Maintenance. For Vladimir Putin, as before for the Soviet leaders and the tsars, the main danger comes from the West and its influence. University professor and researcher at the Sciences Po History Center, historian Sabine Dullin, author notably of The Thick Border. The origins of Soviet policies (EHESS, 2014) and The irony of fate. A History of the Russians and their Empire (Payot, 2021), deciphers the strategy of the Russian president.
In the eyes of Vladimir Putin, how far do Russia’s borders extend?
The vision of Russia’s borders has undoubtedly evolved with Mr. Putin. What has not changed, on the other hand, is the imperative of a “thick” border, that is to say with the widest possible buffer zone to preserve Western influences.
A mid-ranking KGB officer, stationed in Dresden, in the former East Germany, Vladimir Putin was trained to love and serve the great Soviet country, a continent-state which established itself before 1989 as a sort of evident on maps, from Minsk to Vladivostok, from the Arctic to the Black Sea, and which has an immense glacis of satellites.
Mr. Putin identifies with this great power destiny, and the territorial decay of the USSR makes him ashamed. Since becoming president, he has taken on the stature of a unifier of Russian, Russian-speaking and Orthodox lands. On July 12, 2021, he developed, in an article, his conception of history, where the driving role is that of the “Great-Russian” nation, around which the Belarusians and Ukrainians almost naturally gravitate, whom he often prefers to be called “Little Russians”.
Does the strongman of the Kremlin carry a “Great Russian” project, like that of a “Greater Serbia” by Slobodan Milosevic?
The spirit of reconquest and the historical argument on the cradle of the nation bring the two dictators closer together. Mr. Putin retroactively annexes the Rus of kyiv (IXand-XIIIand centuries) to the Russian state. Similarly, Mr. Milosevic wanted Kosovo, recalling the sacred battle known as “the Field of Blackbirds” in 1389. These operations make it possible to deny the contemporary sovereignty of neighboring nations.
But, unlike Serbian nationalism, Russian nationalism is not ethnic, and it has never really departed from its imperial envelope. This is what makes the boundaries of the Russian nation so difficult to map. The Russian Empire encompassed multiple nationalities and religions. The Muslims were, at the beginning of the XXand century, more numerous in the Russian Empire than in the Ottoman Empire. Acculturation increased the number of Russian speakers among non-Russian populations, but without creating Russian ethnicity. Mr. Putin thus makes himself the spokesperson, on the scale of Eurasia, of the Russian-speaking communities. It is a great power nationalism, which despises the “cave nationalism” Ukrainians.
You have 74.38% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.