Russian Culture is NOT Great - But Brings Imperialism and Violence in its Wake!

Silicon Bites Ep347 | 2026-06-06 | On the night of 27 June 2023, a Russian Iskander missile hit the Ria Pizza restaurant in the centre of Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine. Thirteen people were killed. More than sixty were wounded. Among the wounded was the 37-year-old Ukrainian novelist Viktoria Amelina, then one of the most important young literary voices in the country. Amelina, who had spent the previous year documenting Russian war crimes against Ukrainian civilians in the occupied territories, suffered catastrophic head injuries. She died in Dnipro on 1 July 2023. She was, at the time of her death, a writer documenting the war crimes of another country's writers' country. The poet of one literature being killed by the missile from a culture that produced Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Chekhov and Akhmatova. The country that has spent two centuries demanding that Western intellectuals revere its Great Russian Culture killed Viktoria Amelina, deliberately, on a Tuesday evening in late June. ---------- SUPPORT THE CHANNEL: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/siliconc...   / siliconcurtain   https://www.gofundme.com/f/scaling-up... ---------- SILICON CURTAIN LIVE EVENTS - FUNDRAISER CAMPAIGN Events in 2025 - Advocacy for a Ukrainian victory with Silicon Curtain https://buymeacoffee.com/siliconcurta... Our events of the first half of the year in Lviv, Kyiv and Odesa were a huge success. Now we need to maintain this momentum, and change the tide towards a Ukrainian victory. The Silicon Curtain Roadshow is an ambitious campaign to run a minimum of 12 events in 2025, and potentially many more. Any support you can provide for the fundraising campaign would be gratefully appreciated. https://buymeacoffee.com/siliconcurta... ---------- SOURCES: EFDavies / EUobserver-syndicated essay — "Why Russian literature must lose its innocence" (2024) Wikipedia Maksym Eristavi (Substack via Ukrainska Pravda Volya Hub) — "Matryoshka of Lies: The Supremacy" (audio show, 2024-2026) Ewa M. Thompson — Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (Greenwood Press, 2000; ongoing 2022-2026 reissue and citation) Oksana Zabuzhko — Public lectures and essays 2022-2026 — Most internationally recognised Ukrainian writer; argument that Russian literature was not a humanist counterweight to the Russian state but a structural component of it; intelligentsia and secret police as complementary functions of the same imperial body; Dostoyevsky's A Writer's Diary imperial nationalism documented Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) — "Great Russian Culture: Cancelling, Boycotting, Quarantine" — Ukrainian decolonisation framework as model for other colonised peoples; Steve Biko on "complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused"; Terrell Starr on Putin's view of Ukrainians as "white trash" and African-American scholarship on Russian colonialism; Marcelo Dascal on the "colonised mind"; bell hooks on the difficulty of articulating decolonisation experience Harvard Gazette — "Upending Putin's Russia-Ukraine myth" (February 2022) — Snyder Petryshyn Lecture at Harvard; Snyder verbatim on Russian-imperial use of memory: "memory or myth or memorialization or the selective ways that governments and leaders choose to talk about the past and choose to instruct their people to think about the past"; centuries of Ukrainian history beyond Russian framing; Plokhy moderation; Channell-Justice context Timothy Snyder — The Road to Unfreedom (2018) and On Tyranny (2017) Serhii Plokhii — The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (Basic Books, 2015; revised editions) BBC News — The Zero Line: Inside Russia's War (May 2026 documentary) — Four Russian soldiers on the run; Dima (34, Moscow dishwasher repairman): "I see it – just two metres, three metres. Just murders, just click, clack, bang. It's not a drama, it's not a movie, it's real life"; Denis on meat storms: "I saw them send wave after wave, throwing men like meat at the Ukrainians, so they run out of ammo and drones and another wave can reach their objective"; Ilya the sole survivor of his 79-man mobilisation cohort tortured and urinated on; "I remember one of them screaming 'Don't shoot, I'll do anything!' but he zeroed them anyway"; zeroing as institutional practice; UK MoD estimate of 1.2 million Russian troops killed or injured ----------