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.