Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire

Many ethnic Russians came to live outside the Russian Federation and in the former Soviet republics when they migrated for work or were forcibly relocated during the Soviet era and even in tsarist times. Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, most remained and became citizens of the newly independent states. Over time, this Russian diaspora, reconstructed politically by Moscow as Russian compatriots, has become the instrument of Russian neo-imperial aims. In this book I will show how since the 1990s and particularly since the 2000s, Moscow’s policies have leveraged the existence of Russian compatriots, particularly ethnic Russians and Russian speakers residing abroad, to gain influence over and challenge the sovereignty of foreign states and at times even take over territories. This book will demonstrate that Moscow’s hold on these groups serves as an effective pretext for and instrument of much of Russia’s expansionist foreign policy. While Moscow has been using its diaspora as a means of influence since the 1990s, the Russo-Georgian conflict of 2008 was the first full-fledged war between Russia and a post-Soviet state fought largely over Russian compatriots. However, since that time not many discerned a connection between the seemingly disparate Russian policies of compatriot support, humanitarian agendas, handing out Russian citizenship, and information warfare in remote parts of the former Soviet space. Nonetheless, the territorial implications of Moscow’s policies toward its compatriots have been demonstrated in Ukraine’s Crimea and eastern territories, in Georgia’s South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and Moldova’s Transnistria. The distribution of Russian speakers and ethnic Russians across the former Soviet Union countries and current separatist areas and conflict zones is shown in Map 1. Russia’s compatriot policies have raised tensions in Moldova’s Gagauzia, Estonia’s Ida-Viru county, Latvia’s Latgale region, northern Kazakhstan, Armenia, and elsewhere in the post-Soviet space. The developments in Ukraine, Georgia, and beyond have shown that Russia’s compatriot policies are inextricably tied to its expansionist ambitions and neo-imperial aims. For Moscow, compatriot policies perform an integrative function—a unification of the Russian peoples combined with potential to unify with the motherland the territories where they reside.

MAP 1. Distribution of Russian speakers and disputed territories across the post-Soviet states. Map drawn by Giedrė Tamašauskaitė

While neo-imperialism has been a prominent trend in Putin’s era, it is in fact rooted in the history of the Russian Empire. There is an undeniable historical continuity between present Russian imperial projects and past projects of the Romanovs and the Soviets. The Russian Federation has in many respects followed in the footsteps of its historical predecessors and will continue to do so, because of the similar ideological, cultural, security, and geopolitical drivers that have been rooted in the centuries-long imperial experience of the three empires—the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Empire—that have occupied the same Russian political space and territories. The Grand Duchy of Moscow (Muscovy) started out as a landlocked principality in the late thirteenth century and expanded aggressively to acquire new lands and peoples, as well as access to waterways. The subsequent expansion of the Romanov empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under Peter the Great and Catherine the Great was driven by a desire for new lands, the taming of bordering nations, and the quest for warm-water ports on the Baltic Sea, in Crimea, and in the Caucasus.