Lviv, April 20, noon

“When everyone is dead, the Big Game is over. No sooner,” said Hurree Babu, a Bengali secret agent working for the UK. This is a fictional character from the novel “Kim” by Rudyard Kipling. The action takes place in British India in the 1890s. Although Kipling did not coin the term “The Big Game”, his novels made a decisive contribution to its popularization.

The phrase is used to describe the historic battle between Great Britain and Russia for supremacy in Central Asia in the 19th century. It was an age of nascent imperialism, marked by the race for new colonies and the political impetus of European states to seize power.

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For Hanna Arendt, imperialism is the root of two totalitarian criminal regimes, National Socialism in Germany and Stalinism in the Soviet Union, even if it does not lead to the catastrophe of totalitarianism elsewhere. After World War II and the independence of the former colonies, it was widely believed that the era of imperialism had ended. However, the last form of the Russian empire – the Soviet Union – ceased to exist only in 1991.

Today, Russia’s aggressive neo-imperialism and hateful autocratic regimes, served by utterly inhuman propaganda, which, thanks to modern means of communication, have reached unimaginable proportions in the past, creating a toxic mixture that has poisoned our world. for years. “Russia is dying,” wrote the Ukrainian human rights defender, “He is dying of excessive hatred. And he has given himself this lethal injection.”

It seems that death and the Big Game have indeed become the motto of Russia. Maybe they never really gave up. You can read about it in certain Tolstoys:

No, these are not the words of a 19th century novelist. And it wasn’t Leo Tolstoy who said it. This is Piotr Tolstoy, deputy chairman of the Russian Duma. And great-grandchildren of Leo.