Russia: A New Imperialist Power?

ABSTRACT

The authors employ modern Marxist methodology and theory to analyse imperialism and so-called “empires,” making it possible to reveal the mechanisms through which the capital and states of the countries that make up the “centre” ensure the economic, political and ideological manipulation of the “periphery.” On this basis, it is shown that the capital and state machines of the countries of the semi-periphery in general, and of Russia in particular, are primarily objects of imperialist subordination and manipulation. Only in a few cases are such countries and their capital capable of being the subjects of imperialist policy. An analysis is provided of the contradictions affecting relations between the Russia, Ukraine and the West. A system of politico-economic, geopolitical and other arguments is also advanced with the aim of showing that the Russia does not as a rule act as a subject of imperialist policy, and that only in particular cases (in which, for the most part, it relies on the Soviet heritage) is it capable of resisting the “rules of the game” dictated by the imperialist powers. Ironically these instances of resistance prompt accusations of “Russian imperialism.”

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• imperialism
• Marxism
• Ukraine
• geopolitics

Acknowledgements

This article is an abridged version of the text that is published in full as a working paper in preprint series of the Economics Department of Lomonosov Moscow State University (Buzgalin, Kolganov, and Barashkova 2016). The authors wish to thank Renfrey Clarke for prompting this line of discussion, and for his help in translating and preparing the text. Also the authors thank anonymous reviewers from International Critical Thought for their considerate analysis of the text and Gleb Komakhin for his help in working on the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Buzgalin Alexander, Doctor of Economic Sciences, is a professor at the Department of Political Economy of the Faculty of Economics, Lomonosov Moscow State University, and editor-in-chief of the journals Voprosy Politicheskoy Ekonomii (Questions of political economy) and Alternatives, and coordinator of the International Association for Political Economy of the post-Soviet space. His research areas include political economy, Russian economy, methodology of economic theory and inequality. He has published a number of articles in journals like Cambridge Journal of Economics, International Critical Thought and Science & Society.

Kolganov Andrey, Doctor of Economic Sciences, is a professor at the Department of Political Economy of the Faculty of Economics, Lomonosov Moscow State University.

Barashkova Olga is a doctoral student at the Department of Political Economy of the Faculty of Economics, Lomonosov Moscow State University.

Notes

1 The concept of the “chronotope” (“temporal expanse”) was introduced by Bakhtin (1975), and is used by the authors to designate the unity of social space-time in which a particular phenomenon possesses mutually interconnected spatial and temporal coordinates.

2 See Veltmeyer and Petras (2015), for example, on “extractivist imperialism.”

3 A detailed study, drawing out the main characteristics of the “new imperialism,” is presented in a two-volume work of Buzgalin and Kolganov (2015) that rests on a broad range of earlier research such as Amin (2004), Harvey (2003) and Mészáros (1995).

4 Statistics show that in the medium term the funds exported in the form of direct investments in offshore zones almost all return to Russia (Osipov 2012).

5 According to the data of 2015, the share value of Sberbank, Russia's largest financial corporation, amounted to $378 billion (Expert RA 2015), and the share value of the world's largest bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, was $3,317 billion (Financial Times 2015).

6 Metaphorically speaking, we can say that Russia was the first and so far the only country that has given a public slap in the face of NATO, in the first place—in the issue of the Crimea. Russia's successes in the new geopolitics consist in the return of the Crimea and increasing influence on the formation of independent states, as well as recognition of Russia as a “soft power” even by foreign analysts. The main success lies in the fact that Russia was able to directly counteract the interests of Washington and Brussels and impede the implementation of their geopolitical ambitions.