Pomerantsev: Toward a world ‘where everybody’s knives come out’

27 05 2025

In “Play Putin at his own game by ‘nightmaring’ his world order,” Peter Pomerantsev is as astute as ever in his analysis of Russia’s potential weaknesses, which he enumerates lucidly. They include inflation, polarization between regions and ethnic groups, reliance on unreliable partners and unstable supply chains, a botched mobilization, unceasing paranoia, and the constant need to pretend to a strength that isn’t there.

He then presents an absolutely sensible approach to containing Putin’s imperial ambitions:

None of Putin’s issues are in themselves a silver bullet to knock out the Kremlin. The trick would be to apply pressure on them simultaneously to stop the President misbehaving. Hit him by seizing frozen Russian assets in the West or undermining Russian oil sales, then follow with a campaign to sow dissent among Russian soldiers, depress his domestic popularity rating, launch military exercises in the Baltics, undermine Russian mercenaries in Mali, give the Ukrainians the right to hit deep inside Russia, make the cost of doing business with Russia higher for the Chinese, cut vital supply chains for the Russian military to signal that we know every front company they use. Pile on the dilemmas until the Kremlin feels it runs the risk of not being in control. Raise the specter of 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union to get the Kremlin to recalculate the level of belligerence it can afford. Some of the moves can be smaller, others larger. Destabilizing the Kremlin is about the rate and pace of those moves.

And then he brings reality to bear on the situation:

This is something that, so far, has not been tried. Instead the opposite is happening. As Putin looks at how America is alienating allies, damaging its own economy and retreating from global leadership, he must wonder whether it’s going through a self-imposed breakdown. Even as Putin engages in friendly phone calls with Trump, he’s strengthening military exercises with Iran and China.

Russia is also able to sweet-talk America while secretly stabbing at it. In his war on the “Deep State,” Trump has disbanded some of the entities that deal with Russian cyberattacks and covert campaigns in the US. It’s easier than ever to hit America using proxies. Dark Storm, the cyber-criminals who recently took down X to express their support for Palestine, have previously aligned their hacks with Russia as well as Iran. Similar groups have taken out the websites of American water companies and hospitals. Russia’s secret services aren’t likely to have seen an America this vulnerable.

Putin’s dream of destroying the world order America upheld is so close he must feel he cannot fail to grasp it.

In the end, he offers up an olive branch, though it turns out to be a rather tainted one:

But there may be a twist in the tail for Russia. As we enter a world of global lawlessness, countries and coalitions will be thinking about turning the Kremlin’s hybrid toolkit of economic and information war, cyber and sabotage back on Russia.

Up until now, with America guaranteeing security, many showed restraint. With the “international-rules based order” gone, everyone can try the hooligan role Russia has so far played unimpeded. Moscow yearns to carve up the world. But it will be a world where everybody’s knives come out.

The full article can be read here.


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Risky business

11 04 2025

The original version of Risk, the Parker Brothers board game of strategic territorial conquest first known euphemistically as “the Continental Game,” had Ukraine occupying Russia, or at least the historically pre-imperial territory of Russia, along with Belarus, the Baltic Republics, and much of eastern Europe (see below). As a kid, I used to play the game with siblings and cousins; I don’t recall us making too much of that reversal — it made sense to us diaspora Ukrainians. But it also meant that defending Ukraine was really difficult, as it could be attacked from six directions.

I’ve been trying to find out how that huge Ukraine got into the design. The game was created in the early 1950s by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse, best known for the dreamy 1956 film The Red Balloon (a beautiful film made even more so by Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 2007 remake The Flight of the Red Balloon; in retrospect, to us diaspora Ukrainians “Ukraine” was a bit like a red balloon, floating of its own accord like an imagined utopia well away from the world’s realpolitik). From what I’ve seen, the original version of the game, called La conquête du monde, had multiple names within territories; the one that became Ukraine had five names.

The game was redesigned by French game designer and philosopher Jean-René Vernes, and then bought out by Parker Brothers, a family-owned, Salem, Massachusetts based company famous for Monopoly, Clue, Sorry!, Ouija (acquired in 1966), and others, which created the original English-language version of Risk (the one we played, with the large Ukraine) in 1959. That was before the Cuban missile crisis, when westerners mostly knew Ukraine as a Soviet republic whose representation at the UN was fully subordinate to Russia.

I’ve heard theories that someone involved in the game design was Ukrainian (no doubt a diasporic one), but have not found anything to substantiate that. Was it a flight of fancy on the part of Lamorisse (a Persophile who died in a helicopter crash while making a documentary in Iran in 1970) or Vernes, who had spent a few years in a German PoW camp during world war two? According to Philip Orbanes’ book-length history of Parker Brothers, The Game Makers, the game’s tiny wooden armies were made by a Czechoslovak company, but Czechoslovakia’s location on the game board would have been an unidentified borderland of “Ukraine” and/or “Northern Europe.” Heading Parker Brothers at the time of the Risk acquisition was the company’s founder’s son-in-law Robert Barker, and a nephew, Eddie Parker, apparently played a key role in the game’s redesign (though the territorial map was hardly altered, from what I can tell). Neither of them seemed to show much interest in things Ukrainian.

Perhaps it was just the fact that Russia’s huge landmass would have been too large on the map of conquerable territories, and calling one piece of the six or seven that made it up “Russia” didn’t make much sense. “Ukraine” it was.

We might think of it today as an inspirational model for how to decompose the imperial-colonial construct known today as “Russia,” a decomposition some take to be inevitable.

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Zygar & Gladstone on Tucker’s Putin

14 02 2024

WNYC’s (NPR’s) On the Media has created a wonderful 17-minute segment examining the historical claims reiterated by Vladimir Putin in his recent interview (/monologue) with Tucker Carlson. The conversation between host Brooke Gladstone and Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar is well worth listening to. (I should probably specify “dissident journalist,” since “Russia” and “journalism” does not make for a persuasive combo these days. Zygar was the founding editor-in-chief of now banned Russian news channel TV Rain/Dozhd, which continues to broadcast from abroad.)

The conversation covers only a few of the 14 “tales” or “myths” related to the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine that Zygar describes in his recent book War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine. Zygar’s book is one of the first serious efforts by a Russian journalist or historian to begin the process of decolonizing Russian history. (And perhaps the first time U.S. public radio has compared Taras Shevchenko to African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, but it’s an apt comparison.)

The full radio segment can be listened to here.


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Epstein: on Russia’s “anti-world”

13 10 2023

Scanning the Israeli press (for reasons unrelated to Ukraine), I came across an interview that came out earlier this year with Mikhail Epstein, who is one of the most prolific (he has reportedly published 37 books and some 700 articles), creative, and (to my mind) enjoyable of Russian expat philosophers and intellectuals. Epstein’s books on Russian philosophy, spirituality, literature, and culture include After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), A Philosophy of the Possible: Modalities of Thought and Culture (Brill, 2019), The Phoenix of Philosophy: Russian Thought of the Late Soviet Period, 1953-1991 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), the weirdly brilliant quasi-fiction Cries in the New Wilderness: From the Files of the Moscow Institute of Atheism (Paul Dry Books, 2002), and most recently, in Russian, Русский антимир: Политика на грани апокалипсиса (The Russian Anti-world: Politics at the Edge of Apocalypse, 2023).

The interview, entitled “Russia Became an Abyss and We Might All Fall Into It,” was carried out by Israel Hayom‘s David Baron. Its themes echo an article Epstein published last year in Studies in East European Thought entitled “Schizophrenic Fascism: On Russia’s War on Ukraine.” In that piece, Epstein traces the roots of Russia’s “schizophrenic fascism,” or “schizofascism,” which he describes as “fascism under the guise of the fight against fascism.” Schizofascism, he writes, is a “serious, dangerous, and aggressive caricature” of fascism, which “embraces the contradiction between archaic myths, chauvinism, and xenophobia, on the one hand, and corruption and cynicism, on the other.”

Part of the “schizo” nature of this fascism is the simultaneous dependence on and opposition to the West, a “love-hate relationship” that manifests as overt demonization of all things Western — “a hysterical hatred of freedom, democracy, everything foreign, and people of a different identity,” he writes in the article — even as the Russian elite has driven incessantly to purchase assets in the West. This results in “a culture of jealousy and competition that finds its purpose in challenging other cultures and marginalizing them based on the accomplishments that were adopted from them.” Putin has become the world’s Dostoyevskian “underground man,” who is “incapable of suggesting anything to the world but rather only annoys it and tries to pinch it.”

Among other things, the interview traces the “Russian world” (Russkii mir) ideology — “the primary guiding concept of today’s Russia” — to Putin advisor Vladislav Surkov. Compared to previous ruling mythologies — such as “Orthodox Kingdom,” “Third Rome,” and Center of World Revolution — the current one is curiously vacuous, based mostly on a territorial vastness accompanied by a feeling of historical loss.

When asked about how to prevent Russia from “galloping toward its history’s depths,” Epstein replies:

“If Russia’s central government were to be taken apart, different ‘Russias’ could be created – Ural’s Russia, Siberia’s Russia, etc. – that together can create something like the European Union. Maybe this union will be even more organic because of the language all the new Russias share. This is the only way this territory will not threaten the world. We speak about the fear of what will happen to nuclear weapons if Russia falls apart. Let’s start with the fact that it is most difficult to supervise nuclear weapons in the hands of an imperialistic superpower like Russia in our times. If Russia falls apart, we can negotiate how to destroy its threatening nuclear arsenal.”

The full interview can be read here.


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Explaining Russia

23 11 2022

It’s trite to call Russia’s actions in Ukraine these days evil. In their goal of bringing an entire country to its knees through military firepower, battered infrastructure, and a decimated power grid (in time for the cold winter ahead), they are certainly that. But they are an evil that calls for analysis and explanation.

That analysis, however, would have to cover a great deal.

For starters, it would have to explain how it is that Russians allowed their country to succumb to the belligerent authoritarianism of Putinism, and how enough of them came to either support Putin or to consider it imprudent or too costly to resist him. And how Putin himself transformed from the (seeming) pragmatic realism of his early presidency to the neo-imperial fantasies of today. And how the late Soviet power elite finessed its way into an oligarchic capitalism amenable to the consolidation of Putin’s power vertykal (and, conversely, how Putin coldly disemboweled any rival sources of power). And how his rise was built, from the get go, on the creation of external threats (Chechens, Georgians, “Nazis,” the “liberal” West) and assertive displays of disciplinary power to eliminate or neuter them.

And how Russians who were poised to follow in the footsteps of their fellow East Europeans by threading the needle (challenging as it was everywhere) between democracy and neoliberal entrepreneurialism on the one side, and the social safety net of socialism on the other, came to lose all faith in the former two and accept what scraps of the third were offered them. And how decades of Sovietization, the economic traumas of the 1990s, and the creeping authoritarianism of Putinism exorcised away any capacity among Russians to act collectively and politically in the face of any challenge (so unlike Ukrainians in that).

And of how Russia’s essential conservatism bounced back after 1990 with a vengeance, led by an apocalyptic church beholden both to its own hierarchic religiosity and to its deep historical entanglement with power (in this case, Putin’s). And of the unquestioned imperialism and colonialism at the heart of the Russian imaginary, in which Ukraine functioned only as a lesser, weaker brother liable to forget his allegiance to the imperial center and needing to thereby be reined in, repeatedly and by force if necessary. And of how the West, with its wealth, its progress, and its freedoms, became the ultimate foil for the Russian project and the ultimate object of its ressentiment.

And of how challenging the liberal West has become Russia’s modus operandi on the world stage, allowing it to find supporters (tacit or otherwise) in nearly every country in the world, and to repurpose its Soviet era security apparatus toward global informational warfare. And of how Russia’s oil and gas reserves — its only source of economic strength — has made it an attractive partner to other states with reason to distrust the U.S.-led West (such as Iran, Syria, and North Korea these days, but also China and India).

And of how all this leads to a situation where colossal miscalculations — such as the dubious assumption of a three-day military victory and an overwhelmingly welcoming Ukrainian population — will naturally arise, and where the internal logic of strongman authoritarianism, with its blinded judgment and its to-the-death dependence on victory, can only lead to the gory intensification of military might that we are seeing now, people’s lives be damned.

That’s for starters.


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Open Letter to Chomsky

20 05 2022

Since my response to Noam Chomsky elicited quite a flurry of feedback, both pro and con (and occasionally in between), I suspect readers will also be interested in the Open Letter to Noam Chomsky published yesterday by four Ukrainian academic economists.

The authors challenge Chomsky on several premises underlying his arguments concerning Ukraine and Russia. These include his denial of Ukraine’s sovereign territorial integrity (violated by Russia in contravention of several international agreements to which Russia was a signatory), his treatment of Ukraine as a pawn on a geo-political chessboard, the misplaced causality of his argumentation about NATO, and his utter incomprehension of the genocidal and frankly fascist motivations underlying Russia’s invasion. All of these premises are rooted in a selective anti-imperialism that, as I have argued , ignores the multiple forms imperialism can take in order to fight a single imperialism, equated with the U.S.-led West. The risk with such selectivity is that it chooses “strange bedfellows” (since it actually aligns with some fascistic anti-westerners like Dugin and now Putin).

As I argued in my E-Flux piece, the only kind of anti-imperialism that makes ethical and political sense today is a decolonial anti-imperialism, and “Decoloniality is by definition not just an anti-imperialism, but an anti-all-imperialisms. That makes every place in the world an ‘obligatory passage point’ for decolonialism.” Ukraine today is a site for decolonial, anti-imperialist struggle against a force whose cutting edge is the neo-imperial Putin regime, but whose fellow travelers are found around the world (especially, but not exclusively, on the political right).

Read the complete Open Letter here.


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