Reframing the “Post-Soviet” as a Postcolonial Condition: Rethinking Empire, Influence, and Power in Eurasia

Photo: OpenAI

By Louis Sandro Zarandia

When analysts struggle to explain why Georgia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Moldova or Armenia keep finding themselves at the centre of geopolitical crises, they tend to reach for familiar explanations: democratic deficiency, corruption, institutional weakness, a region caught between Russia and the West. What these explanations share, beyond their condescension, is a common blind spot. They treat the symptoms while refusing to name the disease. The disease is colonial legacy - and until we are willing to say so plainly, our understanding of the former Soviet space will remain not just incomplete, but actively misleading.

The term post-Soviet has served as the dominant framework for describing this part of the world since 1991. Convenient and widely understood, it groups together countries from Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia under a shared historical reference point. But a shared reference point is not the same as an analytical framework. Over time, post-Soviet has quietly hardened from a neutral geopolitical descriptor into an interpretive cage - one that flattens the structural asymmetries, imperial hierarchies, and colonial legacies that actually shaped these societies. To read the region clearly, we need a postcolonial lens alongside it.

The objection is predictable: the Soviet Union was not a colonial empire in the classical sense of capital imperialism. True. Moscow held no overseas territories. Soviet Marxism ideology formally rejected colonialism and presented the USSR as a liberation from Tsarist rule. But power does not require an ocean to be imperial. The Soviet state, as well as its predecessor the Imperial Russia, were built through territorial expansion, subjugation of dozens of nationalities, suppression of languages and cultures, mass deportations, and extraction of labour and resources from peripheral regions toward the centre. That Central Asia, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Caucasus experienced this domination differently in scale and character does not dissolve the imperial logic underlying it - it simply means that we need a more flexible definition of colonialism, one not exclusively tailored to the Western overseas model.

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 forced precisely this reckoning. Across academic and policy circles, the language of imperialism and colonial legacy returned with urgency - not as theoretical provocation, but as lived political reality playing out in real time. What had previously seemed like an obscure historiographical debate suddenly appeared as the essential key to understanding not only the war, but the entire region's trajectory since 1991. If the Soviet experience is not understood in colonial terms, the post in post-Soviet remains an empty prefix. It marks the passage of time without explaining what was actually left behind.

What was left behind is what might be called the Soviet Ghost: the continued presence of Soviet political, cultural, and psychological legacies in societies that formally broke with the USSR over thirty years ago. This is not nostalgia, though nostalgia is part of it. It is not simply path dependency - the institutional inertia of inherited structures - nor is it reducible to imperial legacy in the conventional sense of legal or economic residue. The Soviet Ghost is something more active and more insidious: Soviet-era modes of power, identity, and control that continue to operate as living political forces rather than historical remnants. It shows up in Russian disinformation campaigns that exploit Soviet-era identities and grievances. It shows up in the political pressure Russia exerted on Armenia during the 2026 elections, in the wars in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine since 2014. It shows up wherever the tools of empire are wielded under the language of fraternal relations and shared civilisation.

Naming this as postcolonial is not a semantic game. It is what allows us to distinguish between different forms of external influence operating in the region - and that distinction matters enormously. Russian influence operates through coercion: military force, energy dependency, information warfare, the destabilisation of political processes. Western influence, through European integration and democracy-promotion, operates differently - through conditionality, institutional incentives, and norm diffusion. The two are not equivalent. But the postcolonial framework helps us see both clearly, including the legitimate questions raised about the degree to which Western integration processes preserve genuine domestic political agency, or effectively require societies to remake themselves in a predetermined image in order to qualify for belonging.

Euro-orientalism compounds the problem. Post-Soviet societies are routinely portrayed in Western media and policy discourse as unstable, corrupt, and permanently transitional — suspended in an ill-defined space between Europe and Russia, belonging fully to neither. These representations are not neutral. They draw on a long tradition, traced by Edward Said in a different context, of constructing the other as backward and irrational in order to justify external tutelage. When Georgian or Ukrainian or Moldovan political crises are narrated primarily through the lens of dysfunction, the historical structures that produced those crises - Soviet imperial governance, deliberate underdevelopment, manufactured ethnic divisions - disappear from view. What remains is a story about peoples who cannot quite manage modernity on their own. 

This matters beyond academia. It matters because the Soviet Ghost does not haunt only the former Soviet space. It reaches into Western European politics wherever imperial nostalgia finds a receptive platform. The mainstreaming of Kremlin narratives through far-right media channels - journalists and commentators granted prominent platforms to repackage imperial disinformation as heterodox opinion - is not an anomaly or a curiosity. It is one of the primary mechanisms through which colonial and imperial logics penetrate European public discourse. Recognising these narratives for what they are requires the analytical vocabulary that a postcolonial framework provides. Without it, the rhetoric passes as legitimate geopolitical debate.

Defining the post-Soviet world as a postcolonial space is, ultimately, a demand for analytical honesty. It insists that the structures of domination, asymmetry, and cultural subjugation that shaped the Soviet imperial project be named and examined, rather than dissolved into the comfortable language of transition and reform. The Soviet Union was not a colonial empire in every sense in which that phrase has historically been used. But its logics of power were imperial, its consequences colonial, and its legacies are alive.

The crises that will continue to define the international order in the decades ahead - in Ukraine, in the Caucasus, across Central Asia - will not be understood by those who refuse to look at what produced them. The post in post-Soviet has always implied an ending. It is time to be honest about what has not ended at all.

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Louis Sandro Zarandia, Fellow at Center for Strategic Communications of the Strategic Security Initiative (SSI)