Imperial-minded Russians like to define their neighbors, former Soviet republics, using the Western concept of a “failed state”. They claim that the formal attributes of statehood, acquired by them in 1991, did not lead to the formation of effective political institutions and consolidated civic nations. Failed state is a claim for dismantling, an invitation to intervention by more successful administrators. At the same time, Russian imperialism of the modern kind itself indicates at least serious problems with national identity in the Russian Federation.
Having the world’s largest country by territory, rich in mineral resources, and sufficiently industrialized, Russians could prosper and build harmonious relationships with the rest of the world. However, something prevents them from living peacefully, such as Canada does. It’s not geopolitical enemies, and not even Putin’s regime.
Modern Russian statehood suffers from diseases inherited from its distant colonial past. While Western European nations once had their empires, Russia was an empire without a clear division between a privileged metropolis and oppressed colonies.
Throughout its history, Russia has inherited Eastern despotisms, being both an empire and its own imperial colony, combining external colonization with internal self-colonization. In such empires, the actual metropolis is limited to the confines of the capital city or even to the main fortress, the Kremlin.
It cannot be said that there were no attempts to address the problem and “modernize” Russia to the level of contemporary European colonial endeavors, such as France or Britain. However, the pursuit of westernization did not have the desired effect in Russia, as it lost to perpetual disintegration and archaism.
Russia’s colonial past and incomplete nation-building
Russia remained an empire without an imperial nation. Even in cultural terms, the project of a Russian nation in the 19th century failed due to its artificial “triunity.” And already in Soviet times, formal Russia as a union republic was reduced to the once amorphous Great Russia. The other two components (Ukraine and Belarus) continued to exist as distinct nation-republics.
Within the framework of the Soviet Union, Russia (RSFSR) was like a territorial remnant after the sovereigntization of more compact national republics. For some union republics, such as in Central Asia (and temporarily in Karelia), Soviet Russia was the depository and donor of territories. New countries “matured” (either in a colonialist or Marxist sense) to the point of leaving the incubator republic and becoming “equal among equals.” The path of “maturation” from an autonomous oblast (AO) through an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) to a union republic (Soviet Socialist Republic, SSR) passed through various countries in the belly of the RSFSR, but not all of them completed it by 1991.
Two Soviet republics even became founders and members of the UN. These were Ukraine and Belarus, but not Russia. The RSFSR did not even have its own republican party until the very end.
This seemingly complicated situation of the largest Soviet republic arose from the fact that the RSFSR was not actually considered a national state of Russians. It continued to be regarded as the entire USSR in everyday consciousness. Similarly, this situation was perceived in the West, often confusing or equating the USSR with Russia, and “Soviet people” with Russians.
Perestroika and the challenge to Russian identity
While the borders of the RSFSR remained transparent with other republics, and such duality of Russia did not present clear problems. The USSR, like its historical Russian predecessors, could exist without a central metropolis republic and a formed Russian political nation. But everything changed during the perestroika (a political movement for reform within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) during the late 1980s).
If Russia historically was ready for centrifugal movements of its periphery and fighting against them, the rebellion against the imperial center of the “central” (Russian) republic itself caught it by surprise. Russian Moscow challenged Soviet Moscow, which was a blow to the very heart of the unformed Russian identity.
At first, there was no talk of any national project of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) at all. Yeltsin used the Russian Republic only as a springboard for his struggle for power against Gorbachev. The leaders of Russia, in their confrontation with the union center, relied on the support of other republics of the USSR, primarily the Baltic states, which demonstrated the greatest disobedience.
The response from the center was of the same kind: to stimulate internal conflicts in Russia and in other union republics to act as the main and indispensable arbitrator. This is how movements began in autonomous republics such as Tatarstan, Chechnya-Ingushetia, and Abkhazia. Russian irredentism woke up in the form of “international fronts” in the Baltic republics. Those who did not yet have their own autonomous republic immediately wanted to get one, in Transnistria and Crimea.
All of this shook the foundations of the Soviet ethno-federal structure. In 1990, the “parade of sovereignties” began, which engulfed both the union republics of the USSR and the autonomies within the RSFSR.
The compromise in the standoff between Gorbachev and Yeltsin was an agreement to re-found the state by signing a new union treaty. Transforming the USSR into a confederation was supposed to weaken the dictatorship of the “union” Moscow. Raising the status of internal autonomies (which were also supposed to be signatories to the agreement) was meant to strengthen the role of the union center as an arbitrator between confederate subjects. However, these plans were not destined to come true due to the coup attempt by the State Committee on the State of Emergency.
At the moment of maximum weakening of Gorbachev in August 1991, Yeltsin felt an opportunity to take over the union center himself, and then the tactical role of the RSFSR as a “springboard” should have been finally exhausted. As the winner of the coup, the Russian president imposed his prime minister Silayev on Gorbachev and his own candidates for union ministers of defense, internal affairs, and the head of the KGB (the Committee for State Security).
However, Yeltsin failed to lead the entire former state. After the State Committee on the State of Emergency’s coup, Ukraine declared independence and no longer wanted to recognize any union superstructure over itself. Others followed its example. Now Yeltsin resorted to threatening the Russian republics with irredentism, but in vain. Irredentism (a program of the reunification of a people separated by borders) is a clear symptom of the immaturity of a political nation. Another symptom was the definition of the national community not as Russians, but as “Russian-speaking,” “Russian-cultured,” or even as “Russian compatriots.”
In the fall of 1991, Gorbachev partially regained his influence, as he did not want to surrender his positions to his competitor from Russia. Negotiations on a new union treaty continued, but they reached an impasse due to the intransigence of both presidents (of the USSR and the Russian Federation) and Kravchuk’s refusal to return to the talks.
Now the systemic crisis of communism pushed Yeltsin to focus primarily on “his own republic”. Having real power over the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, he hoped to quickly implement the liberal economic reforms proposed by his advisers. Yeltsin did not influence Ukraine or Belarus, and he considered the Central Asian republics as “ballast” that dragged the country down. The union center with the stubborn Gorbachev became a clear obstacle, depriving him of freedom of action.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the birth of the Russian Federation
The Belavezha Accords and the Alma Ata Declaration of December 1991 took the president of the USSR out of the game and, at the same time, finally liquidated his state. Due to the so-called “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, almost no one was upset.
Thus arose the new Russia — the Russian Federation, which inherited the borders of the RSFSR, the international status of the USSR, and all the problems of unfinished Russian nation-building.
Other union republics, primarily Ukraine, received long-awaited recognition of their independence and territorial integrity from Moscow. But they repaid this with no less generous gesture: recognizing the amorphous “central republic” as a full-fledged state equal to themselves with equally inviolable borders.
They even approved transferring to this dubious state (which did not even declare a formal act of independence) the attributes of power of the defunct USSR — the nuclear button and a seat in the UN, including the Security Council.
Not everyone in the post-Soviet space was satisfied with this exchange. National movements within the RSFSR preferred to remain in the paradigm of a weak union center and an even weaker Russian Federation, which served as an incubator for the statehood of the Tatars, Chechens, and other peoples (including Russians themselves on their national territory). These movements were based on the legal basis of the parade of sovereignties of 1990, so the “center republic” could not claim to be the Russian national state.
The former Soviet republics, along with the international community, decided differently. Fear of the collapse of a nuclear state primarily gripped former opponents of the USSR in the “cold war”. So when preventing the collapse was already impossible, recognition of the independence of the 15 republics, the right to secede from the Union which was declared by Soviet law, seemed a reasonable compromise. Even if the difference in status between the “union” Moldova and the “autonomous” Karelia was not justified by anything other than demagogic Marxist phraseology.
The imperialism of the modern Russian state
While not all republics within the former RSFSR reconciled with being included in the new Russian state, in Moscow, the territorial boundaries of the Russian Federation were seen as “confining” and unnatural. They immediately remembered the multimillion Russian irredentist movement and the “legitimate interests” and spheres of influence in the “near abroad”.
Russian authorities continued to view the entire former Soviet geography as the space for their exercise of power. To this end, they tried to use the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and other integration projects, such as the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Union State, the Eurasian Union, and so on. There were also calls for the restoration of the USSR, or the expansion of the Russian Federation at the expense of certain territories, such as Crimea and Northern Kazakhstan.
The Russian Federation failed to create a mature nation-state on the territorial basis of the former USSR. Mentally, it remained a rump state of the Soviet Union burdened with centrifugal movements within the internal national republics. As a result, Moscow is doomed to wage devastating wars both within the former USSR and beyond. Its imperialism is a byproduct of the failure of the Russian project. In this sense, the Russian Federation itself is a failed state, a state catastrophe for its own and foreign citizens.
Overcoming the crisis of Russian identity
The majority of other post-Soviet countries do not have such problems. They have found a model of national consolidation and do not make territorial claims against their neighbors. Unlike the Russian Federation, they were generally comfortable within their borders in 1991. Overcoming the Russian crisis of identity can no longer be an internal matter for the Russian Federation. Since normal, formed countries have become victims of problematic Russian nation-building, this threat has become a matter of international security.
The first step in overcoming the Russian crisis is to abandon the established idea of the state continuity of the USSR —RSFSR — RF. Russia should not have the privileges of the Soviet Union (nuclear weapons, a seat in the UN), and its territorial integrity should not be based on the borders of the former Soviet republic.
Of course, the change in the geography of the Russian nation and statehood should not affect the already formed neighboring countries that have managed to cope with internal consolidation over the past thirty years. Therefore, the inevitable development of Russia is its decrease. Nations that claimed sovereignty in 1990 but could not defend it should be given a second chance. Russia, like a tree, must shake off all the ripe fruits of foreign nation-building. This will finally end the historical role of the RSFSR as a republic incubator.
Radical reduction of the Russian state will benefit both Russia and all its neighbors. Muscovia (why not?) will finally be able to find its internal non-imperial support for identity. To look at its own land as a cradle, not a colony.
Originally posted by Maksym Maiorov on Zbruc.eu. Translated and edited by the UaPosition – Ukrainian news and analytics website
See also: The biggest geopolitical scam of the 20th century: why Russia’s influence in the UN is baseless
