Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire

In addition to being a study of Russian compatriots this book is also a study of the Russian reimperialization project. The use of terms such as “empire” and “reimperialization” may appear dramatic and archaic. Nonetheless, scholars are talking more of empire today than they did twenty-five years ago. What do these terms mean? Reimperialization means the reemergence, revival, or reconstitution of empire.²⁴ International relations scholar Michael Doyle defines empire as “a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social, or cultural dependence.”²⁵ For Motyl, empire is more about the funneling of resources from the periphery to the core. He characterizes empire “as a hierarchically organized political system with a hub-like structure—a rimless wheel—within which a core elite and state dominate peripheral elites and societies by serving as intermediaries for their significant interactions and by channeling resource flows from the periphery to the core and back to the periphery.”²⁶ For the purposes of the argument of this book, I consider the contemporary Russian Federation as an “empire” and the successor of the historical Soviet and Romanov empires—a concept that requires some explanation, especially as regards the Soviet Union.

Russian history is a history of empire. The Russian Empire was officially proclaimed by Tsar Peter the Great in 1721 and lasted until Russia’s first (February) revolution in 1917. At its peak it stretched over Europe and Asia to North America and included colonies in Alaska and northern California. In landmass it was one of the largest empires in history, surpassed only by the British and Mongol empires. However, the Russian Empire’s origins date even earlier—it grew from the Muscovite Russia in the fifteenth century, particularly after Ivan the Terrible was proclaimed tsar in 1547. An important feature of the Russian Empire was serfdom—landless peasants who belonged to the feudal landlord. The concept was almost the equivalent of slavery, as the master could do as he pleased with his serfs and their families, who in 1857 included nearly 40 percent of the empire’s population.²⁷ Established as early as the eleventh century, the system was abolished by decree in 1861 (the same year the American Civil War broke out to end slavery) but many conditions of serfdom persisted.

Indeed, in Russian history, the ideas of empire, tsars, and serfdom are dominant threads that have contributed to present-day Russia and its foreign policy. The culture of a strong leader (a tsar) and of vast masses in bondage (serfs) continues to influence Russian society and identity, and also, as I will demonstrate in Chapter 3, Moscow’s top-down policies toward its “compatriots.” Motyl’s idea of empire as a mechanism of funneling resources from the periphery to the center is also related to unique conditions of the Russian empire. The system of serfdom was introduced by Moscow into newly acquired territories, which increasingly were colonized by Russian or loyal landlords, and thus facilitated the extraction of resources from the periphery to the center.

While tsarist Russia was undoubtedly an “empire”—there is some disagreement whether the term can be applied to the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, the liberal academic establishment did not perceive the Soviet Union as an empire even though it was multinational and hypercentralized. Likewise, the fact that some poorer Soviet republics received more resources than they contributed also challenged the notion of empire. In general, the seemingly pejorative label was perceived as “rabid anticommunism” and “cold war messianism,” among the academic establishment, in line with President Ronald Reagan’s characterization of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.”²⁸ Economists John A. Hobson and Rudolf Hilferding, as well as Lenin himself, all maintained that only capitalism produced imperialism, and by this logic the Soviet Union could not be an empire. Indeed, to the uproar of many Sovietologists, French scholar Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was among the first academicians to suggest that “empire” was the correct scholarly designation for the Soviet Union in her 1979 seminal work that predicted the fall of the Soviet regime.²⁹ It was only after the Soviet Union collapsed that its labeling as an empire became widely accepted—in part because that was how the non-Russian popular fronts as well as Soviet Russian analysts widely described it during the late years of perestroika in the late 1980s.³⁰