There is a phrase that circulates in émigré chats and comment sections with the smooth confidence of a proverb: scratch any Russian, and underneath you will find an imperialist. It is offered as hard-won wisdom, the kind of thing only the war taught us to see clearly. I want to argue that it is wrong — not sentimentally wrong, not impolitely wrong, but wrong in a way that matters, because the mistake it makes is the same mistake the Nuremberg Laws made. I say this as someone who holds Russia fully responsible for this war, who wants Russia to lose it, and who feels the same instinctive recoil you feel when a Russian liberal starts explaining himself. The recoil is honest. The conclusion drawn from it is not. Russians are indeed an imperial people. But imperialism is a disease, and diseases can be cured. What it is not, and has never been, is a gene.
What imperialism actually is
Begin with the thing itself, because most of the argument dissolves once you name it precisely. Imperialism, stripped to its core, is reverence for size. It is the conviction that the supreme value of a state is the quantity of territory it controls — and that everything else, how people live, what their culture produces, whether their science advances, whether their children are safe, is secondary to the map. This is the atavism at the heart of it. When someone insists that the breakup of a large state would be a catastrophe for the very people who make up that state, ask them what concretely would be lost. Not power, not land, not flags: their actual lives. They cannot answer, because the loss they fear is metaphysical. They have been taught to grieve for square kilometers as if for kin.
The Russian nation was formed precisely around this reverence. It underwent what one might call an imperial ethnogenesis — it did not first exist as a people and then acquire an empire, the way a person acquires a coat; it was constituted as a people through and by the imperial project itself. That is why the prospect of dissolution reads to the imperial mind not as political change but as personal death. This is real, and pretending otherwise helps no one. But notice what this explanation is and is not. It is historical. It locates the trait in a process, in centuries of a particular kind of state-building, religion, and law. It does not locate the trait in blood.
Russia is not unique — it is merely the last
The fastest way to see that the imperial syndrome is not a Russian essence is to notice that other peoples have had it and recovered. The temptation is to look at the British today, or at the Arab world, and say: there, no imperialism, no panic about the loss of greatness — only the Russians cling to this. But that is reading the patient after the cure and concluding he was never sick. The British Empire was the greatest the world had seen, the one on which the sun did not set, and it did not die quietly. It was defended, ferociously, for decades. India did not receive independence as a gift; it was wrested from men who carried the imperial syndrome in their bones — and the most eloquent of those carriers, the very archetype of the mind that cannot bear to see the empire shrink, was Churchill. The idea of a single state gathering all who belong together is not a Russian peculiarity either; the dream of a unified Islamic caliphate is the same impulse wearing different clothing. The wish to fold everyone into one great country, regardless of whether they wish to be folded, simply is imperialism, wherever it appears.
So Russia is not the exception. Russia is the straggler. The other classical empires have already collapsed, and in collapsing they were cured — the syndrome ran its course, the fever broke, and the post-imperial nations went on to live perfectly ordinary national lives. The Russian Empire is merely the last of its kind still standing, which is why the disease, treated and healed elsewhere, still rages here. To mistake “last to recover” for “constitutionally incurable” is to mistake the calendar for biology.
The line between history and racism
Here is where everything turns, and it turns on a distinction so simple that it is astonishing how often it is ignored. There is a world of difference between saying that a people has acquired certain traits over centuries and saying that a people is born with them. The first is sociology. The second is racism — and not racism by loose analogy, but racism in the exact technical sense that sent human beings to the ovens.
Consider how servility, cruelty, and submission are actually transmitted. They pass from one generation to the next through normative systems: through law, through custom, through religion, through the whole apparatus of expectation that a society erects and that its members absorb without ever choosing it. A child born into the Stalinist Soviet Union grows up a Stalinist or a frightened conformist, and it does not matter in the slightest whether that child is ethnically Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, German, or French. Drop any infant into those circumstances and the circumstances will do their work. The “spirit of dependence,” as one careful formulation has it, is imposed by society and the state over the course of centuries — it is not passed on through the body. This is signaling heredity, the inheritance of codes, not chromosomes.
The litmus test for whether you have crossed from history into racism is precise, and I would urge anyone to keep it in their pocket. It is the Nuremberg Laws. Those laws were racist not because they were cruel — many cruel laws are not racist — but because they restricted a human being’s rights solely on the basis of birth into a group, with no inquiry into who the person actually was. If you were a Jew, you were condemned; nothing you believed, did, or became could alter the verdict, because the verdict was pronounced on your origin and origin cannot be changed. Now lay the “slavery gene” thesis beside it. If Russianness is a genetic condition of servility, then every Russian carries it from birth, no Russian can escape it, and the only honest policy toward the whole nation is the one the Nazis drew toward theirs. People who talk of genetic slavery without irony — who mean it literally and not as metaphor — have, whether they know it or not, stepped onto exactly these tracks. They would measure the skull, read the nationality, and pronounce the sentence. The horror of that logic is not softened by the fact that the people deploying it currently stand on the right side of the war. One can be on the right side of history and still reach for the wrong, and ancient, instrument.
There is a tell that gives the game away every time. The moment you assign a fixed trait to every member of a nation and call it inborn, you are a racist, regardless of which nation and which trait. If instead you describe how a nation developed certain behavioral tendencies under specific historical pressures — tendencies that are acquired, that vary, that can be unlearned — you are simply observing the world. The whole moral weight hangs on that one word: innate, or acquired.
What the science of inheritance actually permits
It helps to be concrete about what heredity can and cannot fix, because the genetic theory borrows the prestige of science while violating it. Take empathy, the very capacity whose absence the racial theorists want to attribute to Russian blood. The best empirical work suggests that empathy is roughly ten percent hereditary and ninety percent acquired — and even that ten percent comes with heavy caveats, because no one has been able to point to the specific genes responsible or identify their carriers. Now imagine centuries of brutal negative selection, a society that systematically destroyed its gentlest and most independent members generation after generation. Could that fix a physical trait, like average height, given enough time? Plausibly, yes, because physical characteristics have a real hereditary component. Could it breed a “servile mentality” into the genome? No. There is no slavery gene to select for. Mentality is built anew in each person by the world they are thrown into, which is why the same bloodline produces a Stalinist in one decade and a dissident in the next. Selection works on bodies. It does not work on souls, because souls are not inherited.
The proof walks among us
All of this would remain theoretical if no Russian had ever broken free. But they have, and their existence is not a footnote — it is the disproof. When someone says “scratch any Russian and you’ll find an imperialist,” the answer is simply: scratch Sakharov. Scratch Skobov. Scratch as hard and as long as you like; you will not find an imperialist, because the thing the theory claims is universal and inborn is demonstrably absent in them. The reply that these are merely two exceptions proving the rule misses what an exception to a genetic law actually means. A genuinely genetic, universal trait admits no exceptions; that is what genetic and universal mean. Two free men are not a rounding error against the theory — they are a refutation of it. And of course they are not only two. They are simply the two whose names are known. There are, by any sober estimate, something on the order of twenty million Russians who are genuinely not imperialists, who reject the imperial position to varying degrees but really reject it. We do not know most of their names, which is exactly why it is so easy to pretend they do not exist.
I will not pretend this is comforting in the way one might wish. The twenty million are not the problem’s solution, because the problem is not really the committed imperialists either — it is the vast passive majority in between, the people who are not Prokhanovs or Solovyovs, who harbor no burning dream of conquest, but who support the war with their indifference and their silence. That indifference kills. It offers no comfort to a Ukrainian under a missile to know that he is being murdered in the name of perhaps a fifth of the population rather than all of it. The surface of Russian life is defined by those who cheer, and the cheering is real. But “most Russians are passively complicit” is a different sentence from “every Russian is a born slave,” and the difference is the whole of the moral and political question. The first describes a condition that pressure, defeat, and time can change. The second describes a doom, and a doom invites only extermination.
A peripheral European disease
One last stereotype deserves dismantling, because it props up the genetic theory from the side. It is the comforting binary of good Europe and bad Asia, in which Russian cruelty gets filed under an essentially Asiatic nature, some Horde inheritance in the blood. This is geography masquerading as destiny. Russia is not the antipode of Europe; it is a peripheral, damaged part of European civilization. Its Christianity, however distorted, is Eastern Christian — a European tributary. Its language is European. Its high culture was borrowed, absorbed, and elaborated from the European mainstream. The pathologies we are discussing are not imports from some alien East; they are European diseases in a European body that never received the European cures — the contained reformations, the separations of church and state, the slow institutionalization of human rights that healed the syndrome elsewhere. To call the Russian sickness Asiatic is to grant the West a false innocence and to grant Russia a false essence. It is the same move as the slavery gene, performed on a map instead of a chromosome.
So where does this leave us? With a diagnosis, which is the only honest place to stand, because without a diagnosis there is no treatment. Russians are an imperial people, formed by an imperial history, currently the last carriers of a classical imperial syndrome that other nations have already survived. The 2022 invasion had no territorial or economic logic — its causes were entirely subjective, lodged in one man’s imperial syndrome as the necessary condition and in a large part of the population’s as the sufficient one. That is a grim picture. But it is a picture of a curable condition, and the cure is not the disappearance of a people. It is the disappearance of the empire that breeds the syndrome. The man who broke free in his prison cell, refusing to let his captors go, is not an aberration from the Russian genome. He is the evidence that there is no such genome to be aberrant from. Hold onto him. He is the difference between a politics of pressure and a politics of the oven.