The contradictory political nature of the USSR, which has been squeezed into the normative framework of the description of classical empires with some difficulty, has also affected the fortunes of postcolonial research developing in the post-Soviet space (and more broadly regional studies that are trying to establish their own local position, balancing between the use of authoritative theoretical optics borrowed from the “Western academy,” and the “adherence” to material that has not been reflected upon, and the uncritical reproduction of the language of the studied tradition). As a result, political attitudes and epistemological foundations that are fundamentally different from one another are pulled into an increasingly tighter knot: the criticism of hegemony and the affirmation of moral authority, methodological constructivism and traditional primordialism, and sensitivity to the fluid game of differences and the logic of binary oppositions. Then the historical and cultural politics of the Russian state are overlaid on top of
all of this, aiming to heighten the shifts and confusions listed above in order to achieve a postimperial patriotic consensus. This article is an attempt to at
least partially identify the trajectory and mechanisms of these diffusions and substitutions, inscribing them in the current tragic context, which, among other things, has a postcolonial/postimperial dimension.