Putin’s Russia isn’t an Empire and Won’t Become One, Popkov Says

Paul Goble

           

            Staunton, March 1 – Despite what many of Vladimir Putin’s backers hope and many of his opponents fear, the current Kremlin leader’s country is not an empire and won’t become one because it has not had the revolutionary developments that are the precondition of any imperial project, according to MBKh commentator Roman Popkov.

            Empires, he argues, are “the evil and ambitious daughters of progress,” typically, “the direct descendant of a revolution and even a republic,” born where there are “great dreams and great talents, a meritocracy, competition and a passion for development,” none of which exist in Russia (afterempire.info/2019/03/01/popkov_ne_imperiya/).

            When such impulses run out of steam, Popkov argues, “an empire necessarily degenerates and dies. The [Russian] empire died in 1991,” and analyzing its “corpse” should be left to “professional historians.”  And consequently, despite its territorial aspirations, Putin’s Russia is not an empire and isn’t going to become one.

            Instead, having fallen into barbarism and cargo cults, into a comic retelling of former eras and as a result of negative selection, he continues, the country Putin heads is at best “a caricature of an empire,” not a real one. His opponents must understand that and fight not imaginary enemies “like ‘Zalessia Rus’ or invented ‘Ingermanland.’”

            Instead, they must fight “for a great, strong, European Russia, against thieves, idiots, and obscurantists and for a genuine Republic.” Such people must not be distracted by anything else, including not unimportantly the image of empire and its supposed colonies, the Moscow commentator continues.

            To think that Putin’s Russia is or is about to become an empire represents an obstacle to progress, Popkov says.  It is to give that entity too much credit and even to show it too much respect.  “The empire has gone, finally destroyed in August-December 1991; and on its ruins have emerged a clutch of comic things but not emperors or their centurions.”

            Russia after 1991 is simply the largest of “the barbaric kingdoms” the empire fell apart into.  “Barbaric” here refers to “a certain backwardness technologically, archaic on the cultural and social plane,” and to a situation in which the successors to empire ever more fall back from the achievements of the empire from which they sprung.

            Of the former parts of the Soviet empire, he continues, “only Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have been able to get out from under the imperial ruins without serious losses and return to Europe in a civilized state. Ukraine, Georgia and possibly Armenia with temporary success are also trying to pursue that path.”

            All the others, including Russia are “gradually degrading.” Indeed, the only thing that sets Russia apart is its size, its resources, its “quasi-imperial” rhetoric. But Popkov argues that these are differences in degree rather than differences in kind. Russia too is a “barbaric” remnant of an empire that no longer exists.

            Putin’s Russia won’t become one, Popkov says, because at least in modern times, “a state transforms itself into an empire by means of an effort to be advanced, open to talent and the passionate, with functioning social lifts and … by breaking with its patriarchal past and undergoing a revolution.” 

            Russian history makes this clear: “The Russian empire arose thanks to the cultural revolution of Peter the Great, a half-hearted, uncompleted, but all the same radical step for wild Muscovite Rus,” the MBKh commentator says.

            “Before Peter, the geographic expansion of Rus was not so much the result of intentional state policies as of the mass flight of Russian people as far from the tsar and his bandits as they could get.  Peter’s Westernizing cultural revolution drove out the archaic, foolishness and aging idiotism of Moscow and made the empire possible.”

            When Peter’s impulse faded, the Russian empire began to disintegrate, only to be saved by the Bolshevik revolution which led to the formation of “a red empire,” which then as its impulse receded collapsed as well. Without such an impulse, Russia will not become an empire again – and Putin shows no sign of being able to provide that.

            In short, the current Kremlin leader can occupy territories; but he can’t create an empire because an empire is about far more than that.