global geopolitics

The West has forecast Russia’s disintegration for three decades and been wrong each time

Analytical Opinion | November 2026

The essay by Fyodor Lukyanov opens with an image of August 1991 and the final summer of a superpower that few expected to disappear, and that image establishes the rhetorical frame within which the entire argument proceeds. The Soviet Union had been a pillar of the post-war order and its collapse restructured world politics in ways that remain unfinished, while the attempt to replace the old balance with an American-led order has failed to produce lasting stability. Those opening moves are analytically serious, because they resist the retrospective inevitability that dominates Western accounts and because they locate the present disorder in the unresolved character of the post-1991 settlement. The article then turns to Russia’s post-Soviet self-definition and treats the Ukraine conflict as part of that process, raising questions about borders that the Soviet administrative system cannot resolve and forcing Russia to define a place in the world different from that of the ideological superpower it once was.

The historical argument that the Soviet collapse was contingent rather than inevitable finds substantial support in the scholarly literature on the late Soviet period. Stephen Kotkin’s analysis of the Soviet collapse contends that the system was not on the verge of imminent disintegration in the 1980s and that the outcome resulted from the interaction between structural stagnation and the specific choices of the Gorbachev leadership (Kotkin, 2001). Archie Brown’s study of Gorbachev reaches a compatible conclusion, arguing that the reforms opened political space that then escaped the control of their authors (Brown, 1996). Vladislav Zubok’s account documents how perestroika and glasnost weakened the party-state’s capacity to manage the transition while economic reforms dismantled planning mechanisms before market institutions existed (Zubok, 2021). Lukyanov’s claim that the USSR might have survived in another form or for much longer is therefore consistent with the mainstream of the historiography, and his judgement that the collapse owed more to misplaced idealism and incompetence than to a Western conspiracy is defensible on the evidence.

The claim that the last Soviet leadership accelerated the collapse it sought to arrest is likewise supported by the documentary record, and the article’s formulation captures the paradox with considerable precision. The reforms weakened the institutions they were intended to save because they were undertaken without sufficient understanding of the system’s internal contradictions, and the policies actually pursued produced consequences that the USSR’s adversaries could hardly have hoped to achieve themselves. Anders Åslund’s work on the Soviet economy records the fiscal deterioration and supply disruptions that the reform programme exacerbated, and his later analysis argues that the sequencing of reform undermined the stabilisation it was meant to deliver (Åslund, 1991; Åslund, 2007). The scholarly debate concerns the relative weight of structural versus contingent factors rather than the proposition that reform contributed to disintegration, and Lukyanov’s account sits comfortably within that debate.

The article’s turn from history to contemporary policy rests on the claim that Western governments drew the wrong lesson from 1991 and now expect sustained pressure to produce a second Russian collapse. That claim is empirically grounded, because the Reagan-era narrative that confrontation brought down the Soviet Union has been challenged by historians who emphasise the cooperative turn in Reagan’s second term. Beth Fischer’s study argues that Reagan’s accommodation of Gorbachev contributed more to the end of the Cold War than confrontation did (Fischer, 1997), and James Graham Wilson’s account shows that American policymakers were repeatedly surprised by events and adapted their strategies in response rather than executing a pre-formed plan (Wilson, 2014). Jack Matlock, Reagan’s ambassador to Moscow, argued that the administration’s cooperative turn was decisive (Matlock, 2004). The popular Western narrative that Lukyanov criticises is therefore a simplification of a more complex record, and his observation that the West claimed undeserved credit for an outcome it did not engineer is analytically sound.

The structural comparison between the late Soviet and contemporary Russian economies is the article’s strongest empirical move, and the evidence supports its essentials. World Bank and IMF data record that Russia’s economy is market-based, integrated into global trade, and structurally different from the command economy of the late Soviet period, with a private sector share of GDP above two-thirds and a diversified export base in energy, metals and agriculture (World Bank, 2025; IMF, 2025). Anders Åslund’s analysis of Russian crony capitalism documents the emergence of a property-owning class with a material interest in the state’s survival, which is absent from the late Soviet period (Åslund, 2019). Clifford Gaddy’s account of the rent-based structure of the Russian economy emphasises the state’s dependence on resource extraction and the concentration of ownership among politically connected groups (Gaddy, 2020). The existence of a propertied class whose wealth depends on the state’s continuation is a genuine structural difference from 1991, and it supports Lukyanov’s claim that the conditions for a Soviet-style collapse are absent.

The claim that Western governments no longer possess the same ability to dictate the terms of global affairs is also supported by the evidence, though the article overstates the extent of Western decline. The IMF’s World Economic Outlook records the shift in global output shares toward emerging markets and the growing role of non-Western institutions in trade and finance (IMF, 2025), and the sanctions regime imposed after 2022 has been accompanied by the expansion of alternative payment channels and by the reorientation of Russian trade toward Asia. The article’s assertion that the wider world is no longer organised around two opposing blocs is accurate in the sense that the bipolar structure of the Cold War has been replaced by a more fragmented order, and its claim that the post-1991 American-led order has failed to produce lasting stability is consistent with the historical record of NATO enlargement and the breakdown of the Russia-NATO Founding Act (Sarotte, 2021).

The article’s treatment of the Ukraine conflict centres Russia’s own self-definition, and that focus is understandable for a Russian author addressing Western policymakers about the terms of a settlement. The framing nonetheless leaves Ukrainian political life outside the frame of analysis, because Ukraine appears as an occasion for Russia’s definition of its borders and its place in the world rather than as a society with its own institutions, parties and political claims. A victim-centred framework requires that the analyst supplement what a Russian strategic communication would not say, and the supplement is not an accusation of concealment but a completion of the picture that any war-time text from either side will leave unfinished. Serhii Plokhy’s history of the war documents its origins in the disputed legacies of the Soviet collapse and the failure of post-Soviet state-building to resolve questions of identity and territory (Plokhy, 2023), and Timothy Snyder’s work emphasises the role of Russian revisionism in undermining the post-Cold War settlement (Snyder, 2018). The analytical requirement is to hold both the external threat that Russia perceives and the sovereign claims of the Ukrainian population in view without treating either as a pretext for the other.

The article’s claim that Russia has learned from 1991 and that internal division is the real threat performs a dual function that reveals its address to two audiences simultaneously. To Western policymakers, the claim signals that pressure will not produce collapse and that the historical analogy on which they rely is false. To Russian elites, the claim is a warning that misjudged reforms and ignored problems can destroy the state from within, and that bitter internal divisions can bring losses to everyone rather than victory to any faction. The same sentence performs both functions because the warning to the West that Russia will not collapse is simultaneously a warning to Russian elites that collapse remains possible if they mismanage the state. This double address is characteristic of texts produced within authoritarian state-capitalist formations, where the external audience is used to consolidate domestic legitimacy and the domestic audience is used to signal resolve to the external one.

The article’s confidence that Russia is not going anywhere rests on a judgement about state capacity and social cohesion, and that judgement is substantially correct because the population understands the war as a defence of political existence rather than as a project of elite aggrandisement. The stated objectives of the Western campaign, as articulated by American and European officials and in the think-tank literature that informs policy, have included Russia’s strategic defeat, its partition along regional lines, and the opening of its resource base to external capital. A population facing that programme has a choice between political survival and subjugation, and no population accepts subjugation when it retains the capacity to resist. Levada Center’s tracking records presidential approval in the high seventies to mid-eighties per cent through the war years, with a majority supporting the actions of the armed forces and a substantial minority favouring negotiations, and the distribution of opinion is not the product of coercion alone (Levada Center, 2025). The sociological literature on war-time opinion, from Mueller’s work on the rally effect onward, documents that populations under external threat consolidate around leadership irrespective of the substantive merits of the conflict (Mueller, 1970). That consolidation is a real political fact and not an artefact of propaganda.

The costs of the war are nonetheless real and they fall unevenly, and the class analysis has to address their distribution rather than treat them as evidence of manipulation. BBC Russian Service and Mediazona’s joint casualty tracking has documented confirmed Russian military deaths exceeding 100,000 by late 2025, with a disproportionate share from the provinces, the republics of the North Caucasus, and lower-income regions (BBC Russian Service, 2025). The Finnish Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air has documented the scale of Russian fossil fuel revenues that finance the war effort, and Russian budget documents record that defence and security spending has exceeded social spending in recent years (CREA, 2025). The fiscal structure of the war economy transfers resources from civilian sectors toward defence production, and the population bears the inflationary and labour-market consequences. Those facts describe how a population distributes the burden of a war it has largely accepted, rather than how an elite extracts surplus from a population it has manipulated into fighting, and the distinction matters because it determines what follows from the analysis.

The class structure of the Russian state remains relevant to that distribution even when the war is understood as a defensive necessity. Åslund’s account of crony capitalism documents the concentration of ownership among a small number of oligarchic groups with ties to the security services (Åslund, 2019), and Gaddy’s analysis of rent distribution shows how resource revenues are channelled through state corporations and affiliated private entities rather than through public provision (Gaddy, 2020). The war has accelerated this concentration, because sanctions forced asset sales and consolidation and because defence contracts flow to firms with political connections. Mark Galeotti’s analysis of Russian elite politics documents persistent competition between security services, state corporations and regional governors (Galeotti, 2024), and Tatiana Stanovaya’s work on the Putin system describes the personalistic architecture through which elite competition is managed and the risks that arise when it fails (Stanovaya, 2024). The propertied class that benefits from the war’s fiscal transfers has an interest in the state’s survival that coincides with the population’s interest in avoiding subjugation, and the coincidence is real without being complete. The question of who within that coalition bears the costs, and whether the regions and classes that bear them will have a voice in the settlement, is a class question that does not depend on treating the war as a confidence trick.

The anti-imperial framework requires that critique be applied consistently, and consistency here means recognising two operations without equating them. The Western pressure campaign comprises sanctions, military assistance to Ukraine, NATO expansion and the demand for Russia’s strategic defeat, and there is truth in the account of Western expansion and in the double standards that Western powers apply to their own spheres of influence. Russia’s war in Ukraine is itself an operation that removes Ukrainian self-determination and reproduces a centre-periphery relation within the post-Soviet space, and recognising that does not make the Western campaign a defence of Ukrainian sovereignty any more than it makes the Russian campaign a defence of Russian sovereignty. The victim-centred approach holds both operations in view and refuses the choice between the Western narrative and the Russian one because both narratives centre the intervening powers rather than the societies acted upon. The populations that bear the costs are the Ukrainians under occupation, the Russians in the provinces and republics, and the Europeans whose governments have committed to a strategy they did not authorise.

The dependency-theory dimension of the analysis concerns the claim that Russia has escaped the centre-periphery relation through its reorientation toward Asia. The restructuring is real, and it has involved import substitution in strategic sectors, the construction of alternative payment channels, and the redirection of energy exports toward China and India. The framework asks whether this restructuring has reduced dependency or merely changed its direction, and the evidence suggests that Russia’s dependence on Chinese demand for energy and on Chinese supply of machinery and components has increased substantially. The centre-periphery relation that the article claims to escape has been reconfigured rather than abolished, with Moscow now occupying an intermediate position between Beijing and the states of Central Asia and the Caucasus. The article’s assertion that Russia has learned from 1991 is therefore accurate in the narrow sense that it has reduced its exposure to Western finance, and incomplete in the broader sense that it has acquired new dependencies in the process.

The discourse-power dimension of the analysis concerns the institutional position from which Lukyanov writes and the constraints that position imposes on what can be said. The author is editor-in-chief of a foreign-policy journal, chairman of the presidium of a security-policy council, and research director of a discussion club patronised by the state, and he publishes in the government’s official newspaper. That position shapes the article’s silences, because the text can acknowledge Soviet failure, can criticise Western overconfidence, and can warn Russian elites about internal division, while it does not count Russian casualties, does not name the class interests that benefit from the war economy, and does not recognise Ukrainian agency. Those silences are consistent with the constraints of the position and they do not make the article’s central claims false, because a strategic communication addressed to an adversary is not required to supply the adversary with arguments. The analyst’s task is to read the text for what it establishes about Russian state capacity while supplying the accounting that a text of its genre will not provide.

The republican tradition provides the normative standard against which the article’s claims can be assessed. Arendt’s account of the public realm as the space where common things are deliberated requires that the Russian population have a genuine opportunity to determine whether the war serves its interests, and the presence of substantial minority opinion favouring negotiations indicates that such deliberation exists even under constrained conditions. Rousseau’s account of the general will requires that the laws bind the people who author them, and the war’s costs fall disproportionately on populations whose effective voice in its initiation was limited. Nkrumah’s account of neo-colonialism requires that formal sovereignty be accompanied by practical control over economic and political decisions, and the article’s celebration of Russian sovereignty is qualified by the concentration of ownership and the dependence on resource rents that limit the state’s developmental options. The normative standard does not produce a verdict against the war, because the alternative to resistance is subordination to an external programme that no population would accept, and it does produce a standard for judging the peace that follows.

The materialist verdict on the article is that it expresses the perspective of a state-capitalist formation defending its existence against an external programme of partition and resource extraction, and that the propertied class which has consolidated control over energy, finance and security has an interest in that defence that coincides with the population’s interest without exhausting it. The claim that Russia’s economy and society differ from the Soviet Union’s is accurate, and the difference lies partly in the emergence of a propertied class whose wealth depends on the state’s continuation. That class benefits from the war’s fiscal transfers, from the asset consolidation that followed sanctions, and from the suppression of labour organisation that accompanies militarisation, and the population that supports the war bears costs that the class does not share proportionately. The war is a defensive response to an external threat whose costs are distributed according to class, region and ethnicity, and the article’s abstraction of Russia conceals that distribution even as the distribution is a domestic political question rather than evidence of bad faith.

The most plausible trajectory consistent with the evidence involves continued Russian resilience, because the population’s support for the state is grounded in a correct assessment of the external threat rather than in the successful operation of propaganda. The propertied class that Lukyanov implicitly addresses has a material interest in the state’s survival, and the population has a political interest in it that the class analysis must recognise rather than explain away. The war economy is generating distributional pressures that will shape the post-war settlement, and the concentration of casualties among the least advantaged regions is likely to become a focus of domestic political contestation as the conflict winds down. Russian dependence on China will deepen, and the terms of that dependence will constrain Moscow’s room for manoeuvre. The article’s confidence that Russia is not going anywhere is likely to be vindicated, and the question that matters for the populations involved is not whether the state survives but on what terms the burdens of survival will be shared, and whether the sovereignty defended in the war will be accompanied by a political order that gives the regions and classes that bore the costs a meaningful voice in the settlement.

Authored By: Global GeoPolitics

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