Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire

Previously Moscow’s compatriot policies have been studied as a form of soft power and the humanitarian dimension of foreign policy.¹² In contrast to coercive power, soft power aims to gain influence through appeals to cultural and historic affinities and shared values.¹³ While it has been recognized that Russia uses compatriots for geopolitical influence,¹⁴ the full significance of these policies outside soft power has not been grasped.¹⁵ Likewise, the humanitarian dimension of Russia’s foreign policy has been viewed as outside the scope of military or economic sanctions.¹⁶ However, Russian compatriot policies have evolved to be and thus should be understood as a strategic tool of foreign policy and geopolitical ambitions.¹⁷ Compatriots were an important element of Russia’s Foreign Policy Concept of 2000 and reiterated in the updated Concept of 2013, and they are at the crux of Russia’s reimperialization policy. As noted, the definition and the concept of “compatriots” are not fixed, but they are also linked as much to the individuals themselves as to Russian national identity and Russian foreign policy. In any case, the central proposition of this book is that Russia’s humanitarian, compatriot, and soft power policies have become increasingly enmeshed with its territorial aims and military tactics.

This chapter will trace this most important phase and component of reimperialization trajectory. Moscow’s policies and legal framework toward its compatriots emerged rather incoherently in the 1990s. By the 2000s, however, the legal and policy framework took a decided turn and compatriot policies were coupled with the Russian government’s geopolitical and increasingly revisionist aims. A brief review of Stalin’s ethnic policies, which helped create sizable Russian and Russian-speaking minorities in the post-Soviet space, will provide historical context. The evolution of definitions of the term “compatriot,” and the development of related policies, will then be traced from the presidency of Boris Yeltsin to the rule of Vladimir Putin.

STALIN’S ETHNIC POLICIES

In the 1930s Joseph Stalin laid the foundations of what would result in large numbers of Russians and Russophones residing in territories from the Baltic Sea to Central Asia. The Georgian-born robber-revolutionary turned leader-dictator spent his life trying to be more Russian than the Russians themselves despite his heavy Georgian accent in Russian and his distinctive appearance betraying his Caucasian roots.¹⁸ He did not trust the loyalty of the different nationalities of the Soviet Union and in the end sought to eliminate or Russify them. Many of his policies resulted in deporting various nationalities from their native countries into other parts of the Soviet Union and importing Russian workers to create ethnically mixed populations. As American historian Timothy Snyder has argued, Stalin took a different course in ethnic policies from his predecessor Lenin and other Bolsheviks.¹⁹ Stalin did not believe in positive discrimination in selecting non-Russians for the project of building the Soviet Union (though he himself had been selected and favored). He was searching for tools to consolidate Soviet society ideologically and find a basis for its common identity. Stalin perceived nationalism, especially in other Soviet nations, to be a threat to Bolshevism.²⁰ Therefore, promoting the Russian language and culture together with the idea of Russians being “first among equals” in a “friendly Soviet family of nations” was meant to create a sense of unity in the Soviet state.

In his quest to strengthen the Soviet empire and his rule, Stalin ordered mass murder and the deportation of many nations (including the Russians) to Soviet labor camps, or the so-called Gulag.²¹ Already by the end of 1930s, Stalin had a quarter of a million Soviet citizens shot, solely on the grounds of their nationalities.²² Before the Second World War, the labor camps had the dual purpose of providing free labor to contribute to the growth of the Soviet economy and punishing “enemies of the state.”²³ As the war approached, Stalin was increasingly concerned with the security of the Soviet Union’s borders. Therefore, ethnic cleansings were carried out to relocate minorities from border regions inward into Russian territories, on the assumption that separation from their homelands would lead to a faster assimilation into Soviet society.²⁴ In their places, other nationalities (often Russians) were brought in.