Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev’s Russia’s New Imperialism: Capital and Ideology (Stanford University Press, 2026) is an important contribution to social theory on the political Left. The book’s introduction can be read at Left Renewal blog.
A helpful interview with the authors has been published at Le grand continent, readable both in French and in English (“Why do People on the Left Like Putin?“/”Pourquoi a gauche on aime Poutine?“, which, one might sourly add, to a Canadian sounds like a reference to the beloved Québecois dish).
The authors argue, among other things, that Russia took a turn after 2014 from a purely “pragmatic” stance “in 2014, “as defined by international relations theory—a stance that was economically rational, but also entirely cynical [and, they add, kleptocratic], in that it reduced politics to mere games of self-interest, devoid of any moral foundation,” to a form of “total ideology,” in which the “collective West” is the global, perhaps even eternal, enemy of the “Russian World.” The latter drew “upon the body of conservative, reactionary, and imperial ideas that had matured over the preceding years.” The Russian imperialist imagination requires Ukraine to be part of it, rather more so than it did for Lenin’s Bolsheviks, who tolerated some degree of Ukrainian autonomy, at least initially.
The authors also hint at the role Russia plays for the global far right: “In this respect, “the rise of the National Rally, the AfD in Germany, and other European far-right parties,” they note, “is explained less by an attempt by the Kremlin to instrumentalize them to break up the European Union than by the weight of shared ideological representations that objectively bring them closer to Putin’s Russia.”
None of this should be new to regular readers of this blog, but Budraitskis and Matveev’s detailed and theoretically rigorous analysis is well worth reading. Leftist historian Jean Batou provides a lengthy review of the book in International Viewpoint, here: https://internationalviewpoint.org/Russia-s-New-Imperialism.
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