POLITICAL AND MENTAL FOUNDATIONS OF RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM

Today, Russian imperialism is undergoing a new phase of its transformation, moving from covert interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states to open territorial expansion. Its primary task is plans to seize the sovereign state of Ukraine through military aggression, forced inoculation of its own model of the world order and return to the space of a single "Russian world". The former post-Soviet Baltic republics, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia are considered as the next territories for integration into the imperial space of Russia. And this is a war not only and not so much for territories, but for ideas, a worldview that will dominate them. The main features of imperialism as an ideology and policy are an irrational desire for military expansion and absolute security, an unobsessed regime with a “center-periphery” subordination relationship, a patronage-client scheme, and the “privatization” of state functions by the ruling elite, turning them into a source of private profits. A distinctive feature of Russian imperialism is that it carries out not only territorial expansion, but above all ideological and ideological expansion, instilling its ideological picture of the world on the conquered peoples. The Russian imperial ideology has been formed over the centuries and is based on such mental traits as: superiority, dominance, psychological inclination towards permissiveness and robbery, servile submission to power in various forms, abnormal patience, religious fanaticism and more. These features of mentality became the basis of the imperial ideology of state building as a system of views, ideas and worldview of Russians. Russian imperialism (rashism) is a syncretism of Russian Nazism, Orthodoxy and psychotraumatic nostalgia for the USSR, which has turned into an imperial identity.