The question of whether Ukraine is postcolonial may seem an abstruse matter, one best left to scholars. Yet it raises some fundamental issues about the nature of Ukrainian politics.
These issues include Ukraine’s self-identity and its relationship with Europe, its potential relationship with Russia, as well as Russia’s own relationship with Europe – as a subaltern, as the core of an alternative ‘Eurasian’ identity, or as part of a new more plural postcolonial identity.
This in turn raises a host of theoretical questions, since postcoloniality is neither spatial nor territorial, but establishes a condition that shapes a whole web of cultural and political relationships. If Ukraine is to be considered postcolonial, then so should Russia, and indeed the whole post-communist region would share in this condition. This in effect is the position of David Chioni Moore, who, in a seminal essay on the subject, effectively subsumed the notion of the ‘post-Soviet’ into the postcolonial, or more accurately, the Soviet into the colonial. But is this right?
