In the long run, Moscow may be increasingly unable to bear the costs of territorial expansion and military campaigns to reimperialize more post-Soviet territories. Though Russia has recently modernized its military, at some point the cost of modernization may become prohibitive. Yet Moscow has demonstrated great ability and success in engaging in low-cost hybrid warfare and creating frozen-conflict zones in Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and potentially Luhansk and Donetsk. Frozen conflicts are defined as conditions where active armed conflict may have ended but no peace treaty or political resolution has resolved the tensions to the satisfaction of the different sides. In a frozen conflict zone internal sovereignty can be achieved on a breakaway territory but at the expense of “external sovereignty” (recognition in the international system).132 The term “frozen conflict” is almost completely associated with the breakaway post-Soviet territories that emerged as a result of Moscow’s efforts to protect its compatriots. While such conflicts do not amount to direct annexation, they permanently remove territories from the states in question, place them under Russia’s direct influence, and pave the way for Russia’s subsequent territorial expansion. They benefit various local and transnational interest groups (including Russian groups) involved in transportation of commercial goods, money laundering, organized crime, and arms trafficking. After years spent as unrecognized entities in the gray zone of the international community, these territories eventually seek closer ties to Russia or absorption into the Russian Federation rather than independence, as seen in the cases of South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Transnistria. While frozen conflicts may serve as stepping-stones for annexation by Moscow, they are equally effective in destabilizing target states like Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine. By challenging the territorial integrity of these states, Moscow is able to thwart their pushes for EU or NATO membership and thus constrain their foreign policies and keep them in its sphere of influence—a key aim of the Russian government and the reimperialization trajectory.
The proposed seven stages of Russia’s reimperialization policy trajectory help make sense of the seemingly disparate processes under way in many of the fourteen states of the former Soviet Union. They serve as a lens through which to view the Kremlin’s efforts at extending its influence and territory in the former Soviet republics, irrespective of their wishes or the wishes of the so-called compatriots. The seven-stage paradigm is not a timetable for Moscow’s imminent annexation. Instead, it outlines how the stage is set for military escalation and how hybrid warfare, annexation, separatism, and frozen conflicts can become possibilities. The more aggressive phases of reimperialization often come into play either at opportune moments or when the target countries are deliberating closer ties with EU or NATO, as in the cases of Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and Armenia. EU or NATO membership, as in the case of the Baltic States, does not preclude Russia’s use of softer reimperialization tactics, nor does it completely exclude the possibility of separatism and armed conflict.
Russian compatriot policies are both distinct aspects of Russian reimperialization and at the same time underlie all seven stages of the proposed trajectory. Compatriot policies have been little studied before and are in many ways the main focus of this book. As a result, Russian compatriot policies and related foreign policy, national security, and citizenship strategies will be assessed in detail in the next chapter. Having demonstrated the final aims of compatriot policies in the imperial revival project, the following chapter will trace how the Russian diaspora and Russian speakers have been conceptualized, politicized, and securitized as compatriots to become an instrument of Russia’s foreign policy since the 1990s.
CHAPTER THREE
The Origins and Development of Russian Compatriot Policies
…the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. And for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory.
THERE IS NO CONCEPT more nebulous but potentially more important for the geopolitics of the former Soviet space than that of “Russian compatriots.” Compatriots have served an important role in Russia’s quest to reestablish itself as a great power on the world stage. Since the 2000s, compatriot policies have served an integrative function: that of uniting the Russian people and the foreign lands where they reside under the flag of the Russian Federation. Moscow has spent decades trying to define the concept of a “compatriot,” despite its geostrategic importance for Russia. While the term “compatriot” generally refers to a “fellow countryman or countrywoman,” the Russian word, sootechestvennik (literally “those who are with the fatherland”), has come to refer most often to ethnic Russians and Russian speakers residing outside the Russian Federation and encompasses ethnic, cultural, linguistic, political, and even spiritual connotations. Its usage has been broad and mutable. Almost any Russian speaker who resides outside of Russia, or even anyone who was born in the Soviet Union, has been at some point defined by Moscow as a Russian compatriot. Even Russian ethnicity or Russian language is not a prerequisite for belonging to this category. Anyone hailing from some 185 ethnic groups that have historically resided in the territory of the Russian Federation or the Soviet Union could be deemed a compatriot.
A Russian grandfather and veteran, for example, who has lived in Tallinn, Estonia, since the Second World War could be considered a compatriot. But so could a high-school student in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, whose Jewish grandparents arrived in the 1950s from Odessa, Ukraine, escaping the Soviet regime. An ethnic Ossetian living in a mountain village in the Georgian breakaway territory of South Ossetia who speaks his native Iranian language can also fall under the same category—likewise a Tatar girl who is a Russian speaker and lives in the historic city of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, in the heart of Central Asia. The two things that connect Moscow’s so-called compatriots all over the world are being habitual Russian speakers and/or descent from former Soviet or Russian citizens or nations inhabiting former Russian imperial lands. Compatriots are ethnic Russians only in the narrowest sense of Moscow’s use of the term. In 1991 there were about 25 million ethnic Russians residing outside the Russian Federation in the former Soviet Republics.1 They constituted significant percentages of the population in Kazakhstan (38 percent), Latvia (34 percent), Estonia (30 percent), and Ukraine (22 percent).2 In the 2010s, there were about 30 million native Russian speakers outside the Russian Federation.3 But taking into account the entire population of the independent former Soviet republics, there is a total of nearly 150 million individuals who are descendants of Soviet citizens and thus have at different times qualified for Moscow’s identification as compatriots.4 While Russia aims to define compatriots based on language or descent, in reality these individuals are highly diverse—geographically, ethnically, linguistically, generationally, and socially. Over the decades, Moscow has tried to but come short of creating a legal status for the compatriots, and their rights and responsibilities notably differ from those of Russian citizens. Nonetheless, the Russian government has called on numerous occasions for support and protection of its compatriots by various means. This protection may entail many things, from supporting language and cultural programs, to appealing to international organizations to address discrimination of Russian minorities, to their military protection, as in both Ukraine and Georgia.