Taking issue with economistic accounts of the Russian Special Military Operation, Maxim Lebsky looks at the role of the ideology of the “Russian world.” Translated from Russian by Alex Andreev. Originally published here. 

Introduction

From February 2022 onwards, the Special Military Operation became the centerpiece of the Russian news and political agenda. For more than a year now, active hostilities have been going on between the Russian and Ukrainian armies, as well as various paramilitary formations. The SMO has become a high point for private military campaigns, which are not entirely private given the scale of their activities and ties to the Russian state.

Of course, such a major regional conflict needs an explanation. What caused it and what are the interests of the parties? What is the role of the US and NATO? Is Ukraine a puppet of the West or an independent player on the political field? The list of questions can be continued.

My article, of course, certainly does not pretend to be an exhaustive analysis of the conflict, which includes many components. A full and deep analysis will have to be carried out by future historians when the necessary documents and more complete information are available. In my material, I will try to concentrate on the ideological and political prerequisites for the conflict, considering them through the prism of the concept of the “Russian World”.

The special military operation has become a major watershed for the entire Russian society. Marxists are no exception. In the context of the topic of the article, I am interested in precisely that part of the communists who did not support the SMO and tried to conduct a critical analysis of the reasons for its start. Among them was the economist Oleg Komolov, who recorded a series of videos¹ on the YouTube channel “Prime Numbers”, which can be collectively called “Reasons for the Special Military Operation”.

Komolov bases his analysis on a synthesis of Marxism and the world-systems approach. He believes that the conflict between Ukraine and Russia was caused by inter-imperialist contradictions between the center of the system represented by the US and the EU and the sub-regional imperialist Russia. This is a general trend, and on the whole it is noted that it is correct, in my opinion.

Next, Komolov, from the analysis of macroeconomic processes on the scale of the world economy, descends to the relations between Russia and Ukraine. He cites numerous statistics on the economic activity of Russian companies in Ukraine. Over the past 20 years, Russia has invested about $17 billion in the Ukrainian economy, gaining important positions in the oil and gas sector, electric power, metallurgy, engineering, construction and the financial sector. Considering that a significant part of the investments of Russian companies came to Ukraine through offshore accounts (Cyprus ranks first in FDI in Ukraine), then the amount of Russian direct investment in the Ukrainian economy was higher than the 17 billion dollars indicated by Komolov.²

The Maidan of 2014 seriously undermined the position of Russian capital; forces came to power in Ukraine interested in squeezing Russian companies out of the local market. This process dragged on for 8 years, which was accompanied by the forced sale by Russian companies of a number of their assets. At the same time, it should be noted that economic cooperation between Russia and Ukraine developed even after the annexation of Crimea to Russia in 2014.

In 2010, the share of Russia in the total volume of accumulated foreign direct investment in the economy of Ukraine was estimated by Ukrstat at 5.8%; in the rating of the largest investors in Ukraine, Russia then occupied the fifth place. By the end of 2015, the share of Russia increased to 7.8%, by the beginning of October 2016 it exceeded 10%.³ At the same time, the decline in Russian direct investment in Ukraine in 2014 is explained not only by political factors. According to IMEMO experts, the decline in Russian investment in Ukraine was due to a 70.3% revaluation of assets due to the devaluation of the hryvnia and the general deterioration in the situation in the Ukrainian economy.⁴

Table 1. Mutual FDI of the Russian Federation and Ukraine in billions of US dollars (as of the end of the year).⁵ Central Bank data.

According to Komolov, Russian capital was interested in returning the investments invested in the Ukrainian economy and the lost spheres of economic influence. The return of Ukraine to the sphere of influence of Russian capital would also contribute to the strengthening of Russia’s economic and political influence throughout the post-Soviet space. Thus , the NVO is an attempt by the Russian ruling class to reclaim their economic assets in Ukraine.

Which of Komolov’s arguments seem contradictory to me?

Komolov cites a lot of economic statistics and a quote from V.I. Lenin, which says that behind any ideas you need to see the class interest. Oleg’s mistake is that he equates class interest with purely economic interest. All of Russia’s actions in the post-Soviet space are allegedly dictated by the purely economic interests of the oligarchs and big business.

Ideology is only a screen to cover material interests. Interestingly, within the framework of this analysis, ideology is some kind of secondary tool for brainwashing the population. Politicians themselves are guided by purely material interests. Apparently, only Marxists can sincerely believe in ideas.

Criticism of Komolov’s theses should start with the fact that 17 billion dollars (even assuming that the real amount is 4-5 times higher than the indicated figure) for the Russian state is clearly not the money for which it was necessary to take such a radical step as the SMO. Judging by purely economic interests, ties with the EU and the world market were much more important for Russia than Ukraine and the entire post-Soviet space. For example, in 2021, Russia received $267 billion from oil and gas exports, i.e. in a month, Russia received more than it had invested in Ukraine in 20 years.

According to the Federal Customs Service (FCS), Russia exported goods to the EU worth $188.1 billion in 2021. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), Russia sent 140 billion cubic meters of natural gas to the EU in 2021. And according to the FCS, in 2021 Russia exported a total of 203.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas. As a result, 75% of natural gas supplies from Russia came from the EU.⁶

The total export of Russian oil in 2021 amounted to $110 billion for 230 million tons. Europe accounted for approximately 108 million tons, or $50.9 billion. It turns out that half of the proceeds from the export of crude oil were sent to Russia from the EU. It is the same with oil products, which brought Russia about 70 billion dollars for 144 million tons. Of these, 60 million tons are in Europe.

In 2021, the EU remained Russia’s key trading partner. European countries accounted for 35.9% of Russia’s total foreign trade turnover, and taking into account the UK, this figure will grow to 39.3%. The “extremely important” for Russia CIS accounts for only 12.2% of Russian trade turnover, Ukraine – only 1.6%.

At the same time, it is worth remembering that the Russian side took reciprocal steps to reduce trade with Ukraine. Since January 1, 2016, Russia has completely banned the import of agricultural products from Ukraine.⁷ Ukraine did not remain in debt and introduced a ban on the import of many food and industrial products from Russia. In 2017, Kiev imposed sanctions against the Russian enterprise Eurochem and its subsidiaries, as a result of this step, the export of Russian fertilizers to Ukraine was halved – from 67% to 33% in 2018. Since March 2017, Russian banks – Sberbank⁸, VTB, BM Bank, Prominvestbank, VS Bank – it was forbidden to withdraw capital from Ukraine.

You can give different figures, but the conclusion remains the same – the economic ties of Russian capitalism with the EU were much more important than all the post-Soviet countries combined. And the fact that these relations would become very complicated after the start of the SMO was quite obvious. Yes, of course, the Russian leadership did not expect such a sharp and united reaction from Western countries. The Kremlin was betting on the rapid capture of Kiev and the creation of a puppet government, but it is somehow strange to believe that this action had, above all, an economic motivation – to return $ 17 billion, when Russia risked losing a much larger amount.

Since the beginning of the NWO, Russia has suffered significant economic losses. Gazprom’s exports to its key foreign markets in 2022 decreased by 46%, to 100.9 billion cubic meters, thereby reaching the lowest level in the history of the company.⁹ Almost the entire decline in exports fell on the EU countries, deliveries to which decreased by 2.5 times.

In February 2023, against the backdrop of the entry into force of Western sanctions, Russia’s revenues from the sale of oil and gas dropped by 46% in annual terms, to 521 billion rubles.¹⁰

According to the Federal Customs Service of Russia, in 2022 Russia’s energy export revenues amounted to $383.7 billion, which is a record figure for at least the last 27 years.¹¹ According to the International Energy Agency, in January 2023, Russia’s oil and gas export revenues decreased by 38% compared to January 2022.¹²

Taking into account the losses from the freezing of part of the gold and foreign exchange reserves, we are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. I can’t recoup such amounts for the seizure of the territory of partially deindustrialized Ukraine. In response to this, one can say that the Russian leadership made a mistake and was drawn into a protracted conflict. But should Vladimir Putin and his entourage be so underestimated? Naturally, I do not have access to secret documents, but it is interesting that in 2014 a video¹³ was distributed on the Vkontakte social network, which was made, in all likelihood, by order of the presidential administration of the Russian Federation. It was directed against supporters of the entry of Russian troops into the Donetsk and Lugansk regions and it calculated the consequences of the outbreak of a full-scale war between Ukraine and Russia. The video was about new sanctions, the freezing of gold and foreign exchange reserves and other Russian accounts, which were implemented by Western countries in 2022. It is strange to assume that at least part of these negative consequences were not taken into account in the Kremlin.

Komolov’s mistake is to underestimate the role of politics and ideology. Class interest includes several components and is not limited to purely economic motives.

Many examples can be cited when the actions of the imperialists were not based on the primary task of capturing resources and new markets. Was the Vietnam War important for the US to capture the “important Vietnamese market” or as part of a global political and ideological confrontation with the USSR? Russia is not the USSR, but this does not negate the fact that there may be obvious ideological contradictions between imperialist countries. The political elite can sincerely believe that it is carrying out a certain historical mission, realizing certain national tasks. The thinking of the representatives of the ruling class is permeated with an ideology that cements the class order both in the personal and in the public consciousness.

In practice, this means that in no case can Marxism be reduced to a purely economic explanation of what is happening. We thus limit our analytical capacity by assuming that people will always act out of purely economic motives. In reality, this is often not the case.

Class interest is a complex set of interests that includes economics, politics, ideology, and culture. The ultimate goal of the ruling class is to ensure its total hegemony in all the above areas, and this can be achieved in a variety of ways.

Criticism of Vulgar Economism

When analyzing the premises of the Special Military Operation, it is important to avoid vulgar economism, following which some Marxists interpret any action of the ruling class as the task of gaining control over material resources and new markets. Undoubtedly, Ukraine has a favorable geographical position, acting as a transit territory through which Russia exports its energy resources. “Gazprom” is engaged in pumping gas through Ukraine even now in the conditions of hostilities.

However, since the late 1990s Russia has been building new gas pipelines that bypass Ukrainian territory in order to deprive Kyiv of the ability to exert economic pressure on the Kremlin, as happened during numerous gas wars. However, the diversification of gas supply routes did not lead to a complete bypass of the Ukrainian territory: in 2020, Gazprom delivered to Europe, including Turkey, 174.9 billion cubic meters of gas¹⁴, of which Ukrainian transit accounts for 55.8 billion cubic meters.¹⁵

If the Kremlin were guided by purely economic motives, then Russia should by no means start the SMO before the full certification of Nord Stream 2. As a whole, it is unprofitable for Russia as a gas exporter to conduct military operations on the territory through which gas transits. This undermines its credibility as a reliable supplier of energy raw materials.

The economic losses of Russia from the beginning of the military operation in Ukraine are already obvious, while the benefits are still visible only in the extremely distant future (development of agricultural and industrial resources of Ukraine). Against the backdrop of unprecedented sanctions against Russia, even some Russian oligarchs (V. Lisin, V. Alekperov, L. Mikhelson, M. Fridman, O. Deripaska) allowed themselves to slightly criticize the start of the military campaign. Thus, the oligarchs violated the agreement that was concluded at the beginning of the first presidential Putin: the oligarchs do not get involved in politics, but are only engaged in business. M. Khodorkovsky paid the price precisely for the violation of this agreement. It is too early to talk about a full-fledged split in the elites, but centrifugal tendencies in the conditions of the economic crisis and external pressure will inevitably increase. Now these contradictions are most clearly expressed in the form of a confrontation between E. Prigozhin, the head of the PMC “Wagner”, and the leadership of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.

Of course, every military conflict is ultimately a struggle for the distribution of resources and positions of power. However, ideology also acts as an important symbolic capital, which reflects the provision of this or that class about its “historical right” to dominate a given territory and exploit its resources. The point is that ideology is not a cover for class interests, but their expression through the prism of historical and philosophical concepts.

The historical process develops in a much more complex way than a simple abstract scheme. This was well understood by the classics of Marxism. Let me quote a great quote from Friedrich Engels:

According to the materialist conception of history, in the historical process, the determining moment in the final analysis is the production and reproduction of real life. Neither I nor Marx ever claimed more. If someone distorts this position in the sense that the economic moment is supposedly the only determining moment, then he turns this statement into a meaningless, abstract, meaningless phrase .

The economic situation is the basis, but the course of the historical struggle is also influenced and in many cases mainly determined by the form of its various elements of the superstructure: the political forms of the class struggle and its results – the political system established by the victorious class after the battle won, etc. legal forms and even the reflection of all these actual battles in the brains of the participants, political, legal, philosophical theories, religious beliefs and their further development into a system of dogmas.

There is an interplay of all these moments, in which the economic movement, as a necessary thing, finally makes its way through an infinite number of contingencies (that is, things and events whose internal connection is so remote or so difficult to prove that we can neglect it, consider that it is not exists). Otherwise, applying the theory to any historical period would be easier than solving a simple equation of the first degree.

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Marx and I are partly to blame for the fact that young people sometimes attach more importance to the economic side than they should. We had to, in objecting to our opponents, emphasize the main principle that they rejected, and we did not always find the time, place and opportunity to do justice to the rest of the moments involved in the interaction. But as soon as it came to the analysis of any historical period, that is, to practical application, the matter changed, and there could no longer be any mistake. Unfortunately, quite often it is believed that the new theory is fully understood and can.¹⁶

Economic interests are mediated by many other factors that form a structured system of interests of the ruling classes. No matter how much we like it, politicians are the same people as we are, with their own beliefs and views on the world. Such views become especially important in authoritarian political systems, in which there is no system of checks and balances, and the main power is concentrated in the hands of one person and the ruling elite close to him.

In this regard, it seems to me important to consider the history and essence of the ideology of the Russkiy Mir. Liberals see this idea as almost a new form of fascism, while some nationalists consider the Russkiy Mir as the framework of Russia’s new state ideology. Putin himself has repeatedly turned to the idea of the “Russian world”. For this reason, it is extremely important to consider the history and essence of this concept without emotional assessments based on facts.

History of the “Russian World”

The phrase “Russian World” was used by individual authors as early as the Middle Ages. We can also find this expression in the writings of the historian Nikolai Ivanovich Kostomarov and Count Sergei Uvarov, the creator of the theory of “official nationality”. However, the “Russian World” did not receive a detailed justification as some kind of special philosophical or political concept. The roots of the modern ideology of the “Russian World” go back to the Soviet era.

Since the late 1950s in the Soviet Union, the Moscow Methodological Circle operated – a group of intellectuals united around the philosopher Georgy Petrovich Shchedrovitsky. What is the philosophy of Georgy Shchedrovitsky, if it is presented in a simplified form? Shchedrovitsky believed that all knowledge is a methodological scheme. For Shchedrovitsky, what is important is not the object that must be described in knowledge, but the action that must be performed, being the goal and foundation of thinking.

The philosopher singled out universal schemes from the variety of forms of activity, as he called them “the scheme or stencil of the act of activity.”¹⁷ Methodologists studied these schemes of activities to use them in their practice. The methodologist is not a passive observer of events, he can and must actively intervene in the process in order to project reality. The simplest method of design is expressed in the organization-active games.

Organizational-active games were dramatizations of emergency situations at the enterprise, during which the participants had to make quick decisions, while verbally explaining to the audience why they began to act this way and not otherwise. The game could be dedicated to the decommissioning of the power unit of the Beloyarsk NPP or the election of the director of the RAF minibus plant (Riga Automobile Factory). According to Shchedrovitsky’s idea, during the game, people learned the practices of effective communication, developing a technique for making quick and correct decisions through the work of the entire team.

Nevertheless, the question remains open, how, not being specialists in certain areas of industry, methodologists directed the work of the team in the course of organizational and activity games? How could they evaluate the correctness of this or that solution without going into the essence of the production and technological process? I confess that this is a mystery to me.

In one of his interviews, G. Shchedrovitsky said:

I am constantly asked: are there bad games? There are no unsuccessful games, since there is no criterion for failure. This is a very powerful and effective form, it can be extended to any questions, any content can be discussed in it. Most recently, I ran a political party organization game in the Soviet Union. It has a slightly pretentious name “Free Labor Party”. In games, technical and engineering tasks can be worked out, programs for the development of cities and the organization of their urban economy are being built.¹⁸

During the game, the methodologist acted as an organizer and mediator, which facilitated the interaction between different participants, since he could take the position of any side and hear the arguments of all the players. Thus, the methodology of G. Shchedrovitsky was the forerunner of corporate trainings, which are widely used today in many modern companies.

From 1979 to 1991 G. Shchedrovitsky held more than 90 organizational and activity games in various spheres of the national economy.

Pyotr Shchedrovitsky, who shared his father’s philosophy, wrote:

The development and change of activity appears and should appear before us as a two-faced Janus: on the one hand, as a process independent of people, capturing their activity and subordinating it to their spontaneous laws of development, as a “natural ”, and on the other hand, as a product of conscious and purposeful activity of people, as a product of planning, design, programming and implementation, as an “artificial”.¹⁹

Summing up a brief analysis of the philosophy of G. Shchedrovitsky, it is worth emphasizing that the system-thought-activity methodology was a kind of teaching aimed not only at facilitating communication between different participants in organizational-activity games, but at programming and creating new meanings that should have been perceived by the game participants as your own ideas. Those. in some way it was about manipulating people on the part of methodologists.

Many will probably ask themselves, what does the philosophy of G. Shchedrovitsky have to do with the ideology of the “Russian World”?

After the death of Georgy Shchedrovitsky in 1994, his son Peter continued his work. It was he and a number of his like-minded people who put forward the concept of the “Russian World” in the 1990s. As Pyotr Shchedrovitsky himself writes: “… the idea arose between 1993 and 1997, gradually crystallizing from a pre-understanding, an amorphous feeling of the desired form to a complete name “.²⁰

In the 1990s, when the number of orders from industrial enterprises to conduct organizational and activity games decreased, many methodologies became political technologists, participating in various election campaigns at the regional level. In fact, part of the methods developed by Shchedrovitsky Sr. in the Soviet years were transferred by Shchedrovitsky Jr. to the political field.

According to political strategist Marat Gelman (recognized as a foreign agent in the Russian Federation), in the 1990s methodologists were more of a “tool” of election campaigns, rather than their leaders and ideologists. According to him:

In the pre-election work there is the most important task – training the activists [that is, agitators]. The profession of “technologist”, “elector”, which could be obtained in any educational institution, [in Russia] does not exist. Campaigns happen infrequently, so a relatively narrow circle of technologists who travel around the regions regularly earn money in elections. They recruit people with more or less suitable skills to their headquarters, who need to be trained – and “methodologists” were quite often brought in for training. This [participation in elections in such a role] was definitely the gateway through which they entered the [political] technologies: “Since we can teach, we can also lead .”²¹

But methodologists were not enough just to organize election campaigns, they claimed more. Methodologists tried to create a new ideology. As Pyotr Shchedrovitsky recalls, in 1998 a certain high-ranking person from the Russian government ordered him to create a doctrine of Russian foreign policy in the post-Soviet space. Most likely we are talking about Sergei Kiriyenko.

Methodologists have begun to create a foreign policy doctrine not from scratch. Pyotr Shchedrovitsky began interacting with officials in 1993, when he was elected president of the Association of Innovative Schools. He tried to get funding for the development of educational programs, but was refused. Officials believed that it was pointless to invest big money in education – it is as stupid as heating an apartment with an open window. It was about the fact that having received a quality education in Russia, a person will inevitably go abroad.

Pyotr Shchedrovitsky himself recalled:

I found some conceptual solution to justify investment in the educational sector. This solution involved “forbidding”, opening the administrative boundary, in fact, its “cancellation” while simultaneously postulating another boundary, much more stable due to the specifics of its formation – in terms of language and way of thinking.²²

According to his concept, as a result of several waves of emigration abroad, large Russian diasporas (the Russian archipelago) have formed, which can become a network structure for broadcasting intellectual technologies and trade brands from and to Russia.

In the Manifesto of the New Generation, Efim Ostrovsky and Peter Shchedrovitsky wrote:

We Russians are a multinational people. Russians are not blood; Russians are a common destiny. The highest destiny of Russia is to fuse heat and cold, ice and fire in culture, to combine life and machine, to penetrate free fields and free oceans.

We are called to achieve the confluence of the world principles. Among the worlds growing and building on Earth, we are the one that absorbs everything, always remaining the source of a great dream. We have learned a lot, and we still have a lot to learn. Always new, Russia is looking for a new dream. Always moving, Russia is destined to search. The world of new Russia is not an advancing world looking for new lands . The world of Russia is an ascending world and unfolding new images of the future. The world of Russia is a dream world of freedom and happiness. About new ways for ever new people.

Today, the dramatic fork in which the core of the post-Soviet space – Russia is located is becoming more and more clear: either a new development model will be found, which will become the basis for the formation of a new people, or the territory of the Russian Federation, not having acquired a stable political and state form, will turn into an object of activity of world subjects of power – in the worst case – in a dump of human waste.²³

Russia needed Russkiy Mir to implement the strategy of innovative development, which involved solving the following tasks: 1. Formation of an innovative economy; 2. Human resource development; 3. Improving the institutional support for development processes within Russia .

Shchedrovitsky in the late 1990s. and subsequently denied that his concept involved the territorial expansion of Russia, it was about creating a core from the Russian Federation that would unite all Russian-speaking people in a single economic and cultural space. The main goal was to make Russia and Russkiy Mir centers of innovative technological and cultural development.

Shchedrovitsky wrote

International relations in the new era are changing their active, subjective nature. Diasporas, anthropostructures and global networks become centers for the development and adoption of decisions, which are then formalized by state obligations. In contrast to the Serbian scenario of the forceful solution of territorial, confessional and ethno-cultural problems, a cultural-political strategy and a humanitarian-technological approach to their diplomatic solution are being formed. Along with the framework of “personal rights” traditional for European political culture, the idea of the rights of peoples and small communities is looking for its place.²⁴

At the same time, in one of Shchedrovitsky’s articles there is the following phrase: “The powers that are moving from the geographical framework of imperial policy to cultural imperialism are gaining strength today.”²⁵ Of course, one can argue here how the author interprets the concept of “imperialism”, but in his texts he clearly defends the vision of Russia as a new empire, which should carry its values to other countries.

Shchedrovitsky considered Russian diasporas abroad as subjects of Russian cultural and economic policy. He wrote that in the last decades of the 20th century, the very type of warfare was changing – economic competition became its algebra. The brand, the trademark, is turning into the main weapon of the new generation of industrial wars. According to the journalist Andrey Pertsev, who devoted several articles to methodologists, the Russian World of Pyotr Shchedrovitsky – was supposed to become an intermediary for the promotion of brands and trademarks from Russia to the “new infrastructure centers” of the world of the future.²⁶

The ideas of the “Russian World” are not limited to the works of P. Shchedrovitsky. For example, the psychologist Yuri Vyacheslavovich Gromyko was a member of the methodological circle. In his articles, he wrote about the divided Russian people, whose body was “cut into pieces”.²⁷ During the collapse of the Soviet Union, a “truncated Russia” arose, leaving 25 million Russians outside its borders. Gromyko advocated building a networked and strong Russian diaspora with close ties to strong Russian centers within Russia.

In one of his texts, he wrote:

The Russians have forgotten the spell formula that they have to remember if they want to survive. This formula of the prototype of historical statehood is repulsed by the sin of regicide, and the anthropologists of the short course of the CPSU(b) are embedded on top of it. But representatives of Russian communities in the CIS countries have found themselves at the forefront of the struggle for the restoration of Russian self-consciousness, and it is awakening in them most quickly and clearly. This formula is connected with the restoration of the Russian World – Pax Russica – capable of absorbing and including many different ethnic groups and groups, but not through the self-limiting formation of a nation based on the purity of blood and genealogical series.²⁷

Vyacheslav Nikonov, chairman of the Russkiy Mir Foundation, established in 2007, identifies three areas in the interpretation of the Russkiy Mir concept:

Supporters of the geopolitical represented by the thinkers Vadim Tsymbursosky and Dugin. Supporters of this direction developed a concept called the “Island of Russia”.” It assumed isolation from the world, and the creation of an alliance of post-Soviet states that would provide Russia with security and a sovereign position in Eurasia.

The geoeconomic one was presented by Peter Shchedrovitsky. Shchedrovitsky spoke about the “Russian geo-economic world”, which is made up of a huge number of Russian diasporas, including those working in the high-tech sector. Reliance on these diasporas will help Russia connect to the technological and financial resources of the West.

The third school is the geocultural paradigm represented by the works of Sergei Gradirovsky and Boris Mezhuev. In their opinion, the goal of the Russian World is the integration of Russia with countries that are sources of migration flows, located mainly in the post-Soviet space. And in this sense, Russia should create communities on the basis of the British Commonwealth of Nations, or the Association of Iberian-American States, or the Community of Francophone Nations.²⁸

Among the members of the circle of methodologists were psychologists, philosophers, figures from various spheres of public life. But in the context of the topic of the article, we are interested in Pyotr Shchedrovitsky and Efim Ostrovsky. Shchedrovitsky and Ostrovsky in the late 1990s became political consultants of the Union of Right Forces, one of whose leaders was Sergei Kiriyenko. According to Shchedrovitsky himself, the idea of the “Russian World” was originally developed as a foreign policy concept of the Union of Right Forces.

However, the Union of Right Forces did not become a major political force, and Sergei Kiriyenko decided to become an official in the state apparatus. In 2000, Shchedrovitsky and Ostrovsky became advisers to Kiriyenko, who was appointed presidential envoy to the Volga Federal District. Interestingly, Kiriyenko in the early 2000s. together with methodologists, he held the competition “Golden Personnel Reserve of Russia”, which was designed to satisfy the shortage of personnel in the government.

At the same time, it is extremely difficult to determine the direction of the political views of the methodologists themselves. They were ready to work with a variety of politicians and parties. For example, Yefim Ostrovsky led the election campaign of the founder of the MMM financial pyramid, Sergei Mavrodi, in the Mytishchi single-mandate constituency in 1994. With the help of a political strategist, Mavrodi became a deputy of the State Duma.

According to Gelman and Pavlovsky, in 2002, Yefim Ostrovsky and Pyotr Shchedrovitsky campaigned for the Winter Generation Team electoral bloc of Ukrainian businessman Valery Khoroshkovsky, who ran for the Verkhovna Rada. According to Pavlovsky: “Khoroshkovsky made them rich. The campaign was a failure, the party didn’t get anywhere, but in our business, failed rather than victorious campaigns are more profitable.”²⁶

In their numerous interviews, methodologists present themselves as great intellectuals who, through Russian politicians, implemented their own ideas. In one of his interviews, Ostrovsky said:

I considered it completely unimportant which party would raise or lower its measure of power. I had to work with representatives of the right and left camps, and I knew that neither one nor the other force is the bearer of the project of the future Russia. One of my friends called me then “the resident of the future Russia in this country.²⁹

In 2005, Kiriyenko became the head of the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency Rosatom. Pyotr Shchedrovitsky himself became the Deputy General Director for Strategic Development of Rosatom, while at the same time being a member of the board of the state corporation. In 2011, Shchedrovitsky became Deputy Director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS).

As Andrey Pertsev, the author of a long article on the connections between methodologists and Russian authorities, notes, Shchedrovitsky’s followers were convinced that human consciousness can be constructed on the basis of certain and simple algorithms. If you master this technique, you can influence the population through a kind of political technology game, manipulation, in which the entire population of the country is involved.

Thus, Pertsev suggests that the Kremlin borrowed from methodologists not only the very idea of the “Russian World”, but also the principle of interaction between the authorities and society through manipulative political technology campaigns. Shchedrovitsky himself in an interview answered the question about the influence of the methodologists’ ideas on Kiriyenko:

I can only express my own assumption. I think that initially a number of ideas, conditionally mine, are wider – those ideas that I myself borrowed and developed in line with the system-thought-activity approach that my father developed, were quite productive for Sergey himself and his entourage, primarily in that part, which concerned the ideas of management, organization, leadership, i.e. to the extent that it was their real or imagined position in the social system. They were responsible for management tasks. I think that after some time, interest in these ideas began to decline and at some point, it actually disappeared.³⁰

A number of critics of the activities of methodologists go to a certain extreme and paint them as some kind of secret powerful order or sect that almost led Russia, manipulating high-ranking politicians. In my opinion, this is a big exaggeration. It is worth starting with the fact that the very idea of the existence of a single organization of methodologists is a mistake. After the death of Georgy Shchedrovitsky, his school broke up into many conflicting groups. Some of the methodologists became political technologists, having established cooperation with high-ranking officials, while the other part continued to study philosophy and psychology. Kiriyenko and a number of other politicians used some of the methodologists’ techniques and ideas, but they never gave Shchedrovitsky and other methodologists the opportunity to play a leading role.

Of course, it would also be a mistake to put an equal sign between the views of methodologists on the “Russian World” and how the modern Russian state is trying to implement this concept. But what was the important role of methodologists? To answer this question, we need to digress a bit and touch on the theory of nationalism. Researchers distinguish two types of nationalism: civil, it is also state, and ethno-cultural nationalism.

In modern science, this typology is criticized. The American researcher Rogers Brubaker believes that most nationalist movements are of a mixed nature, and both civic and ethno-cultural nationalism have an aggressive potential. Nevertheless, this typology remains dominant and I will base my analysis on it.

Civic nationalism is based on citizenship, i.e. belonging of inhabitants to a certain state with clear boundaries. The most striking example is France. All citizens of the country are French, as they are united by belonging to a single state and subject to common laws.

Ethnic or more precisely ethno-cultural nationalism was widespread in Central and Eastern Europe. It was based on the fact that the definition of a nation was based not on the state, but on language and culture. Members of a nation are all people who are carriers of a particular national language and culture. Thus, a state based on ethno-cultural nationalism blurs its own borders and claims to unite representatives of a divided nation. Such a claim implies a revision of the boundaries, i.e. conflicts and wars with other countries where part of a divided nation lives.

What significance does this typology of nationalism have for Russia? The disintegration of the Union State in the early 1990s, although it was accompanied by a sharp confrontation between the leadership of the RSFSR and the USSR, did not cause a rapid rise in Russian nationalism. In the Soviet years, the concept of “Russian” was in many respects identical with the identity of “Soviet people”. The crisis and collapse of Soviet society led to the loss of the former identification, which left behind a vacuum that politicians and publicists tried to fill, answering the question: who are the Russians?

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. in Russia, two concepts of nationalism competed: civil and ethno-cultural. Civic nationalism was expressed in the concept of “Russian” and defined belonging to a political nation through a person’s connection with a certain state – the Russian Federation, whose leadership, in turn, recognized the borders and national states that arose in the post-Soviet state in the 1990s.

The opposite concept was ethno-cultural nationalism, represented, for example, in the activities of the National Bolshevik Party (on April 19, 2007, it was recognized by the Moscow City Court as an extremist organization, its activities were banned on the territory of the Russian Federation), which was led by Eduard Limonov.

If we recall the activities and theses of this organization, then the NBP constantly raised the problem of the oppressed and inferior status of Russians who found themselves outside the borders of Russia. Russians in Kazakhstan or the Baltics for the nationalists were part of the Russian political nation, just like Russians from the Russian Federation. The first point of the NBP program of 1994 sounds like this:

The global goal of National Bolshevism is the creation of an Empire from Vladivostok to Gibraltar on the basis of Russian civilization. The goal will be achieved in four stages: a) The transformation of the Russian Federation into the national state of Russia through the Russian Revolution, b) The annexation of the territories of the former Soviet republics inhabited by Russians, c) Rallying around the Russian Eurasian peoples of the former USSR. d) Creation of a gigantic continental Empire.³¹

Supporters of such a view of the boundaries of the nation strive to implement the main requirement of nationalism, which was formulated by the scientist Ernest Gellner: “Nationalism is a political principle, the essence of which is that political and national units must coincide.”³² And this in most cases entails a revision of borders and conflicts with neighboring states.

Now let’s return to the methodologists from the school of P. Shchedrovitsky. Their key role was to actively disseminate an ethno-cultural version of nationalism among Russian officials. They argued that the borders of the Russian nation and the Russian world do not coincide with the borders of the Russian Federation, they are much wider. Of course, Russian diasporas abroad were considered by methodologists as subjects of Russia’s cultural and economic influence, but the concept itself allowed for the inclusion of completely different goals in it – the revision of post-Soviet borders and the annexation of new territories to Russia.

Russian civilization³³

 The modern ideology of the Russian political regime – “Russian World” – has become a kind of interweaving of the imperial paradigm, irredentist nationalism, Soviet patriotism and civilizational approach. The core of this concept is the idea of the existence of a special Russian civilization that must be protected from hostile civilizations. The Russian people have a special “cultural code” that does not allow them to become part of Western civilization.³⁴

Traditionally, primordialists consider the nation as an integral and unified entity, which, from the moment of its emergence or in the course of historical development, acquires certain universal properties that are preserved at different historical stages. In the thinking of Putin and other Russian politicians, primordialist ideas are applied not to a single ethnic group, but to the entire Russian civilization. A number of researchers call this position “civilizational nationalism“.³⁵

Supporters of the idea of the “Russian World” as a separate civilization believe that the confrontation between countries is not due to the interests of certain political parties and social forces, but to fundamental contradictions between different types of civilizations. Western civilization is constantly striving to weaken Russia by limiting its sphere of influence. Therefore, the political confrontation between Russia and the West is a natural and inevitable fact. It is laid down at a fundamental level and cannot be changed. Here it is not difficult to notice the influence on the ideologists of the “Russian World” of the work of N. Danilevsky “Russia and Europe” and the book of S. Huntington “Clash of Civilizations”.

The roots of the concept of the “Russian World” lay in the collapse of the USSR and the Soviet social community, during which about 25 million Russian people found themselves outside the borders of Russia. The peculiarity of the historical situation was that large Russian diasporas in the CIS were formed not by the departure of citizens from the state, but as a result of the compression of previously established borders.

American sociologist Rogers Brubecker analyzed the process of disintegration of multinational states in one of his articles.³⁶ He wrote about the formation of the diaspora of the cataclysm – a compactly living part of the nation, which was outside the boundaries of the main core of the nation as a result of the collapse of large states. As a result of this process, several types of nationalisms are formed. The first type is nationalizing nationalism. We are talking about new states that seek to form a political national community as quickly as possible and break cultural and other ties with the core of the old political system. In the post-Soviet context, we are talking about Ukraine.

In contrast to this type of nationalism, nationalism of the motherland is formed, focused on citizens of other countries, perceived as an integral part of a divided nation. This means that Russia considers it its right and duty to monitor how Russians live in other countries, supporting their political activity. It is interesting that these types of nationalisms can be combined in the policy of one state. As Brubaker notes:

Serbia acted as a militantly nationalizing state towards Albanians in Kosovo in the 1990s, while at the same time serving as an external national homeland for Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Croatia, in turn, pursued an equally tough policy towards the Serbs in the Serbian Krajina, while remaining an external national homeland for the Croats in Bosnia-Herzegovina .³⁷

The third type of nationalism, emerging from the ruins of multinational states, is generated by the diaspora of the cataclysm. We are talking about nationalist movements seeking to unite with a large motherland. In the context of the topic of the article, we are talking about Russian nationalists who acted in the Donbass and Crimea and advocated the accession of these regions to the Russian state. The modern conflict between Ukraine and Russia is a clash of three nationalist projects: nationalizing nationalism, nationalism of the homeland and nationalism of the cataclysmic diaspora.

However, a legitimate question may arise here, why did the conflict not start earlier, back in the 1990s? It is important to understand that Russian-Ukrainian relations must be considered not only in the regional, but also in the international aspect.

The modern conflict between Ukraine and Russia has become a manifestation of crisis tendencies in the development of the world capitalist system, during which the contradictions between the core and the semi-periphery have become aggravated.

In the 1990s the Russian oligarchs and bureaucracy were actively involved in the redistribution of the Soviet economic legacy; the fate of Russians in the Baltics or Ukraine was of little interest to them. But along with the stabilization of Russian capitalism in the 2000s. and building a new ruling class – the bureaucracy, the security forces, new and part of the old oligarchs of the 1990s. – the foreign policy ambitions of the Russian Federation have naturally grown.

In the 2000s Russia is turning into a regional imperialist player aimed at restoring its political, ideological and economic control over the post-Soviet space. In the course of implementing this plan, it faces, on the one hand, the resistance of the peripheral states represented by Ukraine and Georgia, and, on the other hand, the opposition of the imperialist core represented by the United States and the European Union. The imperialist center turns the periphery into an instrument of its policy, trying to limit the sphere of influence of the regional imperialist. As a result of a sharp struggle between the three centers of power, a number of local conflicts occur, the crown of which is the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

The conflict between Ukraine and Russia clearly includes an aspect of the global confrontation between Moscow and Washington. NATO’s advance into Eastern Europe, which began in the 1990s, did not worry the Russian ruling elite for a long time, which successfully built Russia into the world market as a semi-periphery of raw materials. Reciprocal steps were taken to build cooperation between Russia and NATO within the framework of the Permanent Joint Council and the Russia-NATO Council.

However, numerous attempts by the Russian leadership to negotiate with the United States on the division of spheres of influence did not lead to any firm agreements. The NATO leadership continued to insist that the doors of the alliance were open for the entry of new members and the issue of including Ukraine would be directly discussed between Kiev and Brussels (NATO headquarters), Moscow in this dialogue is an extra link.³⁸

In almost every speech on Russia’s relations with Western countries, Putin expresses resentment at the fact that Russia was not accepted among the so-called. “civilizational countries”. If we translate Putin’s words into the concepts of world-system analysis, then semi-peripheral Russia seeks to secure its own sphere of influence, which should not be encroached upon by the countries of the center of the world-system. The idea of non-interference in “foreign affairs” is the leitmotif of many speeches and articles by the Russian president. A divided world with clear-cut boundaries of spheres of influence is Putin’s proposal, with which neither the US nor the EU can agree, which, as the countries of the center, are trying to dominate not on a regional, but on a global scale.

The formation of the ideology of the “Russian World” was a natural result of the growth of the political and economic influence of Russia, which tried to gain a dominant position in the post-Soviet space, while occupying the position of a raw material semi-periphery in the international division of labor. Russia found itself in a contradictory position – close economic ties pushed it to establish relations with the imperialist center, and on the other hand, the inclusion of new Eastern European countries in NATO led to an aggravation of Russia’s relations with the West. It was this precarious situation that shaped Russia’s foreign policy, which tried to stop NATO’s eastward advance without cutting ties with the EU and the US. One step forward, two steps back. But such a fragile balance could not be maintained for a long time, the scales had to swing in favor of one of the parties. Political and ideological reasons outweighed the immediate economic interest, and Russia decided by military means to cut the knot of problems that had arisen in relations between Moscow and Kiev.

Now let’s briefly trace the history of the formation of the organizational structure of the “Russian World”.

In 2001, with the support of the Russian authorities, the first World Congress of Compatriots was held, which set the goal of “preserving ethno-cultural identity and maintaining ties with the historical Motherland”.³⁹ It is important to note that the definition of the category “Russian” included a cultural factor, not an ethnic one, i.e. Russian is defined not by blood, but by language, culture and historical traditions.⁴⁰

During his speech at the first World Congress of Compatriots Living Abroad in 2001, Putin stated that “the concept of the Russian world from time immemorial has gone far beyond the geographical borders of Russia and even far beyond the borders of the Russian ethnos.” Putin’s key idea at this stage was that Russia is not just a state with clear territorial boundaries. It is part of the Russian world, which includes all people who speak and think in Russian, regardless of where they live. At the same time, the Russian president emphasized that Russia is aimed at integrating into the world economy, and in this process, Russian diasporas abroad can play an important role.

In 2007, the Russkiy Mir Foundation was established, co-founded by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. With the support of the foundation, books began to be published, conferences and round tables were held. The foundation established its own system of grants, which were provided to various organizations that were engaged in the popularization of Russian culture and language. By the way, the first place in terms of the number of grants was occupied by organizations operating in Ukraine.⁴¹ The Foundation contributed to the creation of a network of Russian centers abroad. By 2009, 40 centers had been opened. The fund’s budget in 2011 amounted to about 500 million rubles.

The promotion of the Russian language and the support of programs for studying the Russian language abroad were announced as the official goals of the foundation.⁴² But in addition to the cultural task, it also set an informational one: it was about promoting the dissemination of “objective information” about modern Russia, Russian compatriots and the formation of a favorable public opinion towards Russia on this basis.

The boundaries of the “Russian World” in the documents of the foundation are formulated as vaguely as possible – in addition to the inhabitants of the Russian Federation itself, the “Russian World” includes any immigrants from Russia and their descendants, foreign citizens who speak Russian, study or teach it, all those who are sincerely interested in Russia.

According to researcher Ekaterina Penkova, the Russian World concept began to take shape institutionally with the presidential decree establishing the Russkiy Mir Foundation, whereas before that “the focus of the controversy was rather declarative”.⁴³

Head of the Russkiy Mir Foundation V.A. Nikonov believes that “the Russian world does not exist within state borders, this concept is not geographical, not religious, and, of course, not ethnic, it is, first of all, self-determination.” The Russian world as a phenomenon, according to Nikonov, arises on the basis of the Russian language and Russian culture.⁴⁴ According to him: “The Russian world is an independent civilization that is capable of carrying ideals, primarily developed within the country itself. It would be very good if this civilization would bring to the world the ideals of freedom, dignity, justice, sovereignty, mutual respect of states, faith, traditions.”⁴⁵

There are no explicit irredentist theses in the foundation’s documents. The emphasis was on the promotion of the Russian language and the inclusion of diasporas in the process of modernizing the Russian economy.

Along with the Russkiy Mir Foundation, the federal agency Rossotrudnichestvo, established in 2008, is also worth mentioning. The CIS countries are the priority in the Agency’s activities. We actively cooperate with international organizations, participate in assistance programs for the Commonwealth countries, and develop federal targeted programs. Inside Russia, we work with the regions and help them develop international contacts in the educational, scientific, technical, cultural, and economic spheres.”⁴⁶ In 2012, the budget of Rossotrudnichestvo was 2 billion rubles.

Along with the institutional development of the concept of the “Russian World” in the 2000s and 2010s. many articles and books are published in which publicists and scientists consider certain aspects of the idea of the “Russian World”. In fact, it was about the theoretical processing of the ideas of Peter Shchedrovitsky.

The well-known Russian ethnologist, director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences Valery Alexandrovich Tishkov, discussing the “Russian world” in one of his articles, focuses on the concept of “Russian”. Tishkov puts the ethno-cultural factor at the forefront, emphasizing that “the Russian language, the Orthodox Church and Russian culture are the three pillars of the Russian world.” The core of the “Russian World”, according to V.A. Tishkov, is Russia. He also pays special attention to such an element of the “Russian world” as the Russian-speaking diasporas outside of Russia.

When determining the belonging of people to the “Russian world”, Tishkov singles out linguistic and cultural factors as fundamental. In his opinion: “The Russian world is not just a statistical set of migrants from Russia. This is one of the forms of cultural behavior and identity, i.e. sensation, loyalty, and chosen service.”⁴⁷

In the 2000s Russia tried to present itself as the main defender of Russian culture and Russian diasporas in other countries. The basis of influence was supposed to be “soft power”, i.e. cultural influence through the creation of a network of Russian schools, the holding of various festivals, the promotion of the Russian language. Such a policy, of course, was not some original invention of the Russian leadership. Maintaining ties with diasporas and using the cultural factor as a “soft power” is part of the foreign policy of many countries.

For example, Germany has a whole network of non-governmental organizations that promote German culture in the world. We are talking about the Goethe Institute, the largest media corporation Deutsche Welle, the German Society for International Cooperation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the German Research Society, and a number of other organizations.

The leaders of the Russkiy Mir Foundation made little secret of the fact that they were striving to turn Russkiy Mir into an instrument of soft power. Methodologist Yuri Gromyko wrote:

Creating the Russkiy Mir Foundation, we did not reinvent the wheel. As it was rightly said here, many other countries took care of a similar problem much earlier than Russia. The most striking example is the British House ELC, not only in terms of the scale of its activities, but also in terms of budget. This is about 600-700 million dollars a year, which the state and big business allocate to popularize the language and culture of Britain. These are the Cervantes Institute, the Goethe Institute, the Dante Institute, and the Confucius Institute, which has become widely known in recent years. We try to take all the best from their activities and hope that the attention of our state and civil society to the problems of the Russian language will continue to grow, not only in our country, but also in other countries.⁴⁸

However, the principal boundary passes at the point where cultural and political influence is transformed into territorial claims, which inevitably leads to the emergence of irredentism. What is irredentism? The word itself comes from the Italian expression “terre irredente “- not redeemed lands. Irredentism is a political movement based on the requirement that ethnic and state borders coincide within a single political space.

Irredentism is a form of existence of nationalist movements that seek to unite the nation within the framework of a single state. Irredentism differs from separatism in that separatist movements most often try to create their own nation-states, while irredentists aim to unite with a large motherland. An example is the irredentist movement during the Italian Risorgimento of the 19th century, when the unification of Italy was underway. During this period, the question arose about the fate of the Italians living on the territory of Austria-Hungary. The irredentists fought for the Austrian territories, where the Italians lived compactly, to be annexed to Italy (Trentino and Trieste).

Very often, irredentism provokes military conflicts, as was the case with Nazi Germany, which sought to seize the western regions of Czechoslovakia, where the Volksdeutsche lived. In the 1990s irredentist movements actively developed in the territory of the former socialist Yugoslavia. Croatian and Serbian nationalists sought to include the territories densely populated by Croats and Serbs into their states.

Prior to 2014, irredentist goals were denied by the Kremlin, the emphasis was on preserving the cultural heritage and honoring the memory of veterans of the Great Patriotic War (St. George’s Ribbon and Immortal Regiment campaigns). However, over time, cultural tasks were transformed into political ones.

The ex-assistant to the President of Russia, Vladislav Surkov, describes the emergence of the “Russian World” idea in the following words: “When this idea was presented to me, what was the task? How to say about the empire, about our desire to expand, but at the same time not offend the hearing of the world community and modern people.”⁴⁹

The crisis of 2014 in Ukraine contributed to the rapid shift of the concept of the “Russian World” from the sphere of culture to the irredentist plane. The annexation of Crimea was the first irredentist action of the Kremlin, which testified to the intention of the Russian leadership to revise the post-Soviet borders. In my opinion, it would be wrong to talk about the existence of some clear-cut plan, which was implemented after Maidan 2014. The Kremlin was forced to largely respond to a serious political challenge, relying on the previously developed concept of the “Russian World”.

The transformation of soft power into hard power was not least due to the inability of Russia to attract the sympathy of the Ukrainian society with political, cultural, and other levers. Talk of soft power has not been accompanied by significant progress in building cultural and educational ties between Russia and Ukraine. If we look at the number of Ukrainian students in Russia in the 2000s then we will not see significant growth: 2000 – 4953 people, 2005 – 5473 people, 2013 – 5771 people. A sharp increase in the number of Ukrainian students is observed after the Euromaidan and the beginning of the civil war in Ukraine (2015 – 2015). – 12 264 people⁵⁰ ). But most of the Ukrainian students (30,041 people) chose to go to study in Poland.⁵¹

Vladimir Putin, in his speech on March 18, 2014, said that Russia was robbed and robbed in the 1990s, leaving behind its borders Russian historical territories in the Crimea and South-East Ukraine. He stated:

Millions of Russians went to bed in one country, and woke up abroad, overnight turned out to be national minorities in the former Soviet republics, and the Russian people became one of the largest, if not the largest divided people in the world. Frankly, our hearts are hurting for everything that is happening now in Ukraine, that people are suffering, that they do not know how to live today and what will happen tomorrow. And our concern is understandable, because we are not just close neighbors, we are actually, as I have said many times, one people. Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities (applause). Ancient Russia is our common source, we still cannot be without each other.⁵²

In another speech, Putin already speaks about the formation of a special cultural and genetic code among the inhabitants of Russia:

… our country, like a vacuum cleaner, drew in representatives of various nations, ethnic groups, and nationalities. On this basis, not only our common cultural code has been created, but also an exceptionally powerful genetic code. Because for all these centuries, millennia, there has been an exchange of genes. This genetic code is almost certainly one of our main competitive advantages in the outside world. It is very flexible and stable. We don’t even feel it, but it sure is there.⁵³

Between 2015-2021 the Russian leadership, apparently, could not completely decide to take new steps on the chosen path, trying to leave room for maneuver for itself. But on February 24, 2022, the Rubicon was crossed.

Of course, the idea of the “Russian World” is devoid of political neutrality. It acts as the ideology of the Russian ruling class, aimed at the ideological legitimization of their actions both within the country and in the international arena.

Vladislav Surkov said in an interview:

We are a divided people, our influence extends much further than the borders of the country. The Russian world is where people speak Russian, respect Russian culture, where our Putin is respected, and there are many of them, where they respect him. This is where they are afraid of Russian weapons and this is our influence. Where our scientists, writers are respected, art is all elements of the Russian world. Not every nation has that kind of influence.⁵⁴

In the context of Huntington’s ideas, it is worth asking what kind of clash of civilizations can we talk about in the case of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine? After all, Russians and Ukrainians belong to the same Orthodox community. The contradiction is resolved through the idea that Ukraine is a weak-willed puppet in the hands of Western countries.

The Russian president has repeatedly said that the Ukrainian leadership is not independent in its decisions, but is completely subordinate to external control. Thus, the Ukrainian state is seen as a weapon in the hands of the US and the EU, which is directed against Russia. Any political and national subjectivity is denied for Ukraine. Russians and Ukrainians are one people, and Putin’s task is to unite the two fragments of the great Russian nation. In his articles, Putin returns to the imperial concept of a large Russian nation. At the same time, it cannot be said that the population of Ukraine denied the closest ties with the Russians before the start of the SMO.

According to a social survey conducted by the Ukrainian sociological service “Rating” in July 2021, 41% of the polled citizens of Ukraine (excluding Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions) agreed with Putin’s statement that “Russians and Ukrainians are one people who belong to to one historical and spiritual space”. The regional spread of opinions is quite natural: Western Ukraine – 70% do not agree with the thesis of the President of the Russian Federation; in the East, 60% agree.⁵⁵

During the initial period of the Special Military Operation, Putin said nothing about the future borders of the Ukrainian state. On the contrary, he stated that in the near future the fate of the Ukrainian statehood itself could become questionable.

With the accession of the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions to Russia, it became completely obvious that the Kremlin is not aimed at creating an alternative Ukraine headed by V. Medvedchuk or V. Yanukovych. It can be assumed that the tasks of the Russian leadership included the maximum territorial expansion of the “Russian World” by including new regions of Ukraine in it.

Of course, this cannot find support even among the part of Ukrainians who were positive about Russia before February 2022. By launching the Special Military Operation, the Kremlin, with its own hands, gave the Ukrainian nationalists a powerful tool to mobilize and unite the Ukrainian nation, which had been divided over the previous decades. In an effort to unite the “Russian World”, the Russian leadership by its actions dealt a crushing blow to the unity of the East Slavic peoples, calling into question any integration projects in the post-Soviet space. As the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev correctly noted: “Putin wanted to be the father of a new Russian nation, but instead he became the father of a new Ukrainian nation.”⁵⁶

The concept of the “Russian World” in 2022 finally turned into a form of aggressive irredentism, which may become a source of new conflicts in the post-Soviet space in the future, given that many Russians live not only in Ukraine, but also in Kazakhstan. At the same time, it is important to understand that the conflict in question is not a struggle of imperial Russia against a free and European Ukraine. This is a clash of two nationalist states, on the side of one of which is the NATO bloc.

The vulnerable point of the ideology of the “Russian World” is a complete immersion in the past and the absence of any image of a common future. The main goal of the Russian regime at the ideological level is to preserve “traditional values” and restore a single political and cultural space of the “Russian World”. Russian politicians openly say that Russia during the time of Alexander III is their political reference point. They apparently forget that many unresolved issues during the reign of the peacemaker tsar were inherited by Nicholas II – ultimately leading to three Russian revolutions. Russkaya Mir is deprived of the image of the future as the most important component of many nationalist movements.

The French thinker Ernest Renan wrote that a nation is formed from two components – the myth of the great past and the myth of the great future:

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things that are essentially one make up this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other is in the future. One is the common possession of a rich heritage of memories, the other is a common agreement, the desire to live together, to continue to share the undivided inheritance inherited <…> To have common glory in the past, common desires in the future, to do great things together, to wish them in the future – that’s the main conditions for being a people.⁵⁷

The Kremlin is trying to actively broadcast the idea of the great glorious past of Russians and Ukrainians as part of the Old Russian state, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, but at the same time completely forgetting about the second component – the project of a “great future”. What was the ideological strength of the Soviet political project was that it tried to construct political nations within the framework of a single Soviet community that built a communist society. The USSR united the peoples in the course of a powerful spurt of modernization.

The Kremlin’s ideology is devoid of a blueprint for a common future for Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians, which makes it unlikely that an all-Union state would be created consisting of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Even the population of Belarus for the most part did not support the idea of full unification with Russia, judging by the 2020 polls.⁵⁸

The most important obstacle in this process is expressed in the unwillingness of the elites to sacrifice the fullness of their power and resources, creating a new vertical of power over themselves in the form of an allied center. Moscow, in turn, is unable to offer a modernized and economically successful project of common development that would attract people from the countries of the former USSR. In this situation, the Russian leadership can only develop the ideas of preserving the common past and “traditional values”.

Conclusion

To sum up this article, it is necessary to briefly once again outline the main stages in the development of the concept of the “Russian World”. In the late 1990s in the Moscow Methodological Circle, the idea arises of accumulating the efforts of Russian diasporas abroad and Russians on the territory of the Russian Federation to create a new technological and cultural project that would allow Russia to break into the leading countries in the new XXI century.

This was supposed to be done through the development of the most innovative areas in the economy and the spread of Russian culture abroad. Some of the methodologists had close ties with major politicians, among whom was Sergei Kiriyenko.

In the early 2000s with the coming to power of Putin, the ideas of methodologists and the methodologists themselves began to influence the formation of Russia’s foreign policy ideology. In 2007, the Russkiy Mir Foundation was created to promote Russian culture abroad. At the same time, the politicization of the concept of the “Russian World” is taking place, which becomes an ideological tool for promoting the foreign policy interests of the Russian Federation.

Euromaidan in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea to Russia finally transferred the idea of the “Russian World” from the cultural field to the irredentist one. Russia is embarking on the path of including into its composition the regions of Ukraine, where the Russian and Russian-speaking population lives compactly. However, in the period 2014-2021. Russia is trying to balance the economic interest of maintaining ties with the West and the growing political contradictions with the North Atlantic Alliance. In 2022, these contradictions reach a peak, which leads to a direct military clash between Russia and Ukraine, which is supported by the NATO bloc.

How this conflict will end is difficult to predict. It is unlikely that the victory of one of the parties will bring long-term peace and stability to our countries. For Russians and Ukrainians, a long period of steel thunderstorms has come. Still, despite the general bitterness and the apogee of nationalism, it is important to maintain humanity and a cold mind.

 

 

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