Russian Imperialism Revisited

From Disengagement to Hegemony

Domitilla Sagramoso

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032172989
• eBook ISBN: 9781135180898
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book examines the nature of Russia's relations with the former Soviet states (FSS), in particular with countries which formed the Commonwealth of Independent States, in order to assess whether there has been a resurgence of Russian imperialism since the collapse of the USSR.

The book sets out to determine whether Russian leaders have attempted to restore a sphere of influence over the former Soviet republics or whether Russia's policies reflect a genuine desire to establish normal state-to-state relations with the new states. It adopts a comprehensive approach, analysing Russia's policies towards the FSS across a broad range of areas: energy, trade and investment; military assistance, security provision and peacekeeping; conflict management, political support, and alliance formation. While not denying the Kremlin's assertive role in the FSS, this book challenges the assumption that Russia has always intended to restore a sphere of influence over its 'Near Abroad'. Rather, it argues that Russia's policies are much more complex, multi-faceted, and often more incoherent than is often assumed. In essence, Russia's actions generally reflect a combination of legitimate state interests, enduring Soviet legacies, and genuine concerns over events unfolding along Russia's borders. This book also shows that, at times, Great-Power nostalgia and a real difficulty with discarding Russia's imperial legacy shapes Russia's behaviour towards the FSS.

This book will be of great interest to students of Russian politics and foreign policy, east European politics, and International Relations in general.

1 What is Russia? Russia’s foreign policy orientation under Yeltsin

The collapse of the Soviet Union produced a serious national identity crisis among the Russian elite and the Russian population at large, namely over ‘What is Russia?’ As pointed out in the introduction, the Russian Soviet Federation Socialist Republic (RSFSR), re-baptised as ‘the Russian Federation’, lacked any historical legitimacy, as it was in fact a Bolshevik invention. Its external borders and internal divisions did not correspond to any pre-existing geographical, political or ethnic reality, maybe with the single exception of mid-seventeenth century Russia. This predicament was magnified by the demise of the Communist ideology, which had been for decades the source of legitimacy of both the Communist system and of the Soviet state. Thus, a heated political debate ensued on what the new Russian state should look like, where its borders ought to lie, and how far its foreign influences should extend. This chapter examines how ideas, identities and beliefs about Russia, and about its place in the world shaped and influenced the country’s foreign policy behaviour in the former Soviet states (FSS). Several prominent thinkers refused to admit the possibility of a Russian state within the frame of the RSFSR and instead stressed the artificial nature of its existing borders. Political Scientist Aleksandr Tsipko, for example, argued that the RSFSR had neither a historical nor an ethnic legitimacy. ‘It is essentially a vestige of the division of old Russia into separate Soviet socialist republics’, Tsipko noted and added, ‘this division was done in an off-hand way. No one, neither Lenin nor Stalin took a serious attitude towards the borders of these semi-state formations. As a result, the borders of the RSFSR are purely random in nature’ (Tsipko, 1991a). Consequently, he pointed out, some age-old Russian areas which were colonised by people originally from Central Russia ended up as parts of Ukraine and Kazakhstan. At the same time, many purely imperial conquests carried out by Tsarist Russia, for example in the Northern Caucasus, remained within the RSFSR, as part of what Tsipko called ‘lesser Russia’ (Tsipko, 1991a). Moreover, like many Russians, Tsipko feared that the breakdown of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) would eventually lead to the disintegration of RSFSR along similar lines. ‘If all the republics become sovereign states’, Tsipko (1991b) argued, ‘the centre will die, and along with it, the state that for centuries has been called Russia’.

Old and new ideas on ‘What is Russia?’

This predicament led to new proposals by Russian thinkers which envisaged different models of reintegration of the former Soviet lands. Tsipko proposed turning the existing Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) into an asymmetrical confederation including those countries most eager to keep close ties with Russia, namely Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan (Tsipko, 1994, p. 447). Russian writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his renowned article ‘Rebuilding Russia’ instead placed emphasis on the Slavic nature of Russia by advocating that Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Northern Kazakhstan remain united in what he called a ‘Russian [Rossiisky] Union’ (Solzhenitsyn, 1990). Similarly, Konstantin Zatulin, chairman of the Russian Duma CIS Committee from 1993 to 1995 and founder of the Congress of Russian Communities (CRO), also expressed support for a union between Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, eventually to be joined by Tajikistan and Georgia.¹ Academician Aleksei Arbatov, however, taking a more pragmatic line, held the view that only an economic union with a selected group of states, particularly Ukraine and Belarus, because of their similar socio-economic developments, proved desirable.²

The future of ‘Russia’ was also closely tied to the fate of the 25 million ethnic Russians who lived outside the borders of the Russian Federation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These Russians suddenly became ‘foreigners’ in their own country, and also suffered from the severing of their personal ties with family and friends living in Russia. After the collapse of the USSR, the Russian government felt responsible for the protection of their rights. Presidential advisor Sergei Stankevich stated that Russia had both the moral obligation and the political responsibility to protect the fate of Russians living in the Near Abroad, while Academician Andranik Migranyan stressed Russia’s special role as the protector of Russians inhabiting the newly independent republics. ‘Russia cannot be indifferent to the fate of Russians in Kazakhstan and Ukraine, or to the fate of the minorities in the autonomous entities of the seceding republics in general’, he wrote (Migranyan, 1991). More radical voices, such as that of Ksenia Myalo, expressed the view that the Russian people had become a ‘divided nation’ as the Germans, the Jews and the Armenians had been divided in the past. Reintegration of the former Soviet republics, in one sort or another, was considered the best way to overcome such a tragedy (Myalo, 1993, p. 8).³

The idea of ‘Russia’ was also closely linked to the place that Russia, it was believed, had to occupy in the international system as well as to the country’s foreign policy orientation. Should it become part of the West, should it remain part of a ‘Eurasian’ civilisation, or instead should Russia concentrate on its own internal development and remain isolated from the world arena? A heated debate among political scientists took place in 1992 which had a significant impact on the developments of Russian foreign policy. This debate on the overall orientation of Russian foreign policy was closely intertwined with a similar discussion on the various models of domestic transformation. It began well before the collapse of the USSR and was, to some extent, the result of a revival of Russian national sentiments. During the years of perestroika, nationalism in the RSFSR developed into two contrasting ideologies which envisioned two radically different developments of the Russian nation. On the one hand, patriotic nationalists insisted on the distinctiveness of Russian development and the specific mission of the Russian people, whereas liberal nationalists emphasised the unifying features of world civilisation and preferred to see Russians as ‘normal people living in a normal country’ (Chuprinin, 1990, p. 211). As Viktor Zaslavsky rightly explained, this reflected an earlier clash between the liberal-democratic, Europe-oriented anti-Communist nationalism and the xenophobic, authoritarian and anti-Western nationalism that had already occurred in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s. It took the form of an ideological struggle between Russian intellectuals connected with the more liberal journal Novy mir, and those grouped around the journals Molodaya gvardiya and Nash sovremennik, who took up the banner of Russian patriotism (Zaslavsky, 1992, p. 80). The latter combined a genuine concern for the destruction of Russian culture and peasantry, the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian traditions, with a defence of Stalinism as the legitimate continuation of Russian imperial traditions. This movement suffered from an internal contradiction, since its supporters could never decide between either a ‘Russian revival’ or ‘the preservation of the empire’ (Streliany, 1990).

During the late 1980s, the imperial idea slowly lost ground, in view of the growing influence of liberals and the dissemination of nationalist ideas among the Russian liberal-democratic intelligentsia. General perceptions about the economic costs of the empire on the Russian population increased the desire of ‘seceding’ from the rest of the Soviet republics. For the first time, an anti-imperial Russian nationalism, which aspired toward the creation of a ‘national’ Russian state, emerged, as noted by Zaslavsky (1992). Liberal nationalists called on the Russian people to cast off the backward, non-European, non-Christian component of the Soviet Union and to return to the home of European culture. They supported ‘the opening of Russia to the influences of the industrially developed countries’, and Russia’s ‘transition to a market economy and [its] integration into the world market system’ (Zaslavsky, 1992, p. 88). Yet, as imperialist nationalism lost ground, a more conservative group of Russian national patriots adopted a ‘Russia first’ isolationist posture, ‘understood not only as a separation from all non-Slavic or even non-Russian republics, but even more crucially as a repudiation of the West and a search for a specifically Russian way of life and Russian spiritual values’ (Zaslavsky, 1992, p. 88).

The failed August 1991 coup dealt a major blow to the Russian imperial nationalist idea. The autumn of 1991 saw the progressive implementation of liberal nationalist ideas, which resulted in the disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the emergence of a new Russian state. The new geopolitical reality confronted liberal nationalists with a series of new problems. On the one hand, many Soviet republics, usually the most economically dependent on Russia, proved reluctant to secede from Russia. On the other, Russia was forced to handle a series of delicate issues, such as the presence of large Russian minorities living in the newly independent states, various border disputes, and the existence of several dozen nationalities and ethno-territorial units within the Russian Federation, which were expected to press their claims for independence from Russia. In view of these difficulties, imperialist nationalist ideas in support of the restoration of the Soviet Union, albeit in a new form, again made themselves heard. Among the Russian population deep nostalgia for the Soviet Union gained ground as people found it hard to come to terms with the existence of the Russian state within its new boundaries and the development of the former Soviet republics, particularly Ukraine and Belarus, as independent states. However, the longing for empire did not immediately translate into an active and consistent strategy aimed at the restoration of the USSR. Neither did it lead to the effective creation of an informal empire, despite the fact that certain aspects of Russia’s policies towards the FSS, particularly towards states belonging to the Russian-led CIS, did acquire a neo-imperialist character in the early to mid-1990s, as will be shown in the next chapters.

The foreign policy of the new Russian state

Russia’s pro-Western orientation (1991–1992)

The collapse of the USSR opened up a new era in the foreign policy of the Russian Federation, no longer a republic of the defunct Soviet Union but now an independent sovereign state. Following on the lines of the Russian national liberal programme, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev adopted a distinctly pro-Western orientation and a clearly anti-imperialist approach, based on the recognition of the former Soviet republics as sovereign and independent states. This also entailed the rejection of any forcible change of borders among the FSS.⁴ ‘We simply have to learn to live as independent states and to view each other as equal partners’, Kozyrev wrote in an article on Izvestiya in January 1992 (Kozyrev, 1992a). The newly independent states were encouraged freely to join a new organisation with Russia, the CIS. The latter was seen by Russian leaders as a way of preserving a common economic and politico-military space in the former Soviet territory and as a means of further deepening integration. This project was promoted on a voluntary, non-coercive fashion. Kozyrev sustained that only natural, voluntary ties among the CIS, and not forceful integration, would create a viable and solid institution (Kozyrev, 1992a). He called for the creation of ‘belt of good-neighbourliness’ along the entire perimeter of the Russian Federation, and the withdrawal of Russia’s military presence from abroad (Leonov, 1992). Similar views were shared by Galina Starovoitova, Yeltsin’s advisor on nationality issues, who claimed that Russians had to discard their imperial legacy once and for all, and abandon a significant part of responsibility for developments in the former ‘colonies of the empire’ (Starovoitova, 1992). She believed that the Soviet Union was the last disintegrating empire and saw decolonisation as ‘the basic meaning of [Russia’s] present history’ (Inform-TV, 1991). She supported a Western-oriented foreign policy because, according to her, ‘the Russian people, by their mentality, are oriented to European values’ and stressed that Russia could not be divided by the Ural mountains between Europe and Asia, East and West (Inform-TV, 1991).

These views were reflected in Russia’s policies not only towards the CIS but also in Russia’s approaches to the world as a whole. During the early 1990s, Russia’s foreign policy was aimed above all at creating a favourable domestic and international environment which would facilitate the economic and political transformation of Russia. Kozyrev repeatedly stressed Russia’s desire to join the club of the more dynamically democratic states in the world, and Moscow’s wishes to transform its old enemies in the West into partners and eventually allies (Kozyrev, 1992b). President Yeltsin also several times expressed Russia’s intentions to cooperate with the United States in order to bring a long era of Cold War confrontation to an end. ‘We will no longer consider ourselves potential opponents, but allies’, he said in the spring of 1992 (Izvestiya, 1992). In a speech at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in February 1992, Yeltsin went as far as proposing the creation of a global defence system in cooperation with the United States, based on the establishment of a joint global anti-missile project (Rossiiskaya gazeta, 1992). The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) in turn envisaged the fulfilment of the country’s national interests through Russia’s participation in various global and regional security systems, such as the United Nations (UN), the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) and even NATO, and through the development of multilateral agreements and international cooperation – espousing a clear liberal-internationalist view (Leonov, 1992).

An active foreign policy debate begins (1992)

This pro-Western stance immediately provoked a negative reaction from influential academics and members of Russia’s political elite, and a heated discussion on Russia’s national identity and the orientation of its foreign policy soon ensued. The old nineteenth-century debate between Slavophiles and Westerners resurfaced, although with some noticeable differences due to the new Russian internal circumstances and the changed international environment. Liberal Westernisers, following directly on Gorbachev’s New Political Thinking, stressed the link between Russia’s domestic political configuration and its foreign policy orientation. Scholar Nikolai Kosopalov, insisted that the primary concern of Russia’s foreign policy had to be the establishment and the consolidation of a democratic and liberal domestic political system. Only by transforming its internal structure, Kosopalov argued, would Russia be able to discard its old imperial legacy and its assertive foreign policy traditions (Kosopalov, 1993). Liberal Westernisers cast off pre-existing Soviet foreign policy traditions of a realist nature which tended to perceive the world as a struggle for power among states. Instead, they supported the development of an international system based on the primacy of international law and cooperation through international organisations. These views, which were adopted by the Russian MFA, received very harsh criticisms from Russian Imperial Nationalists, and from their new variant, the Neo-Eurasianists, all of whom could not resign themselves to the loss of the Soviet Empire.

Russian Imperial Nationalists, such as the writer Aleksandr Prokhanov; Eduard Limonov, founder of the National Bolshevik Party; and Sergei Baburin, leader of the Russian nationalist opposition in the Supreme Soviet, all regretted the collapse of the Soviet Union, and refused to consider such developments as irreversible. They believed that the Russian empire had to be recreated in one ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 What is Russia? Russia’s foreign policy orientation under Yeltsin
• 2 Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States
• 3 CIS integration under Yevgeny Primakov: Russia’s post-imperial model
• 4 Russia’s CIS gas trade during Yeltsin’s Presidencies: towards market-based relations?
• 5 The outbreak of military conflicts: Russia’s difficulties in discarding its Imperial legacy
• 6 Vladimir Putin at the helm of Russia: a return of Russia’s Hegemony?
• 7 CIS economic integration gathers speed
• 8 Vladimir Putin strengthens CIS military integration: a new military bloc emerges
• 9 Separatist conflicts in Eurasia: Russia’s hegemonic power is reinforced
• 10 From Putin to Medvedev … and back to Putin: Whither Russia?
• 11 The Eurasian Economic Union: A neo-Imperial Paradigm?
• 12 Russia’s CIS gas trade: an instrument of Russia’s hegemony?
• 13 The Russian–Georgian War and its aftermath: Russia’s neo-empire
• 14 The annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine’s Donbass: Russia’s neo-empire expands
• 15 Conclusion
• Index