THE QUESTION OF WHERE RUSSIA BEGINS AND ENDS, AND WHO constitutes the Russian people, has preoccupied Russian thinkers for centuries. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 turned these concerns into a big “Russian question” that constitutes a world problem: What should be the relation of the new Russian state to its former imperial possessions—now independent post-Soviet republics—and to the Russian and Russian-speaking enclaves in those republics?
The current Russo-Ukrainian conflict is only the latest turn of Russian policy resulting from the Russian elite’s thinking about itself and its East Slavic neighbors as part of the joint historical and cultural space, and ultimately as the same nation. The conflict reprises many of the themes that had been central to political and cultural relations in the region for the previous five centuries. These included Russia’s great-power status and influence beyond its borders; the continuing relevance of religion, especially Orthodoxy, in defining Russian identity and conducting Russian policy abroad; and, last but not least, the importance of language and culture as tools of state policy in the region. More importantly, the conflict reminded the world that the formation of the modern Russian nation is still far from complete.
The fall of the Soviet Union and Russia’s failure to maintain control of the post-Soviet space, either through the Commonwealth of Independent States or through the more flexible project of forming a Russian “liberal empire”—a sphere of influence controlled through economic power and cultural ties—provided the immediate geopolitical context for the Russian leadership’s decision to use military force to try to maintain its dominance in the region. But why did the Russians decide to fight in Ukraine against those whom Vladimir Putin himself repeatedly called part of the same people as the Russians?
Ukraine today is at the very center of the new “Russian question.” Because of its size, location, and, most importantly, historical and cultural ties to Russia, Ukraine was, is, and probably will remain for some time a key element in the Russian elites’ thinking about their own identity and destiny. Is Russia to become a modern nation-state, or will it remain a truncated empire, driven into ever new conflicts by the phantom pains of lost territories and past glories? The rise of Russia as both nation and empire has been closely associated with Ukraine, not only because of Russian historical mythology but also because of its record of territorial expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, and the reformulation of its identity according to concepts first formulated by European thinkers of the early modern era, and explained to the Muscovite elite by the Kyivan literati.
Ukraine and Ukrainians were central to Muscovy/Russia’s search for identity from the seventeenth century when Kyivan monks advanced the idea of common “Slavo-Rossian” nationhood, and it remained central during the development of the imperial Russian project by St. Petersburg intellectuals in the eighteenth century, as well as during the imperial struggle against nineteenth-century Polish insurgents for political and cultural influence, and, finally, during the formation of the Soviet Union, with Ukraine as its key element, in the twentieth century. Russian visions of empire, great-power status, and nationhood all hinged on a view of Ukraine as a distinct but integral part of Russia. Many in the Kremlin and beyond have regarded the possibility of Ukraine leaving the Russian sphere of influence as an attack on Russia itself.
Ukraine’s departure is destined to spell the end of Moscow’s imperial ambitions in the post-Soviet space. “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire,” wrote Zbigniew Brzezinski in a seminal article in Foreign Affairs in 1994, a few years after the Soviet collapse. Brzezinski raised the stakes for the West in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict even higher when he suggested that “Russia can be either an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both.” Around the same time, Edward L. Keenan, a leading Harvard expert in Russian history, suggested that if the Soviet collapse indeed marked the disintegration of the Russian Empire, then it would have to lead to a Russo-Ukrainian war. The outbreak of that war twenty years later made the connection between the Soviet demise and Russian imperial collapse apparent to the world at large.
Ukraine’s departure also shatters the imperial model of Russian national identity, in which Ukrainians are still perceived as part of one Russian nation. Post-Soviet Russian identity is probably best imagined as a set of concentric circles. At the center of them is the core of Russian ethnic identity. The first concentric circle surrounding this core deals with Russian political identity based on Russian citizenship. There follows a circle concerning East Slavic identity. The final and outer layer consists of all other participants in Russian culture—the Russian-speakers of the world. The architects of the “Russian World” project, backed by both the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church, define Russians as bearers of Russian language and culture, irrespective of ethnic origin or citizenship. The Ukrainians, as the central element of the East Slavic layer outside the Russian core, are instrumental in making post-Soviet Russian identity work as a transnational phenomenon. That identity, imperial in its main features, threatens the stability of the whole East European region, extending from Moldova, where Moscow backs the separatist republic of Transnistria, to Latvia and Estonia, members of the EU and NATO with sizable Russian-speaking populations.
The Crimean annexation and the war in the Donbas brought together Russian statists and Russian nationalists both within and outside the government. It boosted the morale of both groups at a time when nostalgia for former Soviet and East Slavic unity was in decline in Russia and in other post-Soviet states. Although the Russian government was quite successful in mobilizing support among the largely ethnic Russian population of the Crimea, the effect of Russian propaganda in the Russian-speaking—but for the most part ethnically Ukrainian—regions of eastern and southern Ukraine was mixed at best. The pan-Russian idea was brought to Ukraine by armed militias along with authoritarian rule and the concept of a nation monolithic in ethnicity, language, and religion—a proposition that was always a hard sell in the historically multiethnic and multicultural borderlands of Eastern Europe. Thus, Russia succeeded in annexing or destabilizing areas where the majority or plurality of inhabitants considered themselves ethnic Russians, but failed in culturally Russian areas where most of the population associated itself ethnically and politically with Ukraine.
The long-term outcome of the conflict and its impact on nation-building in the region are still unclear, but, contrary to the wishes of its authors, it accelerated the disintegration of one big Russian-dominated historical and cultural space and strengthened the model of ethnic nationhood on both sides of the front line. The Russian government decided to annex only territory with a predominantly ethnic Russian population (the Crimea); the plan of turning the mainly ethnic Ukrainian but Russian-speaking southeastern region of Ukraine into a Russian dependency failed; and Russia refused to consider an annexation scenario for the Donbas, which it had helped to destabilize. Ethnic Russians inhabiting a peninsula not adjoining Russian territory found themselves eligible for annexation in the eyes of the Kremlin, but Russian-speakers immediately across the border were denied that honor.
On the Ukrainian side, Russian aggression mobilized the multiethnic and multicultural Ukrainian political nation, and Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, with its predominantly ethnic Russian population, and the loss of a good part of the Donbas, where that population constituted a plurality in the big cities such as Donetsk, dramatically increased the percentage of ethnic Ukrainians in the territorially diminished Ukrainian state. As a result of the conflict, Russia became more ethnically Russian and Ukraine more ethnically Ukrainian. More and more Ukrainians of all ethnic backgrounds tend today to embrace Ukrainian culture as a symbol of their identity.
Will the Russian government and the Russian political and cultural elites accept the “loss” of Ukraine? This is the essence of the “Russian question” in its present form. As recent events have shown, the unresolved Russian question threatens peace and stability in Europe and the world in general. This threat is no less serious than the one posed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the German question—the idea of uniting all the German lands to forge a mighty German Empire.
Many believe that the outbreak of World War II can be traced back to the failure to resolve the German question by peaceful means, and some find a parallel between Hitler’s Germany and Putin’s Russia in their use of the nationality card to destabilize and annex neighboring territories. The Russo-Ukrainian conflict has already become the worst international crisis in East-West relations since the end of the Cold War. It remains to be seen whether the annexation of the Crimea and the war in the Donbas are the final episodes in the disintegration of the USSR or a new and terrible stage in the reshaping of European borders and populations.
The answer will depend on the ability and readiness of the Russian elites to accept the post-Soviet political realities and adjust Russia’s own identity to the demands of the post-imperial world. The future of the Russian nation and its relations with its neighbors lies not in a return to the lost paradise of the imagined East Slavic unity of the medieval Kyivan state, but in the formation of a modern civic nation within the borders of the Russian Federation. This was the path followed by former imperial metropoles such as Britain, and modern nation-states like Germany, which recognized the independence of English-and German-speaking countries and enclaves beyond their borders. The alternative might be a new Cold War or worse.