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August 29, 2025
Empires are like old stage costumes: once they glittered under the footlights, taffeta whispering across history’s marble floors. Now they sit in a props closet, riddled with moth holes and smelling of naphthalene. All that’s left to them is yearning for their former selves. That ache has a name: the phantom pains of greatness.
Yes, every great power has an unavoidable chapter – the breakup of its empire. And almost always what follows is not a triumphant rebirth but a painful spell of phantom pains: lost colonies, shattered myths of a “mission,” a sense of national humiliation, and political depression.
Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Britain – they all went through it. Those that didn’t get stuck in denial not only survived; they found themselves anew. Muscovy-Russia still has that journey ahead – if it chooses maturity over an eternal hangover.
Until 1974, Portugal was Europe’s last stubborn colonial holdout. Its dictatorship clung to empire against the grain of economics, common sense, and the will of the colonies themselves.
The Carnation Revolution was one of those rare moments when the army proved wiser than the ministry of culture.
The “civilizing mission” turned out to be a coffin lid – not for Africa, but for the metropole. Did Portugal “lose”? Yes – and that was its victory.
It stopped being a museum of poverty and stagnation and became a modern country that spends more on books than on Kalashnikovs.
As soon as the country stopped fighting with geography, it returned to itself: it joined the EU, modernized, and became fashionable. Today Portugal means fado, the ocean, and European coziness – not a reeking concentration camp in Salazar’s desert.
Moscow? It’s still belting out “Arise, vast country!” and sending boys to die for the ruins of Tokmak. It has chosen the opposite path. Today’s Muscovy-Russia is a far more repugnant, bigoted imperial malignancy than Portugal under Caetano – and with nuclear weapons and TikTok-censorship at that.
After World War II, the Netherlands lost its crown possession – Indonesia. There was guerrilla war, blood, and an attempt to turn back the clock.
But The Hague let go – not out of weakness, but out of maturity. And it won. It lost the “pearl,” but – unlike a country further to the east – it didn’t then set off around the world on an armored train.
The Dutch shed the planter’s pose and chose the professor’s. They didn’t become a “great nation”; they became useful – to the world, to themselves, to their children.
Instead of trying to hold islands in Asia, Amsterdam became a European capital of startups, freedoms, and culture. Universities, ag-tech, urbanism – these became the new identity of a country that once had fleets, armies, and governors in Batavia.
The Netherlands traded colonies for human capital.
Moscow, in theory, could have taken that road. It has talented people, logistics, tech parks, even respectable universities. But instead of a “new Amsterdam”, we get a reconstruction of colonial thinking – not in Jakarta, but in Donetsk.
While Moscow dreams of “Novorossiya” and “grand geopolitics”, the Dutch are building vertical farms and creative hubs and selling IT solutions rather than unsellable ideological junk.
The British Empire didn’t die in India; it died at Suez. When the US and the USSR halted Britain’s aggression against Egypt in 1956, it became clear the “ruler of the seas” no longer ruled.
The empire vanished; the influence grew.
What does Muscovy-Russia do in contrast? It revives the Gulag, expels professors, exports fear but not ideas. That’s not soft power. It’s not even power. It’s decay.
The Kremlin’s vision of the future is staged on Stalin-style parades and rancid Telegram channels, banking on everyone being afraid. But not everyone is. And many are already laughing.
France went through its own hell:
It faced the trauma, lived through the drama, and reformed. Paris didn’t try to take back what it had lost. It moved into the EU, intellectual diplomacy, and style.
Today when you say “France,” you think culture, food, universalism – not massacres in African villages.
France became an architect of European integration, a model of cultural diplomacy, and an example of working through trauma rather than avenging it.
Yes, not without problems – but with hope.
The so-called “Russian Federation” would do well to take note: pour resources into regional development instead of storming neighbors. Create meaning, not repression. Turn cities into university and business hubs, not barracks.
But Muscovy-Russia always turns every defeat into revenge, every challenge into a barracks, every chance into a torture chamber. Moscow keeps living inside a drama it refuses to process. It doesn’t want to be a new country. It wants to be an ancient curse.
At first each clung to the past – and lost. But renouncing colonial nostalgia in favor of democratization and investment proved, in the end, a winning strategy.
Each took one step back to take two forward. Instead of florid delusion – measured adulthood. That’s why they integrated, democratized, and now actually live in the 21st century.
Imperial Muscovy, meanwhile, still hunts for some “our city”, and instead of building a normal hospital in Tambov or a school in Ryazan, it barges into the ruined schools of Dzhokhar, Yevpatoria, Sukhumi, Aleppo, Tskhinvali, Berdyansk… Because admitting you’re not wanted is scarier than death.
Empires die twice: first politically, then morally. Moscow may have lost its empire in 1991, but in its head it still keeps the map of 1913 (or perhaps 1860 or 1903 – dreams of Alaska, Manchuria, Korea, Hokkaido, California, Constantinople, the Balkans, etc., are still alive).
That’s why it doesn’t live; it settles scores.
It doesn’t build; it demolishes.
It doesn’t seek itself; it hunts others.
An empire is like an old man’s grandiose delusion in a bathrobe. Moscow still won’t admit the empire is dead. It keeps talking about a “geopolitical catastrophe” and about what’s “ours.”
And you know what, my friends? This is no longer tragedy. It is kitsch.
To be an empire in the 21st century is like wearing an 18th-century wig and demanding a duel. There’s no grandeur or style in it – only ridiculous disgrace.
Moscow could choose the path of Istanbul, Lisbon, Vienna, London, Amsterdam, or Paris. But to do that, it must admit defeat – which is to say, grow up. Stop living a lie.
And if not?
Well then it ends like the hero of a Shakespearean tragedy: alone, dagger in hand, with the theater burning behind him.
Moscow becomes the last ghost-city of a dead empire – mindless, senseless, tasteless.
Like a broken prop in a provincial opera.
