On the evening of 29 October 1939, a sixteen-year-old Polish Jew and his parents pulled into Innsbruck railway station, last stop inside the Third Reich. They shared a forged passport given to them by a South American honorary consul, stamped with a counterfeit consular seal by a Jewish engraver in Warsaw. Their chances of escape rested on the slender prospects of this unlikely document – after all, none of them spoke Spanish – and the encounter that was about to unfold on their train.
They were on the run for their lives. Two months earlier, Germany had invaded their country, causing Britain and France to declare war. Within four weeks, German forces were encircling Warsaw, and the boy’s resourceful parents were completing their escape plan. While the family sheltered from German fire, the Red Army invaded Poland from the east. Polish resistance was considerable, but it was ultimately futile. The country was dismembered. Most of it became part of Greater Germany. Austria, somewhat more willingly, had already been part of the Third Reich for two years. So for this family, Innsbruck was the final hostile frontier. Next stop: the relative safety of fascist Italy, which was still a non-belligerent.
At Innsbruck station, a Gestapo officer entered the train. The Polish family waited. They had a compartment to themselves. Eventually, he came in and inspected their passport. He told them to leave the train: their papers were not in order. There was no exit stamp. They could get one in Berlin.
It was late evening and the Alps were barely visible, though travellers with skis clustered on the platform. The boy and his father pulled their suitcases off the train. This was it. In Berlin, their passport would be exposed as a fake and their story would unravel. The father of the family was sufficiently clear-headed to admit that there would be no escape from that. So he went off to roll the dice one final time.
He headed down the platform, disappearing in the night-time Alpine air. The boy and his mother guarded their things. Everyone around, clutching their skis, was red-faced, noisy and jolly. It was time for the train to leave.
Suddenly, the father returned. The stationmaster had told him to get back on the train. They piled their bags on board, jumping back into their compartment. The train set off, passing the Alps, rolling towards the border. Italy was minutes away.
But the same Gestapo man was still on board the train. He came back to their compartment and took their passport. They were still in Greater Germany. Eventually, the officer returned. OK, he said, handing the document back: you can leave but you will never be allowed to return.
In a fog of tears and cigarette smoke, they passed across to Italian territory. Many of their relatives would be destroyed in Auschwitz.1 Eight months later, the family would reach the United States, where the boy would learn English, serve in the Army, go to Harvard and become the most naturally gifted of his adoptive country’s historians of Russia. Americanizing his name to Richard Pipes, he went on to write one of the most remarkable collections of works that an outsider has ever assembled on the history of Russia: he wrote on the nationality question in the early Soviet Union, the historian Nikolai Karamzin, the liberal Pyotr Struve, the reformer Alexander Yakovlev, the Russian Revolution, property relations, conservatism, late-imperial terrorism, the paintings of the 1860s – not to mention the history of Russia from the beginning to the present, and much else in between. In every case, the research was formidable, the argument exemplary, the pace and style enticing.
But Pipes wilfully gave up the one advantage held by outsiders who specialize in the history of Russia. The Russians themselves hold the trump cards of native-language skills and instinctive cultural knowledge, the practical benefits of living and working alongside all of their sources, and the enduring commitment that comes from studying the past of one’s own place and people. But the outsiders have distance, and the fresh angles and perspectives it brings. Even outsider-historians can never stand apart from their subject, but Pipes was determined to engage ‘morally’ as well as ‘scientifically’.
Although his family had fled the Germans, and although it was the Holocaust that killed their relatives, Pipes and his parents were only one step ahead of the Red Army, too, which had invaded the eastern zone of Poland on 17 September 1939. He grew up in a part of the country where Polish, German and Czech were spoken, but where the historical memory of the Russian Empire and the 1920 war with the Bolsheviks was still strong. It made him an insider-outsider, and when Soviet scholars read his early works and excoriated ‘Meester Paips’, they were in a sense quarrelling with a former neighbour, even an estranged relative. Decades on and thousands of miles away from Warsaw 1939, Pipes still chose to forego the possibility of distance. His understandable anger about the Soviet invasion of his country was always consistent with his scholarly conclusions. He ignored the scholarship of ‘Sovietologists’ and revisionist historians with whom he disagreed, whose vituperative responses were scarcely less appealing. His pre-judged sense of Russia circulated far beyond Harvard and all the way to the White House, at the most dangerous moment of the Cold War since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Thanks not least to the brilliance of Richard Pipes, and the crystal clarity of his bestselling, heavyweight books, the ‘Cold War’ interpretation of Russian history hardened and was rehearsed in the White House Situation Room. Drawing on deep research and engaging exposition, Pipes argued that Russia’s authoritarian past was the inevitable prologue to its totalitarian future; that totalitarianism consisted in monolithic, top-down repression, brain-washing and uniformity, and nothing else, inside the USSR and in its satellite states alike; and that the Soviet Union was an expansionist threat not just because of communism, but because of a deeper Russian history, characterized by a tsar or a political elite which ruled ‘patrimonially’, owning everything within their realm, and pushing back borders to satisfy their need for resources.
Pipes was a warrior-scholar. This was the scholarly armed wing of the Russia Anxiety. We might call it the Pipes Protocol.
‘In the history of Russia,’ Pipes wrote in the early 1980s, ‘expansionism is not a phase but a constant.’ No wonder, he argued, that the Soviet Union had ended up the biggest country in the world. The long-term expansionism of Russia had three recurring causes: as a means of escaping the poverty of the heartland; as a way of maximizing an existing geographical advantage, hitting the multiple targets – to the west, south, east, north – that Russia’s Eurasian core made available; and as a method of enriching elites. What expansionism precisely did not result from was ‘anxieties’ about invasion, Russia’s uniquely long borders, or its complex geopolitical situation. ‘Those who make this point,’ Pipes insisted, ‘usually have but the scantiest familiarity with Russian history.’2
During the second half of the 1970s, Pipes nurtured contacts in the most anti-communist wing of the foreign policy establishment, with men such as Paul Wolfowitz. He made high-level but temporary contributions to policy development during and after the presidency of Gerald Ford. This put him on the radar of Ronald Reagan. In 1981, Reagan had just been elected president of the United States. Leonid Brezhnev, sick and unresponsive, was soon to enter his last year. Soviet troops were in Afghanistan. Martial law was about to be declared in Poland. The United States had boycotted the 1980 Olympics, held in Moscow. Détente was finished: Reagan had a straightforward ideological commitment to fighting communism, at least diplomatically. The Cold War really did look like the Cold War, and the Soviet Union really did look like a dictatorship.
Following Reagan’s election, Richard Pipes was appointed to the National Security Council (NSC), the body that outlines for the president his foreign policy options. For two years, on leave from Harvard, he helped to develop the Reagan White House’s hardline attitude to the Soviet Union. Pipes was convinced that the centuries of Russian imperial expansion had left an indelible mark on the mentality of the country’s current rulers. More than this, he thought, the Soviets’ interventionist foreign policy derived from communist principle. They pursued a grand strategy for extending Soviet power beyond Soviet borders; they were not simply diplomatic dealmakers looking for peaceful coexistence. Seeking to explain why this had not led to more outright conflict or an encroachment on Western Europe, Pipes pointed to the aim of achieving global hegemony through a range of methods that need not be military.
Cosying up to the Reds as a means of avoiding war, as many specialists and politicians in the United States were advocating, was no good. ‘That objectives of life other than physical survival, objectives which enabled our ancestors to bequeath to us the benefits of the [sic] civilization – among them, personal freedom, the rule of law, and human rights – must in our age take second place to “good relations with the Soviet Union”?’ he asked rhetorically, tearing into a Congressman who had suggested that this might be the best aim of American foreign policy. ‘That,’ he asked further, ‘we must give the Soviet government carte blanche to perpetrate inside its country and abroad any barbarity as long as it refrains from firing nuclear weapons at us?’ In the book he wrote straight after stepping down from the NSC, he came close to saying that a large collection of otherwise disparate groups – government employees, trade unionists, intellectuals, even businessmen – conspired together to minimize the threat from the USSR, precisely so that they could more easily pursue their own vested interests. What was needed was a policy that transcended the famous division between hawks and doves. ‘The key to peace,’ Pipes concluded, ‘lies in an internal transformation of the Soviet system in the direction of economic decentralization, greater scope for contractual work and free enterprise, national self-determination, human rights and legality.’ Making this point a year or so before Gorbachev was appointed general secretary of the Communist Party, when such a transformation seemed vanishingly unlikely, Pipes believed the only way to achieve change in the USSR was through the strongest American measures: ‘a combination of active resistance to Soviet expansion and political-military blackmail and the denial of economic and other forms of aid.’3 (By ‘aid’, he broadly meant the normal exchanges of international relations.) When the time came, Pipes argued that Gorbachev had succumbed to external pressure rather than made his own radical diagnosis based on internal evidence.
In any case, this was a high-risk strategy, though it was plain to Pipes that the risks were worth taking. President Reagan increased the tempo of his rhetoric, famously calling the Soviet Union ‘the evil empire’. His administration stepped up the arms race with its proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, which promised to militarize space itself, and threats to transfer new ballistic and cruise missiles – the Pershing II and Gryphon – to Western Europe if the Soviet side did not remove its SS-20 missiles from the Eastern bloc. Just as the Soviet Union was developing a new strategy to avoid a nuclear escalation – if war broke out in Europe, their response would be to destroy Western nuclear emplacements with conventionally armed aircraft strikes – the Americans seemed to be risking the finely balanced structure of peace. Between 2 and 11 November 1983, when Pipes was already back at Harvard, NATO ran a series of command-and-control exercises in West Germany codenamed Able Archer. It was a prime moment when misunderstandings and fears could have made the Soviets trigger-happy. But the Soviet response suggested they were rational actors rather than desperate expansionists.4 The paradox was that a hardline NATO response to the USSR in the age of mutually assured destruction depended on the assumption that the Politburo would respond calmly and realistically, which was not quite the message of the Pipes Protocol.
Pipes’s experience in the White House, where everyday politics was about as far from the result of deep historical structures as one could imagine, might also have challenged his long-term view of Soviet and Russian history. He saw close-up how specific personalities could shape high politics, sometimes in irrational or absurd ways. His first boss on the NSC, Richard V. Allen, was crowded out of top-table influence by Reagan’s closest lieutenants, and ultimately brought down by a manufactured scandal: he was entirely innocent of the corruption with which he was unfairly tainted.5 Everywhere Pipes looked, a chaotic blend of anger, envy and amiability seemed to play an outsize role in shaping America’s response to global events.
No doubt this helped clarify his own approach to the past. He had an ongoing dispute with Marxism, with its overarching historical theories about class struggle. ‘I believe that various events are propelled by diverse forces,’ he wrote, ‘sometimes it is by accident, sometimes individuals make all the difference, on other occasions it is economic factors or ideology.’ He underscored the basic point that every historian knows, but which was not always clear from his long-range explanations of Russian development: ‘No one cause ever explains everything.’
Pipes wrote the toughest of historical polemics about how the authoritarian tendency in Russian political culture caused one of the most sustained national expansions in human history. But his general view of history seems to have been quite different. ‘I have learned that human beings are utterly unpredictable,’ Pipes wrote at the end of his memoirs, ‘that one can neither anticipate what they will do nor understand why they will do it.’6 This points to the central paradox of Pipes’s work. Even after spending decades describing a relentless authoritarian path for Russian history and its expansionist dynamic, he also saw the possibility of mere historical chaos. Even as he described a Soviet grand strategy masterminded by ideological clarity and fuelled by history, he also saw the Soviet government as a rational actor, capable of responding quickly to events. Had he not, he could not have advocated probing, testing and pushing the adversary. The stakes were just too high.
His might have been the most brilliant voice arguing for the long-term continuity of Russian history. But Pipes was a man whose whole life depended on an episode of blind courage and sheer chance at Innsbruck railway station on a terrifying night in October 1939, and he saw that contingency and personality can undermine the structures of historical explanation, though he held fast to a single main cause – the basic violence of patrimonial rule – to explain the longue durée of Russian history. Possessing all the gifts of scholarship and rhetoric in abundance, he convinced many of his readers. The ‘Pipes Protocol’ therefore leaves a mixed legacy: it was a successful attempt to apply a powerful but rigid interpretation of the past to present policy; it represented a body of historical research marked by both brilliance and wilful omission; and it leaves a model that can be applied to post-Soviet and Putin-era contexts too, with equal risk. Pipes was prepared to test his view of history against the future, sometimes with success. He was one of the few scholars to anticipate that the Soviet Union might plausibly soon fall, though in the end it fell by accident rather than logic, diminishing the force of his prediction. And he was one of even fewer to imagine (correctly, it turned out) that a fault line with Ukraine could be a proximate cause of Soviet collapse.
The Pipes Protocol contributed to the Russia Anxiety; it still does. This was one of its author’s intentions. But there are at least three good reasons to give us pause. First is the comparative perspective. Muscovy was not the original territorial aggrandizer in the region, or the only combative state seeking competitive advantage, which at least relativizes our understanding of the original sins of colonization. Second is the way the Muscovites and Russians ran their territory. The method was exploitative, for sure, but it was a collaborative exercise, too. This combination applies to all empires, but it is highly unlikely that the Russian Empire was a more violent and ‘extractive’ place than, say, the still larger British Empire. (Remember that the period 1904–53, the age of ‘tears without end’, is an exception in Russian history.) Third is the convoluted history of relations between the different national groups in the Soviet Union, featuring Stalinist violence against specific ethnicities as well as affirmative action to support ethnic minorities in general. In the end, Russian nationhood might even have been weakened by its imperial and Soviet heritage, and for all the drama of events in the 2010s, especially in Ukraine, it is likely that only a very small proportion of Russians have the slightest appetite for invasions and expansionism.
Moscow was founded in 1147. Its early history shows that it was far from the only grabber of land in the region.
The early expansion of an East Slavic ‘state’ emanated from Kiev, not Moscow. By 912, Kievan Rus had extended its reach to the Baltic coast, as well as to the west, east and south, taking in the area of what would become St Petersburg, Moscow and Minsk, stretching down to the Black Sea coast, and making Crimea a dependency. In every case the lines of its authority were loose, and it possessed nothing like a central state to administer its periphery, or even its home city. Even though the Kievan patrimony was splintering at the start of the eleventh century, Kiev continued to exercise hard and soft power across the region. Vladimir the Great, who reigned between 980 and 1015, sent out his sons to take control over what would become neighbouring principalities: Vyacheslav, for example, became prince of Novgorod, and Yaroslav took Rostov. The princes brought with them the Kievan principle of kormlenie, of ‘feeding off’ the locality by right of raising tribute from it.7 Even more importantly, Vladimir the Great secured Kiev’s relations with Byzantium in 988 with the conversion of the Rus people to Christianity. This was not only of spiritual and strategic importance, but it provided a unified religious mentality that could animate and justify territorial expansion.
Kiev became the elder sister of East Slavic civilization. Later in the eleventh century and after, the city dominated the region without controlling it directly. The Rus went beyond Kiev. Other Rus principalities were formed. The Houses of Galicia, Suzdalia, Volyn, Smolensk and Chernigov came into being. They competed for power and space. To the north was the capacious, prosperous and outward-looking ‘Republic’ of Novgorod, a large territory with a more ‘democratic’ political culture that governed itself from 1136, and was fully capable of coercive expansionism. Medieval Novgorod had trade connections to the West, and its political system hinted at the promise of rights, representation and responsiveness. But its wealth rested on the ill treatment of another place. Novgorodians colonized the ‘land of darkness’ to the east and north, up towards the Arctic, to capture the fur that made them wealthy. They exploited the indigenous people who helped them in their quest. This was the European way for centuries, and the people of Novgorod were typical of this wider trend. Their desire for the skins of squirrel, otter and sable was insatiable.8
Only at this point, with Kievan Rus losing momentum, and other versions of Rus, in adjacent territories, becoming more powerful and distinctive in their own right, did one of their rulers, Yuri Dolgoruky, the founder of the Suzdalia dynasty, establish or at least fortify a number of settlements to the north-east of Kiev. One of these was Moscow, in 1147.9
So it was not that the new Moscow possessed unique expansionist genes. The expansionist genes were European, and other polities in the region shared them. Meanwhile, the urge to expand stretched across Europe. On Christmas Day 800 AD, Charlemagne, King of the Franks, was crowned emperor of Catholic Christendom by Pope Leo III in Rome. On 27 November 1095, Pope Urban II preached the sermon that launched the First Crusade.
The rise of Moscow did not imply the fall of Kiev. All the way through to 1918, Russia’s was only one of the empires seeking power over the territory that had once been dominated by Kievan Rus.
It was the Mongols who finished off Kievan Rus, defeating Kiev in 1240. For more than 400 years, Kiev was subordinate to other empires: to Mongols, Poles and Lithuanians, while the Ottomans occupied nearby territory in what would also become modern Ukraine. In 1569, following the Union of Lublin, large parts of the Ukrainian lands were subsumed in the new Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Only in 1667 did Moscow gain control of part of this territory.
Moscow became an expansionary power in its own right during this period, thanks to favourable political circumstances. For a start, it had emerged stronger from its encounter with the Golden Horde, eventually inflicting a major defeat on the Mongol-Tatars in 1380. Within a century, it threw off Tatar oversight completely and became a major regional power. Like other would-be superpowers – like China before it, or Spain and Portugal, colonizers of the Americas, at the same time – it spread its wings. It was keen to secure the ideological legacy of Kievan Rus: to have access to its founding legends and its uninterrupted history of Christianity since the tenth century. Not only did this history offer the promise of salvation, but it was a way of binding local people together, Slavs as well as other tribes, giving them something in common and a set of symbolic reasons to support the ‘tsar’ (Ivan III was the first ruler of Muscovy to use the title). But in annexing such former Rus heartlands as Novgorod and Smolensk, Muscovy was not fixated on Kiev in particular, and did not have a specific strategy to absorb Ukrainians. Instead, it wanted access to a shared history. Symbolism was more important than annexation; after all, Moscow would not rule Kiev until the seventeenth century.
Meanwhile, Moscow itself was subject to the attentions of neighbouring empires. The Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania was the regional great power, a large and effective empire. Political circumstances gave it a brief chance to conquer Moscow, just as Russia would later take a more lasting opportunity to defeat Warsaw almost 200 years later. When Muscovy was on the ropes during the Time of Troubles (1598–1613), the Poles seized their moment, offering a candidate for the vacant throne. In 1610, Polish forces occupied Moscow. They torched the city and battened down in the Kremlin. Meanwhile, another Polish army captured Smolensk, while Sweden took control of Novgorod. In November of 1612, Muscovite forces relieved their own capital and expelled the Poles.
The Muscovite ‘conquest’ of Ukraine took place in this context of clashing East European empires rather than its own sui generis, uniquely malevolent expansionism. In 1648, Cossacks rose up against Polish rule, releasing the anger of the Ukrainian peasantry at the Polish lords who had enserfed them. It was a time of bitter anti-Semitism, as many of the stewards who managed the lands were Jews, and they too were now targeted by local ‘Ukrainian’ peasants. A Cossack state, the Hetmanate, emerged. Six years later, Cossack leaders accepted the overlordship of Muscovy. There were clashes between Muscovy and Poland, and the Ottoman Empire took advantage, extending its own control up the western side of the Dnieper (what has come to be known as ‘right-bank Ukraine’). But in 1667, the Poles and Muscovites came to terms, agreeing to their spheres of influence in the Ukrainian lands. Naturally enough, the Cossacks struck back at them both.
‘Ukraine’ – the term is unhistorical for the seventeenth century, though the basis of a Ukrainian consciousness had come out of Polish rule, even if it was not yet much of a priority for most Ukrainian peasants – became part of Muscovy, soon to be part of Russia, and then the Soviet Union. It was formally tied to Moscow for 324 years. Yet the story is not as simple as that. The western part of today’s Ukraine, even as it was subsumed within other empires, was clearly Polish. It did not have another identity. In the eighteenth century, Poland would be partitioned between the rival powers of Romanov Russia, Hohenzollern Prussia and Habsburg Austria. Until 1918, the Habsburgs governed large parts of ‘Ukraine’ and ‘Moldova’, such as Bukovina. They ruled over the Ruthenians (as they called the inhabitants of modern western Ukraine) thinking of them as part of their Polish patrimony. From 1918, this zone became part of independent Poland. It took the Nazis to eliminate the Poles and Jews in western Ukraine before the zone was taken over by the Soviet Union with their defeat of the Nazis and joined to its Ukrainian republic. Polish-Ukrainian relations warmed in the twenty-first century thanks to their common opposition to Russia, but for many years their relationship in the western borderlands was extremely hostile.
Crimea entered the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century after a long contest between Ottomans and Cossacks. Much of the historic territory of later Belarus, the ‘White Russian’ lands which are the third element of East Slavic civilization, also came under Russian rule at this time. The medieval city of Minsk (Mensk) is originally traced to Polatsk, on the edge of the Galicia-Volhynia principality that was one of the leading Rus power-centres in the eleventh century. After this, part of what would become modern-day Belarus lay in medieval Lithuania. The ‘Belarusian’ territory was ruled by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from its formal inception in the Union of Lublin of 1569. Many of the local peasants belonged to the Uniate Church, practising a version of Catholicism. From the middle of the seventeenth century, they faced plunder by the Cossacks. But as the Kingdom of Poland emerged from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Minsk continued to be governed from Warsaw. The Partitions of Poland from 1772 brought ‘Belarus’ within the Russian Empire. This was a belated ‘reunification of Rus’; the tsar was now monarch of Great, Little and White Russia, the meaning of which became central to the evolution of Russia’s imperial and national identity over the nineteenth century.10 But while history was rewritten and deployed to best advantage by all sides during that period, and while St Petersburg came to ‘Russify’ the region culturally from the 1860s, as we will see below, this was a contingent outcome. It was not the latest chapter in an age-old process of Russian expansionism in the region.
Who colonized whom? Who has the deeds of ownership across the East Slavic lands? The state that would soon become Russia was no more expansionist when it came to Ukraine and Belarus than its rivals, Lithuania, Poland and the Ottoman Empire, while, earlier, Kievan Rus possessed its own expansionist dynamic. Before this, expansionist Varangians had come from Scandinavia to create Kievan Rus in the first place, and before that, the region was home to many competing tribal groups – jostling, fighting, scattering, spreading and naturally ‘expansionary’ like all such early human groups – of whom the Slavs won out. All these peoples and polities fought over the East Slavic lands. Moscow was only one of several expansionist powers in the region.
In the last decades of imperial Russia, by which time Kiev had been part of the Empire for two centuries, a Ukrainian-speaking intelligentsia, made up of poets, historians and educators, was codifying the basis of a language and culture that for the first time could make a coherent sense of Ukrainian nationhood. The various groups in St Petersburg’s governing and intelligentsia circles, from Slavophiles to Westerners to hard-nosed administrators, acknowledged its significance. A common response from St Petersburg elites was to regard the western borderlands, where Ukrainian was spoken, with affection, celebrating the wealth of their harvests, the security of their strategic location, and the cultural consolations of their twee peasant customs. These Russians increasingly constructed their own sense of what it meant to be Russian with some reference to this place.11 The idea that Ukraine could be a sovereign territory, which in a sense it had never been, even at the time of Kievan Rus, was, though, incredible. Even when Ukraine voted for independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, this sense of incredulity among many members of the political elite in Moscow persisted. Arguably, it persists, exacerbating the tensions and conflict between Kiev and Moscow that developed from the early 2000s. For the leading Ukrainian historian, Harvard’s Serhii Plokhy, overcoming the problem of how Russian elites perceive Ukraine is the defining crisis of modern Russian nationhood,12 though this surely risks reducing a complex phenomenon to a single cause.
In any case, when future historians look to explain relations between Russia and Ukraine in the age of Putin, they would be wise to start not with Kievan Rus but with the twenty-five years since perestroika and the end of the Cold War: the circumstances of the collapse of the Soviet Union, its impact on domestic Ukrainian and Russian politics, together with the role of NATO, the EU and Washington. It is not that the rest is just ancient history, but that this older past has not made Russia into a uniquely rapacious colonizer that can’t help itself, despite the assumptions of the Russia Anxiety.
Russia became one of the great empires of world history. It was a contiguous empire. Expanding outwards over land and into different peripheries from its metropolitan centre, it was the same type of empire as its great rivals, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman. To an extent – especially in the imaginations of some of its rulers, such as Peter the Great – it had something in common with the Roman Empire. But it was quite different from the overseas, maritime empires of modern Britain and France, or the intercontinental conquest machines that took the Spanish and Portuguese to the Americas, and the Mongols across Eurasia. Russian rule, like Turkish and Austrian, was based on the steady accumulation of territory, often populated by peoples of related ethnicity, and requiring not just coercion but a collaborative strategy of rulership. Historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper call this approach to empire the ‘management of difference’. As they show, it’s an essential way of understanding the operation of the Russian Empire.13 The Anxiety, of course, puts forward opposite conclusions about Russian imperial rule.
And yet empires exist because of military conquest. They use force or its implicit threat to maintain their rule. Taking leave of the empire is not usually an option for subject peoples. The expansion of Russia over many centuries seemed inexorable. Violence was central to conquest and security, just as in every empire that’s ever been in human history. No wonder, you might think, that the Russia Anxiety set in.
Facing mightier towns, such as Tver and Novgorod to the north, the earliest princes of Moscow gradually pushed out their borders through guile and toughness. Dmitry Donskoi (1359–89) captured Vladimir in the east and increased the area of Muscovy twofold, pushing northwards to the monastic settlement of Belo’ozero, and close to the major northern lakes of Ladoga and Onega, not far from the space that would later become St Petersburg. Vasily II (1425–62) annexed such important towns as Vologda in the north and Nizhnyi Novgorod in the east. Muscovy prepared for a future without the Mongols.
It was during the reign of Ivan III – Ivan the Great, from 1462 to 1505 – that Muscovy greatly increased in size, becoming a serious power, thanks to the so-called ‘gathering of the lands’. Most importantly, Novgorod was defeated and its territory – and fur trade – entered Muscovite control. But Muscovy pushed out too to the south as well as the north, closing in on the Black Sea and brushing up against the Crimean Khanate, and taking Chernigov, not far from Kiev. Ivan the Great’s grandson, Ivan the Terrible, took miles of open territory and fought wars to win contested zones. The great gains were Kazan, the homeland of the Tatars, in 1552, and Astrakhan, near the shores of the Caspian Sea, in 1554. It was these victories that signalled two of the future Russian Empire’s most important characteristics. One was its multinational character, and especially its ability to reign over Muslims as well as Christians. The other was the drive to the south, towards the Black Sea, the Caucasus and Central Asia, and, in time, to war with the Turks. Meanwhile, at the end of Ivan’s reign and during the rule of his son Fedor, the route into Siberia was opened up, with the conquest of such staging posts as Tyumen in 1586 and Tobolsk in 1587.
Between the reign of Ivan the Terrible and the Revolution of 1917, the Russian Empire grew, on average, at the rate of 50 square miles per day.14 Despite the Anxiety’s assumptions, most of this was the exploration of virgin territory, big forests and uninhabitable land, and was not military in nature. Other empires challenged them, not least the Swedes and the Turks, fighting time and again over Russia’s southern conquests. But it was expansion to the west that both guaranteed Russia’s great-power status and most raised the heat of the Russia Anxiety. During the reign of Catherine the Great, Prussia, Austria-Hungary and Russia carved up Poland between them in three partitions. In 1772, the Russian border was pushed less than 100 miles westwards, in a curve that followed the line of the Dnieper river. The next partition was in 1783, when a much larger slice of Poland entered Russian rule, including big parts of what would later be Belarus and Ukraine – Minsk, the Pripet marshes and land further to the south. Then, in 1795, the final land-grab went as far as the Baltic, taking Lithuania from Polish rule. After the Napoleonic Wars, when the Congress of Vienna adjusted Europe’s borders, Warsaw itself entered into the Russian Empire, and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, which had been controlled by Prussia, was no more. Poland was off the map until 1918. Countless Polish exiles, scattered across Western Europe, understandably gave dark accounts of the destruction of their homeland; if they had a kind of moral immunity to the irrational syndrome of the Russia Anxiety – their country had, after all, been partitioned by Russia, Prussia and Austria – they helped to disseminate the Anxiety to those who did not.
Peter the Great had declared himself Imperator, a deliberately European title. From the turn of the nineteenth century especially, the Russian Empire developed a deadlier edge that gave it more in common with other modern European empires. A new wave of expansion in the Caucasus caused bitter colonial wars, not least the struggle over Chechnya. Georgia (southern Caucasus) entered the Empire in 1801, and Dagestan (northern Caucasus) as late as 1881. In Central Asia, the Russians found themselves face to face in a colonial confrontation with the similarly expansionist and strikingly risk-taking British. The bulk of today’s Kazakhstan had been incorporated by 1855, and the Russians peered at Afghanistan. In all these territories, it was difficult for the government to understand its new subjects and to keep accurate information about them. The style of campaigning and governance seemed to select from the crueller repertoires employed in the overseas empires of the Western Europeans. This was the world from which Stalin emerged later in the century. But the Russians were only the latest imperial visitors to Central Asia – Tamerlane and then the Qing Empire were there first – and the Persians had swept through the Caucasus long before them.
Tsarist Russia was distinctively part of Europe and its great-power politics in the nineteenth century; it had (or was) a European empire with a Eurasian reach. If it did not resort to the exterminatory policies of Belgium in the Congo, or the concentration camps of Britain during the Boer War, it made use of some familiar methods of violence. Nationalist uprisings were crushed in Poland, the most reluctant corner of the empire, in 1831, 1846 and 1863, though the British destruction of the Indian Mutiny was more violent. Life began to change very quickly across the western parts of the Russian Empire in the last third of the nineteenth century thanks to the urban and industrial development, and especially the expansion of the railways, that were common to other modern empires. Crucially, Ukraine was no longer a sleepy backwater. The population of Kiev was 25,000 in the 1830s; in 1900, it was ten times as many.15 Such unrestrained growth was both necessary and threatening for the tsarist government, ensuring industrial development and international security while loosening control over the population. Migration from the countryside brought more Ukrainian speakers to the cities. Cultural nationalism among the intelligentsia deepened and spread. The government responded with ‘russification’ policies, aggressively limiting the opportunities to teach, learn and publish in Ukrainian. In Poland, too, russification measures had a sharp edge. Now only Russian was spoken in law courts and government offices, while members of the Uniate Church were required to convert to Orthodoxy.16 Meanwhile, across the empire, ethnic Russians themselves continued to be exploited in the name of imperial development, as the motor of ‘internal colonization’ ticked over.
And so the bottom line of this centuries-long expansion was force. It could not be otherwise; this was an empire, after all. But force was only part of the story. Unlike some empires, Russia’s did not systematically eliminate those who were different, but ‘managed’ the differences between contrasting groups. Its form of governance required limits on violence, and it made use of multiculturalism and toleration.
Take the example of Finland. Never a sovereign nation, it was annexed from Sweden in 1809. Under Russian control, it became a grand duchy, where Alexander I and his successors ruled not as tsar of all the Russias but as grand duke of Finland. ‘In determining conditions in Finland,’ wrote Alexander, ‘my intention has been to give the people of that country a political existence, so that they would not even consider themselves conquered by Russia, but joined to it by their own self-evident interests.’17 Helsinki, the capital from 1819, took on the look of St Petersburg, but this only emphasized its cosmopolitan and European features. A national Finnish intelligentsia and cultural tradition emerged. The Kalevala, Finland’s literary masterpiece, and the music of Sibelius were central achievements. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, concerns about the security of the Finnish–Swedish border and about the extent of Finnish separateness led to tentative russification measures, such as proposals of 1890 to align criminal law and postal practices with imperial norms. But the Finnish Diet was scandalized, and protests set in.18 The last twenty years of Russia’s rule in Finland, through to independence in 1918, were marked by unrest. This took place in the context of the revolutionary changes that were gripping St Petersburg and other parts of the Empire rather than representing self-starting decolonization.
Or take the example of Mathilde Kshesinskaya, the most famous ballet dancer in the Marinsky Theatre, even in the Empire, and the favourite of Nicholas II. She was Polish, brought up in a Polish family that had a long record of making a living in the world of dance and music. And yet she was born in St Petersburg, where she found great artistic and professional success, and formed connections across the city’s nobility. Far from being an obstacle, her Polishness was an asset. After all, the nobility itself was cosmopolitan by language and sometimes ethnicity; Baltic Germans, for example, held prominent positions at court and in the country’s civil administration. Kshesinskaya spent part of her childhood in Poland, where the family had a country house, and her early career depended on a Polish network in St Petersburg. She played up a rumour that she herself had noble blood – though of Polish heritage, which gave her added exotic appeal. She seemed to make choices about her national identity. She was Catholic, but her son was baptized Orthodox. When she fled Petersburg during the Revolution – Lenin famously made a speech from the balcony of her house – she did not end up in Poland, but in France. According to one historian, nationality was ‘a costume that Kshesinskaya either put on herself or had placed upon her by others’.19 But the dressing-up seems to have been strategic and opportunistic – and successful – rather than to have been forced upon her.
Over the centuries, pushing the borders back had required the ability to rule over a disparate and diverse set of peoples. Rulers of the empire and the men who worked on their behalf – the soldiers, merchants and nobles – mastered a repertoire of soft power with a hard edge. They devised cultural exchanges, initiated trade on favourable terms, exploited local resources, allied with newly conquered elites who then managed the territory on behalf of Moscow: they demanded oaths and taxes, alternated between gifts and violence. Moscow, and later St Petersburg, ruled a hugely varied contiguous territory. It was a European project, but one which lacked the obsessions with racial hierarchy and racial exclusion that were built into many of the other European empires, and which found their ultimate expression in the Third Reich.
By the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire offered a Eurasian perspective. When Ilya Repin completed his famous canvas of 1886 which showed Alexander III meeting village elders at the Kremlin, he was showing the tsar as he wanted to be seen: in Moscow, at the heart of his realm, with his European-styled family standing behind him, and the Eurasian diversity of the Empire around him. This was a stylized image, a reflection of awe. Repin also painted The Zaporozhe Cossacks Write a Mocking Letter to the Sultan during the 1880s. The message about Russia’s comfortable and comforting diversity was the same, though the tone was comic. Repin’s painting showed how the Cossacks, who had long been a dominant force in what is today’s southern Ukraine, gleefully thumbed their noses at the Ottoman Sultan’s 1676 ultimatum against them, turning instead to the protection of the emerging Russian Empire. It was an open celebration of one of the Empire’s most famous cultures, one that was strong and rough-edged, but whose martial tradition was not a threat to St Petersburg. Repin combined different intelligentsia traditions: the urge for social criticism, and an openness to the West, a feel for nationhood and a curiosity about empire, and the attitudes that cut across these viewpoints: the serious-minded and the joyous, the career-minded and the heartfelt.20 The reviews of the painting were mixed, because while critics agreed on the colour-filled life it gave to part of ‘Russia’, they could make it serve either conservative or liberal agendas.21
Diversity supported various political ends, and was encoded into the different political visions of the Russian Empire. The Empire could not have worked as it did without toleration. Catherine the Great, in her epochal Nakaz (her monarchical manifesto) of 1767, promised ‘wise toleration’ of other faiths, and followed it up with a decree of 1773. Orthodoxy remained the state religion, but higher-ups in the state administration debated ways of extending toleration throughout the nineteenth century, for example with limited experiments on the validity of mixed marriages in the western provinces, where they were most common. Such men as Konstantin Pobedonostsev were bitterly opposed, but toleration did have friends in high places, such as Pyotr Valuyev, who became minister of the interior in 1861. Four years later, he recorded the following diary entry: ‘Since 1861, I have been fighting for freedom of conscience.’ As these ideas became increasingly commonplace for educated Russians, the language of toleration became more familiar. In 1905, it was a serious aspect of the October Manifesto, Nicholas’s programme of concessions designed to secure the monarchy in the face of revolution. Thereafter the Department of Religious Affairs of Foreign Confessions pushed forward its commitment to the principle.22
It bears repeating that this was an empire, not a Sunday school. The picture was mixed, and there were many exceptions. Elite Russia was fascinated and entranced by the peoples and places that made up its changing hinterlands, but a tendency to racism among some officials – for whom nomadic Kazakhs, Kalmyks and Bashkirs were ‘wild, untamed horses’23 – persisted. Muslims played a fundamental part in imperial life, and members of other leading religions, including Buddhists, went about their lives, but the authorities were much less sure of the Jews. Many Jews had become subjects of the Empire following the partitions of Poland. Most of them were confined to the ‘Pale of Settlement’ in this region, which effectively institutionalized anti-Semitism, though the pogroms that took place from time to time, famously at Kishinev in 1903, were the work of local anti-Semites, not the government. But official and elite attitudes were inconsistent – Prime Minister Witte was married to a Jew – and were driven by the usual modern imperative of identifying and cataloguing the population so that it could be taxed, supervised and regulated.24
And what about Pyotr Valuyev? He might have argued with Alexander II in favour of toleration, but he also supported the prototype of russification in the western borderlands.
An opposite imperial process stood out in distinction to toleration and violence alike. This was the tendency to standardize. Take the example of the currency. All the parts of a contiguous land empire should really use the same money. In Hungary, for example, Austrian currency became the standard legal tender following the great compromise that established the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy. But in the western borderlands of the Russian Empire, the process took much longer, beset by technical complications. For decades, the new Polish lands in the Russian Empire continued to use their own currency (alongside others, including the ruble), and the territory operated its own financial system. It was only in 1866 that Poland became an official user of the Russian currency.25 Before then, the persistence of the zloty was just one example of the patchwork of imperial life. The desire to standardize, to make the economy more efficient and administration more rational, was a modernizing instinct, a universal tendency shared by the other modern empires.
But the Russians were not the most expansionary people in modern history, and they did not administer the cruellest empire, far from it. Was the conquest of Eurasia as coercive as the rollback of the continental United States? The latter process rested on the enslavement of black Africans. It was coterminous with the removal of land and political rights from native Americans, formalized, for example, in the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851. And it caused war with neighbours – Mexico, in 1846 – and, as expansion went inter-continental, with rival empires such as Spain. Was Russia an empire where America was a republic? Hardly, if the most recent historian of this topic, in his clearly titled and massive book American Empire, is to be believed.26 Could the Russians not keep away from their post-imperial ‘near abroad’, whereas the Western Europeans beat a dignified retreat from empire? The war in Chechnya was as traumatic as France’s Algerian War or Britain’s rage in 1950s Kenya, but at no stage of Russia’s imperial disengagement, either after the Russian Revolution or the collapse of the Soviet Union, was there violence on the scale of August 1947, when the British washed their hands of India. (By contrast, the fighting in Ukraine in the 2010s looked more like a conflict over border security and national integrity that had something in common with the territorial crises over redrawn borders after the First World War.) To some extent, all this takes us back to the ‘hypocrisy radar’ that we discussed in chapter 4. With their genius for rhetoric, the Americans could talk of an ‘Empire of Liberty’. The French made la gloire sound like a virtue, and the chutzpah of the British made for warm words about the rule of law over subject peoples. By contrast, the Russians scratched their heads and told it as it was. ‘Equality had nothing to do with it, and neither did the rights of man,’ write Burbank and Cooper. ‘But men, women and children of lesser and greater gods could be brought under the multicoloured wing of the Russian empire.’27
Russia was a Eurasian empire, but it was a European power. Naturally enough, Russian empire-building was not a compassionate process. It was driven by the need to control resources, secure borders, act out national and masculine identities and stand up to foreign powers. Geography, ideology and great power politics merged together – just as they did in the other leading European monarchies. Muscovy-Russia was hardly unique. But it was not a more violent and insatiable empire than its rivals, though it was certainly ready to crush movements that sought independence.28 Comparative history, then, deflates the Russia Anxiety. As George Kennan taught us in chapter 1, the process of confronting Russia’s realities must come through scrutinizing our own societies. And when it came to the Russian Empire, Russia’s people themselves were colonized too.
Some Russians were victims of their own empire, just as some Americans were, but most Britons, whose empire was far away, were not. How did this start? As the Muscovite realm expanded eastwards, especially in the sixteenth century, soldiers and traders targeted fur on an ever-greater scale. Local people, most of whom had had little interest in working with fur, were required to operate the everyday business of the fur trade, while the big profits that they generated were quickly transferred back to the capital. The process was even more exploitative thanks to the taxes that were levied and the corruption that sprang up. This system brought thousands of square miles under the exploitation of the imperial centre. It has been called ‘internal colonization’. The social organization of local people south of the Arctic was changed to exploit them better. Whole ethnic groups incidentally vanished in the process, while the animals themselves experienced a miserable state of permanent massacre. Even later, the process went on: in the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries, for example, the Kamchadal population fell by 90 per cent, and the Vogules by 50 per cent.29
One of the drivers of Russian economic development was, therefore, the exploitation of its own peoples. The Russian Empire grew and grew between the reign of Ivan the Terrible and the period of Soviet power (though it faced an upset with the destruction of the Tsarist order at the end of the First World War). This process – expansion, enrichment, extermination – was one of the repertoires of the great world empires. The Spanish and Portuguese conquest of Central and South America unfolded in an even more violent way, together with greater force of arms and the onset of catastrophic epidemics. It made possible, though, the seizure of extraordinary riches, especially in the accumulation of massive silver reserves from such places as the Potosi mines.30 Three hundred years later, in Australia, the British rollback of territory, securing the interior, came at terrible cost to the Aboriginal peoples. The British gained the resource of land on a massive scale, increasing the Empire’s agricultural capacity, opening new zones of colonial settlement and expanding the scope of the global economy of the Anglosphere.31
Yet the Spanish, Portuguese and British were engaged in mass destruction thousands of miles from home. The violence of imperial conquest not only did not threaten the personal security of people in the homeland, it did not trouble their consciences. Distance lends enchantment. By contrast, in Russia, the territory that was being gathered up was contiguous country. It was the homeland itself – the native soil of the motherland and the domestic state institutions of the fatherland – that were increasing in size and reach. The metropole (the native heart of the empire) was immediately adjacent to the periphery (the conquered imperial territory). Aside from some long-standing conquests that were recognizable civilizations in their own right, such as Georgia and Armenia, and other conquests that did not reconcile themselves to Russian rule, not least Chechnya and Poland, the whole place was ‘Russia’, nation and empire, rolled into one – and even the exceptions were still viewed as Russia by some.
So the exploitation of the Russian peoples by their own government was inseparable from a still wider historical problem: the impossible-to-disentangle relationship between the Russian nation and the Russian Empire. But this was not uniquely a Russian problem. It was similar to the United States. Starting with the English in Virginia and Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, the native American population became embroiled with the newcomers in a zero-sum game that they were bound to lose. Progress, modernization and enrichment coincided with destroying the locals. From the early nineteenth century, under President Andrew Jackson, the expansion of the United States into the territory of indigenous peoples was a matter of seizing natural resources (gold in Cherokee Georgia in 1829, for example), taking and fencing off land, evicting natives, repressing them, cheating them, using violence against them, and involuntarily but conveniently spreading disease to which they were vulnerable. ‘The waves of population and civilization are rolling to the westward,’ said Jackson in December 1830, ‘and we now propose to acquire the countries occupied by the red men of the South and West in a fair exchange.’32
If America and Russia had something in common, then a difference was the extent to which the politically dominant ethnic group – the Russians themselves – suffered in the process of Russia’s ‘internal colonization’. In the United States, there was a pretty clear hierarchy of social advantage, based on racial identity, with whites at the top, especially those of Anglo-Saxon descent and Protestant religion. The men who ruled were from the ethnic group that enjoyed the most economic advantages. By contrast, the tsar and his government could scarcely be accused of looking after their own. The Russian interior was not opened up for free farmers to populate the land. Instead, migration there was often forced, and economic advantage was focused on the landowning class. The men and women who might have been farmers in their own right in the United States were enserfed in Russia, and made to work under the ultimate threat of corporal punishment. True enough, serfs developed robust systems of mutual protection based on customary laws, and could enjoy a basic standard of living that was similar to that of agricultural workers in some other parts of Europe. They were not exploited in the way that American slaves were exploited, and in 1861 they were emancipated. But for many years, Russians still extracted profit from their fellow countrymen without paying for it in return. Meanwhile, there were non-Russian zones of the Empire where serfdom did not extend, in the Western borderlands, for example, and in parts of Siberia. The standard of living in some of these places was relatively high. Nowhere did the imperial project do less for the Russians themselves than in its penal system. Like other empires – like the British sending convicts to Australia – Russia created a zone of incarceration. Even here, though, the ruling principle was the ‘management of difference’.
Nineteenth-century Siberia was the Russian government’s ‘prison of peoples’. Thousands of convicts were transported there. They left an historic mark not just on Siberia’s landscapes, cities and inhabitants, but on the world’s imagination too. Over three centuries, soldiers, adventurers and merchants had gathered the Siberian lands under Tsarist control. Bit by bit, hundreds of small ethnic groups were caught in an alien empire.
This was Vasily Surikov’s homeland. He was born in 1848 in Krasnoyarsk, in a two-storey wooden house with decorative, Siberian eaves. His home was full of history. The family observed traditions, told folk tales and put the women in their place. They were Cossacks. It was his father’s job in the local administration of justice that took the family to a distant Siberian village when Vasily was five. His childhood was filled with the deep Siberian forest – the taiga – and its mushrooms and berries, with horses and hunting, birch trees and meadows, and, in time, with schooling back in Krasnoyarsk, where he lived with his godmother. It was a tough education, with beatings and little praise. When he was eleven his father died. The family came back to Krasnoyarsk, and Vasily lived with them again. They were reduced to one floor of their house while another family lived upstairs. The pension that came from his father’s service was not enough to live on, so his mother and sister Katya took in sewing.
It was a solemn time. One of the few sparks of fun came from his uncle, another Vasily, on leave from the army, who told stories and drew pictures for him. He pointed a way out, unexpectedly focusing his nephew’s interest in drawing. At school he had an art teacher called Nikolai Grebnev. He helped to channel Vasily’s talent in a town without art galleries. Grebnev took Vasily under his wing, buying him paints, telling him he would become an artist.
But life got worse. Vasily’s sister Katya married, moved out, then died. The teenager had to earn money. His mother appealed to her husband’s former colleagues. Vasily was levered into an undemanding job in the provincial administration. At least he could keep the remnants of their household secure, though Grebnev’s prediction about his future now seemed more unlikely than ever. Still, he got another break. First he was invited to give drawing lessons to the governor’s daughter, Vera. Then, in the middle of a lesson, the governor brought him a letter from the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. The governor had sent them some of Vasily’s pictures, and now the Academy wanted to meet him. Thanks to a gift from a local art-loving businessman, Vasily had the funds to make the trip. It took him two months to get there. He arrived on 19 February 1869. Vasily was only twenty, but he had the improbable chance to become the greatest history painter of his time.33 He made use in part of his own history.
Cossacks, including the ancestors of the Surikov family, had fought to make Siberia part of Russia. Vasily Surikov would paint some of the pictures that celebrated and humanized their role in Russian history, most famously in Yermak’s Conquest of Siberia, which he completed in 1895.
Yermak might have been the conqueror of Siberia, but the band of soldiers and adventurers that he led had many Cossacks in it. Although much of his life is shrouded in mystery, and he became the subject of nationalist myths in the decades before 1917, it seems that he crossed the Irtysh river and defeated Khan Kuchum’s army of Siberian Tatars in October 1582. He was bankrolled by the Stroganov family to the tune of 20,000 rubles, which paid for muskets, cannon and 800 mercenaries. The Khan had no chance with his bows and arrows. Of course, Yermak didn’t capture the whole of Siberia, and his expedition was a private one, but he declared his victory in the name of Ivan the Terrible, and sent him the tribute that the conquest extracted. Yet soon his army began to disintegrate under the devastating pressures of the frontier. Ivan sent Yermak a back-up force which arrived just in time. Now the path across Eurasia beckoned.34
By the turn of the 1890s, Vasily Surikov the Siberian-Cossack was already one of the most celebrated painters in Moscow and St Petersburg, able to command fantastic sums for his monumental canvases of historical scenes. He decided to tackle Yermak’s triumph, the great event that fused his family’s and country’s destinies. On a visit to Krasnoyarsk in 1889, he went to his old family house and communed with its Cossack past; he explored the Irtysh, and returned to live in Siberia for a time in 1892. He wanted to get to know Cossack faces, and studied them on location in the Don, and in his Moscow studio.35 And he had a good knowledge of historical sources.
Meanwhile, in 1891, the future Nicholas II – still crown prince, imagining it would be decades yet before he ascended to the throne – led the dedication ceremony for the Trans-Siberian railway.36 This was nothing if not Yermak for the modern age. The locomotive had displaced the musket, but it was the latest chapter in the tsarist state’s assertion of real and symbolic control beyond the Urals. Sergei Witte, who as minister of finance raised the investment, wrote to Alexander III about what the railway meant. Russia, he claimed, ‘has long since appeared among Asiatic peoples as the bearer of the Christian ideal, striving to spread among them the principles of Christian enlightenment, not under the standard of Europeanization, but under her own special standard’.37 The Imperial Geographic Society had been founded earlier in the century, dedicated to exploration and ethnographic study: the aim was to show how the Russian lands made up a cohesive and special territory. Its members made discoveries, constructed knowledge, and fired imaginations. By the 1890s, this work was popularized by exotic adventurers such as Nikolai Przhevalsky and Esper Ukhtomsky.38
Surikov’s painting of Yermak’s Conquest of Siberia shows the battle at the Irtysh river and the defeat of Khan Kochum. Cossack soldiers loom out of the visually dominant left of the picture, larger than their opponents. One of them wears a red coat, catching your eye. They are Surikov’s stock. He loved them, just as Tsarevich Nicholas and Tsar Alexander III did; as crown princes, they had taken great pleasure in their investitures as ataman of the Don Cossacks at Novocherkassk, Alexander in 1869, Nicholas in 1887. The ceremony went with being heir to the throne.39 In the painting, the Cossacks massacre their opponents with their muskets, while the arrows of the Siberian Tatars fall short, in the river. But they hold their ground on the right of the picture despite the terror. The Cossacks’ hats and helmets, and the even more ornate and traditional clothing of the Siberians, are authentic. Their faces reflected Surikov’s study of Cossack and Siberian features and the hours of sketching in his studio and on his travels, while the depiction of costumes derived from his research. The canvas brings together the ancestors of different groups inside the late Russian Empire, and different parts of Surikov’s own life, in an image that celebrated Russia’s geographical destiny. It’s a violent picture.
But like the leaders of other durable empires, not least their neighbours in the middle of Europe, the Habsburgs, Russia’s imperial rulers could not only be violent and exclusive.40 Far from it. They had to use ethnic and religious diversity productively if their imperial project was to be stable and successful. And so they employed local soldiers: in one Siberian expedition of 1659, 150 Yukagirs served alongside nineteen Russians. The tsars’ lack of administrative reach required them to make political compromises, collecting little or no tribute in some places, conscripting few or no army recruits in others. Meanwhile, local groups were often allowed to exercise their own customary laws and administer their own forms of justice. So in the small transactions of Siberian life, exploitation might come from faces more familiar than those of the imperial centre and its agents, be they Yermak’s troops, greedy fur traders or aristocratic governors. Russian expansionism assumed an organic and multi-ethnic aspect, less artificial than the overseas global empires of Western Europe, and sometimes less deadly than America’s westward drive.
And so it was no wonder that the newly crowned Nicholas II loved Surikov’s picture. A year after his accession, he bought it for 40,000 rubles. But even at the height of the painting’s success, when Surikov was presented to Grand Princes Pavel and Vladimir, in an atmosphere of extravagant praise and great excitement, Vladimir’s wife, Maria, expressed her abundant enthusiasm to Surikov in French, so often the language of the elite in the last century and a half.41 Imperial Russia looked west and east, to Europe and Eurasia. Its expansionary identity was precisely what made it a great power like France and Britain, and even what defined its European status.
Expansionism isn’t an indispensable part of Russia’s historic political culture. It isn’t an especially Russian phenomenon. But it is a reality of European and then global politics. The question is, then, whether Russia has taken a ‘normal’ geopolitical process to extremes, and whether the charge against it – that it’s the bad actor of world politics, that it has expanded in ways that lie outside international norms – is really a fair one.
When the Russian Revolution came in 1917, the Bolsheviks were emphatic anti-imperialists. They were committed to ending the Russian Empire, though they were also committed to defending the Revolution. The Russian Empire survived as a collection of territories. Some of the repressive qualities of empire persisted, while other qualities – the management of difference – continued to be required. And in an important way, the Soviet Union was also something other than an empire: it was the Eurasian experiment in communism. All of these factors knock down the two-dimensional cut-out monster image, on which the Russia Anxiety depends, of an exceptionally aggressive expansionist power, one that has probably even today not got the bug out of its system. As the historian Geoffrey Hosking has pointed out, Russians were the rulers of the union that resulted, but also, perversely, its victims.42
Stalin was the Bolsheviks’ resident expert on issues of nationality and empire. Before the First World War, he had found himself trapped in lengthy Siberian exile following his arrest for revolutionary crimes. Lacking opportunities to impress Lenin and the other leading Bolsheviks, and feeling the self-conscious worries of the autodictat, it became important for him to establish an area of expertise, flex his theoretical muscles and perhaps also transcend his origins in the Caucasus. In his tract of 1912, Marxism and the National Question, Stalin argued that to be a nation, a people must possess defined historical roots, a dominant language and a shared culture and mentality. Crucially, though, a nation must also have its own territory and economy. Anything less, and the group in question might be little more than a tribe. This meant, for instance, that – in contradistinction to Russian tradition, later Soviet law and the usual definitions that were prevalent in Eastern Europe – the Jews were not a nation. Nation-states were a capitalist phenomenon, and they were not permanent, but nor were they, as Lenin maintained, merely transient.
This arcane disagreement between two politicos on the fringe of the fringe became, amazingly enough, the fulcrum of twentieth-century nationalities policy in Eurasia. The dispute levered between visions of multiculturalism and Russian domination, accommodation and exclusion, and compromise and violence. It was not that Lenin took one position and Stalin the other, let alone that Lenin was a compromiser. The Leninist ideal – propounded by the multilingual exile on the run from country to country – was one of internationalism. Focusing on cultural differences and national separateness risked undermining the cross-border alliance among the proletariat. Class trumped nation every time. Yet many in the Bolshevik Party, and more widely in the Russian radical Left, took a different view, and not simply one based on theoretical posturing, but on practical politics. Take the ‘Bund’, an autonomous Jewish socialist organization. Many of its members were drawn to Bolshevik or Menshevik politics because of late-imperial anti-Semitism, especially the pogroms, which they connected to economic grievances and came to explain in class terms. In time, the Caucasian nationalities would also have specific representation in the predecessor organizations of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, such as the Armenians’ group in 1907. Lenin came to see that a purist position was not going to work. Strategy trumped principle. He thought that the far Left had to ally with national minorities, and accept that the same groups could campaign for both national sovereignty and working-class liberation.43 Lenin came to recognize Stalin’s point that nations had a part to play in the coming collapse of capitalism.
As a result, the Russian Revolution also made possible a period of national liberation. On the day that the Bolsheviks came to power, the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets promised to ‘provide all the nations that inhabit Russia with the genuine right to self-determination’. Yet this was a revolution from which it was not really possible to opt out. It quickly became apparent that the tension between an overarching Russian identity and the status of the smaller nationalities was as difficult to resolve as the other tensions that beset the revolution: between individual and collective, liberation and coercion, class and gender.
The solution: Lenin and Stalin would build the nations which would equip the inhabitants of those territories with the language and culture to become revolutionary socialists. In debate, they saw off those who retained their idealist attachment to internationalism, the likes of Nikolai Bukharin. Yet while they built nations, they also built something that looked a bit like the old empire. Lenin and Stalin fell out in the process.
On 30 December 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics came into being. It replaced the Revolution’s original Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, whose constitution was approved in July 1918. Some of the old territories, notably Finland and Poland, had gained independence, while Ukraine and Belarus, Transcaucasia and Central Asia, were incorporated during the Revolution and the Civil War, making the RSFSR a kind of successor of the old Russian Empire, centrally driven and strong enough in the centre to defeat the Whites. It was the formulation that Stalin had favoured. But in his last political actions before suffering a disabling stroke, Lenin prepared for the Party Congress that would approve the new, more ‘democratic’ solution to the nationalities issue, the USSR. In the new USSR, some of the constituent nationalities within the Russian republic itself retained a certain level of autonomy, but now those nations that were larger and more distinctive, including Ukraine, gained their own status as republics, formally on the same level as Russia, though Moscow was the capital of the union as a whole. This was where Stalin and Lenin diverted from each other again. Even though he himself was a Georgian, Stalin had preferred that the revolutionary state continue to be called Soviet Russia, rather than have the label of a multinational union, which caused Lenin to say he was a national ‘chauvinist’.
Still, Stalin oversaw the introduction of an extraordinary experiment, before he moved on from the Commissariat of Nationalities and became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1924. The experiment ran into the 1930s (in some places it slowed down sooner), when it was replaced by a more Russia-dominated model of Soviet life; but even after that, Soviet nationalities policy was still a revolutionary phenomenon. What the Bolsheviks did was this. They turned languages that had only before been spoken into written texts, making possible literacy, complex local administration and a published literature. The Bolsheviks opened new schools in which the status of the local language was privileged. Venerable languages, such as Armenian, or those threatened by russification during the late imperial period, such as Ukrainian, were both promoted. All the infrastructure of mass publishing and culture, from newspapers to movies, was put in place. Local people, conversing in local languages, became new elites. Small and large nations experienced an accelerated development or were more or less created from scratch through a sequence of policies that amounted to positive discrimination. And yet the Russians were still clearly in charge. Moscow ruled. For one of its leading historians, this was the ‘affirmative action empire’.44
Bolshevik nationalities policy in the 1920s and early 1930s was called korenizatsiya, from the word koren’, or root, and often translated as ‘indigenization’. The idea was that the Bolsheviks were deeply planting the roots of democratic nations in the soil of the old empire. This also applied to the Jews. Trotsky and many other Jews had played a pivotal part in the Bolshevik Revolution. Notwithstanding Trotsky’s own exile, they became central in the Bolshevik state, from the Politburo on down. In 1931, an autonomous Jewish republic was created inside the Russian republic. Called Birobidzhan, it was a Janus-faced place, weirdly located in the middle of nowhere, near the border with China. The policy of indigenization made it possible. It emerged at a time when Jews were doing well in Soviet society, but Birobidzhan hinted at Jewish separateness, even at the old Pale. Most Jews stayed where they were, though a few sought a better future in the East. Never popular, Birobidzhan survived.45
The Russian republic contained within its borders a number of other ‘autonomous republics’ like Birobidzhan. In Tatarstan, for example, the percentage of Tatars in local government rose from 7.8 in 1921 to 35.4 in 1930. In Udmurtia, where the Udmurts were 59 per cent of the population, they occupied 68.7 per cent of leadership posts in government in 1935.46 There were unforeseen consequences, such as when Muslims in Central Asia responded to enforced secularization by discovering an attachment to the veiling of women that they had not hitherto possessed.47 Still, even sympathetic outsiders looked on the most incontrovertible examples of post-imperial modernization with an Orientalizing gaze. Jahon Obidova, who was born in 1900, grew up in a poor peasant family in a village north of Tashkent. She was forced to marry a brutal sixty-five-year-old when she was thirteen, enduring her torment until she ran away to the city, worked in domestic service and joined the Bolshevik Revolution. By the middle of the 1930s, she was the senior official in the city’s government. Even so, a German socialist, Fannina Halle, who had come to Tashkent to write about feminism, saw her not as the product of modernity and communism, let alone of her own personal qualities, but of history, empire and the East. ‘Such burning, flashing eyes,’ she wrote, ‘reflecting … the hardship and despair of past centuries, and the succeeding revolt, rebellion, struggle, and readiness to die of an Eastern woman.’48 Even when the Soviet Union constituted itself in ways quite unlike the old empire, it was difficult for observers to escape an older perspective upon it.
Nevertheless, if the new Soviet Union could liberate national groups, it could also find new ways to coerce and harm them. As part of the Great Terror, ‘special operations’ were conducted against those national minorities which seemed especially threatening, such as Germans and Koreans. Such people either were inhabitants of borderlands or might conceivably owe allegiance to a foreign power, even if their ancestors had lived in Russia for centuries. The most notorious such order was number 00485, introduced on 9 August 1937. On its basis, lists of potential enemies of the people who were of Polish nationality were drawn up. In total, as many as 247,157 people were shot as a consequence of the orders against nationalities. Nearly all of these people were entirely innocent of any possible conspiracy; on the contrary, they were probably broadly in favour of Soviet power. They were lost resources in the fight that was coming against Germany, rather than a fifth column.49
Nation-building was an exercise in social engineering, though it probably went more closely with the grain of people’s lives than other Bolshevik programmes. Despite the appalling violence of the Terror, nation-building was usually a peaceful process, avoiding ethnic bloodshed. Indigenization might come with long-term risks of regional violence, some of which were realized after 1991, but in its early stages, it was more inclusive and harmonizing than many other Bolshevik policies.
If the early history of nationalities policy and ‘empire’ in the Soviet Union undermines the assumptions of the Russia Anxiety, does Ukraine fit into the same picture? By the time of the Russian Revolution was Ukraine ripe for independence, or was it ready to embrace a shared communist experiment with Russia? The answer was both. The Ukrainians effectively claimed independence during the revolution with the establishment of the parliamentary ‘Rada’ in Kiev. But these lands were of such strategic importance and cultural sensitivity that Ukrainian independence was unthinkable for the Bolsheviks. Ukrainians were themselves divided about the Revolution. Some of the bitterest fighting of the Civil War, worst barbarism – on both sides – and most terrible anti-Jewish pogroms took place on Ukrainian land. When they were secure in power, however, the Bolsheviks introduced national policies that promoted a genuine Ukrainian nationhood. These were political concessions and so were vulnerable to reversal, but they also made ideological sense to Lenin and many of his supporters.
In the 1920s, a programme of ‘Ukrainianization’ took place as part of the USSR’s wider nationalities policy. It had major consequences. In 1923, 12.5 per cent of newspaper circulation was of Ukrainian-language titles; in 1932, it was 91.7 per cent. As a result, by 1932, the coal miners’ trade union arranged 61.9 per cent of its ‘cultural circles’ and 75 per cent of its lectures and discussion groups in Ukrainian; in the agricultural sector, almost all these events were in the local language.50 Of course, this expanded the sense of Ukrainian nationhood. But people often did not express that sense of nationhood in political ways. This was because the Soviet Union was a dictatorship. Dictatorial control allowed the rapid introduction of a nationalities policy which assuaged many Ukrainian concerns; it also made the organization of a separatist movement impossible.
The essence of the Soviet dictatorship in the time of Stalin was suspicion, not least of national minorities. If peasants – that awkward class whose work had to pay for Stalin’s industrial revolution – were often distrusted, peasants of certain nationalities were seen as the most likely traitors or saboteurs. In 1932, following agricultural collectivization, the grain yield in the Ukrainian republic was very low, as it was in the Kuban region of the North Caucasus. One of the reasons for this really was popular resistance, which was not just a figment of the government’s imagination, but there were other causes too. It was not difficult for a conspiracy-minded Kremlin to explain the failure of collectivization in terms of a beneficent nationalities policy gone wrong, which needed radical and vicious correction. The grain requisitions that usually accompanied collectivization were especially extreme in these regions. This was terror, because it deprived people of the food they had grown themselves and desperately needed in order to survive. It took place in Russian regions, too, especially but not only in the lower Volga, and also in the Kazakh lands but in Ukraine and the Kuban it became a ‘nationalities terror’. In Ukraine alone, as many as 3.9 million people died during what became known as the Holodomor, or extermination-famine. The most deaths were in Ukrainian-speaking areas.51 Aside from the deaths of Ukrainian-speaking peasants, the police took action against certain Ukrainian elites: members of the Communist Party, especially those who were prominent supporters of Ukrainianization, and writers, intellectuals, teachers and administrators who worked in Ukrainian programmes. Emigrés who had come into Soviet Ukraine from what would later be west Ukraine, which was still in Polish hands, were also targeted.52 All these groups were made up of likely ‘conspirators’. This was mass murder on an epic scale. Calling it ‘genocide’ has become more of a political than an historical label, often designed to push political change rather than to describe or explain what happened.53 The judgement of the leading American historian of early Soviet nationalities policy avoids talk of genocide, because the intention of the Stalinist authorities was to root out opposition of all kinds, rather than to exterminate a nationality as such.54 The consequences of grain requisition and famine in the Russian Volga region, especially near Penza, and on Kazakh territory, were also devastating. No major scholar doubts the extent of the Ukrainian tragedy. The crime was not perpetrated by Russians against Ukrainians, but by a multinational Soviet government led by a Georgian.
But in the end the argument might be splitting hairs. Let Nikita Khrushchev have the last words, ones taken from the Secret Speech. Here he condemned many of the crimes of Stalin. He drew attention to the forced deportation of some ethnic groups, especially the Chechens and Ingush from the North Caucasus. ‘The Ukrainians avoided meeting this fate only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them,’ he said wryly.55
For the rest of Soviet history, and in a reversal of their national origins, Russia acted like an elder brother to Ukraine – often patronizing, sometimes implicitly regretful for past wrongs, sometimes keen to help, sometimes aloof, sometimes didactic, occasionally vindictive. But Moscow was not Kiev’s enemy. The worst of what happened next took place in western Ukraine after its annexation from Poland in 1939 during a brief Sovietizing occupation that soon gave way to Nazi control. The city of Lviv – Lwow, Lvov – had been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Kingdom of Poland, then the Habsburg Empire, finally modern Poland; it had not really been a Ukrainian city before. For three years during the Second World War, it was occupied by the Germans. They killed the Jews. Poles suffered disproportionately. To a limited extent and in a very dangerous context, Ukrainian nationhood developed.56 Later, when it was part of the USSR, Ukrainian identity there began to coalesce – the city became more and more Ukrainian – in quiet or outright opposition to Soviet policy. The USSR deplored Ukrainian nationalism for its backward and bourgeois qualities, and accordingly acted against it. From being a mixed borderland, without a dominant ethnic identity, western Ukraine became one of the few genuine centres of opposition to Soviet power, together with the Baltic states, whose Soviet roots were similarly shallow.
But other futures were possible for Ukraine in the Soviet Union, as the federation’s ‘second republic’, and a member state of the United Nations in its own right. One was the consequence of well-meaning if patronizing direction from Moscow, which assumed an unshakeable logic of fraternal union under Soviet leadership. Dmitry Shelepin, a senior official who worked closely with Khrushchev on ideological questions and became a bitter critic of his boss, noted that after Khrushchev moved from Kiev to Moscow ‘he was vain enough to want the Ukrainian people to regard him as their generous “chief” and “patron”’. Shepilov argued that, time and again, Khrushchev took the side of Ukraine or simply worked hard to gain support there. The most famous example was his proposal to transfer sovereignty of Crimea to Kiev. Shepilov did not like this: it was ‘senseless and a gross violation of historical tradition and the Leninist nationalities policy’. According to his figures, 71.4 per cent of the Crimean region was Russian at that time. Only Molotov spoke against the policy in the Presidium, and the decree was approved on 19 February 1954. Shepilov so disliked Khrushchev that he could never see a positive motive for any of his actions. ‘Khrushchev wanted to hand Ukraine an anniversary present and thus polish what he fancied was his already glorious image in that land,’ he concluded.57 The transfer was part of a wider post-war celebration of Ukraine-Russia ties, prompted by the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Council of 1654 that had brought the Cossack Hetmanate within Muscovite protection. Khrushchev witnessed poverty and devastation in post-Nazi-occupation Crimea and argued that direct administration from Kiev would more quickly solve its problems.58 However one explains the Crimean handover, it can’t be interpreted as oppression. It was not about equality – it seemed to be more about paternalism, goodwill and gift-giving than national rights and an ineffable statement of sovereignty.
An extension of this approach was associated with Petro Shelest, the first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party between 1963 and 1972. He was also a member of the Politburo in Moscow. Shelest restored the vision of ‘national communism’ that had been put forward by Mykola Skrypnyk after the Revolution. Skrypnyk was a long-standing Bolshevik, a passionate revolutionary, who saw a Soviet and national vision for Ukraine. He put the ‘indigenization’ policy of Ukrainianization into practice as commissar of enlightenment, or education, in the republic. Skrypnyk committed suicide in 1933, during the violent repression that accompanied the famine. But during Khrushchev’s Thaw, he was rehabilitated, and life was breathed into some of his ideas. The point was that a person could be both Ukrainian and Soviet, that both identities could prosper simultaneously, and that the advantages of being Soviet – the fruits of domestic communism and international security – offered the best possible chance for the Ukrainian people.59 A version of this approach, stripped of illusions, was probably the instinctive assumption of many people who lived in the Ukrainian republic, including Ukrainian-speakers, through to the late 1980s.
In Kiev State University and other places of learning, this new approach to nationhood was consolidated during the Khrushchev era. It was a time of communist idealism among significant numbers of people, including in Ukraine. But a complementary notion also probably gathered support: cultural distinctness and practical autonomy as part of a shared Soviet drive to a modernized and better future. This was a revised national communism or a particular Soviet nationalism with poles of attachment: the Soviet Union and the Ukrainian nation. Kiev State University was allowed to conduct more of its work in Ukrainian. There was an inner logic in this way of understanding Soviet-Ukrainian identity.60
But Soviet-Ukrainian identity in the years after Stalin also possessed a destructive tension. In Lvov/Lviv, whose Jewish-Polish-Ukrainian composition had been shattered by German occupation, and whose Ukrainian majority had been targeted by the ‘pacification’ campaign of the post-war era, the sense of Ukrainian nationhood was quite different. The city developed a youth culture and a counter-culture that rejected Soviet norms; there was an established hippie scene in the city in the 1970s, as well as a taste for nationally inspired pop music. In 1969, the success of the city’s football club, the Carpathians (Karpaty), in the USSR championship prompted some Ukrainian nationalist celebrations. The public culture of Poland seeped across the border, helping to give focus to calls for independence from 1990,61 placing western Ukraine and especially Lviv, together with the Baltic states, at the vanguard of this movement.
Brezhnev, who was himself from east Ukraine, feared that what was happening in Lvov (as he called it) could ultimately lead to the same thing happening in Kiev. He ran the Soviet Union and Ukraine from the vantage point of his ‘Dnepropetrovsk’ mafia, which was culturally and economically closer to Russia and distrusted a more national vision of Ukraine. In a sense he was right to be cautious. But most of the time it seemed certain that the Ukrainian republic was a fundamental part of the Soviet Union, that its separation was unimaginable, and that the voices off-stage in Lviv were of no relevance to anyone.
By 1991, ethnic differences placed the USSR at mortal risk. The Soviet collapse was not inevitable until just before it happened; and calls for national sovereignty were an unlikely precipitant until they were the very factor that brought the union to an end.
Remember that the post-war USSR consisted of fifteen republics, of which the Russian republic was the largest, and the Ukrainian republic an indispensable junior partner. The others stretched across Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. This multinational project carried risks. With time, the ethnic structure of the USSR had destabilized the coherence of the Soviet project. In 1989, ethnic Russians made up 50.8 per cent of the total population of the USSR. They were a majority, and they controlled the union, but their position was not quite secure. Even in the Russian republic itself, they were only 82 per cent of the total population (and probably less), a reminder of Russia’s heterogeneity. In some republics, the dominant ethnicity was under strain because of many years of Russian immigration. Kazakhstan was the most striking example. In 1989, only 40 per cent of the population belonged to the titular nationality, and 38 per cent were Russian. More politically consequential was the composition of Latvia, which was 52 per cent Latvian, and 34 per cent Russian, the result of migration to fill factory jobs. This created instability, compounding the Baltic grievances that strained the union.
Other ethnic stresses resulted from rapid population growth in the Caucasus and especially in Central Asia. The population of Uzbekistan grew by 26.4 per cent in the 1970s, when Russia’s population grew by 4.9 per cent; in the 1980s, Uzbek growth had risen slightly to 27 per cent, while the extent of Russian increase had gone down, to 3.9 per cent. The Russian republic benefited in terms of security and superpower status from its relationship with the smaller republics that surrounded it, but it paid for the privilege, transferring 67 billion rubles in subsidies in 1989 according to one calculation, and perhaps gaining fewer advantages than any other republic from trade within the union.62
But others had paid, too. The ‘small peoples of the north’ – such ethnic groups as the Nenets and Dolgan, who live around the Arctic Circle and who traditionally make a living from reindeer hunting and other native occupations – were researched, catalogued and given written cultures and ‘freedom’ by Soviet power. But the collision with Soviet modernity brought increasing risks to native culture. Between 1959 and 1979, the percentage of native people who worked in the old, traditional ways fell from 70 to 43. Yet by the late 1980s, many of the basic advantages of modern life had not penetrated far into their homelands, as only 0.4 per cent of their overcrowded homes had running water, and only 0.1 per cent were equipped with central heating. Thanks especially to alcohol, the mortality rate was six times higher in this geographical zone than in the Soviet Union as a whole.63 In the end, Soviet life had brought its own sharp twist on the fate of the Aborigines in Australia or to the troubled communities of native Americans.
In 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union brought into being fifteen independent nation states, many of which were historically recognizable but had never existed as unitary states before, like Ukraine or Belarus, or could have possessed no imaginable existence a few decades earlier, like Kazakhstan. The Russian Federation itself was an enigma. On the one hand, it was the logical successor state of the Soviet Union, inheriting its capital city, many of its central institutions, its seat at the United Nations Security Council, the lion’s share of its armed forces and its nuclear arsenal. Many outsiders didn’t notice much difference: it was ‘Russia’ before and ‘Russia’ now. But this was actually the first time that ‘Russia’ had been a nation state rather than an empire or the centre of a Communist federation. Even now, with hundreds of ethnic minorities, a complex structure of local ‘autonomous’ republics and provinces, and many languages, the ancestral cultural centre of Russianness possessed both a national identity and an imperial inheritance. What else could one imagine in the biggest country in the world? Yet for all the dominance of Moscow, and notwithstanding the catastrophe of war in separatist Chechnya in the 1990s, this has been an unusually peaceful decolonization, and a plausible transition from an imperial to a communist to a national identity.64 Russians have had to come to terms with a Russianness that defines their territory and their state (using the adjective rossiisky) and a complementary Russianness that describes their ethnicity, language and culture (russky). For all the complexity and apparent contradiction, the linguistic explicitness of these labels has perhaps helped them to achieve a clearer and more stable identity than the English in the United Kingdom.
If Western Europeans ever reflect more carefully about their own imperial pasts, they will find it more difficult to think of Russia’s history of expansionism as unusual. They might think about the similar challenges that their own countries have faced, and the more violent and harmful ways that their own countries have sometimes tried to solve them. Self-awareness is one of the antidotes to the Russia Anxiety. But this is not always easy, if all the time you are thinking about war.