Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territories since 2014, and with greater intensity after the full-scale invasion of 2022, has produced new configurations of linguistic and cultural erasure. Beyond territorial control, the occupation involves systematic attempts to restructure the symbolic and epistemic order of public life through the prohibition of Ukrainian-language education, forced curricular replacement, destruction of Ukrainian books and archives, and the Russification of signage, bureaucratic communication, and cultural infrastructure. These interventions regulate communication while simultaneously reshaping identity, notions of belonging, and memories. This paper conceptualises these measures as forms of linguistic, symbolic, and epistemic violence that target language and identity as explicit objects of domination. The analytical framework draws on theories of linguicide and linguicism, colonial erasure, and the coloniality of knowledge, which foreground how cultural and linguistic suppression is central to imperial power. Fanon’s reflections on colonial violence further illuminate how the denigration of indigenous languages undermines self-representation and agency. Recent scholarship has called for questioning Russia’s presumed “imperial innocence” in global narratives, highlighting the need to situate contemporary practices within the longer trajectories of imperialism and the Soviet era. Empirically, the study investigates how linguistic domination is narrated, justified, and contested across multiple discursive arenas. It asks two main questions: 1. How are language and identity erasure implemented as strategies of colonial domination in the occupied Ukrainian territories? 2. What structural and ideological mechanisms underpin the suppression of the Ukrainian language and culture? The research data for this paper comprise ten semi-structured interviews conducted between 2023 and 2025 with displaced residents of the occupied territories, experts working on occupation-related issues, and officials with access to field information. The interview data are supplemented by materials collected from Telegram channels, policy documents, and NGO reports. The qualitative analysis is conducted in MAXQDA and involves iterative coding and categorisation across several thematic dimensions, including linguistic landscape, education, media and informational control, bureaucratic communication, and memory and cultural heritage. The preliminary findings illuminate the systematic efforts by the Russian Federation to eliminate the Ukrainian language and identity in the territories it temporarily occupies, underscoring the critical role of erasure as a tool of colonial domination. The systematic suppression of the Ukrainian language in education, media, and public discourse in occupied territories aligns with broader colonial practices of erasure, reflecting attempts to replace Ukrainian identity with a Russian-centric narrative.

The collapse of the Soviet Union generated profound political, institutional, and epistemic uncertainty across its former republics. In the Republic of Moldova, this uncertainty was particularly acute in debates over language, national identity, and cultural belonging. This paper examines how literature, philology, and education functioned as key sites for producing certainty in the early post-Soviet period, focusing on the shift from “Moldovan” to “Romanian” language and literature education between 1991 and 1994. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis, the paper analyzes Limba Română, a literary and pedagogical journal published under the auspices of the Moldovan Ministry of Education during this period. Far from being a marginal intellectual outlet, Limba Română served as an institutional platform through which philologists, writers, and cultural activists, some of whom simultaneously held political office, articulated and legitimized a Romanian national identity as a “scientific truth.” Through appeals to philological expertise, historical continuity, and the literary canon, the journal framed Romanian identity as primordial and epistemically indisputable. The analysis shows how identity was constructed through three interrelated discursive strategies. First, philology was positioned as the ultimate authority on questions of language and identity, transforming linguistic claims into axiomatic truths. Second, the Romanian literary canon was mobilized as evidence of an uninterrupted ‘national essence,’ against which Moldovan and Soviet-era writers were selectively evaluated and reintegrated. Third, education was conceptualized as a key institutional site for correcting the “distortions” of the Soviet past, with schooling imagined as a nationalizing apparatus tasked with purifying language, disciplining bilingualism, and transmitting the canon to future generations. By situating these discourses within a broader post-imperial context, the paper argues that the post-Soviet transformation of language and literature education in Moldova was institutionalized through the convergence of philological authority and state power, producing a regime of certainty that endured even after subsequent governments challenged its explicit political claims. By foregrounding literature and education as technologies of certainty in a moment of profound uncertainty, this paper contributes to broader debates on culture, memory, and the formation of post-imperial orders in Eastern Europe.

The late Soviet period was marked by profound ideological uncertainty. Beneath the regime’s external projection of stability and narratives of “friendship of the peoples,” multiethnic harmony, and an anti-imperial self-image stood persistent internal anxieties about loyalty and the fragility of its universalist claims. Building on David Seymour’s reframing of antisemitism not as a timeless “reservoir” but as a commodity produced within specific social relations, the paper examines the cultural logic of late-Soviet antisemitism, in which the suppression of Jewish cultural life and the erasure of the Shoah created conditions that rendered Jewish experience inexpressible within Soviet ideological grammar. Rather than treating antisemitic narratives as remnants of earlier periods, I analyze how they were actively shaped and mobilized in this period to stabilize the regime’s self-understanding whenever its ideological coherence was under strain. Two case studies illuminate this dynamic. First, the disproportionate placement of Jews as translators reveals how the regime relied on their intellectual and linguistic labor for the management of its peripheries while simultaneously actively suppressing Jewish cultural visibility. Translation became one of the few domains left accessible after Jewish cultural expression was made impossible, yet a space in which Jews were indispensable while remaining structurally marginal. Second, the Cold War-era anti-Zionist campaigns fused Judaism, Zionism, Western power, and capitalism into a single framework that painted Jews as potential enemies inherently incompatible with Soviet ideals. These narratives supported the Soviet Union’s self-presentation as anti-imperial on the geopolitical stage, while marking the internal limits of Jewish belonging. The analysis shows that the regime’s universalist self-image depended on producing Jews as the point where that universalism failed – a constructed incompatibility made possible by the prior erasure of Jewish history, and mobilized to reinforce the coherence of the Soviet ideological project. The paper traces how this dynamic continues to echo in contemporary Russia, where Jewish history is routinely invoked in instrumental ways. The Shoah is emphasized in official narratives that seek to ground Russia’s moral authority in the legacy of the victory over fascism, yet Jewishness is framed as morally suspect in the context of the invasion of Ukraine, appearing as a category that can be mobilized when the state seeks to identify disloyalty. While the ideological coordinates have changed, the function is comparable: Jewishness remains a site through which the state negotiates the boundaries of belonging and manages the tensions within its own self-presentation.

This paper studies the more than a hundred-and-thirty stirring watercolor and pencil portraits that a Hungarian-born migrant woman, Ilona Szilágyi (1904–1985) produced in Soviet Gulag camps during her eight years of imprisonment between 1937 and 1945. Szilágyi was a committed Bolshevik revolutionary who lived, studied, and worked in the Soviet Union as a political migrant, seeking refuge from the increasingly fascist politics of Europe and her homeland between the world wars. Yet, her Soviet life and art practice inevitably got entangled with the violence of the Soviet system in the late 1930s and 1940s. Arrested in 1937 as the wife of an “enemy of the nation” in Leningrad (today St Petersburg), Szilágyi was sent to the forced labor camps of Western Siberia, where she documented her fellow inmates in beautiful portraits with oftentimes colorful, abstract backgrounds that offer no hint of the camps. Yet, as the artist’s handwritten inscriptions attest, all her models were so-called «чесеи́р», the Russian acronym for a family member of an enemy of the nation. Just like the artist herself, the gracefully smiling women who sat for Szilágyi were all wives, daughters, or sisters of men who were deemed guilty of anti-Soviet activities during the Great Purges. Uncertainty remains structural to reading and making sense of the portraits. They have been kept together as a collection that Szilágyi likely carried with her not only through her repeated relocations across camps but also to Hungary in the late 1940s, following her release from the Gulag. She never showed these portraits in public and never talked about them, just as she kept silent about the experience of the Soviet Gulag to the end of her life. She died in 1985, four years before she would be rehabilitated by Soviet law. That said, there is no information regarding the production of these haunting portraits—whether they were commissioned as propaganda about the women-only camp of Tomsk or born out of Szilágyi’s will to document women who were erased from Soviet society is uncertain. Embracing, rather than suppressing, the uncertainty that surrounds Szilágyi’s Gulag portraits, I am especially interested in reading them against and in line with portraiture practices of Socialist Realism and its call to depict individuals as social types who were characteristic of Soviet society. I speculate about how the Hungarian migrant artist used Socialist Realist principles to portray women who were all deemed to be unwanted foreigners in Soviet society.