Russia Today: An Anti-Imperialist Perspective

Editorial Note: The below transcript was from an event organized by AISC. This timely roundtable was convened on November 15, 2025, to confront the intensifying imperialist aggression towards Russia and the global implications of the war in Ukraine. At a moment when Russophobia saturates mainstream discourse and critical analysis is silenced within Western academia, this event sought to restore historical clarity by bringing together leading anti-imperialist scholars, organizers, and researchers.

Featured speakers Paweł Wargan, Henry Hakamäki, Radhika Desai, Andrey Ivanovich Kolganov, and Arto Artinian provided rigorous, grounded analyses of Russia’s political economy, society, and global position. They dismantled dominant narratives that falsely frame Russia as an imperialist aggressor and instead situated the conflict within the longue durée of Western encirclement, sanctions warfare, and attempts to recolonize the post-Soviet space.

Drawing on Marxist theories of imperialism, geopolitical economy, and anti-colonial struggle, the speakers demonstrated how sanctions have backfired—triggering unexpected processes of economic reorganization, multipolar realignment, and renewed sovereignty across much of the Global South. Their interventions emphasized that Russia’s resistance cannot be understood in isolation, but rather as part of a wider global struggle against neoliberal hegemony and for a more just, multipolar order.

AISC dedicated the Roundtable to the life and work of Professor Alexander V. Buzgalin, a founding father of the post-Soviet Marxist school, and one of the greatest Marxist scholars of all times.

The roundtable forms part of AISC’s continuing effort to challenge ideological repression, defend academic freedom, and build anti-imperialist internationalist analysis capable of confronting the dangerous escalation of US/NATO militarism.

Read the transcript below. In addition to the transcript, the audio from the roundtable is available here .

Jeannette Graulau:

Welcome to the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective Roundtable, Russia Today: An Anti-Imperialist Perspective. This is the first of a series of events that seeks to understand the complex processes of historical change that define our times.

The tempo of political change demands collective action and the safest analytical paths to move forward. This roundtable, as well as the internal discussions and lively polemics that led to this event, are rooted in our commitment to build rigorous analysis of Russia in relation to the world today, and to do so by rejecting the Russophobia that regrettably prevails in most academic debates.

As such, the idea for this roundtable comes from our firm conviction that to think, write historically is to think, write politically, as a Marxist historian once said.

The Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective is formed by a group of professors and researchers from various universities and organizations who believe that thought and action go together, that knowledge thrives only when subjected to this dialectic, and who seek to build structured analysis of reality and knowledge that is accessible to all.

I am Professor Jeannette Graulau, and hosting this event with me is my colleague and friend, Professor Corinna Mullin.

On behalf of members of the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective, and the friends of the collective who made this roundtable possible, we welcome you to the roundtable Russia Today.

We have invited scholars, educators, and organizers who are fully immersed in all dimensions of the question of Russia today, and whose work is moving the question of Russia beyond sterile academic debates—helping us think systematically and coherently about the forces, structures, and relations that shape Russia’s role in the world economy today.

Joining us today are Paweł Wargan, researcher, organizer, and political coordinator of the Progressive International. Pawel, we thank you, because you made much of this roundtable possible. We thank you for enthusiastically endorsing this idea, and we are delighted you are joining us today.

We also welcome Henry Hakamäki, educator, co-host and producer of Guerrilla History. He is based in the Republic of Tatarstan and is editor at Iskra Books.

We welcome Radhika Desai, whose work has truly redefined the way we think about global politics today—a professor of political economy at the University of Manitoba in Canada, director of the famous Geopolitical Economy Research Group, and founding member of the International Manifesto Group.

We also welcome Professor Andrey Ivanovich Kolganov, Professor of Economics at Lomonosov Moscow University and principal researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

And last but not least, we welcome Professor Arto Artinian, Professor of Political Science, expert in Soviet political history, and a colleague of ours here at The City University of New York.

Professor Lyudmilla Bulavka-Buzgalina could not join us today. This is certainly our misfortune. She sends her greetings and wishes us creative breakthroughs. On behalf of our collective, if Professor Bulavka-Buzgalina is listening, I want to say that ours is an open invitation. We are looking forward to hosting you in one of our future events.

Many colleagues and friends have asked us here why Russia today matters to scholars headquartered in the ‘comforts’ of the West.

We say the question matters because we are at a critical moment in world history—one that has revealed the historical limitations of the liberal nation-State and the historical limitations of the liberal, multilateral order.

We say the question matters because waves of Western sanctions isolating the ‘commanding heights’ of the Russian economy—the Russian oil, gas, and petrochemical industry—sanctions that seek to inflict economic strangulation of Russia—have nonetheless had their own dialectics, giving birth to new modes and ways of thinking about import substitution, industrialization, and regional geographies of trade—all elements that have considerable implications for peripheral nations.

We say the question matters because the Russian society has learned to live and adapt to the temporal unevenness created by the sanctions cycle of the 21st-century capitalist world economy—a cycle which no classical political economy, not even Marx, ever predicted, and thus one that Economics and Political Science textbooks must account for, if these fields want to remain relevant moving forward.

We say the question matters because reactionary nationalisms in the West are fueling and reviving the historical engines that have moved Western imperialism for centuries—seeking to destroy what Marx once called Russia’s ‘historical gifts’ to Europe and the rest of the world.

And finally, the question matters to scholars on these shores of the Atlantic Ocean because we must keep the historical record straight. At a time when intellectual and academic freedom—needed for the pursuit of scientific knowledge—is under threat, the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective reaffirms its loyalty to a robust transcontinental dialogue on Russia today, even if such dialogue will entail persistent difficulties.

It is in the spirit of dialogue amidst persistent difficulties that we proudly dedicate our first Roundtable and these deliberations to the life and work of Professor Alexander Buzgalin—a founding father of the post-Soviet Marxist school, and whose theoretical work we are certain will be part of today’s debate.

Now I proceed to remind all of the roundtable format: each panelist will have 10 minutes to present his and her views on the roundtable themes. Afterwards, we will open the floor for questions and answers, for which we shall have roughly 30 to 40 minutes. Then Professor Corinna Mullin will deliver concluding remarks.

We begin with Paweł Wargan. Paweł, the floor is yours.

Paweł Wargan:

Thank you so much, Jeannette. Thank you, comrades. It’s a really tremendous privilege to be among such distinguished speakers and to speak on such an important question. I think, you know, this question is critical, and I want to start by saying a few words about why I think it’s so important to have these conversations.

And if I’m allowed a little detour, I’d like to turn back not to February 2022, but to October 2023, and to the Hamas operation against the colonial occupation in Palestine.

In the immediate wake of that operation, there was a pretty widespread and concerted effort in large parts of particularly the Western left—but not exclusively the Western left—to revise well-established norms and principles about the right of armed resistance of peoples who are subject to colonial occupation.

And I think more salient to this conversation: to revise also well-established theoretical notions of the national question and its entanglement with imperialism—the answers to the question of what it means to pursue sovereignty in the context of a globalized imperialist system that is prepared to destroy nations and, as we see very clearly now, exterminate entire populations to secure accumulation.

And in a sense, these tendencies—which I think became clearer to a much broader segment of the Western left and on the globe after October 2023—emerged after the escalation of the war in Ukraine in February 2022.

There was an effort across the West, in the immediate aftermath of the start of the Special Military Operation, to find ‘the right Ukrainians’ or ‘the right Russians’ to give their analyses on the question. These tended to be people whose positions were in some way fundamentally compatible with Western imperialism—whether in openly backing NATO or at least in narrowing the analytical terrain in a way that truncated our understanding of the role of imperialism in the crisis.

The most sophisticated of these had quite strong class analyses of the Russian state, of the Russian ruling class, of the possible internal motivations that drive political decisions within Russia—but they almost entirely removed those considerations from a much broader understanding of imperialism, and in particular, how imperialist encroachment distorts domestic processes and reshapes the dynamics of internal class struggle.

The more egregious of these analyses tried to discard theories of imperialism and theories of class struggle altogether. There was a paper, I think, which is very telling in this regard, published by the Alameda Institute, which had a series of essays that try to do exactly that. One of them—and I quote verbatim—made the claim that:

The appearance of the non-economic roots of Russia’s aggressive expansionism since 2014 raises questions about the contemporary validity of classical theories of imperialism.

So this is, in a sense, an attempt to reverse-engineer the quality of being ‘imperialist’ to the Russian ruling class by discarding a century's worth of analytical insights that were built on the back of the real movement of history and the real struggles within that process.

And then, of course, at the very far end, you had a whole spate of articles that tried to rehabilitate NATO—now as a so-called anti-imperialist force—because it is standing up to this ‘new imperialism.’ And this new imperialism, again, has no economic basis—this much has been conceded by some of the people making this claim. But the argument was put forward again and again that it is obviously imperialist because war is imperialist. And this became the default position for many forces on the Western left—in particular in Europe, where I come from.

Their function was to conceal what were fundamentally moral arguments beneath a very thin theoretical veneer. And in fact, their effect was to, to a greater or lesser extent, mount an ideological defense for imperialist encroachment—again, either by undermining the theories that help us understand what imperialism is, or by concealing the structural and material causes of the conflict.

Why is that important? Well, I think on one hand, if you look at the record of what Western strategic planners—especially U.S. strategic planners—have been saying pretty much since the 1950s, there is a very clear intent expressed again and again, with very clear policies to back it up: to secure control over the entirety of the Eurasian landmass—what the former U.S. strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski called ‘the Grand Chessboard,’ and what Perry Anderson called ‘the fulcrum of world power.’

To secure spaces that had been closed to capital accumulation by the existence of socialism—and very concrete steps were taken, which can be seen over the course of history, and which accelerated with the fall of the Soviet Union, to realize those aims.

But we also see, to an extent, the effects of what that imperialist encroachment actually means for the people living in these countries.

Iskra Books also publishes a magazine called Peace, Land, and Bread. I recently published an essay there called "The Neoliberal Holocaust," which revisits the question of the mortality crisis in the former Soviet Union—where the latest research puts the figures at 17 million people who died as a result of the reinsertion of these territories into the sphere of imperialist accumulation, compared with the mortality rates and projections from the 1980s.

And these were, to a large extent, the results of an agenda imposed at the behest of the so-called ‘Washington Boys’ and the International Monetary Fund—transforming an essentially planned economy underpinned by a robust industrial base into a rent-seeking economy whose primary function is the siphoning of natural resources upward toward a new class of capitalists, and outward to Washington, London, and other Western capitals.

And that is the same agenda playing out across the entire topography of our planet.

So understanding this in the context of the former Soviet space is important because this is one of the terrains that remains highly controversial in the West—and I think cracking this particular nut will help us have a much clearer understanding of imperialism’s agenda for the world as a whole.

Now, all that said, it seems increasingly like the imperialist agenda for Russia has failed, at least for now. And it's failed, and we see that through two kinds of transformations that have started to emerge over the past few years. The first is internal—having to do with Russia’s economy. The second is external—having to do with the integration of counter-hegemonic forces, the forces of the Global South, and their increasingly improving relations with the Russian state.

I want to start with the internal transformations. Here, I’d like to turn to a quote from Samir Amin, from one of the last chapters in one of the last books he published before he passed away—on Russia—which was published about two years before the start of the SMO.

He poses a very prescient question: the extent to which Russia will be able to weather an increased economic and sanctions assault by the West will depend on the balance of class forces within its ruling class. On one hand, he identified a very powerful class of comprador elites seeking ever-closer ingratiation with Western financial capital. On the other hand, he identified a kind of national sovereignty elite that wanted greater industrial development.

It seems we now have an answer to that question. In the years since the sanctions were implemented—and this is by far the most comprehensive sanctions package in history, with over 28,000 sanctions implemented against Russia—it appears that, as in Cuba and Iran, sanctions have given rise to what Satori Muhammali and Christopher Weaver call a resistance economy. A resistance economy fosters economic diversification, technological innovation, national unity, and counter-hegemonic alliances.

Even liberal economists have been acknowledging this. Eke Freeman, a Hoover Fellow at Stanford, recently showed that the Russian people are materially better off in the past two years, and the Russian state has improved its capacity to trade with other countries—and this already accounts for inflation. Jamie Galbraith has said the sanctions appeared ‘in the nature of a gift,’ because they made transformations possible inside Russia that would have been politically untenable without isolation from Western markets, including capital controls, seizure of foreign businesses, and increases in Russian ownership relative to foreign ownership.

All of these would have been extremely difficult without sanctions. And those sanctions have also backfired on their architects—Europe is suffering a historic economic crisis caused by sharp increases in energy costs, whereas for Russia, the increases have offset the effects of decreased exports. Large parts of the Third World continue to trade with Russia—many expanding their trade.

I think I’m running out of time, but briefly, the external transformation worth mentioning is the deep reorientation of global alliances since February 2022. The most interesting are the bilateral relationships emerging between Russia and members of the anti-hegemonic bloc—strategic partnerships, military alliances, deepening economic ties with Cuba, the DPRK, Iran, Venezuela. One central effect: Russia is able to deploy its military technologies to countries under imperialist assault in ways that help them secure their sovereignty.

To conclude, all these taken together point to the emergence of a structural challenge to the system that Paris Yeros calls the late neocolonial moment—characterized by consolidation of imperialism, collapse of Bandung, and imperialism’s transition into terminal crisis. One question worth exploring is whether the internal developments in Russia have overcome the structural crises that emerged with the collapse of the Soviet Union—or whether these problems have simply been hidden from view.

I’ll end there. Thank you again.

Jeannette Graulau:

Thank you, Pawel. You have truly opened the entire geographic landscape of imperialist encroachment and the endogenous and exogenous factors that we need to take into account. Thank you for your presentation.

Now we will hear Henry Hakamäki. Please, Henry, the floor is yours.

Henry Hakamäki:

Thank you very much, Jeanette, and thank you to the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective for inviting me to speak today. It’s amazing to be part of this panel with so many brilliant comrades. I’m joining you from Kazan, in the Republic of Tatarstan, where I’ve been living, researching, and teaching.

The question of Russia today is absolutely fundamental for anyone trying to understand global politics, imperialism, and the formation of the emerging multipolar world. What I want to do in my remarks is to contribute a bit of an on-the-ground perspective—not as someone who is Russian, of course, but as someone who lives here, works here, and interacts daily with people from all walks of life.

I want to start by addressing the media narrative, particularly in the West, that Russia is supposedly ‘isolated,’ that it is ‘collapsing,’ that it is suffering some sort of terminal decline. Anyone who actually lives here—or even visits—knows that these claims are completely disconnected from reality. Russia is more economically stable, more politically unified, and more globally connected than at any point since the 1990s. Now that’s not to say there are no problems—there are actually major structural issues that I’ll touch on—but the “collapsed, isolated Russia” narrative is simply fantasy.

Let me begin with a point I make often: The war did not begin in 2022. The war began in 2014. The Special Military Operation (SMO) was not the start of the conflict but an escalation of an already ongoing war—one initiated by the United States through the Maidan coup and its installation of an openly anti-Russian, ultranationalist regime in Kyiv.

This framing is absolutely essential. It’s not Russia that ‘invaded Ukraine’ out of nowhere. It is Russia that finally responded—eight years later—to a conflict that had already claimed thousands of lives, mostly ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers in the Donbas. When I talk to students here, even those who are critical of the government, this point is universally understood. There is broad consensus that Russia was pushed into a corner—economically, militarily, culturally—and that the West left it with no option but to respond.

Now, let me talk about sanctions, because this is another area where the Western narrative is wildly distorted. If you believed Western media in March 2022, Russia was supposed to collapse within weeks. We were told the ruble would become ‘rubble’ that stores would empty, that society would unravel. None of that happened.

Instead, as Paweł just discussed, sanctions triggered what is widely described here as a period of forced modernization. Let me give you a few very concrete examples:

• Foreign companies left—but Russians immediately replaced them with domestic or Eurasian alternatives. McDonald’s left; within weeks ‘Vkusno i Tochka’ opened in exactly the same locations, with nearly identical menus, often with higher salaries for workers.
• Agriculture exploded. Russia is now one of the world’s leading grain exporters and is self-sufficient in key food categories. The Soviet Union, remember, was historically food-import dependent.
• Industry is shifting. I’ve visited factories in Tatarstan that have completely retooled supply chains away from Western parts toward Turkish, Iranian, Chinese, and domestic manufacturers.
• Import substitution is real this time. People often joke that Russia has announced import substitution every decade since the 1990s without doing it. But after 2022, they actually did it—because they had no choice.

But here’s the most important point I want to make about sanctions: sanctions unified society. Before 2022, Russia had profound political divides. Many people distrusted the government, not because they were ‘pro-Western liberals,’ but because neoliberal reforms of the 1990s and 2000s had eroded trust in the state’s commitment to social welfare. But after the SMO and after sanctions, people saw the West attacking not the government, but them, their families, their history, their identity.

You cannot underestimate how deep this shift is. I speak to students every day who are 18, 19, 20 years old—people who grew up entirely in the post-Soviet era, who never experienced the USSR. Many of them were not patriotic at all before the SMO. Now they are deeply committed to defending their country—not because they love Putin, but because they feel they are defending their existence as a people.

Now I want to turn to a point that is extremely misunderstood in the West: Russia is not an imperialist country. This should be obvious to anyone who uses a Marxist understanding of imperialism—Lenin’s definition [is] fundamentally centered on monopoly capital, finance capital, export of capital, and control over dependent peripheries.

But Russia does not export capital in any imperialist sense. It does not rely on neo-colonial extraction. It is not plundering the Global South. It is not imposing structural adjustment policies. It is not dictating economic terms to weaker nations. In fact, one of the greatest ironies of the present moment is that Russia’s major geopolitical partners are precisely those countries most targeted by imperialism: Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, DPRK, [and] several African nations.

These relationships are not exploitative; they are based on mutual survival in the face of the U.S.-led imperialist system. One last point before I wrap up: much like the USSR, modern Russia is deeply multi-ethnic. This is incredibly important for understanding Russian society. I live in Tatarstan. My students are Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvash, Russians, Uzbeks, Tuvans, Armenians, Chechens—sometimes in the same classroom. Russia’s stability comes not from Russification but from a highly complex system of negotiated multicultural statehood that the West completely misunderstands.

The idea—promoted heavily in Western media—that ethnic minorities hate Russia or are being ‘used as cannon fodder’ is deeply offensive to people here and completely out of touch with reality. In many regions, minority nationalities are more supportive of the SMO than ethnic Russians, precisely because they have stronger collective memories of fighting fascism, colonialism, and imperialism.

Let me close with this: Russia today is not the Russia of the 1990s. It is not a collapsed post-Soviet state. It is a rising, self-confident, increasingly sovereign pole in the emerging multipolar world.

There are enormous contradictions—yes.

There are major capitalist elements—yes.

There are internal struggles over economic direction—yes.

But there is also a deep, broad, society-wide understanding that the struggle against Western imperialism is existential. And that changes everything.

Thank you.

Jeannette Graulau:

Thank you, Henry. You directly ruptured what I would call the ‘two-dimensional representation of Russia’ in Western media and provided us insights into contradictions and political processes unfolding within Russian society. Thank you for this contribution.

Now we will hear from Professor Radhika Desai. Professor Desai, you have the floor.

Radhika Desai:

Thank you so much, Jeanette. And thank you to the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be among such distinguished panelists and to discuss such an important subject. And thank you, Paweł and Henry, for your excellent presentations, which have already laid out so many of the analytical foundations that frame this discussion.

I want to begin by reiterating something both of them have already said but that cannot be emphasized enough: the conflict in Ukraine did not begin in 2022. It began in 2014—and in a broader historical sense, even earlier.

To truly understand Russia today, we must understand the long arc of U.S. and Western strategy toward Russia, which stretches back to at least the late 1990s, if not earlier, and is rooted in the logic of U.S. unipolarity.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States believed, quite literally, that ‘history had ended,’ that capitalism had triumphed, that neoliberalism had no alternative, that the U.S. could reshape the world according to its own interests.

It saw Russia not as a potential partner, not even as a defeated rival, but as a vast territory to be absorbed, dismantled, and subordinated. And so, as Paweł rightly referenced, Russia was subjected to the most vicious neoliberal shock therapy, resulting in the greatest peacetime demographic collapse in recorded history. Seventeen million excess deaths—this number needs to be repeated again and again, because you will never hear it in Western scholarship.

The West expected this to continue indefinitely. It expected Russia to remain weak, fractured, and dependent. But Russians did something unexpected: they resisted. Not in the romanticized sense of some heroic revolutionary upsurge, but in the real, material sense of rebuilding an economy, rebuilding a state, and rebuilding a sense of national purpose. And this is, I think, one of the greatest unspoken truths of our time.

When Western analysts talk about the ‘Russian threat,’ they are not talking about a military threat or an ideological threat. What they fear is that Russia represents a viable alternative to Western neoliberalism—a model of state-led development, state sovereignty, and social stability that many countries in the Global South are increasingly drawn to.

Now, on the subject of imperialism, let me be absolutely clear: Russia is not an imperialist country. That point has been made, but I want to situate it historically.

Lenin defined imperialism as the monopoly stage of capitalism, characterized by: (1) concentration of production and capital; (2) merging of bank capital with industrial capital; (3) export of capital; (4) formation of monopolies and international cartels; (5) territorial division of the world among great powers.

Not one of these applies to Russia today. Russia does not export capital. It is not integrated into the Western-controlled financial system. It does not control global value chains. It does not impose structural adjustment policies. It does not maintain dependent peripheries. If anything, Russia is a victim of imperialism—economically strangled, militarily encircled, ideologically demonized.

To call Russia ‘imperialist’ is absurd.

Moreover—and this is even more fundamental—modern imperialism is not simply competition among national capitals. It is centered around the U.S. dollar system, around control over global finance, global institutions, global supply chains, and global military bases.

Russia is excluded from, and actively resisting, this system. So again: by any Marxist measure, Russia is not imperialist.

Now, on the question of sanctions—this is where things become even more interesting, because sanctions are the West’s preferred weapon for enforcing imperial discipline. And Russia is the most heavily sanctioned country in world history. More sanctions have been imposed on Russia in the last two years than on Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela combined—many times over.

And yet—Russia has not collapsed. Quite the contrary: Russia has achieved something that only a handful of countries in the world have ever managed—it has partially delinked from the U.S.-dominated financial system.

Delinking is a concept Samir Amin emphasized repeatedly. It does not mean autarky. It means development oriented toward domestic needs, not external demands. It means freeing oneself from the tyranny of the dollar system. And Russia is doing exactly that. Let me give a few examples:

• Russia now conducts the majority of its trade with China in yuan and rubles, not dollars.
• Russia has developed alternative payment systems.
• Russia has rebuilt industrial capacity that had been outsourced or dismantled in the 1990s.
• Russia has deepened economic integration with BRICS, the Eurasian Economic Union, Iran, India, and much of Africa.

Sanctions were supposed to crush Russia. Instead, they accelerated financial multipolarity.

Moving to the geopolitical aspect: the West believed Russia could be isolated. But what has happened? Russia’s partnerships have expanded dramatically—not just with China, but with countries across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.

The entire Global South sees what is happening. They see that the West’s goal is not ‘democracy’ or ‘human rights,’ but the destruction of sovereignty. And they see Russia—and increasingly China—as forces resisting that destruction. This brings me to a central point: the conflict in Ukraine is not a regional war or a border dispute. It is a confrontation between imperialism and the emerging multipolar world. Ukraine is simply the terrain on which this confrontation is taking place.

The West’s goal is not to defend Ukraine—the West has sacrificed Ukraine. The goal is to crush Russia. Why? Because Russia stands in the way of American unipolarity. Because Russia refuses to become a vassal. Because Russia rejects neoliberalism. Because Russia is forming alliances with the Global South that undermine Western hegemony.

And so, the United States and its European partners have pursued a strategy of escalating confrontation—militarily, economically, ideologically. But—and this is extremely important—they are failing. Economically, Europe is in [a] profound crisis. Its deindustrialization is accelerating. Its energy costs are unsustainable. Politically, its governments are collapsing one after another. Socially, it is being torn apart by austerity and xenophobia.

Meanwhile, Russia is gaining confidence, gaining partners, and gaining strategic depth.

I want to conclude with the following thought: what we are witnessing is not simply a conflict between Russia and the West, but the beginning of the end of the neoliberal world order. For decades, the United States believed it could encircle, sanction, and destabilize any country that resisted its domination. But Russia—like Cuba, like Iran, like Venezuela, like China—has shown that resistance is possible, and that the era of unilateral imperialism is drawing to a close.

This has profound implications — not only for Russia, not only for Ukraine, but for the entire world. And it places upon us, as scholars and activists, an enormous responsibility: to understand these changes rigorously, to challenge the ideological distortions of Western academia, and to contribute to the global struggle for a more just and multipolar world.

Thank you so much. And sorry if I took a bit longer.

Jeannette Graulau:

Thank you, Professor Desai. You have expanded the theoretical horizons of how we must situate the Russian question in the longue durée of imperialism, financial hegemony, and multipolar transition.

We now turn to Professor Andrey Ivanovich Kolganov. Professor, the floor is yours.

Andrey Ivanovich Kolganov:

Differences, I must stress, do exist between the Soviet period and the present period in Russia, but the deeper structural forces shaping Russia’s place in the world economy—and the forces acting on Russia from the outside—remain highly relevant to understanding Russia today.

Let me begin with a point that has already been made by Paweł, Henry, and Radhika, but which is absolutely central for anyone trying to grasp Russia’s position: Russia is not, in any meaningful sense, an imperialist country.

Some people in the West, and even some so-called ‘Leftists,’ repeat the claim that Russia is imperialist simply because it is a large country, simply because it has military power, or simply because it asserts its sovereignty.

But this is a complete misunderstanding of what imperialism is. And it reflects a broader trend, particularly in Western academic circles, of replacing serious analysis with moralistic judgments. If we want to understand imperialism scientifically, we must turn to the Marxist tradition—Lenin, Bukharin, and also to contemporary scholars like Samir Amin. And from this point of view, Russia does not fit the definition of an imperialist power.

Let me explain why.

First, Russia does not export capital in the way imperialist countries do. Yes, Russian companies sometimes invest abroad, but this is nothing like the systematic, global export of capital by the United States, Britain, or even Germany. Russia does not dominate international financial institutions. Russia does not impose structural adjustment programs. Russia does not form monopolistic international cartels. Russia does not dictate the economic policy of other countries.

Second, Russia is not a center of global finance. It does not control the dollar system. It does not issue a global reserve currency. It does not use its financial institutions to shape the politics of other countries.

Third, Russia is itself the target of imperialist aggression. Russia is surrounded by NATO bases. Russia is sanctioned. Russia is subjected to constant economic warfare. Russia is the object of an imperialist strategy—not the subject of one.

Now, if Russia is not imperialist, what is Russia? This is a more complex question, because Russia is not a socialist country, nor is it fully capitalist in the Western sense. It occupies a very particular position in the world system—as a large, resource-rich, semi-peripheral country with significant industrial capacity and an increasingly autonomous geopolitical orientation.

To put it differently: Russia is a country that capitalism has not been able to fully colonize.

And this, I believe, is the real reason behind the relentless hostility of the United States and the European Union. They cannot tolerate a country of Russia’s size—a country with nuclear weapons, with vast natural resources, with technological capabilities—existing outside of their control.

Now let me turn to the impact of sanctions. The Western expectation was that Russia would collapse. They predicted a decline in GDP of 10%, 15%, even 20%. They predicted mass unemployment, hyperinflation, [and] political instability. They predicted—as they always do—regime change.

But what happened? Russia’s economy contracted by a few percentage points and then rebounded. Industrial output has grown. Unemployment is at a historic low. Wages have increased. Inflation is under control. The State has imposed capital controls, supported key industries, and reoriented trade away from the West. Why did sanctions fail? There are several reasons.

First, Russia is a resource-independent country. It produces its own energy, its own food, and many of its own industrial inputs. It is not dependent on Western imports in the way smaller countries are.

Second, Russia has alternative partners. China, India, Iran, Türkiye, Central Asia, Africa, Latin America—all of these regions have expanded economic ties with Russia. Western attempts to isolate Russia have isolated the West instead.

Third, sanctions forced something that Russian economists have been demanding for decades — the reindustrialization of Russia. Many industries that had been dependent on Western imports—machinery, electronics, chemicals—have been revitalized. These processes are uneven, but they are real.

Fourth, sanctions destroyed the political influence of the comprador bourgeoisie—the section of the Russian elite that was oriented toward the West, kept its money in London, bought property in France, and used Western institutions as instruments of class power. With their assets seized and travel restricted, their political weight has dramatically decreased. This has strengthened the position of what Samir Amin called the ‘national bourgeoisie’—those sections of the elite that support sovereignty, industrialization, and State-led development.

Now let me say a few words about society. One of the most significant effects of sanctions and the Special Military Operation (SMO) has been the consolidation of the Russian people. We have seen levels of political unity not present since at least the early 2000s—arguably since the late Soviet period.

Western analysts cannot understand this. They cannot understand why sanctions, which were supposed to cause unrest, instead produced unity. They cannot understand why Russian society did not fracture, why people did not revolt, why the government did not collapse. The reason is simple: Russians understand that this is a war for national survival. They understand that the West is not attacking the government, but Russia itself.

Let me conclude by addressing the broader global context. The conflict in Ukraine is not a conflict between Russia and Ukraine. It is a conflict between Russia and NATO, between a sovereign state and an imperialist alliance, between a multipolar world and a unipolar one.

Russia today stands at the forefront of a global struggle for a more just world order. Whether we speak of economic integration with China, military cooperation with Iran, diplomatic initiatives in Africa, or participation in BRICS—all of these point to the emergence of a world in which the domination of the United States is no longer uncontested.

Russia is not perfect. Russia has internal contradictions, social inequalities, political limits. But Russia is playing a progressive role in the world today—not because of its internal system, but because of its external position in the global struggle against imperialism.

The task of scholars, particularly scholars on the left, is to analyze these dynamics objectively, without moralism, without ideological bias, and without succumbing to the Russophobia that has infected so much of Western academic discourse.

We must understand the real forces shaping the world today, and in doing so, contribute to a broader anti-imperialist movement that is emerging across continents.

Thank you very much.

Jeannette Graulau:

Thank you, Professor Kolganov. You have expanded the theoretical foundations and posed clear arguments about Russia’s position in the world economy and in the broader anti-imperialist struggle.

We now turn to Professor Arto Artinian. Professor, the floor is yours.

Arto Artinian:

Thank you, Jeanette, and thank you to the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective for organizing this important and timely discussion. It is a privilege to be here with all of you. I want to speak not only as a political scientist, but also as someone who has spent decades studying the Soviet Union, Russian political development, and the historical forces that shape Eurasia.

I would like to begin by posing a simple but fundamental question: What is Russia fighting for? Western commentators say Russia is fighting for ‘Empire.’ Others claim it is fighting for ‘Putin’s ego,’ or to ‘restore the USSR,’ or to expand territory. These ideas are absurd. They reveal nothing about Russia and everything about the ideological atmosphere of the West, where Russophobia has replaced analysis.

If we want to understand Russia’s actions, we must look at history—not propaganda.

For at least 300 years, Russia’s security has depended on preventing hostile powers from establishing military footholds on its borders. Napoleon understood this. Hitler understood this. The architects of the British and American empires understood this. Russia is a vast country with long borders and no natural defensive terrain in the West. Its entire historical experience has been shaped by invasions coming from Europe.

So when NATO expanded to Russia’s borders—after explicitly promising it would not—this was experienced not as ‘geopolitical competition,’ but as an existential threat. For Russia, NATO’s presence in Ukraine is not hypothetical. It is immediate. It is material. It is military. This point cannot be overemphasized.

Let me add something else that is rarely discussed in Western political science: Russia is a civilizational state. This is not a nationalist concept. It is a sociological one. Russia contains dozens of ethnicities, languages, and religions; it spans continents; it has multiple historical traditions; and its political institutions have evolved to accommodate this complexity.

Where the West sees ‘authoritarianism,’ Russia sees a form of statehood capable of managing diversity and maintaining stability across a landmass larger than the surface of the Moon.

Now, on the question of the Special Military Operation (SMO). Many Western analysts insist that the SMO is irrational, a reckless act of aggression. But if you examine Russia’s security doctrine, its diplomatic initiatives from 1991 to 2022, and its repeated attempts to negotiate a neutral Ukraine, a very different picture emerges.

Russia made every possible diplomatic effort to avoid war:

• It asked for written guarantees that Ukraine would not join NATO.
• It proposed a new European security architecture.
• It sought implementation of the Minsk Agreements.
• It negotiated directly with the United States.

Every proposal was rejected. Every red line was crossed. Every attempt at peaceful resolution was sabotaged—often by the same Western powers that now accuse Russia of being ‘anti-diplomatic.’

When a country is faced with a combination of military encirclement, political subversion, and cultural aggression, it must eventually choose between submission and resistance. Russia chose resistance.

Let me turn now to internal dynamics. The Western view of Russia is frozen in the 1990s—a chaotic, impoverished, politically unstable country. But that Russia no longer exists. The Russia of 2024 is confident, economically resilient, socially cohesive, and increasingly sovereign. Sanctions, paradoxically, have accelerated this transformation.

I want to focus on one area where this is most visible: political legitimacy. The West expected sanctions to destabilize Russia. Instead, they have delegitimized the West in the eyes of ordinary Russians. People who were previously indifferent to politics or skeptical of the government now see clearly that the West is not opposed to Putin—it is opposed to Russia. This distinction is absolutely crucial.

The SMO has produced a new political consensus in Russia, one grounded not in ideology but in the felt experience of defending the country from external aggression. This is why the Western dream of a ‘Russian Maidan’ is delusional. Russia has been through its Maidan—in 1991 and 1993. Russians remember the catastrophic consequences. They will not repeat them.

Let me now address the cultural dimension, which is often overlooked.

One of the greatest misunderstandings in Western analysis is the assumption that Russian culture is increasingly nationalist or xenophobic. This is wrong. Russia is not rejecting the West because it hates liberalism; Russia is turning away from the West because the West has become imperial, decadent, and hostile.

The ideological landscape of Russia is much more complex than Western media suggests:

• There are conservatives who support the SMO.
• There are leftists who support the SMO.
• There are liberals who support the SMO.
• And there are people who criticize the government, but still support the SMO, because they see it as a defense of national sovereignty.

The ideological spectrum is diverse, but the national consensus is strong.

Lastly, I want to speak about the global implications. The SMO has accelerated the crisis of the Western imperial order. For the first time since 1945, a major non-Western power is confronting the United States directly — and not only surviving, but reshaping world politics.

Russia’s partnerships with China, India, Iran, and many African states are not temporary alliances. They are part of a deeper structural shift toward a multipolar world. And this shift is irreversible.

In my view, the West is experiencing not just a geopolitical decline but a civilizational one. Its institutions are decaying. Its elites are incompetent. Its societies are fragmented. Its political systems are paralyzed. Its ideological hegemony is collapsing.

Russia is not fighting for empire or expansion. Russia is fighting for a world in which it can exist without being subordinated—a world in which sovereignty is respected, cultures are preserved, and nations are not forced to conform to the dictates of Washington, London, or Brussels.

And for that reason, Russia today is playing a progressive role in global history.

Thank you.

Jeannette Graulau: Thank you, Professor Arto Artinian, for situating Russia’s struggle within the longue durée of civilizational development, geopolitical encirclement, and the crisis of Western hegemony.

I know we are running short on time, but before we close, I want to pose a final question to the panel—one that arises often in our classrooms and organizing spaces.

Given the profound ideological distortions we confront today—around Russia, around imperialism, around global struggle—what guidance would you offer to students and young scholars trying to understand this moment? What intellectual tools, what political sensibilities, what historical anchors do they need?

I invite each of our speakers to offer a brief reflection before we turn to Professor Mullin for our concluding remarks.

Paweł Wargan:

Thank you, Jeanette. What I would say to young scholars is: do not begin from Western narratives. Begin from the material world. Begin from the history of imperialism, from the lived experiences of people in the Global South, from the long lineage of anti-colonial thought.

The Western academy has become, frankly, hostile to critical thought. It rewards moralism and punishes structural analysis. So develop your own intellectual independence. Read widely. And most importantly: anchor your understanding of Russia—or any geopolitical question—in the global struggle against imperialism. That is the thread that ties everything together.

Henry Hakamäki:

Building on Paweł’s point, I would encourage young people to cultivate humility—the willingness to learn from people outside the West and outside academia. When I teach here in Tatarstan, I learn more from my students than from most Western “experts.”

Talk to people. Listen to them. Don’t assume that the Western perspective is universal—it is not. And also: do not be afraid to take positions that challenge dominant narratives. Being anti-imperialist is not fashionable in the West, but it is necessary if you care about truth and justice.

Radhika Desai:

My advice is to situate everything in the long history of imperialism. Imperialism is not an event—it is a structure, a world system, a set of relations anchored in finance, production, and military power.

If you understand imperialism, you will understand why Russia is being targeted, why China is rising, why the Global South is asserting new forms of sovereignty. And do not fall into the trap of thinking that imperialism is ‘old-fashioned.’

It is more central today than ever. Lenin is not outdated—he is indispensable. And finally: remain intellectually rigorous. Reject moralistic frameworks that reduce complex geopolitical struggles to caricatures of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’

Andrey Ivanovich Kolganov:

I would add that young scholars must learn to think dialectically. The world is not static. Contradictions shape everything. What looks like weakness in one moment becomes strength in another.

Sanctions intended to destroy Russia instead strengthened it. Attempts to isolate Russia isolated the West. These are dialectical reversals—and you cannot make sense of them without a dialectical method.

Also: understand that knowledge is not neutral. Analysis is political. You must choose whether your work contributes to imperial power or to the liberation of peoples. That choice cannot be avoided.

Arto Artinian:

My message is simple: study history. Study Soviet history, study Eurasian history, study the history of NATO, study colonialism. Western narratives rely on historical amnesia. They erase context in order to invent accusations.

Be suspicious of frameworks that present Russia as uniquely dangerous or irrational. These are not scholarly claims—they are ideological weapons.

Remember that Russia is not only a state; it is a civilization with centuries of experience resisting imperial domination. If you understand that history, you will understand the present.

Jeannette Graulau:

Thank you, all of you, for these deep reflections. It is now my honor to invite Professor Corinna Mullin to offer closing remarks.

Corinna Mullin:

Thank you, Professor Jeanette. And thank you to all of our speakers today—Paweł Wargan, Henry Hakamäki, professors Radhika Desai, Andrey Ivanovich Kolganov and Arto Artinian—for a truly enlightening discussion and for helping us cut through the suffocating fog of Russophobic propaganda that dominates public discourse.

Also, on behalf of the collective—the AISC—I want to extend thanks as well to the audience, and to our amazing moderator, Jeanette. And to all the panelists for your invaluable time and profound insights. To the audience—thank you for the fantastic, engaged participation and questions. And also to Suzanne for setting up the webinar and providing crucial technical support and making the event possible.

This roundtable has shown us that to understand Russia today, we must locate it within the longue durée of imperialism, uneven development, and multipolar transition. This historical lens that you’ve all provided reveals our current critical moment not as an isolated event, but as the latest chapter in this history of Western imperialist encroachment on what Pawel described as the grand chessboard of Eurasia—a project decades in the making. As Pawel pointed out, Western imperialism sought to transform a planned economy into a rent-seeking economy, leading to a devastating neoliberal holocaust—but it was not successful. And I think that’s what you all have conveyed as well: that it triggered a powerful dialectical reversal.

The sanctions intended to inflict economic strangulation have backfired—acting, as was said, almost as a gift that birthed this resistance economy, forcing a strategic break from what Henry called the silent, systematic engine of plunder—the system of unequal exchange.

Our panelists collectively refuted the notion of a ‘new Russian imperialism,’ grounding their arguments in history. And, as Radhika powerfully summarized, what we have here is a direct opposition between imperialist and anti-imperialist forces.

And all of this brings to mind our comrade Fidel Castro, who described our task as a ceaseless ideological battle against that extremely powerful empire—U.S. imperialism—a battle we must wage, he said, fully confident in our ideas.

So I want to thank you all for contributing so powerfully to this battle, and for helping us move forward with the historical clarity and theoretical rigor that we need more than ever in this moment.

So, without further ado, I just want to encourage you all to follow the work of our AISC blog. This roundtable, in fact, emerged from an incredibly rich special issue that Jeanette Graulau edited on Russia Today. Please have a look at that and all of our other issues. The blog is called The Pen is my Machete.

Please also follow our podcasts and future roundtables; follow us on Instagram and on Twitter so that you can continue to contribute to, and follow, this important battle of ideas.

And I want to thank you all again for attending, and we hope to see you again in the near future.

Thank you.

Jeannette Graulau:

Thank you, Corinna. And thank you all for joining us. This concludes our roundtable.