a bit of situational awareness for enlightenment. Back then, though, I believed — indeed, I knew — Russia couldn’t invade Ukraine. Now, I can see that for the Moscow-centered empire, colonial conquest was all but inevitable.
The West refuses to understand what Russia is on purpose
Pick up any map, and you’ll easily spot a vast country called Russia. But make no mistake — this is no nation; it has no national interests, only imperial ambitions. Bizarrely, we justify Moscow’s criminal actions eagerly at our own peril, despite the threat it poses not just to Ukraine, the Baltics, Poland, etc. but to the entire world and, paradoxically, to the population of Russia too. Don’t take my word for it, ask the people of Tatarstan, Bashkiria, Dagestan or any other Eurasian folk Moscow had colonized. The veritable prison of nations spent decades, if not centuries, attempting to erase their identities, languages, and cultures.
To help Ukraine defeat the aggressor is not charity, it’s in our strategic interest
Our stubborn refusal to face the facts is confounding. What is holding us back from processing the lessons of Russia’s bloodstained history, from believing Russia when it tells us it plans to commit genocide? Why can’t we act decisively on this knowledge?
Given an opportunity to restore deterrents, rebuild our credibility, and reassert our commitment to the values we profess, we flounder time and again. To help Ukraine defeat the aggressor is not charity, it’s in our strategic interest. Any other outcome creates a much more problematic future for each of Ukraine’s allies individually, and all of us collectively.
The peril of inaction, cloaked in excuses and laced with cowardice
Gaining clarity of vision and decolonizing my mind has been a decades-long process, still ongoing. I finally learned Ukrainian, and I no longer speak Russian. After all, Moscow used the pretext of “protecting” Russian speakers in Donbas to justify its invasion. As an unhumorous joke goes, no matter where you are or who you are, if you continue to speak Russian, the motherland will come to “save” you one day.
As I reflect on my journey, I see much of it mirrored in the painstakingly slow and reluctant awakening of the Free World to the realities of Ruscism (Russian Fascism). But we can’t afford decades of incremental enlightenment; we must now recognize that the policy of “with Ukraine as long as it takes” has failed. From the start, it was grounded in our misunderstanding of Moscow.
History makes it clear that Russia responds to indecisiveness and weakness by raising the stakes, but when faced with strength and determination, it retreats. The humiliating defeat of the Tsarist Russia by Japan in 1905 is one such example. More recently, In 1989, a nuclear-armed superpower — one of only two in the world — was forced to withdraw from Afghanistan after another devastating loss. Its equally violent successor, the Russian Federation, has claimed victory in every conflict it initiated since, with the consequences all too obvious.
We, in the Free World, can no longer afford to be willfully gaslit by Moscow’s lies. The stakes are too high, not just for Ukraine but for every democratic nation. Our moral and historical obligation extends beyond thoughts and prayers; it demands decisive action. We owe this to the generations before us, and even more to those who will follow. The time has come to end incrementalism and commit fully to Ukraine’s victory, securing not a temporary ceasefire–certain to boomerang back as a yet more dangerous war–but a lasting peace for Europe and the world.
This article first appeared in Newsweek on October 11, 2024
