A month ago, Mark Feygin, a Russian politician in exile and blogger, hosted a debate on the [Russian] imperial legacy between Vitaly Portnikov, a Ukrainian journalist, and Yulia Latynina, a Russian liberal journalist, on his Feygin LIVE YouTube channel. The battle of words between the latter two has been viewed over one million times on the Internet and provoked lively discussions in social networks, particularly in the post-Soviet states and among people from the post-Soviet space.

Here’s what Vitaly Portnikov said about that: “People from many other former Soviet republics have spoken to me about this debate. Their reaction was the same as that of the Ukrainians. Oddly enough, this perception also arose among many repatriates to Israel, Jews by origin… This video debate is also being watched in Russia because even people with anti-imperial views in Russia itself may not have seen such a [verbal] clash either. It’s important to note that this is not a clash of enemies. This is a discussion between people who are supposedly from the same liberal camp – between those who talk about democracy and oppose [Vladimir] Putin. But when discussing the above topic, they follow opposing narratives”.

In Vitaly Portnikov’s opinion, the Russians “were formed as an imperial nation but were not formed as a political nation”, and “that is why they are not very concerned, say, with the problems of the peoples [ethnicities] of Russia”.

“We are dealing with a Moscow-centric model of empire. People in Russia perceive this as a norm of State building”, Vitaly Portnikov added. “Imperial identity and attitudes do not begin to develop [in children] at school, they begin with the family. Such consciousness is a product not only of education but also a consequence of a kind of compensation. If a person does not have the ability to control his own country, then the only way to compensate for this is to dominate other people. And this dominance leads to neglecting those others. For example,........

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