“At least don’t speak English to each other!” pleaded Nina’s mother, Julia, a Muscovite. She worried that widespread Russian support for Putin’s annexation of Crimea would bring us unwanted attention. After all, it was Khrushchev who, in 1954, had transferred Crimea (Russian from 1783 until then) to Ukraine. This was at Khrushchev’s time an administrative move, which shifted control of the area from one Soviet socialist republic to another, with the aim of improving its governance—the Crimean Peninsula lies to the Ukrainian mainland’s south, without a land connection to Russia. That, of course, changed in May 2018, when the Crimea Bridge opened with pomp and circumstance over the Kerch Strait that divided the peninsula from the Russian territory.
In his Granddad Frost–type travels, Putin had planned on moving east to west, but we would do the opposite, because despite its grandstanding as a unique power, Russia’s definition of itself begins in Europe, with the arrival, in the ninth century, of the Ruriks. The Ruriks were Nordic princes who came to rule over the eastern Slavs, the proto-Slavic people speaking Old Russian, the language from which Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian would emerge. A century later, Russia further anchored its identity in Europe by adopting Christianity from the Byzantine Greeks. Moreover, once Byzantium had fallen to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 and the devastating era of Tatar-Mongolian rule over Russia ended in the 1470s, the country declared itself the Byzantine Empire’s successor, the Third Rome, as the last bastion of Orthodox (that is, true, spiritual) Christianity. Russia appropriated the Byzantine Empire’s emblem—its imperial coat of arms, with the double-headed eagle. From then on, the country began expanding (both east and west) thanks to the successful efforts of the early czars. Its growth was further assisted by Europeanizing reforms of Russia’s first emperor, Peter the Great. The young sovereign undertook these reforms after visiting Europe in the late seventeenth century and encountering countries vastly more developed than his own.
The keys to understanding Russia’s geopolitics, its people and its leaders, have been the nation’s faith—the stress on the communal rather than the individual in either Christian Orthodoxy or communist brotherhood—and its giant territory and what it holds. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia shed satellite nations in Eastern Europe and republics in the Baltics and Central Asia. Abroad, it then began to be seen not as the center of a Eurasian civilization, but as an extension of the West.
The Putin decades, however, have changed that perception as Russia, once again, began to reimagine itself in civilizational, not just national or geographical, terms. The country that Barack Obama dismissed as a “regional power” after the Crimea annexation looks set to rival the United States. Not least because Russia, like the United States, occupies a “region”—a continent, actually—verging on two oceans.
Also like the United States, Russia, contrary to its convictions, does not constitute a separate civilization—civilizations, as those of Persia or China, possess independent frames of reference. Russia derives much of its identity from the West, either in imitation of it or in opposition to it. It has both striven to define itself as Western and what the West is not. The pro-Russian patriots who became known as the Slavophiles in the nineteenth century believed in Russia’s religious and spiritual uniqueness, which set it apart from the West and assured it future glory. Another group, the Westernizers, argued for the rational, European approach to Russian matters. Even though at least half of Russia’s landmass is in Asia, it does not see itself as Asian.
Russia, then, is a mutant, an oxymoron of geography, a self-enclosed empire defined by its central government and its rule over an extensive territory on which dwell dozens of peoples speaking many languages. However, Russian is the mother tongue of eight out of ten Russian citizens, and the lingua franca of virtually everyone.
Russia’s gross domestic product stands at $1,283 billion, which makes its economy the world’s twelfth, behind those of India, Brazil, and South Korea.[4] It spends $70 billion annually on its military, less than China does, and only one-seventh of the defense budget of the United States.[5] In economic terms, Russia hardly seems like much of an empire.
But either way, relatively few outsiders have seen much of it. How many foreigners, or even Russians, have made a concerted effort to traverse its vastness, as the American song has it, “from sea to shining sea”?
Demonized as a dictator, at least in the United States, Putin has nevertheless overseen a turn in Russia’s fortunes that was impossible to imagine during the chaotic Yeltsin years of the 1990s, often deemed democratic in the West. Stepping in to reverse the excesses produced by the collapse of socialism and the sudden introduction of the free market, Putin nationalized, or rather took under the Kremlin’s control, Russia’s hydrocarbon industry, assuring his almost bankrupt government of much-needed revenues. Aided by high world energy prices, he was able to pay pensions and salaries owed to miners, railroad workers, and teachers, and so many others whom the Yeltsin administration had largely abandoned. Under Putin, roads and bridges were built, factories began functioning, and the jobless index fell to below 5 percent by 2017,[6] and this is despite the many rounds of sanctions imposed by the West after the Crimea annexation.
The Russia Putin built has largely survived notwithstanding the government’s self-punishing response when it decided to levy its own countersanctions. These retaliatory measures—blocking import of European food and agricultural products and barring certain American politicians and businesspeople from visiting Russia—hurt the Russian economy and its partners much more than those at whom the countersanctions were aimed. But such was Russia’s state of mind—when dealing with the West it often addresses matters emotionally, not pragmatically.
Such harmful actions add to the many already existing problems—an undiversified economy, graft, nepotism, aging infrastructure, in addition to shrinking space for free speech, free assembly, and the press. Despite these infringements on democracy, however, many Russians appear to share Putin’s belief that only a centralized Russia can achieve the desired greatness, or at least the mythology of it. That mythology is mostly based on the idea of Russia’s superior soul and its imperial stature as a unique nation straddling the East and West. The president recently confirmed this: “We are less pragmatic than other people, less calculating. But then we have a more generous heart. Perhaps this reflects the greatness of our country, its vast size.”[7]
Russia’s other enduring myth is that of a caring and benevolent czar—be it Ivan the Terrible; Peter the Great; or Nicholas I, who announced that the three pillars of Russia’s empire were pravoslavie, samoderzhavie, narodnost (the Russian Orthodox faith, absolute state power, and the people). After the March 2018 presidential elections, with Putin winning an impressive 77 percent of the votes,[8] and a subsequent inauguration fit for a czar, many Russians have begun to see Putin as Putin the First.
Do the three imperial pillars of Russia’s past still uphold an empire of Putin’s present? We were determined to find out.
1
KALININGRAD
THE AMBER-TINTED GAZE OF AN EMPIRE
5
Lauren Carroll, “Obama: US Spends More on Military Than Next 8 Nations Combined,” Politifact, January 13, 2016.
6
Yevgeny Kalyukov, “Uroven Bezrabotitsy V Rossii Vpervye Za Tri Goda Upal Nizhe 5%” [For the First Time in Three Years Unemployment Fell to Under Five Percent], RBC, September 19, 2017.
7
Lynn Berry, “Putin’s Choice of Words Shed Light on Ukraine,” Associated Press, April 17, 2014.
8
Andrew Roth, “Vladimir Putin Secures Landslide Victory in Russian Election,”