Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire

In what ways is the contemporary Russian Federation linked to the historical empires of the Soviet Union and the tsars? The Russian Federation is the successor state of both the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and the Soviet Union, and it inherited the financial obligations and nuclear privileges of the USSR. The RSFSR itself was no nation-state but rather a collection of different administrative regions organized by ethnicity.³¹ Like a Russian matryoshka doll that has a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside the other, so was the RSFSR a smaller empire within the larger USSR, which in turn was part of the larger Soviet empire that included satellite states like the Central and Eastern European Warsaw Pact states and Mongolia. Yet in fact, the RSFSR, the USSR, and the Soviet bloc were not three distinct empires at all. They were all one and the same Russian empire ruled largely by Russians from Moscow and apart from much of East-Central Europe, having much the same borders as the tsarist empire. The Soviet Union occupied almost the identical territory of the tsarist empire, while today the Russian Federation coincides with the borders of the RSFSR. The Russian Federation’s proclaimed special sphere of interest is broader and follows the borders of the Soviet Union. Outside the communist ideology, there was very little difference in the imperial project of the Soviets versus that of the Romanovs and increasingly little difference from that of Putin’s Russia, which seemingly has adopted imperialism as its ideology. Moscow has always been the core and the other states and territories were the vassals in this centuries-long imperial project.

While the history of Russia as an empire is generally little disputed, the question that remains is whether Russia’s history determines its present. In other words, does Russia’s historical past necessitate imperial ideology or foreign policy or a reimperialization drive, as this book argues? Political scientist and scholar of Russia Daniel Treisman argued otherwise: “Of course, the past matters; but the footprints do not control the walker. Countries are always both reliving and escaping from their histories, and those histories are not single narratives but albums of distinct and often mutually contradictory stories that offer multiple possibilities for development.”³² Yet tsarist and Soviet policies have created the conditions of a Russian diaspora and Russified minorities across the Eurasian continent that persist until the present day, and which offer a path to Russian imperial ambitions. This is coupled with the fact that Russia views itself as a nation-state rather than a civic state. In Moscow’s eyes the Russian nation remains divided by post-Soviet state borders following the collapse of the Soviet Union.³³ As Putin declared in his speech on March 18, 2014, following the annexation of Crimea, “Millions of people went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former Union republics, while the Russian nation became one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders.”³⁴ Regardless of the fact that these people have been settled for generations in territories that are now independent states, Moscow seems intent on uniting the Russian diaspora and the territories where they reside under the flag of the Russian Federation.