Its goals include вЂњreunification with Russia and the abandonment of involuntary integration into Europe, as well as the rejection of the anti-Russian NATO bloc.вЂќ This uprising results in an undeclared war, with Russian troops marching into Ukraine.

Authorities in Mariupol report that Russian forces are forcibly deporting the beleaguered cityвЂ™s inhabitants.Д®arly in The Third Empire, a pro-Russian, Kremlin-sponsored uprising occurs in Ukraine. Putin is using StalinвЂ™s tactics in the current war too. Over the past 20 years, the Kremlin has carried out projects of re-Stalinization in Russia, rebranding the former dictator as an effective manager and a harsh but fair ruler. (The first empire referenced in the bookвЂ™s title was that of the czars the second was the Soviet Union.) In The Third Empire, Joseph Stalin is Iosif the Great, whom Yuriev lauds for conquering new lands, destroying worthless elites and the вЂњinternal enemies of RussiaвЂќ during the purges of the 1930s, and deporting entire peoples during and after the Second World War-which resulted in mass death.

The narrator of the novel, which unfolds in 2054, is a Brazilian historian who describes the origins of the Russian resurgence begun by Vladimir II the Restorer and completed by his successor, Gavriil the Great. Read: What Ukrainian literature has always understood about Russia The Third Empire is rumored to be popular and highly influential in the Russian leaderвЂ™s circle one Russian publication described it as вЂњthe KremlinвЂ™s favorite book.вЂќ Yuriev, a businessman and former deputy speaker of the state Duma who died in 2019, was a member of the political council of the Eurasia Party, which envisions an essentially feudal social order overseen by a political class that rules through fear. YurievвЂ™s book, like PutinвЂ™s war with Ukraine, is an expression of post-Soviet neo-medievalism, a far-right, anti-Western, and antidemocratic ideology that assigns вЂњRussian Orthodox civilizationвЂќ a dominant role over Europe and America. Mikhail YurievвЂ™s 2006 utopian novel, The Third Empire: Russia as It Ought to Be, anticipates-with astonishing precision-RussiaвЂ™s strategy of hybrid war and its recent military campaigns: the 2008 war with Georgia, the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the incursion into the Donetsk and Luhansk regions the same year, and RussiaвЂ™s current assault on Ukraine.

But we can read the book that foretells the Russian leaderвЂ™s imperialist foreign policy.

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