In the second part of our interview, Russian socialist and political economist Ilya Matveev sat down with Green Left’s Federico Fuentes to discuss how Putin’s Russia transformed from friend to foe of Western imperialism. Read part one here.
Matveev is speaking on the panel “Imperialism(s) today” at the October 8 online conference, “Boris Kagarlitsky and the challenges of the left today”, of which Green Left is a co-sponsor.
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How can we best understand Russia’s transformation into an imperialist power?
Starting in 1999, Russia began to recover from the crisis of the ’90s: up until about 2008, it experienced a period of strong economic growth with an annual growth rate of about 7%.
During this period, Russian companies became powerful global corporations. While Russian capital was not as powerful as Western capital, it became a serious player on the global market.
At the same time, there was an overaccumulation of capital inside Russia as a result of high energy and commodities prices.
These emerging Russian companies needed to reinvest their surplus capital somewhere — and they opted to reinvest in post-Soviet countries.
Their aim was to reconstruct something similar to the supply chains and economic ties that existed during the Soviet-era. The difference, however, was this time Russian capital would be in control.
This created pressure on the Russian government to be more assertive in the post-Soviet region. So, in this sense, the classic Leninist economic logic of imperialism is relevant to the Russian case, particularly during the 2000s when Putin first comes to power.
But it is important to re-emphasise that when Russia was staking its claim over the post-Soviet region during this first period, it did so in a cooperative rather than confrontation manner with the United States and the West.
This was not just limited to economic cooperation between Western and Russian capital; there was also geopolitical cooperation between the Russian and Western states.
For example, Russia cooperated with NATO in its war on Afghanistan: Russia was NATO’s biggest supplier of oil and resources, and provided the NATO coalition with logistical land and airspace routes.
Despite any disagreements or tensions that existed, the West viewed Russia as a junior partner, at least until 2014.
Ultimately, there was nothing inevitable about Russia becoming an enemy of the West if we limited ourselves strictly to economic logic. Russia could have remained a sub-imperialist power that jointly profited from the post-Soviet space with Western capital.
So, what led to this change in Russia’s positioning towards the West?
To understand this change, we have to look at the political logic at play.
Putin feared that the West was plotting regime change against him. Putin was also clearly incapable of comprehending popular movements and social revolutions.
When the Arab Spring [of 2010–11] occurred, Putin saw it as nothing more than the West seeking to destabilise Middle Eastern countries.
Then came the [2014] Maidan Revolution in Ukraine. Putin refused to accept that this could be a real popular movement driven by people’s genuine frustration with the government and repression. Instead, he saw Maidan as the US using Ukraine as a pawn in its chess game with Russia.
Maidan transformed Putin’s understanding of everything. Because if Maidan was a move by the West against Russia, then according to Putin’s logic, Russia had to respond by violently crushing this move and making one of its own.
Ultimately, Putin’s fear of regime change coloured every calculation he made. It led him to conflate a political threat to his regime with a Western security threat to Russia.
The result was that Russia became a much more aggressive imperialist country after 2014: annexing Crimea, arming separatists in the Donbas, and occupying parts of eastern Ukraine, are all ultimately explained by Putin’s ideological fear that the West was plotting regime change.
In reality, the West was perfectly fine with Putin as a capitalist ruler that facilitated Western companies’ access to Russian natural resources and the post-Soviet region. Putin was also fine with this, until he feared the West was plotting against him.
This ultimately explains why Russia embarked on its confrontation with the West. And once Russia started down this path, it was difficult to turn back as the confrontation took on a logic of its own.
For example, after Russia annexed Crimea, Ukrainians started to hate Putin and turned to the West for help. Yet that is exactly what Putin wanted to prevent.
So what did he do? He became even more aggressive towards Ukraine and ultimately initiated a full-scale invasion, all in the name of preventing a pro-Western Ukraine.
But Ukraine’s hatred of Russia was precisely the product of Russia’s own actions.
Putin could not understand this, however; for him, this was all just a manifestation of the West plotting against his rule.
Paradoxically, while Putin’s convictions were not grounded in reality, the chain of events he unleashed only strengthened his convictions, eventually leading him down the path of this disastrous war.
That is why this war was not the result of economic motives; it was driven by ideology.
Could China’s rise as an alternative power that Russia could turn have influenced Putin’s decision to confront the West?
That is an interesting question. I agree that Putin had a better sense of these global changes that were afoot compared to Russian economic managers and the government, who viewed this kind of extreme confrontation with the West as unimaginable.
Just look at 2022: it was evident at the time that even the most hawkish sectors of the government were not expecting the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Putin, on the other hand, was completely convinced that Ukrainians were all just waiting for Russia to liberate them from Western colonialism and the supposedly small minority of Nazi Bandera types ruling the country.
But while holding this fantastical view of Ukraine, Putin was in some ways more prescient than others when it came to the kind of tectonic shifts that were occurring in global affairs and Russia’s place in the world.
Putin could sense the possibilities posed by China and semi-peripheral countries such as Turkey, Brazil and India becoming more autonomous from the US.
Putin understood that Russia breaking from the West would be very painful, but that it could probably survive in an alliance with China and by trading with semi-peripheral countries that had become powerful in their own right, economically and politically.
And he was right about this: while his views on Western motives and Ukraine were wildly inaccurate and biased, his vision of what was happening internationally was quite accurate.
This combination of sound and unsound thinking is what ultimately drove the invasion and everything that has happened since.
Why is it important to understand Russia’s war on Ukraine as an act of imperialist aggression, rather than as a defensive move against NATO as some argue?
The problem with economistic definitions of imperialism is that when a country does not fit a certain economic profile or you cannot immediately explain a country’s actions on the basis of some kind of economic logic, then the default position is that the country cannot be imperialist or aggressive, and its actions must therefore be defensive.
But a country can be aggressive without its actions being driven by specific economic motives. If we understand imperialism as a policy of systematic aggression towards a weaker neighbour, then we can see why imperialism defines exactly what Russia has been doing to Ukraine since the ’90s.
There were already flashpoints of aggression back then when Russia manipulated gas supplies to Ukraine in order to influence government policies.
Then in 2004, Russia tried pressuring Ukraine into electing a pro-Russian presidential candidate, sending spin doctors and covert operatives from Moscow to Kyiv to help defeat [Viktor] Yushchenko.
When this failed, Russia sought to coerce Ukraine by halting its supply of natural gas, first in 2006 and again in 2009.
Russia also acquired economic assets in Ukraine in order to create an economic platform to use as a political foothold in the country.
After this you had the annexation of Crimea, Russia’s participation in the war in the east and, finally, the full-scale invasion in 2022.
The whole story of Russian-Ukrainian relations in the post-Soviet period is one of Russian imperialism towards Ukraine. How else can you describe this if not imperialism?
Moreover, how can this be defined as defensive? Russia’s imperialist actions began well before there was any talk of Ukraine joining NATO and Ukraine’s army was practically non-existent before 2014. Ukraine only started strengthening its army as a response to Russian imperialism.
It is self-evident that Russia is the aggressor in this relationship. Its aggression has escalated gradually, but Russia has always been the aggressor. By sticking to a solely economic understanding of imperialism, we miss Russian imperialism as a phenomenon.