Monday, June 22, 2026
If Everything Is Colonial, Nothing Is: Ukraine, Central Asia, and the Boundaries of Colonial Rule
Sattar Khan Abdulgafarov (1846–1901) was a Muslim judge from Shymkent, in what is now southern Kazakhstan. Russian officials would later remember him as the first native Central Asian to master their language. He embraced Russian culture more enthusiastically than most of his peers: he lived in a Russian-style house with European furnishings, ate Russian food, and even drank alcohol. His wife wore Russian dress and did not veil; their three sons attended a Russian school. Such choices provoked harsh condemnation from his Muslim coreligionists and ended his judicial career. Nor did Russians accept him as one of their own. At times, he found work as a translator for the colonial administration or as a tutor at a Russian school, but he repeatedly fell into poverty and isolation. As one Russian official wrote after his death, “He was excited about the new life, but faced condemnation from his fellow tribesmen and, moreover, ruined his health.” There was little comfort the official could offer: “When the time comes, a historian of the introduction of Russian civilization in Islamic Turkestan will find good words for him.”
Sattar Khan’s story shows that the boundary between colonizers and colonized could be crossed only at great cost. We know comparable cases from other colonial empires, but could one imagine anything similar in the Ukrainian context? Is there a tale of “the first Ukrainian who adopted Russian culture”? Of course not. From the point of view of the imperial center, Ukrainians had no foreign culture to adopt and no threshold to cross—they were already Russians. Vladimir Putin’s recent claims simply extend a long-standing tradition of denying Ukrainian national distinctiveness. The idea of a triune Russian nation that Putin invokes does not withstand historical scrutiny, but the remedy is not to swing to the opposite extreme and label every form of domination “colonialism.”
To substantiate the claim that Ukraine experienced colonial exclusion, Anton Kotenko cites an Interior Ministry directive to stop hiring locals (tuzemtsy) as policemen in the Kyiv General-Governorship. He proposes this document as evidence of colonial rhetoric and practice. But does a single, decontextualized order prove Russian colonialism in Ukraine? I would argue no. For one thing, we are not told whom the term tuzemtsy referred to. Did the order target ethnic Ukrainians, or rather Poles? The timing suggests a link to the Polish uprising of 1830–31. More importantly, we learn nothing about implementation. Was the directive enforced? If so, how consistently? Kotenko does not tell us, and the existing literature does not mention such a policy.
In any case, this directive did not block people of Ukrainian descent from serving in the security apparatus. Consider General Mikhail Ivanovich Dragomirov (1830–1905), a native of the Chernihiv Governorate. A leading authority on infantry tactics, he was appointed in 1889 as commander of the Kyiv Military District and later also as governor general of Kyiv, Podolia, and Volhynia. He is remembered as a Ukrainophile governor general who allowed soldiers to sing Ukrainian folk songs. To what extent he identified as a Ukrainian (or Little Russian) remains uncertain, but it is telling that his friend Ilʹia Repin immortalized him among the Cossack leaders in the famous painting “Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks.” However, neither his Ukrainian origins nor his possible sympathies for the Ukrainian cause impeded his rise to one of the most sensitive offices the empire could offer in its Ukrainian lands.
Dragomirov’s career suggests that even in the late nineteenth century, Ukrainian descent did not bar access to the top ranks of the Romanov state. Fabian Baumann and others have shown that “belonging” to the Russian or Ukrainian nation often hinged on personal choice and could split families. Ethnic origin did not predetermine political identity. Sattar Khan, by contrast, had no such latitude. In Central Asia and other colonial settings, “natives” were always thrown back upon their foreignness. Despite his loyalty to the imperial project, Sattar Khan was confined to minor administrative roles; a military career for a Central Asian by birth was unimaginable.
This sense of foreignness—absent in Ukraine in the same way—was central to Russian rule in Central Asia, as it was to European empires in Africa and Asia. When Kotenko suggests that this emphasis on foreignness is merely my personal preference, he overlooks decades of scholarship on colonialism. In one form or another, all concepts of colonialism hinge on rule by an external power over a population that is marked by the colonizers as alien. Frederick Cooper, Partha Chatterjee, Jürgen Osterhammel: across their work on colonialism, foreignness is foundational. If we decide to dispense with it, we step outside the term’s accepted meaning. If that is the move, why import the concept at all while cutting out its core?
No less problematic is Kotenko’s suggestion to reclassify groups as diverse as Poles, Czechs, Germans, and Jews as potential colonial subjects if Ukrainians do not fit. This constitutes a remarkable shift in his argument from the Ukrainians as an ethnic group to the territory of Ukraine. Yet, it fails to explain how anti-Polish politics could ever serve as proof of colonial rule in Ukrainian lands. Moreover, the broader problem persists: What analytical traction remains if the concept balloons to cover virtually any cross-cultural governance or encounter? If everything turns out to be colonial, there is no need for that concept anymore.
Kotenko quotes several nineteenth-century authors to show how widespread colonial analogies in relation to Ukraine were. These examples do enrich our understanding by demonstrating that such comparisons circulated as early as the mid-nineteenth century. But they ultimately only confirm what Stephen Velychenko argued a quarter-century ago: in Ukraine, colonial comparisons were largely the rhetorical preserve of government critics seeking to brand tsarist rule as unjust or illegitimate. In Central Asia, by contrast, colonial analogies were not merely a polemical flourish, nor were they confined to a narrow circle of dissenters. In Turkestan, even outspoken proponents of imperial expansion framed it in explicitly colonial terms. We have no comparable evidence for late imperial Ukraine.
Kotenko rightly calls for more research on imperial policies in the southwestern provinces. Yet calling for more research and demonstrating that Russian rule in Ukraine was colonial in character are not the same thing. In any case, contrary to Kotenko’s suggestion, my intervention was not a call to shut down efforts to decenter Russia. On the contrary, I welcome the overdue shift to viewing the empire also from its peripheries. I fully agree that we need much more work on administrative practice in the empire’s southwestern lands and on imperial perceptions of Ukrainians and other non-Russians. I have called for more research into parallels, cross-connections, and transfers between Ukraine and colonialism, and I am convinced this will remain a fertile field. Yet, we should not mistake analogy for identity: Romanov rule in Ukraine was imperial, but not a case of colonialism.
Ulrich Hofmeister is a historian of eastern Europe at LMU Munich who specializes in the history of Russia, Central Asia, and Ukraine. His thematic interests include imperial, urban, and intellectual history. He is the author of The White Tsar’s Burden: Russian Notions of an Imperial Civilizing Mission in Central Asia, published in German, and coeditor of Imperial Cities in the Tsarist, Habsburg, and Ottoman Empires (Routledge 2024). Currently, he is working on a book project about the founding of cities in the Russian empire during the eighteenth century.
Citations
- N.P. Ostroumov, Sarty: Ėtnograficheskie materialy: Obshchii ocherk (Tashkent, 1908), 154. See also B.V. Lunin, Istoriografiia obshchestvennykh nauk v Uzbekistane: Bio-bibliograficheskie ocherki (Tashkent, 1974), 333–37.
- See, for example, E.A. Samoilenko, Kievskaia gorodskaia politsiia v seredine XIX—nachale XX vv. (Kyiv, 2000); Serhiy Bilenky, Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands: Kyiv, 1800–1905 (Toronto, 2018).
- For Dragomirov, see S.M. Bushak, “Drahomyrov Mykhailo Ivanovych,” Entsiklopediia suchasnoi Ukraini, ed. I.М. Dziuba, A.I. Zhukovsʹkii, M.H. Zhelezniak et al. (Kyiv, 2008), at https://esu.com.ua/article-21197 (accessed June 15, 2026).