The Foreclosure of Continuing Old Exploitation in a New Form: Invoking the Specter of Soviet Anti-Imperialism in the 21st Century Abstract

• In Event: Left Perspectives on State- and Post-Socialism II: Ghosts of Revolution: Post-Soviet Resentment and the Rise of the Right

Abstract

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the question of whether the Soviet Union was a bastion of anti-imperialism or the successor to the Russian Empire, the “prison of peoples,” has become urgent. Vladimir Putin himself has stated that “everybody remembers our specific aid to African countries in the struggle for their liberation…during the Soviet era,” and that the USSR always had “lots of sympathy for the fight of African-Americans for their natural rights.” On the other hand, the war has called the USSR’s alleged commitment to decolonization into question by highlighting continuities between Soviet and Russian policy culminating in the Russian invasions of Georgia and Ukraine. Rather than reducing Soviet engagement with the colonized world to this binary, in this paper I will bring to the fore a forgotten history of a Soviet anti-imperialist discourse which itself emerged from Bolsheviks’ critiques of the legacy of Russian imperialism in Central Asia and the Caucasus, and especially their critique of failures by early Soviet institutions to address ongoing Russian supremacy in these regions. By foregrounding this oppositional tendency, deliberately suppressed by Stalin’s purges and exclusion from Soviet historiography, we can recover an emancipatory fragment of anti-imperialist discourse which is irreducible to both Putin’s current project of coalescing a geopolitical bloc around opposition to the West (which has nothing to do with addressing class inequality, either in Russia or the Global South), and to a cynical reading of Soviet anti-imperialist discourse as a mere mask for ongoing Russian imperial aspirations.

Author

• Alex Jackson, Harvard U