Universality and conflict as a decolonial and culturological problem

[Excerpt] Authors and ideas from the post-Soviet world have witnessed a prosperous encounter with post-colonial studies for some time now. At the same time, contact with the so-called ‘decoloniality’ – a body of thinking that emerged from the Latin American context – is still in its infancy. Some dialogues, however, have already been initiated (see Tlostanova, Mignolo 2012; Tlostanova 2015a; Tlostanova 2015b; Silova et al. 2017; Tlostanova 2018; Gradskova 2019; to some extent Koobak et al. 2021; Fry, Tlostanova 2021; Tlostanova 2022), in the belief that a decolonial framework could help to clarify the political, social, cultural history and dynamics of the post-Soviet space. Such an encounter could also contribute to a retrospective interpretation of the intellectual tradition of the Soviet Union and its tensions between imperialist policies and discourses of freedom and equality.