Russia’s new imperialism

First published at Stanford University Press. The following is the introduction to Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev’s new book Russia’s New Imperialism: Capital and Ideology.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, was an unprovoked act of aggression that brought immense tragedy to the Ukrainian people and demanded unspeakable sacrifices from Ukraine’s defenders. It was also — and still is — a mystery. Russia’s original plan was based on rather fantastic assumptions. The Kremlin expected the war to be over in ten days and did not even consider alternate scenarios. Russian soldiers brought their dress uniforms with them, preparing for an imminent parade on Khreshyatik Street in Kyiv. Many traveled in unarmored trucks, with nothing but a thin layer of canvas to protect them from Ukrainian ground and air ambushes. On the second day of the invasion, Putin addressed the Ukrainian troops directly, calling on them to overthrow the country’s civilian leadership. Messages received by Ukraine’s top military commanders urging them to surrender confirm that his call was serious and not just a rhetorical flourish. All in all, it is clear that the Kremlin fully expected that a quick and singular show of force would be enough to defeat and subjugate Ukraine, one of Europe’s largest countries in both territory and population.

But the mystery behind the decision to invade runs deeper than the Kremlin’s delusions about Ukraine and Ukrainians. Even if Putin succeeded in installing a puppet regime in Ukraine, turning it into another Belarus, it is unclear what Russia would have gained. Political, economic, cultural, and academic ties with the West would still have been severed, limiting Russia’s development potential. And Russia would still have found itself in the middle of a new cold war, with a geopolitical and geo-economic position far weaker than in Soviet times. Why provoke a multidimensional conflict with a bloc that is twenty times larger in terms of GDP?

The strangeness of the Kremlin’s miscalculation is confounded by the fact that a pattern of counterproductive consequences had already emerged since Russia began its aggression against Ukraine in 2014. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and covert participation in the Donbas war had already turned many Ukrainians against Russia, yet Putin still somehow believed that they would come around if their leadership — in his words, “a bunch of dopeheads and neo-Nazis” — was removed.1 Moreover, Russia’s aggressive actions since 2014 had already led to the strengthening of NATO’s eastern flank (not the other way around, as Putin claimed), making the strategic consequences of the 2022 invasion, such as Finland and Sweden joining NATO, entirely predictable. In other words, the Kremlin adjusted its losing strategy by doubling down on it.

In this book, we seek to contextualize and explain Russia’s external aggression. We believe it warrants the term imperialism, which we define as a systemic policy of coercion in international relations under conditions of highly asymmetrical power distribution. Coercion against a weaker state can take many forms: political, economic, and military. For example, Russia’s coercive actions toward Ukraine in the post-Soviet period included interference in elections in 2004–5; gas cutoffs and manipulation of gas prices; bribery and acquisition of economic assets to gain a political foothold in the country; trade restrictions related to Ukraine’s attempt to sign the Association Agreement with the European Union in 2013; the annexation of Crimea; the instigation and coordination of separatist uprisings in the Donbas; intelligence operations and “active measures”; and, finally, its full-scale invasion of the country in 2022.2 Elements of this repertoire of coercion can be found in Russia’s dealings with other post-Soviet states, including Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia.3

Since Lenin’s seminal analysis, imperialism has often been treated in critical scholarship as a stage or period in the development of the global capitalist system. However, while Lenin famously defined imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism,” he also recognized the existence of multiple imperialisms in his own time. In 1916, for example, he characterized Russian imperialism as “much more crude, medieval, economically backward and militarily bureaucratic” than Western imperialism. Similarly, Trotsky formulated the “law” of uneven and combined development based on the Russian case, according to which states at different levels of capitalist development coexist and interact within a single international system, which also affects their imperialist policies. Both Lenin and Trotsky suggest that we must expect different modalities of imperialism to coexist within the same period, defying the idea of a single “essence” of imperialism. Additionally, the ideological and subjective dimensions of imperialism have a logic and causality of their own that further diversify the varieties and practices of imperialism. In the case of post-Soviet Russian imperialism, as we shall see, ideological consolidation is particularly important.

An insightful editorial in the left-wing journal Salvage, published on April 22, 2022, two months after the invasion began, claimed: “The left mostly mocked American insistence that a Russian attack was coming, so now some re-evaluation of the multiplicity of contemporary imperialist actors is due”. However, the editorial went on to describe Russian imperialism as largely a mirror image of Western imperialism. In this book, we intend to reveal the specificity of Russian imperialism, as well as its global implications.

Lenin or Schumpeter?

An important, if indirect, debate took place in the 1910s between the Marxist thinker Vladimir Lenin and the liberal thinker Joseph Schumpeter. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin took up John Hobson’s argument, claiming that imperialist aggression and inter-imperialist rivalries were a necessary byproduct of monopoly capitalism and its contradictions (i.e., the need to find profitable outlets for the surplus of capital). For Lenin, imperialism was an essentially modern phenomenon linked to the development of capitalism. Moreover, he radicalized Hobson’s position by claiming that capitalism was unreformable and that inter-imperialist wars were therefore inevitable.

In a long essay titled “Imperialism and Social Classes”, Schumpeter responded to Lenin and other Second International Marxists by offering a restatement of the doux commerce (gentle commerce) thesis characteristic of liberal thought. He claimed that imperialism does not organically spring from capitalist development. Capitalism directs social energies into industry, not war, and therefore “a purely capitalist world ... can offer no fertile soil to imperialist impulses”. According to Schumpeter, imperialism survives in capitalist societies as an atavistic product of precapitalist social structures and ideologies that linger.4

Both Lenin and Schumpeter allowed for some latitude in their theories. As we have seen, Lenin recognized the importance of the legacies of an absolutist state for imperialism, particularly in the case of Russia. Schumpeter, on the other hand, accepted that imperialism — although alien to capitalism in its “pure” form — allowed for a mutually beneficial relationship between state and capitalist interests. Indeed, in his analysis of capitalist monopolies under imperialism he came remarkably close to the arguments of the Marxists of the Second International. Yet at their core, Lenin’s and Schumpeter’s views of the relationship between capitalism and imperialism remain diametrically opposed.

The juxtaposition of Lenin and Schumpeter can help us think about contemporary Russian imperialism. Are Russia’s imperialist tendencies a necessary byproduct of the development of its post-Soviet capitalist economy? Or, on the contrary, are they an ugly legacy of the Soviet and imperial pasts, a ghost now visible precisely because of the weakness of Russia’s post-Soviet capitalist development? Guided by these questions, we examine sources as diverse as economic and military statistics, Putin’s speeches, the writings of fringe imperial-nationalist intellectuals, opinion polls, and interviews with ordinary Russians. We also combine approaches from political economy and social theory. The answers are not clear-cut.

Lenin’s thesis certainly goes a long way in explaining the reemergence of imperialism in post-Soviet Russia. In the 2000s, there were signs of a crisis of overaccumulation in the Russian economy. Post-Soviet countries represented a particularly attractive outlet for Russian investment, as they offered the possibility of rebuilding the Soviet-era supply chains under the control of Russian companies. They were also familiar territory for Russian managers and harbored the potential for strong market growth. Indeed, the imperative of economic expansion put pressure on the Russian state to be more assertive in its “near abroad.” Coercion in the form of economic measures, political interference, and intelligence operations was seen by the Kremlin as a way of advancing the interests of Russian businesses (many of which were state-owned). Even limited military intervention could be aligned with these economic goals, as in the case of Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia, which, among other things, undermined Georgia’s participation in the Nabucco gas pipeline that bypassed Russia.

There are clear limits to the Leninist explanation, however. They pertain to the specific place of the Russian economy within the global capitalist system. Since its resurgence in the early 2000s, Russian capital has occupied an intermediate position in global capitalist networks. While it was influential and — in some cases such as in Belarus and Armenia — dominant in post-Soviet countries, it was also dependent on Western capitalist centers. Russia acted as a regional node in the globalized accumulation process. When Gazprom used gas cutoffs to force Moldova and Ukraine to hand over their gas infrastructure, the company’s Western portfolio investors, such as BlackRock, benefited as much as the Russian shareholders, including the Russian state. At the same time, companies like Gazprom acquired assets in the West and their owners and managers bought luxury mansions in London and sent their children to elite private schools there. This combination of power and dependence is captured by the notion of subimperialism, originally developed by the Brazilian economist Ruy Mauro Marini to identify Brazil’s place in the global capitalist system. It points not so much to a zero-sum conflict between nation-based capitals pace Lenin but rather to a hierarchy of capitalist formations.

Russia’s subimperialist position meant that economic factors alone cannot explain (and, in fact, militated against) the sharp break with the West that occurred after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. The impulse to escape its subimperialist position and engage in all-out confrontation with the West could only come from elsewhere, not from the imperatives of capital accumulation. What, then, of the alternative Schumpeterian explanation?

The Kremlin’s obsession with Ukraine certainly bears the markings of older imperial discourses, revealing a continuity between the past and the present. In an article published in 2021, a few months before the invasion, Putin described Russians and Ukrainians as “one people” divided by the enmity of Russia’s geopolitical enemies. The portrayal of Ukrainian identity as a fabrication of foreign intelligence services was, in fact, one of the hallmarks of imperial Russia’s policy on Ukraine at the beginning of the twentieth century. Historical myths and obsessions seem to recur.

But the question remains: How did this particular form of imperial nationalism come to hold such powerful sway over an influential section of the Russian elite that includes Putin himself? Another puzzle emerges here too. If the past manifests itself in the present in the form of an imperial ideology, how did its megalomania and fanaticism come to replace the extreme cynicism characteristic of Russia’s post-Soviet elite? After all, the dominant frame of analysis of Putin’s Russia has long centered on the notions of corruption and kleptocracy. Yet the chain of events that began with the annexation of Crimea does not fit this understanding of the Kremlin as narrowly kleptocratic or interested only in economic matters. How did the world of ideas become so important to the Russian regime?

We argue in this book that ideologization did not simply replace cynicism. Rather, the Kremlin’s new imperial ideology is rooted precisely in pushing its cynical worldview to its limits. Putin’s formative years as a politician coincided with a period when ideologies were widely discredited and “ideals” were treated as a joke. In this world of adventuristic capitalism, it was dog eat dog. Over time, Putin and a subset of his cronies began to project Russia’s experience of primitive accumulation onto the world stage. Having lived through the “piranha capitalism” of the 1990s, they began to frame international relations as a ruthless struggle for survival in which only a swift show of force could prevent one actor from being crushed by another. Bluffing meant weakness, and weakness meant death. This worldview was radicalized by the Arab Spring, color revolutions in the former Soviet states, Russia’s own opposition protests in 2011–12, and the Maidan uprising in Ukraine. Refusing to entertain the idea that these could be genuine popular struggles, the Kremlin interpreted all these mobilizations as a weapon wielded by the West against its opponents, including Russia. Following this logic, the Kremlin conflated the survival of the political regime with the security interests of the country itself.

The result was that the Kremlin’s sweeping cynicism acquired an intellectual scaffolding consisting of imperial nationalism, conservative statism, and conspiracy theories. These ideological tropes were used as part of government propaganda, but — in a phenomenon that international relations scholar Jack Snyder has called “blowback” — Putin and his cronies themselves came to believe them. This produced the ideological consolidation necessary to make such bold moves as the annexation of Crimea and Russia’s covert involvement in the Donbas war. The events of 2014 set Russia on an entirely new trajectory, one that eventually led to the 2022 invasion, economic decoupling from the West, and a multifaceted internal transformation. At both of these turning points — 2014 and 2022 — ideological factors were decisive. In effect, while we do not fully subscribe to the Schumpeterian explanation, certain elements of it ring true: Russian imperialism since 2014 has been counterproductive, largely irrational, and rooted in the historical myths of empire. But it was the modern experience of primitive accumulation, as well as recent events such as the Arab Spring, that enabled the ideological consolidation of Putin’s regime.

Russia among others

There is, of course, a third possible explanation, neither Leninist nor Schumpeterian, but “offensive realist,” with international relations scholar John Mearsheimer being its most (in)famous proponent. According to this view, Russian expansionism is not a product of internal developments (economic or ideological) but rather a response to external pressure — an entirely predictable reaction that does not depend on domestic factors. Coincidentally, this is Putin’s own view. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, he described US policy toward Russia since 1991 as “pressure, pressure, pressure”. What to make of this argument?

There is no denying that the tensions between Russia and the US are not entirely of Russia’s own making. In 2002, for example, the US unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, forcing Russia to develop new weapons capable of defeating missile defenses in order to maintain the nuclear balance. The US withdrawal from the treaty had profound strategic consequences; what is more, it coincided with a period of rapprochement between Russia and the US. In 2019, Bryce Farabaugh and Deverrick Holmes of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation stated: “In hindsight, the treaty’s abandonment 17 years ago can be viewed as an opening salvo in the unraveling of the arms control system and American-Russian relations we see continuing to this day”.

In the area of strategic stability, as in other areas, however, the overall US policy toward Russia can hardly be described as “pressure, pressure, pressure.” The US and Putin’s Russia did successfully negotiate two nuclear treaties: the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (2003) and the New START Treaty (2011). In addition, the US canceled the part of the European missile defense plan that could have theoretically undermined the nuclear balance by reducing Russia’s offensive strike capability. In effect, the US — as well as Russia, up to a certain moment — proved to be capable of negotiation and concession.

The cursed question of NATO’s eastward expansion, which has caused various writers to spill so much ink that the stain can be seen from space, should also be examined without resorting to simplistic narratives. It is true that any Russian government, not just Putin’s, would hardly have been happy with NATO’s enlargement, particularly since Russia’s own chances of joining NATO have always been close to zero. Nevertheless, public statements and the actual developments on the ground both need to be considered. In terms of public statements, NATO did not declare Russia an adversary until April 2014, after the annexation of Crimea. As for developments on the ground, NATO did not permanently deploy troops to its new eastern members until 2017 — again, only after Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Moreover, the new troops amounted to only 4,500 soldiers. And even as NATO expanded eastward, the US was steadily withdrawing its troops from Europe and European armies were shrinking. Since Russia began its rearmament program in the late 2000s, the conventional military balance has actually improved in Russia’s favor despite NATO’s eastward expansion. It was not until Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 that this trend reversed, but NATO is hardly to blame.5

In short, developments in US-Russian relations cannot in themselves explain Russia’s imperialist policies. For the Kremlin, however, they have become part of a specific ideological construction, according to which perennial Western hostility toward Russia has reemerged in the American (or “Anglo-Saxon”) determination to crush and dismantle Russia by using Ukraine as a battering ram. In Vladislav Zubok’s apt formulation, “Russian myths are not just a bundle of lies and deceptions. A myth is a powerful synthesis of actual developments, just a biased one. Putin’s myths, like all myths, have grains of truth enveloped in willful interpretations and self-fulfilling prophecies”. The key to the conundrum of Russian imperialism, particularly after 2014, lies in the inner workings of the myth, although material developments certainly play a role when they interact with the Kremlin’s mythology.

Stability and Change

In his powerful analysis of the causes of the First World War, Christopher Clark wrote of Austria’s decision to issue an ultimatum to Serbia on July 23, 1914: “Decisions of this kind may acquire an existential dimension, in that they promise to re-invent the decision-making entity, to fashion it into something it was not before”. Similarly, Putin’s fateful decision to invade Ukraine on February 24, 2022, made Russia anew.

Three years into the war, the Russian economy is on full war footing: Military expenditure in 2024 is estimated at $149 billion, accounting for 7.1 percent of GDP. Against all odds, Russia’s economic decoupling from the West proved feasible. While trade with the EU and US collapsed, trade with China, India, and other large developing economies has soared. Unemployment is the lowest in post-Soviet Russian history; in fact, there are widespread labor shortages that put upward pressure on wages. At the same time, all conceivable expressions of dissent are now criminalized, and the regime’s repressive apparatus works with a consistent, monotonic quality, fining and imprisoning people for offenses such as tearing down propaganda posters or criticizing the war in private conversations reported to the police. Furthermore, Russia’s ideology of imperial nationalism is underpinned by an extreme conservative agenda, which includes a complete ban on gender-affirming treatment of any kind, as well as any public mention of LGBTQ concerns. While not completely new, all these trends came to fruition only after February 24, 2022.

Developments in Russia hint at something durable — not just a wartime emergency but the basis for a new polity, economy, and society. As time goes by, the changes have acquired a momentum of their own and may eventually become irreversible. The more the oligarchs adjust to living lavishly in Dubai instead of London and trading with Asia instead of Europe, the less incentive they have to seek a reversal of the Kremlin’s anti-West policies. And while ordinary people are yet to fully internalize the Kremlin’s imperialist ideology, the groundwork is being laid to indoctrinate a new generation of Russian youth through sweeping changes in the education system. Hundreds of thousands of the most politically engaged and opposition-minded people have left the country; they are no longer a problem for the regime. And those members of the opposition who have not left are powerless in the face of the regime’s vast repressive apparatus.

And yet, signs of instability lurk beneath the surface. The economy suffers from persistent inflation. Only war-related sectors exhibit growth; civilian industries are stagnating or declining. Military spending, at least three times the prewar level, is putting an enormous strain on public finances. Yevgeny Prigozhin’s revolt in June 2023 also revealed the fragility of Putin’s model of shadow governance: Far from being a perfect monolith, Russia’s state system is crisscrossed with corporate, regional, and personal loyalties. Under conditions of strong political or economic turbulence, fissures are bound to appear. We do not want to speculate on Russia’s future, but we also do not believe it is preordained.

Imperialism and the Russian public

From 2022 to 2024, the Public Sociology Laboratory — a research collective that includes one of the authors of this book — gathered hundreds of interviews with ordinary Russians to reconstruct Russian society’s attitude toward the war. Speaking of Russia’s “new territories” — that is, the occupied parts of Ukraine annexed by Russia — one of the interviewees pointed out: “I’m not a citizen of these territories, I can’t consider them my people — they’re not. They’re not my kin, not my blood, they’re not my people”. Another respondent, when asked about conscription, replied: “So they [the population of the Donbas ‘people’s republics’] will come here and I’ll go fight instead of them? I don’t need that”. And a nurse in a small town in the Urals said, “Ukrainians are a separate people. What are we fighting for?”.

The findings make clear that the Kremlin has far outpaced the majority of Russian society in its imperial-nationalist radicalization. The idea, expressed in Putin’s 2021 article, that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people,” still does not have widespread currency in Russian society, and the “new territories” — with the exception of Crimea — are not considered by most as part of Russia. Of course, consistently nationalist and imperialist views are also present. For one interviewee, the war amounted to “cleaning up our rebellious province, which for some reason thinks it’s a separate state”. However, such views are in the minority. The majority of Russians are cynical about the Kremlin’s official rhetoric and often see the war as a geopolitical conflict in which neither side can claim the moral high ground. This logic, however, does not preclude a passive acceptance of the war, which many have come to see as inevitable. Moreover, a significant part of the population supports the war regardless of Russia’s motives. One of the respondents summed up this position: “It’s weird to be on the other side [pro-Ukraine]. Well, because you’re on this side. That’s where your relatives are dying”.

In the short term, the Kremlin has accepted the cynicism and passivity of the Russian people. In fact, it was these very factors that helped Putin tighten his grip on Russia in the first place. Putin’s regime governs through material incentives, such as high payouts for those who join the army and severe penalties for dissent. In the longer term, however, the Kremlin’s project for Russia — just like its project for Ukraine — is deeply ideological. Putin now sees his mission as the “reeducation” of the Russian people along conservative and nationalist lines — essentially, the creation of a new society. The vast machinery of the Russian state is gradually being reoriented to achieve this goal.

Opposition to imperialism in Russia exists and has included actions ranging from painting anti-war graffiti to burning down conscription offices. So far, however, the state has been quite effective in disorganizing, isolating, and crushing it. Organized opposition groups have largely moved abroad and are all in deep crisis. One can only hope that this crisis in the opposition will be transformative and not its swan song.

Global implications

Resurgent Russian imperialism is redrawing the global geopolitical and geo-economic map. With its first attack on Ukraine in 2014, the Kremlin reversed Europe’s post-1989 demilitarization. After years of decline, the military expenses of European NATO members grew from $235 billion in 2014 to $380 billion in 2024, finally reaching the 2 percent of GDP target long demanded by the US. Over the same period, the number of military personnel in NATO’s European bloc grew from 1.8 million to 2 million. In addition, Germany agreed in 2024 to the deployment of US long-range nonnuclear missiles on its territory, and other European countries such as France, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, and Poland are planning to acquire or develop their own deep-strike capabilities. The most advanced US missile system to be placed in Germany, the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), has a range of more than three thousand kilometers and can hit not only Moscow but most of European Russia. NATO is also developing new land corridors to quickly move three hundred thousand troops to its eastern flank in the event of a military conflict with Russia. In sum, from a geostrategic standpoint, the new cold war between Russia and the West is in full swing. The obvious difference with the pre-1989 situation is that Russia and its allies (i.e., Belarus, Eritrea, North Korea, and — before Assad’s downfall — Syria) account for only 3.5 percent of global GDP in purchasing power parity terms, compared with the 10.5 percent of the Soviet bloc. Moreover, NATO is now on Russia’s doorstep in Finland, Sweden, and the Baltic states.

And then there is the question of China. Some observers, including French President Emmanuel Macron, have described Russia as a “vassal state” of China. We doubt this claim. With Russia’s options for external trade now severely limited, China certainly has an upper hand in some negotiations — for example, over the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline. However, the overall relationship between China and Russia is one of mutual dependence, not control and subservience. For China, which has its own simmering conflict with the West, letting Russia fall means facing the world’s most powerful political and economic bloc alone. For this reason alone, a certain minimum of economic and diplomatic support for the Kremlin is virtually guaranteed. At the same time, getting too close to Russia — for example, by entering into a formal military alliance with it — would exacerbate its own conflict with the US, which China prefers to manage carefully rather than escalate recklessly. These calculations determine China’s policy toward Russia, which includes, on the one hand, intensive economic cooperation and Xi Jinping’s declaration of support for Putin in the wake of Russia’s 2024 presidential elections, and, on the other hand, partial compliance with Western sanctions against Russia, especially in the financial sphere, and the avoidance of any military alliance commitments. The big question here, not addressed in this book, is the likelihood of wider conflict — perhaps even military escalation — between China and the US. Do structural factors, such as the clash between two powerful centers of capital accumulation, make such a scenario inevitable? Or does its possibility depend on the agency of specific actors? What is clear is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is an agency-related factor that puts additional strain on Sino-American relations.

Beyond changing the strategic posturing of world powers, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed several geo-economic truths. First, Western sanctions, including the freezing of some $300 billion in Russian central bank reserves, demonstrated the extent to which economic relations could be weaponized in the context of a modern, globally integrated economy. Second, Russia’s response showed that a major commodity exporter can, in fact, survive rapid decoupling from the West by redirecting trade to non-Western countries and by engaging in conventional state-capitalist economic mobilization. Both facts have certainly been noted by other major semiperipheral economies. Gita Gopinath, first deputy managing director of the IMF, recently claimed that “trade and investment flows are being redirected along geopolitical lines”. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine contributed to this process both directly and by signaling to other countries what was possible.

The attack on Ukraine not only cost hundreds of thousands of lives, wreaking havoc and devastation, but it also encouraged a spiral of militarization and the “blockification” of the international system. Of course, the Kremlin alone could not have achieved such a result — it was the product of both structural factors and contingent decisions by other governments. Nevertheless, Russia’s contribution to this state of affairs is material and substantial. The intense competition between rival imperialisms is now an undeniable fact that requires both academic reflection and a practical response from progressive, internationalist movements.

Our intellectual and political standpoint

We have written this book from the double position of researchers and internationalist anti-war activists. The questions we ask — What is the nature of modern Russian imperialism? What are its driving forces? — are certainly related to academic debates in international relations and Russian studies. Yet they are also highly political. Our interest in these questions stems not only from their place in scientific discussion but also from their relevance to our personal politics. It is precisely because we are politically invested in these questions that we want to advance our understanding of Russian imperialism through empirical research and theoretical speculation. We are certainly politically biased, yet we aim to separate objective observation from subjective judgment, as per Weber’s dictum. When conducting the research for this book, we did not have any preconceived answers. We went where theory and empirics took us. At the same time, we believe that our politics made our academic judgment more acute.

In this book, we focus on Russia’s political, economic, social, and ideological developments. This is not because we consider developments in other countries to be insignificant. Instead, our focus on Russia is directly related to our understanding of Russian imperialism as a phenomenon with its own domestic causes rather than merely a response to the actions of other states and changes in the international system, as Mearsheimer would have it. At the same time, when discussing Russia, we pay particular attention to incorporating Ukrainian sources, as we believe they offer a privileged epistemic perspective on Russian imperialism. As with other elements of our approach, our aim is to achieve a better analysis and understanding of our chosen subject.

* * *

Drawing on more than a century of Marxist thought from Lenin to David Harvey, we begin by laying out the political-economic foundations of post-Soviet Russian imperialism. Chapter 1 examines the tendency of resurgent Russian capital toward external expansion in the 2000s, the state-capital relations under Putin’s regime, and the economic roots of emerging imperialist impulses.

• 1

  Unless otherwise noted, all translations are our own.

• 2

  These issues are covered by a multitude of sources and are discussed throughout this book. The most comprehensive account of Russian-Ukrainian relations in the post-Soviet period can be found in D’Anieri 2019.

• 3

  A systematic discussion of the coercive elements of Russian foreign policy in the post-Soviet space can be found in Sagramoso 2020.

• 4

  This echoes Weber’s notion that imperialism reflects the striving for “the glory of power over other communities” characteristic of the political elites (feudal lords, modern officers, and bureaucrats) (Weber 1978, 911). At the same time, unlike Schumpeter, Weber did not subscribe to the doux commerce thesis: He did not counterpose capitalist development to imperialist expansion.

• 5

  This analysis is not intended as a comment on NATO as such, only as a characterization of NATO’s policy toward Russia. For example, NATO’s repeated claim to be a “defensive alliance” is questionable, given its offensive operations in the former Yugoslav states, Afghanistan, and Libya. But NATO’s post-1991 strategic posture was not threatening to Russia. As the RAND report on NATO’s European theater notes, “NATO militaries have retooled to focus on stability operations and lighter forces that can be more easily deployed out of area to such places as Afghanistan”. In other words, NATO’s focus has shifted away from a conventional war with Russia.