Instruments

Legal political parties, movements, or factions within the colonized society that are covertly or openly sponsored, directed, and comprehensively supported by the aggressor state. They are used as a proxy instrument for destabilization, for the procedural seizure of power from within, and for legitimizing external interference under the guise of a domestic political process.

An instrument of foreign-policy pressure and manipulation. It is applied by the colonizers in the international arena toward sovereign (or formally independent) states until their complete absorption. It includes negotiation processes, the imposition of enslaving treaties, the creation of legal traps, external economic blockades, international blackmail, and collusion with third countries on the partition of others' territories.

An instrument of internal administration and institutional coercion. It comes into use once a territory has already been stripped of international subjecthood and de facto turned into an internal colony. It encompasses the work of the metropole's entire state and bureaucratic apparatus: the issuance of discriminatory laws and decrees, changes to administrative borders, systematic cultural and educational assimilation, social engineering, and the legal formalization of control (through population censuses or imitation referendums).

An instrument of demographic and military expansion that combines military service with agricultural labor and the physical settlement of territories. It is employed by the state to create an armed buffer on the frontier, to displace Indigenous populations from their lands, and to radically reduce the cost of maintaining an army of many thousands. The settlers are shifted to self-sufficiency, bound to the land, and placed under the total control of the military command. Historical incarnations: the irregular Cossack hosts (Terek, Greben, Kuban), as well as the institution of military settlements deployed on a large scale in the Russian Empire by Alexander I under the direction of Count A. A. Arakcheyev. In introducing this system, the emperor drew on European experience: the model was the Prussian cantonal system of army recruitment (Kantonssystem), under which the country was divided into military districts and a soldier's service was combined with cultivating the land, including on the territories seized after the partition of Poland.

Religious institutions loyal to the empire, used for ideological legitimization.

External or artificially created loyal governing bodies that replace or duplicate legitimate local authority.

The police apparatus provides everyday coercive and administrative control over society. The metropole needs this instrument to hold on to power, to maintain the desired order on the ground, and to keep basic records of the population, including through mechanisms of registration and restrictions on movement. From the 1600s to the present day, this system has changed only its signboards: voivode offices and investigative prikazes gave way to the city police and address bureaus in the Russian Empire. In the Soviet era, this branch of power was embodied in the vast structures of the NKVD and the MVD, and today the same supervisory and administrative function continues to be performed by the modern MVD system.

A state institutional apparatus of mass ideological influence, formatting of consciousness, and cognitive control. It included specialized party structures (in particular, the agitation and propaganda departments of the Central Committee), as well as the press, the system of mass events, cinema, and literature, all fully controlled by the authorities. It was used by the aggressor to replace real history with artificial imperial-communist myths, to subject the population to total ideological indoctrination, and to deliberately cultivate a fanatical totalitarian personality type, blindly devoted to the regime and cruel toward dissenters. The propaganda machine served as the basic mechanism for legitimizing state violence and masking the policy of forced assimilation.

The use of the state healthcare apparatus, psychiatric clinics, and research institutes as a punitive instrument. The system of medical institutions is turned into an extension of the repressive apparatus: doctors under the control of the security services fabricate politically motivated diagnoses (for example, the nonexistent "sluggish schizophrenia"), while closed institutions are used as prisons for the indefinite isolation and drug-induced torture of dissenters .

Armed forces under direct state control.

Instruments of covert interference, bribery of elites, orchestration of proxy wars, interrogation, and institutional terror against dissenters. Historical incarnations: the Preobrazhensky Prikaz, the Secret Chancellery, the FSK and the FSB of Russia.