Monday, June 22, 2026

Romanov Empire, Colonialism, and the History of Ukraine: A Reply to Ulrich Hofmeister

On December 1, 2023, I attended Juliet Johnson’s Presidential Address at the 55th ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies) Convention. The address impressed me with its opening land acknowledgment and reflections on “de-centering Russia,” as did the whole convention, which featured many panels devoted to its theme of decolonization. Yet, upon leaving Philadelphia, I wondered how long these conversations, particularly in relation to Ukraine, would last.

I read Ulrich Hofmeister’s article as a suggestion to draw a symbolic line under the discussions held over the last four years. It argues that even if the Romanov empire “can indeed be considered a colonial power, the concept of colonialism is not equally appropriate for all its regions and at all times”. While I wholeheartedly support the call to be more attentive to the concepts we use, the unambiguous argument that “even though the Ukrainian steppe was a major arena of kolonizatsiia, Ukraine does not fit into the concept of colonialism” (748) is based on insufficient empirical evidence and flawed methodological premises.

Consider the following archival document, sent from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to one of its subordinates. This circular shared “the supreme order from this time onward not to appoint natives (tuzemtsev) and local population as policemen.” Confronted with such a term, one might expect the document to pertain to Central Asia or Siberia. And yet, I found this text from 1831 in the archive of the Kyiv general-governor in charge of three imperial provinces on the Right Bank of the Dnipro. The circular undermines Hofmeister’s argument in several ways. First, it reminds us that during the age of empires, there was no single administrative unit of Ukraine governed by a single coherent policy. Actions designed for one of the southwestern provinces did not necessarily apply to others, and differences extended beyond the introduction of zemstvos on the Right Bank mentioned by the author. For instance, in the 1880s, Ukrainian-language theater companies could perform in Odesa but not in Kyiv. The space and time of our inquiry matter.

Second, Hofmeister claims that Ukrainian contemporaries rarely viewed policies, such as the abovementioned exclusion of natives from local state service, “through the prism of colonialism” (746). The scarcity of published reflections under a regime of stringent censorship does not, however, presume the absence of such discussions. Even then, the latter can be easily found in sources before the 1890s. Thus, the empire’s colonial conquests were denounced in Taras Shevchenko’s 1845 poem “Caucasus.” Forty years later, the theme re-echoed in Mykhailo Hrushevsʹkyi’s story about the Mahdist War, which aimed to critique the “enslavement and exploitation of colonial peoples under the hypocritical mask of culture, Christian morality, etc.” Meanwhile, self-reflecting on his own background, in 1862 Volodymyr Antonovych “confessed” that he was “also a colonist, also a planter, . . . also belonged to a party, which strives to suppress national development of the natives (tuzemtsev),” presenting the history of Ukraine as a history of what, rephrasing Alfred Rieber, might be called as sedimentary colonialism, directed not only from St. Petersburg but also, sometime earlier, from Warsaw.

Third, even while targeting an unspecified group of “natives,” this document is a revelation of what Darius Staliūnas calls “segregationist policy,” which aimed to diminish the influence of “Poles” in the empire’s western borderlands after the uprising of 1830–31, and which, according to Daniel Beauvois, led to the “large-scale liquidation of a whole social group.” Followed by the forced transfer of land to new “Russian owners,” mass closure of Catholic churches, and the prohibition of Polish in public spaces, it reminds us that Ukraine’s history, unlike Hofmeister’s account, is not only the history of ethnic Ukrainians. If, in the author’s understanding, “colonialism” is based on “othering,” and thus is the wrong concept to describe governmental policies towards those who identified themselves as allegedly similar Little Russians, what about local Czechs, Germans, or Jews?

Fourth, Hofmeister’s claim about the inapplicability of colonialism to ethnic Ukrainians rests on his choice to define the concept’s kernel as “the aspect of foreignness” (757). The author claims that Russians allegedly did not perceive ethnic Ukrainians as alien; were the latter to speak Russian, the argument goes, they could even make careers in imperial centers, and therefore the western European understanding of colonialism is inapplicable to Ukraine’s history. “Foreignness,” however, is only one component of the definition of colonialism, as quoted by Hofmeister himself, which continues by stressing cultural hierarchies between colonizers and colonized: “Rejecting cultural compromises with the colonized population, the colonizers are convinced of their own superiority and of their ordained mandate to rule” (756–57). Here, the term khokhol, together with other concomitant nouns and adjectives, immediately comes to mind. Unlike in Hofmeister’s understanding, this term was not merely used to deride “Ukrainian peasants . . . as harmless” (760), but was first and foremost a slur that denigrated Ukrainian-speaking people, no matter their level of education or social status, as having a clearly lower cultural standing than Russians. Unfortunately, we lack well-researched histories of Russian perceptions of ethnic Ukrainians who ascended to the ranks of imperial generals or university professors, and whether they could ever stop being considered khokhols.

I fully agree that using “a homogenized concept of colonialism risks leveling the spatial and temporal specificity of different forms of rule, societal differences, and varieties of cultural dynamics.” To the best of my knowledge, however, no monograph has analyzed the complexities of the imperial policies implemented in the southwestern provinces, nor fleshed out the hitherto abstract concept of “Romanov colonialism” based on Ukrainian materials. Therefore, I would urge historians of Ukraine, who have barely scratched the surface of the topic, not to be so hasty in dismissing our engagement with the wider comparative field of colonialism studies until we have thoroughly researched our case in all of its nuances.

Anton Kotenko is a research fellow at the Department of East European History at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. He is the author of The Promise of Ukraine: A Conceptual History of Nineteenth-Century Nationalism (forthcoming with OUP), and articles in Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Russian Review, and Urban History. He is currently working on the history of zoological gardens in the Romanov empire.

Citations

1. Ulrich Hofmeister, “Colonialism or kolonizatsiia? Why the Difference between Ukraine and Central Asia Matters,” in “Cluster: Towards a History of Russian Colonialism,” special issue of Slavic Review 84, no. 4 (Winter 2025): 748.
2. Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine, f. 442, op. 1, spr. 918, a. 1.
3. Mykhailo Hrushevsʹkyi, “Spomyny,” Kyiv 12 (1988): 127–28.
4. Vladimir Antonovich, “Moia ispovedʹ,” Osnova 1 (1862): 94; Alfred Rieber, “The Sedimentary Society,” Russian History 16, no. 2/4 (1989): 353–76.
5. Darius Staliūnas, Making Russians: Meaning and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863 (Amsterdam, 2007), 90; Danielʹ Bovua, Gordiev uzel Rossiiskoi imperii: Vlastʹ, shliakhta i narod na Pravoberezhnoi Ukraine, 1793–1914 (Moscow, 2011), 411.
6. See, for example, Aleksei Suvorin, Khokhly i khokhlushki (St. Petersburg, 1907).
7. David Saunders, The Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture, 1750–1850 (Edmonton, 1985).
8. Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton, 2017), 56.