Aggressors may conduct systematic ideological indoctrination of their own population, cultivating a cult of exceptionalism and messianism. Within this paradigm, the colonizer's culture is proclaimed superior and a bearer of progress, while the culture of the colonized peoples is deliberately marginalized and portrayed as backward, derivative, or altogether lacking the right to independent existence. This serves as the basic ideological justification for subsequent domination.
The propaganda apparatus of the Russian Empire used poetry to broadcast the logic of domination into society: the imperial historian and participant in the events V. A. Potto records that the poet A. S. Pushkin proclaimed in verse the inevitability of subjugation: «Submit, Caucasus - Yermolov is coming!»[1], while the poet V. A. Zhukovsky extolled the destruction of infrastructure by military commanders: «Scarcely at the villages - the villages blaze»[2].
The systematic imposition of the metropole's logic of superiority. Researchers reconstruct Katkov's logic thus: "a nation must be a tribe capable of creating a state; only a state nation can establish order in a given territory; tribes incapable of creating a state have to submit to the state nation"[3]. Katkov himself wrote: "In the recognition of a nation the question of power, of government, of the state is decided"[3]. Hrushevsky records both the thesis and its reach: Valuev invoked an imaginary "majority of Little Russians" who allegedly "know neither a Ukrainian nationality nor language, only one Russian people and tongue," while the ideology's mouthpieces carried it to the formula "there are no Ruthenians — there is only one 'Russian people' from the Carpathians to Kamchatka"[4].
Total indoctrination of Russian society with the ideas of the philosopher I. Ilyin (so-called "white fascism") and the transformation of the "Russian World" concept into a state ideology (rashism) that justifies the metropole's cultural superiority and existential right to violence against its neighbors[5].