The Russian World—Putin’s Justifications for His Invasion
Moscow's Kremlin. /Picture via Russia Beyond
The close embrace of Russian and Ukrainian freestyle skiers at the closing ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics was an unforgettable moment for viewers around the world. However, as soon as the song of "You and me" fell, the Russia-Ukraine friendship in the "global village" was destroyed by the war. On February 21, 2022, Putin announced in a video address to the nation that he recognized the Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic of eastern Ukraine as independent states.
In his speech, he accused NATO of using Ukraine to pursue anti-Russian policies and stressed Russia's "inseparable" historical and cultural ties with Ukraine. In one of the most controversial parts of his speech, Mr. Putin referred to Ukraine as Stalin's "geofiction," that "modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia, or rather Bolshevik Communist Russia," and that it had been "stolen from Russia" by the Failed Soviet policies.
Three days after Putin's speech, Russia launched a "special military operation" in Ukraine, putting the country in a state of war. As of April 18, the death toll in the war has risen to 2072 and over 150,000 Ukrainian refugees have fled, according to Jiemian News. On February 27, Putin announced that the Russian military's nuclear-armed strategic Deterrent force would be upgraded to a special combat readiness state.
"The situation is more dangerous than the Cuban missile crisis," Andrei Kortunov, director general of the Russian Council for International Affairs, said in an interview with China Newsweek. Russia has one of the world's largest nuclear arsenals.
What do Mr. Putin's public remarks before the war on Feb. 21 reveal about his historical and political vision? How did the Soviet policies he criticized set the stage for the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine? Beyond the historical dimension, how do the current Russian political ecology and world order affect the current Russia-Ukraine crisis? On this topic, I interviewed Zhang Xin, associate professor of the Institute of International Relations and Regional Development of East China Normal University.
Zhang Xin believes that Putin's speech on February 21, whether confusing Russia as a political entity that eliminates the concept of Russian civilization or criticizing the imagination of early Soviet cosmopolitanism, reveals his desire to continue the "great Russian civilization" and the ambition to establish a "Russian world." Zhang Xin also believes that the historical legacy of the Soviet Union, criticized by Putin, foreshadows the current Russia-Ukraine relations: Post-Soviet countries tend to break away from the former core empire (Russia) in order to secure their independent political status; The need to assert national and ethnic unity also makes it difficult for post-Soviet states to adopt a model of civic nationalism that tends to suppress and homogenize multiculturalism -- which is why Russia now condemns Ukraine's government as a "fascist regime."
On the other hand, Zhang Xin argues that the dominant genre in Russia's domestic political environment in recent decades has been "a mixture of nationalist and civilizationist ideas" and the emergence of "Irrendentism," which is closely related to the larger geopolitical context: part of Russia's expansion is a desire to reestablish its imperial system as a counterpoint to a larger dimension of imperialism—the post-Cold War Unipolar world and trans-Atlantic system dominated by the United States. Putin's banner of "moderate conservatism" and his criticism of neoliberalism and liberal politics in Europe and the United States now have more and more adherents around the world. They are the people who did not gain a better life 30 years after the end of the Cold War; they are the people who are lost in the face of the "end of history."
In an interview, Zhang Xin mentioned that the voices of the ordinary people in Russia and Ukraine are often overshadowed by growing tension. A poll in late 2021 found that more than 70 percent of people in both countries want to maintain "their current independent political identities, but with free movement of people and goods," when asked about their ideal future of Russian-Ukraine relations. This result may surprise many. For a long time, we imagined Ukraine's relationship with Russia as an estrangement after the Orange Revolution, a seesaw between the east and the west. In reality, however, what ordinary people want most of all is not division, rivalry, or death, but open borders, free movement, and close communication—like that of the warm embrace shared between Russian and Ukrainian athletes at the Winter Olympics.
Violence in Kyiv’s Independence Square in 2014 after the Ukrainian government abandoned an agreement to strengthen ties with the European Union under pressure from Moscow./ picture Jeff J. Mitchell via Getty Image
▍Soviet legacy and the concept of the "Russian World"
Interviewer: Before the war, Putin made a speech recognizing the independence of the two regions in Eastern Ukraine. In the speech, he emphasized that Ukraine is "an inseparable part of Russia's history, culture, and spiritual space." What is the spiritual and cultural connection between Russia and Ukraine?
Zhang Xin: From the ethnic and cultural point of view, Russians and Ukrainians are of the same origin, namely the East Slavic people in history. They share a common religion. Old Church Slavonic is the origin of the languages spoken today in Russia and Ukraine. Kyiv has always been regarded by Russians as the origin of Russian civilization, as reflected by the saying that "Kyiv is the mother of all Russian cities".
Interviewer: Why does he call these spiritual and cultural connections "inseparable"?
Zhang Xin: There is a subtle distinction to note here. Which "Russia" is Putin referring to in his "Russian historical, cultural and spiritual space?" Is it Russia, now a nation-state, or the broader, more general Russian culture or civilization? Different interpretations of this are prone to conflict.
Mr. Putin's speech was supposed to be about the latter, which has more to do with the concept of the "Russian world."This historical concept has been redeployed by the political and cultural elites of the newly independent Russia since the 1990s, and it has now become a frequently used concept in politics.It broadly means that the modern Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians are the three branches derived from the East Slavic people on the basis of Kievan Rus. In history, there was a civilization in which Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine were the core.
There are, of course, many interpretations of the meaning and boundaries of this civilizational construct. The common one is that people who speak Russian and identify with Slavic civilizations are members of this community -- a community with geographic boundaries far beyond those of the current Russian state.
Mr. Putin employed this broad concept of civilization in his speech, but using it to justify that Ukraine as a nation-state is "indivisible" from the Russian Federation can be controversial.
The discrepancy between notions of civilization and the modern concept of the nation-state is often ambiguous and even conflictual in contemporary political discourse, and the resulting disputes not only occur between Russia and Ukraine. For example, in 2020, the Weibo (Chinese micro-blogging site) account of the Belarusian Consulate in China posted an article titled "Belarus is not White Russia," demanding that its Chinese name be changed to "Belarus" in future diplomatic exchanges.* Since the name "White Russia" could easily be mistaken for a country derived from the Russian Federation, changing the name can better represent the cultural and historical roots of Belarus in Chinese translation.
Interviewer: In his speech, Mr. Putin criticized Soviet-era policies, saying, "dividing regions of the country along ethnic lines and giving sovereign republics the right to secede from the Soviet Union planted nuclear bombs for the country." What was the policy of the Soviet Union?
Zhang Xin: After the Bolshevik revolution, the multi-ethnic political entity of Tsarist Russia fell apart. After the dissolution, there were many difficulties in constructing a new nation. The Bolsheviks needed to find ways to persuade various ethnic groups to join the new political entity. As part of the construction of the state, the ethnic policy of that time had a sense of compromise. Later, the Soviet Union gradually formed the system of Soviet satellite republics, which essentially combined the nationalities of the 15 republics to a Soviet identity. The 15 satellite republics retained their names in their official titles. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, for example, was the Ukrainian home country.
In communist theory, nations and ethnicities are products of class society and will die out sooner or later with revolution. The Soviet Union utilized the satellite state arrangements to unite the different ethnic groups under a singular political entity. By doing this, it aimed to strengthen ethnic identity. What it's really doing is waiting for the eventual integration since it believes that USSR would transcend notions of ethnicity or nationality.
However, after the establishment of this system, national identity was constantly strengthened in practice, which was contrary to the original idea of the USSR evolving beyond ethnic distinctions. At the end of the Soviet Union, the 15 republics have already established preliminary nation-state structures, which provided convenient ways to dissolve the USSR. In theory, there were many different ways the USSR could split into. But in reality, the Soviet Union, being the multi-ethnic state that it is, has eventually disintegrated along the borders of its satellite states.
Interviewer: Putin described the Soviet system as "stealing Ukraine from Russia." Why did he say that?
Zhang Xin: Lenin was very opposed to Russian chauvinism at that time. It is also true that the Soviet Union was originally created as a political entity with a cosmopolitan imagination: it was neither a Russian nation-state nor a Soviet nation-state. Its name had no concept of specific geographical space or specific groups of people, which was revolutionary at the time, when the hope was that the new political entities emerging from the socialist revolutions all over the world would join the Soviet Union.
Putin's criticism of the Soviet Union, which has become increasingly clear in recent years, is that the Soviet Union has weakened the historical continuity of what he sees as the "Russian world," and that he is critical of Lenin's arrangements to give republics the right to secede from the Soviet Union. Over the years, Putin and some political elites in Russia aimed to connect Russia’s reality with its historical heritage belonging to Tsarist Russia. However, the existence of the USSR interrupted that historical narrative, which is reflected in Putin’s repeated criticisms of Lenin’s ethnic policy – how the USSR destroyed Russia’s history of ethnic unity. In his first two terms as president, Putin made few comments on such issues, but in his third term, which began in 2012, he has spoken out much more on ethnic and historical issues.
In Putin's view of history, much of what is now Ukraine is historically Russian land. Putin believes that, throughout history, policies of past Russian leaders such as Catherine II, Lenin, and Stalin have undermined that idea. The most recent was Khrushchev's abandonment of Crimea to Ukraine in 1964. In that sense, he said, it was "stolen" from Russia.
Former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was Russian but felt an affinity with Ukraine./Picture via NPR
Interviewer: Is the growing sense of national identity within these satellite republics also cutting into what Putin sees as "greater Russian civilization"?
Zhang Xin: Yes, the republic system in a sense has strengthened the identity of the smaller community (Ukraine) within a larger transcendent community (the Soviet Union) -- although the initial intention was to dilute the identity at the satellite republic level.
Putin's view of the Soviet Union's ethnic policies as cutting into a continuing, broadly defined "Russian world" or "Russian civilization" is also reflected in Russia's relations with other former Soviet states with Ethnic Russian populations. For example, the linguistic rights, cultural rights, and historical views of world War II of Russian residents in the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) have been very different from Russia. Kazakhstan has a similar problem. Former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev was so determined to move the capital of Kazakhstan from Almaty to Astana, a far less natural place in the north because he wanted to ensure political stability in the heavily Ethnic Russian north.
Interviewer: What was the relationship between Ukraine and Russia under this Soviet policy?
Zhang Xin: The Ethnic policy of the Soviet Union actually achieved a lot, which is often overlooked in today's public discussion. The official narrative of the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s claimed that "the Soviet Union had solved the ethnic problem." This was not pure propaganda because social conflicts did not focus on the ethnic dimension. But now many Western scholars and Ukrainian scholars are discussing whether post-colonialism should be used to understand relations within the Soviet Union and whether Ukraine was a victim of the Soviet Union or Russia's "colonial policy." These are still controversial questions in history, and I'm not in a position to decide.
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Belarus is translated literally as “White Russia” in Chinese
