Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire

In May, Putin also ordered the Foreign Ministry to develop policy guidelines toward compatriots abroad.⁸⁵ These “Basic Guidelines for Support of Compatriots Abroad by the Russian Federation for 2002–2005,” approved by the government in November 2002, changed Russia’s discourse regarding the Russian diaspora. As political scientist Maria Nozhenko argues, if for the previous eight years the political establishment viewed the diaspora as a problem that Russia should tackle, now Russian speakers of the post-Soviet space were considered Russia’s external political resource to be employed vis-à-vis other states.⁸⁶ As Putin stated a few months after the adoption of the document, “such ‘humanitarian’ activities [compatriot policies] mean for the interests of the country no less than the activities of Russian business abroad.”⁸⁷ The Basic Guidelines called for the “initiation of their [compatriots’] role in expanding cooperation of the Russian Federation with other states and further development of democratic transformations in the Russian Federation.”⁸⁸ Though the prescriptions were still in the realm of soft power, this was the first time that compatriots were officially articulated in government policies as having a role to play in Russian foreign policy.

The decade of the 2000s saw a rising momentum of utilizing compatriots in Russia’s soft power and influence efforts. As outlined in the previous chapter, the increasingly proclaimed notion of the diaspora as a “Russian World,” the spread of the Russkiy Dom network, and the establishment of the Russkiy Mir Foundation and Rossotrudnichestvo reflected Russia’s growing wealth and nationalism and the strengthening of Putin’s regime. The summer of 2008 was marked by both the Russo-Georgian war and the record peak in oil prices of US $145 per barrel. A few years earlier, in April 2005, Putin uttered his much-quoted phrase that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century.” However, many have forgotten that in that instance the primary disaster he referenced was that of the Russian compatriots—“Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory.”⁸⁹ Something had to be done and Moscow could finally put its money where its mouth was regarding the compatriots.

In the middle of this decade of resurrection of Russia’s power and wealth, on the occasion of the sixty-fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War (the Second World War as it involved the Soviet Union) in June 2006, a presidential decree launched the “National Program of Support to Voluntary Migration of Compatriots Living Abroad to the Russian Federation.” Russia—the fair-weather friend to its compatriots—was finally going to invite them back home. However, the compatriots were not being invited solely out of good will. The program was intended to solve Russia’s evident labor shortage and related economic imbalances.⁹⁰ Between 1992 and 2004 the country’s demographic situation deteriorated significantly—the excess of deaths over births reached 10.4 million and contributed to a decline in skilled human resources.⁹¹ Therefore, according to the program, compatriots would have to be settled in government-specified regions that had experienced a population decrease or labor shortages. The glitz and glamour of Moscow and St. Petersburg were not intended for Russian compatriots; instead, they would have to settle for the Far East and Siberia.⁹² This program of compatriot resettlement demonstrated that Russia was cynically using both the term and the people—compatriots—solely for its own immediate national interests rather than to benefit the interests of compatriots.