Postcolonial Rhetorical Analysis

The appropriation of postcolonial and at times decolonial rhetoric in relation to the postsocialist countries in the increasingly unipolar (in spite of all multipolar proclamations) world, has gone quite unevenly. In postsocialist Eastern Europe it was faster, more successful, and less censored because the liberating rhetoric logically shifted from the old dependence on Russia and the USSR to a critique of the new dependence on Western Europe and the US without touching the interests of the new national elites. Therefore the postcolonial discourse was not only harmless but even somewhat useful for the new independent states. The postsocialist intellectuals started to write on the subalternization and peripheralization of Eastern and Central

Here the postcolonial and decolonial discourses of any political kind are tabooed as the symbolic power and influence of the losing ex-empire have remained quite significant until very recently. Therefore any critique of Russian and Soviet expansionism is banned and in many cases has also continued until now. Sympathies have often stayed on the Russian side and lingered on the mutual past even if this past was highly mythologized and invented. In many cases this was a tactical position more than a sincere belief. And only the latest serious economic crisis, international isolation and the terminal decline of the Janus-faced empire (Tlostanova 2003) , which is now hastily swapping its masks, shifted the situation in a drastic way. As a result the Central Asian and Caucasus states and regions some of which are still formally parts of the Russian Federation, started looking for other partners and coalitions including those in the Middle and Far East—the partners which before used to be kept in reserve as the association with the old metropolis was simpler and in way

Rather the whole Russian model can be viewed as a case of zoological coloniality following nineteenth century Siberian dissident Afanassy Schapov to whom Etkind devoted one of the best chapters of his book (Schapov 1906). Schapov meant a parallel annihilation of the fur-providing animals and indigenous people who were forced to hunt these animals under pain of death during the early colonization of Siberia. Today this model of dehumanizing and equating human lives with mere instruments of thoughtless extracting of natural resources covers already the whole population of the Russian Federation regardless of our ethnic-racial, class or religious