Ilya Matveev: ‘Lenin’s theory only goes part of the way towards explaining Russian imperialism’

[Editor’s note: The following is an edited transcript of the speech given by Ilya Matveev on the “Imperialism(s) today” panel at the “ Boris Kagarlitsky and the challenges of the left today” online conference, which was organised by the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign on October 8. Matveev is a political scientist formerly based in St Petersburg, Russia. Currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. Transcripts and video recordings of other speeches given at the conference can be found at the campaign website freeboris.info, from where the below is republished.]

Thank you. It is a pleasure to be speaking at this event, in such esteemed company, and to be able to support Boris in this way. To continue this theoretical discussion of imperialism, I want to take up some of the themes discussed by Robert Brenner in his presentation, but I think I have a slightly different perspective on the nature of Russian imperialism. What I propose to do is to use three authors who wrote about imperialism and to look at the Russian case through the lens of three different theories.

The first has already been mentioned, that is Vladimir Lenin’s theory. For Lenin, imperialism was ultimately an outgrowth of contradictions and tendencies inherent in capitalism, such as a tendency towards monopoly. The tendency towards overaccumulation of capital drives capital’s need for external expansion, and this in itself leads to inter-imperialist rivalries and ultimately world wars. This is Lenin’s theory in a nutshell.

Interestingly, a few years after Lenin published his famous essay on imperialism, the liberal thinker Joseph Schumpeter put forward a kind of liberal interpretation of imperialism in response to Lenin’s theory and the theories of other Second International Marxists such as Rudolf Hilferding and Rosa Luxemburg. According to Schumpeter, imperialism is inimical to capitalism, especially capitalism in its pure form, and imperialist impulses represent ideologies and social structures from the pre-capitalist past. This was Schumpeter’s major thesis, namely that imperialism is essentially a legacy of the absolutist state and ruling classes and ideologies from the absolutist period. They survive in a new capitalist era. And this is why states adopt aggressive imperialist policies. For Schumpeter, imperialism could ultimately be compatible with capitalist interests, but it is a sort of artificial combination. And like other liberals, Schumpeter thought that the development of capitalism somehow would lead to the withering away of imperialism and war. So that is the second theory I want to look at.

The third theory is that of John Mearsheimer, a contemporary of ours, unlike Lenin and Schumpeter. His main point is that country-specific factors are ultimately irrelevant for this whole discussion; internal capitalist contradictions are irrelevant, and ideologies and social structures are irrelevant because imperialism, or what he calls “great power politics,” stems from the very nature of the international system. In this view, every state struggles for security and makes other states insecure. Thus inter-imperialist wars are built into the international system. When one state threatens another state, the threatened country will respond with aggressive measures. This is basically inevitable and does not depend on the domestic, social and geological structures in the threatened country.

So here we have three kinds of guiding ideas. And we can analyze Russian imperialism using these three perspectives.

I want to start with Mearsheimer because I think this is the easiest sort of case to consider. We can ask whether Russia was actually threatened when it initiated its aggression against Ukraine in 2014. Objectively speaking, Russia was not threatened by NATO. It was not threatened by Western imperialism. The major argument for the proposition that Russia and its security interests were somehow threatened by the West is the expansion of NATO. But this should be seen in the context of actual developments on the ground, which demonstrate that NATO was in fact becoming weaker as a conventional military alliance. It was expanding, but it was also becoming weaker.

This chart shows that NATO armies were becoming smaller, and the US was withdrawing its troops from Europe. Back in the 80s, there were 300,000 American soldiers in Western Europe, and by 2014 it was something like 30,000, or ten times fewer. It is the same story with equipment. The chart comes from a report published by the Rand Corporation, a US national security think tank. The report states that Russia was, in fact, becoming stronger than NATO in the specific Eastern European potential theatre of war.

Mearsheimer himself admitted this fact. In his famous — or infamous — article in 2014, he stated that NATO was expanding, but that it was also very careful not to provoke or threaten Russia in terms of conventional military strength. But he went on to make an interesting argument. He said that it does not matter that NATO was not objectively a threat. What matters is that Russia felt threatened, so the Kremlin perceived the situation as threatening. But this is a different argument, of course. It is not about objective developments anymore. It is about perceptions and, therefore, about ideology. So, I think that Mearsheimer’s theory is actually the weakest of the three theories we are looking at in terms of explaining Russian imperialism.

Then we have Lenin. His theory is actually stronger, in my opinion. We can see the emergence of certain criteria for imperialism in Russia in the post-Soviet period, especially during the period of economic recovery in the 2000s and the early 2010s. The criteria that Brenner already mentioned began to appear in Russia: the concentration of capital, capitalist monopolies, the over accumulation of capital, and the need for external expansion. This was all present in Russia in the 2000s. 

Russian companies were extremely interested in post-Soviet countries because they could rebuild Soviet-era supply chains under their control. They could benefit from those old Soviet industrial economic ties. And they also sought new markets in post-Soviet countries. This economic expansion created pressure for political assertiveness as well. I would argue that any Russian government, and not just Putin’s government, would feel some pressure to be more assertive, maybe even more aggressive, in the post-Soviet space because of the needs of capital accumulation. So, this argument is valid to a certain extent.

But at the same time, what is different from the pre-1914 period, for example, is that Russia was integrated into global capitalism in a very specific way. On the one hand, it was quite influential in its region, the post-Soviet region. On the other hand, Russian capitalism was a dependent form of capitalism. In fact, it is dependent on Western centres of capital accumulation. And so Russia was in an intermediate position: a classic case of semi-periphery. So, I do not believe that the impulse for this extreme confrontation with the West could have come from the economic sphere, from the sphere of capital accumulation. Russian capitalism was just not built for this confrontation.

The impetus could only come from outside the economic sphere, probably from the political sphere. So, the impulse not just towards imperialism, but towards a specific form of imperialism that would not only break with the West but engage in this extreme confrontation with the West, could only come from elsewhere, not from Russian capitalism, because Russian capitalism really benefited from the way it was integrated into the global economy.

The Russian ruling class derived huge benefits from this intermediate position, or what we could call its sub-imperialist position in post-Soviet countries, where Russian corporations were very influential and sometimes even dominant. At the same time, Russian corporations had deep ties with Western companies and Western centres of capital accumulation. In fact, Western capital was exploiting the post-Soviet region through Russian capital — not directly, but through Russian capital. And this is the essence of a sub-imperialist position. So, speaking strictly in economic terms, that was the essence of Russia’s global integration. 

An illustration of this was Russia’s participation in the Davos forum. Take Dmitry Medvedev, for example; he was not a bloodthirsty nationalist back then. He was a kind of a moderate semi-liberal politician. And he spoke at Davos. This demonstrates that the Kremlin’s intention was to maintain its sub-imperialist role.

In sum, Lenin’s theory goes some of the way towards explaining Russian imperialism, but not all the way, in my opinion. Then we have Schumpeter, who offers not just a non-Marxist explanation, but to some extent an anti-Marxist explanation. Nevertheless, I think it is compelling in some respects, because Schumpeter emphasises historical elements in imperialist policy. He sees it as a kind of revenge of the past.

And if we look at Russia’s imperialist discourses we find in them an echo of the Soviet and especially the imperial past. The arguments that the Kremlin and Putin use resemble the arguments of the Russian Empire and specific ideological tropes about how Ukrainian identity was somehow invented by foreign intelligence specifically to weaken and destroy Russia. All that was already present some 120 years ago. These discourses have made their reappearance in Russian politics. So, the idea that Russian imperialism is a product of the past is compelling.

One obvious argument is that Putin is preoccupied with the past. He is constantly reading history books, and his obsession with Russia’s place in history and his own place in history is evident in his thinking, in his public speeches, and in the articles that he publishes. In terms of ideology, the influence of the past is very clear.

But then there’s the question of Putin’s transformation from a cynical materialist into an ideological imperialist. Why did he suddenly develop this interest in historical ideas? For me, that points to limitations of Schumpeter’s theory, as it does not really explain how the past reasserted itself in the present in Russia. I think that the explanation ultimately lies in contemporary events and not just some kind of metaphysical revenge of the past.

More specifically, the Kremlin’s ideology is based on the experience of primitive accumulation in the 1990s, when people, including Putin, participated in a kind of dog-eat-dog free for all in which you need to be on the offensive all the time or else you will be destroyed by your competitors. This was the essence of Russian capitalism in the 1990s, and this kind of experience was projected by the Kremlin elites onto the world stage. In Putin’s view, the world works just like Russian capitalism in the 90s: it is the Wild West. You cannot show weakness. You need to take the offensive at every opportunity, and you can never bluff. Bluffing is a sign of weakness, and weakness means you will be destroyed.

Based on this kind of experience and habitus, to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s term, the ideology was fashioned after the Kremlin was radicalised by the Arab Spring and by the colour revolutions in the post-Soviet space. The Kremlin felt threatened by these events, and they interpreted them as an attack by the West — not as genuine popular protests, but as something inspired by the West to weaken these countries and destroy these political regimes. The conclusion was that the West is plotting the same thing against Russia, and so the Kremlin needs to strike first in order to neutralise the threat of a colour revolution or something similar to the Arab Spring. These were the triggers that dredged up those discourses and ideologies from the past and made them so relevant to the Kremlin in the present moment.

This ultimately explains the ideological consolidation of the Kremlin. In my opinion, ideology is the crucial factor in Russia’s aggression in 2014 and 2022. It cannot be accounted for simply with reference to objective contradictions, such as the contradictions of capital accumulation or geopolitical contradictions. By themselves they cannot explain the Kremlin’s decisions and actions, such as the decision to annex Crimea or the decision to invade Ukraine. Ultimately, the explanation lies in the sphere of ideology.