The Colonial Legacy of the “Wagner State” and the Destruction of the Russian Cultural Code

By creating a giant colony beyond the Urals, unparalleled in world history, and populating it mainly with criminal elements, the Muscovite Tsardom and the Russian Empire laid a time bomb not only under their economy, but also under the very cultural code of the country.

This mine has already exploded several times and continues to explode time and time again.

Being a highly criminalised society from the very beginning of the Moscow Principality, with zero tolerance for torture and perceiving criminal practices as socially acceptable and even desirable, Russian society nevertheless had extensive cultural contacts with Europe, which acted as a brake on the further criminalisation of Russian society.

However, even broad segments of the population, who were also massively exiled ‘beyond the Ural Mountains’ and were not immersed in the criminal subculture, fell victim to the cultural influence of professional criminals and adopted the same principles of social existence as those of the criminal and prison hierarchies.

By maximally developing and expanding the internal colonial-penal ‘anti-Russia’, defining new and new categories of ‘exiles’ and new territories of exile, the Russian state gradually created a laboratory that eventually exploded, even before the establishment of Soviet power.

Russian society, already highly criminalised, was influenced by a criminal subculture nurtured over three centuries of exile and penal servitude, which programmed it for development and management only within the framework of informal criminal and prison traditions and norms.

The Soviet Gulag ensured a second explosion, and seems to have finally turned Russia into a prison state that can only be governed as a prison, and its citizens can only be governed as a collective of prisoners, as mentioned by the CPT in its 2025 Standard on informal prison hierarchies. In fact, Russia, having demonstratively set a course to withdraw from the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture, has declared prison-like conditions to be the main principle of state governance. Although the citizens of the ‘Wagner State’ themselves no longer have any particular objections to this.