*This upload carries only the first ten minutes. The whole talk, which runs to 28 minutes and goes on to the Ukraine crisis, NATO and Germany, is at [U1d0SF0XuKg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1d0SF0XuKg).*
00:04 Marko Bojcun: Somebody asked me upstairs as I was coming up which part of Ukraine I'm from. It's [inaudible]. To answer the question — is Russia a new imperialist power? My answer is in the negative. It is not. It's a very old imperial power. It's a power that has been growing since 1482, and with six expansions
00:38 exceeded 20 million square kilometres by the First World War. It was the weakest of the European imperial powers on the eve of the First World War, and it was also an imperialised power by big financial interests of the West European states, and that is why it collapsed under the pressure of the First World War. But it was an imperialist power already, conquering a periphery that extended
01:11 right up to the territories conquered by the other European powers — all the way to China, to the Pacific, to the Baltic, to the Black Sea, into the Carpathian Mountains. Now I suppose the question arises in everybody's head: well, what about the Soviet period? Did this end Russian imperialism as a structure, as a state and military and economic
01:41 structure of domination and oppression of nations by the Russian nation? That's what I mean when I talk. Well, in terms of economic relations it's a very mixed picture, because we do see the emergence of non-Russian peoples from a largely peasant, rural, illiterate existence to fully mature social
02:16 structures, and the acquisition of the capacity to rule themselves quite independently by the time the Soviet Union ended. But this was a very uneven process. What is more important is that in the Soviet period — in the Stalin period, let me be precise — the Soviet state used extra-economic means, state-bureaucratic in their character, to oppress and to deny the right of national self-determination to the non-Russian peoples: through oppression, through the
02:49 extermination of national Bolshevik and communist leaders of the non-Russian peoples, through famine, through migration, through the resettlement of Russians to the non-Russian republics. And if you study the economics of the period, the result in terms of socio-economic development was the uneven development of the nations, of their social structures, of their opportunities in life. If you look at their languages, the same thing happened.
03:20 And so one cannot say that Russian imperialism — and, yes, of course, great Russian chauvinism as an ideology of Russian imperialism — you cannot say that it disappeared in the Soviet period. And after the ten-year hiatus under Yeltsin that Catherine spoke about in the previous presentation, we see the restoration of a
03:53 capitalist imperialism, for the second time, a Russian capitalist imperialism, in the roughly fifteen years of the rule of Vladimir Putin. For the Russian establishment the collapse of the Soviet Union, as Putin has said, was the greatest single tragedy of the twentieth century. This was not a tragedy of the collapse of the Soviet state in the way that we understand it. For them, and for him, it was
04:25 the collapse and the loss of a periphery that the Russian ruling nation had acquired over a period of over 500 years. That was a big tragedy for them, and that is what part of the current project of the Russian state is all about: to reclaim that periphery. Under Putin there has been quite an
04:57 explicit strategy for the restoration of Russian imperial rule. First, from around 1997–98, to reclaim the near abroad, the immediate periphery around Russia, through a state-led strategy of promoting several national economic champions in the energy and
05:28 mineral sectors, to take back the markets and the processing and transiting assets of the former Soviet republics around Russia — namely Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan. And in the second period, to use that reclaimed territory on the immediate periphery to pave the way for Russian transnational
06:01 corporations such as Gazprom, Sistema, Norilsk Nickel and others — to pave the way for their entry into wider markets, consumption markets, investment areas and technologies beyond this immediate territory, so they can achieve transnational competitive status.
06:32 The paradox of this process is that the Russian economy has been very weakly driven by domestic demand as it has grown, and it does not satisfy its domestic demand. It is not a diversified economy as a result of this growth, nor is the bourgeoisie interested in diversifying that economy. Property
07:06 ownership is too insecure in Russia, and markets and strategic resources are in the gift of state authorities. So it has been more profitable for the oligarchs, who have accumulated wealth from the exploitation of raw materials and energy resources, to invest those proceeds beyond the Russian Federation, and they
07:40 have invested them beyond the Russian Federation in economies that are more diversified, more technologically superior to the Russian one, and which afford them security of ownership of their property and their investments. So the paradox is that while the Russian national economy is not diversified, Russian capitalism is diversified — and is diversified sectorally and
08:12 geographically, among transnational lines of production, consumption and investment. What are the destinations of that investment? A Deutsche Bank report in 2006 showed that by that year Russia was the largest overseas
08:42 investor of capital, outside of its own borders, of any of the BRIC countries. And in 2006 it was investing 160 billion US dollars. It was the second largest investor in the so-called emerging market economies in the world after China — after Hong Kong, let me be specific. And if you look at the
09:13 structure of overseas investment by Russian capital around 2008–2010, 52 per cent was invested in Western Europe, around twenty per cent was invested in the near abroad countries — that is to say immediately around the Russian
09:43 Federation — and about ten per cent in east-central Europe. How much time do I have, please? [inaudible] Just the water, please.
---