Anastasia Piliavsky
“Decolonization” as Ukraine’s Suicidal Culture War
Since the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine, a discourse of “decolonization” has proliferated in Ukraine’s public sphere and policy. Driven by a social minority and the whiplash trauma of war, this aggressive project declared war against all forms of Russophone culture in Ukraine—from music and literature to the use of the Russian language in schools. Its advocates, a disproportionately vocal minority of violent right-wing and cultural activists, treat the Russian language as a vessel of Russia’s murderous colonialism. To stop it, one must wage war against Russophone culture. The trouble is that most of Ukraine’s Armed Forces and most victims of Russia’s war—whose cities and villages were razed for refusing to submit to Russia—are Russian-speaking Ukrainians. I will speak about the sources of this “decolonial” culture war in independent Ukraine’s history, its relation to Putin’s postcolonial theory and hybrid war, and its effect on the prospects of peace in Ukraine—and in Europe.
Anastasia Piliavsky is a social anthropologist and publicist who teaches anthropology and politics at King’s College London. A specialist in Indian politics, she holds a doctoral degree from Oxford, where she read Social Anthropology as a Rhodes Scholar. Her publications include Patronage as Politics in South Asia (Cambridge 2014) and Nobody’s People (Stanford 2020). She also curates a regular column in the Times of India, and contributes regularly to Indian, British, and Ukrainian media, where she speaks and writes about India and Ukraine. Piliavsky is now a Principal Investigator of a European Research Council-funded project on India’s vernacular political lexicons. Since February 2022, she has also been an active supporter of Ukraine’s refugees and armed forces. More recently, she has become a vocal advocate of political nationhood and an opponent of culture wars in Ukraine. She is currently writing a book titled Endarkenment: How the American Left Lost its Way, about the rise of culture wars and the fall of the political Left in the United States. A native of Odessa, who has lived in Britain, India, and the US, she now lives with her daughter Clara between Cambridge and Odessa, Ukraine.