*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

In the wake of Russia’s 1996 presidential election and amidst murmurs in some Russian quarters in opposition to continued democratization, it was suggested that the country again faced a choice between repeating past historical blunders and a new path (Elyassi, 1997). Twenty-five years on, the wrong choice may have been made for the Russian people. Putin’s 2022 attack on Ukraine betrays a duplicitous political mindset and will reflect badly on Russia. Negating Ukraine’s independence on the grounds that it used to be under Tsarist and Soviet domination not only shows double-standards, it denies the right to statehood of many UN nation-states and supposes their re-colonization. Closer to home, it can legitimize separatist movements within the Russian Federation, a barely one hundred-year superstate of reluctant nations some with much older and richer histories and little cultural affinity with Russia.

In this age of international economic and technological competition, Putin’s ambition to achieve national grandeur by territorial conquest is anachronistic especially for a country the size of Russia. And his yearning for Russia’s past, if not intended to divert attentions from a corrupt and authoritarian rule, points to jingoistic historical fantasy. Because Russia’s political history over the past two centuries is the tragic story of missed opportunities of a nation whose immense potentials to join the ranks of advanced countries have been ruined by vainglorious, incompetent and often suppressive rulers.

Having emerged wounded, but victorious from the Napoleonic wars, Tsarist Russia was invited by European powers to decide the future of the continent, but without any understanding of the political realities of the age. During the following few decades, Western states were pursuing industrialization to bring their nations out of the feudal-mercantile age into the age of modern capitalism. In the process, they embarked on intensive colonization to meet the need of their economies for raw materials and markets (Blaut, 1989). Feudal Russia joined the fray but with an obsolete mentality. It waged wars of conquest against weaker neighbors to build a white elephant of an empire with no organic connection with the domestic economy. Tsarist imperial expansionism inflated the ego and paid for the extravagant lifestyle of the ruling elite and supported a top-heavy giant of an army. The cost was imposed on a nation of serfs.

Not for the last time in Russia’s history, the giant proved to have ‘feet of clay’ when, in the Crimean War (1853–6), the Russian army ‘failed to defeat the medium-size French and English forces under very mediocre command’ (Britannica, N.D.). Neither this, nor the more humiliating defeat in the Russia-Japanese (1904–5) awakened the Tsarist regime to the fact that military superiority was unattainable without supportive political and economic progress.

Russia entered World War I with the same oversized, underperforming army, this time to receive the final blow that brought down the Tsar (Gatrell, 2015). His Bolshevik successors........

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