Анджела Стент - Putin's World - Russia Against the West and with the Rest

Russia in many ways remained out of the mainstream of European civilization. It largely missed the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. Its history has contributed to a collective memory of exceptionalism, endurance, resistance to conquest, but also vulnerability. The lack of natural borders and repeated threat of invasion reinforced a determination not to lose territory and to steel the country against future attempts to encroach on its sovereignty. When Putin accuses the West of trying to “break up” Russia and impose an agenda that is inimical to the country’s real interests, he appeals to the dual legacies of superiority and inferiority complexes that for centuries have shaped Russia’s view of its role in the world. 15They have enabled a series of authoritarian rulers to justify their harsh rule by warning of enemies within and without and have made Russia a military foe to be feared. Putin insists Russia is what he calls an absolutely sovereign country with no limits on its ability to determine its own fate. This powerfully resonates with many Russians who believe their right to self-determination is constantly challenged by the West. What ties them all together is the “Russian Idea.”

What ideas drive the Kremlin elite? What binds Russia together? During the Soviet times, what held together the population was a mixture of ideology and nationalism. In the beginning of the communist era, people may have believed in Marxism-Leninism, but over time they became cynical as they understood the difference between communist slogans about equality and the dictatorship of the proletariat and the reality of a society in which the Communist Party elite (about 8 percent of the population) lived substantially better than those not in the party. By the time the USSR collapsed, Soviet official national identity was a mixture of patriotism and a belief in the superiority of the socialist system. But it had been increasingly challenged by Mikhail Gorbachev, the provincial Communist Party ideology secretary who rose to become leader of the USSR in 1985. He understood that he had to reform the atrophied Soviet system:

Imagine a country that flies into space, launches Sputniks, creates such a defense system, and it can’t resolve the problem of women’s pantyhose. There’s no toothpaste, no soap powder, not the basic necessities of life. It was incredible and humiliating to work in such a government. 2

Since the Soviet collapse, Russians have been searching for a new identity. But after twenty-five years, there is still no consensus, and the potential ethnic minefields are evident. What does it mean to be Russian? This question for centuries has provoked controversy and never has been fully answered. Is being Russian an ethnically exclusive concept? In Soviet times, the “fifth point” in every internal Soviet passport was nationality. At age sixteen, every citizen had to state his or her nationality, and this largely determined their career trajectory. Being Russian was the most desirable category and most career enhancing. Then came Ukrainian and other Slavic ethnicities. Being Jewish—defined as a non-Russian nationality—often meant exclusion from the most prestigious academic institutions or Communist Party positions. Being Kazakh, Uzbek, Chechen, or Azeri could also be problematic. This, then, is the exclusive definition of what it means to be Russian: the privileged nationality in a multinational state. Since the Soviet collapse, there have been attempts to define “Russianness” in a more inclusive, civic-based way—as a citizen of Russia, irrespective of ethnicity. The government attempted in the 1990s to introduce the inclusive term “ Rossianin ” (citizen of Russia) for Russian, as opposed to the ethnically exclusive “ Russky .” It never caught on, and during the Putin era, the ethnically exclusive expression has become mainstream. Indeed, in 2017, Putin stated that the Russian language is the “spiritual framework” of the country, “our state language” that “cannot be replaced with anything.” 3

After seventy-four years of communist rule, and the loss of the non-Russian Soviet republics, it was not clear what Russia’s new national identity should be nor who was a Russian. So in a rather unusual move, in 1996, Boris Yeltsin created a commission with a unique charter: to come up with a new Russian Idea. He appointed an advisory committee headed by the Kremlin’s assistant for political affairs, Georgii Satarov, and the government newspaper offered the equivalent of $2,000 to the person who produced the best essay on the topic in seven pages or less. But from the outset the project was doomed. Satarov admitted that a national idea could not be imposed from above but had to come from the bottom up. No one was able to come up with an appropriate national idea, even though one contestant won a prize for his essay on the “principles of Russianness.” In 1997, the project was terminated. 4Trying to have a commission create a new national identity on the spot in a fluid political transition was almost certain to fail. But a new identity is indeed gradually emerging.

In 2007, the Kremlin backed the creation of an international organization: Russky Mir (Russian World). Its head is Vyacheslav Nikonov, grandson of Stalin’s long-serving foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, whose dour demeanor and his equally dour negotiating style were legendary. Nikonov, an outspoken defender of the Kremlin and critic of the United States, has served in the Duma and has held academic positions. His foundation is designed to promote Russian culture and language worldwide and also to appeal to people who have emigrated from Russia over the past century to return to their roots. It usually defines as “Russian” inclusively anyone who speaks Russian (Russko-Yazichny) and identifies with Russian culture irrespective of their ethnicity.

The seeming confusion about what it means to be Russian has its roots in the origins of the Russian state. Muscovy became a consolidated state at the same time as it began to expand and conquer adjacent territories in the fourteenth century. For the next five hundred years it expanded (and sometimes contracted) as the state grew stronger. Along the way, it fought wars with Tatars, Livonian knights, Poles, Swedes, Turks, and Persians—and its population constantly became more ethnically diverse. Many “Russians” were in fact the product of mixed marriages, with a variety of roots. Indeed, one-third of the prerevolutionary Russian imperial foreign ministry was staffed by Baltic Germans, ethnic Germans who lived in the Baltic states when the Russian Empire acquired them. For instance, the Russian foreign minister in the early twentieth century was Count Vladimir Lamsdorf. One of his descendants later became West Germany’s economics minister. Russians’ sense of their own identity was also increasingly bound up with their sense of imperial destiny, of paternalistically ruling those around them, including Ukrainians, who were known as their “little brothers.”