Overview

Russia: The Last Imperial Empire? Why Decolonisation Never Fully Happened When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, fifteen new countries declared independence. The maps were redrawn. The Cold War was over. Russia, it seemed, had finally joined Britain and France in accepting the end of empire. It hadn't. Russia never treated those borders - in Ukraine, Georgia, or the Baltic states - as final. It never fully accepted that these were foreign countries in the same sense as those beyond Europe. Unlike Western Europe, it never underwent a reckoning that reframed empire as a closed chapter. Instead, imperial logic survived under new names: the ""near abroad,"" frozen conflicts, privileged interests, and the protection of compatriots. This book explains why Russian foreign policy follows patterns that repeatedly baffle outside observers. It traces the structural differences between land empires and overseas colonies, showing why distance matters - and why Russia's form of expansion created ambiguities that decolonisation could never fully resolve. It reveals how the Soviet Union maintained empire while denying it was one, and why 1991 was experienced in Moscow not as liberation, but as humiliation and loss. From the tsars to the Soviets to the present day, the continuity is clear: Russia governs not as a nation-state within fixed borders, but as the centre of a sphere where sovereignty is conditional and history is never settled. If you've wondered why post-Soviet conflicts keep recurring, why compromise repeatedly fails, or why Russia treats its neighbours differently from how other powers treat theirs, this book provides the answer. Empire didn't end in 1991. It just stopped calling itself by that name.

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