What the Bolsheviks and Nazis can teach us about Russia today

The following is a guest post from Rutgers University-Newark political scientist Alexander Motyl. In a post at The Monkey Cage last week, Motyl argued that realist scholars were doing a poor job explaining Russian behavior. Here, he suggests an alternative theoretical lens, that of empire.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the concept of empire entered Soviet and post-Soviet studies, as scholars attempted to place the end of the Soviet multinational state in an appropriate comparative framework. A variety of excellent books was the result, including edited volumes by Bruce Parrott and Karen Dawisha, Barnett Rubin and Jack Snyder, Richard Rudolph and David Good, and Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen. No less important, the concept of empire entered the post-Sovietological discourse and, as such, lost its former association with Cold War political platforms. Empire, in a word, became respectable, so much so that the term is now used far more loosely with reference to the USSR and Russia than most rigorous scholars of empire would prefer.

Oddly enough, while many of Vladimir Putin’s policies toward the Russian “near abroad” have often been termed imperial or neo-imperial, very little effort has been made to connect Putin’s current imperial aspirations to the obvious fact that the Soviet empire collapsed and that imperial collapse presumably had some impact on Russia’s subsequent trajectory. Although Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika weakened the sinews of the empire, the USSR remained intact until 1991, when, within the space of several months, the entire imperial system disappeared and was replaced by independent — or nominally independent — states.

Movements, parties and individuals committed to imperial revival have existed in all post-imperial metropoles. And of course, they have also existed in post-Soviet Russia, with the most obvious example being Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his bizarrely named Liberal Democratic Party, who have been explicitly promoting imperial revival since the early 1990s. But the urge for reimperialization is especially strong in metropoles that survive imperial collapse — or the sudden, rapid and comprehensive dismantling of the core-periphery ties that defined the empire. Metropoles that emerge from decaying empires, those that lose territory over centuries or decades, generally reconcile themselves to the loss of empire and rarely embark on full-scale attempts at imperial revival. In contrast, post-collapse metropoles still retain imperial ideologies, discourses and cultures, while the economic, institutional and social ties that once bound peripheries to cores generally continue to exist, even after the formal core-periphery relationship has been dismantled. Under conditions such as these, there are strong grounds for imperial revival to acquire policy prominence among post-collapse core elites.

There are three good examples of post-collapse cores pursuing imperial revival after their empires collapsed. The Russian Bolsheviks drew on imperial ideologies and took advantage of continuing structural ties and succeeded in reestablishing most of the former Russian empire in 1918-1922. The German Nazis drew on similar ideologies and structural connections, but they failed to reestablish the German Reich in the 1940s. And post-Soviet Russian elites, both in the 1990s, when the imperial discourse first enjoyed a revival among Russian policymakers and intellectuals, and in the period since Putin came to and consolidated power, have progressively encroached on the sovereignty of their non-Russian neighbors. Russian elites have pursued reimperialization in the form of economic schemes intended to bind non-Russian economies to Russia’s, the use of “soft power” propaganda of the indivisibility of the so-called “Russian world” and the cultivation of Russians and Russian speakers in the “near abroad,” and by means of hard power, as in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014-2015.