Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire

Russia’s policies toward the inhabitants of its imperial space have also been consistent for centuries. Historically, Moscow’s imperial quest has created sizable pockets of ethnic Russians, Russian speakers, and other displaced minorities in the territories that constituted the Russian Empire. The tsars imposed Russification policies that made the Russian language and the Cyrillic alphabet official while banning native ones on most of the subjugated territories. Other policies included ethnic cleansing, resettlement and deportations of locals, and colonization by Russians to create multiethnic populations in newly acquired lands.³ During the Soviet empire, Stalin’s ethnic policies continued the tsarist trajectory. Russification was pursued during the entire Soviet period despite the official proclamations of equal rights for all nations. Soviet-era immigration policies sought to increase the percentage of Russians while diminishing the percentage of local ethnicities in every Soviet republic excluding Russia. The purpose was threefold. First, targeted immigration supported industrialization in the Soviet republics by enlarging the local labor force. Second, immigrations and the creation of multi-ethnic societies helped establish a new identity, a “Soviet nationality.” The third goal was to enmesh and intertwine the fifteen Soviet republics within the Union ethnically, culturally, politically, and economically.⁴ As a result of these ethnic policies and Soviet imperial rule, following the fall of the USSR the boundaries of its successor states did not always reflect the ethnic, political, or economic realities on the ground for many Russians and non-Russians alike.⁵ As a result, the legacies of Russia’s historical imperial projects, and specifically tsarist and Stalinist ethnic policies, have created the means, causes, and conditions for Russia’s imperial revival. Since the 2000s this revival has been facilitated and driven by the pretext of protecting Russian compatriots in the former Soviet republics.

POST–COLD WAR NARRATIVES AND DEBATES

The analysis of Russian foreign policy has been greatly influenced by the times and their geopolitical context. The end of the Cold War and the perceived triumph of democracy and capitalism marked a decline of interest in Russia and the former Soviet space. In 1989 American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that “what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”⁶ The concept of “the end of history” gained popularity among international relations scholars and policymakers and influenced the study of Russia and the post-Soviet space. The fledgling Russian democracy under President Boris Yeltsin and the enlargement of NATO and the EU to include Central and Eastern European states in the late 1990s and 2000s bolstered this hopeful concept of the “end of history.” The Cold War seemed an element of the past safely confined to history books. Yeltsin pulled out Soviet troops from Eastern Europe, dramatically cut Russia’s military spending, and agreed to let Ukraine keep part of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet—all while not stoking separatism in Crimea. Neither Yeltsin’s regime nor the incoming Putin regime recognized the independence of Georgia’s South Ossetia or Abkhazia. Moscow still has not recognized Moldova’s breakaway territory of Transnistria. Under Yeltsin and Putin, Russia also accepted two rounds of NATO enlargement by the adhesion of former Warsaw Pact states and the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 1999 and 2004. In the 2000s, Putin closed Russia’s military bases in Cuba and Vietnam, while the United States opened military bases in Central Asia. Since 1991 Russia and the United States continued to collaborate on disarmament of weapons of mass destruction, and post-9/11 on the fight against global terrorism. Russia looked like a potential partner for the West. Where did this story of East meets West go wrong? Was this narrative of cooperation between Russia and the West ever really true? Some ask today if the West pushed the weak and humiliated Russia too far and failed to understand its strategic national interests and security concerns. Or was there an alternative narrative all along?