Many ethnic Russians came to live outside the Russian Federation and in the former Soviet republics when they migrated for work or were forcibly relocated during the Soviet era and even in tsarist times. Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, most remained and became citizens of the newly independent states. Over time, this Russian diaspora, reconstructed politically by Moscow as Russian compatriots, has become the instrument of Russian neo-imperial aims. In this book I will show how since the 1990s and particularly since the 2000s, Moscow’s policies have leveraged the existence of Russian compatriots, particularly ethnic Russians and Russian speakers residing abroad, to gain influence over and challenge the sovereignty of foreign states and at times even take over territories. This book will demonstrate that Moscow’s hold on these groups serves as an effective pretext for and instrument of much of Russia’s expansionist foreign policy. While Moscow has been using its diaspora as a means of influence since the 1990s, the Russo-Georgian conflict of 2008 was the first full-fledged war between Russia and a post-Soviet state fought largely over Russian compatriots. However, since that time not many discerned a connection between the seemingly disparate Russian policies of compatriot support, humanitarian agendas, handing out Russian citizenship, and information warfare in remote parts of the former Soviet space. Nonetheless, the territorial implications of Moscow’s policies toward its compatriots have been demonstrated in Ukraine’s Crimea and eastern territories, in Georgia’s South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and Moldova’s Transnistria. The distribution of Russian speakers and ethnic Russians across the former Soviet Union countries and current separatist areas and conflict zones is shown in Map 1. Russia’s compatriot policies have raised tensions in Moldova’s Gagauzia, Estonia’s Ida-Viru county, Latvia’s Latgale region, northern Kazakhstan, Armenia, and elsewhere in the post-Soviet space. The developments in Ukraine, Georgia, and beyond have shown that Russia’s compatriot policies are inextricably tied to its expansionist ambitions and neo-imperial aims. For Moscow, compatriot policies perform an integrative function—a unification of the Russian peoples combined with potential to unify with the motherland the territories where they reside.
While neo-imperialism has been a prominent trend in Putin’s era, it is in fact rooted in the history of the Russian Empire. There is an undeniable historical continuity between present Russian imperial projects and past projects of the Romanovs and the Soviets. The Russian Federation has in many respects followed in the footsteps of its historical predecessors and will continue to do so, because of the similar ideological, cultural, security, and geopolitical drivers that have been rooted in the centuries-long imperial experience of the three empires—the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Empire—that have occupied the same Russian political space and territories. The Grand Duchy of Moscow (Muscovy) started out as a landlocked principality in the late thirteenth century and expanded aggressively to acquire new lands and peoples, as well as access to waterways. The subsequent expansion of the Romanov empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under Peter the Great and Catherine the Great was driven by a desire for new lands, the taming of bordering nations, and the quest for warm-water ports on the Baltic Sea, in Crimea, and in the Caucasus.
Russia’s policies toward the inhabitants of its imperial space have also been consistent for centuries. Historically, Moscow’s imperial quest has created sizable pockets of ethnic Russians, Russian speakers, and other displaced minorities in the territories that constituted the Russian Empire. The tsars imposed Russification policies that made the Russian language and the Cyrillic alphabet official while banning native ones on most of the subjugated territories. Other policies included ethnic cleansing, resettlement and deportations of locals, and colonization by Russians to create multiethnic populations in newly acquired lands.3 During the Soviet empire, Stalin’s ethnic policies continued the tsarist trajectory. Russification was pursued during the entire Soviet period despite the official proclamations of equal rights for all nations. Soviet-era immigration policies sought to increase the percentage of Russians while diminishing the percentage of local ethnicities in every Soviet republic excluding Russia. The purpose was threefold. First, targeted immigration supported industrialization in the Soviet republics by enlarging the local labor force. Second, immigrations and the creation of multi-ethnic societies helped establish a new identity, a “Soviet nationality.” The third goal was to enmesh and intertwine the fifteen Soviet republics within the Union ethnically, culturally, politically, and economically.4 As a result of these ethnic policies and Soviet imperial rule, following the fall of the USSR the boundaries of its successor states did not always reflect the ethnic, political, or economic realities on the ground for many Russians and non-Russians alike.5 As a result, the legacies of Russia’s historical imperial projects, and specifically tsarist and Stalinist ethnic policies, have created the means, causes, and conditions for Russia’s imperial revival. Since the 2000s this revival has been facilitated and driven by the pretext of protecting Russian compatriots in the former Soviet republics.
POST–COLD WAR NARRATIVES AND DEBATES
The analysis of Russian foreign policy has been greatly influenced by the times and their geopolitical context. The end of the Cold War and the perceived triumph of democracy and capitalism marked a decline of interest in Russia and the former Soviet space. In 1989 American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that “what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”6 The concept of “the end of history” gained popularity among international relations scholars and policymakers and influenced the study of Russia and the post-Soviet space. The fledgling Russian democracy under President Boris Yeltsin and the enlargement of NATO and the EU to include Central and Eastern European states in the late 1990s and 2000s bolstered this hopeful concept of the “end of history.” The Cold War seemed an element of the past safely confined to history books. Yeltsin pulled out Soviet troops from Eastern Europe, dramatically cut Russia’s military spending, and agreed to let Ukraine keep part of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet—all while not stoking separatism in Crimea. Neither Yeltsin’s regime nor the incoming Putin regime recognized the independence of Georgia’s South Ossetia or Abkhazia. Moscow still has not recognized Moldova’s breakaway territory of Transnistria. Under Yeltsin and Putin, Russia also accepted two rounds of NATO enlargement by the adhesion of former Warsaw Pact states and the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 1999 and 2004. In the 2000s, Putin closed Russia’s military bases in Cuba and Vietnam, while the United States opened military bases in Central Asia. Since 1991 Russia and the United States continued to collaborate on disarmament of weapons of mass destruction, and post-9/11 on the fight against global terrorism. Russia looked like a potential partner for the West. Where did this story of East meets West go wrong? Was this narrative of cooperation between Russia and the West ever really true? Some ask today if the West pushed the weak and humiliated Russia too far and failed to understand its strategic national interests and security concerns. Or was there an alternative narrative all along?