Forgetting Bolshevik indigenisation: Botakoz Kassymbekova, Aminat Chokobaeva, ‘Expropriation, assimilation, elimination: Understanding Soviet Settler Colonialism’, south/south dialogues, 05/07/2023 | settler colonial studies blog

Forgetting Bolshevik indigenisation: Botakoz Kassymbekova, Aminat Chokobaeva, ‘Expropriation, assimilation, elimination: Understanding Soviet Settler Colonialism’, south/south dialogues, 05/07/2023

27Jul23

Excerpt: The Soviet Union is often described as an empire with heavily centralized rule over a large multiethnic territory, which suppressed anti-imperial resistance (Kappeler, 2001). Yet many scholars view the Soviet Union as more similar to a multinational state that stopped discriminating between the former colonizers and the colonized (Khalid, 2021). But as we will argue in this essay, the Soviet Union shared more than a passing similarity with colonial empires: the key to understanding both the Soviet Union’s interventionist policies and its use of violence in the peripheries lies in the concept of settler colonialism. In this article, we present schematic principles of Soviet settler colonialism and open discussion for a further rethinking of the Soviet field through the lens of settler colonialism.

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