Moscow also institutionalizes the compatriots through various other cultural organizations, including the Russkiy Mir Foundation and the Russkiy Dom network. Throughout the 2000s the ideological concept of the “Russian World” gained strength on the back of Russkiy Dom, which was established in 1999 to promote Russian values, language, and culture as well as offering legal protection to Russians.61 By 2011 Russkiy Dom’s annual budget was some $30 million, with over fifty centers across the globe, including such disparate countries as Germany, Latvia, the United States, Switzerland, and Mexico.62 Likewise, Russia lends support to various transnational movements and organizations of the post-Soviet space that have historical or cultural ties to Russia and are deemed to be part of the Russian World. One example is the Cossacks, an East Slavic people with strong military and Orthodox Christian traditions living across Russia, Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and beyond. They have enjoyed Moscow’s political, financial, and even military support for their separatist movements and have fought on the Russian side in the wars of Transnistria, Georgia, and most recently Ukraine where they have formed a short-lived and self-proclaimed separatist Cossack People’s Republic in the east of the country, which eventually was liquidated and incorporated into the Luhansk People’s Republic.63
Russia also organizes large-scale events for its compatriots, such as the World Congress of Russian Compatriots, held in Russia every three years since 2003, where representatives from post-Soviet countries meet in a forum with the Russian president and other state leaders. Topics of discussion range from minority rights, resettlement back to Russia, to preservation of cultural and linguistic ties with the motherland.64 In some ways the congress is reminiscent of the early Soviet Comintern, or Communist International, which in the 1920s and 1930s held World Congresses in Moscow where representatives from international and European communist parties would meet. The Comintern was a tool of Soviet foreign policy, and the Kremlin held a disproportionate power share in the congresses which it used to promote its revolutionary ideals while expecting the foreign participants to declare loyalty to Moscow rather than to their home countries.65 Likewise, Russian compatriot representatives are expected to agree loyally with the policies outlined in the Kremlin, while they have limited ability to shape compatriot policy.66 According to participants, Russian embassies, which aid the recruitment processes, provide advance instructions to compatriots on what to do and what not to do at the congresses.67 It is no surprise that reports have cited a decline in compatriot participation at the World Congress meetings from around a thousand in 2009 to slightly over five hundred in 2012.68 Nonetheless, what is most concerning for post-Soviet states (and will be outlined in detail in the case study chapters) is the fact that compatriot organizations encourage the diaspora to make political demands such as changes in language and citizenship policies and calls for regional separatism and autonomy, as well as disseminating specific historical interpretations that split societies along ethnic lines.
STAGE 4: PASSPORTIZATION
The idea of providing ethnic Russians, Russian speakers, and others in the post-Soviet states with Russian passports has long appealed to the Russian government. As the next chapter will outline, in the early 1990s Moscow sought to establish the principle of dual citizenship in the post-Soviet space and at the same time sought to “passportize” whole regions outside its borders. In the global context, a number of states accept the principle of dual citizenship, and it could be argued that Moscow’s efforts to negotiate the principle with the sovereign post-Soviet states (especially in the case of Central Asia) were not unusual. However, Moscow’s passportization policies, which often violate the laws of the foreign states affected, differed significantly from accepted international norms. The policies undermined state sovereignty by encouraging often unlawful activities of handing out passports and by their targeting of specific populations of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers residing in particular foreign territories where Russia sought greater influence. They also targeted other minority populations like Ossetians and Abkhazians that resided in breakaway territories of Georgia. As a result there was fierce opposition from many countries to both Russia’s passportization efforts and the related principle of dual citizenship. In 2006, then First Deputy Prime Minister Medvedev argued that while “the international practice of the past several decades” rejects dual citizenship, it could become relevant as the CIS reached a level of integration comparable to that of the EU.69 Still among the CIS only Tajikistan has a formal agreement with Russia enabling dual citizenship while Kyrgyzstan and Armenia have not formalized the agreement but their citizenship laws could allow for it. Nonetheless, the semilegal practices of obtaining Russian citizenship continue unabated in much of the post-Soviet world since the early 1990s.
In some cases, the fact that residents of the former Soviet republics had not acquired citizenship in the newly independent post-Soviet states (due either to imposed legal constraints or to their own unwillingness) was also used by Moscow as a reason for passportization. The Russian government has maintained that if former citizens of the Soviet Union had not received citizenship in the new states, then “Russia as a legal successor to the Soviet Union was obligated to grant these people citizenship and rights under the Constitution of Russia.”70 This logic has been particularly relevant in Estonia and Latvia, which, as discussed in more detail in the chapter on the Baltic States, did not grant automatic citizenship to Soviet-era migrants who included many Russians and Russian speakers. Tallinn’s and Riga’s policies and the resulting passportless populations played well into Moscow’s hands, providing an arguably justifiable reason for their passportization as well as creating an international grievance. Meanwhile, in Georgia’s South Ossetia and Abkhazia and Moldova’s Transnistria, while Tbilisi and Chisinau granted automatic citizenship to inhabitants of these territories, separatist movements precluded many from obtaining Georgian or Moldovan passports. In these territories there was ready acceptance of Moscow’s passportization policies. However, in most other former Soviet republics, like Ukraine’s Crimea or northern Kazakhstan, Moscow was clandestinely and often illegally offering Russian citizenship to foreign citizens. Interestingly, Russian ethnicity was not a prerequisite for passportization in Moldova and Georgia. For instance, in the case of South Ossetia, there were virtually no ethnic Russians or native Russian speakers according to the 1989 census which lists ethnic Ossetians as making up 66 percent of the population and ethnic Georgians as totaling 29 percent.71 Whether targeting Russians or other nationalities, Russian passportization policies have played an important role in establishing and reinforcing separatism in Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Crimea.