The Empire Returns to the Screen Once Again: Russian Propaganda About ‘Novorossiya’ and the Continuity of the Colonial Narrative
Whenever Russia embarks on the next phase of its aggressive policy, its cultural apparatus responds with predictable precision – churning out products designed not so much to entertain as to justify its actions after the fact. The new Russian series Novorossiya. Potemkin, set in the era of Catherine II, Potemkin, and the conquest of Taurida, is precisely such a product. Although its artistic quality objectively falls short of other Russian military propaganda films released since February 2022 – and it is important to note this from the outset, lest we overestimate it as an artistic phenomenon – that second-rate quality does not negate but rather heightens the need for analysis. After all, propaganda is not always skilful. It is, however, effective.
The series suffers from all the ills characteristic of contemporary Russian cinema in its ‘blockbuster’ guise: excessive computer-generated imagery that makes no attempt to conceal its artificiality, decorative extras, a linear plot, and an almost complete absence of psychological depth or even basic acting. The casting of genuinely well-known actors with long careers only deepens this disconnect between the performers’ potential and the poverty of the concept. But this contrast is symptomatic: the ideological objective clearly took precedence over the artistic. The series was not made for film festivals or critics – it was made for a specific audience with a specific purpose, and in this narrow, pragmatic sense, it arguably fulfils its function.
The series’ ideological architecture is simple, and that is precisely why it is dangerous. At its core lies the axiom of supremacy – of Russia as a state, the Russian people as the subject of history, and the Russian Empire as a natural and even providential project. All other nations within the scope of this narrative are portrayed through a lens of inferiority – each in its own way, but invariably within the same hierarchical logic. The Zaporozhian Cossacks are depicted as an unruly, semi-criminal mob devoid of any statehood – allies tolerated out of ‘great-power benevolence’ rather than out of any recognition of their own worth. The Turks are thoroughly treacherous, incapable of an honest word. The French embody a cynical political game with which a ‘decent’ state would do better not to engage. This arrangement of characters is no accident; it reproduces the classic colonial map, where the centre embodies civilisation and the periphery represents either hostile chaos or obedient raw material for ‘harvesting’.
Two key characters in the series utter phrases that deserve careful analysis – not as artistic details, but as ideological theses.
“The empire needs this war,” says Potemkin. The phrasing is almost textbook in its bluntness: not the people, not security, not justice – but the empire, as such, as a mechanism, as a self-sufficient end. Placed in the mouth of an eighteenth-century favourite, this phrase reads as a direct justification of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine: war is needed not because there is a threat, not because there is a grievance – but because without it, the very entity that calls itself an empire ceases to exist.
The second phrase – “Russia is guided not by people, but by God,” spoken by the aged Field Marshal Münnich – is no less dangerous, though its danger is more subtle. It strips the authorities of any rational accountability: if the ruler is a conduit of divine will, then criticism of his actions becomes not only futile but sacrilegious. This is the theological immunisation of authoritarianism – a tactic rooted in Moscow’s Caesaropapism that, in the context of the modern information war, has been given a revitalised lease of life.
To grasp the full scale of what is happening, this series cannot be analysed in isolation. It is a continuation – whether conscious or not – of a powerful cultural tradition established in 1984 by Valentin Pikul’s novel The Favourite. That novel – a two-volume fictional chronicle of Potemkin and Catherine II – did more to legitimise the idea of ‘Novorossiya’ and the ‘eternally Russian Crimea’ than any academic treatise or official document. Pikul planted what might be called a ‘literary time bomb’ – one that detonated in the twenty-first century, when the Kremlin’s propaganda machine began seeking cultural justification for its claims on southern Ukraine.
Pikul is an instructive yet deeply dangerous case. Soviet in his formal identity, he was a great-power Russian nationalist at heart, and these two aspects were incongruously yet inseparably intertwined. The Favourite is written in a genre that might be described as pseudo-documentary apologetics: copious references to archives, letters, and real people create an illusion of objectivity, beneath which lies a very specific ideological agenda. The annexation of Crimea is portrayed not as conquest but as the restoration of the natural order. Potemkin is not a coloniser but a builder. The destruction of the Zaporizhian Sich is either glossed over entirely or presented as a regrettable but necessary ‘civilisational’ sacrifice.
Today, in the context of a full-scale war against Ukraine, both Pikul’s The Favourite and the new series read as parts of a single long-term project – the cultural production of a colonial narrative that continued uninterrupted through the Soviet era and beyond the collapse of the USSR. ‘Novorossiya’ is not merely a propaganda brand launched in 2014. It is a literary and cinematic trope that has been implanted in the minds of millions over decades through fiction, school readers, and television series. When Putin invokes ‘Novorossiya’, he is not inventing anything – he is activating an existing cultural code, and therein lies the greatest danger.
Stalin’s dictum about cinema being ‘the most important of all the arts’ has long since become a cliché, but it bears repeating here precisely because it describes not the aesthetic superiority of cinema but its political function: the ability to shape mass perception not by appealing to rational argument but by bypassing it entirely – through imagery, emotion, and identification. A bad television series can be a more effective propaganda tool than a brilliant essay – and that is precisely why Russia’s dreadful television still deserves serious academic and journalistic scrutiny. To ignore it is to cede the ground on which a real battle is already being fought: over the interpretation of the past and, through it, the legitimisation of the present.
