SUMMARY:

Tomohiko Uyama explains Russia’s aggression in Ukraine by the country’s imperial legacy and compares this war with the Japanese Empire’s invasion of Asia in the 1930s and early 1940s. He contends that Russia’s imperialism was prompted by the boom in imperial studies that has normalized the Russian Empire and the USSR as polities engaged in the management of difference while at the same time obscuring their profoundly oppressive and violent nature. This historiography also underestimates the non-Russian peoples’ aspirations for independence, which Uyama regards as synonymous with autonomy. He suggests that national movements reveal their true goals and aspirations only to foreign observers and never to the representatives of Russian imperial power.