Geopolitical Imagination: Ideology and Utopia in Post-Soviet Russia by Mikhail Suslov

Abstract

Reviewed by: Geopolitical Imagination: Ideology and Utopia in Post-Soviet Russia by Mikhail Suslov David Lewis Geopolitical Imagination: Ideology and Utopia in Post-Soviet Russia. By Mikhail Suslov. (Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, 215) Stuttgart: ibidem. 2020. 304 pp. $40. ISBN 978–3–8382–1361–3. Post-Soviet Russia has often been viewed as a post-ideological political system, governed by personal economic interests on one level and ruthless Realpolitik on another. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a sharp reminder that ideas and beliefs also matter in Russian foreign policy. They contribute to what Mikhail Suslov calls the 'geopolitical imagination', a mental map of the world shared by many Russian elites which shapes foreign policy in important ways. Suslov's excellent monograph helps to unpack these ideas, explaining how they came to be so influential in modern Russia. While some chapters have been previously published elsewhere, Suslov has woven his different topics into a compelling book-length narrative which will become an essential volume for understanding contemporary Russian political thought. Suslov uses Kotkin's notion of Russia's 'perpetual geopolitics' (see Stephen Kotkin, 'Russia's Perpetual Geopolitics: Putin Returns to the Historical Pattern', Foreign Affairs, 95.3 (May–June 2016), 2–9), but turns this on its head. Instead of viewing geographic factors as immutable drivers of Russian behaviour, Suslov considers how geography was reimagined in contemporary Russia to address crises of identity and status through the articulation of spatial and geopolitical imaginaries. The geopolitical imagination 'not only explains the past and legitimizes the present, but gives valuable hints for political forecasting' (p. 22). It is both an attempt to overcome the trauma of the collapse of empire and a political project that offers a future utopia expressed in spatial terms. This geopolitical imagination is often strangely lax about actual geography. Russian geopolitical thinkers have switched easily between different spatial projects with very different geographies. Chapter 5, for instance, examines the Russian Orthodox Church's spatial concept of 'Holy Rus'. Its advocates claim this as a metaphysical transnational space, resistant to the 'spiritual' colonialism of the West. In reality, however, it has morphed into a geopolitical project that perpetuates Russian colonial attitudes and practices towards its neighbours. Suslov next analyses Eurasian continentalism, a spatial concept with multiple meanings and interpretations but which nevertheless 'tends towards conservative, palingenetic moral exceptionalism' (p. 226). Suslov concludes with a detailed analysis of 'Novorossiya', a geopolitical fantasy project briefly entertained in 2014 before it was rapidly dropped by the Kremlin. Yet eight years later, although the terminology changed, the same territorial aspirations re-emerged in Russia's 2022 attempt to conquer and annex regions of south-eastern Ukraine. The case of Novorossiya offers the clearest tension between the Russian state's geopolitical visions and those of a medley of other actors, including nationalist polemicists, academics, and politicians. At times, the Russian state has actively promoted particular geopolitical projects, but geopolitical imagination is not simply the outcome of top-down propaganda. The strength of Suslov's work is that it transcends the thinking of Vladimir Putin or his close officials to explore how geopolitical [End Page 282] concepts circulate in wider culture and society, from university textbooks to popular novels. Thus, in Chapter 4 Suslov looks at the genre of 'Russian Imperial Science Fiction', a kind of neo-imperialist pulp fiction that contrasts sharply with the Soviet expression of the genre, which was intellectually curious and often of high literary quality. Here too the boundaries between state and literature are blurred. One of the key publishing initiatives is run by a State Duma deputy; another, promoting so-called 'liber-punk' (books with titles such as Liberal Apocalypse which criticize liberal values), is funded by the pro-government 'Interaction of Civilisations' think-tank (p. 146). Suslov also explores the literary franchise Eurasian Symphony (2000–05), a seven-book series co-authored by Igor Alimov and Viacheslav Rybakov (writing under the pseudonym Holm van Zaichik). Their stories describe life in the Eurasian conglomerate 'Ordus', a utopian superpower which traces its history to a thirteenth-century amalgamation of the Golden Horde and ancient Rus. Unlike, say, Vladimir Sorokin's dystopian...