Book Review: ‘Russia’s New Imperialism’ Examines the Sources of Moscow’s Wars and Violence

Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev’s new book, Russia’s New Imperialism, has a new and compelling answer. Analysts of Russia seem to have been caught on two sides of a divide. One side sees Russia as nothing more than money-making mafia racket, populated by political entrepreneurs scrambling to anticipate what the Kremlin wants and make the most money for themselves as they go. Cynical and corrupt, this Russia has no truck with grand ideas. On the other side are those who see ideology everywhere, arguing that Russia is an imperialist and nationalist country packed with ideological zealots. Driven by centuries of military culture and a deeply ingrained determination to subjugate its neighbors, Russia can behave in no other way, they say.

Budraitskis, a political theorist, and Matveev, a political economist, build an elaborate scaffold of Marxist scholarship to argue that these are two sides of the same Russia. “[I]deologization did not simply replace cynicism,” they argue; instead, the latter has grown out of the former. Russia’s “transition from its ‘rational’ economic imperialism of the 2000s to the ‘irrational’ ideologically motivated imperialism of 2014 and beyond is part of the same process.” The Kremlin’s new imperial ideology emerged by “pushing its cynical worldview to its limits,” absorbing every aspect of the state into a machine of violent state antagonism.

Budraitskis and Matveev, both of whom are staunchly anti-war Russian exiles, eloquently describe the violence of the early post-Soviet years as emanating from a loss of faith in the Soviet system and the emergence of two Russian subcultures: vory v zakone (thieves in law) and patsany (lads). The former is a parallel organized criminal caste that began to cooperate with Soviet bureaucrats in the 1980s and then fought to control the communist state’s assets after the Soviet collapse. The latter was comprised of thuggish urban street gangs. Each of these subcultures, which had its own rules for those on the inside while remaining suspicious of outsiders, offered belonging, protection, and a sense of identity amid the post-Soviet collapse. Thus Budraitskis and Matveev draw a line from the 1990s to the present in which everyone, including and especially Putin, saw post-Soviet life as a “social Darwinist” perpetual struggle, a “constant conflict and confrontation in which you can only rely on violence and the support of your closest male friend circle.” So far, so familiar: Readers may recognize these descriptions from recent work by Mikhail Zygar.

Indeed, the authors then go on to link Russia’s behavior in the early Putin era to this apparently non-ideological domestic culture of belonging and violence: Might makes right; everybody but your closest friends is out to get you. The Russia of the 2000s was a rapacious capitalist beast but ultimately rational. The authors do not dismiss Moscow’s “capitalist imperialism” phase lightly. They argue that it grew out of a cynical mindset: “In the 2000s, a new kind of imperialism emerged in Russia: an imperialism that relied on economic methods and pursued economic goals. In many ways, it was an extension of Putin’s ‘wheeling and dealing’ approach to the international stage.” Simultaneously, argue the authors, Russia was in hock to the Western economic system, so that the Russian elites attempted to assert dominance over the region even as theirs was not a dominant global power. Thus a feeling of “constant conflict” dominated the Kremlin’s thinking and led to, for example, its behavior in the brief war against Georgia in 2008. According to the authors, the Kremlin used military force against Georgia as part of a plan to weaken Tblisi’s ability to participate in gas transit projects that bypassed Russia. The use of energy as a strategic weapon, they note, also occurred when Moscow cut off gas supplies to Ukraine as it tried to extract exorbitant prices from Kyiv in the late 2000s.

Demonstrators march in an anti-Putin rally in the central Arbat area in Moscow, on March 10, 2012.ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images

For Budraitskis and Matveev, the twin turning points came in 2012 and 2014. By 2012, Putin had become paranoid over protests at home and revolutions abroad. Returning to the presidency after a brief constitutionally mandated interlude under his proxy, Dmitry Medvedev, Putin replaced economic interests with an obsesssion to protect the country’s “civilizational identity and belonging” as Russia’s geopolitical priority. Now, Russians applied the same “‘eat or be eaten’ mentality,” as the authors put it, to foreign countries. Thus the Kremlin and Russian elites were primed to interpret international relations through what they perceived as the rational order of things, including a Russia confronted with a perpetually antagonistic West. Now, the West was no longer just an uneasy competitor; in the elite’s eyes, competition with the West threatened Russia’s total annihilation. In this Russian logic of power, the Maidan protestors of late 2013 and onward could not have been anything but “pawns controlled by foreign hands.” Rather than citizens rising up against a corrupt regime that was about to sell their country to the Kremlin, the Maidan protests were merely proof that the West was out to destroy Russia.

In this way, the state’s “capitalist imperialism” became infused with what often looked like a paranoid mindset. A turn from the global economy to an “inward-oriented mode of accumulation” was driven by a desire to protect state “sovereignty”—which the authors describe as an ideologically loaded term meaning not just economic autarky, but the Russian state’s “absolute independence from any constraining external or internal factors.” External or internal factors, of course, would mean any perceived threat from abroad, whether real or not. Thus, what seems like a geopolitically and economically foolhardy decision to invade Ukraine in 2022 becomes, in the true believer’s eyes, a perfectly rational act that defended Russian civilization from the ever-present Western threat. The post-Soviet logic of the patsany was now bolted onto a broader civilizational ideology: Russia plays by its own rules, can trust nobody, and has to “eat or be eaten.” Thus Putin, in his own eyes, had no choice but to turn to violence.

Other writers have already described Russia’s ideological “medley of anti-Westernism, illiberalism, social traditionalism, cultural conservatism and national-civilizationism.” This ideological mélange, the authors of Russia’s New Imperialism suggest, has been added post-factum to the state’s antagonistic worldview in order to frame a “coherent and internally consistent interpretation of the country’s past, present, and future.” Through this lens, the authors carefully address the Kremlin’s approach to historical myth-making, the involvement of the Russian Orthodox Church in war, and the search for “thinkers” such as Ivan Ilyin who might justify state violence as an “expression of Christian love.” Indeed, the book is particularly strong when it dissects thinkers like Ilyin and the authors of the faintly terrifying essay collection The New Oprichnina. They argue that a state “bound by necessity to defend itself” from internal and external enemies has been “a central instrument of modernization in Russia.” Russian thinkers have thrown together a grab-bag of ideas to demonstrate that repression is not just regrettable to keep Russia strong—it is essential.

The authors of Russia’s New Imperialism are at their strongest when they discuss the capitalist basis of the Kremlin’s aggressive ideology. This is also the most novel aspect of the work. Budraitskis and Matveev contend that, after 2014, the economy was securitized in the same way as the rest of the country’s foreign policy. Capital accumulation was reorganized around insulation from external pressure, resulting in “a more inward-oriented accumulation strategy based on protectionism, import substitution, and the development of the military-industrial complex.” In other words, the Kremlin’s obsession with sovereignty—a by-word for maximizing the “state’s absolute independence” in the face of imagined threats—was becoming an economic program as well as a political one. In this sense, today’s ailing war economy may struggle or even collapse, but at least it is perceived to be sovereign (albeit, as they note, in practice this has meant replacing dependence on the West with that on China).

Ukrainian prisoner from the Donbass battalion looks at his Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) rebel guard as pro-Russian rebels control the region in Ilovaisk, Ukraine on Dec. 4, 2014.ERIC FEFERBERG/AFP via Getty Images

Into this work on Russia’s contemporary economy, the authors weave in plenty of supporting detail on how war is enriching Russian businessmen with investments in the military complex. One of the book’s best sections is the grim account of the “economies of plunder” that emerged after 2014 as the Donbas economy was looted, property was seized across occupied Ukraine, and the Wagner Group’s rampages in Syria and Africa enriched its leaders. War has greatly benefitted at least some Russians—these are particularly clear examples of how Russia’s “new imperialism” could be economically ruinous yet extremely profitable for those closest to, and ready to adapt to, its violence.

However, Russia’s New Imperialism does have some flaws. The first revolves around the authors’ claim that “Russian imperialism in Ukraine turned violent” in 2014. In fact, Russian imperialism has been violent almost from the moment the Soviet Union collapsed. Russian troops’ occupation of Transnistria, which began in 1992, goes completely unmentioned. The extreme violence of both the first and second Chechen Wars, which presumably the authors would ascribe to a general atmosphere of “social Darwinism,” is likewise brushed over. These violent military excursions were surely just as central to the creation of today’s aggressive imperial ideology as the economic phenomena of the 2000s that the authors focus on: privatization, organized crime, and capitalist accumulation.

Chechen women pray before an upcoming Russian assault during the Chechen War in Grozny, Chechnya on December 15, 1994.MICHAEL EVSTAFIEV/AFP via Getty Images

Likewise, the authors could have more explicitly addressed how hybrid war tactics—which are top of mind in Europe as drones are shot down over Lithuania and trains are struck near the Polish border—are the Kremlin’s go-to instruments in its war against the “antagonistic” West. What the authors here call “soft power” tactics—“intelligence operations and cyberattacks; Gazprom’s manipulation of gas supplies and prices; the militarization and blockade of the Sea of Azov; the mass granting of Russian citizenship to the residents of the Donbas ‘people’s republics’; massive support for a Kremlin puppet in Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk; and pro-Kremlin propaganda by the Russian Orthodox Church aimed at Ukrainian churchgoers”—may be more appropriately seen as acts of a political-cultural war that began much earlier than 2014. Other analysts might contend that a thuggish, violent, and imperialistic culture has always been the driver of a militaristic regional power that, after the 1991 Soviet collapse, only briefly dallied with the trappings of global economic integration.

In the closing part of the book, the authors pose a tough question that has long befuddled Russia experts, myself included: “[I]s it safe to assume that expansionist nationalism is really as deeply rooted in Russian society as [the Russian political elite] seem to believe or claim?” Their treatment of this question, though, is the biggest drawback of the work. In the dense second chapter, they argue for a Gramscian understanding of ideology as embedded in social experience rather than the result of straightforward indoctrination from above.

But they contradict themselves when they frame the Kremlin and Russian elites as the main drivers of ideology and argue that the Russian public has little interest in the state’s ideology. After all, the authors suggest, the entire hodgepodge of quasi-intellectual materials that the Kremlin has used to justify Russia’s violent invasion of Ukraine is mere camouflage for the new “capitalist imperialism.” It’s all been concocted from on high by “managerial logic” and “narrow groups of experts” associated with the elites—and thus it has ever been, according to the authors.

Supporters of the Black Hundreds march in Odessa, Russia in 1905. Internet Archive Book Images

Indeed, Budraitskis and Matveev go even further by claiming that ideas like the “Russian world” and “historical Russia” have “both historically and at present … been imposed on Russian society from above rather than growing organically from below”; that “anti-Ukrainian discourse in the Russian Empire was produced largely by the upper classes and the state bureaucracy”; and even that “there are almost no historical examples in Russian history of Russian nationalist mobilization from below.” Even extreme nationalist groups like the Black Hundreds during the late tsarist era were “directly backed by the government.” In reality, the Black Hundreds stemmed from a mass popular movement. The same holds more broadly: The radical right evolved separately from the state under the tsars, in the post-Stalinist era, and especially after the collapse of communism. Violent Russian nationalism has always been accompanied and fed by significant amounts of public support.

All too often, public discussion of Russians’ nationalist and imperialist attitudes resorts to tired cliches about brainwashing, which tells us nothing much about how and why the Russian public seem willing to wage violent war at great cost in lives and treasure without mass dissent. Nonetheless, the authors push back too hard. The Russian public might exhibit “apathy,” be “passive,” or consume propaganda, but the book’s claim that “in general Russia remains in a depoliticized state” hardly stands up to scrutiny.

When the authors hunt for “political rituals typical for the totalitarian regimes of the past,” they ignore the new, digitized means of participation the Russian regime has created in concert with its citizens. In Russia, ideology is co-created in daily life through participatory social media clicks, shares, likes, and comments; in discourses and images reproduced in TikTok videos and Telegram posts; and in the online communities from which peripheral thinkers like Alexander Dugin have gained increasing public prominence. Russia’s New Imperialism does briefly mention some of the internet agencies and online formats funded and created by the Kremlin. However, the Russian internet involves mass participation, and extreme nationalist communities online pre-date the Kremlin’s widespread involvement. Millions of Russians voluntarily participate in both these non-state communities and the Kremlin’s own projects. Those on the lookout for 20th century-style totalitarian parades will inevitably miss Russia’s digital ideological self-transformation.

Russian political philosopher Alexander Dugin attends the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Saint Petersburg, Russia on June 3.Olga MALTSEVA / AFP via Getty Images

Indeed, it is hard to argue that Russian society is depoliticized when over 1.5 million Russian soldiers have been deployed to Ukraine since 2022. These soldiers have committed many thousands of war crimes and yet more acts of plunder. The Kremlin did not force these soldiers to act in this way, nor are they passive participants in war. Russian soldiers in Ukraine may not be consciously enthused by the state’s ideology, but they are active participants in a war that the state frames—in what the authors would call capitalist imperialist terms—as an opportunity for self-actualization and wealth creation. Participation itself is agency. Volunteering to fight, circulating wartime narratives, and taking part in patriotic digital campaigns are ways of enacting and reproducing the state’s ideology. If ideology operates through practice, as Budraitskis and Matveev’s own Gramscian framework suggests, these participants cannot be “depoliticized.”

The extent of public politicization lies at the heart of understanding not just what might happen in Russia after the Ukraine war ends but in what lies ahead for a post-Putin society more generally. Budraitskis and Matveev have written a fascinating volume that gives analysts of Russia an important new understanding of how capital and ideology, the individual and the state, fear and suspicion have all become interlinked. If the analytical world has been somewhat taken aback by the development of Russia’s war economy and society since 2022, then it need no longer be. Many analysts will argue with Budraitskis and Matveev about exactly when Russian state ideology really turned violent and how deeply that violent ideology has penetrated society. Nonetheless, this book’s treatment of the continuities between early and late Putinist ideology is a winning addition to other recent books on the relationship of money, war, and violence in Putin’s Russia.