ON DECEMBER 31, 1999, THE AILING BORIS YELTSIN USED THE occasion of his New Year’s address to make an unexpected announcement. He was stepping down as president of the Russian Federation. His address and the broadcast that followed left no doubt whom Yeltsin wanted to see as his successor—the forty-eight-year-old prime minister, Vladimir Putin, addressed the public immediately after Yeltsin’s unexpected announcement.
Putin was a largely unknown quantity at the time of his first New Year’s address to the nation. He had entered high-level politics only a few months earlier, in the summer of 1999, when Yeltsin had unexpectedly appointed him as his prime minister. In that post he had been responsible for the country’s economic performance and day-to-day administration. Putin—who had been head of the Federal Security Service, post-Soviet Russia’s secret police, in 1998–1999, and earlier in his career had been an intelligence officer—had been chosen by Yeltsin’s inner circle as a counterweight to Yeltsin’s critics, who were planning to unseat him as president in the coming elections. One of the contenders had been the mayor of Moscow, Yurii Luzhkov, who had actively played the Russian nationalist card against Yeltsin, presenting himself as a defender of Russians abroad during his numerous and highly publicized visits to Sevastopol, whose port was home to the Russian navy base in Ukraine. There he had funded a number of social and cultural projects and opened a branch of Moscow University.
Another contender, Yevgenii Primakov, who had become Yeltsin’s prime minister in the wake of Russia’s financial meltdown of 1998, had championed the reintegration of the post-Soviet space under Russian political control. During his tenure as head of Russia’s foreign intelligence and as foreign minister in 1996–1998, Primakov had turned Russian foreign policy away from its Western orientation, seeing the enhancement of Russia’s status in the “near abroad”—the term used in Moscow to describe the former Soviet republics—as a requisite for its revival as a great power. Putin was fast-tracked for the presidency by a group of oligarchs close to Yeltsin who were friendly toward the West. Like one of Putin’s backers, the multibillionaire Boris Berezovsky, they considered the Primakov reintegration project too costly and contrary to Russia’s economic interests.
Yeltsin had helped create the Russian state, but the nation was still in the making. It was now up to his successors to define its character and establish its borders. In his surprising announcement on the eve of the year 2000, Yeltsin addressed himself to the rossiiane, members of the civic Russian nation. His heir, Vladimir Putin, who spoke after him, addressed the audience not only as rossiiane but also as compatriots. Whether the reference was to citizens of the Russian Federation or included Russians and Russian-speakers abroad was not entirely clear.
THE PROTECTION OF THE RIGHTS OF RUSSIANS AND RUSSIAN-speakers in the Baltics and the countries making up the Commonwealth of Independent States had become a hot-button issue in Russian politics and a rallying cry uniting the nationalist and conservative opposition to Yeltsin and his government in the fall of 1993. After ordering his army to storm the Russian parliament building, which had been occupied by opposition leaders, and imprisoning them, Yeltsin used his 1994 New Year’s address to indicate that his government had not abandoned the Russians in the “near abroad.” He referred to them as compatriots—people sharing a common fatherland. But what to do about them was not clear. Yeltsin’s government originally pushed for dual citizenship for the “compatriots,” but it encountered resistance from newly independent countries, including Ukraine, that did not recognize dual citizenship.
Yeltsin’s advisers then came up with the idea of Commonwealth citizenship—an idea proposed back in 1991 but shot down by Ukraine. This model was supposed to combine civic citizenship in the Russian Federation with ethnic and culture-based citizenship for Russians and Russian-speakers abroad. Once again, there were no takers among the post-Soviet republics, but Belarus showed readiness to move in a similar direction. In 1997, Yeltsin and the new Belarusian leader, Aliaksandr Lukashenka, signed a charter on the formation of a state union that envisioned common Russian-Belarusian citizenship. By that time, Belarus had reinstated a Soviet-style flag and Russian as its official language. If not entirely stopping its nationalization project, Belarus was scaling it down. The Russo-Belarusian Union presented one more challenge to the civic model of Russian nationality.
The Russo-Belarusian Union never became a full-fledged reality with common government institutions or citizenship. Negotiations on the union were used to satisfy the post-Soviet nostalgia of a significant part of the Russian public still suffering from the shock of losing a larger state and identity. The Russian leadership refused to act on the idea of East Slavic unity to create one “Russian” state. Like Gorbachev’s union of 1991, it would have been incomplete without Ukraine. And Ukraine was moving in a direction opposite to the one chosen by the new government in Minsk. In 1997, when Yeltsin and Lukashenka signed their union charter, the Ukrainians negotiated a cooperation agreement with Russia that put a legal end to their lengthy political divorce. The agreement gave Russia a lease on a navy base in Sevastopol in exchange for recognition of the Ukrainian borders and refusal to support pro-Russian separatists in the Crimea. The notion of an East Slavic union now lacked one of its main pillars.
The Russian leadership stuck to the idea of forming a new Russian nation on the political foundations of the Russian Federation. It was a difficult but not impossible task. In 1997, a poll in which respondents could express more than one preference found that 85 percent of citizens of the Russian Federation associated themselves with the ethnic Russian nation, 71 percent favored the civic nation, and 54 percent were still closely attached to the notion of the Soviet people. In 1996, Yeltsin appealed to Russian intellectuals, asking for their help in finding a new Russian national idea. Most responded with suggestions for basing the new Russian identity on statehood. But there were other ideas as well. The revived Russian Communist Party, whose popularity presented the main political challenge to the regime, tried to keep the all-Union identity of the Russians alive, reinforced by an attachment to East Slavic unity and the Orthodox religion. Radical nationalists advocated a racially pure Russian nation that would not include non-Russian citizens. More moderate nationalists pushed for an East Slavic identity based on culture that would include ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers outside the borders of the Russian Federation.
In 1996, the historical demographer Vladimir Kabuzan published a study of settlements of Russians and Russian-speakers outside Russia. In his new mental map of Russia as an ethnic and cultural entity, he included eastern and southern Ukraine, northern Kazakhstan, and parts of Estonia and Latvia. Kabuzan wanted those territories either to be attached to Russia or established as autonomous units with special linguistic and cultural rights in their respective states. He also suggested the possible separation from Russia of areas populated largely by non-Russians. It was an argument in favor not only of letting Chechnia go but also of forming a Russian nation-state on cultural grounds. The cultural model of Russian nationhood informed the imagination of many opponents of the government, although few of them were prepared to give up any part of the territory of the Russian Federation. They wanted the extension, if not of its territory, then of its extraterritorial powers to cover people whom they considered members of their nation.
VLADIMIR PUTIN WON THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN MARCH 2000 and took office in May of that year. His opponents had planned for a June election and were caught off guard by Yeltsin’s sudden resignation, which advanced the date. The first sign that the election had resulted in the victory of Yeltsin’s man but not necessarily of his ideas came in December 2000, when Putin agreed to adopt the music, and, in part, the lyrics, of the old Soviet national anthem as the new symbol of Russia. During Yeltsin’s tenure, the music of a patriotic song by the nineteenth-century composer Mikhail Glinka had been adopted as the national anthem, but Russian political and cultural elites could not agree on the lyrics—a sign of problems in searching for Russia’s new identity. Against Yeltsin’s publicly expressed wishes, Putin resolved the conundrum by going back to the Soviet anthem.
The eighty-six-year-old poet Sergei Mikhalkov, who had coauthored the lyrics in 1943, was asked to draft a new text. This was his third exercise of that kind, the first two having been performed under Khrushchev in 1956 and then under Brezhnev in 1977. Where there had earlier been mentions of Lenin and Stalin, then of Lenin, the party, and communism, there was now a reference to God. The opening reference to the unshakable union of peoples forged by Russia was replaced with praise of “Russia, our sacred state.” What remained unchanged in all the versions of Mikhalkov’s anthem was praise of the fatherland. The words “Glory to you, our free fatherland,” which had figured in the original version of 1943, were reprised in 2000. The immediately following reference to the “Firm bulwark of the friendship of peoples” was replaced with “Union of fraternal peoples for the ages.” The Union was thus restored to favor, along with the brotherhood of its constituent peoples. Whether the reference was to the old Union or the peoples of the Russian Federation was for future generations to decide.
When it came to Russian policy in the post-Soviet space, Putin inherited from Primakov the vision of Russia as a great power whose status depended on its integrationist project. Putin believed in Russia’s right to dominate the post-Soviet space as its sphere of influence, but he hoped to achieve such dominance by political and economic means, without turning Russian ethnicity, language, and culture in the “near abroad” into instruments of Russian dominance there. In 1999, the parliament discussed different versions of a law on compatriots abroad extensively, and eventually adopted one of them, but it had minimal impact on foreign policy. Putin’s policy on Ukraine and Belarus, which did not differ substantially from his policies on other post-Soviet countries, was formulated in a document titled Strategy for Russia: Agenda for the President—2000 prepared by Russia’s Council for Foreign and Defense Policy.
Its authors, who included both Yeltsin-era Westernizers and Primakov-type realists, argued that relations with the “near abroad” should benefit Russia economically. Political and economic reintegration of the post-Soviet space should proceed from below, with Russian businesses acquiring partial ownership of the transportation infrastructure and local enterprises in the former Soviet republics in exchange for debts accumulated by those countries for Russian natural gas. This strategy could be implemented on various levels—bilateral, subregional, including only selected post-Soviet republics or most if not all of them. The key was to win the loyalty of the new governments and local elites. Thinking of Russia as a divided nation or mobilizing ethnic Russians or Russian-speakers abroad to achieve integrationist goals seemed counterproductive.
This new orientation became known in the first years of the millennium as Russia’s liberal empire project. Its ideological formulation came in 2003 in an article by Anatolii Chubais, one of the architects of Yeltsin’s privatization reform and then head of the Russian electrical-power monopoly. Chubais argued that Russia’s mission in the new century included the construction of a strong democratic state and the foundations of a capitalist economy, but he did not stop there. “It is my profound conviction that Russia’s ideology for the whole foreseeable historical future should be liberal imperialism, and Russia’s mission should be the construction of a liberal empire,” wrote Chubais. As of 2003, he was busy building that empire from below. A few months earlier, his company had acquired control of an atomic electrical-power station in Armenia, and it was eyeing assets in Ukraine, where it helped finance the construction of two nuclear reactors.
Anatolii Chubais was the mouthpiece of the oligarchs—the new group of large business owners who had emerged out of the economic and political chaos of the post-Soviet transformation by being both more innovative and more ruthless than their competitors. They had gained control of the most lucrative parts of the Russian economy, including the oil and gas industry, in the rigged privatization of the mid-1990s. In return for preference from President Yeltsin, they had used their economic and media resources to help reelect him to office in 1996. They had also helped bring Putin to power in 2000. In return, they demanded Putin’s loyalty, which Putin was most reluctant to offer. He would spend a good part of his first term in office trying to establish his monopoly of power and free himself of Yeltsin’s entourage. Two of the leading oligarchs, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, had taken refuge in the West. A third, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was arrested. The rest did not challenge Putin’s rule.
Putin won his second term as president in March 2004, taking 71 percent of the popular vote. Things could not have looked better for him. Revived by limited economic reforms in the first years of Putin’s presidency and by high oil prices, the Russian economy was doing well, growing at a rate of 7 percent per annum. The economic reintegration of the post-Soviet space was also moving forward. It had begun on the regional level in 2000 with the creation of the Eurasian Economic Community, which was joined by Belarus, Kazakhstan, and a number of Central Asian states. Ukraine refused to join, but in 2003 it signed an agreement with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan on the formation of a Single Economic Space. The agreement was ratified by the Ukrainian parliament in 2004.
The key factor for the success of the liberal empire project was political stability in the region and continuity of policy in the neighboring states. Authoritarian regimes were preferred, since their leaders could be counted on to follow a steady policy course as they became dependent on Russia in economic or security terms. Democracies were hard to handle, because the outcomes of elections could be unpredictable. With the Baltic states joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union, Belarus getting an authoritarian ruler in the person of Aliaksandr Lukashenka, and Kazakhstan and the other Central Asian republics solidly in the authoritarian camp, the unpredictability of electoral politics in Ukraine and Georgia presented a major challenge to Russian foreign policy. Especially important was Ukraine, the crown jewel in any integrationist project in the post-Soviet space. In 2004, as in 1991, Ukraine remained the largest post-Soviet country after Russia.
Presidential elections were coming up in Ukraine in the fall of 2004. At stake was the future of post-Soviet integration and ownership of the largest network of pipelines linking Russian and Turkmen natural-gas fields with markets in Eastern and Central Europe. The outgoing Ukrainian president, Leonid Kuchma, had allegedly agreed to sell Russia a stake in his country’s gas-pipeline system in order to deal with Ukraine’s ballooning debt to Russia’s gas monopolist, Gazprom. Kuchma introduced his prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, to Putin as his successor, who would continue his policies. In the fall of 2004, Putin went to Kyiv in hopes of boosting Yanukovych’s ratings in his campaign against the pro-reform and pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko. In the weeks leading up to the election, Yushchenko was poisoned with a strain of dioxin that could not be produced in Ukraine but could be produced in Russia. He survived the attempt, but it hampered his further participation in the campaign.
Fed up with Kuchma’s corrupt regime, Ukrainian voters had no intention of electing his and Putin’s protégé to the presidential office. According to the exit polls, Yushchenko won the race. But that was not the result announced by the head of the government-controlled electoral commission, who told shocked Ukrainians that victory had gone to Yanukovych. The Orange Revolution, named after Yushchenko’s campaign colors, followed immediately. At its forefront were students organized in civic youth groups such as Pora! (It’s Time!).
Hundreds of thousands of people went into the streets of Kyiv and did not leave until the government agreed to repeat the presidential election, this time under the strict control of international observers, most of them from the West. As expected, Yushchenko won, and Putin congratulated him on his victory, but few doubted that the Russian president perceived the outcome of the Orange Revolution as a major defeat. Putin blamed the West and its pro-democracy campaign in the post-Soviet space for what had happened in Ukraine. He felt threatened not only by the coming to power of a pro-Western candidate in the largest post-Soviet republic, but also by the example that the democratic movement in Ukraine had now set for opponents of his increasingly authoritarian regime in Russia. The exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky made no secret of his support for the Orange Revolution.
The Russian elites had to regroup both at home and abroad. At home, Putin mimicked the tactics of the leaders of the Orange Revolution by creating numerous youth organizations that would support his regime. The most notorious of them was Nashi (Ours), established in 2005 by a former official of the Russian presidential administration, Vasilii Yakemenko. For years, Nashi would harass real or imagined opponents of the regime. Abroad, Putin did everything in his power to stop what he regarded as Western encroachment on his turf, the post-Soviet space. Of special concern to the Kremlin was Georgia, where the Rose Revolution of 2003 brought to power the pro-Western Mikheil Saakashvili, and Ukraine, where Yushchenko had no illusions about Moscow’s role in supporting his opponent and its plans for his country. He launched a pro-Western policy, trying to get Ukraine admitted to the European Union and NATO.
Putin went on record opposing Ukraine’s membership in NATO but declared that Russia had nothing against its membership in the European Union. Nevertheless, he used gas supplies to Ukraine—and, through Ukraine, to member nations of the European Union—as a political weapon to bring Ukraine under his economic control and complicate its relations with the West. Earlier, Russia had forced Turkmenistan, the second-largest producer of gas in the post-Soviet space, to sell its gas through Russia, and had used debts accumulated by other post-Soviet countries for gas supplies from and through Russia to exert political pressure.
In March 2005, soon after Yushchenko’s inauguration, Russia raised the price of natural gas supplied to Ukraine. On January 1, 2006, it cut all supplies to Ukraine, claiming that Ukraine was stealing natural gas destined for Europe. Supplies were restored four days later, but a new crisis erupted in January 2009, when supplies were cut off again for twenty days for Ukraine, and thirteen days for European customers, leaving southeastern Europe without natural gas in the depths of winter. Depicting Ukraine as an unreliable partner not only for Russia but also for the European Union, Moscow imposed conditions that eventually made Ukraine pay more than Germany for its natural gas.
EU membership was not in the cards for Ukraine. Gas-supply problems aside, the European Union was still dealing with challenges caused by its large expansion of membership in 2004. But NATO membership, which was backed by the United States, could have become a reality for Ukraine. In April 2008, Putin traveled to the NATO summit in Bucharest to campaign against NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. He gained the support of Germany and France, and the decision was postponed until December 2008. Putin decided not to wait. After returning from the NATO summit, he established official relations with the self-proclaimed governments of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the two regions of Georgia that had rebelled against rule from Tbilisi in 1991 and enjoyed Russian support ever since.
In August 2008, the Russian army invaded Georgia, first taking over the separatist enclave of South Ossetia and then marching on the Georgian capital. Thanks only to Western diplomatic intervention, the fighting was stopped, and Russian troops withdrew from Georgia proper. But the two separatist republics remained under Russian control and were formally recognized by Russia as independent states. For the first time in Russia’s post-Soviet history, its army had been used beyond its borders to subdue a rebellious neighbor. The liberal empire was gone: the military empire was about to rise.
In December 2008, NATO refused to provide either Georgia or Ukraine with a NATO membership plan. Barack Obama, who assumed the American presidency in January 2009, pressed the “reset” button in relations with Russia. Putin had lost to pro-democratic forces in Ukraine and Georgia in a contest of ballots but won in a war of bullets, stopping the rebellious republics from evading his embrace in the ranks of NATO. One of the lessons that he learned from the outcome of the Orange Revolution was that dealing with governments in the post-Soviet states was not enough for success. One also had to engage with people on the street. The old ideas of his political opponents about a divided Russian nation and its compatriots abroad came in very handy in that regard and were soon put to use in Putin’s new foreign policy.
“HAVE YOU READ DENIKIN’S DIARIES?” VLADIMIR PUTIN ONCE asked Larisa Kaftan, a Ukrainian-born reporter of Russia’s leading newspaper, Komsomol’skaia pravda (Komsomol Truth). The reference was to the memoirs of a leader of the Russian White Army of the revolutionary era, General Anton Denikin. “No,” responded Kaftan, who promised to read the work. “Be sure to read them,” suggested Putin, and then added: “Denikin discusses Great and Little Russia, Ukraine. He writes that no one may meddle in relations between us; that has always been the business of Russia itself.” Kaftan did as promised and later published an article that included a selection of quotations from Denikin’s writings. The one Putin had in mind read as follows: “No Russia, reactionary or democratic, republican or authoritarian, will ever allow Ukraine to be torn away. The foolish, baseless, and externally aggravated quarrel between Muscovite Rus’ and Kyivan Rus’ is our internal quarrel, of no concern to anyone else, and it will be decided by ourselves.”
The conversation took place on May 24, 2009, when Putin, then prime minister of Russia, was visiting the Donskoi Monastery in Moscow. He laid flowers on the grave of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had died the previous year, and on the graves of several Russian historical figures and intellectuals who had died in the emigration after 1917 and whose earthly remains had now been reinterred in Russia. Among them was General Denikin. The Orthodox archimandrite Tikhon, who was close to Putin and accompanied him on his visit, explained to the journalists that Putin had personally paid for the tombstones on the graves of Denikin and his wife, as well as on the graves of two émigré intellectuals, the philosopher Ivan Ilin and the writer Ivan Shmelev. Russia was taking back its long-lost children and reconnecting with their ideas.
The Russian president was particularly impressed by the writings of Ivan Ilin, who had emerged during the interwar period as one of the leading ideologues of the White movement. At the start of the Cold War, he had written an article titled “What the Dismemberment of Russia Promises the World,” directed against what he considered the Western conspiracy to dismember the Soviet Union. “Russia will not perish as a result of dismemberment,” Ilin warned Western governments, “but will begin to repeat the whole course of her history: like a great ‘organism,’ she will again set about collecting her ‘members,’ proceeding along the rivers to the seas, to the mountains, to coal, to grain, to oil, to uranium.” Putin first cited Ilin in his address to the Russian parliament in 2006, when he laid out his plans for reform of the armed forces.
Putin’s interest in the graves of Russian nationalist thinkers and generals developed at a time when he was reconsidering the importance of Russian history and culture in the continuing effort to secure and enhance Russian influence in the post-Soviet space. In June 2007, Putin established a special foundation, the Russian World. Its cofounders were the federal ministries of foreign affairs and education. Putin placed Viacheslav Nikonov, the grandson of Viacheslav Molotov and a historian and political consultant close to the Kremlin, in charge of the foundation as its executive director. The officially declared goal of the foundation was to promote the Russian language and culture abroad.
Putin had first gone on record speaking about the “Russian World” (Russkii mir) as a concept in 2001, when he had addressed the First Congress of Compatriots Living Abroad. The Russian World, he said, transcended the borders of the Russian state and ethnicity. Five years later, in December 2006, when he addressed a meeting of Russian artists, writers, and intellectuals in his home town of St. Petersburg, he had more specifics: “The Russian World,” said Putin, stressing the linguistic and cultural aspect of his vision, “can and should unite all who cherish the Russian word and Russian culture, wherever they may live, in Russia or beyond its borders.” He then exhorted the audience to “use that expression—the Russian World—as often as possible.” This was the opening salvo of a long-term ideological and geopolitical campaign that became a key factor in asserting Russian influence abroad.
The term “Russian World” has its origins in the mid-nineteenth century and can be found in the writings of Panteleimon Kulish, who was a member of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius and one of the fathers of the Ukrainophile movement. He used the term to define the population that came out of Kyivan Rus’. With Ukraine more of an intellectual project than a political reality at that point, the term did not threaten the foundations of the Ukrainophile movement per se. But the situation would change. The term would later be used by the Russian Slavophiles, who applied it to the ethnic and cultural community within the borders of the Russian Empire. The Revolution of 1917 made it all but obsolete.
The term was rediscovered in the late 1990s by the Russian political consultant Petr Shchedrovitsky, who was trying to formulate policy for the Russian government toward the “near abroad” in the turmoil of the post-Soviet transformation. Starting in 2007, which the government proclaimed the international year of the Russian language, the concept of the Russian World became an integral part of Russian foreign policy. Its “citizens” were located and supported not only in the post-Soviet space but also in Western countries to which Russians had emigrated after 1991. The promoters of the new concept defined Russian identity not only in ethnic or civic terms but also in terms of culture, and they mobilized support for Russian government policies on the basis of attachment to such figures as Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.
The concept soon attracted the attention of a key figure in the formulation of Russian national identity in the first post-Soviet years, the former minister of nationality affairs in the Russian Federation, Valerii Tishkov. In one of his publications, Tishkov defined the Russian World as a “trans-state and transcontinental association united by its attachment to a particular state and loyalty to its culture.” There was irony in his embrace of a cultural notion of Russian identity after having promoted a civic one in the early 1990s, but Tishkov distinguished between Russia and abroad. Immediately after the collapse of the USSR, he had argued that most ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers outside the Russian Federation would not leave their places of residence or assimilate to the local cultures but would stay where they were, preserving their linguistic and cultural characteristics. “My opinion,” he said in retrospect, “was originally voiced in support of the view that Russians did not spend centuries settling the territories of eastern Ukraine, the Crimea, and Northern Kazakhstan in order to narrow the Russian World now by so-called repatriation.”
In 2007, Tishkov responded to the new signals coming from the Kremlin by presiding over a number of academic initiatives that considered the status of the Russian language in the post-Soviet space. In the following year he delivered a paper on the preliminary results of work conducted by Russian ethnographers and sociologists. Tishkov saw language as the key marker of membership in the Russian World. He asserted that the Russian language was losing its privileged Soviet-era status in the “near abroad,” and that Russia had to take measures to protect that status. Tishkov wanted the Russian language to be given official status equal to that of the local language in the countries of the “near abroad.” (In Belarus, where Russian had acquired that status, it maintained its dominance over the local language.)
Tishkov proposed that Russia support demands for such status in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Latvia, Moldova, and Kyrgyzstan. His other idea was to obtain “personal autonomy,” meaning individual linguistic rights, for Russian-speakers, whom he also called compatriots, in their countries of residence. Tishkov also saw the Russian World as a means of achieving Russian foreign-policy objectives. “The Russian World is more than present-day Russia,” he argued. “That is how it was, and that is how it should be, and the task of specialists is to help people of Russian culture and language preserve their spiritual origins for themselves and their descendants and, along with that, to strengthen Russian influence and authority.”
The Russian government put its resources behind the concept of the Russian World in 2007 by creating the Russian World foundation, whose first mandate was to open Russian World centers abroad with the support of a budget of 1 billion rubles provided by the Russian government. By 2013, there were 90 centers in 41 countries tasked with promoting the Russian language and culture. Among the beneficiaries of foundation grants were Natalia Narochnitskaia’s Fund for Historical Perspective, which promotes a Russian nationalist vision of history abroad. Among the foundation’s partners is the International Council of Russian Compatriots, created in 2002, which has 140 organizations in 53 countries and has been headed by Vadim Kolesnichenko, a longtime member of the Ukrainian parliament from the city of Sevastopol. Kolesnichenko has personally submitted close to twenty bills to the Ukrainian parliament intended to maintain the dominant position of the Russian language in the Ukrainian economic, social, and cultural spheres, which has not changed since Soviet times.
In 2009, the Russian World as an idea and as an integrationist project acquired a new enthusiast in the person of the newly elected sixty-three-year-old patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kirill (Gundiaev). He was the main speaker at the third congress of the Russian World foundation, which took place in 2009, the year of his election to the patriarchal throne. Kirill had spent the previous two decades as head of the international department of the Moscow Patriarchate, where he had presided over the church’s efforts to stop the disintegration of its structures all over the former Soviet Union and preserve its unity.
The main threat to church unity came from Ukraine, where close to 60 percent of the Moscow Patriarchate’s parishes had been located before the Gorbachev era. Kirill was instrumental in stabilizing the church after the loss of thousands of parishes in western Ukraine to the revived Ukrainian Catholic Church in 1989–1990. The rebirth of that church, which had been suppressed by Stalin after World War II but maintained an underground existence, had long encumbered ecumenical dialogue between Moscow and the Vatican, turning an already anti-Western institution—the Russian Orthodox Church—into a bulwark of opposition to the outside world.
The rise of national identities and agendas among the clergy and the Orthodox faithful in the post-Soviet space presented another challenge to the dominance of the Moscow Patriarchate in the region and established the Russian Orthodox Church as a watchdog of all-Russian unity. The Orthodox Church had never changed its official name or its concept of the Russian nation, which it regarded, as in imperial times, as consisting of the three East Slavic peoples. When it came to the preservation of all-Rus’ unity, Ukraine was again the key. In the early 1990s, in his capacity as head of the international department of the church, Kirill had successfully beaten back the efforts of Metropolitan Filaret of Kyiv to create an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church out of those parishes.
Caught between Moscow and Kyiv, the Ukrainian Orthodox divided, with two-thirds of them recognizing the jurisdiction of Moscow and the rest going their own way. Coupled with the loss of thousands of parishes to the revived Ukrainian Catholic Church, the new split increased already existing anxiety in Moscow about the fate of its heritage in the post-Soviet era. Nevertheless, Kirill managed to keep most of the Ukrainian Orthodox under Moscow’s jurisdiction. Moscow lost a significant number of parishes in the Baltics but maintained control over those in Belarus.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus remained the core areas claimed and controlled by the Moscow Patriarchate, just as before the Revolution of 1917. Kirill’s new role as a promoter of the Russian World helped put East Slavic unity close to the center of the patriarchate’s ideology. The church’s contribution to the concept of the Russian World was a rhyming slogan, “Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus / There you have it: holy Rus’.” The authorship was ascribed to a Ukrainian cleric who had revived Orthodox religious life in the city of Chernihiv during the German occupation, under which religion had been tolerated to a much greater extent than under the Soviets. Kirill recited the slogan on one of his visits to Kyiv. Although his vision of the Russian World expanded to include Kazakhstan and Moldova, Ukraine remained at the center of his attention. As patriarch, he would often visit Ukraine to celebrate Orthodox holidays and real and imagined ecclesiastical anniversaries.
Vladimir Putin joined Patriarch Kirill on his annual pilgrimage to Kyiv in July 2013, when they came to celebrate the 1,025th anniversary of the baptism of Rus’. It was there that Putin first publicly embraced the idea, previously articulated by the church, that Russians and Ukrainians were one people: “We understand today’s realities: we have the Ukrainian people and the Belarusian people and other peoples, and we are respectful of that whole legacy, but at the foundation there lie, unquestionably, our common spiritual values, which make us one people.”
In less than two years, the vision of Russians and Ukrainians as one people would lead the Russian president and his army across the Ukrainian border, first into the Crimea and then into eastern Ukraine, creating one of the most acute crises not only in Russo-Ukrainian relations but also in world politics.