The Russian ‘Opposition’: Hidden Messages of Russian Neo-Imperialism

Recently, I came across a post by Mikhail Khodorkovsky on Facebook, which is worth quoting in full:

“The militarisation of Europe, culminating in the war in Ukraine, clearly shows that Putin simply invented the military threat from NATO. For example, in the period after the Cold War, the number of tanks in service in European countries fell from 19,000 to just over 4,000, and combat aircraft from 3,500 to 1,500. A significant portion of the weapons systems currently at the disposal of European armies was developed and produced before 1990, after the end of the Cold War.

European NATO forces have largely lost their military potential. Despite its eastward expansion and the admission of new members from the former socialist bloc, NATO in Europe has become weaker in absolute terms and in terms of its share of defence spending. Until the start of the war against Ukraine, NATO in Europe did not pose a real threat and relied on American money, weapons and troops.

After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, NATO revised its approach. The war resulted in the physical expansion of NATO to include Sweden and Finland, a dramatic increase in defence spending and a move towards a single European army. In other words, the result of Putin’s opposition to NATO is that the Alliance will now be stronger and will in fact be directed against Russia. That’s how the game is played. That’s how Putin outplayed everyone”.

Khodorkovsky’s opinion on NATO expansion and the ‘game’ that has become traditional for Putin is very interesting. Russian liberals are probably not revealing anything new from the old manuals, and Khodorkovsky’s speech confirms that the Russian ‘opposition’ is, in fact, a pocket device for Putin’s regime and a tool for continuing Russia’s neo-imperialist policy and supporting colonialism both within the state (with regard to those countries that are still forcibly part of the Russian Federation) and in relation to territories that have been seized as a result of Russia’s armed wars in the 21st century.

In fact, when Khodorkovsky criticises Putin and even calls the invasion of Ukraine an ‘invasion of Ukraine’, the average citizen may think that he really does hold an anti-Putin position and is truly an example of an opposition figure without quotation marks.

However, while anti-Putin rhetoric may be present in Khodorkovsky’s speech, it is unlikely that such a speech could indicate that Khodorkovsky and his like-minded colleagues have even minimally changed their imperialist vision of the future Russian state they dream of, which would be a ‘new Russia without Putin’ or simply ‘old Russia, but without Putin.’

This entire speech is destroyed by the last sentence, which few people may notice because it concludes the video and is drowned out by the mass of statistical information and other arguments presented by Khodorkovsky. The point is that NATO used to be weak, but Putin, being a fool, expanded it, thus ‘awakening the sleeping beast.’ And if previously, without Putin, NATO was weak and did not pose a ‘threat to the Russian people,’ today NATO is indeed an aggressor against Russia, and ‘the Russian people must defend themselves against this aggressor.’

What a subtle and hidden instrument of imperialism can be read in this message… Khodorkovsky is trying to kill not two, but even more birds with one stone:

• by branding Putin as a failed politician;
• by demeaning his status as a strategist;
• by shifting all responsibility onto Putin for awakening the ‘aggressive NATO bloc,’ which had not been aggressive for the past decades.

And most importantly, according to Khodorkovsky, NATO is now the main threat to all Russians. This means that every Russian must contribute every last penny to fill the military budgets and protect ‘Mother Russia’ from the aggressive, predatory NATO bloc, which was awakened by ‘the failed Putin.’

The main message of this text is that the neoliberal opposition is very subtly turning into the same dragon that exists today in the form of Putin’s regime. And in fact, in order to win the love of the Russian population, which has already been pampered and raised in the context of the ‘external enemy’ doctrine (which is the main threat to every Russian man), Khodorkovsky uses the same tools. And quite successfully — in order to demonstrate, on the one hand, that Putin’s regime is unsuccessful not because it started a war against a neighbouring state, but because it did not win it, and at the same time awakened ‘monsters on the borders of the Russian Empire’. And only the opposition, he says, “knows how to counter this monster (if it takes the lead of the Russian government structures, of course)”, which ‘already exists today’ and ‘threatens every Russian.’