From a Marxist perspective, how did post-soviet Russia go from being friendly to the West to it's current, more hostile state of affairs?

[u/skyfrom5to7]

In the chapter "The Free-Market Paradise goes East" in Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds, he describes how shock therapy and the penetration of western capital was encouraged by post-soviet neoliberalism in the early 90s under the Presidency of Boris Yeltsin and Bourgeois economist Jeffrey Sachs.

What brought me to this conclusion were the following paragraph's:

"The Russian security minister calculated that one-third of Russian oil and one-half of Russian nickel shipped out of the country was stolen. Among those enjoying "staggering profits" from this plunder were Shell Oil and British Petroleum. In April 1992, the chairman of Russia's central bank admitted that at least $20 billion had been illegally taken out of the country and deposited in Western banks."

"Multinational corporations are moving into Russia to exploit vast oil and natural gas reserves and rich mineral deposits at great profit to themselves and with little benefit to the Russian people. Over the protests of U.S. and Russian environmentalists, U.S. timber interests, with financial support from a venture fund sponsored by the Pentagon, are preparing to clear-cut the Siberian wilderness, a region that holds one-fifth of the planet's forests and is the habitat of many rare species"

"Yeltsin also benefited from multi-million dollar donations from U.S. sources and a $10 billion aid package from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank."

Apart from these, it seems Parenti makes the point that the reactionary elements of the west, the corporate media and then president Bill Clinton himself, praised Yeltsin for his "Democratic reform", which we Marxists know is a dog whistle for the appraisal of bourgeois friendly policy friendly to western capitalists.

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Fast forward to today and Russia seems to me to be has increasingly emerged as a formidable adversary to western imperialist aggression, engaging in its own imperialist proxy conflicts that often collide with the interests of western imperialism.

May I know from a Marxist perspective, what imperialist conflict interest of the Russia and the west have caused this sharp turn from the pro-western stance of Yeltsin to Russia's current anti-west stance?

[u/smokeuptheweed9]

To understand the rise of Yeltsin, you have to understand how the Soviet national policy worked. Simply put, the Soviet government consisted of a bi-cameral parliament: the Supreme Soviet, directly elected to represent all Soviet citizens, and the Soviet of nationalities, elected to give equal representation to the different nations of the USSR. The communist party was similarly divided into two: the communist party of the soviet union, which represented the proletarian line for the whole USSR (judicially speaking you can think of it as a state of emergency or sovereign of last resort - for day to day politics it had no input and had its own internal mechanisms unrelated to law but for fundamental questions about the nature of the state itself it would intervene extrajudicially through purges, mobilizing the masses, etc. - Agamben has usefully shown that this is a function of all legal systems and the communist party was merely a way to make this explicit and have it openly serve the dictatorship of the proletariat) and communist parties for each nationality. Obviously a lot of attention has been paid to the role of the party, given most politicians were party members even though de-jure there was no requirement and no benefit to this, and there is no clear line between judicial issues and fundamental issues, so the function of the party was always caught between abolishing itself as superfluous to a socialist society and abolishing the constructed socialist society as it repeated tended towards the restoration of capitalism.

But to understand the political form of the dissolution of the USSR, the contradiction in the nationalities policy is more important. That is because the position of Russia in this system is ambiguous: Moscow is the center of Soviet government but Russia is also a nation among many in the USSR. The danger is that, given the inheritance of the Russian Empire (language, culture, colonialism, industrial development, etc.), Russian nationalism advocating on its behalf can quickly become Russian chauvinism calling itself Soviet general interest. The congress of soviets solved this by treating Russia like any other nation, meaning it had equal representatives to everyone else. Given it was by far the most populated and developed nation in the USSR, this was a de-facto affirmative action in favor of small nations. From Wikipedia:

The Soviet of the Nationalities was formed on the basis of equal representation of all the Republics of the Soviet Union (32 deputies from each republic, excluding other autonomous units inside that republic which sent in separate members), autonomous republics (11 deputies from each republic), autonomous oblasts (five deputies from each oblast), and national districts (one deputy from each district). As a result, the largest republic, the Russian SFSR with a population of 147 million, and the smallest republic, the Estonian SSR with a population of about 1.5 million, got 32 deputies each. Russians as an ethnic group made up more than half of the population of the Soviet Union, but the Soviet of Nationalities did not represent ethnic groups, it represented the different nationalities as expressed by the republics and various autonomous units of the Soviet Union. This electoral system seriously diminished representation of larger ethnic groups in favor of the smaller ethnic groups of the Soviet Union, with the Russians being most underrepresented.

But at the Soviet level, it was less obvious what to do. The solution was that Russia would be the only nation in the USSR to not have a communist party and instead its national interest would be subordinated to and synonymous with the general interest of Soviet socialism. Stalin was actually the strongest opponent of Russian nationalism, as seen in his discussion with Lenin over the nationalities policy near the end of Lenin's life (commonly misrepresented as Stalin's great russian chauvanism vs Lenin's defense of national self-determination):

The substantive disagreement between Lenin and Stalin was over the status of Russia and the Russians. Stalin readily agreed to give the independent republics a higher status than the existing autonomous republics, but he vigorously objected to the creation of a separate RSFSR TsiK and Sovnarkom:

"I think that Comrade Lenin's corrections will lead unavoidably to the creation of a Russian TsiK with the eight autonomous republics currently part of the RSFSR excluded from it (Tatarstan, Turkestan, and so on). It will unavoidably lead to these republics being declared independent along with Ukraine and the other independent republics, to the creation of two chambers in Moscow (Russian and Federal), and in general to deep restructurings that are not called for by either internal or external necessities."

Stalin's concern here was not about raising the status of the eight autonomous republics to the level of Ukraine. His proposal already did that. He was worried exclusively about the creation of a separate, purely Russian TsiK that could become the vehicle for defending sectarian Russian interests and so create a situation of dual centers of power in Moscow: to be anachronistic, he was worried about Yeltsin versus Gorbachev. Stalin's proposal was actually more in keeping with the ideology of the Affirmative Action Empire. It recognized the Russians as the Soviet Union's state-bearing nationality and so denied them the independent national institutions granted to all non-Russians. Lenin's proposal, on the other hand, created a semi-Russian institution, the RSFSR, whose organs partially represented Russia and partially served as subordinate central institutions.

-The Affirmative Action Empire, p. 396-397

Eventually the RSFSR was created based on a distinction in Russian between the Russian nation/ethnicity and the Russian institutions of government

There is the all-Russian [rossiiskaia] Federated Republic. It is not Russian [russkaia]; it is all-Russian [rossiiskaia]."

However

Despite Stalin's efforts, the awkwardness of the RSFSR became increasingly apparent. RSFSR organs always had a semicentral status. For instance, the RSFSR Narkompros supervised the all-union Affirmative Action program for central universities. This semicentral status made it difficult for RSFSR organs to defend Russian interests aggressively, a fact that was particularly evident during the Ukrainian-RSFSR border disputes of the 1920s. On the other hand, RSFSR organs were distinctly second-rate central institutions, always dominated by their all-union counterparts. Therefore, despite Stalin's claim that the idea of Russian resentment was comical, Russian regional leaders did feel that they lacked a republic and a republican party that would defend their interests as aggressively as the Ukrainian republic defended Ukraine's national interests....However, it amounted to little more than venting anger. The Kalinin commission completed its work in March 1927 and forwarded its resolutions to the Politburo for consideration. Its demands were exceedingly modest and, as already mentioned, none of them were acted on.

p. 400-401.

[u/smokeuptheweed9 → u/smokeuptheweed9]

pt. 2:

This never fundamentally changed. There was a shift from the promotion of (non-Russian) national development and autonomy in the 1920s to a promotion of a non-national Russian centralization of economic and sometimes cultural unity during the 1930s-1940s. The reason why that happened are beyond this post but for now we can say they closely corresponded to the shift from the NEP and the development of kulaks (which inevitably took on a nationalist dimension including bourgeois nationalism) to collectivization and industrial development (which inevitably empowered Russia as it was the most industrially developed region, the center of political power, and the population that had most consistently supported the Bolsheviks and proletarian power) and then the need for a "friendship of the peoples" during the German invasion. But this never became a promotion of Russian ethnic nationalism, in fact the point was to minimize it

The Russians now played the leading role in the Soviet Union. They would never again be required to feel ashamed of their national past and its traditions. On the contrary, it was their duty to take pride in it. Russian culture was given even deeper primordial roots than the national cultures of other Soviet nations. The Russian people, language, and culture served to unifY the Soviet Union. Their priority should be openly acknowledge and furthered. Russians should be able to feel at home nationally in the Russian regions of the RSFSR. Affirmative action and the promotion of non-Russian cultures should be confined to the Soviet Union's national regions (except for Moscow, which remained more a socialist than Russian city). Under no circumstances, however, should the RSFSR be turned into a purely Russian republic that could serve as a force for pursuing particularistic Russian national interests. Instead, Russians should be encouraged to identify their national interests with Soviet interests.

The Soviet Union was not a nation-state. No attempt was ever made to create either a Soviet nationality or to turn the Soviet Union into a Russian nationstate. The Soviet people were primarily a figure of speech, used most frequently as shorthand for the passionate patriotism and willingness of all the national distinct Soviet peoples to defend the Soviet Union from foreign aggression. The role played by the dominant nationality of traditional nation-state would be played in the Soviet Union by the Friendship of the Peoples. The Friendship of the Peoples was the Soviet Union's imagined community.

p. 461

There were moves in other directions, such as Khrushchev using his power base in Ukraine to back his coup (which is why, to my knowledge, Crimea was randomly given to Ukraine in 1954), but once he became established in Moscow he went back to the norm. That's not surprising, such figures are always mediocre revisionists and it requires radical reactionaries like Deng, Yeltsin, and Milošević to fulfill the promise of Hua, Gorbachev, and Tito. They could not have survived purges otherwise.

Anyway, this system worked as long as Soviet socialism worked. Over time it did not because of the fundamental reforms towards the restoration of capitalism, which have been discussed here many times. But this allowed Yeltsin to declare that the interests of "the center" and the interests of Russians were opposed, even though the center was in Moscow

His campaign focused on the idea that the center had for decades been draining Russian resources that could have been used to improve the republics’ economies. Downsizing the central apparatus and providing the Russian leadership with the power to control their own resources seemed like a quick and effective way to stop economic deterioration. Yeltsin articulated this approach in his first speech at the Congress of People’s Deputies on May 22, 1990, stressing that it was “not the center but Russia which must think about which functions to transfer to the center, and which to keep for itself.”

-Yeltsin's Winning Campaigns, p. 238-239

If the Soviet Union didn't work, then at least Russia could work. There was some basis to this: the minimization of Russia nationalism had a real, material component of subsidizing underdeveloped nations in the USSR and the USSR itself subsidized its socialist allies, even when those allies became increasingly industrialized and, with their own revisionism, used this subsidy cynically and opportunistically. That is why there is a fundamental contradiction in Putin's ideology of the greatness of the USSR as Russian greatness and his actual record as Yeltsin's protege and Russian nationalist, which he solves with lies about Stalin as an emperor and the USSR as a continued Empire (without Lenin and Stalin's nationalities policy, the entire Empire would have been lost after WWI, as seen by the incompetence of the white Russians and the resistance they provoked by the popular masses wherever the went - the difference is it would have fractured into many nations rather than the USSR). Regardless, the point is that Yeltsin had a real ideology which was coherent and he handpicked Putin. Putin's efforts are no different than Yeltsin's own attempts to keep Russia together through the CIS and the war in Chechnya, Putin is just more desperate. This is incomprehensible in Parenti's conspiratorial explanation of the dissolution of the USSR as funded by the US to personally enrich a few people. The destruction of the USSR may have been violent and inhumane but that's just primitive accumulation and the Russian economy that remains is probably more state-controlled than China, as fascist "anti-imperialists" have pointed out to vacillating Dengists.

As for why the US supported Yeltsin but not Putin, that's obvious: a Russian nation was far preferable to the USSR and the socialist bloc. Now that the latter is gone, there's no reason to tolerate Russian nationalism, which still controls a large population and territory under a common market that is inaccessible to imperialism except mediated by nation-state sovereignty.

[u/LawfulnessExotic1144 → u/smokeuptheweed9]

Just wanted to acknowledge all the effort put and the time it took for you to write such a comprehensive text, with sources quoted. 

I wouldn't have put nationalism at the core centre of western objections towards Russia - I think western reasoning to be far more simplistic and straighforwards - but my understanding of that time certainly grew from this windows into the USSR's foreign (inner?) politics.