Historians may describe the period between the First World War and today as one of conflict over empire: empires’ disintegration as a result of this war and the subsequent continuous attempts to rebuild them, attempts that cost many wars and a lot of blood and destruction. This happened in Russia, Central Europe, Germany, Japan, and, to a lesser extent, Turkey.
Resurrecting defunct empires has always been a costly illusion that indicates the scale of their opposition to the prevailing socio-political framework, as well as the frameworks that shape economic ties and cultural exchange, thus indicating a refusal to accept this rising tide. The nation-state and then democracy were, and still are, the declared opponents of these resurrection attempts.
The imperial resurrectionists of the world thus acquired a number of characteristics:
- Putting the “glorious” past ahead of the “lousy” present. With them, the past does not pass.
- Putting the non-European ahead of the European, not exclusively in the geographical sense but in the sense of the link between the European dimension, then the European-American dimension, and democracy.
- Similarly, might is put ahead of free peoples’ choices in foreign relations and tyranny ahead of a democratic political system domestically.
Together, these characteristics make those defined by them reactionary, backward-looking, and vicious.
Recently, with his invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin declared himself the world’s primary imperial resurrectionist and thus the most prominent leader of the global counter-revolution vis a vis the 1989 revolutions that liberated several nations from the bond of Soviet slavery after the USSR itself collapsed and granted them free and independent states.
Imperial resurrection acquired its anti-revolutionary tint very explicitly and indicatively: in response to the massive transformations achieved by the “color revolutions” in turning revolution into a civil and civilized concept, violence and raw power relations were re-introduced. In response to “civil society” and its organizations, the banner of “military society” was raised high. Then, in response to small states enjoying their sovereignty and freedoms, it declared, with extreme viciousness, that only empires, even when they are mere imaginary projects, can be sovereign and free.
It is not difficult to list the features that define the nature of the Putinist attempt. After early drills on restoring the Soviet Union, which Putin did not restrain himself from mourning (Georgia 2008, Ukraine 2014, and Syria 2015 to complement and expand imperial prestige), Moscow reiterated its rejection of “NATO heading East,” without taking a moment to consider the peoples of the East’s desire to head West.
Russia has also focused heavily on the affairs of Russians outside the country in a manner resembling the Nazis’ emphasis on the German minority’s “persecution” in the border regions of the Sudetenland, which paved the way for invading Czechoslovakia. Russia’s economic conditions have been hit hard by this military policy. The Russians’ economy is still founded on exporting raw materials, while people, as we know, are nothing more than the fuel that powers the imperial project.
As for the domestic and foreign atmosphere around Putin’s war, it has turned “Eurasianism” and “cohesion from Lisbon to Vladivostok” into a sick joke of absolutist Asiatic tyranny. We get this impression from the following developments: All of Europe is now against Putin, and he is against all of Europe and is threatening it with nuclear weapons. His biggest ally is China, and his smallest allies are Bashar al-Assad and his Lebanese and Palestinian subordinates.
Protesting against wars is forbidden in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the activists who did protest were dragged to jail cells (compare that to the protests against the Vietnam War in the US, the Iraq war in Britain, and the Lebanon war in Israel...). Don’t forget that we are talking about a regime that has been ruled by the same person since 2000, be it directly or circuitously, a man whose constitutional amendments allow him to remain president until 2036.
The fact is that Putin, who has borrowed the term “people’s republics”- which he used to describe the two separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk- from the Soviet dictionary, is daunted by having inherited the Soviet Union, first and foremost as a military concept. “Socialism in one country” was built for the sake of this concept, and defending it became the task of the world’s communists. Hungary and Czechoslovakia were invaded, and Poland was almost invaded, for its sake, while the communist parties of countries like Greece in Europe and Iraq in the Middle East were sacrificed in the same vein.
Among the reasons paving the way for Putinism is the fact that Sovietism, as a military concept, was never reviewed as critically as fascism was reviewed after the Second World War. Most of those who wanted to remain “leftists” and ended up Putinists merely brushed over that experience or considered its repudiation a foregone conclusion that goes without say. Thus, an old and grim value system that revolves around power and aggression was perpetuated. Among the sad consequences of that value system is that to some, Volodymyr Zelensky’s past as a comedian is more scandalous than Putin’s past as an intelligence officer of the Soviet empire.
Recently, some have justifiably raised their voices to say that the sanctions being imposed on Putin and Russia today should have been imposed on the same scale after the invasion of Georgia in 2008, the first invasion of Ukraine eight years ago, or the invasion of Syria seven years ago. This did not happen, allowing the costly imperial illusion to go along its way unimpeded. It is most likely that democratic societies, which were shocked by the recent invasion, will begin questioning many of the previous period’s myths on how to deal with imperial resurrection projects. The biggest of these myths was that it is better not to interfere in support of freedom or to deter those butchering it.
