Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire

Russia also organizes large-scale events for its compatriots, such as the World Congress of Russian Compatriots, held in Russia every three years since 2003, where representatives from post-Soviet countries meet in a forum with the Russian president and other state leaders. Topics of discussion range from minority rights, resettlement back to Russia, to preservation of cultural and linguistic ties with the motherland.⁶⁴ In some ways the congress is reminiscent of the early Soviet Comintern, or Communist International, which in the 1920s and 1930s held World Congresses in Moscow where representatives from international and European communist parties would meet. The Comintern was a tool of Soviet foreign policy, and the Kremlin held a disproportionate power share in the congresses which it used to promote its revolutionary ideals while expecting the foreign participants to declare loyalty to Moscow rather than to their home countries.⁶⁵ Likewise, Russian compatriot representatives are expected to agree loyally with the policies outlined in the Kremlin, while they have limited ability to shape compatriot policy.⁶⁶ According to participants, Russian embassies, which aid the recruitment processes, provide advance instructions to compatriots on what to do and what not to do at the congresses.⁶⁷ It is no surprise that reports have cited a decline in compatriot participation at the World Congress meetings from around a thousand in 2009 to slightly over five hundred in 2012.⁶⁸ Nonetheless, what is most concerning for post-Soviet states (and will be outlined in detail in the case study chapters) is the fact that compatriot organizations encourage the diaspora to make political demands such as changes in language and citizenship policies and calls for regional separatism and autonomy, as well as disseminating specific historical interpretations that split societies along ethnic lines.

STAGE 4: PASSPORTIZATION

The idea of providing ethnic Russians, Russian speakers, and others in the post-Soviet states with Russian passports has long appealed to the Russian government. As the next chapter will outline, in the early 1990s Moscow sought to establish the principle of dual citizenship in the post-Soviet space and at the same time sought to “passportize” whole regions outside its borders. In the global context, a number of states accept the principle of dual citizenship, and it could be argued that Moscow’s efforts to negotiate the principle with the sovereign post-Soviet states (especially in the case of Central Asia) were not unusual. However, Moscow’s passportization policies, which often violate the laws of the foreign states affected, differed significantly from accepted international norms. The policies undermined state sovereignty by encouraging often unlawful activities of handing out passports and by their targeting of specific populations of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers residing in particular foreign territories where Russia sought greater influence. They also targeted other minority populations like Ossetians and Abkhazians that resided in breakaway territories of Georgia. As a result there was fierce opposition from many countries to both Russia’s passportization efforts and the related principle of dual citizenship. In 2006, then First Deputy Prime Minister Medvedev argued that while “the international practice of the past several decades” rejects dual citizenship, it could become relevant as the CIS reached a level of integration comparable to that of the EU.⁶⁹ Still among the CIS only Tajikistan has a formal agreement with Russia enabling dual citizenship while Kyrgyzstan and Armenia have not formalized the agreement but their citizenship laws could allow for it. Nonetheless, the semilegal practices of obtaining Russian citizenship continue unabated in much of the post-Soviet world since the early 1990s.