A new anti-colonial struggle has started. Will it reach Putin?

History is teetering on an edge. No one knows which way it will go. Maybe the Russian empire, the last and most terrible of the European empires, will fall. Or maybe it will absorb the hit and survive as it has survived and expanded since the 17th century. You'd be a fool to bet against it. The graveyards of Eurasia are full of those who did.

- Nick Cohen

And yet the breathtaking heroism of the Ukrainian resistance and the insane self-delusion of the Putinist regime are allowing Russia's opponents from Syria to central Asia, and from Georgia to Moldova, to ask that most revolutionary of questions: “What if?”

What if the empire falls? What if structures that have endured and enslaved for centuries can be blown apart like the creaking trucks in a Russian munitions convoy?

Talking to the men and women engaged in what is - if only the global left could see it - the great anticolonial struggle of our times, you hear them moving through the stages of revolutionary commitment. From peaceful protest to jail sentences to the realisation that civil disobedience will never be enough.

Lives are transformed as the stakes are raised. The story of Timur Mitskievich echoes the anticolonial protests of the 20th century. In 2020, he was a teenager in Minsk when the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, rigged the presidential election as he had crushed every challenge to his rule since he came to power in 1994. Supporters of the opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya took to the streets in the largest popular demonstrations in Belarus's history.