26 May, 08:01
In the winter of 1916, the French ambassador to Petrograd, Maurice Paléologue, records in his diary a conversation with an interlocutor who explains to him the arrangement of forces at court.
The State Council, the Duma, the senatorial lords, the great financiers and industrialists - all of them hold the Empress through Stürmer and Rasputin, and through the Empress they hold the Emperor. Paléologue objects: the Emperor is not in their hands and will not be. His interlocutor answers calmly and terribly: in that case they will kill him or force him to abdicate. In favor of his son, under the regency of the Empress. To achieve this, the man continues, these people will stop at nothing - they will provoke strikes, riots, pogroms, crises of want and hunger, they will manufacture everywhere such misery, such despair, that the continuation of the war will become impossible. "You did not see them at work in 1905."
This conversation is worth rereading today, a hundred and ten years later, not for the sake of its plot and not even for the ominous accuracy of its forecast. It is worth rereading for one reason: for the fact that a French ambassador is conducting such a conversation in Petrograd at all. That the internal kitchen of Russian politics is being discussed by an allied diplomat as part of his own working field. That Russia in 1916 sits inside the West's conversation with itself, not as an object of observation but as a functional element of the system, whose breakdown concerns every other participant.
That is the starting point from which it makes sense to compare Russia a century ago and Russia today. Not by the level of repression, not by the character of the regime, not by the moral physiognomy of the ruling dynasty or its contemporary equivalent. By one parameter, which in Giovanni Arrighi's framework is structural: where a given territory stands relative to the systemic cycle of accumulation, and in what phase of that cycle it finds itself.
For 1916 the answer is plain. The Russian Empire is a semi-periphery of the British systemic cycle of accumulation, entering its terminal financial phase. The British cycle, which began in the late eighteenth century, has by 1916 already exhausted its material expansion and is shifting into the financial phase: the City of London lends to the world, while real industrial leadership drifts toward the American and German economies. Within this cycle Russia occupies a comprehensible place. It imports capital from Paris and London, imports technology, supplies grain and raw materials, services the geopolitical interests of the Entente on the eastern front. Witte and Stolypin embedded it in the system on the terms of a debtor-ally, and indebtedness here is not pathology but the condition of membership. The French loans are not merely debt - they are the umbilical cord through which inclusion flows.
And here is the key point: creditors are interested in the survival of their debtor. Not out of philanthropy but out of systemic logic. Russia as a functional element of the Entente, as the eastern front, as a supplier of cannon fodder and grain, as an enormous market for French industry and British capital - such a Russia is needed, and its bankruptcy would strike the creditors themselves. That is why Paléologue is sitting in Petrograd discussing exactly how to bring down Stürmer. Not because France adores the Tsar or detests Stürmer. Because Russia has to work. A debtor that stops working depreciates the debt. A semi-periphery that exits its function collapses the construction.
The indebtedness of 1916, viewed through Arrighi, is a growing pain inside a working world-system. It is heavy, humiliating, politically destructive - but it is a pain of growth, of inclusion. Russia is inscribed into this system.
Now Russia in 2026.
The American systemic cycle of accumulation, which began in the early twentieth century and reached maturity after the Second World War, has by Arrighi's diagnosis already passed its signal crisis and is now in the phase of terminal crisis. The signs are all those he described: hypertrophy of the financial sector, the divorce of capital from production, the exhaustion of hegemonic consensus, attempts at forcible restoration of leadership, the appearance of a potential successor in the East. The Chinese cycle is accumulating but has not yet taken hegemonic shape, and it remains uncertain whether it will - in "Adam Smith in Beijing" Arrighi left this question open, and today the openness has only widened.
In this picture Russia occupies none of the systemic positions. It is not a semi-periphery of the American cycle - it has been ejected from there by sanctions, the freezing of reserves, the disconnection of banks, the rupture of technological chains, the embargo on critical imports. It is not a core of the forming Chinese cycle - it is its raw-material periphery of the second order, a supplier of discounted oil and gas, whom Beijing graciously permits to exist in the capacity of a junior partner on Beijing's terms. It is not an alternative center of accumulation - for that role it possesses neither productive base, nor financial infrastructure, nor technological sovereignty, nor demographic reserve, nor even ideological appeal.
Russia in 2026 sits between cycles. It is a territory that has fallen out of the old world-system at the moment of its transit and has found no place in the new one taking shape. And here lies the central inversion compared to 1916, the inversion that overturns the intuitive comparison. On the surface it looks as though 1916 was a catastrophe and 2026 is merely a difficult time. Indebtedness, war, revolution on the doorstep versus sanctions and stagnation. By Arrighi it comes out the other way around.
The debt of 1916 was a sign of inclusion. The isolation of 2026 is a sign of exclusion. The French loans held Russia inside the system - creditors invested in its preservation. The frozen reserves push Russia out of the system - former partners invest in its weakening. In the first case the outside world has an interest in the functionality of the debtor. In the second case the outside world has an interest in dysfunction. This is not a quantitative difference of position - these are different types of position.
The second inversion concerns the resource base. Witte's and Stolypin's industrialization gave the Russian economy real material growth: a railway network, metallurgy, the Baku oil fields, the development of industrial centers from St. Petersburg to the Donbas, a banking system, stock exchanges. Demography was working in the Empire's favor - a young population, an agrarian reserve which Stolypin was attempting to convert into a farmer class. Literacy was rising, the engineering school was forming, science was reaching world level. The debt was being serviced by grain exports and by the products of nascent industrial development. Russia in 1916 stood on a rising curve of accumulation - uneven, contradictory, politically dangerous, but rising.
Russia in 2026 stands on a falling curve. The deindustrialization of the nineties was not compensated; the raw-material rent of the 2000s and 2010s went into consumption, into the stabilization fund, into villas and yachts, into imitative modernization, into the war. The demographic hole deepens: those who left in 2022 will not return, the mobilized will not have children, the birth rate has been falling for three decades. The technological chains built from the late eighties onward have been severed by sanctions and are not reproducible inside the country. The engineering class has emigrated or aged. Science has lost its connection to the world. The export model has shrunk to discounted oil for Beijing and Delhi, gas that has lost its European market and lacks the infrastructure to replace it, metals and fertilizers in what remains. This is not an indebted economy - it is an economy consuming the fixed capital inherited from the Soviet period and not reproducing even what it had at the start.
The contrast here is brutal. 1916 - a rising base with encumbrances. 2026 - a falling base without encumbrances only because there is no longer anything to encumber: no creditors, no investors, no technological partners, no allies in accumulation. Russia in 1916 was a debtor with assets. Russia in 2026 is neither debtor nor creditor - it has fallen out of the very logic of debt relations with the core of the system.
The third inversion - and the most painful - concerns what remains after collapse. The Nikolaevan Empire lost the war, lost its dynasty, passed through a civil catastrophe. But the industrial base built by Witte, the engineering schools, the cadres inherited from the Empire, the geographical integrity of the key regions - all of this passed to the Bolsheviks. And the Bolsheviks were able to build on it the Soviet project, which, monstrous as it was, turned out to be the next regime of accumulation, embedded in the interwar world-system as an alternative pole. The catastrophe of 1917, in Arrighi's systemic optic, was a transition from one regime of accumulation to another within the same world-system. Russia did not fall out - it changed position.
What will remain after the current regime, should it collapse in the foreseeable future, is an open question, but the dynamics of the 2010s and 2020s give discouraging answers. What is being consumed is not only current output but the fixed capital accumulated over a century. Infrastructure wears out without renewal. Cadres flow out without replacement. Institutions degrade without alternative. Territories within the Russian Federation drift toward informal autonomies disguised as loyalty. The North Caucasus has long lived by its own rules; the Far East drifts economically toward China; the Siberian regions become raw-material enclaves of corporations. Collapse, if it comes, will leave the next regime - whatever it may be - with less material base than the Bolsheviks inherited in 1917. And this in a context where the external environment will be hostile or indifferent, not allied, as it was for the Reds, whom the West in fact granted respite through its sham intervention and then through long years of recognition.
The fourth inversion is the systemic exit. By Arrighi, crises inside a cycle are resolved in two ways: by changing the regime of accumulation within the same world-system, or by military mobilization aimed at restoring position. The Russian Empire of 1917, through catastrophe, took the first path - it changed its regime of accumulation without falling out of the world-system. The Soviet project embedded itself in the interwar order as a counter-hegemony, and after 1945 as one of the two poles of a bipolar world. This was a bad position, repressive, cannibalistic, but it was a position inside the system.
A crisis of falling out of the cycle is not resolved in this way. A territory cast out of the world-system in the phase of its transit has no internal mechanism of relaunch - because any relaunch requires re-embedding in the system, and the system is transitioning into a new configuration in which no place for this territory is foreseen. Arrighi gives two variants for such cases: disintegration into smaller units, which embed themselves individually into the new order on the terms of the new center, or conservation of the whole territory as a sub-imperial periphery of the new hegemon, also on its terms. A third variant does not exist in his model. The history of systemic cycles does not know an independent exit from falling out.
Here a natural question arises: what about China? If a new hegemon is forming in Beijing, will it not become precisely the system into which Russia embeds itself, thereby solving the problem of falling out? Common-sense reasoning suggests: where else would it go - it will pivot east, redirect its pipelines, substitute the European market with the Chinese, receive technology instead of Western technology, and thus find a new place under a new sun. This picture is painted in the Kremlin as well, and it is so flattering for the regime's self-preservation that one is tempted to believe it. By Arrighi it does not work.
It does not work for several reasons, and each is substantial. The first: the Chinese cycle of accumulation has not yet taken hegemonic shape. Beijing has no global financial infrastructure comparable to the dollar's; no military system capable of guaranteeing order beyond its region; no ideological project capable of becoming the universal language of a new world-system. China is stronger than at any time in the last two hundred years, but it is not yet a center - it is a contender. And as a contender it cannot offer a semi-periphery a full-fledged place inside an established system, because the established system does not yet exist. Russia in 2026 is embedding itself not into a new hegemonic order but into its construction site - on which the status of semi-periphery is not even defined.
The second reason matters more. Even if the Chinese cycle is consummated, Russia's place in it is predetermined by its resource base and geopolitical situation. That place is raw-material periphery without leverage. Not a semi-periphery in the manner of the British cycle a century ago, when Russia could trade on its geopolitical weight, its market, its army. A raw-material periphery without an alternative buyer, without technological sovereignty, without transport independence from Chinese terminals and ports, without financial infrastructure outside the yuan. This is not a partnership of unequals - it is dependency without exit. Beijing receives oil at a discount, gas at its own price, metals and fertilizers on its own contracts, and in exchange provides exactly as much technology and finance as is necessary to sustain extraction, and not one unit more. The logic of the relationship is colonial in substance, wrapped in the rhetoric of strategic partnership.
The third reason is the most pitiless. China does not regard Russia as an ally and not as a partner in the new world-system - it regards it as an object of slow expansion. Demographic pressure on the Far East, economic absorption of border regions, gradual transfer of raw-material corporations under Chinese contracts, infrastructural binding through Belt and Road - all of this is already under way and will intensify as Moscow weakens. Beijing does not rescue Russia from falling out of the world-system. Beijing uses this fall to gradually acquire its assets at a discount. This is not a noose that tightens in a single movement - it is a noose that tightens over decades, and each new decade of dependency makes exit impossible in terms of available resources.
And here it is worth turning to Trump. In May 2026, after a series of meetings, initiatives, and special envoys, Washington effectively walked away from the negotiating frame around the Russo-Ukrainian war - without formally closing it, but having ceased to invest political capital in it. On the surface this looks like an abdication of responsibility, like the abandonment of Ukraine, like disillusionment with one's own capacity to broker a deal. In Arrighi's logic it may look otherwise.
If the American cycle is in its terminal phase and Washington is searching for a way to preserve the remnants of hegemony through the restructuring of alliances and obligations, then Russia in that restructuring has no value as a partner. Not as an adversary to be integrated, not as an ally against China, not as an independent pole. It is a fallen-out territory, drifting into Beijing's orbit by the natural course of things. To hold it back from that drift through diplomatic effort means spending resource on what would occur in any case. Not to hold it back means allowing the Chinese cycle to take on the burden of Russian dependency. The deeper Russia sinks into the Chinese noose, the more Beijing spends on its maintenance, and the less remains for competition with Washington in the Pacific, in the technology sector, in the financial architecture of the coming order.
In this optic Trump's exit from negotiations is not surrender and not caprice. It is a structural decision based on a cold calculation: Russia will cost Beijing more than it is worth, and let Beijing feed it. The stool was not kicked from under Putin in a single motion - it has been pulled away slowly and deliberately, through the ending of support for the negotiating process, through the refusal to press Kyiv toward concessions, through the quiet continuation of a sanctions regime that no one intends to lift. Putin has been left alone with the Chinese noose, and with each passing month or two that noose will tighten without any participation from Washington.
What this means for Ukraine is a question whose answer is less obvious than it appears. On one hand, the American exit from the negotiating frame removes the pressure for a bad peace on Russian terms. That is good. On the other hand, it removes the American investment in the outcome of the war as such - Washington is prepared to support Kyiv instrumentally but is not prepared to invest in victory as a strategic project. That is bad. Ukraine finds itself in the position of a country whom no one prevents from fighting but whom no one helps to bring the war to a decisive break. A war of attrition on both sides, with the slow erosion of Russia's resource base and the slow drift of Russia into the Chinese orbit, is a scenario that suits Washington in Arrighi's logic. It suits Ukraine less, because the cost of attrition for the smaller economy is higher.
But there is another side to the same coin. If Russia falls out of the world-system and is conserved as a Chinese raw-material periphery, then Ukraine finds itself on the border of that Chinese orbit. And on how decisively Ukraine embeds itself into the European contour of security and accumulation in the coming years depends its own systemic position. Not as a buffer between West and Russia - that role no longer exists, because the Russia that needed a buffer no longer exists. But as the eastern flank of the European space, bordering on the zone of Chinese influence through a fallen-out territory. This is a new geopolitical configuration, and it demands a new Ukrainian strategy: not balancing between West and Russia, not bargaining for neutrality, not searching for compromises - but the full and accelerated embedding into the European cycle of accumulation, while that cycle is still open to new members.
Paléologue then recorded a terrible forecast and was right on every point except one. He thought he was discussing a crisis of the Empire inside the war. In fact he was discussing the transition from one regime of accumulation to another within the same world-system. It was a heavy, bloody, catastrophic transition, but it was a transition.
Today there is nowhere to transition to. And this, by Arrighi, is the main difference between 2026 and 1916 - and not in 2026's favor.
Trump, it seems, has understood this and is acting accordingly - neither pulling Moscow out of the pit nor pushing it in harder, but simply stepping aside so that it sinks under its own weight and under Chinese weight at the same time.
Putin has not understood. He has not understood and will not understand, because in his picture of the world Russia continues to be one of the poles, negotiates as an equal, bargains for spheres of influence, brandishes the nuclear argument, and waits for the West to tire and come to make a deal. He thinks in the categories of the Yalta world, in which Russia had a seat at the table because the victors of 1945 had placed it there. The category of falling out of a systemic cycle does not exist in his vocabulary. The category of "sub-imperial periphery of Beijing" does not exist there either. He sincerely believes that the pivot east is a strategic maneuver and not a drift toward colonial status. He sincerely believes that the Chinese friendship is a symmetrical alliance and not a supplier's contract. He sincerely believes that time is working for Russia because the West is weakening - failing to notice that Russia is weakening faster, and in a direction from which there is no return.
This is not a question of intelligence or of being informed - it is a question of frame. Putin sees the world in twentieth-century coordinates, in which the main event is confrontation with the West, and any loss of the West automatically means a gain for Moscow. Arrighi shows that the twentieth century has ended, that the American cycle is playing out its terminal plot, and that in this playing-out Russia does not win - it falls out. To understand this from inside the Kremlin is impossible, because the whole Kremlin is built on the denial of this possibility.
Ukraine, by contrast, should understand it immediately. The window for embedding into the European cycle is not open forever, and while the American cycle plays out its terminal plot, the eastern flank of Europe must be formalized. Once the plot has played out, it will no longer be on anyone's terms that the redrafting takes place - it will simply not take place at all.