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russia seeks to restore itself as an empire. The empire must disappear. The war for Ukraine is the last battle of the empire… We repeat these or similar lines so often that we leave ourselves not even a shred of doubt about the imperial nature of our neighboring state. After all, up until 1917, this country was called the russian Empire at Peter the First’s behest, and the Soviet Union left no doubt about its imperial essence, writes Ukrainian journalist Vitaly Portnikov for zbruc.eu.
But if it is an empire – perhaps the last continental empire that somehow keeps going – why does it behave so strangely? The world’s largest country by territory, which for centuries remains unpopulated in its non-European part, has been fighting for Avdiivka or Kostiantynivka for four years now, spending petrodollars primarily on war – and this is despite the fact that russia has only a few regions left that are actually capable of feeding the state. Well, fine, that’s putin’s madness. But even in the 1990s, when there was literally no money at all, russia used its own army to maintain control over Transnistria or Abkhazia and was ready to resolve the conflict with Ichkeria through a bloody war. And what about the 1920s? Devastation, famine, total catastrophe – yet the Red Army tried to restore imperial borders, and Bolshevik leaders could not calm down literally until the 1940s, until the annexation of Tuva… At the same time, in most of the annexed lands, there is no development whatsoever – even the russians themselves are starting to talk about a strange empire that is forced to spend money on what was stolen.
russia is indeed a strange empire. In world history there are two imperial types. The first is a “sedentary” empire, which sends troops for others’ resources – this is an eternal story from Rome to Great Britain, you could say. And the second is a nomadic empire, which fights primarily for living space, and does not particularly care about resources; they are not its top priority. A vivid example of such an empire is the Golden Horde.But with moscow, an astonishing mutation occurred. The Muscovite principality turned out to be a sedentary periphery of a nomadic empire and inherited its political culture. The decline of the Golden Horde began precisely when it proved unable to expand into new territories and literally started to shrink, breaking apart in favor of its own outlying regions. Its most fortunate and most ruthless successor turned out to be moscow, whose entire history is nothing but relentless and unceasing expansion, starting literally from the first days when the principality became an independent state, and never ending – literally, never. At the same time, you cannot say that russians need living space – they cannot even develop the European part of their own country, let alone Siberia and the Far East.
And at the same time, it cannot be said that they are conducting some meaningful war for resources – everything happens according to the behavior of the beloved russian fairy-tale hero, Emelya, who builds his career without leaving his own stove. If oil deposits are found in the captured territory – great, we’ll live off oil and build new cannons with tanks to capture something else. And if none are found – well, that’s fine too, because the captured territory “equals four Frances.” Everything must be big and meaningless: the Tsar Cannon that never fired, the Tsar Bell that never rang, the Tsar territory that was never settled or developed.
So I think the whole point lies precisely in this unrestrained expansion, not even in the empire itself. You have to keep moving to disguise civilizational impotence, the inability to create anything of your own, the need to constantly imitate and steal — and movement makes it possible to pass stolen things off as your own and even lecture others from the height of your own “moral authority,” which is based not even on quantity but on sheer size. That’s why the communist revolution was able to triumph first in russia, because it matched this idea of expansion and was – let’s not forget – a “world” revolution, not a russian one; hence all those Hungarian and Bavarian Soviet republics. Stalin defeated the main ideologist of the “world revolution,” Trotsky, because he soberly assessed Soviet russia’s strength and realized that it would be enough to restore the old empire under new slogans, but not enough to force the same fate upon the whole world.
But then, when the Soviet Union ended up among the victors in World War II, expansion began on a scale that even Trotsky himself would have applauded: Central Europe, China, half of Korea, Cuba; later Angola and Mozambique; and even Ethiopia! Everything started to fall apart in Afghanistan, but the reason was not only an ill-considered war – it was also that moscow simply proved unable to either develop the countries in that vast new sphere of influence or to consume their resources. It drove them toward degradation and degraded itself – and the problem was not only communism as such but precisely russia. It’s enough to simply compare the standard of living and the fulfillment of people in communist Yugoslavia under Marshal Tito with the neighboring countries of the Soviet bloc to understand everything. And I remember very well how, during Soviet times, many intellectuals dreamed of at least something like Yugoslavian socialism, without realizing that the main problem lay in the very essence of russian expansion, not just in communist ideology.It would seem that the collapse of the Soviet Union should have become a lesson for russians – but it didn’t! At first they simply didn’t notice the collapse and decided that now they were living in the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States – UT]. And when they realized that they were, in fact, living in russia, they started longing to expand that russia at least to the borders of the mentioned CIS. russians supported the “independence” of Transnistria literally within a few months after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They sent troops and “volunteers” to the Caucasus. Later came the war in Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, Ukraine – and now, the “russian man” is stealing toilet bowls in Bucha!
In recent days, against the backdrop of the catastrophe in Crimea, which came as a surprise to moscow, I find myself thinking about what they will do if they stop, if they cannot defeat Ukraine and are forced to halt their expansion. Are they even capable of stopping at all, if expansion is the very essence of their strange and savage civilization? What will they do without expansion, when everything they have done until now was for the sake of expansion? Will they take out their anger on non-russian peoples, so that they try to break away and new opportunities for “gathering lands” arise? Squabble among themselves? Or will they simply clench their teeth, put on a show of having understood everything, find themselves a new young putin, and prepare for a new war and a new expansion?
