The three-hundred-year geopolitical bubble that legitimately burst just over 100 years ago and then, through the efforts of the communists, was patched up and stretched over a large part of Eurasia, gave the “Russian empire” in its post-Soviet reincarnation about another 100 years, but could not save the bubble from its final end.
Such events will inevitably raise one simple question for historians of the not-so-distant future: what was it? Was Russia even an empire? By the way, many experts are already quite rightly calling Russia a fake empire. However, they feel it intuitively rather than trying to explain it.
The history of the world is replete with examples of empires succeeding one another and of different empires coexisting at the same time. In terms of internal logic, all empires work in a similar way: the centre exploits the periphery, sets the rules and controls internal exchange. But in terms of the logic of external interaction, they can be divided into true empires – and those which only look like “empires”, imitating them in form but absolutely not corresponding to them in essence, just like any other fake, i.e. the fake empires.
In genuine empires, the periphery is primarily used for raw materials and cheap labour. In the centre, all this is converted into a final product, where it tends to increase in value, undergoing a qualitative redistribution based on better technological development, and only then, having become a higher surplus-value commodity, does it participate in global exchange.
Unlike the former, the fake empires, or rather their centres, actually, mediate between their own peripheries and the epicentres of the world economy. Thus, they only siphon off labour resources and raw materials from the periphery in order to eventually, without actually producing any product (or producing a product with low surplus value), export a rather narrow segment of intermediate goods demanded in the world market only because demand for these goods is met by the needs of the genuine empires that produce the final product.
This is the fundamental difference between different types of empires. When it is said that any empires act as a destroyer with respect to many things, this is true. But genuine empires, while destroying, also create, creating a new product, generating rather than simply retransmitting new values.
Fake empires create nothing! They exist and evolve solely as a parasite that expropriates resources and consumes people, leaving behind only devastation…
After the events launched in February 2022, the slide of the Russian bubble from this large part of Eurasia is almost unstoppable, new ruptures are inevitable, and further patching up is impossible. For one simple reason: the imperial fuel has run out – there is nothing more to patch ideologically!