Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire

While Russia’s instruments of influence have varied from energy exports to culture and business networks, all of these instruments have been greatly securitized. In other words, cultural and business interests have often been conceptualized by the Russian government as being in the same sphere as security and military matters, thus legitimizing Moscow’s reliance on extraordinary means to secure against perceived or constructed threats toward Russian language or culture. For instance, Russian culture is defined by the Foreign Policy Review of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as “an instrument to ensure Russia’s economic and foreign policy interests and positive image in the world.”⁹ Russian culture is shared by not only ethnic Russians but also Russian speakers and those under Russian influence.¹⁰ Russian compatriots have also served both as a target of Russia’s soft power and as Moscow’s means to wield soft power over target countries such as Ukraine, Latvia, and Kazakhstan. Lastly, unlike most states where soft power is largely produced by civil society, Russia controls the institutions and individuals that help shape the country’s image and thus its soft power, such as the media, NGOs, cultural figures, universities, and the church.¹¹

Just as Russian soft and hard power are often intertwined, so too are Russian soft power, and its humanitarian and compatriot policies. Sherr argues that in Russian perception, these three elements are essentially synonymous.¹² For the purposes of this book, Russia’s soft power includes its efforts to reinforce linguistic, cultural, economic, and religious affinities with neighboring states as well as to co-opt different interest groups. The Russian language is an important means and pretext for softer and harder methods of influence. Just before the official collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, some 139 million people from the fourteen former Soviet republics (excluding Russia) knew the Russian language to a greater or lesser extent and shared many cultural, social, political, and economic ties with Russia.¹³ Of those people, some 25 million were ethnic Russians with even closer identification with the Russian state.¹⁴ As the next chapter will demonstrate, it took some years before an orchestrated policy and mechanisms to deal with the Russian diaspora developed, though Moscow’s efforts to privilege the Russian language in both the government and the education systems of post-Soviet states emerged early on.

Russian high culture, with its classic authors, composers, and choreographers, remains well regarded in most parts of the world and could be a legitimate and effective component of the country’s soft power. Indeed, true soft power must attract rather than trick or coerce. Russian popular culture also remains relevant for many countries of the former Soviet Union where the Russian language is widely spoken. As Russia expert Fiona Hill noted at possibly the height of the country’s soft power in 2004, Russia offers “a burgeoning popular culture spread through satellite TV, a growing film industry, rock music, Russian popular novels and the revival of the crowning achievements of the Russian artistic tradition.”¹⁵ This culture flourishes not only among the older generation but also among the younger set in the post-Soviet space, despite the influx of popular culture from the United States, Europe, and Asia. However, to date it seems that the natural appeal of Russian culture has been insufficient to support the Kremlin’s geopolitical aims of imperial revival.¹⁶ Instead, Russia has turned to institutionalized means of soft power and various state-sponsored organizations.