Alexander Kojeve and the Russian Special Military Operation
Haz Al-Din
Abstract
This article, Alexander Kojève and the Russian Special Military Operation, reinterprets Kojève’s “End of History” thesis through a Marxist-Leninist and multipolar framework, arguing that the contemporary geopolitical struggle between the West and emerging civilizational states represents the reawakening of historical antagonism within the supposed universality of liberal modernity. Haz Al-Din traces Kojève’s appropriation of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic and his vision of the “Universal and Homogenous State,” revealing how bourgeois modernity, by reducing humanity to abstract form and negation, culminates in nihilism and the dissolution of concrete human particularity. However, rather than dismissing Kojève, Haz Al-Din affirms his immanent critique of Western modernity — its self-annihilating tendencies — as a necessary dialectical stage that exposes the contradictions of capitalist civilization. Drawing on Marx, Schmitt, and Lenin, the article argues that the reemergence of partisan subjectivity in struggles such as Russia’s Special Military Operation and anti-imperialist resistance worldwide marks the material reassertion of concrete determination against the formal abstraction of the liberal order. The partisan, unlike the passive liberal citizen, embodies the return of political particularity and historical necessity within the end of history itself. In this light, the Russian and Chinese models of modernization — modern yet tradition-preserving — represent the dialectical negation of Western universalism. The essay concludes that the multipolar order expresses not a regression but the reentry of Being, struggle, and contradiction into global politics, reviving the historical process that bourgeois modernity sought to abolish.
Keywords
Alexander Kojève, end of history, Marxism–Leninism, partisan theory, multipolarity, Haz Al-Din
