Whither Russia?

The proxy war in Ukraine, launched in 2014 with the Western-backed Maidan coup and the assault on the largely Russian-speaking population of Eastern Ukraine, escalated in February 2022 with the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO). That escalation would have world-historic implications. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—an instrument to advance and deepen imperialism within Europe and secure accumulation beyond it—pushed the boundaries of nuclear escalation and faced a military and economic power that its strategists had underestimated and misunderstood. The imposition of a boundary on NATO expansion not only saw the long-simmering conflict explode into the largest land war on European soil since World War II, unleashing a historic economic and political crisis that continues to deepen across the continent. It also activated larger global forces, which had been dormant in the era of US hegemony. The West, in its attempt to isolate and weaken Russia, instead provoked the reintegration of forces in the South and paved the way for its isolation on the world stage.

Russia’s intervention brought two processes into motion. Domestically, it appeared to tip the balance in a long-standing contradiction between competing tendencies in the contemporary Russian economy: a neoliberal current that sought ever-greater ingratiation with Western financial capital, and a push toward national sovereignty that sought to reignite industrialization and technological development. Globally, the SMO brought into clearer relief the polarization in the international system that the so-called “unipolar” moment had obscured. The nations of the Global South did not follow the West's demands that they implement sanctions or cease trade with Russia. Instead, the years after the launch of the SMO saw Southern cooperation deepen, including through BRICS, multilateral institutions like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and bilateral relationships established between Russia and other anti-hegemonic forces—from Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to Cuba and the states of the Sahel. At the same time, Russia’s de-linking from the West would fundamentally restructure European economies that depended on its energy imports, drawing them into deeper dependence on the U.S.

This article situates the SMO in a world-historical context. It considers the character of the contemporary Russian state—at once a major capitalist power and an inheritor of the institutional and cultural legacies of the Soviet Union—and looks at the dynamics in the international system that conditioned Russia’s political reintegration into the global periphery and world anti-hegemonic front. It analyzes NATO expansion, including the extension of the U.S. nuclear umbrella, as a central instrument of imperialist accumulation on the Eurasian landmass, and Ukraine’s role within that process both historically and today. It looks at the impacts of the war on the states of the West and the ways in which their renewed belligerence both reflects and accelerates the chronic crises of capital that plague them. And it considers the ways in which scholarly responses to the SMO contributed to revisionism, eliding imperialism and the national question as central factors in the conflict.

Russia’s Turn Towards Sovereignty

In one of his last books, Samir Amin pointed towards a fork in the road of Russia’s future. Under the presidency of Vladimir Putin, he wrote, the Russian state balanced two contradictory temperaments. On one hand, it introduced “disastrous” neoliberal reforms that served to buoy the powerful Western-oriented comprador elites—and eroded the public support urgently needed to weather an escalating assault by the West. On the other, it sought to defend Russia’s national interests on the world stage. Where would the balance between these contradictions fall? For Amin, the answer would be decisive to Russia’s future. "If the comprador fraction of the Russian ruling classes... ends up gaining the upper hand," he wrote, "then the 'sanctions' with which Europe is intimidating Russia could bear fruit. The comprador segments are still disposed to capitulate to preserve their portion of the spoils from the pillaging of their country.”[1]

Amin did not live to see the escalating sanctions imposed on Russia following February 2022—among the largest sanctions packages in history. But it is now clear that the measures did not achieve their stated objectives. Were he alive today, Amin might find himself agreeing with James Galbraith, who argued that the sanctions appeared “in the nature of a gift.” By cutting off Western capital, they created the conditions for Russia to adopt protectionist and industrial policies, seize or expel foreign firms, and implement capital controls—measures that would otherwise have been politically untenable. It was in the West where the brunt of the damage was felt. Europe suffered the combined effects of diminishing oil and gas supplies from Russia and rising prices on international markets. Russia, in turn, benefited from the higher prices, which nullified any losses from weaker exports. Galbraith observed that “the sanctions had the precise opposite effect” to the stated objective of denying Russia the means to “fund the war.”[2] But the policy continues unchanged. On October 23, 2025, the European Union implemented its 19th package of coercive measures, which tightens the noose on Russian energy and included further secondary sanctions designed to block third states from dealing in certain Russian goods.[3] In total, there are now at least twenty-eight thousand sanctions against Russian individuals, firms, and institutions.[4] In response, the arc of Russian development is bending sharply toward a development path favouring sovereignty and closer integration with the Global South—and away from the capitulation desired by Washington and Russia’s comprador elites.[5]

This represents a deep shift in Russia’s political and economic trajectory. The collapse of the Soviet Union had transformed the Russian economy from a centrally-planned system based primarily on industry into a rentier economy based on the extraction of raw materials. The gains were siphoned upwards, to a new and rapacious coterie of capitalists, and outwards to Wall Street or the City of London. The effects were catastrophic. Between 1992 and 1993, approximately fourteen thousand firms accounting for nearly three quarters of the Russian economy were sold into private hands at bargain sale prices.[6] GDP dropped by around forty percent and industrial inputs halved—as did real wages. A 2,520 percent rise in inflation decimated the savings of Russian citizens.[7] Poverty exploded from two million to nearly seventy-five million people in a period spanning around five years.[8] Fertility rates collapsed as the reserve army of labor grew and social support systems were put on the chopping block—a rentier economy no longer needed to support a large workforce.[9] Hunger in Russia increased to levels comparable to the 1947 famine, when severe drought and the lingering effects of Germany’s war of extermination against the Soviet Union killed up to one million people. In fact, the reinsertion of the former Soviet Union into the global capitalist system killed more people than the famine that swept Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and other parts of the bloc in 1930-1933. In all, nearly seventeen million people died as a result of capitalist restoration across the former Soviet republics,[10] with mortality being directly related to the extent of privatisation.[11] This period was more devastating to the Russian people than even the most fanciful accounts of “communist repression.” This is the Russia that Vladimir Putin inherited.

For a time, Putin’s administration appeared to balance, as Amin recognised, the implementation of aggressive neoliberal reforms on one hand and the pursuit of the national interest on the other. In 2001, Russia passed a new Labor Code that liberalised labor relations, enabling the use of short-term contracts and weakening the bargaining power of unions. In 2012, Russia entered the World Trade Organization. In 2018, it pushed through a pension reform that saw the government raise the retirement age from fifty-five to sixty for women and sixty to sixty-five for men by 2028—a move that sparked widespread protests across the country. Russia largely remains a rentier economy underpinned by the extraction and export of natural resources, which comprised 16.7 percent of GDP in 2024.[12] That year, Russia’s oil and gas industries contributed approximately thirty percent to the federal budget, suggesting that these sectors—a significant part of which are state-owned—play an outsized role as guarantors of political stability and supporters of demand within the Russian economy.[13] But the structure of that economy bears scant resemblance to what Russia’s shock therapists had envisioned. According to Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service, from 2005 to 2014 the share of the public sector in the country's economy doubled, from thirty-five to seventy percent of GDP.[14]

In the early 2000s, the government had moved to discipline business elites—most visibly with the expropriation and internment of businessman and oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003. This paved the way for increased state intervention in the economy. Russian scholars describe a relationship of interdependence between large businesses and the state. Large corporations make significant investments in regional development in exchange for regulatory approvals, protection, or to demonstrate their loyalty[15]—suggesting a degree of subordination of capital to the state. Government officials sit on the boards of many major companies. A 2011 study found that representatives of the presidential administration sat on the boards of twenty-three out of twenty-seven so-called “List A” companies, and on six of the forty-one "List B" companies. Federal officials were present on the boards of all twenty-seven "List A” companies and all forty-one “List B” companies. Representatives of the security and military services were present on twenty-three "List A” and nineteen “List B” boards.[16] Although this number is likely to have fluctuated, the trend appears to have been towards more state control. In 2015, the number of officials on the boards of Russia’s top sixty companies increased by twenty-eight percent compared to the previous year, while the participation of non-nationals decreased by nine percent.[17] Crucially, a significant proportion of Russia’s financial capital is state-owned. The country’s two largest banks, Sberbank and VTB Group, account for around half of total market share. Together with other state-owned banks, they make up a substantial majority of total banking assets in the country, a figure that has risen steadily over the past decade.[18] The period after the launch of the SMO saw further changes. Since 2021, mining output contracted, as did output from utilities. The decline in export-oriented extractive industries was offset by growth in other sectors, including financial and insurance activities, construction, manufacturing, and transport. Spending on public administration and security grew significantly since 2021.[19] Russia’s gross fixed capital formation has seen a sustained year-on-year increase since 2020,[20] reflecting both the developing war industry and a drive towards import substitution necessitated by the sanctions.

The period since Vladimir Putin first came to power also saw tremendous improvements in living standards and related economic indicators. Some of these tendencies appear to have sharpened after the first wave of sanctions was introduced in 2014. The GINI coefficient declined from 40.9 in 2013 to 35.1 in 2025. Per capita GDP increased from a low of USD $1,330.8 in 1999 to $14,889 in 2024. Life expectancy increased from sixty-five in 2000 to seventy-three in 2023. Poverty halved from nearly a quarter of the population in 2002 to 12.1 percent in 2021, and extreme poverty fell from 7.2 percent of the population in 1999 to 0.2 percent in 2021.[21] Today, the Russian economy appears to exist in a liminal space between the incompleted project of neoliberal reform commenced in the 1990s and a surging state capitalist model with a high degree of socialisation and growing social protections. An economy characterised by large, vertically-integrated and state-controlled strategic industries and a large, state-owned banking sector suggests an economic model that is more comparable to China than it is to the countries of the West. It represents, perhaps, a unique case in the post-Soviet world that requires more rigorous assessment than it has been afforded.

The National Question in post-Soviet Russia

In their attempts to assess the SMO in class terms, scholars have been gripped by various forms of analytical myopia. Much of the commentary appears to be rooted in attempts to attribute, through reverse-engineering, the category of “imperialist” to the Russian ruling class. I will not engage with the more egregious forms of revisionism that have emerged from this current. Among them are attempts to analytically cleave imperialism from capitalism[22] or to deploy the radical veneer of “decolonial” thought to advance an agenda of balkanisation. Others commit the ontological error of assigning to the 2014 Maidan protests the category of “revolution,” even though it did not fundamentally overturn the class structure of Ukrainian society — nor did it seek to do so.[23] Some of the more rigorous thinking produced in this vein is limited by its singular focus on the class interests of Russia’s ruling elites, examining only the balance of class forces endogenous to Russia or the immediate region while ignoring the broader dynamics of imperialism.[24] These accounts elide the national question and theories of internationalism. A correct analysis requires situating these class dynamics within the context of the objective conditions prevailing in the world as a whole.[25] It is impossible to understand Russian nationalism as an anti-hegemonic force without engaging with these theoretical questions and situating Russia within the realities of contemporary imperialism.

The national question—which defined the contours of internationalist theory—emerged in the era of monopoly capital and colonialism. For Lenin, internationalism demanded support for anti-colonial struggles, whether of a socialist or nationalist character.[26] These struggles, as the debates of the Third International set out, chiselled away at the structure of colonial accumulation which sat at the source of ruling class power in the metropoles.[27] Capitalism’s endemic crises of overproduction required external markets to absorb excess demand and escape cycles of declining investment and rising unemployment. The colonies provided both these markets and the raw materials that were essential inputs in the European industrial transition.[28] Capitalism, therefore, had to be challenged at its source. This set the stage for the defining conflict of the twentieth century: between imperialism, on one hand, and the forces of socialism and national liberation, on the other. With few exceptions, the struggles of this era saw most colonised countries achieve political sovereignty.

The neocolonial turn reflected empire’s determination to prevent economic sovereignty from emerging within the container of political decolonization. From the 1970s, imperialism deployed a broad toolkit to reimpose domination over the Third World and break the “Bandung spirit.” Structural adjustment, debt, capital exports, technological innovation, sanctions, and wars crushed the nascent sovereignty regimes in the Global South. This process reached its apotheosis in the period after 1991, with the consolidation of imperialism on the world stage and the concurrent collapse of the Bandung system—inaugurating the era of “late neocolonialism.”[29] The trauma of Soviet collapse was not contained to its republics. Its shockwaves produced violent convulsions across the Third World, collapsing wages,[30] escalating food insecurity,[31] deepening global labor reserves,[32] entrenching dollarisation and financialisation, and drawing ever-greater parts of the South into the fold of neoliberal globalisation—processes backed by a historic escalation in imperial wars of aggression.[33] This period represented the globalisation of an imperialist system determined to de-develop or dismantle states and cheapen their labor and resources in the service of accumulation—a process that steamrolled across the entire topography of our planet.[34] The de-statization agenda is set out very clearly in relation to Russia, with a motley of Western leaders insisting on dealing it a “strategic blow,” while state institutions like the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe develop proposals for Russia’s “decolonization.”[35]

The motor force of the SMO cannot be understood outside an assessment of the strategies of imperialist accumulation. The non-comprador parts of the Russian ruling class may have different views about the appropriate development path for the country—and even different material interests. But they have converged, together with the country’s major communist forces, around the question of national defence. As Max Ajl has argued, given the stakes at play, the defence of state sovereignty exists as a positive good in itself, not least because it enables forms of economic planning that advance development on terms independent from the imperatives of imperialist accumulation. Writing about the resistance in the Arab-Iranian region, Ajl concludes that “forces defending state sovereignty cannot simply be dismissed as ‘bourgeois nationalist,’ ‘state-capitalist’ or using kindred typologies. Such descriptions may have elements which are formally correct. But they block from view the strategic landscape which is contoured by the current stage of US accumulation, wherein ‘waste’ is an input into accumulation.”[36] The devastation experienced by hundreds of millions of people in the former Soviet republics exists as a living memory of the consequences of integration into this system of accumulation. In this context, the significant improvements in living standards achieved for the Russian people—which depend on the preservation and advancement of Russia as a sovereign political subject—constitute a major part of the class interest of Russia’s working people as a whole. They remember well what the surrender of that sovereignty entails.

The Battle Over Eurasia

Forcing Russia’s final capitulation has been the explicit aim of U.S. foreign policy for decades. U.S. imperial strategist Zbigniew Brzeziński—one of the architects of the U.S. proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan—outlined the logic of this strategy in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. Washington’s hegemony depended, he wrote, on preventing “the emergence of a dominant and antagonistic Eurasian power.”[37] Here, Brzeziński echoed the Defense Planning Guidance, a strategic planning document leaked to the New York Times and published in March 1992, which charted the course for U.S. imperial policy in the post-Cold War era. “Our first objective,” the document said, “is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere.” Eurasia is a central axle of world power—and the U.S., Brzeziński wrote, had a “growing economic interest…in gaining unlimited access to this hitherto closed area.” Ukraine would be a critical piece on this chessboard,[38] where victory would give the U.S. access not only to Russia’s resource wealth, but also a path towards the complete encirclement of the People’s Republic of China and perhaps the final dismantling of peripheral sovereignty.

Three parallel military strategies were deployed to advance this goal. The first was the expansion of NATO, which drew additional states into the imperialist bloc, securing Washington’s political control of ever-larger parts of Europe while safeguarding accumulation beyond it. NATO encirclement is not a figment of the Russian imagination but a concrete reality, and a clear betrayal of commitments made in 1990 and 1991 not to expand the bloc eastward.[39] The second was the establishment of precedents for unilateral military action. Especially relevant for Russia were NATO’s campaigns in Yugoslavia, Iraq and, later, Libya. These interventions were met with protest from Russian officials, and reinforced their view that the West is prepared to undo the very foundations of the international order to preserve its position. This was the thrust of Vladimir Putin’s 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference, where he condemned the “uncontained hyper use of force” in international relations and the growing “disdain for the basic principles of international law,” which he said powered a renewed arms race and posed grave long-term risks to international peace. Already then, he pointed to the inevitability of the emerging BRICS bloc overtaking the West economically and seeking to remould the international system towards a model of sovereign equality.[40]

The third military strategy—one that is omitted from nearly every analysis of the conflict—concerns the nuclear question. U.S. nuclear doctrine has for decades slipped towards an increasingly omnicidal posture, in the process exerting a potent distorting effect on the Soviet and, later, Russian economies. In 1980, the Jimmy Carter administration officially endorsed a “countervailing strategy” with Presidential Directive 59. With that document, the U.S. nuclear doctrine abandoned the framework of “Mutually Assured Destruction”, which said that no one could win a nuclear war and therefore rendered nuclear weapons ineffective as tools of war or diplomatic coercion. In its place appeared the notion of “countervailing” or “counterforce” power, which assumes that the U.S. could dismantle a rival’s military capabilities with a debilitating nuclear first strike.[41] This was the rationale behind the so-called ‘Euromissiles’—the US nuclear arsenal that arrived in Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, with a five-minute flight time to the USSR. The deployment of the Pershing-II missiles was accompanied by a further evolution in the U.S. nuclear posture, and the adoption of the “decapitation strategy” where the U.S. would target Soviet economic, political, and military command centers, effectively nullifying its entire political system and leading to the country’s swift disintegration. This was rooted in the racist belief that the Russian people are by their nature cunning and violent and, through their history of suffering, more tolerant of mass death and therefore requiring of greater casualties before surrendering[42]—a narrative that persists to this day. Although the U.S. eventually withdrew the Pershing-II missiles, it retains at least 100 nuclear bombs in Europe, spread across Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey, with additional deployments planned for the United Kingdom. Alongside the bomb, the U.S. activated Aegis missile defence systems in Poland and Romania in 2016, which are theoretically capable of intercepting Russian nuclear strikes. It unilaterally exited key arms-control treaties with Russia: the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019, and the Open Skies Treaty in 2020. In doing so, it dismantled a key pillar of international security established in the late years of the Soviet Union. And, in 2025, Ukraine attacked strategic Russian early-warning radar systems and strategic aviation. Each of these manoeuvres upsets the careful symmetry of nuclear power and advances conditions in which the U.S. first strike doctrine might begin to seem palatable to imperial war planners.

While we rarely hear about Russian sovereignty, we remain inundated with talk about the Ukrainian struggle for self-determination. But Ukraine’s trajectory since 2014 has reflected, instead, a systematic and deepening subordination to imperialism. The 2014 Maidan protests, sharpened into a coup following a false-flag massacre carried out by right-wing factions within the movement,[43] overthrew a government that had maintained friendly relations with Russia and a policy of non-alignment. The doors then opened to the methodical elevation of fascist and reactionary elements within Ukraine's state apparatus—arming NATO’s frontlines against Russia with supremacist ideology—and the deepening penetration of Western financial capital into its economy. Ukraine underwent a major campaign of neoliberal restructuring, which included an assault on trade unions and workers—policies actively advanced from abroad.[44] Since 2014, Ukraine faced a mass exodus of labor, large parts of it to Poland where underpaid Ukrainian workers helped redress long-standing labor shortages.[45] By the end of 2014, Ukraine formally renounced neutrality, and NATO stepped in with a menu of training, joint exercises, and arms sales. From its subordinated position, Ukraine became the bridgehead for the long-simmering U.S. strategy of resubmitting Russia's vast wealth to the dictates of the global neoliberal order. This process represented nothing less than the imposition of a neocolonial arrangement on the Ukrainian people.

Here, another dimension of the national question becomes relevant—one that is largely unique to the post-Soviet space. The geographic architecture of the Soviet Union reflected thinking about the role of nations within the state. Borders were delineated to favour non-Russian nationalities to break with “great Russian chauvinism”—producing numerous states with significant Russian-speaking minorities. After the October Revolution, the Ukrainian Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic was proclaimed and requested that it be incorporated into Soviet Russia. Lenin refused, and the resource-rich and largely Russian-speaking territory remained within Soviet Ukraine. There, it came to form part of a broader project with various nationalities living together in peace under the framework of socialism. In 1954, Crimea was added to the picture as the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR transferred the peninsula from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. As in the former Yugoslavia, the territorial decisions made in the USSR did not anticipate that they would later become ingredients in a violent agenda of balkanisation, which splintered the plurinational compact established under the USSR. When the union disintegrated, these ethnic divisions became flashpoints of resurgent nationalisms, territorial contestation, and stranded ethnic Russian populations.

As in Yugoslavia, the violence had historical antecedents. Like Croatia’s Ustaše, Ukraine had in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) a violent force that collaborated with Germany and perpetrated its own Holocaust against Ukrainian Jews. Although these forces were systematically dismantled by the Red Army and Soviet intelligence during and after the war, MI6 and the CIA kept them on life-support.[46] Missions like Operation Red Sox sought to provide covert support to radical nationalists organising against the Soviet Union, while thousands of Ukrainian nationalists were given shelter across the West, particularly in Britain, Canada, the United States, and Germany. The West provided paramilitary training, preparing Gladio-style “stay behind” networks for Ukrainian insurgents. British and, later, German intelligence services formed relationships with OUN-B Stepan Bandera. The West German intelligence officer who established contact was a former Wehrmacht General named Reinhard Gehlen. During the war, his team had strategised about breaking up the Soviet Union by weaponising ethnic minorities.[47] The West funded diaspora groups engaged in anti-communist organising.[48] Between 1953 and 1990, the U.S. led a clandestine campaign—Operation AERODYNAMIC, which was renamed QRDYNAMIC, then PDDYNAMIC and finally QRPLUMB—that funded Ukrainian newspapers, bulletins, radio programming, and research institutes designed to produce and disseminate nationalist perspectives within Ukraine. The U.S. considered this among its most successful operations with disaffected Soviet citizens, cultivating a new generation of nationalists in the country.[49] These currents remained particularly strong in western Ukraine, and help explain why the Russian minority in the east was opposed to the country’s capture by nationalist forces and their backers in NATO.

But even while it claims hundreds of thousands of lives on the battlefield, NATO’s strategy is failing to bear fruit. More than two decades after its first wave of eastward expansion, the alliance met a hard limit to its advance. Russia has secured a considerable advantage—both in the military and in the economic domain. It not only withstood the most comprehensive economic assault in history, dealing a significant blow to the West’s sanctions apparatus. It also capitalised on it to reinforce the path of state-led development. It has expanded its territorial control. This time, the demand to incorporate the two eastern Ukrainian regions of the Donbass found support in the Kremlin, and Russia has now proclaimed control over a total of four Russian-speaking regions—a new reality that increasingly looks irreversible. Beyond the domestic impacts, Russia’s intervention sharpened both contradictions that lay dormant in the West, and those in the broader international system. February 2022 unleashed in the West a frenzy of revanchism, repression, and revisionism. Russian and Soviet flags were banned from public spaces, Russian books were removed from curricula, and Russian artists and athletes were barred from events. Some of the measures were absurd. Yuri Gagarin had his name removed from a fundraiser hosted by the Space Foundation. Others were ominous, portending things further on the horizon. It was after February 2022 that the West openly began rehabilitating fascism. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invited Yaroslav Hunka, a Waffen-SS veteran and one of many Ukrainians who were welcomed in the West after the war, to Canada’s parliament where he received a standing ovation. Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock positively recalled her grandfather, who fought against Russia during World War II. In Latvia, Waffen-SS veterans held their annual march while Victory Day commemorations were suppressed by the police. Across Eastern Europe, statues commemorating the Red Army’s victory against Nazism were torn down. The list is extensive and need not be recounted in full here. In many ways, the reaction to February 22, 2022 presaged the psychosis that followed Hamas’s operation against the Israeli occupation on October 7, 2023. Both unleashed a phenomenon that is perhaps unique to the Euro-Atlantic axis: the visceral panic at seeing a peoples considered inferior rise up to challenge Western hegemony.

The transformation had implications far beyond the Western world. In the immediate aftermath of the start of the SMO, the West tried to strong-arm the rest of the world into following its playbook of condemnation and sanctions. But the nations of the Global South resisted. Although many condemned the assault, few cut economic ties with Russia and fewer still imposed sanctions against it. Instead, the West gradually isolated itself. In the years after 2022, BRICS expanded, overtaking the West economically as Putin had predicted nearly two decades ago. Bilateral relationships between key anti-imperialist forces solidified. New infrastructures of economic exchange and political cooperation began to emerge, gradually establishing the foundational conditions for transnational engagement outside the straitjacket of the U.S.-led imperial system. The gas supplies that Europe lost will now flow to Beijing, as Russia and China signed a major deal to deepen energy cooperation.[50] These tendencies have only sharpened following Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza in 2023 and its war on Iran launched in June 2025. In The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski warned that the greatest threat to the U.S. would be the emergence of an “antihegemonic coalition” led by China, Russia, and Iran. In a grand irony, this coalition emerged precisely in response to the policies that U.S. imperial planners advocated—from sanctions to debt traps to military encirclement, all of which are now boomeranging against their architects.

So, whither Russia? Samir Amin saw in Russia “segments of the political class… that are disposed to support a state capitalism that would, in turn, be open to the possibility of moving in the direction of a democratic and socialized management.” Is that path likely? Have the sanctions been as devastating to the ‘oligarchy’ as Galbraith suggests? Have their interests been subordinated to the state or simply contained by the government of a skilled and ageing leader? It is perhaps too early to tell whether the state apparatus built over the past few decades has matured sufficiently to contain the forces unleashed by the collapse of the USSR. But there are positive signs. Russia’s close alignment with the forces of world socialism—China, Cuba, Venezuela, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea—have at the very least tempered some of the anti-communist currents in the government, and appear to have generated a genuine interest in alternative development models. With Western belligerence on the rise, the march towards sovereignty will remain the only viable path for the foreseeable future. Time will tell. When Amin wrote his book, it was 2018. The forked path with which it ends points both to uncertainties in his thinking and to the brilliant clarity of his prognoses. Today, with the benefit of seven textured years of history, we can suggest with slightly more confidence that Russia’s reintegration into the global anti-hegemonic front may well prove to be one of the decisive chapters in the drawn out struggle against imperialism.

Pawel Wargan is a researcher and organizer. He serves as Political Coordinator at the Progressive International and has published in Tribune, Monthly Review, Peace, Land & Bread and elsewhere.

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[1] Samir Amin, Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 128.

[2] James K. Galbraith, “The Gift of Sanctions: An Analysis of Assessments of the Russian Economy, 2022 – 2023,” Working Paper No. 204 (Institute for New Economic Thinking, April 2023).

[3] European Commission, “EU adopts 18th package of sanctions against Russia,” July 18, 2025, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_1840 .

[4] Statista, “Total number of list-based sanctions imposed on Russia by territories and organizations worldwide from February 22, 2022 to January 11, 2024, by target,” January 2024, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293531/western-sanctions-imposed-on-russia-by-target/ .

[5] It appears that a segment of the Russian ruling class sought precisely the outcome that Amin feared. Leonid Volkov, a close associate of Alexey Navalny, repeatedly advocated for the lifting of sanctions on select members of Russia’s ruling class—often singling out representatives of financial capital like Oleg Tinkov—while outlining a strategy of escalating “political turbulence” in the country. (Incidentally, Tinkov permanently left Russia in 2022 after criticising the government). The approach hinted at an agenda of regime change that would reinstate the pro-Western comprador class with the consent of the liberal middle class in Russia’s metropoles.

[6] Karla Hoff and Joseph E. Stiglitz, ”After the Big Bang? Obstacles to the Emergence of the Rule of Law in Post-Communist Societies,” American Economic Review 94, no. 3 (2004).

[7] World Bank, Russian Economic Reform: Crossing the Threshold of Structural Change. (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1994).

[8] Branko Milanovic, Income, Inequality, and Poverty During the Transition from Planned to Market Economy (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1997).

[9] Ali Kadri, “Notes on the Fall of Fertility in Russia,” IDEAs, https://www.networkideas.org/featart/feb2012/Ali_Kadri.pdf .

[10] This is based on new data compiled by Jason Hickel and his team at the Institute for Environmental Science & Technology (ICTA-UAB) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. The figures are the subject of a forthcoming piece, Paweł Wargan, “The Neoliberal Holocaust,” Peace, Land and Bread 6(forthcoming October 2025).

[11] David Stuckler et al., “Mass privatisation and the post-communist mortality crisis: a cross-national analysis,” The Lancet 373, Issue 9661.

[12]Statista, “Share of the oil and gas industry in the gross domestic product (GDP) of Russia from 2017 to 2024,” https://www.statista.com/statistics/1322102/gdp-share-oil-gas-sector-russia/ .

[13]TASS, “Share of oil and gas revenues in Russia’s budget at about thirty percent in 2024 — deputy PM,” January 30, 2025, https://tass.com/economy/1906453 . It is worth noting that these figures appear to have been in decline, although this may also reflect different accounting strategies. In 2022, it was reported that oil and gas amounted to 45.5 percent of government revenues. See Сергей Мингазов, “Счетная палата отчиталась о росте нефтегазовых доходов бюджета в 1,7 раза,” Forbes Russia, August 31, 2022, https://www.forbes.ru/finansy/475741-scetnaa-palata-otcitalas-o-roste-neftegazovyh-dohodov-budzeta-v-1-7-raza .

[14] Budget, “Госсектор в российской экономике. Ключевые цифры и тенденции [The state sector in the Russian economy. Key figures and tendencies],” May 31, 2019, https://bujet.ru/article/377053.php .

[15] Stanislav Klimovich and Ulla Pape, “Business-State Relations and the Role of Corporate Social Responsibility in Russia’s Regions,” Russian Analytical Digest 254 (2020): 7-10.

[16] Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White, “The Formation of Russia’s Network Directorate,” in Russia as a Network State, eds. Vadim Kononenko and Arkady Moshes (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

[17] Interfax, “Число чиновников в советах директоров компаний РФ в 2015г выросло на 28%, иностранцев - упало на 9% [The number of officials on corporate boards in the Russian Federation increased by twenty-eight percent in 2015, and the number of foreigners fell by nine percent],” October 28, 2015, https://www.interfax.ru/presscenter/476057 .

[18] Magomed Ruslanovich Tashtamirov et al., “State of Banking Competition in the Banking Services Market in Russia,” paper presented at the 4th International Conference on Social and Cultural Transformations in the Context of Modern Globalism (SCTCMG), May 19-21, 2021, European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences (2022), https://www.europeanproceedings.com/article/10.15405/epsbs.2022.11.85?utm_source=chatgpt.com .

[19]Trading Economics, “Russia GDP Annual Growth Rate,” https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/gdp-growth-annual .

[20]Trading Economics, “Russia Gross Fixed Capital Formation,” https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/gross-fixed-capital-formation .

[21] All data drawn from the World Bank Group, https://data.worldbank.org .

[22] For example, Ilya Matveev has argued that “the non-economic roots of Russia’s aggressive expansionism since 2014 raises questions about the contemporary validity of classical theories of imperialism” and that “imperialism does not need to be a simple extension of capitalism.” Instead, he sought to redefine imperialism as “violence and domination driven by an unaccountable political class” against “predominantly the working class.” Ilya Matveev, “The War in Ukraine and Russian Capital: From Military-economic to Full Military Imperialism,” Dossier: The War in Ukraine and the Question of Internationalism (London: Alameda Institute, 2023), https://alameda.institute/publishing/dossier-ukraine/ .

[23] In an award-winning essay that was widely-read across the left in the West, Taras Bilous compared Ukraine to Cuba during the Cuban Missile crisis, arguing that the Russian invasion was motivated by fear of a revolutionary neighbour just as the US was threatened by a Soviet-aligned Cuba. This argument assigns a progressive character to the Maidan, obscuring its role within the US system of imperialist accumulation. See Taras Bilous, “The War in Ukraine, International Security, and the Left,” New Politics, May 24, 2024, https://newpol.org/the-war-in-ukraine-international-security-and-the-left/ .

[24] For example, this kind of reasoning has pushed Ukrainian scholar Volodymyr Ischenko to conclude that Russia’s rhetoric about sovereignty "is not necessarily an articulation of Russia’s national interest so much as a direct reflection of Russian political capitalists’ class interests.” See Volodymyr Ischenko, “Behind Russia’s War Is Thirty Years of Post-Soviet Class Conflict”, Jacobin, October 3, 2022, https://jacobin.com/2022/10/russia-ukraine-war-explanation-class-conflict .

[25] Vladimir I. Lenin, “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism” (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 4.

[26] Vladimir I. Lenin, “Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Question,” Second Congress of the Communist International, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/05.htm .

[27] M.N. Roy, “Supplementary Theses on the National and Colonial Question,” Second Congress of the Communist International, https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch04.htm .

[28] Utsa Patnaik and Prahbat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History and Present (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021), Part I.

[29] Paris Yeros and Praveen Jha, “Late Neo-colonialism: Monopoly Capitalism in Permanent Crisis,” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 9, no.1. (2020): 3.

[30] Utsa Patnaik, The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays (Monmouth, Wales: Merlin Press, 2007).

[31] Paris Yeros, "Generalized Semiproletarianization in Africa", The Indian Economic Journal 71, no. 1 (2023).

[32] Paris Yeros, "A Polycentric World Will Only Be Possible by the Intervention of the 'Sixth Great Power'," Agrarian South Journal of Political Economy, 13, no. 1 (2024).

[33] According to data compiled by the U.S. Congressional Research Service, some eighty percent of U.S. military interventions after 1946 took place after the fall of the USSR. Barbara S. Torreon and Sofia Plagakis, “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2022” (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2022).

[34] Ali Kadri, Arab Development Denied: Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment (London: Anthem Press, 2014).

[35] Commission on Security & Cooperation in Europe: U.S. Helsinki Commission, “Decolonizing Russia: A Moral and Strategic Imperative,” June 23, 2022, https://www.csce.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/0623-Decolonizing-Russia-A-Moral-and-Strategic-Imperative.pdf .

[36] Max Ajl, “Palestine’s Great Flood: Part I,” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 13, no. 1 (2024).

[37] Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop,” New York Times, March 8, 1992.

[38] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic, 1997), 51, 209.

[39] Documents published by Der Spiegel in February 2022 reveal that US, UK, French, and German officials were clear that they “could not… offer membership of NATO to Poland and the others.” Klaus Wiegrefe, “Neuer Aktenfund von 1991 stützt russischen Vorwurf,” Der Spiegel, February 18, 2022.

[40] Vladimir Putin, “Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich Conference on Security Policy,” Kremlin,February 10, 2007, http://www.en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24034 .

[41] John Bellamy Foster, “The U.S. Quest for Nuclear Primacy: The Counterforce Doctrine and the Ideology of Moral Asymmetry,” Monthly Review 75, no. 9 (2024), https://monthlyreview.org/2024/02/01/the-u-s-quest-for-nuclear-primacy/ .

[42] Diana Johnstone, The Politics of Euromissiles: Europe's role in America's world (London: Verso, 1984), 25.

[43] Ivan Katchanovski, “The "snipers’ massacre" on the Maidan in Ukraine,” Cogent Social Sciences 9, no. 2 (November 2023), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4628852 .

[44] Thomas Rowley, “UK sponsors deregulation of labour rights in Ukraine,” openDemocracy, November 10, 2021, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/uk-sponsors-deregulation-of-labour-rights-in-ukraine/ .

[45] Paweł Wargan, “Poland—Migration Policy as Controlled Inflow and Outflow of Labor Demand,” Dossier: Import–Deport, European Migration Regimes in Times of Crises (Zetkin Institute, 2024), https://zetkin.forum/publications/import-deport-european-migration/#poland .

[46] Casey Michel, “The Covert Operation to Back Ukrainian Independence that Haunts the CIA,” Politico, November 11, 2022, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/11/covert-operation-ukrainian-independence-haunts-cia-00029968 .

[47] Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda, Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War (Washington, D.C.:National Archives and Records Administration, 2010), 83.

[48] Torben Gülstorff, “Warming Up a Cooling War:An Introductory Guide on the CIAS and Other Globally Operating Anti-communist Networks at the Beginning of the Cold War Decade of Détente,” Working Paper No. 75 (Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, February2015), https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/cwihp_working_paper_75_warming_up_a_cooling_war.pdf .

[49] Breitman and Goda, Hitler’s Shadow, 88-91.

[50] Al Jazeera, “Russia, China ink deal to build new gas pipeline as they deepen energy ties,”September 2, 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/2/russia-china-ink-deal-to-build-new-gas-pipeline-as-they-deepen-energy-ties .