Anotace
After the fall of the Soviet bloc, former satellite states in Eastern Europe attempted to re-establish their identity through externalizing their Soviet past and distancing from Russia. To that end, framing the Moscow-dominated period in their national histories as colonial experience proved useful. Variegated applications of postcolonial studies on the post-Soviet space gained wide currency in Poland and in the Baltic states in 1990s and 2000s. However, those states’ accession to Euroatlantic structures, most importantly, to the EU and NATO, had twofold consequences for the postcolonial debates: 1) their political instrumentalization lost their urgency due to the perceived mitigation of the Kremlin threat; 2) a new wave of othering from the side of Western partners, as well as intellectual collaboration with the Western Leftists, urged new interpretations of Western colonialism vis-à-vis its East as the main internal Other. Throughout this dynamics, ‘classical’ postcolonial studies – centered around former maritime empires and their overseas possessions – remained largely closed to East European interpretations as ideologically incompatible with the postcolonial ‘mainstream’.
Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, swiftly qualified as a “colonial war” (Timothy Snyder), produced a new twist in old debates and generated new arguments on the applicability of the postcolonial approach to the post-Soviet space. Russian neo-imperial conquest against the unfolding peripheralization of Europe enable new interpretations, capable to enrich both Area and postcolonial studies, which presents the core objective of the course.