SUMMARY:

Martin Schulze Wessel points to the Russophilic trend that has prevailed until recently in German historiography and has implicitly acknowledged Russia’s entitlement to territories and political control over them in the post-Soviet space, particularly in Ukraine. This attitude is attributed to an uncritically humanizing attitude toward Russia’s imperial past and historical empires in general, associated with the imperial turn of the 1990s. Furthermore, associating the Russian Empire and the USSR with the Russian nation leads to the neglect of other national histories and experiences of colonial oppression. The answer to this partisan approach is to decolonize the concepts used by historians, which entails overcoming the prevailing “scheme of Russian history” by embracing other national historical narratives.