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Russia Doesn’t Have a “Neo-Imperial” Policy

Stephen Blank seems to think that Russia is bent on creating a “renewed empire”: But the consequences of letting this system continue with impunity do not stop at Russia’s borders. Autocracy in Russia is synonymous with empire, and the criminality we see in Moscow is a fundamental instrument of Russia’s neo-imperial policy throughout Eastern Europe […]

Stephen Blank seems to think that Russia is bent on creating a “renewed empire”:

But the consequences of letting this system continue with impunity do not stop at Russia’s borders. Autocracy in Russia is synonymous with empire, and the criminality we see in Moscow is a fundamental instrument of Russia’s neo-imperial policy throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

As Dmitri Trenin has pointed out before, this is quite wrong. Trenin wrote:

Compared to the prolonged and bloody demises of the British and French empires, the Soviet Union’s collapse was remarkably calm. The “Commonwealth of Independent States” (C.I.S.), which many people mistook for a new name for the Soviet Union — and some dubbed “a fresh edition of the Russian empire” — accomplished the mission of making sure that the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. was one of the most peaceful and least violent imperial exits in history.

It was able to do so because the Russian Federation, counterintuitively, did and has done little to attempt to hold on to its “near abroad.” It has had few resources to spare, and no will to subdue.

If the “neo-imperial policy” of Russia is not really neo-imperial, why describe it this way? The purpose is to alarm Western audiences into thinking that corruption and abuses inside Russia represent a threat to Russia’s neighbors and the world. Russia’s problems with corruption and abuse of power are real and severe, but Russians are the ones suffering from them and no one else. This is a misleading and dangerous kind of alarmism, since it stokes an irrational fear of a Russian threat that increases tensions between Russia and the U.S. and also between Russia and its neighbors. Because it links criticism of Russia’s legal and political criticism with an unhinged Russophobia, it also tends to undermine that criticism.

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