Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Russia's devastating invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is a manifestation of a wider phenomenon: Russia's new, post-Soviet imperialism. This book provides a theoretically informed, critical account of Russian imperialism that is attentive to the interplay between economy and ideology, coercion and hegemony, structure and agency. While economic developments go a long way toward explaining the reemergence of Russia's imperialist impulses in the twenty-first century, a purely economic logic cannot account for the dramatic shift in Russian imperialism beginning with the annexation of Crimea and the instigation of a separatist insurgency in the Donbas. Nor can objective geopolitical developments, such as US and NATO military deployments, provide an adequate explanation for this shift. Instead, this book shows how the Kremlin's reaction to the Maidan revolution was rooted in the ideological consolidation of the previous years: the emergence of a total ideology that designates the West as Russia's eternal enemy and Ukraine as the West's geopolitical pawn. Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev examine Russian foreign policy and the Kremlin's project to remake the Russian people to better serve its imperialist agenda.
"Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev—two of the sharpest analysts of contemporary Russia—trace how post-Soviet 'adventurist capitalism' and the myths of 'Historical Russia' fused under Putin into an ideology of ruthless survival. This masterwork of political synthesis exposes the invasion of Ukraine as the chilling culmination of a decades-long remaking of Putinism."—Alexei Yurchak, University of California, Berkeley
Introduction
1. The New Capitalist Imperialism
2. The Birth of Ideology Out of the Spirit of Cynicism
3. The Kremlin's Complexes of Ideas
4. From Annexation to Invasion
5. Myths and Failures of Empire
6. In Search of the "Imperial Syndrome
Epilogue
Notes
References
Index