Karaganov in 2017. Photograph Dmitry Rozhkov

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If the way you followed leads you to advocating for nuclear war, Karaganov, of what use is your way?*

‘These officials are in essence — our rabble; the rabble of yesterday’s and today’s day: not the gentry and not the common people; not beasts, not clods of earth, not wisps of mist, not shards of planets, not demons and not angels. Without the addition of the particle ‘not,’ one can say only one thing about them: they are people; this is — not especially flattering; people — businessmen and philistines, whose spiritual depth is hopelessly and firmly blocked off by the ‘cares of the vain world’.’

Alexander Blok (1921)

by Richard Steinhardt

There is a particular kind of Russian intellectual who survives every regime change not by adapting his principles, but by demonstrating that he never really had any. He is a kind of bureaucrat. Sergei Alexandrovich Karaganov is the epitome of this type.

He briefly served the Soviet Union, then he did his intellectual flunkying for that drunken corrupt sot, Boris Yeltsin, and then attached himself to Vladimir Putin, shifting his stance to match whoever held power. He is not so much a thinker who arrives at conclusions through analysis or on principle, but is a resonance chamber—a man whose intellectual practice and ideological veneer is whatever the current power structure needs it to be. The only consistent thing about Karaganov is his rat-like instinct for survival.

Karaganov was born on September 12, 1952, into the Soviet nomenklatura. His father was a cultural diplomacy official and editor of Soviet Literature; his mother headed the poetry department at Novi Mir. He grew fat on figures of speech and perhaps the overblown rhetoric about initiating nuclear war he exhibits to this day is a family inheritance. Effectively, Karaganov’s parents were doyens of Bulgakov’s MASSOLIT.

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Karaganov was educated in the system’s institutions and given privileges that few Soviet citizens had access to. No doubt he pushed his way to the front of quite a few queues and had plenty of valyuta to spend in the foreign currency shops. In 1974, he graduated from the Economics Department of Moscow State University. Magically, he secured a plum research trainee role at the USSR mission to the United Nations from 1976 to 1977. He was rewarded and fattened enough by privilege to be trusted not to defect.

From 1978 to 1988, without even a master’s degree, nepo boy worked at the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies (ISKAN), the premier Soviet think tank for superpower analysis. In 1979, he finally completed his Kandidatskaya (equivalent to an MPhil, not a doctorate) dissertation on “The Role and Place of Transnational Corporations in US Foreign Policy.”

In 1988, he co-founded the Institute of Europe. In 1989, he defended his doctoral dissertation on “The Role and Place of Western Europe in US Strategy Towards the USSR (1945-1988).” His dissertation topics were instrumental—U.S. foreign policy analysis that served state interests, not independent scholarship. He was an apparatchik on the make, not an intellectual with his own convictions.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Karaganov didn’t fall with it. He pivoted. In 1991, he became a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1992, he formulated the “Karaganov Doctrine”—Russia should defend the rights of ethnic Russians in the “near abroad.” That same year, he advised Yeltsin to apply for NATO membership. From 1993 to 1999, he was a member of the Presidential Council. In 1994, he became Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. In 1998, he joined the Trilateral Commission: the group that prioritises the interests of transnational corporate and financial elites over democratic public welfare

Now this is the same man who advocates now for multipolarity and global equality. He later admitted: “I persuaded Boris Yeltsin in 1992 to apply for NATO membership… But he was rejected. When he was rejected, I was appalled… I told my friends… ‘they couldn’t have rejected that, it is so stupid’.” This was not a man of principle—this was a man who had bet on the West and, when rebuffed, began preparing for the opposite.

As Putin consolidated power, Karaganov shifted again—this time from Europhile to hardline anti-European. From 2001 to 2013, he served as Advisor to the Deputy Head of the Russian Presidential Administration for Foreign Policy. In 2006, he became Dean of the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at HSE. In 2012, he was made Honorary Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. In 2022, he was awarded the Order of Alexander Nevsky—”for great contribution to the implementation of the foreign policy of the Russian Federation and many years of conscientious work.”

He now describes the European elite as “degenerate,” “absolutely insane,” and governed by people with “hyena brains.” What a profound economic, social and geopolitical analysis! In his railing against Europe (despite the fact that it is the USA who is the prime prosecutor of this war) he calls the war in Ukraine a war “with Europe, not Ukraine.” He admits the USA is behind the war, but chooses to point the finger at Europe alone. “This war could and should be ended,” he declares. “But it will be finally finished only when Russia achieves the total defeat of Europe… We are fighting not Ukraine, not Zelensky and the like. We are fighting again the Europe which has been the source of all ills and all evil in the history of humanity.”

The same man who once pushed for NATO membership now threatens to nuke Europe. Karaganov has publicly proposed a seven-step nuclear escalation ladder. First, publicly announce revision of nuclear doctrine and lower the threshold for using nuclear weapons. Second, publicly raise the alert level of strategic nuclear forces. Third, move nuclear weapons to new locations (Belarus in 2023). Fourth, conduct military exercises simulating a nuclear strike. Fifth, carry out a highly visible warning nuclear detonation, perhaps using a Tsar Bomb 2. The Tsar Bomb was the most powerful bomb ever detonated. Sixth, launch a single nuclear strike against a military target in a hostile country. And here he cavils about moral responsibility as he advocates for mass murder. Seventh, if the West does not back down, carry out a series of nuclear strikes against multiple targets in Europe. “Germany, Romania, Poland… Germany comes first,” he says. “Revanchist mindset is reawakening. Germany is becoming what it has been for the last 150 years—a source, the main source of evil in humanity and in Europe.” Sergei Karaganov has stated that Germany “can never be forgiven for starting two wars in two generations” and that “if they come close to rearming, they should be eliminated.”

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The Tsar Bomb was the most powerful bomb ever detonated. Министерство обороны СССР

Consider the greasy pole climbing atheist who now invokes God. He was a Soviet insider in an officially atheist state, yet now frames Russia as the defender of traditional Christian values against a “godless” West. Karaganov wields his ‘God’ like a cudgel. He invokes Dostoevsky’s question: “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” “One has to choose between a colossal sin and a mortal sin,” he says. “If we do not use nuclear weapons and do not stop the world sliding toward a great thermonuclear war… we will have committed a monstrous offense before our Lord.” The shift from Soviet atheism to Orthodox rhetoric fits his pattern of ideological flexibility and chameleon like switches. Consider the anti-Soviet critic who benefited from the system.

Once the USSR was dead, Karaganov wrote this about the system that had made him: “By the turn of the 1970s-1980s, the Soviet model of development had lost its viability… Party and government functionaries were prospering, intellectuals were quietly loathing them… The Soviet ideology and identity imposed by bloodshed, millions of deaths and massive propaganda… were beginning to crumble. Almost no one had any beliefs or faith in the future.” He attacked the system after it was gone. He wrote about “party and government functionaries prospering”—yet he was one of them. He wrote about “intellectuals quietly loathing” the system—yet he stayed silent, kept his positions, and rose frothing to the top during the time of oligarchy.

The anti-imperialist without anti-capitalism

Consider the anti-imperialist with no systemic socialist or Marxist or Leninist analysis. He condemns European colonialism as the source of all evil: “Europe robbed—well, a large part of Europe, not all of Europe—and grew rich by looting the world, killing millions of people, destroying civilizations and suppressing civilizations. Europe is the main breeding ground of all humanity’s evils.” And yet the anti imperialist response of the Bolsheviks in defending the revolution is recast as Eurasianism while the svelte Karaganov castigates the Russian communists. The Cheka defended the USSR and he castigates the Cheka. The USSR united behind Stalin and the communist party and he castigates them too. He led a working group proposing “de-Stalinisation of society” in 2011, calling Stalin “one of the worst tyrants in human history, who deserves only disgust and contempt.”

Sergei Karaganov twists and turns and is entangled in contradiction. Consider the critic of oligarchs who serves oligarchs. He attacks “unpatriotic” elites who have “lost their moral compass,” but he never criticises the concentration of wealth, the corruption, or the plundering of state assets that defined post-Soviet Russia. His criticism is directed at those who aren’t loyal enough to the state—not at the system of oligarchic power itself.

Which is not to say that sometimes the stopped clock isn’t right twice a day. Karaganov says “in 2013 when there was a meeting of European leaders where I said that if you continue into this, your system, there will be a big war and millions of Ukrainians will die. [Yes!] And nobody dared to look into my eyes.” He calls Europeans “traitors to their motherlands” for serving American interests. [Yes!].

Consider the defender of “traditional values”. He calls for a return to “traditional values” and condemns the social progress of the post-1968 era: “Europeans… have been intellectually degrading after the 1968 so-called revolution, which killed most of European education… They have lost respect for the family, for love between men and women, respect for seniors, patriotism, etc. What is left? It is a moral hole.”

And at the very same time Karaganov claims that the Russian Federation needs to be a tolerant multicultural society. He also says, hilariously, that Russians are less racist than Europeans. Tell that to a Londoner! A Parisian!

The obvious opportunity to work more closely, naturally, with the People’s Republic of China arises, and Karaganov is no longer advocating to Join NATO from his position in the Trilateral Commission, now he says: “We are originally a Eurasian country… Our European journey should have been ended 130 to 140 years ago.” He claims Russia’s cultural openness comes from the Mongol Empire: “The Mongols did plunder, but they were highly tolerant of religions.”

What do we call a former Soviet analyst incapable of conducting a proper Marxist analysis of imperialism, who only condemns based on national identity. Sergei Karaganov seems not to be a thinker who arrives at conclusions through thorough analysis or principle. He is more like Samuel Huntington making generalisations about different nationalities and ‘civilisations’.

Karaganov is a resonance and amplification chamber—a man whose ideology is slightly more edgy than what the current power structure in the Russian Federation needs it to be. He articulates the impulses of the oligarchic class he serves. Bomb Europe! Putin once called Karaganov “a terrifying man.”

“I am quite eminent and well known as it is,” Karaganov boasts, “and I have already achieved everything that can be achieved in this world, many, many times.’’ He advocates a nuclear first strike, he says, this ‘’because I consider myself morally obliged to do it.” The man who advises nuclear strikes on Europe, who claims Europe is the “source of all evil,” who invokes God while advocating mass murder, who condemns oligarchs while serving them, who attacks the Soviet system he benefited from, who shifts from Europhile to anti-European—this is the man who, in his own words, has “already achieved everything.” He is the chameleon who has served every Russian leader since Brezhnev, shifting his ideology to match whoever sat in the Kremlin. Intellectual shape-shifting is the only consistent thing about this intellectual brute.

If a lifetime of analysis, adaptation, and influence culminates in advocating nuclear strikes on Europe as a moral duty, Sergei Alexandrovich, of what value did your intellectual journey hold?

Blok, Alexander. “On the Calling of the Poet” (“O naznachenii poeta”). Speech delivered at the House of Writers, Petrograd, 11 February 1921. Published in Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 6.

Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita. Written 1928–1940; published 1966–67. [MASSOLIT as the satirical archetype of the venal, state-serving writers’ bureaucracy.]

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. 1880. Part IV, Book XI, Chapter 4.

Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Караганов, С.А. «Россия и мир: Новая эпоха». Международная жизнь, №1, 2007, с. 12–29.

Караганов, С.А. «О мире, войне и ядерном оружии: Семь ступеней эскалации». Россия в глобальной политике, Т. 21, №4, 2023, с. 22–37.

Совет по внешней и оборонной политике (СВОП). «Стратегия для России: Повестка дня для Президента—2000». Москва, 2000. [Co-authored by Karaganov; the policy blueprint that shaped early Putin-era foreign policy.]

*After a quote from Anton Chigurh in the Coen brothers’ movie, No Country for Old Men

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Richard Steinhardt is a committed socialist and a radical humanist and has published in the Morning Star and a variety of other communist and socialist publications. He believes that human conscience and understanding should always precede dogma and deterministic formulas posturing as ‘social science’.