In May 2008, Dmitry Medvedev became president of Russia, swapping his role with Vladimir Putin who became prime minister. After a few months, in August, the first milestone was a war in Georgia. In May 2012, Putin became president again and, two years later, the ongoing Ukrainian crisis escalated into a real war for the control of Donbas. Meanwhile, Moscow secured Crimea and, with it, the naval base of Sevastopol. The Russian military intervention in Syria began in September 2015. Finally, on February 24th, 2022, the invasion of Ukraine opened a violent and tragic page in European and global relations.
Therefore, Russia at War is not a sensationalist headline, but the synthesis of a characteristic element of Russian politics over the past fifteen years, a thread of its evolution. This is intertwined, and at times entangled, with other elements – one above all is Moscow’s continuous dependence on the energy sector. It is the synthesis of a problem – a restructuring often started but never completed.
A third trend is more purely political and concerns the form of the state organisation. The recurrent simplification is the narrative of Russian authoritarianism as opposed to Western democracy. Given that authoritarian attitudes in the Russian political system are evident, it is more useful to identify their determining factors. For this purpose, the Marxist conception, which refers to “variations and gradations” of democracy, is certainly more effective than others. It is in this framework that the concept of sovereign democracy can be placed, as the specific Russian political form defines itself, in which the link with international relations is not lost.
This is the Russian imperialist state, today engaged in the war for the partition of Ukraine. Moreover, it is a state that has to guarantee the exploitation of 65 million wage earners, who, like their comrades in the western metropolises, increasingly abstain from voting in elections, thus exposing the true nature of elections as an instrument for representing bourgeois interests. With this political form, the Russian ruling class tries to assert its imperialist interests in the era of unprecedented tensions we are now facing. With what results, time will tell.