Crime and Punishment: What Dostoyevsky Can Teach the Global South about the Ukraine War
The Post Magazine / August 1, 2024
Raskolnikov kills the old pawnbroker; illustration by Nikolai Karazin, 1893.
“Don’t do it, Rodya!” was written, in paint, on the wall: “Не убивай, Родя!” And “Rodya, don’t kill!” It was in St. Petersburg, in the spring 2002, when I stood for the first time in front of the house where Rodion Raskolnikov probably lived: Stoliarny Per No. 9. Whoever had painted this graffiti was shouting back at Dostoyevsky’s murderer, as if he could correct the novel from the distant past.
At Stoliarny Per No. 5 there is a passageway to the inner courtyard. Dostoyevsky must have had this place in mind when he made Raskolnikov find the axe in a caretaker’s shed. The murderer continues on to Ulitza Kaznacheyskaya, where the novelist wrote Crime and Punishment, in house no. 7. Dostoyevsky then sends Raskolnikov in the direction of the Griboedeva Canal. On Kokushkin Bridge, Rodion stops and looks into the water, full of gloomy thoughts. Then he turns right from Sadovaya Ulitza into Rimskogo Korsakova, crosses Voznesensky Prospekt towards Ulitza Bolshaya Podiacheskaya and Sredniaya Podiacheskaya. The usurer’s apartment is located between the street and the canal, Kanala Griboedeva 104, through the corridor to the inner courtyard, entrance no. 5, 3rd floor. There he kills her with the axe, along with her sister, Lisaveta, whop suddenly appears. Rodya flees down the stairs through the corridor and onto the street.
When I was 16, I read Crime and Punishment like a thriller. Decades later, the novel was a guide for the flaneur, whose walks often ended at Moika 86, in the “Idiot” restaurant, named after another novel by Dostoyevsky, where we sometimes had meetings about filming. Today, Crime and Punishment is a warning sign for the war in Ukraine—especially for readers from the Global South. Like the student from China to whom a friend rented an apartment on Nevsky Prospekt, many intellectuals from Asia, Africa and South America are familiar with Dostoyevsky. A large number of them have studied in Russia. For this reason alone, they refuse to accept the West’s propaganda.
The formula of “unprovoked war of aggression” is pure self-deception on the part of NATO for the academic class of the Global South; they see the war in Ukraine more as a defensive pre-emptive strike by Russia, in line with Nicolo Machiavelli: “It is not he who first takes up arms who is the instigator of disaster, but he who compels it.”
You can also read this in Dostoyevsky: The bloody deed has a prehistory. The student Raskolnikov is characterized by a mixture of poverty and arrogance. He considers himself morally superior. So, he comes up with the idea of “permissible murder,” with the notion of “extraordinary people who enjoy natural privileges in the sense of general human progress,” which, however, does not correspond to the actual situation of his life. Observers from the Global South likewise attest to a mixture of megalomania and being unhinged from reality on the part of NATO. Intellectuals in the Global South hold the NATO states responsible for a whole series of the most serious political crimes.
They accuse the West of numerous wars of aggression in violation of international law: The bombing of Serbia in 1999 to force the secession of Kosovo—a war of aggression in violation of international law, as the former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder put it years later. The war of aggression against Afghanistan in violation of international law that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, at the end of which the USA and ISAF fled Kabul defeated, and which ended with the very situation they supposedly wanted to eliminate: the rule of the Taliban. The war of aggression against Iraq in 2003, in violation of international law, and the eradication of entire cities such as Raffa or Fallujah with hundreds of thousands of deaths, especially among the civilian population. The USA’s regime change operation in Syria up from 2011, which violated international law, because Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad refused the plan to build a gas pipeline from Qatar to Europe and thus compete with Gazprom. The bombing of Libya in 2011, which was orchestrated by the current US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Together with Hillary Clinton, back in 2008, he planned the coup in the Honduras.
The statement by former top German diplomat Christian von Schulenburg that NATO has been responsible for most political assassinations since 1991 has met with approval in Africa, South America and large parts of Eurasia. His conclusion is shared in the global South: There is no more international law; NATO has destroyed it and replaced it with the law of the fist, called the “ruled-based order.” A megalomaniac hegemon; but a large part of the world no longer plays along.
Every cab driver in New Delhi or Colombo understands that the eastward expansion of NATO, despite promises to the contrary, and the advance of the Western alliance to Russia’s borders are perceived as a threat in Moscow, just as Washington would not accept Canada or Mexico joining a hostile military alliance. The Monroe Doctrine alone stands in the way of this. Only the children of the upper middle classes in German editorial offices do not want to understand this because they have degenerated into transatlantic satraps.
The Maidan coup in Kiev in 2014, in which an elected president was chased out of office with Western help and US support, and the fatal shots that were demonstrably fired from Right Sector buildings, the deployment of three Georgian snipers and a US instructor named Bryan Christopher Boyenger, the close cooperation between the EU and the US on the one hand and Ukrainian fascists on the other hand—all of this has not been forgotten in the global South, despite the lies of the Western media.
The civil war in Donbass from 2014 to 2022 is also well remembered, where fascist militias and the Ukrainian army, partly under US direction, terrorized the Russian population with grenades, bombs, mines and rockets—according to the OSCE, with more than 14,000 dead, including 3,400 civilians; according to Russian figures, more than 6,000 civilians were killed and more than 13,500 wounded. This is a forgotten war only in Europe.
In the BRICS+ countries, it has also not been forgotten that former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President Francois Hollande declared that the Minsk II agreement was only intended to give Ukraine time to rearm—thereby undermining an agreement valid under international law through UN Resolution 2202 and thus misleading Moscow.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s statement to the European Parliament on September 7, 2023 was noted very closely in the global South. Stoltenberg said that Putin had proposed a deal to him in the fall of 2021, months before the start of the Russian attack in violation of international law: If NATO renounced the admission of Ukraine, he would renounce an invasion. However, according to Stoltenberg, this was not accepted. At the same time, Stoltenberg mentioned that the war in Ukraine had already begun in 2014.
Like the OSCE, Asia Times geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar has pointed out that the Ukrainian army massed its troops on the demarcation line to the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics in February 2022 and massively increased shelling of the civilian population, apparently in preparation for a military invasion. Observers in the BRICS+ countries therefore see the Russian invasion as a pre-emptive strike to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. This is also how Putin justified the invasion: Protection of the ethnic Russian population in the Donbass; denazification of Ukraine and forcing a neutral status.
Even if NATO opinion-makers in Germany’s editorial offices stubbornly deny this: Brookings Institution senior fellow and advisor to three US presidents Fiona Hill, the pro-government US magazine Foreign Affairs, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, Zelensky Party faction leader Davyd Arakhamia, Russian President Vladimir Putin and thus all those involved have confirmed that the West blocked the peace negotiations in Istanbul in the spring of 2022. On April 9, the then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled to Kiev and urged the Ukrainian leadership, on behalf of the USA, to abandon the advanced peace negotiations and continue fighting. The West torpedoed the Ukrainian leadership’s peace efforts in February, March and August 2022. NATO is therefore partly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in the Ukraine war. All of this is well documented.
There is no scenario in which Ukraine wins this war. In spring 2022, the already initialed peace negotiation results stipulated that Ukraine would retain the Donbass, Kiev would declare its neutrality and upper limits for the armed forces would be defined in detail. The Russian troops now have the advantage. Putin’s peace proposal from June 2024 sets much tougher conditions: The regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhya are to become part of the Russian Federation in their entirety; it demands the neutrality of Ukraine, a security zone and laws against right-wing extremism and fascism. NATO did not respond to this. The Western alliance is therefore once again responsible for prolonging the war. Anatol Lieven, an analyst for the magazine Responsible Statecraft, now assumes that Ukraine will be divided and speaks of a “Cyprus status.”
In the global South, the West is being blamed for the ongoing destruction of Ukraine. There is a keen awareness that the people of Ukraine are being used by the West as cannon fodder. Former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador: “We supply the weapons; you supply the corpses. That is immoral.” The Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Oleksii Makeiev, also speaks of a “proxy war.” In this proxy war, the Ukrainians are merely human material for NATO. Military analyst Jacques Baud writes: “They are treated like sub-humans.”
For Rodion Raskolnikov, the victim, the old pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna, is just a “louse,” just a worthless sub-human whose life does not matter when it comes to proving one’s own greatness and superiority. How similar is the hubris of both Rodion and NATO!
The intellectuals of the BRICS+ states blame the West for all these crimes and hope for punishment. In their eyes, the West will be punished in five areas in the future: financially, economically, politically, socially and culturally.
Financially
Russia’s exclusion from the SWIFT financial transaction system has not brought the Russian financial system to its knees. With the digital cashless payment system MIR, Russia has created an alternative in a very short space of time, which is also recognized in Kazakhstan, for example. The Russian economy is turning away from Europe and towards Asia. As a result, China and India are becoming the most important customers for oil and gas. Russia will soon have five nuclear-powered icebreakers, making the northern route navigable for tanker convoys all year round. Trade is increasingly being settled less in dollars and more in local currencies. The process of de-dollarization will also gain momentum through the Shanghai Development Bank. It can be assumed that the global demand for dollars will fall and that the USA will lose the ability to finance its wars via the money printing press. The costs of war will ruin Europe financially. The attempt to illegally transfer frozen Russian foreign assets to Ukraine will lead to the withdrawal of financial investments from third countries and thus to the weakening of the Western banking system. The debt burden of the states will drive inflation. However, the problem of the downward trend in the rate of profit will not be solved. This is because there is simply too much capital in the hands of large financial investors such as Blackrock or Vanguard to be invested profitably. In the meantime, Blackrock and JP Morgan have taken over Ukraine’s debt management. This means that the country has fallen into the hands of financial investors. And the collapse of the financial system is a matter of time.
Economically
Just a few months after the start of the war, Indian economists pointed out that the West would lose the economic war with Russia. Further studies have since confirmed this. The Russian economy is proving surprisingly resilient, mainly for two reasons: It has had enough time to work towards self-sufficiency since the regimen of sanctions began in 2014. The majority of countries in the Global South are not following the West’s sanctions against Russia. These include India, Brazil, China, Argentina, Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Chile, Uruguay, Guatemala, Panama, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Turkey and the entire African continent. These countries represent more than three quarters of the world’s population. The European Council on Foreign Relations came up with the formula: “United West, divided from the rest.” The West is isolated, not Russia.
The war in Ukraine is accelerating tectonic shifts in geopolitics in favor of the BRICS+ states. The West is fighting for survival, not Russia.
To the Global South, the war in Ukraine appears to be a luxury problem for the North. From this perspective, Ukraine is not a country of liberation fighters, but another exploiter. The open racism of European circles in the unequal treatment of white Ukrainian and black African refugees is driving sympathy towards the multi-ethnic state of Russia.
There are also tangible interests: Russia is becoming increasingly involved in Africa. Africa’s food supply depends on Russia. From there, African states obtain grain and fertilizer. The sanctions imposed by the West are affecting supply chains and making grain at least 30 percent more expensive. Hunger crises are inevitable as a result of these measures. The West wants to weaken Russia and is producing a mountain of African corpses.
Russia is a country that is self-sufficient in energy and resources. China needs Africa’s natural resources. Russia hardly needs them. What Russia needs are Western technologies for its industry, also in order to exploit its resources in a more effective way. African countries are thus becoming middlemen in the workaround of sanctions. China has become the main supplier of digital technology. The war in the North strengthens the South economically and in terms of power politics. However, the chances of democratization are not growing.
With the terrorist attack on the Nordstream pipeline, which US President Biden announced and for which former CIA employees also hold the USA responsible, the transatlantic energy trap has snapped shut for Germany. The sanctions mean that Europe has to spend many times the original amounts on raw materials. In addition to gas, enriched uranium, titanium for aircraft construction, rare earths and noble gases for semiconductor production are also urgently needed in the USA. The high costs of energy and raw materials are leading to a decline in competitiveness, a shrinking industry and accelerating de-industrialization. Companies are relocating to the USA, China, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Germany and Europe are turning from a preferred industrial location into an industrial museum. Already in 2015, a long time before the war, Richard Sakwa was talking about the “suicide of Europe.” The infrastructure—including the military infrastructure—will continue to disintegrate. Olaf Scholz is the chancellor of decline. His cabinet is a nightmare for employees. For the USA, on the other hand, this is a perfect war: it is far away and the arms industry is earning billions. Nevertheless, the country will break because none of these billions will reach the majority of Americans.
Politically
We are already dealing with a political class in decline—today we are led in all Western industrialized countries by transatlantic corrupted elites. But there are reasonable doubts about President Biden’s mental capacity. Top political personnel in Germany seem to be stuck at the level of childish language acquisition. The German ambassador in Kiev posts a selfie with a plush tank and writes: “My favorite toy!” Such infantilization of politics and diplomacy is ridiculed worldwide and leads to German politicians having to use the delivery entrance when travelling abroad.
The latest election results and polls—across Europe—show that this political class is becoming increasingly unpopular. It does not represent the interests of the people, but acts like the governors of an occupying power, in consensus with its American friends, who have also helped them into the saddle. This elite will crumble and eventually be replaced by common demagogues like Trump, who in turn will be replaced by charlatans, who will be replaced by criminals and mafiosi and finally by monsters. Bourgeois post-democrats will pave the way for right-wing extremists and anarcho-capitalists.
Social
The horrendous arms expenditure will lead to massive cuts in social benefits, especially in Germany. This is leading society into a test of strength. The populations of the West are dividing further into a majority that is compensating for its existential fears by seeking protection from the state and big brother USA, which is preparing to suppress reality and lie away the facts, as it did during the coronavirus crisis, and a majority that is following the ever new lies of politicians and is no longer willing to engage in an Oedipal conflict, trusting authorities unconditionally and thus destroying democracy in socio-psychological terms—because democracy is based on criticism and control of political power. And into a minority that can no longer stand the lies, and rebels. Social conflicts will increase. A subliminal civil war will flare up periodically into massive physical confrontations in streets, subways and soccer stadiums. This will be overlaid by increasing distribution conflicts, in disintegrating welfare states that have long since turned into armaments and military states. The appropriate dystopia is the movie Mad Max, the remake of which has reached the cinemas: Armed gangs roam through a destroyed industrial landscape and fight each other. In 2004, the article “Addressing State Failure” appeared in Foreign Affairs. Its conclusion: failed states make it easier for Washington to exert influence from outside.
Culturally
From the perspective of the Global South, Western culture as a whole is seen as excessively individualistic, transhumanist, perverse and unnatural. Russian social philosophers such as Sergey Karaganov and Dimitri Trenin see this as degeneration and decay. Western culture is increasingly perceived as toxic and dangerous. The southern hemisphere is turning to traditional points of orientation, “values,” such as family, community and state. This is being promoted financially and propagandistically, particularly by those states that want to distance themselves from the West, such as Russia or China.
Western culture is facing an age of idiocy, the destruction of reason, in which the ailing education system plays a decisive role. The ability to think is diminishing and being replaced by identitarian attitudes based on confession, not knowledge. As Hegel says in Logic: identity is “the expression of empty tautology.” When an author like Serhij Zhadan receives the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for calling Russians “animals” and “pigs,” when a NATO propagandist named Florence Gaub is allowed to say unchallenged, in the talk show Lanz, that Russians are “not Europeans, in the cultural sense,” who “have a different relationship to violence, to death,” then this cultural rock bottom has been reached. This is the racist language of fascism. We have reached the stage of counter-enlightenment. Western culture will isolate itself worldwide and be seen as a decadent stage of decline.
In 1866, Dostoyevsky published Crime and Punishment in 12 episodes, in the monthly Russkiy Vestnik. Raskolnikov finds no peace after his murder. He fails because of his own megalomania. The investigating judge recognizes Raskolnikov as the murderer, but there is no proof. In the end, plagued by remorse and on the advice of the prostitute Sonia, he turns himself in. He is convicted and sent to a labor camp for eight years.
As we saw at the NATO summit in Washington in July 2024, the Western alliance and its commanders are not plagued by remorse. This is where reality diverges from Dostoyevsky’s novel.
But those who cling to falling empires are dragged down with them. That is the punishment for the crimes of the West.