Our colleague, the Kremlin apologist

Until Russia's full-scale invasion, Russian historian Alexei Miller was highly regarded in Western academia. Reflections on Russo-Centrism, colonialism and how Western scholars failed Ukraine.

Russia is seeking to legitimise its war against Ukraine through the construction of historical narratives. Vladimir Putin not only presents himself as a historian, but the Kremlin can also rely on the support of professional Russian historians. Among them is Alexei Miller, professor in St. Petersburg and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Miller refers to Putin’s decision to launch a “special military operation” (he uses the Kremlin’s official terminology) as a willingness to no longer merely comment on history, but to change it, perhaps alluding to a well-known quote by Marx. According to Miller, the root cause of this war is the seizure of power by „Ukrainian nationalists“ in Kyiv in 2014 and their allegedly aggressive anti-Russian policies. After all, Russia had always been willing to accept Ukrainians as part of the Russian nation.

Alexei Miller in October 2020 at the Yeltsin Centre. Source: Wikki Commons.

Miller’s career as a Kremlin propagandist should concern Western academics, as he was one of the most influential historians in the West in the field of empire studies, particularly with regard to Russian-Ukrainian relations, until Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He was a regular guest at international conferences, served as an advisor to students and postdoctoral researchers at Western universities, and published in peer-reviewed journals such as Kritika. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Ab Imperio, and the American Historical Review. As a recurring visiting professor at the Central European University in Budapest, he supervised doctoral students interested in the history of Ukraine.

But even if, like I was as a doctoral student, you were working on other minorities in the Russian colonial empire of the nineteenth century, you could not avoid Miller and his work. His publications were considered highly relevant. However, Miller avoided the term “colonial” for the Russian Empire. In his book „The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century” (published in 2003 by Central European University Press), he argued that the crucial question was why Russia failed to assimilate the Ukrainian-speaking peasant population into the “Great Russian” nation. After all, he maintained, the cultural and linguistic differences between the “Great Russian” and “Little Russian” peasants (Miller uses the terms without quotation marks) were manageable, and only a few “Ukrainian nationalists” were seriously committed to the Ukrainian cause. Already at this point, Miller was telling the story of Russian-Ukrainian relations as a failed Russian nation-building project and thus from the perspective of the Russian state. „Little Russians and Belorussians never experienced discrimination in the Russian Empire at the individual level,“ Miller claimed in 2003, a statement he repeated almost word for word after the full-scale invasion. According to this logic, anyone who could become Russian was not subject to discrimination. In this interpretation, Russification as a prerequisite for advancement and integration is not a colonial policy of marginalisation, but rather a privilege for those affected.

After the Russian occupation of Crimea and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014, Miller spoke out several times, including in academic publications, with a clear position. He did not speak of Russian aggression or occupation, preferring instead, in line with many Western commentators, to refer to Russia’s attack as the „Ukrainian crisis”. In the academic journal Kritika, he presented his view of the “multiple histories“ of this “crisis” in 2015: Russia feels existentially threatened by the West, and its actions are determined by the premises of “realpolitik”. He interpreted the Maidan as the exclusion of Russian-speaking Ukrainians from Ukrainian nation-building projects. Kritika then chose to republish this text, which was problematic to say the least, shortly after the full-scale invasion. In 2024, an article written by Miller and one of his Russian doctoral students appeared in the American journal Communist and Post-Communist Studies. However, Miller now publishes mainly in Russian media affiliated with the regime, regularly in the English-language online magazine Russia in Global Affairs, for example. One member of the advisory board is Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Through his English-language publications, one can assume Miller still reaches a certain international audience today.

Russia’s influence on Western research on Eastern Europe, and thus also on the broader public, is not a new phenomenon. In the Soviet Union, Miller’s father Ilya, also a historian, was among those who, at the behest of the Soviet secret service, attempted to influence the academic world. Alexei Miller’s colonial view of Ukraine has been painstakingly clear at the very least since his statements on the Russian attack in 2014. Why did this do so little damage to Miller’s international contacts and reputation in Western academia? He was still regularly invited to conferences, and many scholars continued to collaborate with him. Today, Miller provides the historical legitimisation for Russia’s genocidal and neo-colonial war. Considering his previous publications, his current stance is hardly surprising. That is why the Miller case cannot be dismissed as the regrettable transformation of a once-esteemed colleague into an apologist of the Kremlin. For decades, Miller has been spreading narratives which, albeit formulated in less primitive terms, anticipated the current statements of the Russian leadership and were in line with the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian ideology, according to which there is no separate Ukrainian identity. It is not surprising that Russian scholars cultivate a colonial view of Ukraine; after all, such a view is widespread among the Russian cultural elite. The crucial question is why Miller’s theses found acceptance in Western empire studies.

Undoubtedly, this research has produced studies whose findings remain valid to this day, such as Michael Khodarkovsky’s book on Russia’s development into a colonial empire in the early modern period or Moshe Gammer’s work on Russia’s war against the peoples of the North Caucasus in the nineteenth century. However, the “imperial turn” in historiography and the „New Imperial History” have also produced gaps. The new imperial research was primarily driven by the question of what held empires together over centuries. They were no longer regarded as giants with feet of clay, which would inevitably have to be replaced by nation-states sooner or later, but as relatively “successful” political formations. Historians of Russia were fascinated by the tsarist empire's supposedly high capacity for integration with regard to its multi-ethnic population.

The question of what held empires together is certainly justified. However, even empires considered “successful” due to their longevity were characterised by violence and inequality. This was too often overlooked in the new research on the Russian empire. Despite all its diversity, the privileging of the Russian language and culture was an essential feature of the tsarist Empire (just as it was in the Soviet Union), with the consequence of the marginalisation or even genocidal eradication of non-Russian languages and cultures. The centres of political power were St. Petersburg and Moscow, and the state’s elites were predominantly ethnic Russians. The inclusion of non-Russians into these elites came at a price. Scepticism towards nationalism and a fascination with empires as places of diversity and supposedly relatively harmonious coexistence under the banner of hybrid identities have led to these fundamental facts being ignored by too many scholars. One example is a programmatic text on “New Imperial History” published by the editors of the journal Ab Imperio in 2005. The authors describe empires instead as an “open-ended system of social, political, and cultural entanglements“.

Alexei Miller emphasised the “complexity” of Russian imperial rule, which, he claimed, could not be reduced to violence. But above all, he continuously spoke out against „national master narratives” (especially Ukrainian ones), while promoting colonial master narratives himself. Miller remains true to this line to this day: in a collection of his writings published in Russia in 2024, he highlighted his opposition to “national narratives” as the leitmotif of his academic career. The deconstruction of national narratives was a popular undertaking in Western research on Eastern Europe. If only we had deconstructed Russian colonial master narratives with the same enthusiasm! The trivialisation of the destructive power of Russian colonialism paved the way for discrediting anti-colonial emancipation efforts in Ukraine and the Baltic states as expressions of anti-Russian ethnonationalism, even in academic discourse. In this interpretation, it is the colonised, not the colonisers, who are the irrational and potentially dangerous actors.

How do we, as historians of Eastern Europe, now deal with the fact that these narratives have been so influential in our field? We demand that politicians come to terms with the failure of their Russia policy. Where have we historians failed, what have we overlooked, reproduced, supported and thereby normalised? In the summer of 2014, I sat on a panel with Alexei Miller at an international conference at the Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow on the occasion of the centenary of the First World War. I was a doctoral student at the time and felt honoured by the personal invitation from the HSE. I did not consider whether it was appropriate for me to continue working with Russian state institutions just a few months after Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The HSE, which was established by the Russian state, was considered academically prestigious and politically liberal. Today, the university supports Russia’s war against Ukraine. After Miller’s lecture, a young Ukrainian colleague asked him why Ukrainians were so quickly labelled nationalists when they insisted on their own language and culture, and why different standards were applied to Russians. Miller reacted in a thin-skinned and aggressive manner, mocking the young woman in his answer. In a room full of scholars from all over the world, many of them professors at prestigious Western institutions, nobody spoke out or came to the defence of our Ukrainian colleague. We all failed her. Everything was completely normal.

This is the English translation of an article which first appeared in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on August 6, 2025 (No. 180), p. N5. URL: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/geist-soziales/putins-historiker-alexei-miller-und-seine-kollegen-110622275.html