The West's Centuries-Old Attempt to Take Russia and Control World Resources

Collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian War & Fake Histories that May Be Our Undoing

Reading time: under 10 min

Kit Klarenberg's article is compulsory reading for anyone trying to understand the current predicament of the West vis-à-vis Russia. He brings up the deep enmeshment of Britain & France in Russia after the October 1917 Bolshevik takeover. This untenable situation has roots going back to at least the nineteenth century and British colonialism in India (sic - Britain feared Russian expansion in Central Asia up to Afghanistan which once lay on the very borders of British India). It is, in this way, a Eurasian long-term geopolitical game, with Britain, France (and now the US) vying to out compete & ultimately destroy Russia and exploit its vast resources for themselves, while, of course, preventing Russia from exerting its (to my mind usually beneficial) influence worldwide, and thus undermining colonialist and neocolonialist projects of what the Russians call the Collective West. With the inevitable rise of the nations of the ‘South’ in economic & geopolitical terms - India, for instance, is considered now to be the world's fifth largest economy, and Brazil's economy is seemingly now firmly in the list of the ten largest, and so incidentally is Russia's - submitting and partitioning the world’s largest country is literally the last stand of the Collective West. It is its last stand not only against Russia, but in fact against the entire world outside of itself. That is because Russia as the midwife of the now fast-emerging multipolar world order is a proposition that we must take very seriously, as shown, for instance, in Russia's increasing influence in Africa, as highlighted, for instance, in its presence in the Sahel (especially Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger) which was until last year a virtual backyard of France and the West. Hence, to quote a famous (and as it has turned out, uncannily accurate) quip from Putin, the current fight against Russia to the last Ukrainian.

Old British map (probably eighteenth century). Source: Library of Congress

I have recently discussed briefly the collapse of the Soviet Union in my Odyssey channel: Collapse of the Soviet Union It is just a brief take on the ideas of Vladislav M. Zubok's Collapse The Fall of the Soviet Union, and how that collapse is at the root of the Ukrainian War and a possible Third World War. The collapse of the USSR led directly to NATO expansion to the East, and hence to today's Ukraine war. I have not read Zubok’s work, and have instead used Gokul Sahni's comments here: Zubok's Collapse Sahni is a savvy Singapore-based geopolitical analyst, as shown by this twitter/X feed: Gokul Sahni

In the West, usually Ronald Regan and his policies are largely or partially credited with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Zubok obviously takes a different line, though he does recognize the importance of the competition with the US as one of several, mostly internal, factors leading to collapse. Be it as it may, the fact is that the collapse of the USSR in 1991 encouraged the Western vultures to try their luck yet again, as in 1917-1920. We are now literally collectively playing the price of this greed and folly with deep roots in the past. We usually think history is something ancient and bookish, however interesting and alluring, that has no direct bearing on our lives today. It turns out we could hardly have been wronger.

As an aside, it is intriguing, to say the least, to think that the collapse was not inevitable, or that the USSR might have somehow reformed itself, or that a breakup would not have happened, even with the collapse. An important point of Zubok's work is that the peoples of the USSR were not really hankering after Western democracy, nor were the soon-to-be breakaway republics necessarily yearning for independence. It is in fact not too difficult to kickstart a successful independence movement. We in Latin America still remember the US-engineered Panamanian independence from Colombia back in 1903, which enabled the US to have a free hand in building and then controlling the Canal in the Isthmus of Panama (the Canal opened in 1914). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Panama remains one of the most US-friendly nations in the Western Hemisphere to this day. It also uses, for all practical purposes, the US dollar as its national currency.

This deep history, as laid out in Klarenberg's piece, is vital here. Europe has been an economic and geopolitical powerhouse starting in the eighteenth century. Until then, both China and India loomed very large economically, as they are now yet again doing today. Both ended up defeated by Western (mostly British) colonialism, even tough only India became a formal colony as such. This long spell of European and Western hegemony is now coming to its inevitable end. I say inevitable because Europe is not a resource-rich region by any means, especially not when compared to other regions in the world, including Russia. The current on-going, if still partial, de-industrialisation of Germany due to discontinuing cheap gas supplies from Russia (via the likely US-engineered blowup of Nord Stream II) is a poignant recent illustration of Europe's age-old resource poverty. Germany has been the industrial powerhouse of Europe for a long time now. Alas, no more. The US will likely go through a long period (some say probably lasting for half a century or so) of comparative impoverishment (that is, as compared to the standards prevailing until the very recent past), but it will eventually sort itself out, especially as it is one of the most resource-rich regions of the world. Not so in the case of Europe, which will fairly probably slide back into being the modern counterpart of the comparative backwater it was at the start of the modern age five hundred years ago.

I am not, needless to add, a specialist in Russian history, though I consider myself reasonably well-informed about its general lines and even some details. I was amazed, however, when I read Klarenberg's piece, because it highlights something I was only very dimly aware of, namely, the enormous importance of British and French meddling in Russia in the aftermath of the October 1917 Revolution, as well as the to this day hardly widely divulged details of that interference. In fact, Klarenberg avers that those details are still not fully in the public domain over a hundred years after the fact (sic). It must be because full awareness of the sordid details might awaken the slumbering masses. More probably, it is because the project is still on-going, and we are merely watching now its latest episode. The open interference, including the sending of troops (incidentally, this clearly mirrors today Macron's vowing to send French troops to Ukraine) was aimed at carving up different spheres of influence in the erstwhile Russian Empire, to break its spine and influence, and exploit its rich resources for the benefit of Britain and France. In reality, it may well be that the Bolsheviks were ultimately victorious because of that every interference, as both Britain and France made sure not to give ‘too much’ support to the opponents of the Bolsheviks, lest the Russian empire or an avatar thereof come up yet again, which would mean their plans of domination and spoliation would then be foiled once more. The wide-ranging international front - very reminiscent of today's NATO et al. coalition against Russia (it even included Japan back then, who is also today against Russia) - cobbled together to invade and take over Russia turned out in this way to be insufficient to defeat the Bolsheviks, especially as it soon triggered fierce resistance even among the West's own staunch Russian allies inside the country, who saw through their erstwhile allies’ evil intentions (Klarenberg mentions in this regard, for instance, white soldiers defecting to the Red Army).

We have been in this way indoctrinated in what I can only call fake history for a very long time now. That is why, I believe, I did not know about the history laid out by Klarenberg, except in its dimmest contours. Fake history may sound like a mere arcane or scholastic issue, or perhaps a pedagogical faux pas, or a philosophical ethical problem. It is none of that. Fake history leads to people destroying their own nations and killing themselves en masse in unwinnable wars, as is currently happening in Ukraine. Black Rock and other Western corporations are already buying up land and other assets in Ukraine, making sure the country will be a poverty-stricken, underpopulated hole, but nonetheless one that provides valuable resources to the Collective West for decades to come. Fake histories literally may kill you and your family; at the very least, they potentially throw you into dire, transgenerational poverty, and your country into colonial status in all but name, as is seemingly the case of Panama a full one hundred and twenty-one years after its nominal independence (though, naturally, Panama was never a resource-rich, or even moderately developed, country as Ukraine, but instead mostly only a strategically significant isthmus and a somewhat remote province of a much larger country, namely, Colombia).

The prospect here is of Ukraine as a mega and far richer Panama and an enduring thorn on the side of Russia, and hopefully, if the wildest dreams of NATO et al. come true, a trigger for the downfall and eventual partition of Russia, leading to a decades- or even centuries-long feast for all involved. Alas, it shall not happen. However, as it clearly is a last stand on the part of the Collective West - as, with the current and fast accelerating rise of the ‘South’, illustrated, for instance, by an ever-expanding BRICS, it has been left with virtually no options to keep its entrenched, long-standing economic and geopolitical privileges - the mayhem and suffering, and why not, wide-ranging war it will likely trigger is bound to affect the rest of the world in very concrete ways. We have to brace ourselves for what is coming.