Colonial History
The Russian Empire today comprises nearly double the land mass of the United States and Canada combined. It is properly called an Empire as the vast majority of its territory was never home to indigenous Russians; it was taken from the peoples who originally inhabited it. It makes up one-sixth of the Earth’s landmass, historically third in size behind the Mongol and British empires but far larger than the U.S., Spanish and Portuguese Empires expanding at roughly the same time. It was an Empire rationalized on the basis of the myth of ‘Great Russia’ in which the conquered were viewed as as proto-Russians united by an mythology of shared culture which was not bounded by geographical borders—a Russian version of U.S. ‘Manifest Destiny’ or the Chinese ‘Great State’. Operating from the Grand Duchy of Moscow, Ivan III was the first to style himself Czar (1462-1505) and to take on the expansion of what was then a small kingdom centred on Moscow. From 1462 until 1911 Moscow fought 113 wars of expansion, winning most and creating at its height a Russian Empire stretching from Europe to the border of British Columbia. From the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has been involved in 14 more wars not only with Ukraine but also with Georgia, Moldova, Tajikistan, Ingushetia, Dagestan and Chechnya—this last could be seen as a precursor to Israel’s ‘war’ on Gaza as the capital Grozny was levelled to much the same extent as Gaza is currently.
So why do numerous pundits and analysts dwell exclusively on U.S. actions through NATO as the primary reasons for the Russian invasion of Ukraine while foregoing any discussion of Russian motivations for war or the relative importance of both? In the best traditions of Empire building Russia has demonstrated all the actions and policies—removal of populations, colonial settlement, massacre, racist policies for the conquered and recurring invasion of neighbouring polities—without any need of external motivation. In this they have recapitulated the actions of Romans, Ottomans, Mongols, British and the United States as the latter expanded from Atlantic to Pacific. In the 19th Century both the U.S. and Russia ran roughshod over indigenous populations; stories of lonely cavalry men at Fort Apache could easily apply to Russian forces on frontier duty at the Holy Cross Fortress on the Sulak River.
If reputable analysts such as Jeffery Sachs, David Gibbs, and Robert H. Wade criticize the U.S. for its actions toward Russia and its use of NATO to amplify them, all in the context of provoking Russia into its invasion of Ukraine, they are doing us a disservice by not placing U.S. provocation in the context of Russian ambition. As these writers provide no discussion of domestic Russian motivation for the war it is evident that the arguments put forward are directed toward domestic strife in the U.S. rather than elucidating the motivations for the invasion of the Ukraine. A professional historian such as Gibbs and a scholar of Global Political Economy such as Wade must surely know that U.S. provocation is front-loaded by Putin to disguise his own motivations for invasion. Recognizing this they can only be taking the U.S. to task for its often misbegotten policies and actions in order to influence domestic policy. For the U.S. actions they detail are factors in Russian motivation but by no stretch of anyone’s imagination should they be cast as primary ones. There is no doubt that NATO was created as a response to the Soviet ‘Red Menace’ but without NATO Russia’s expansionist wars would still have taken place just as they did for centuries before NATO existed. To claim NATO as a primary motivation for Putin only indicates the writer is either oblivious to Russian history or is writing for domestic political consumption alone. History shows clearly that Russian rulers have never needed any external motivation for colonial conquest: the Ukrainian war is the latest act in Russia’s colonial expansion and has been undertaken completely for domestic reasons. Most tellingly you might ask yourself why Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, countries formerly controlled by Russia, are now all members of NATO. Was their primary motivation the Russian devil they knew or the U.S. devil they were wary of? The answer seems obvious.
Failure to weigh Russian motivation gives a pass to Putin’s autocracy and lends support to the growing belief in the U.S. that democracy has failed and it is time to consider the advantages of an autocratic leader—let’s forget this waffling, democratic consensus failure and get a strong leader to drain the swamp. It can be argued that some form of autocracy is humanity’s default organizing principle and Russia’s centuries of imperial expansion are one of the best arguments for its practice—within the past month a Russian friend has yet again assured me that the Russian people are unsuited for democratic governance and that an autocrat is the only power they will accept. But we must be extremely careful in using autocracy to call out faults in democracy; autocracy by any definition has no place for citizen consent. While is is legitimate to lay out U.S. actions and motives towards Eastern Europe, to do so in the context of the Ukrainian war without weighing them against Russian motivation for the war is disingenuous at the least and mendacious at the worst.
Further Reading.
Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire / Michael Khodarkovsky Characterizing the colonial history of Russian conquest Khodarkovsky writes “On the one side was Christian Russia, a military-bureaucratic state, with urban centres and a dynamic agricultural-industrial economy. On the other were various non-Christian societies with kinship-based social organizations and static, overwhelmingly nomadic-pastoral economies.” Sound familiar?
To Run the World / Sergey Radchenko. Soviet aggression, Stalin to Gorbachev.
Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right / Quinn Slobodian Outlines the rise in the U.S. of autocratic political theory and the claimed failure of democracy.
The Fourth Political Theory / Aleksandr Dugin Dugin is Putin’s political theorist. In this book he dismisses liberalism, communism, and fascism in favour of his new political construction based on ‘ethnos’ as a ‘community of language, religious belief, daily life, and of sharing resources and efforts; as an organic entity’. (Wikipedia). Dugin’s major work on Eurasianism as the enemy of Atlanticism is not available in English but there is much discussion of it on the Internet; you can start with Wikipedia and go from there.
Oakley Rankin, Hornby Island
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Oakley Rankin posits that academics such as United Nations advisor Professor Jeffrey Sachs and others who want an end to the U.S.- NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and no further NATO expansion, ignore important historical context from 400 years ago in Eurasia. It is Mr. Rankin who is ignoring the most significant contexts in the history of Russia and Ukraine, and the Cold War with the U.S. and NATO.
Russia was the Eastern Front, the largest and deadliest theatre of WW2 in Europe, where the vast majority of Nazi ground forces were destroyed, defeating the German army’s offensive capabilities and forcing them to retreat toward Berlin. The Russian Army ultimately captured the German capital in May 1945. There were a total of 27 million dead Russian soldiers and civilians in their effort to defeat Hitler and the German Nazis.
Ukrainian ethno-nationalist allies of the Nazis murdered thousands of Jews and Poles and Roma peoples during that time, the same ideology that dominates power in Western Ukraine today. Right Sector, Svoboda, and the Azov Nazis control much of the corrupt Ukrainian regime, armed and funded by NATO in an attempt to expand NATO and its nuclear weapons to Russia’s border. This is NATO’s proxy war against Russia.
The U.S asserted that Soviet Russians putting nuclear weapons in Cuba represented the “red line” of an existential threat, leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it is absurd to expect Russia to accommodate NATO’s nuclear weapons on its borders. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the peace dividend was supposed to be an end to the Cold War. The U.S. and NATO have broken their commitment not to expand.
The most recent context that Oakley Rankin is missing, is that Ukrainian leader Zelenskyy was elected in a landslide victory on a campaign platform of peace with Russia. Immediately following Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine, there were peace negotiations in Istanbul in April of 2022 that were agreed to in principle, but the signing of the deal was scuttled by NATO, forcing Zelenskyy to capitulate. The proxy war went on.
These views do not represent support for any state actor or their leaders, but rather an intellectually honest anti-war accounting. We cannot rely on corporate or state funded media to report honestly on these issues, and anyone who dissents from them is smeared as pro-Russian. The NATO propaganda, and the arming and financing of this proxy war, including by Canada, represents the greatest threat to sustaining civilization.
Keith Porteous, Associate Editor
