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
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.
The Russian government would, however, shun the label of an empire or a reimperializing power. In the case of Crimea’s annexation, Moscow argued that it was righting a historic wrong by taking back Russian land that was unfairly given to Ukraine by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. In the case of Georgia or the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries, Moscow (with its supporters) has argued that Russia was simply trying to protect its sphere of influence and interests that were under threat from NATO and EU expansion. For instance, following the Russo-Georgian war in August of 2008 then-President Dmitry Medvedev stated that “As is the case of other countries, there are regions in which Russia has privileged interests.”35 In 2014, Secretary of the Security Council of Russia Nikolai Patrushev was quick to emphasize Russia’s “assets,” all the while arguing that the United States seeks expansion at the expense of Russian interests. According to Patrushev, in the 1990s “Russia unilaterally surrendered its assets on the world stage without being compensated at all.”36 Yet, underneath all of these arguments regarding spheres of influence and inherently Russian lands and “assets” is the same tone of an imperial power seeking to maintain its empire or reimperialize. Indeed, as Motyl states: “Important as historical reality, conceptual category, and analytical device, empires refuse to go away.”37 In the case of Russia, compatriots become a pretext and sometimes an ideological driver in this broader quest for empire that provides a mission, (at times) greater economic and population resources, and most often, a sense of greater security and a distraction from domestic problems.
In the analysis of the driving forces of a state’s foreign policy, it is helpful to assess their nature. Are these forces primarily structural? Are they fostered by agents of history? Are they driven by personalities? To apply these competing views to Russia’s situation, one might ask: Is Russia’s reimperialization driven by structural factors like the global balance of power and the balance of power and resources between Russia and its near abroad states? Or has the figure of Vladimir Putin been central in policies of reimperialization? Certainly, Putin has been an important architect in the political reconstruction of the Russian diaspora into Russian compatriots and in launching the policy of their military protection during the 2000s on the principle of protecting the “legitimate rights and interests” of Russian citizens abroad.38 On the other hand, the Russian diaspora and Russia’s quest for empire predate Putin by centuries and will likely remain issues long after Putin retires from power. Putin’s policies reflect in many ways the ambitions of the Russian society and state, as demonstrated by his 85 percent approval rating in late 2014.39 For the purposes of this analysis, I will not aim to unpack the Kremlin’s decision-making apparatus, but will take note of the different actors in Russian foreign policy such as the executive leadership, the Foreign Ministry, and the Russian military, and will pay particular attention to individuals like Putin and even to the legacies of Joseph Stalin. In the end, I hold that Russia’s structural and historical predilections have played the key role in its quest for reimperialization, while Putin’s leadership and the related domestic political circumstances have been strongly contributing rather than central factors. Throughout this book the focus will fall on the potential structural, ideological-historical, economic, and political drivers of Russia’s reimperialization regarding each set of states discussed.