‘Crimea is ours’: A discursive history

Introduction

Over the last 25 years, the predominant discourses of Russian national identity have evolved to the point that the annexation of Crimea and militarily intervening in eastern Ukraine became thinkable and natural by 2014. If in 1992, Russia understood itself as poised between becoming the West and restoring the Soviet Union, then in the last 10 years, Russia understood itself as becoming authentically Russia, delinked from identification with the West, and rejecting most of its Soviet past, but increasingly identifying with Imperial Russia. While there are many domestic sources for this historical trajectory, Western policies played a significant role in reconstituting Russia’s identity along the way. Ukraine’s part in constituting Russian national identity has shifted accordingly, so that by the time of mass demonstrations in Kiev against the Yanukovych government in Ukraine, it would seem obvious to Russian elites and masses alike that Crimea must become theirs once more, and rebels in eastern Ukraine must be supported.

First, I sketch out the discursive terrain of Russia from the collapse of the Soviet Union until today. I do this more schematically at first, laying out the evolution of the predominant discourses of Russian national identity from 1992. I highlight 9/11 and its aftermath as a major inflection point and then zero in on the last 10 years or so, to concentrate on the critical changes that have occurred in Russian understandings of what it means to be Russia and Russian. Second, the moment of annexation itself requires untangling. I think we will see that an unfortunate concatenation of events made the Russian decision possible in March 2014, as opposed to any time earlier. This is important because while the discursive changes I trace made Russia’s annexation of Crimea thinkable and possible, it was the contingent circumstances of that moment that made it a reality.

The Soviet collapse and its discursive fallout

When the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, Russia was born on its wreckage. As we can see from Figure 1, the Russian discursive terrain was at first polarized between Liberal and Conservative discourses, as evidenced by the fact that the blue and red lines, denoting Liberal and Conservative discourse, respectively, overlap at about 50 percent at that juncture. At the same time, there is a rapidly emergent Centrist discourse (the green line) that would come to dominate. The y-axis represents the percentage of the total discursive space occupied by any particular discourse of Russian national identity.

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Figure 1.

Discursive trends in Russian national identity.

The Liberal discourse identified with the United States and the West, against the Soviet Union, and understood Russia as part of the universal civilization of modern liberal market democracy. ¹ It implied a foreign policy of alliance with the United States and the West. It expected Russian great power identity to be restored only through economic development. It understood Russian interests in the Near Abroad as negligible because it saw no economic gains to be had from interacting with them and saw no fraternal Russian peoples there as it understood Russia as a civic national, not ethnonational, project.

Conservative discourse was the mirror image of the Liberal in most respects. It understood Russia in ethnonational terms. It identified with the Soviet past, especially its economic model. One could say that it identified with the USSR in general, minus its Stalinist excesses. One major departure from the Soviet past that Conservatives valued as part of Russian identity was the Russian Orthodox faith. A Conservative foreign policy implied an alliance with any country that would balance against the imperialist United States. It stressed military power over economic power as part of the path to great power status. Given its ethnonational Russian identity, it understood the Near Abroad, the Former Soviet Union (FSU) as a critical national interest, as there were 25 million ethnic Russians then living in that abroad, in addition to a natural ethnonational brotherhood with Belarus and Ukraine.

The emergent Centrist discourse understood Russia as unique, although associated with European social democracy, but definitely not with US liberal market democracy. It also identified with a Soviet past but shorn not only of Stalinist excesses but also of its ineffective economic model. Moreover, this discourse rejected an ethnonational Russian identity in favor of the civic national ‘Rossisskii’ identity shared by Liberals. ² While unique, Russia was situated within a universal civilization of modern social democracy. ³ With time, as we will see, the Centrist discourse becomes a ‘catch-all’ discourse, steadily co-opting parts of Liberal and Conservative understandings of Russia, leaving both of them with precious little constituency. ⁴

Centrist foreign policy implied no particular alliances but rather understood Russia as one of several great powers who would participate in multilateral international institutions to manage world affairs. Both economic development and military modernization were understood as necessary to restoration of great power status. While there were Russian interests in the Near Abroad, they were not nearly as critical as they were to Conservatives with their ethnonational identification with Russians in the FSU. Such interests as Russia did have could be successfully defended through participation in international institutions such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and Council of Europe (CE).

Liberal discourse was rapidly discredited by Russian realities. The economic collapse, rampant and rising crime, corruption, and violence associated with privatization and democratization caused a mass Russian disidentification with the Liberal understanding of what Russia should become. Moreover, Liberal discourse had no answer to the plight of Russia’s diaspora in the Near Abroad. Liberal expectations for an alliance with the United States and Western Europe, and a Marshall Plan to build a liberal Russia, were dashed by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expansion and the absence of any substantial economic aid or investment in the Russian economy. By the 2000s, the ‘bad Russian 1990s’ would become a totemic negative Historical Other for the predominant Centrist discourse of the time.

Meanwhile, just as the Centrist discourse profited from Liberal delegitimization, Conservative discourse understood Russia in ways that alienated, rather than resonated, with average Russians. Continued Conservative identification with the failed Soviet economic project, with an ethnonational Russian identity project in a multinational state, and calls to balance against the United States despite having no material wherewithal to credibly do so, discredited Conservative discourse to the growing advantage of Centrists.

Foreign Minister Kozyrev, in defending the Liberal preference for relying on international institutions to defend the human rights of Russians abroad, painted the alternative as Soviet:

We of course are in favor of defending Russians outside Russian borders, but with methods acceptable to a contemporary sense of justice … Of course it is possible to defend human rights on the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) platform using tanks …, but one may also use legal methods … To cross the border of a sovereign state … is absolutely unacceptable. ⁵

Kozyrev later identified Russian military interference in Georgia not only with Bolshevism but also with Nazi Germany. ‘The party of war and of neo-Bolshevism is rearing its head in our country … Massive transfers of arms are occurring in the Caucasus and Moldova … What is happening here resembles 1933 in Germany …’. ⁶ As President Yeltsin put it in February 1994, ‘both neo-imperial (Conservative) and isolationist (Liberal) approaches for Russia are inadmissible’. ⁷

During the 1990s, only Conservative discourse would (and did) argue for the forceful restoration of Crimea to Russian control. Its positive identification with the Soviet Union and ethnonational understanding of Russia implied that Moscow necessarily not only recover the Soviet Union but also protect the 25 million Russian speakers living abroad, in the Baltic States, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Moldova, Georgia, and elsewhere, including Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo War. ⁸ But Conservative discourse did not dominate the Russian state. Instead, Centrist discourse, which rejected any ethnonational understanding of Russian identity, relied on multilateral institutions, such as the OSCE and CE, to protect Russians living abroad and, more crucially concerned with preventing Russia itself from spinning apart in places such as Chechnya, did not regard a forceful restoration of the Soviet Union as even thinkable. ⁹

The 9/11 effect

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, produced the most significant discursive effects on Russian identity since the economic collapse and political chaos of the early 1990s. 9/11 allowed a rapid and substantial rise of Liberal discourse at the expense of Conservatives. But this would be a very short-lived recovery, all of 3 months or so. Thereafter, the Liberals once again declined, and the Centrist discourse once again picked up support from the discredited Conservatives.

Liberal discourse, on one hand, was empowered by 9/11 because the United States became an instant potential ally with Russia in a global alliance against terrorism, something the Center had been seeking before 9/11. ¹⁰ Conservative discourse, on the other hand, was discredited by treating 9/11 as an anti-imperialist act against the United States, rather than as an act of terrorism that united Russia and the United States by a common threat. ¹¹ Just as Liberals were discredited by Kosovo and continuing NATO expansion, Conservatives were discredited by treating 9/11 as an opportunity to ally with Muslims against the United States, forgetting the centrality of the antiterrorist war in Chechnya to Russian national identity. Only the Agrarian Party and the Communist Party of Russia (KPR) voted against the Duma resolution supporting Putin’s cooperation with the United States in the war against terrorism. ¹² Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s resolution calling for ‘the Moslem world to resist the global aggressor – the United States’ was voted down in the Duma, as were Liberal Democratic Party and KPR resolutions condemning US aggression and Russian cooperation with the United States on Afghanistan. In November 2001, Gleb Pavlovsky, Putin’s personal political ‘technologist’, advised Putin to ‘become a President of a Right majority and formulate a Right national-liberal ideology’. ¹³ In part through subsequent US unilateralism, a National Conservative ideology was to emerge in subsequent years.

The Centrist discourse, supplemented by Liberal regard for the United States as an ally, and in contradistinction to Conservative anti-imperialism, was strengthened by understanding 9/11 through the war in Chechnya and expectations for an antiterrorist alliance with the United States. ¹⁴ At the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) Defense Ministers’ meeting in Moscow in November 2001, Russia’s centrality to this mission was reaffirmed. ¹⁵ Before the summit in Crawford, Texas, Putin’s aides in the Kremlin told reporters that now Bush was going to make Putin the second ‘good sheriff’ in the world, and Russia was to become a US ‘partner’ in the maintenance of international security. ¹⁶ The fact that Bush Administration hardliners such as Condoleezza Rice and Richard Armitage had made public pronouncements in favor of a new relationship with Russia was treated as front page news. ¹⁷ Talk of multipolarity, and its periodic references to a potential alliance with China or India, completely disappeared, replaced by a discourse of bipolar struggle between civilization and barbarism. ¹⁸ As Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the International Affairs Committee of the Federation Council put it, ‘Russia should join not NATO, but some new world alliance … some kind of Union of Civilized States’. ¹⁹ The aim is, as Putin said at the Shanghai Asian Pacific Economic Council summit on 21 October 2001, ‘to construct new relations based on the common aims of world civilization’. ²⁰ So, Conservative bipolar understandings prevailed, but the United States was not the Other: terrorism and barbarism were.

In the meantime, how the United States prosecuted the Global War on Terrorism abroad and treated civil liberties at home reinforced the Center’s own strategy at home against Chechen terrorists. Russian commentators, for example, justified a controlled media in Russia by citing CNN Chief Walter Isaacson’s November 2001 memo to CNN reporters to not to show civilian deaths in Afghanistan. ²¹ Kommersant Vlast, a most liberal Russian news magazine, declared US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld a ‘Hero of Russia’, for frankly admitting that it is impossible to avoid civilian casualties when fighting terrorism, thus justifying Putin’s leveling of Grozny. ²²

Yabloko liberal leader Grigorii Yavlinsky warned against the antiterrorist alliance with the United States being used as cover for a ‘Potemkin village of managed democracy’ at home. ²³ And he had reason to worry. Vladimir Voinovich, one-time dissident exile writer, ridiculed those who did not understand the need to suspend liberal rules when one is fighting against ‘barbarism’. ²⁴ Georgii Bovt wrote that, regrettably, ‘to defeat terrorism, civilization must defeat itself, for international terrorism is the product of the present world social system’. ²⁵

This potential Center–Liberal alliance at home and Russia–United States antiterrorist alliance abroad lasted for about 3 months. In Putin’s phone call to President Bush in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, in the pages of Russian newspapers, and in conversations with Russian policy-makers, intellectuals, and ordinary people on the street, there was a thread that somehow linked US and Russian identities: now you know, as we have always known, how vulnerable we all are. ²⁶

The US announcement in December 2001 that it was giving the legally required 6-month notice of its intention to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty came as no surprise to Russian officials. ²⁷ But its occurrence resulted in the first post-9/11 expressions of fear that the new alliance with Washington, or at least the high hopes that it would go beyond merely a narrow tactical antiterrorist operation, was in trouble. On the 3-month anniversary of the attack, a front page Kommersant headline warned that ‘Russia and the United States have Begun to Argue Again’. US unilateralism on ABM and strategic arms control was the issue. The same day in Izvestiia, an article on Powell’s visit concluded with the question: ‘How will conversations be in Moscow after the victory in Afghanistan?’ ²⁸ Actions such as these were used within Conservative discourse to discredit Putin’s policy of allying with the United States against terrorism, not to mention any more profound fusion with the West. Russia, in the words of Ziuganov, must end ‘the disgraceful flirtation with NATO’. ²⁹

Only days after the US war in Afghanistan had commenced in the first week of October, it was noted that US statements that the war would be expanded beyond Afghanistan were already threatening the antiterrorist coalition. Although ‘neither Putin nor his ministers had publicly expressed their doubts’ yet, leaders of Moslem states and even European allies had made their opposition to expanding the list of targets known to Washington. ³⁰ And it was Jack Straw, the foreign secretary of Washington’s closest ally, the United Kingdom, who remarked at a Kremlin meeting with Putin that the ‘agreement on the joint military operation is limited to the territory of Afghanistan’. ³¹ In particular, Bush Administration warnings that Iraq could be next were ‘opposed by the main European allies of the United States in the anti-terrorist operation’. Even British Defense Minister Geoffrey Hoon, in response to American hints that Iraq was next on the target list, told the British Parliament that ‘I have not seen any evidence of a direct connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda’. Opposition to US military action against Iraq was expressed as well by French Defense Minister Alain Richard and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. ³²

The unilateral US abrogation of the ABM treaty announced in December and clear US intentions to invade Iraq demonstrated that an alliance with the United States was impossible. Russians who expected a sense of shared vulnerability were quickly disabused of this possibility. Instead, US unilateralism was aimed at restoring illusory absolute security. Withdrawal from the ABM treaty, continued NATO expansion eastward, the US war in Iraq, and US support for ‘color revolutions’ in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine combined to further undermine Liberal identification of Russia with the West, let alone the United States. Conservative discourse would have been significantly strengthened had not the Center adopted some of its understanding of Russia’s place in the world. Some have argued that these Western policies transformed Russia’s Centrist understanding of multipolarity from one in which Russia, Europe, China, the United States, and others collaborate in managing global affairs, to a Conservative one of multipolarity implying Russia, China, and others balancing against the United States and the West. ³³ Russian conduct in Crimea and Ukraine in 2014 is consistent with this analysis.

Russia becoming Russia

Over the last 10 years, Centrist discourse has consolidated itself as the predominant discourse of Russian national identity in Russia. It has co-opted many identities in both Liberal and Conservative discourses, while still excluding the extremes of overidentification with the West, the USSR, and Russian ethnonationalism. As Putin put it, ‘Russian identity is not Soviet, not fundamentalist conservatism, and not Western ultraliberalism’. ³⁴ Citing Nikolai Berdiaev, ‘the sense of conservatism is not to prevent movement forward and upward, but rather to prevent movement backward and downward, toward a chaotic darkness or return to a primitive condition’. ³⁵

Figures 2 to 4 show the predominant discourses of Russian national identity during Putin’s first term, Medvedev’s interregnum, and Putin’s second term. ³⁶

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Figure 2.

Putin I.

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Figure 3.

Medvedev.

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Figure 4.

Putin II.

If we look at the three word clouds, we see the most salient aspects of Russian national identity in the public remarks of Putin and Medvedev from 2005 to 2014. ³⁷ There are some salient continuities, some interesting disappearances or attenuations, and several significant recent appearances.

There are six identities that appear consistently across the 10 years: neoliberal, raw material appendage, USSR negative and positive, regional leader, and developing.

First, Russia is, should, and will be neoliberal in its economic orientation. This identity co-opts Liberal discourse while rejecting Conservative appreciation of the Soviet economic model. Russia persists as a raw material appendage of the world capitalist economy, and this identity is one which both Centrist and Liberal discourses wish to transcend through neoliberal development. The consistent rejection of much of the Soviet experience, combined with continuing appreciation of many aspects of the Soviet past, both rejects some Liberal discourse and co-opts many Conservative understandings.

Russia is, and should be, a regional leader. Each discourse has different understandings of what this means in practice. Liberals understand it along the neocolonial lines advanced by Chubais in October 2003 as ‘liberal imperialism’. ³⁸ Centrist discourse identifies with Liberals in this regard. On the other hand, Conservative discourse often ‘militarizes’ the idea of regional leader to imply forceful reunification of ethnic Russians with their Homeland or a restoration of some version of the USSR. Centrist discourse rejects this, although, of course, Russia’s actions in Ukraine are perhaps a harbinger of movement in the Conservative direction.

Finally, Russia is understood as a ‘developing’ country, developing not only economically in a neoliberal direction, but also politically, as an emerging democracy. This identity also co-opts Liberal understandings of Russia and rejects Conservative ideas of restoring the USSR, rather than becoming more liberal and democratic.

Three Russian identities have abated in salience or disappeared altogether. First, Centrist discourse constantly appeals to foreign ways of being and doing things. But this treatment of the outside world as a significant positive other, or source of best practices, has markedly declined in the second Putin administration. The other two disappearing identities are directly related to the first. In Medvedev’s discourse, Russia is often understood as corrupt, and stunted political and economic development was attributed to this Russian characteristic. Moreover, foreign standards were often invoked to demonstrate to Russians what they should be like. Under Putin II, Russian corruption has dropped to insignificance.

Since 1992, being European has always been a prominent part of Centrist discourse. It still was under Putin I and Medvedev. But in recent years, it has not only greatly declined in salience, but its meaning has been transformed. First, it has been diluted to signify merely adopting European best practices and standards, as instruments to become more neoliberal or democratic. Still more recently, Russia has come to be understood as the True Europe, while Western Europe is a corrupted version occupied, influenced, and suborned by the United States.

The result of these disappearances and attenuations is a Russian Russia, rather than a European Russia defined by external indices, metrics, and standards of evaluation. These changes also co-opt more of the Conservative discourse, as well as feed directly into the two salient new arrivals.

The first new identity under Putin II involves repeated claims that Russia is equal, if not superior in some respects, to the West. This is part of Russia becoming Russia, independent of others’ negative evaluations of Russian realities. The second new feature of Putin II is an identification with Imperial Russia as a positive Historical Other. All of these changes add up to a Center Conservative discourse leading into events in Ukraine.

Two new arrivals

Consistent with movement away from relying on international standards of evaluation and identification with Europe, the New Russia understands itself as equal to the West in many respects and superior in some. Imperial Russia becomes a Historical Other with which an authentic Russia can identify.

Russia is not inferior to the West

While both Putin and Medvedev frankly acknowledged that Russia was a work in progress had much to learn from the West and the developed world in general, Putin in particular was increasingly annoyed at the constant criticism from Western leaders. In a press conference in Moscow after a meeting with the visiting Portuguese prime minister, Putin declared:

Let’s not see the situation as if one side is shining and white, clean and pure, while the other is some kind of monster that has just crawled out of the forest, with hoofs and horns instead of normal human features. ¹¹⁰

But neither Putin, in his first term, nor Medvedev in his only term, ever compared Russia favorably to the West. This all changed in 2012, with a litany of comparisons with the rest of the world that put Russia in a more favorable light.

The Russian economy is doing better than European economies. ¹¹¹ The Russian state spends more on research and development than France, Britain, and Italy, at least when measured in terms of investment as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) calculated according to Purchasing Power Parity. ¹¹² Russia is no worse than Germany in gendered wage inequality. Russia is more sovereign than European countries because it has less official debt. ¹¹³ Russia’s GLObal NAvigation Satellite System (GLONASS) satellite navigation system is better than Europe’s Galileo and as good as the United States’ global positioning system (GPS). ¹¹⁴ Russian income inequality is no worse than in the United States. ¹¹⁵ Russia spends more on its space program than the United States or Western Europe. ¹¹⁶ Russian birthrates are now equal to or higher than most West European countries. ¹¹⁷

Putin also came around to a position that many Western social scientists would accept: Western citation counts are ‘not an absolute criteria for quality of work’. Indeed, addressing a meeting on Russian education, ‘many of your foreign colleagues think they have become dependent on leading scientific journals and are dictated to by them’. ¹¹⁸ Instead, we ‘need to create our own system of evaluations’. ¹¹⁹

More acerbically and defensively: Russian laws on public demonstrations are more liberal than some West European laws. ¹²⁰ The Russian law on the registration of foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is no different than the 1938 US Foreign Agent Registrations Act. ¹²¹ Russia has more religious freedom than the United States as Russian law protects religious sensibilities; the United States allows the burning of the Koran. Russia is more democratic than the United States because the US electoral college allows candidates with fewer votes to win the presidency. ¹²² Russian prisons are more humane than Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. Russian police behavior no worse than the United States where you can get a bullet in your head. ¹²³ Gay rights in Russia are more secure than in the United States where states like Texas still have antisodomy laws. ¹²⁴

And recall all these comparisons are made against the background of a Russia in only the first couple decades of its development, so it need not be ashamed of how it compares to those who have taken centuries to get where they are.

Imperial Russia’s usable past

Putin, most recently, has found Imperial Russia to be an inspirational example for contemporary Russia. It had a respected merchant entrepreneurial class which should provide a sound historical foundation for neoliberalism to develop in Russia today. Unlike the Soviet Union, it did not betray the nation in World War I but fought valiantly. ¹²⁵ Unlike the Soviet Union which repressed religion, Imperial Russia fostered a patriotic education carried out by the Russian Orthodox Church, synagogues, and mosques. ¹²⁶ Unlike the Soviet Union, which had an ideological foreign policy, Imperial Russia ‘never imposed its will on anyone’. ¹²⁷ Reminiscent of official Soviet celebrations of various peoples and republics voluntarily joining the Soviet Union, Putin marked the 100th anniversary of the ‘unification/edinenie’ of Tuva to Russia by highlighting the benefits of being part of the Empire. ‘As a result of Russia taking Tuva under its wing, the Tuvan people were able to preserve their way of life, culture, language, and faith of their predecessors’. ¹²⁸ Finally, the Russian Empire was continually faced with external efforts to contain its power, to keep it down, just like Russia today. ¹²⁹

If we look at Figure 5, we can see just how successfully the Center has co-opted the main features of Russian identity as it has evolved over the last 25 years. The only uniquely Liberal understanding of Russia is aspirations to adopt Western liberal democracy with its respect for civil liberties and human rights. The only uniquely Conservative understanding of Russia is its regard for ethnonational Russians as its essential core. But on all other dimensions, the Center has spread itself broadly enough to capture all of the main identities, either wholly or in part, of the two competing discourses of Russian national identity.

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Figure 5.

Centrist dominance.

Making Crimea ours

Over the last 10 years, Russia’s discursive topography has changed so that an increasing number of Conservative identities have been co-opted by an ever-widening Center. We can say that the positive appreciation of social and cultural aspects of the Soviet Union, Russia as an obvious regional leader which is the center of the post-Soviet cultural, economic, and social infrastructure left after the Soviet collapse, and Russia’s continued development on the path of neoliberal democracy all militate in favor of the recovery of Crimea from Ukraine. Moreover, that which is still appreciated about the Soviet Union – its great power status and foreign policy heft – also help realize Russia’s actions today in Ukraine. Ukraine’s appropriate place is within a post-Soviet space led by a reforming and ascendant Russia. Both escaping from Western standards of evaluation and rejecting a European identity for a genuinely Russian one are permissive discursive conditions for recent Russian actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Both understanding Russia as the West’s equal, and in some cases better, and regarding Imperial Russia as a significant, and aspirational, Historical Other for contemporary Russia place Ukraine within Russian regional hegemony.

The only, though very significant, aspects of Russian identity that do not imply a reconstitution of regional Russian hegemony are its neoliberal aspirations to develop into the core of the world capitalist economy, shedding its plight as a raw material appendage of the developed world. But Western sanctions imposed for Russian actions in Ukraine make Russia’s most undesired outcome the most likely one. It is also hard to imagine Russia achieving very many of its aspirations to adopt or meet the many Western standards that remain to define Russian identity.

More specifically, the predominant elite discourse of Russian national identity makes the annexation of Crimea and the arming of rebels in Donetsk and Lugansk sensible in several ways. With Russia increasingly identifying itself as becoming authentically Russian once again, it can go it alone, create its own regional hegemony, including Ukraine. It can take advantage of the common historical Soviet legacies that unite post-Soviet states and elites. There is a realization that there is a natural order in the region with Russia at its head and center, just as in the imperial Russian (and Soviet) past. Putin’s increasing rejection of foreign standards and their replacement by domestic ones is accelerating the move to insulate Russia from the Western or the US gaze that has continually, in his view, humiliated and ridiculed it over the last 25 years. By being Russia, remaining Russia, it can selectively engage with the world without, as Putin put it, ‘losing itself’ in, or to, that world.

Disappointed by US unilateralism after 9/11, Russian hopes to be a multilateral partner of the United States and the West were dashed, pushing it to establish its own unilateral regional hegemony. Other great powers have refused to acknowledge it as an equal collaborator at the global level, so the near abroad becomes the abroad. Recognition of Imperial Russia as a positive Historical Other for contemporary Russia makes Ukraine part of a single political, cultural, historical, and even spiritual unit. Since the Soviet collapse, Ukraine has been understood as part of a larger Russian community, including Belarus, the Slavic community, including Serbia and the Russian diaspora in the FSU, and even farther abroad.

Putin repeatedly mentioned how well Ukraine had done, economically and otherwise, under Imperial Russian rule, and perhaps even more insensitively, under Soviet rule as well. In Kiev, to celebrate the 1025th anniversary of the ‘Christianization’ of Russia with Ukrainian President Yanukovych, Putin said this is ‘really our common holiday’, reminding us of our ‘spiritual unity and common roots’. We have ‘done a lot together in previous centuries and achieved outstanding things’. ¹³⁰ In an interview with the Associated Press and Russian TV, Putin reminded his audience that even during the Russian civil war, when whites and reds were fighting to the death, and millions died, ‘they never raised the question of the secession/otdelenie of Ukraine’. Both believed in the ‘integrity of the Russian state’. He went on to analyze Ukrainian history. Before becoming part of the Russian Empire, the Ukrainian people or narod had endured centuries of deprivations, essentially suffered like humiliated slaves. But once ‘both parts of Rus were reunited’, Ukraine began to ‘develop and prosper’. Moreover, the USSR made Ukraine bigger by awarding it more territory. ¹³¹ At Valdai, Putin argued that the Soviet Union had been good for Ukraine, as well, skipping over the Ukrainian Holodomor (literally, death by hunger), the famine set off by collectivization in the 1930s in which millions of Ukrainians perished. He said that after WWII, the Soviet government had invested 1.5 trillion rubles in reestablishing its industries, a third of which went to Ukraine. ¹³² Indeed, ‘according to Western evaluations, the per capita national income of Ukraine in 1970 was more than that of Italy’. ¹³³ It is just unnatural for Russia and Ukraine to be separate entities.

How Ukraine is understood in elite Russian discourse is crucial. Despite the fact that Medvedev and Putin continually rejected Conservative discursive constructions of Russia as ethnically Russian, instead touting Russia’s multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, civic national Rossian identity, when it came to Ukraine, ethnonational Russian identity predominated.

Ukraine itself and Ukrainians are always referred to as fraternal by Putin and Medvedev. ¹³⁴ In the years prior to March 2014, Medvedev referred to the two countries’ genetic links, calling them ‘our closest nearest relatives’. He even cited his own ‘Ukrainian blood’ from his mother’s grandfather. ¹³⁵ Putin invoked their shared Orthodox heritage, their spiritual unity, that they were ‘divinely ordered together, that they are a single people, part of a big Rossian world’. ¹³⁶ It should be said that these expressions of fraternal closeness have continued right through the annexation of Crimea and the continuing conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia are naturally one entity, ‘one people’ with a ‘common Dnieperan, Kievan baptismal font/kupel’. ¹³⁷ Referring to the two countries in a nationwide television call-in show, Putin avowed, ‘We will never part from each other’. ¹³⁸

About a year before the Crimean annexation, Putin began to elaborate an array of carrots and sticks with respect to Yanukovych’s upcoming meetings with the EU on an association agreement. He began by enumerating the economic benefits for Ukraine if it is to join the Customs Union (CU) with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Citing a Ukrainian Academy of Sciences study, he told Yanukovych that Ukraine’s GDP is expected to grow from 1.5 to 6.5 percent, ‘depending on the depth of integration’. He combined this with a warning: if Ukraine stays out of the CU, Ukrainian workers will no longer be able to travel freely to Russia. Putin concluded by saying that ‘now Ukraine faces a political choice’, as the economics are obvious. ¹³⁹ In a forum on the Rostov Oblast economy, Putin warned that if Ukraine signs an EU association agreement, Russia will have to consider controls on Ukrainian exports to Russia, as it will be hard to know if they are not really reexported EU goods that would be subjected to higher tariffs. ¹⁴⁰ He warned that if the Russian economy has to ‘protect itself’ from such Ukrainian goods, Gazprom might have to raise its currently concessionary natural gas prices for Ukraine. ¹⁴¹

Putin publicly worried what would happen to joint Russian–Ukrainian production, such as in missiles and aviation, suggesting the Russian market might be closed to such exports from Ukraine. ¹⁴² Moreover, the moment Ukraine signs up with the EU, its free trade agreement with Russia will become null and void, so higher tariffs will be imposed on Ukrainian exports. ¹⁴³ He promised Ukraine a better deal from the EU if Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan would negotiate as one. ¹⁴⁴

On the day before demonstrations erupted in Kiev over Yanukovych’s delay in presenting the EU association agreement to parliament for ratification, Putin said, ‘Ukraine can make its choice; we respect it, but it will have negative consequences’. No matter what, ‘the fraternal status of our peoples is not being cancelled, it is not going anywhere’. ¹⁴⁵ By early December, Putin was accusing the Maidan demonstrators of ‘trying to overthrow the legitimate, I want to stress, legitimate, authority’ in Ukraine. ¹⁴⁶

By 8 December, there were 500,000 protestors on the Maidan. The Russian counteroffer to Ukraine included a reduction in gas prices from US$400 to US$269 per 1000 m ³ , an agreement to resume production of the An-124 transport plane, construction of a bridge on Kerch Peninsula to Crimea, and US$15 billion in debt relief. ¹⁴⁷ Putin later justified the aid package by saying, ‘if we really say this is a fraternal people and country, then we must act like close relatives’. But he warned that if Ukraine joins the EU, it will become an agricultural appendage; its industries will not survive. It will need hundreds of billions of dollars to bring itself up to European standards, and it does not have the money, and nobody will give it to Ukraine. ¹⁴⁸

The day after 80 people died on the Maidan, on 21 February, Putin’s representative, Aleksandr Lukin, and the foreign ministers of Poland, Germany, and France, reached an agreement that an interim government would be established in Ukraine, with elections to be held in November. ¹⁴⁹ Yanukovych fled Kiev the next day. On 27 February 2014, the occupation of Crimea began. A referendum was held on 16 March. EU and US sanctions against Russia were announced the next day. In his 18 March speech welcoming Crimea and Sevastopol as two new subjects of the Russian Federation, Putin revealed his thinking: ‘Our Western partners have stepped over the line, behaved crudely, irresponsibly and unprofessionally … Without Russian sovereignty over Crimea, both Russia and Ukraine can lose it’. ¹⁵⁰

While the predominant discourse of Russian national identity, and the discursive constitution of Ukraine within that discourse, made the annexation of Crimea and support for eastern Ukrainian rebels commonsensical in that discourse, it was the precise concatenation of circumstances that favored Crimean annexation at that moment. The first is the sense of betrayal. Russia had reached agreement with the United States and Western Europe on a negotiated solution to the Ukrainian crisis, and yet Yanukovych was forcefully driven from power. At the least, the West had gone for the ‘exploitation payoff’ in this Prisoners’ Dilemma game, refusing to try to convince the Maidan demonstrators and their political representatives to abide by the 21 February agreement. After all, the latter were very likely to have won the November elections foreseen by the agreement. At worst, the West had put the Maidan demonstrators up to the coup and been conniving all along in Yanukovych’s ouster.

Either account of the West’s inactions or actions made it appear that Ukraine was not just heading toward the EU but was also heading toward NATO. This possibility made the occupation of Crimea absolutely essential; there could not possibly be a hostile NATO naval base in Crimea, especially given Imperial Russia’s valiant military struggles over centuries to secure this territory for Moscow. As Putin more evocatively characterized the threat, ‘This would have excluded Russia from this region, for which so many Russian bones have been buried over previous centuries’. ¹⁵¹ Speaking to Russian ambassadors, Putin warned that ‘everything Russia has fought for since Peter the Great was threatened’ by the coup in Kiev. ¹⁵² In this sense, Russia launched a preventive war in Crimea to deny NATO this opportunity.

These understandings of Western motives were arrived at against the background of years of accumulated resentment against US unilateralism in world affairs: in Eastern Europe with NATO expansion; in the FSU with support for regime changes; and the world in general, in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Nor would either the annexation of Crimea or the support for rebels in eastern Ukraine have been possible absence numerous discontented Russians in these Ukrainian territories. ¹⁵³ In this sense, we might conclude that there are certain scope conditions for further Russian territorial aggrandizement: Russian regard for a foreign population as fraternal, that population’s own expression of discontent with its government, and the prospects of NATO membership promising a geopolitical setback for Moscow.

Conclusion

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and subsequent military intervention in eastern Ukraine were surprising and troubling to most in the West. The discursive history of Russian national identity over the last 25 years perhaps does not make Russian actions any less troubling but should make them more understandable. Russia’s discursive terrain began as polarized between the Conservative neo-Soviet identity of the system that was just overthrown, and a Liberal Western future promised by Gorbachev and his still more Liberal opponents. But the realities of 1992 and thereafter rapidly opened the ground for an understanding of Russia that would reject the purist visions of both Liberals and Conservatives. The economic collapse, political chaos, corruption, violence, and uncertainty of the 1990s discredited the Liberal understanding of Russia and its future. ¹⁵⁴ Western failure to invest economically in Russia in the 1990s in sums expected by Russians and required to make a difference, combined with creeping NATO expansion and the war in Kosovo undermined Liberal discourse, apparently fatally.

But continued Conservative adherence to the rejected Soviet model of economic management, ethnonational Russocentrism, and a foreign policy predicated on eternal conflict with the United States, steadily eroded this discourse’s creditability, as well. The final blow to Conservative understandings of Russia was Conservative support for Islamic terrorism against the United States after 9/11, in the face of the terrorist threat from Chechnya at home.

Within the predominant discourse, Ukraine was always part of a broader Slavic and Orthodox Christian family. ¹⁵⁵ Ukraine was, therefore, understood as a natural part of Russia’s regional project, whether the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Eurasian Economic Union, or a restored Soviet Union. Ukraine’s identity relationship with Russia has critically changed as Russia came to understand itself increasingly as an authentic Russia apart from Europe and the West. This made Ukraine still more important to constituting the Russian Self, rooted as it was in historical Rus’, Orthodoxy, and Empire. Those social and cultural aspects of the Soviet Union that were evaluated positively in Russian discourse were seamlessly and naturally applied to Ukraine, who was assumed to share this common mentality, culture, history, and physical and ideational infrastructure. Ukraine was becoming an increasingly intrinsic constitutive part of the Russian Self, one whose separation from Russia was increasingly understood as unnatural, unthinkable, and, indeed, dangerous. The February 2014 overthrow of Yanukovych did not just threaten Russian geopolitical interests in Crimea; the fear of a possible NATO base in the Black Sea was real. But in Russian eyes, the removal of Yanukovych was also an existential threat, as Ukraine has become an inalienable part of Russia itself.