Russian Nationalism: Putin’s Fragile “Russian World”

The Kremlin justifies the military operation in the Donbass with allegedly threatened “Russians” who live there. But Putin’s notion of who and what is Russian is “scientifically untenable,” says Russia expert Schmid.

tagesschau.de: In the Russian language there are two concepts for nationality. When is which term used – and by whom?

Ulrich Schmid: “Russkij”, in German “Russian”, refers to the Russian culture, the Russian language, and “rossijskij” refers to the official name of the state and denotes everything that belongs to the state (“Rossiya”), to the federation. In German you can translate this as “Russian”. Colloquially, the use of “russkij” dominates in Russia – as soon as one speaks of “rossijskij”, everything that is said takes on an official connotation.

tagesschau.de: For several years now, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been coining the term “Russkij mir”, ie a Russian world. What does he imagine? And who is included?

Smith: This has to do with the idea of ​​Russia as a unique civilization. Moscow happily accepted Samuel P. Huntington’s thesis of the “clash of civilisations” and turned it into a political directive: yes, there are different civilizations, and yes, they should clash.

This self-confidence of being a separate, non-Western civilization has led to the development of corresponding institutions. And the most important institution is the “Russkij mir” foundation, which has existed since 2007 and is intended to show that Russian culture reaches far beyond the territory of the Russian Federation and has an identity-forming effect.

tagesschau.de: Is that an idea that Putin himself coined, or did he just adopt and promote it?

Smith: Such ideas have existed since the 19th century: at that time, the so-called Slavophiles repeatedly spoke of a Russian civilization. This discourse receded into the background in the Soviet Union because the political identity was not to be defined nationally but socially. A Soviet patriotism was propagated that would replace pride in belonging to the Russian or Ukrainian nation with a social class consciousness as a worker or peasant.

Solzhenitsyn’s “Trinity” of Nations

tagesschau.de: At the time of the Soviet Union there was the idea of ​​”druschba narodow”, the friendship of peoples. Why is friendship between different peoples not good enough for Putin as a link; why does he insist that Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians are one people?

Smith: The friendship of peoples does not primarily refer to the relationship between Russians and Ukrainians, but was seen as a connection between very different groups in the multi-ethnic Soviet Union. After the October Revolution, Lenin did everything in his power to create a positive counter-image to the tsarist empire. From a communist point of view, the Tsarist Empire was a prison for peoples and the young Soviet Union was a paradise for nationalities.

Then, in 1990, what didn’t belong together flew apart. The Soviet nationalities program had failed. The key concept to which Putin refers in his essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” is the alleged “trinity” of East Slavic peoples, i.e. Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. The religious imagery is of course deliberately chosen. Here, Putin is continuing the conservative tradition of thinking of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who repeatedly conjured up this East Slavic “trinity”.

tagesschau.de: What turn did national understanding take in Russia in the “Putin era”, i.e. since 2000? Since the 2010s in particular, plans for “patriotic education” and a Russian interpretation of history, for example through the “Russian Military-Historical Society”, have come to the fore.

Smith: Here you have to distinguish between claim and reality. The claim was actually that you create a Russian patriotism that is based on a Russian cultural core. However, this project failed: in 2016, Putin even proposed a law “about the Russian nation”, which failed because of the objections of the non-Russian constituent republics in the Russian Federation, above all Tatarstan and Dagestan. They resisted because they wanted to defend their own cultural traditions against Russian Orthodox dominance.

Next step: incorporation of the “People’s Republics”?

tagesschau.de: In Putin’s speech, we saw how he first stripped another nation – Ukraine – of statehood and then accorded it two self-proclaimed “People’s Republics”. How do you rate this speech compared to Putin’s understanding of what belongs to “Russkij mir”?

Smith: Yesterday he highlighted the tradition of a unified, historical Russia. That, too, is a speech bubble that the Kremlin keeps using: Russia has a thousand-year history – and of course that also includes the first East Slavic state entity, Kyiv Rus.

That he now also recognizes the self-proclaimed “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk as states follows the pattern of South Ossetia and Abkhazia after the 2008 war in Georgia – and I suspect the next step we’ll see will be the incorporation of Donetsk and Luhansk as be new federal subjects in the Russian Federation.

tagesschau.de: The rulers in Donbass supported by Moscow are not referred to there as separatists, but as “people’s militias”; In the past few weeks and days, Moscow has launched massive false reports of an alleged genocide, a genocide in Donbass, which is in progress. Which people do you mean?

Smith: The argument of an alleged genocide not only appears in false reports, but also in Putin’s speech: He explicitly used the term “genocide” and referred to the situation of the “Russians” in the Ukrainian Donbass. When Crimea was annexed in 2014, the Kremlin used the genocide argument: one had to intervene to prevent bloodshed. Putin qualifies the Russian-speaking residents of the Donbass as “ethnic Russians” who are allegedly being persecuted by the Ukrainian state because of their language or culture. This is scientifically untenable.

tagesschau.de: How does Putin want to justify that these two small territories should also belong to Russia?

Smith: Putin has repeatedly pointed out that there are allegedly millions of “ethnic Russians” in Ukraine who dream of returning home. As an example of the imbalance of such an argument, I refer to my own situation: You could also describe me as an ethnic German in Switzerland – but that would of course completely miss my civic identity as a Swiss citizen. It is just as short-sighted and misguided to describe Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine as ethnic Russians.

“Putin’s Greatest Fear”: The Collapse of Russia

tagesschau.de: So Putin himself does not derive his understanding of nationality from very different characteristics: religion and culture, the historical territory of Russia, the language. In eastern Ukraine, on the other hand, people’s affiliation with Russia is tied to their passport. Why so vague – and why is it important to Putin to recognize two “people’s republics” as sovereign states when in his eyes everything is Russian in the end?

Smith: Here you can draw a nice comparison to Germany: Germany only functioned when it really became a federation. In the interwar period, Germany was Prussian-dominated – similar to how the Russians, “russkie”, dominate in Russia today. But unlike in Germany, the Russian Federation has federation subjects at very different levels, from cities with federal importance such as Moscow or Sevastopol to autonomous regions and republics. The whole thing is a relatively fragile entity – Putin’s greatest fear is that what happened to the Soviet Union could happen to the Russian Federation: it would fall apart.

And precisely because the identification between Russians and Russians varies, the passport can be a link that is linked to a civic identity – similar to the decisive symbol that held the Federal Republic together after World War II, the D-Mark. I can imagine that the Russian passport should take on a comparable function.

tagesschau.de: Where does Putin’s seeming obsession with Ukraine and the people who live there come from, as he has cultivated it since 2014?

Smith: This obsession started much earlier, at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, when NATO said in an unfortunate formulation with no time horizon: Ukraine and Georgia will be NATO members.

Since then, Putin has been doing everything he can to bring Ukraine back into the Russian Federation’s sphere of influence. Euromaidan 2014 was a major setback for him. The situation we saw then – the annexation of Crimea and Russia’s covert aggression in the Donbass – is only the second-best option for Russia. Actually, Russia intended Ukraine to be the cornerstone of the Eurasian Economic Union founded in 2015. Of course that’s over.

Putin also seems to have completely lost touch with Ukrainian reality. In recent years he has repeatedly indicated that it might be time for Russian-Ukrainian reconciliation and rapprochement. I think it won’t be a matter of years, but of generations.

The conversation was led by Jasper Steinlein, tagesschau.de