Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire

A Russian grandfather and veteran, for example, who has lived in Tallinn, Estonia, since the Second World War could be considered a compatriot. But so could a high-school student in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, whose Jewish grandparents arrived in the 1950s from Odessa, Ukraine, escaping the Soviet regime. An ethnic Ossetian living in a mountain village in the Georgian breakaway territory of South Ossetia who speaks his native Iranian language can also fall under the same category—likewise a Tatar girl who is a Russian speaker and lives in the historic city of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, in the heart of Central Asia. The two things that connect Moscow’s so-called compatriots all over the world are being habitual Russian speakers and/or descent from former Soviet or Russian citizens or nations inhabiting former Russian imperial lands. Compatriots are ethnic Russians only in the narrowest sense of Moscow’s use of the term. In 1991 there were about 25 million ethnic Russians residing outside the Russian Federation in the former Soviet Republics.¹ They constituted significant percentages of the population in Kazakhstan (38 percent), Latvia (34 percent), Estonia (30 percent), and Ukraine (22 percent).² In the 2010s, there were about 30 million native Russian speakers outside the Russian Federation.³ But taking into account the entire population of the independent former Soviet republics, there is a total of nearly 150 million individuals who are descendants of Soviet citizens and thus have at different times qualified for Moscow’s identification as compatriots.⁴ While Russia aims to define compatriots based on language or descent, in reality these individuals are highly diverse—geographically, ethnically, linguistically, generationally, and socially. Over the decades, Moscow has tried to but come short of creating a legal status for the compatriots, and their rights and responsibilities notably differ from those of Russian citizens. Nonetheless, the Russian government has called on numerous occasions for support and protection of its compatriots by various means. This protection may entail many things, from supporting language and cultural programs, to appealing to international organizations to address discrimination of Russian minorities, to their military protection, as in both Ukraine and Georgia.

The official usage of the term “compatriot” arose only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in early 1993, when it was employed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other government departments.⁵ There is no evidence that the term was ever used with the same political connotations during the Russian empire or during the Soviet era. As Great Soviet Encyclopedia entries show, until the 1990s the term sootechestvennik was nothing more than a Russian version of a French word compatriote (fellow countryman/countrywoman).⁶ According to the entry in the 1955 edition, which also cited Lenin’s use of the term, sootechestvennik was used as a translation of the Latin word patriota (meaning exactly “compatriot”).⁷ Joseph Stalin used the word sootechestvennik with exactly the same meaning in his Victory Speech following Germany’s surrender in 1945.⁸ But neither Lenin nor Stalin used the term with the same political connotation that it increasingly gained in the 1990s.