The Cold War never ended
The Cold War never truly ended: the spectre of the Russian Revolution still haunts American elites — and explains the West’s enduring hostility against Russia even post-1991
In my latest piece for Compact, I argue that the United States’ and NATO’s persistence in the strategy of containing, marginalising and weakening Moscow, even after the grand ideological antagonism of the Cold War had vanished, wasn’t just rooted in geopolitics, but also had a powerful cultural-ideological dimension — namely, the desire of Western, and especially American, elites to punish Russia for having challenged Anglo-American global capitalism for almost a century:
The Russian Revolution was a profound psychological and ideological trauma for Western elites. Yet, to grasp its enduring legacy, we must also consider its geopolitical implications for the West—and especially for the Anglo-American establishment—long before the Cold War formally began. If the Bolsheviks hadn’t taken power in 1917, it is very likely that the fragmentation of the already crumbling Tsarist empire would have gone much further. The likely outcome would have resembled that of Austria-Hungary: a constellation of weak nation-states ripe for Western domination.
Instead, the Bolsheviks created a new, unified state—the Soviet Union—animated by an ideology that directly challenged Western expansionism. This altered history. As the German political scientist Hauke Ritz argues, the revolution delayed, perhaps by a century, the formation of a unified Western imperial order under Anglo-American leadership. By turning Russia into the center of an alternative world-system—and, after 1949, a nuclear-armed one—it imposed serious limits on Western power.
Despite its internal contradictions, the USSR’s existence constrained Western imperialism in multiple ways. Its anti-colonial stance inspired independence movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Moreover, its mere presence forced Western elites to moderate capitalism at home as well, giving rise to the welfare state and social democracy. Never had capitalism been so humane as during the decades when socialism stood as a rival system.
The Soviet Union’s collapse offered the West an extraordinary opportunity to erase the legacy of 1917—to restore the global hierarchy the revolution had disrupted. But as Ritz suggests, Western, and particularly American, elites harbored a deep historical resentment towards Russia for having postponed US geopolitical supremacy by several decades. From this perspective, Russia could not simply be “forgiven” or allowed to re-enter the Western system as if nothing had happened. Even after the Soviet Union was gone, it needed to be punished for its defiance. Thus, when the chance finally came to dismantle Russia’s power in the 1990s, the impulse was not reconciliation but vengeance.
Read the article here.
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Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)
Dear Thomas, the greed for Russia did not start in 1917. It has a very long history of French-British "Civilizing Mission" coveting Russia as they saw us as barbarian tribes, similar to how Zionists saw Palestine. There is a very useful article on Wikipedia called "anti-Russian sentiment" that traces the history of the West and Anglosphere coveting Russia and desire to conquer, colonize and dismember it: Here is only the history starting with 19th Century: "On 19 October 1797, the French Directory received a document from a Polish general, Michał Sokolnicki, entitled "Aperçu sur la Russie". This forgery is known as the so-called "The Will of Peter the Great" and was first published in October 1812, during the Napoleonic Wars, in Charles Louis-Lesur's much-read Des progrès de la puissance russe: this was at the behest of Napoleon I, who ordered a series of articles to be published showing that "Europe is inevitably in the process of becoming booty for Russia".[25][26] Subsequent to the Napoleonic wars, propaganda against Russia was continued by Napoleon's former confessor, Dominique Georges-Frédéric de Pradt, who in a series of books portrayed Russia as a power-grasping "barbaric" power hungry to conquer Europe.[27] With reference to Russia's new constitutional laws in 1811 the Savoyard philosopher Joseph de Maistre wrote the now famous statement: "Every nation gets the government it deserves" ("Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite").[28][29]
Beginning from 1815 and lasting roughly until 1840, British commentators began criticizing the perceived conservatism of the Russian state and its resistance to reform efforts.[30] In 1836, The Westminster Review attributed growth of British navy to "Ministers [that] are smitten with the epidemic disease of Russo-phobia".[31] However, Russophobia in Britain for the rest of the 19th century was primarily related to British fears that the Russian conquest of Central Asia was a precursor to an attack on British-colonized India. These fears led to the "Great Game", a series of political and diplomatic confrontations between Britain and Russia during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[32]
In 1843 the Marquis de Custine published his hugely successful 1800-page, four-volume travelogue La Russie en 1839. Custine's scathing narrative reran what were by now clichés which presented Russia as a place where "the veneer of European civilization was too thin to be credible". Such was its huge success that several official and pirated editions quickly followed, as well as condensed versions and translations in German, Dutch, and English. By 1846 approximately 200 thousand copies had been sold.[33]
In 1867, Fyodor Tyutchev, a Russian poet, diplomat and member of His Imperial Majesty's Own Chancellery, introduced the actual term of "russophobia" in a letter to his daughter Anna Aksakova on 20 September 1867,[citation needed] where he applied it to a number of pro-Western Russian liberals who, pretending that they were merely following their liberal principles, developed a negative attitude towards their own country and always stood on a pro-Western and anti-Russian position, regardless of any changes in the Russian society and having a blind eye on any violations of these principles in the West, "violations in the sphere of justice, morality, and even civilization". He put the emphasis on the irrationality of this sentiment.[34] Tyutchev saw Western anti-Russian sentiment as the result of misunderstanding caused by civilizational differences between East and West.[35] " -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Russian_sentiment
I think it is astonishingly the same as we see today. Revolution, communist party, socialism, Stalin, etc. have only been used as a propaganda tool, to cover the plain old GREED for Russia. Just like Zionists have been using "islamism", "hamas", "terrorism" to justify their greed for Palestine.
Not only has the Cold War not ended, but one can find this Russio-phobia in 19th century discussions of "the West." See The West: A History of an Idea. By Georgios Varouxakis. Harvard Press, 2025. Recent WWII history have also shown that the lines of the "Cold War" began before WWII was over. This uncomfortably puts North Atlantic societies on the side of the Nazi's -- as shown by the immigration policies in the intelligence communities in which defeated Nazi Germans were received as aids against the "eastern communist menace." It sets the NATO abuse of Ukraine with its neo-Nazi core into a broader historical anti-Russian tradition.