Crisis 22

Imperialism & Colonialism

War & Punishment - Spheres of Influence

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March 2025

War & Punishment

While some Russian writers, like Bulgakov and Chekhov, stood up to injustice and autocracy, many have done the opposite. Examining these latter gives us an insight into how deeply autocracy, empire, and a sense of Russian superiority are engrained in Russian culture. In his wonderfully titled book, War and Punishment (2023), Mikhail Zygar notes the cause-and-effect relation between many — though not all — Russian writers and the present war:

Many Russian writers and historians are complicit in facilitating this war. It is their words and thoughts over the past 350 years that sowed the seeds of Russian fascism and allowed it to flourish, although many would be horrified today to see the fruits of their labor. We failed to spot just how deadly the very idea of Russia as a “great empire” was. (Of course, any “empire” is evil, but let different historians judge other empires.) We overlooked the fact that, for many centuries, “great Russian culture” belittled other countries and peoples, suppressed and destroyed them.

In Crisis 22 I’ll try to confront what Zygar puts into parentheses here: the fact that Russia isn’t alone in its imperialism. Yet my starting point is Russia and the Russian writers who ❧ explore this imperial current, ❧ show us how difficult it is to oppose this current, and ❧ show us how easy it is to add to this current’s strength. My working hypothesis is that the great Russian writers, whether they’re for or against empire, help us to contextualize, expand, and deepen our understanding of the relation of politics to culture and history — especially in Russia but also around the world.

My exploration of the Ukraine crisis also uses postcolonial literature to make arguments against imperialism. This includes countering the Kremlin’s specific and contradictory claims to ❧ have the right to control other countries and ❧ be a champion of the Global South against countries who aim to control it — like Russia aims to control Ukraine!

The Kremlin’s war against Ukraine and the West is a hybrid one. One part of its strategy is an appeal to nations such as India, South Africa, Brazil, and Indonesia. If the Kremlin can convince these nations that the West is the real problem, then it’s more likely to take Ukrainian land without suffering economic or diplomatic consequences. Yet how can a government that represses its own people and attacks its neighbours be a model for a post-colonial, post-imperial world?

Novels such as The Quiet American and The Year of Living Dangerously explore the previous Cold War situation, and help us see that the Kremlin is rehashing aspects of its previous Soviet propaganda in order to justify its war today. The key difference here is that communism had a rationale about exploitation and the common worker, however idealistic in theory and distorted in practice.

Invading Ukraine has no such ideal or rationale. The notion that Russia is liberating Ukraine is repeated over and over by the Kremlin, but only deluded people outside Russia take this seriously. This isn’t to say that the West is somehow perfect, or that in the past it didn’t act like Russia is acting now. This is why I bring in The Quiet American and The Year of Living Dangerously. These two novels help us see that while the West held up the ideals of democracy, it often violated its own ideals. For instance, The Quiet American takes direct aim at both France and the US, two countries that bombed the Vietnamese brutally in a vain attempt to control them. It’s also hard to accept the recent actions of the Americans: in 2003 they invaded and ripped apart Iraq even though the UN and the majority of Western nations saw this as a catastrophic error; in early 2025 the American president repeatedly threatened to annex Greenland and Canada; even more to the point, the Trump administration has in many ways gone along with the Russian narrative that Russia isn’t to blame for invading and bombing Ukraine.

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Spheres of Influence

I would argue that in order to fight imperialism, it’s also necessary to fight the notion of spheres of influence. Russia doesn’t have a special claim over — let alone a right to take over — Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, the Baltic States, Kazakhstan, etc. Nor does China have a right to take over Taiwan just because it falls within its historical definition of China. Nor does the United States have the right to take over Canada, Mexico, Panama, or Greenland. As a Canadian, I can only hope that the days of Manifest Destiny are behind us.

In a podcast episode from December 20, 2024, Francis Dearnley argues that balance of power leads to spheres of influence, which leads to dictatorship:

I stumbled across a Woodrow Wilson quote last week which got me thinking. He said in 1917, when trying to lay the foundations for the League of Nations,

Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be not a balance of power but a community of power. Not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.

[…] Power in and of itself does not make right; […] there are higher values which should be upheld and defended, not because they're culturally or intellectually superior, but because history has shown them to be more pragmatically auspicious to humanity, and what most people would choose if they were given a fair choice: a more democratic world under a rule of law.

What I find so staggering at this moment is how many supposedly clever people in the West have seemingly abandoned that idea and speak now only in the language of power and the balance of power. Because if you do that, you concede so much ground to those who fundamentally seek to destroy you.

For once you permit the idea of balance of power alone, you permit the idea of spheres of influence. And once you concede that, as we've seen with Ukraine, then you find yourself willing to accept that millions of people should live their lives in bondage, at the whim of a dictator, because it's within his sphere, because that's what the balance of power dictates. We tend to not follow the logic all the way through to the end, but when you do, you see, I would argue, how corrosive that mentality can be ...

I highly recommend the podcast from which this excerpt comes: Ukraine: The Latest. This podcast deals with ❧ military tactics & strategy, ❧ geopolitics & economics, and ❧ psychology, culture, & art. Through the serious (and at times humorous) discussions and interviews by Dom and Francis, we’re given hard facts as well as personal, humane, personalized takes on the conflict. We learn about geopolitics but we also face war culturally, in a way that puts muscle and flesh back on the bones. This podcast unambiguously opposes the imperialistic destruction of Ukraine and its people, and it also helps turn the horror of this war into a diverse understanding — something I hope to do in Crisis 22.

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Next: 🌏 Pushkin’s Brethren

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