Russia Destroying Itself by Trying to Maintain Its Former Empire, Eppl Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 12 – Overcoming an imperial past is never easy for any country, Nikolay Eppl says, because it requires the rejection of the imperial ideas that had been at the core of national identity and the acceptance of the genuine independence of former colonies that the metropolitan center had long considered its own.

            The Russian analyst, who now lives in the Netherlands and is the author of the 2020 book An Inconvenient Past, says that Russia has not done either and still believes that what was once Moscow’s must remain part of Russia’s patrimony and control or Russia itself will disintegrate (svoboda.org/a/nikolay-epple-neprorabotannoe-proshloe-privelo-k-voyne-/32941550.html).

            That has led Moscow to war in Ukraine; but that conflict, Eppl insists, will not save Russia but ultimately destroy it -- yet another case in the long history of how dying empires have hastened their end by insisting that the past must remain in place, refusing to recognize new realities, and not redefining itself to fit into the new world.