In today’s Europe hardly anyone gives a second thought to the letters people use to write, as they are almost invariably from the Latin alphabet. This is followed by the use of Cyrillic in Bulgaria and Ukraine, and the Greek alphabet in Cyprus and Greece. Yet, until the Holocaust, Hebrew was the continent’s third-largest script by number of users.

Standing fast by Poland’s national “master narrative”, the country’s schools teach that the Polish nation, defined as all the speakers of the Polish language, is a millennium old. Yet, this pairing of the Polish nation and language dates back only to the late 19th century.

In Polish popular opinion, the view that the Polish nation consists of all the speakers of the Polish language is not controversial. Hence, the Polish speech community is unreflectively equated with the Polish nation. In turn, all the territories where speakers of Polish reside compactly are deemed to rightfully constitute the Polish nation-state. 

Science fiction is a genre that aspires to predict the human future through the lens of expected technological progress. Few realize that it emerged from the tragic experience of Poland-Lithuania’s Jewish community during the dark 20th century.

Many have expressed surprise at the emerging alliance of Beijing, Moscow and Tehran, which are three starkly different regimes. Do they have anything in common apart from authoritarianism? It is all too rarely noticed that above all China, Iran and Russia are the world’s sole surviving land empires.

After the fall of communism, democracy seemed to have won the day all over the world. Thirty years later, autocracy have steadily replaced democratic regimes and is on the rise in Western Europe and the United States, where democracy originated. Many naively believed that autocracy and democracy are mere labels, a choice that would not substantially impact our day-to-day lives.

Following Russia’s inexcusable invasion of peaceful Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian flags, ribbons and other signs of solidarity with this country under attack have been proudly displayed across democratic Europe. Shockingly, they are absent in Barcelona. Instead, quite open public support is lavished on neo-imperialist Russia.

Democracy and imperialism are mutually exclusive. No empire was, is or can be democratic. The British Empire was not, the imperial People’s Republic of China is not, nor will imperial Russia become a democracy, even when a self-professed democrat is installed at its helm. The necessary precondition of democratization in an empire is decolonization.

In February 2024, the death (or rather, extrajudicial killing) of the leading Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny sent shock waves across the democratic world. It could have been a subdued affair, as in the case of the Chinese 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. Beijing arrested him on trumped up charges in 2008 and withheld medical care, leading to the dissident’s premature death in 2017. The Chinese authorities did not want to turn Liu Xiaobo into a martyr for democracy. Hence, he was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea. No grave means no pilgrimage site.

Russia ditched democracy as not fit for the country’s needs. As a result, the Kremlin identified elections and relatively brief terms of office as the system’s weak points. Since the 2010s, Moscow has learned how to use the openness of the internet and democracy for destabilizing the West. It costs little and brings huge returns. The Kremlin has successfully weaponized democracy for attacking Europe and North America.

The modern Polish nation was ultimately forged out of a union between former Poland-Lithuania’s nobility and Slavophone Catholic peasants. This process of creating ethnic Poles was anything but easy, with antisemitism often used as a means of overcoming the estate chasm between nobles and peasantry.

The West’s endorsement of Russian imperialism comes in different forms, sometimes taking on the guise of “Eastern European studies” in renowned centres of learning.

Russia’s propaganda, which is largely aimed at the so-called “global south”, denigrates the West as degenerate, poor, and being in “satan’s power”; while Vladimir Putin is portrayed as their representative and saviour. Never mind the fact that the Russian onslaught on Ukraine triggered a worldwide food crisis and made automobile transport and education once again unavailable for hundreds of millions in the global south.

Walking directly into the defunct Soviet Union’s ideological worn-out shoes, neo-imperial Russia of today poses itself as a friend of the poor and oppressed masses outside the West. The Kremlin’s top rashists criticise the “golden billion” (золотой миллиард zolotoi milliard), or the West’s inhabitants who enjoy peace and prosperity across the rich global north. On this platform, the Russian government usurps for Moscow the right to speak on behalf of the world’s poor and huddling seven billion, living the so-called global south. But who is Russia’s golden thousand (золотая тысяча zolotaia tysiacha) whom this rhetoric benefits and who literally own Russia?

Debate has recently grown about the Russian Federation’s possible decolonisation in the future. Despite this, it is important to remember just how closely married Moscow’s current system is to empire. Spanning over centuries, this model continues to enrich the elite to the detriment of the population.