Decolonization of Post-Soviet Higher Education: Critical Inquiry Through a Reflexive Scholarly Dialogue

Introduction

The current studies of decolonization in global higher education often avoid engaging with the cases and problems of Russian imperialism. The Kremlin’s historical linkages of the Soviet era, when Moscow successfully exploited anti-western rhetoric while helping the Global South countries fight the lingering colonialism (Nkuna, 2023), presently contribute to a curious silence among these countries regarding the criticism of Russia’s own imperial legacy and intentions. The Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 were nothing less than the neo-imperial abuse and violation of the international laws that arguably exist to protect the sovereignty and independence of nation-states. The Russian support to the secessionist regimes of Samachablo region (known in the global discourse as South Ossetia, as used by Russians) and Abkazhia was perceived as “understandable” during Moscow’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, and the business with Russia was brought back to normal afterwards by the Obama administration and its Western allies, as well as by the former colonies of Global South. This kind of “normalization” became too grotesque and, therefore, too difficult to ignore during the resurgence of “realpolitik,” when the Russian war turned into a “genocidal campaign” against Ukraine in 2022 (Snyder, 2022). Despite the genocide, the leftist movements of the West as well as the anticolonial movements of the Global South appeared to obfuscate the Russian war crimes (Pokalova, 2023). In their view, the Russian aggressiveness appeared to be more justified than the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion. It was even more mind-boggling to see that Ukraine, which valiantly fought for its sovereign rights during this “genocidal campaign,” was denied agency by both the Western leftists and the former colonies of the Global South (Amin, 2015; Gorodnichenko et al., 2022; McLaren, 2022; Nkuna, 2023).

Indeed, the dilemmas of decolonization have soared to new orbits of post-truth politics globally, and universities as institutions of inquiry and learning have come under intense scrutiny (Oleksiyenko and Jackson, 2021). With some scholars seeking to position themselves as exclusive controllers of the global discourse and attain new rights in reinterpreting the canons of academic freedom (Gorodnichenko et al., 2022), intellectual leadership and critical inquiry have acquired new connotations, especially when global higher education prioritizes “prestige economy” and favors circumspect producers of knowledge (Oleksiyenko et al., 2018; Oleksiyenko & Ruan, 2018).

Trying to understand the problems associated with these transformations in the postcolonial domains, we have undertaken a reflexive scholarly dialogue (RSD) as a means to connect the discursive investigations with the “lived experiences.” As scholars from Georgia and Ukraine, respectively, we examine our own comprehension of the discursive problems in the context of Russian imperialism and invasions which we have experienced personally. While seeking to amplify the conversation in this domain, we explore the challenges faced by colleagues at home and abroad. Our main perspective in that regard is to problematize rather than explain and justify the misorientations and misjudgments supporting post-truth politics in global higher education and beyond.

A Reflexive Scholarly Dialogue

Being subjected to Soviet legacies in Georgia and Ukraine, and deeply involved in the studies of transformations in higher education and university knowledge production of the two countries in the post-soviet times, we use the privilege of “lived experiences” (Trahar, 2009) and engage reflexive power to discuss what it meant to be subjugated by the Russian dominance and discourse and why it would be important to liberate ourselves from the Russian influences. In disbelief but hope about opportunities to reverse or at least challenge the misguidance of the Western leftists and the Global South scholars, we have started this dialogue at a crossroads of philosophy and politics. We call our dialogue a RSD, which is a combination of introspective and retrospective reflections on lived experiences which were informed by critical inquiry and intellectual debates. We met online and in person over the past 2 years to discuss and understand our concerns. Through the RSD, we have been trying to explore different political forces that are engaged in promoting and reinterpreting the discourse of “imperialism” and “colonialism” in the post-soviet environment. Our own “lived experiences” in the post-Soviet societies are essential as they allow for a deeper engagement with arguments generated by those academics and analysts who seek to strengthen or obfuscate Russian imperialism.

In this precarious period of time, when Ukraine wages a major war against the Russian genocide, and Georgia seeks to amplify its decolonial position and restore justice with regard to the lands occupied and controlled by Russia since 2008, the RSD is essential for sustaining an open-minded and critical investigation of the problems sustained through teaching, learning, and inquiry in the postcolonial environments worldwide. It also allows for enhancing critical thinking and exploring new methodological approaches in confronting the post-truth politics in global higher education and its networks of knowledge production. Being engaged with scholarship and scholars critically, we look for opportunities to understand how intellectuals and their academic communities can strengthen critical voices while penetrating the problems of Russian neo-imperialism.

Being aware of difficulties in investigating Russian neo-imperialism, we recognize the challenge of confronting the power of dominant and deceptive discourses. In that regard, we are trying to problematize discursive entrenchments and positionalities that are pursued by some scholars for privilege and power. We engage with retrospection of the Soviet experiences where problems of “intellectual leadership” (or lack of such) appeared to legitimize and empower authoritarianism, as described by Stern (2006) in her study of Western intellectuals supporting the legitimacy and power of the Stalinist regime—the regime which some still see as helpful in challenging the bourgeois and capitalist West rather than a repressive police-state hiding behind the apologetic scholarship abroad (Amin, 2015).

The RSD is not a task of an individual scholar or isolated scholars who act independently and without critical feedback. We emphasize the importance of developing a dialogue which acts through “multiple agoras” (Tavadze, 2024). Within the post-soviet discourse, “agora” is a peculiar notion in the social and political philosophy of Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili (1930–1990). He argued that during the Soviet era a specific situation was created when no critical thought was possible. Hiding in the kitchens to have a private conversation with a trusted friend over a glass of alcohol if not tea or coffee, the intellectuals were conducting multiple conversations and having a fragmented space where some of the ideas were traveling from one kitchen to another. The problem of self-censored, hushed, and private conversation continues in many post-soviet environments up to now, when we witness the rise of “surrogate academic freedom” (Oleksiyenko, 2021). The excessive focus on performativity and neutral (or neutered) topics in post-Soviet higher education urges many scholars to avoid important or sensitive issues. Within this context, there is a need for what Bourdieu calls “autonomous collective intellectual” (Bourdieu, 2000). We envisage and enable it through a decentralized (and in this sense, anarchist) critical and continuous dialogue which questions and challenges dominant discourses of power. In the long run, we however hope that this dialogue embraces more people, who, according to Ram, can bring together “the intellectual or creative interventions of writers, poets, philologists, and political activists [. . .] whose work constitutes a set of alternative trajectories” (Ram in Spivak et al., 2006, p. 832) and thus begin to defy what has been termed the “colonial matrix of power” (Mignolo, 2010).

Having engaged with the RSD critically, we aim to refine this method to investigate ourselves as well as our arguments under the premises of global and regional powers that shape either intellectual ignorance or arrogance. In the long run, we hope to connect the discourses of the present and the past across countries and continents. Intentionally critically minded, we also assume that the biases can be formed and spread in any part of the world—north, south, east, west—while side-lining the experiences and narratives of the peripheral actors in the global discourse, and reinforcing their entrenched fighting with the West as well as simultaneously ignoring the disadvantaged narratives of the countries abused and colonized by imperial Russia. As analysts from the peripheral higher education systems, we are fully aware of the problems of communicating on the margins and staying behind the doors rather than at keynote lecterns of major conference halls.

Postcolonial and Neocolonial in the Post-Soviet Higher Education and Beyond

By starting this dialogue, we admit several important premises. There have been limited efforts to discuss the notion of “postcolonial” concerning the former post-Soviet space. In 2001, David Chioni Moore called for applying the term “postcolonial” to the post-Soviet region and spoke about “two silences”: the first is a silence “of postcolonial studies today on the subject of the former Soviet sphere” and the second is the “mirrored silence” of post-Soviet scholars to analyze their respective regions using a postcolonial lens (Moore, 2001, p. 115). Eighteen years later, Tamar Koplatadze (2019) noted that “Russian studies departments display a remarkable lack of enthusiasm for postcolonial theory [. . .]” and suggested using the postcolonial paradigm to “ensure a more sophisticated understanding of the Soviet experience and current politico-economic, social and cultural developments in the post-Soviet region.” She also remarked that “[t]he claim that [the post-Soviet] countries have been ‘mute’ is exaggerated.” Koplatadze thinks that what is needed is “to look at the ways in which Russia’s ‘others’ talk back, define themselves [. . .] to react to, resist, and define the terms of their engagement in this new context.”

Although agreeing with the spirit of Koplatadze’s statement, we think that using the notion “Russia’s others” has the consequence of reinforcing the Russo-centrist paradigm and the centrality of Russian studies in understanding the developments happening in the post-Soviet region. This kind of approach reflects the disciplinary knowledge-structuring in Western universities where there are frequently Russian Studies departments, but rarely—Ukrainian, Georgian, or Kazakhstan Studies Departments. Such an approach demonstrates the spell of what Harsha Ram calls “Petrine paradigm” (Ram, 2006, p. 832), which examines the former colonies of Russia through the lens of Russian representations and justifies lack of their own agency. This lack of agency is often viewed as natural in view of the center–periphery relations, where centers are supposed to act as “empires of knowledge and development” (Altbach, 2007).

Below, there is a segment of our RSD which explains our concerns about the geopolitics of knowledge production in the post-soviet space. Our arguments coded under GT for Giorgi Tavadze and AO for Anatoly Oleksiyenko are just some initial thoughts in the emerging domain of decolonial studies in the post-Soviet context of higher education. We talked through these issues numerous times and then wrote pieces which underwent revisions. By collaboratively writing, revising, and elaborating on our pieces, we were clarifying our expressions and seeking more depth to achieve more insights coming from personal reflections as well as to connect them to the literature and conversations in the field. While doing this, we are not trying to build a position of authority. Instead, we aim to advance the problematization of postcolonial discourses that bring together local scholars and their counterparts in some parts of the world but not in others (and not exclusively in the Global North or the Global South). Our dialogue has a “Socratic” character—namely, we engage in this dialogue to reveal deficiencies in existing definitions (of who is colonial, what it means to be colonized, etc.). The dialogue, as it unfolds below, is open-ended, and invites others to join in the discussion, to share their voices, to speak up about their “colonial experiences.”

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GT: First and foremost, it is essential to acknowledge that the post-soviet context is “neocolonial.” Following Russia’s aggression in Georgia in 2008 and subsequent actions in Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022, the situation in the post-Soviet space is no longer accurately described as solely “postcolonial.” It is more apt to characterize it as “neocolonial.” We have witnessed instances such as the Russian President’s denial of Ukraine’s right to exist in his televised address before the full-scale invasion in February 2022. We have also observed Russia’s predatory occupation of Crimea in 2014 and its punitive war against Georgia in 2008. Consequently, we find ourselves in a neocolonial context, where the former empire aggressively seeks to regain lost influence and employs all means to subdue its neighbors. This situation brings to mind Nance Condee’s observation from 2006:

Only the greatest optimist would claim that Russia’s civil associations—independent election monitoring, the media, veterans’ associations, environmental and public-health advocacy groups, policy research institutes, and so forth—have continued to develop. Instead (in a clumsy paraphrase of Monk Filofei), a dynastic empire fell, a socialist one followed, and a third is now consolidating its institutions along familiar trajectories. [. . .] Russia, recovering gradually from its post-imperial fatigue, remains (though reconfigured) an empire nevertheless. (Condee in Spivak et al., 2006, p. 830)

At present, 20% of my country is under Russian occupation. Russian soldiers have erected barbed wire fences in the Samachablo region and have penetrated deep into the territory of my homeland (Tavadze, 2014). At one point the so-called “border” is only 200 m away from the main Georgian highway that runs from Eastern to Western Georgia. In addition to this exercise of hard power, Russia effectively employs soft power. In recent years, we have witnessed an unprecedented rise in political groups that openly acknowledge their ties to Russia, explicitly reject democratic values, adopt strongly anti-Western stances, and label themselves as “patriots.” In many cases, they have demonstrated a willingness to resort to violence to assert their positions and intimidate those who hold differing views. It is alarming that some of these groups propagate the ideas of Alexander Dugin, a Russian pseudo-intellectual who, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, said: “I think kill, kill and kill. No more talk anymore. It is my opinion as a professor” (CNN, 2022). In his work “Foundations of Geopolitics” (2000), Dugin denies the sovereignty of entire countries, including Georgia and Ukraine, by incorporating them into what he calls the “Russian South.”

This is the context in which we, as scholars, find ourselves. Pretending that this context does not exist or attempting to shift the focus to another dimension would be self-deception. The threat facing our country is existential; it could cease to exist because, unlike the Baltic countries, which are NATO members, Georgia lacks strong security guarantees. We have seen that even for Ukraine, which is much larger than Georgia, the absence of such guarantees poses a significant problem.

Recognizing the presence of a neocolonial situation as an existential threat is a premise upon which all postcolonial/neocolonial debates should build. We cannot ignore the fact that we are still subject to the dynamics of imperial force and pretend that we are in a postcolonial situation (with a strong emphasis on “post”).

However, I noticed that it is difficult to communicate these issues to Western colleagues. They seem to be unaware of Soviet history. For instance, in 2008, when Russia attacked Georgia, Noam Chomsky demonstrated a remarkable degree of ignorance when he wrote:

The basic facts are not seriously in dispute. South Ossetia, along with the much more significant region of Abkhazia, was assigned by Stalin to his native Georgia. Western leaders sternly admonish that Stalin’s directives must be respected, despite the strong opposition of Ossetians and Abkhazians. (Chomsky, 2008)

Chomsky makes fundamental mistakes. First, these regions were not assigned by Stalin to his “native Georgia.” Throughout the centuries, they were part of Georgian kingdoms, then of the unified Georgian kingdom, and subsequently, of Georgian kingdoms and principalities until they were conquered by external imperial forces. Second, Chomsky turns a blind eye to Russian imperialism and places the entire burden of the conflict on the collective West, which is simply a ridiculous perspective.

In that regard, I was wondering: to what extent would we be able to explain these problems to colleagues who are not familiar with Soviet history or the histories of Georgia and Ukraine? If most of the Global South scholars (probably not most but definitely some) follow the old anti-westernization discourse which was promoted by the Soviet Union and Moscow in the past (and we previously questioned if they might have benefited from it), how can we justify the need to rethink Russia and its policies in the present times? What does it really mean to do that if the claims about the enlightenment of scholarship are still important?

AO: It is a challenging question. Indeed, many scholars are unfamiliar with Soviet history, as well as with the role of the imperial Kremlin in subjugating different nations and ethnic groups on the vast territory of geopolitical EurAsia. Born in Soviet Ukraine, I myself was unfamiliar with Soviet history per se (e.g., the history of GULAG – the Soviet penal system consisting of labor camps, as portrayed by intellectuals such as Aleksander Solzhenitsyn or Ivan Svitlychnyi, who personally experienced the criminal regime, or the history of anti-western subversion and the engagement of Western writers as Lenin’s “useful idiots,” as elaborated by Ludmila Stern [2006]). As you well know, the Soviet curriculum presented a very different history. The Marxist-Leninist political economy and philosophy claimed the inevitability of Soviet success coming from the failures and decay of Western capitalism. My Soviet days were shaped by indoctrinated rote learning and ideological texts, sugar-coated in the grandiosity and supremacy of the Russian language, literature, and leadership—a powerful mix aiming at building a “happy future” which for no obvious reason had to follow the collapse of the “evil West.” As far as I remember, the curricula in history and philosophy were often explaining this future by the inevitability of the Western collapse. The collapse indeed happened but it was the collapse of the Soviet regime, following its neo-imperialist invasion of Afghanistan and disagreements in the socialist camp as explained by Austin Jersild (2014) in his intriguing study of the Sino-Soviet alliance. The scholars who inspected Russian and Soviet histories in depth showed clearly the imperial nature of the regime and its ideology (see, for instance, Plokhy, 2017).

Reflecting on this inevitability, I often wonder why the Soviet anti-westernization doctrine emphasized “happiness” and not “success” while talking about the future. In classrooms, it was a private success (to get a “gold medal” and get through the corrupt university system) which mattered for students—and not a universal happiness. I think that happiness was a projected emotion that became essential for Soviet propagandists to alleviate the grief and poverty which the Kremlin reproduced through such acts as Holodomor in Ukraine (Stalin’s man-made starvation), GULAG, and the failing planned economy. Certainly, the schools and universities still harbored thinkers, who knew that happiness (as much as success) was a relativistic term in the economy of scarcity managed by the police-state. When most citizens struggled to get a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk after standing for hours in long queues, they could be “happy” to secure a basic amount of calories for themselves and their families. And those who had “good networks” (called “blat”) felt certainly even “happier” while avoiding long queues and food shortages.

However, if you take, for example, a university graduate who might become a successful engineer (i.e., supposedly a talented and useful specialist), he would not necessarily be happy in the absence of “blat” and would compete for scarce goods while often ending up with frustration and excessive consumption of alcohol (also purchased clandestinely from some suspicious characters exploiting the economy of scarcity, deliberately sustained by the Soviet regime). Instead, a dim-witted party bureaucrat (“apparatchik”) could be more successful and happier while instrumentalizing his ideological allegiances and sustaining scarcity and precarity among rank-and-file citizens. The “great literature” of Russia (this unexplainable enigmatic term of self-adoration and propaganda in the geopolitics of nowadays) was unable to explain the phenomenon of Soviet corruption at that time. Actually, it was forbidden to discuss it. In the battle of ideologies, what mattered to the Soviet apparatchiks was an illusion of happiness. That was the only way to convince people in other poverty-stricken developing countries to stand with the Soviet world. “Proletariat of the world, unite!,” the Soviets proclaimed from ubiquitous posters spanning the postcolonial planet.

To present this benevolent appeal as a way to colonize the Global South could be viewed as cynical at that time. Using the Russian language and the Russian military presence on the postcolonial lands was certainly perceived as a way to create solidarity of the working class and their socialist leadership to defeat the capitalist West that exploited the poor. It was not until the brutal invasion of Hungary (1956), and then Czechoslovakia (1968) and then Afghanistan (1981), that the intentions of the Russian expansion were questioned, and duplicity of the Soviet intentions loomed larger. Why would Russians feel as having an undeniable right to take charge of national agendas in other countries and on other continents if the sovereignty and agency of the liberated people were the priority of the international anticolonial movement? Why would Russian colonizers, even if presented as liberators, be a better sort of colonizers than the Western ones?

I often reflect on my conversations with foreign students from the Global South studying at the university in Kyiv where I did my undergraduate studies. From my reflections on interactions with them (and they could not be very open for fear of snitches employed by the Soviet regime), it appeared that in the postcolonial countries, the questions about Russian intentions were often shunned as their governments were seeking opportunities to befriend the Russian colonizers (sic! They were not viewing them as “colonizers”—in the Orwellian lingo, just “friends” fighting for equality and justice in the global arenas controlled by the West). As in the Soviet territories, the authoritarian regimes elsewhere could survive only if they were controlled by the rule of a “supreme leader,” rather than by the rule of law. The rule of law was known to be unpredictable in view of independent courts and thus could punish the leader for corruption. For the corrupt elites abroad, it was easier to build alliances with similarly corrupt and authoritarian systems such as the Soviet one. In that regard, Russians (as they were called abroad while appropriating and subjugating cultures and languages in the other 14 Soviet republics) appeared to them to be closer in mind and spirit than Westerners. At least, the Russians, unlike their counterparts in the West (and particularly in the United States which hosted millions of immigrants and refuseniks from the societies “befriended” by Russians), were not questioning undemocratic practices or corrupt economy, which often prevailed in the developing countries. Surprisingly, however, what mattered to the Soviet regime was only the ability and allegiance of the allies to be actively anti-Western. Meanwhile, Soviet security officers were often tolerant of the international students bringing back to the Soviet dormitories and selling to the Soviet students all kinds of “prestige goods”: jeans, chewing gum, glam journals, and so on—everything which was considered a “deficit” in local stores and was forbidden by those officers for sales or gifts to protect the “unpolluted” mindsets and souls of “patriotic” Soviet youth.

Given that Russians provided exceptional living conditions and stipends for their sons and daughters joining the Soviet elite institutions of higher learning, the privileged class of the developing countries could easily make allegiances to their patrons in the Kremlin. The gentry was happier when sending their offspring to study abroad at Moscow State University rather than in Oxford. The study in the former was giving more advantage financially (as fees were often waived or comparatively lower, or as scholarships were provided). Admissions were also easier to handle at Russian institutions using soft power instruments to befriend foreigners and nurture their long-term loyalty. For the Soviets, loyalty mattered more than meritocracy. Besides, the future of the trade routes between the Soviet empire and the new economic enclaves in the newly decolonized Global South, controlled by Russian diplomacy and military, was more promising and safer for their offspring.

The Soviet legacy of influence and networking in those postcolonial societies should not be disregarded in the current geopolitics. Chankseliani (2022) shows that the Russian policies of the “soft power” administration have been continuing after the Soviet collapse. Besides, I don’t anticipate them to discontinue as the legacies of dependence on Russian “aid and trade” (a non-dichotomous policy) have been entrenched in the Global South. Why would foreign scholars who had invested in Soviet education and “friendship” try to depreciate those investments after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

GT: I’d like to make a brief comment regarding the cooperation between local elites and colonial powers. The concept of cooperating (“comprador”) local elites is well documented in postcolonial literature (Fanon, 2005), and I won’t delve deeper into that here. I simply want to suggest that a similar trend can be observed in Georgian history. In different periods of history, local elites attempted to cooperate with various powers, including Iran, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union. Cooperation is beneficial for these elites, but it is important to note that this is not something which is necessarily related to the rule of law and democracy.

AO: I certainly understand that it is beneficial for them. Yet, one question particularly bothers me: when Russia acts as an imperial power and subjugates and recolonizes post-Soviet territories, why would scholars abide by the rules of corrupt elites? Doesn’t it bother them that Russia abuses international law, grabs territories from Georgia or other former republics of the Soviet Union, and wages a genocidal war in Ukraine? One can certainly argue that it might be of lesser concern to businesses in those ally-states which were cultivated by the Soviet operatives in the past, or which are controlled by the Russian mercenaries in the present (see, for example, the arguments by Pokalova, 2023).

As the previous research in this area showed, Russia used to advance its colonization policies and campaigns by starting with ostensibly benevolent trade posts but then moving in military units, arguably to protect these posts (see Allworth, 1994, and more recently from Pokalova, 2023). While trying to control trade routes and operations in alien territories, Russians would then continue expropriating or annexing those territories to enhance the control. Given that the Russian tradesmen distrusted international agreements, it has become a tradition for Russia to switch from commerce- to conflict-making while strategizing how the interests of private businesses become a “national security interest” in international affairs. Meanwhile, these businesses disregarded the welfare of ordinary people at home and in the occupied lands, while generating anti-Western sentiments and hate speeches among precarious populations. The Russian elites stoked the perceptions of national pride while depreciating international law and denying the rights for sovereignty and independence to the formerly colonized republics of Georgia and Ukraine.

The neocolonial elites of Russia started to argue that other empires had also abused the public interest and constructed corporate laws in favor of their corporate benefits. Historically, the expansive and extortionist corporate elites used to merge military and commercial interests in many countries to advance corporate interests through conquests and conflicts in other parts of the world. The history of the East India Company comes to mind. However, the practices of medieval times underwent major revisions over the past 50 years. With the collateral damage growing exponentially under the ever-growing impact of technologies of mass destruction, one cannot rely on the principles of imperial governance where superpowers can easily conquer vulnerable nations and suppress their resistance. Following the experiences of two world wars of the 20th century, the former European empires delved into the processes of decolonization to reduce prospective damage to their geopolitical and commercial interests. The world wars made elites aware of the moral and material costs of genocides and dehumanization resulting from imperial (self-) destruction. Developing new rules based on international law, trade, and security has promised the superpowers and their allies a smarter balance between the costs and benefits of their cross-border relations.

However, as Timothy Snyder, the outstanding historian of Yale University, argues, the European empires continued to wage wars with their colonies after the World War II and had to be defeated before abandoning the imperial legacies. In his view, the Russian defeat in Ukraine would be necessary for the Russian elites to learn what the European imperialists had learned before. Meanwhile, the “hybrid war” strategists of Russia, as stimulated by their Manichean social scientists (Umland, 2022), have been recycling the old forms of colonialism and feudalism, which appeared to work for them in the past. Propelling the medieval dogmas of the world order, they happened to be repositioning themselves for mistakes and losses of the previous era. In the absence of critically minded and outspoken scholars in Russia, there is simply a lack of bold and powerful arguments which would openly and systematically challenge the Kremlin and the colonial thinking of its pseudo-tsars. Sometimes, I think (although this may appear as apologetic) that their skewed silence or balderdash can be intentional to avoid punishment from a re-emerging police-state (as the Soviet legacy suggests). The triumphant authoritarian regime tends to cultivate aggression and collusion of political forces that are desperate for bloodshed while still hunting for new business and military posts on the “never-ending frontiers of Russia” (according to the Putin-speak). They certainly need academics who will justify those policies.

I am not sure to what extent the leftist scholars of the West or postcolonial thinkers of the Global South understand the Soviet legacy and Russian politics of academia. What we can learn from the Russian interpretations of that legacy is that deliberate teacher training and curriculum development are very much needed to educate new generations of academics and politicians about the imperial defeats rather than about the imperial glories. Scholarship should be critically minded and resist the inclinations of researchers who seek prestige and privileges from the propaganda-like narratives. Can modern academics re-evaluate their expertise and re-educate themselves and others for those purposes?

GT: I would suggest distinguishing the notions of a “scholar” and an “academic.” When I use the term “scholar,” I refer to a person who is not only engaged in research in his or her respective field out of an inner calling but also reflects on public issues and openly discusses them, whether with colleagues or in public forums such as conferences, workshops, or on social media. I owe this understanding to Paul Gibbs. The notion of the scholar advanced here is broader than that of an “academic.” A scholar can be a person who is not employed at a university, whereas an “academic” is typically a part of the university community. This distinction does not imply that scholars are inherently superior to academics. The point I wish to convey here is that scholars are more socially engaged (while recognizing that academics can also pursue their respective fields passionately without actively engaging in public discourse).

Another essential characteristic of a scholar engaged in public discussions, according to this perspective, is the practice of “parrhesia” (Foucault, 2010)—the act of speaking what one believes to be true, even if doing so may jeopardize his or her position within academia or society at large. Therefore, a scholar is an individual who consciously employs “parrhesia” as a means of truth-telling and engages with students, colleagues, or the broader public. A notable example of such a scholar from recent Georgian history, in my view, is the prominent Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili (1930–1990).

These qualities of a scholar have become all the more important in today’s world, where universities are widely recognized as no longer being ivory towers isolated from society. Much discussion centers around the responsibilities of universities. Universities themselves proudly declare their “service” missions on their websites. Philosophers of education identify various dimensions within this concept. For instance, Paul Gibbs states that “universities bear a weighty responsibility for shaping humanity’s future, and in response, they have a special duty not to misuse the responsibilities and privileges they have been granted” (Gibbs, 2004, p. 82). Ronald Barnett has developed an ecological model of the university in which universities hold global responsibilities (Barnett, 2022, p. 244 ff.). In light of this, it is possible to speak of the “remedial responsibilities” of universities (Tavadze, 2023).

It should be noted, however, that universities are not abstract entities. The university community, comprised of individuals (students, academics, administrators), interacts with the physical realm of the university (campus territory). In an ideal university, every individual strives for the well-being of the entire community. Due to various human factors, achieving this in a real university, entangled in structural forces and human passions, is not always feasible. In these circumstances, individual efforts from members of the university community, as well as their coordinated actions, are what enact the university’s specific responsibilities.

Two significant forces are presently influencing the Georgian academic landscape. On one hand, due to increasing neoliberalization, Georgian academics are increasingly drawn toward what has been termed “academic capitalism” (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997), characterized by intense competition for funding, the measurement of research “outputs,” and so forth. I do not perceive this process as entirely negative, as it appears to foster the internationalization of research and international cooperation. However, it also promotes the fragmentation of academic public spaces, individualization, and a sense of distrust among academics due to heightened competition. Strong emphasis on English language publishing further isolates more internationalized Georgian academics from the rest of the Georgian academic community and the general public.

On the other hand, the Soviet legacy perpetuates what you have once termed “surrogate academic freedom,” which manifests as academic conformism and a reluctance to engage in discussions of contemporary issues within the university, academia, or society at large (Oleksiyenko, 2021). Both neoliberalization and the Soviet legacy pose significant threats to the existence of robust academic public spaces, whether in physical settings, edited volumes, or social media. Echoing Mamardashvili, it is possible to assert that we are losing “agoras”—spaces where thoughts “gain their muscles” (Mamardashvili, 2020, p. 158), where participants encounter each other in their co-presence, and conditions are created for transforming thoughts into actions. Not only are we losing these agoras, but, as you have remarked during our previous discussions of Mamardashvili’s concept, we are becoming agoraphobic. Indeed, agoraphobia has become a curse afflicting the Georgian academic community.

So I am not sure what makes the critical inquiry legitimate and powerful for the purposes of de-Sovietization of the discourses which were built on the anti-Westernization arguments by scholars in the Global South. Besides, we have not discussed enough of the problems propelled and reinforced by the Western leftists. What is the role of academics and scholarship in that regard?

AO: For me, their role is about advancing critical inquiry in scholarship. The critical inquiry should encourage professors and students to raise questions about the logic of their elites and universities as well as tell the inconvenient truth to the powerful. The de-Sovietization and de-Russification of the global discourse become particularly essential in that regard to finally recognize the major geopolitical problem that had been created by the Kremlin’s imperial legacy—that is, the problem of intimidation and fear. Since Stalinist times, many politicians and scholars still keep self-censoring their speech and writing while failing to confront the authoritarian regime resolutely. The “mysterious Russian soul” of intimidation and abuse should be more discussed in the context of fearmongering sustained by the Russian police-state and its sponsorship of “soft power” projects in the West and elsewhere.

Through the myths and images of “great Russian literature,” ballet, or “nuclear physics,” this police-state used to spread false narratives about “grandiosity” and “exceptionality” of the Russian state and higher education as well as legitimized their intervention in the affairs of neighboring states while using “hard power” to spread fear through death and devastation, when the “soft power” projects failed to achieve a desired effect (see my discussion in the “International Status Anxiety and Higher Education: The Soviet Legacy in China and Russia,” co-edited with Zha Qiang, Igor Chirikov, and Li Jun).

The de-Sovietization discourse and analyses are very much needed, both in global media and university curricula, to shed light on the Russian practices of the weaponization of international trade and sponsorship of international terror. Through critical inquiry, we need to teach our students to ask daily to what extent the Russian practices of intimidation and fear control us: our thinking, speech, and action, and what might be needed to overturn them: whether a deliberate learning exercise or a simple act of asking—“where does it take me?.” Scholars should be at the frontline of doing that.

GT: First and foremost, I’d like to make a brief comment on the phenomenon of “fear-mongering” and the deliberate cultivation of a culture of fear and terror by imperial force. Following one of my anticolonial posts on social media, a former student of mine who holds pro-Russian views engaged in a heated discussion with me. During our debate, this individual sent me an image of the destroyed city of Bakhmut, suggesting that she or he does not want “this to happen in Georgia.” To me, this serves as a clear illustration of how the culture of fear operates: there is a formidable colonial power; one should avoid provoking it, as doing so may lead to destruction. It is considered wise and prudent to maintain silence and safeguard one’s fragile sense of safety.

Can we resist this? How? Let me begin answering this question with an example that some might not take too seriously. At the end of the 2004 movie “I, Robot” (director: Alex Proyas), robots, who initially obediently follow orders from a loudspeaker, notice Sonny, a robot of the same model as theirs but with the ability to question and even dream. They see Sonny, stop, and then gather together, thereby violating the order to proceed into containers, which would have resulted in their fragmentation and continued instrumentalization. Instead, it seems they are choosing their autonomy and freedom.

I think that this scene is illustrative. I am not equating the character of Sonny with the figure of a scholar, thereby suggesting that other academics are mere robots. Nor am I suggesting a global unification of academics and their transformation into scholars a la Marx. The point I am trying to make here is that all academics can become like Sonny at some moment if they decide to do so. There is no need to create one great global agora, to stage one grand revolution, or even to encompass a single university with an ambitious project. What we need, I suggest, in our specific situation in Georgia at least, is to pause at some moment in the midst of the torrential rain of lectures, presentations, papers, conferences, grant applications, and so on, to contemplate an issue that affects our community, and ask ourselves, “What can we do to solve it?” I deeply believe that pondering on that question necessarily leads us to step out of our individual closed zones and reach out to others within our university community or beyond it. By meeting, discussing, and debating with others, multiple agoras will be created in which thoughts will be shaped, and momentary circuits of resistance to anti-democratic forces will be established, which may dissolve but hopefully will reappear in another circuit shortly afterwards. I am not suggesting that this does not happen in our academy at all; I just suggest that this should happen more often. This might be a way to form what Bourdieu calls an “autonomous collective intellectual” (Bourdieu, 2000).

This is anarchistic work, which begins with parrhesia but does not stop with it. The image of a courageous parrhesiastic intellectual who stands alone will not induce change. The change is brought about by multiple agoras, where different like-minded individuals exchange their views and discuss the issues affecting their communities. Philosophers of education frequently propose normative models of universities that are comprehensive, but they rarely outline the ways how to realize these models practically. I think that the question of practical realization is quite important to be neglected. In what follows, I suggest some tentative courses of action:

Of course, this is not easy. As the Georgian proverb goes, even eating bread is not easy and requires effort. Life is a continuous effort. Doing anarchistic university work requires bold decisions, strong enthusiasm, and commitment. But personal effort alone is not sufficient; we need to cooperate. So, the motto of the anarchistic scholar will be as follows: “Scholars of all universities, engage!” And “engage” here means “engage with”: with students, with each other, and with the wider public.

AO: I think we should also consider practicalities from the perspective of a socially engaged researcher. For Ukrainian education researchers (maybe for their Georgian colleagues as well), I see the imperative of engaging their colleagues and students into asking: Which research questions remain unanswered and which teaching resources remain untapped for advancing a critical perspective on our history and experiences of colonialism?

For example, the questions of war and terror generated by Russia for the sake of its “peaceful business development,” as outlined above, are often side-lined and under-analyzed locally as much as globally. As Ukrainians are waging the war with the Russian neocolonialists, what exactly can they share from their own experience to colleagues in Georgia and elsewhere?

Russians in Russia or in Ukraine can also participate in unrooting and disrupting the misguided curriculum development in their own schools and universities, and thus stop glorifying the Russian invasions and invaders in their history courses. They can equally disrupt the colonial parlance of being “liberatory” and “empowering” in their conference presentations. Regretfully, the criticism of Russian imperialism is often shunned by Russian intellectuals. From my observations of the Russian elite scholars, such criticism, as well as the whole theme of Russian imperialism and damage to the occupied territories, is not part of their academic “prestige economy.” As noted by Marek Kwiek (2022), or by other scholars, who criticize the futile and naive races for global rankings (e.g., Shahjahan et al., 2022), the prestige economy prioritizes academic discourses and publications that are safe for use and dissemination broadly and thus get a larger volume of citations. Moreover, by advancing the rhetoric on Russian “glorious” days, implying successful conquests and exploitation of foreign lands, these scholars primarily serve themselves. The more “prestige” goes to their country, the more power and influence they can project in controlling the occupied lands and subjugating colonized populations. Alas, the more Western validation they receive in the global rankings and marketplaces, the more confidence and propagation of the unique “Russian idea” they begin to propel at home and abroad. To discontinue the evil cycle of the global prestige economy becomes a critical responsibility not only for scholars in Georgia and Ukraine but also for their colleagues in progressive universities and intellectual communities worldwide.

This requires re-engaging critical thinking about the roles and responsibilities of intellectual leaders in post-soviet higher education. What duties should be essential for intellectuals and educators in postcolonial countries? How can they facilitate a more critical engagement with the knowledge produced under the control of the Russian empire on the occupied or “befriended” territories around the world? What are the ways for Russian educators to empower a self-critical perspective in their institutions and communities regarding the genocide committed in Ukraine or the occupation of Georgian territories? What can be an effective approach toward building a more resistant postcolonial space in the former Soviet republics? While these questions are important for post-Soviet scholars, they should be also posed before colleagues in the West and the Global South. For a more sophisticated and captivating scholarship, more analytical depth and critical thinking are vitally important and should be sought.

Discussion and Concluding Remarks

The RSD, as briefly presented above, has appeared to be a thought-stimulating format for reimagining our legacies as well as re-engaging with personal reflections regarding scholarly roles and responsibilities in decolonization. What we would like to emphasize through this dialogue is that coloniality is legacy-bound and personal, as much as a broader social phenomenon. The RSD has allowed us to see the connections between personal lived experiences and the greater social constructs.

No matter what we think about this legacy, coloniality is problematic regardless of where it comes from. Moreover, the aggressive and genocidal coloniality, as it is manifested by Russian invaders in Ukraine these days, is criminal. It is a different kind of coloniality and the differences that we explore cross-culturally suggest that scholarship can be good only when it can shed light on nuances, and not only make sweeping generalizations and establish meta-discourses. This certainly gives another undertone to what Spivak et al. (2006) once noted by saying that “[e]very postcoloniality is situated, and therefore different” (p. 828).

There is obviously a need to epistemologically discontinue the Russo-centric paradigm which tries to peripheralize others in order to build its own centrality. Russia invades, ruins, burns down, and harms others while turning the occupied territories into devastated and underdeveloped areas. By making them less developed, Russia seeks an opportunity to present itself as a more advanced economy and political system which then generously (and cynically) forces the occupied territories to abide by its system of symbols, language, thinking, and administration. Instead of modernization, it creates devastation and then through hunger, terror, and humiliation (as it used to do during the Soviet era) subjugates the population, while appropriating their work and attributing their achievements to the Russian occupation. Unfortunately, the deceptive strategies engaged by Russia appear to be working well in the ignorant discourses mediated by some Western intellectuals (as explained in the letter by Gorodnichenko et al., 2022). Marginalized and muffled by their deceptive bravados, there remain the lives of the occupied and the enslaved who have no other option but to keep surviving despite all odds (Oleksiyenko and Terepyshchyi, 2024).

The Russian type of colonization urges a serious concern. The former colonies often acquire ambivalent attitudes toward ex-metropole. For example, despite the occupation by Russian forces and Russia’s post-truth politics regarding the independence of Georgia’s breakaway regions, there has been a steady rise of political discourse in Georgia with some interest groups denouncing the West, while shifting attention to the “European and American colonialism,” and “global capitalism.” At the same time, these interest groups are silent about the fact of ongoing occupation and colonialism by Russia. This creates an impression that the current Georgian government has questioned the unqualified commitment to the West, which was made by the previous governments, and decided to pursue politics of “thaw”/reconciliation with the former colonizer. Similarly, Ukraine was shifting its allegiances back and forth between the European Union and Russia before 2014, until the multi-million protest, known as the Revolution of Dignity, ousted the pro-Russian government of Victor Yanukovych who refused to sign the association agreement with the EU and signed an agreement with Russia instead. In subsequent years, Russia occupied Ukraine’s Crimea and Donbas and then continued to escalate its military aggression while ending with a “genocidal campaign” against Ukraine in 2022.

Russian colonialism is built on advocacy of the voices of the disadvantaged, who at opportune times are funded by the Kremlin to undertake disruptive or radical actions in the systems where these disadvantaged feel resentful and where the Kremlin suddenly sees an opportunity for intervention and expansion of its presence and power. According to the “International” hymn of the Soviet Union, used by Stalin, and probably self-servingly—“the one who was nobody, will reign supreme.” The cult of supremacy in mediocrity and poverty used to be an attractive model during the Soviet times and has appealed to many who were not able to overcome their disadvantages in the global competition of the 21st century.

We admit that the “post” in “postcolonial” does not denote the end of colonialism. “[T]he danger of retrenchment, or of a neocolonial relation, is ever present,” remarks Moore (2001, p. 112). According to Nancy Condee, “[a]n adequate account” of the current complex situation “must address the simultaneity of Soviet postcoloniality and Russian colonialism, their contradictions and yet their intense compatibilities” (Condee in Spivak et al., 2006, pp. 830–831). This situation calls for analyzing what she calls “symptoms of contiguous empire” and, we might add, their effects on former colonies. The ongoing war in Ukraine, as well as the occupation of Ukrainian and Georgian territories, is a hard fact (Tavadze, 2014). We continue to live in what Derek Gregory (2004) calls a “colonial present” and therefore need rigorous research and education to cultivate critically minded voices.