The Rebuilding of “Greater Russia”: From Kievan Rus’ to the Eurasian Union (Note 1)

The purpose of the present examination is 1) to summarize briefly the evolution of historical Russia as the amalgam of multiple ethnic and cultural communities into a growing imperial domain; 2) to outline more specifically the policies pursued by the tsarist and communist regimes to integrate minority communities into the Russian majority; 3) to examine the impact on Russia of the collapse of the former USSR; and 4) to trace current efforts by the Russian government to reintegrate the disparate parts of the former USSR, including especially regions of other post-Soviet states with a significant ethnic Russian population, into a new “Greater Russia.” Although it will touch on Soviet integration policies that targeted national minorities who, by 1989, represented half of the population, the focus will be on recent and current policies intended to “Greater Russia.”


Introduction
Most Westerners who learn of a revival of Russian nationalism or of President Putin's commitment to protect the interests of ethnic Russians in post-Soviet states where they represent a minority, do not think of the fact that the Russian population is quite diverse ethnically. This concerns not only the twenty percent of the population that is officially listed as non-Russian, but also the ethnic Russian population which results from the mixture and merger of various communities over the course of the last millennium. The first Russian state, Kievan Rus', combined Eastern Slavs and Norsemen, or Vikings; in the Middle Ages Finnic groups in the far north and later Turkic populations in the south and east were absorbed by the expanding Russian state. While many remained culturally distinct from the ethnic Russian community, others were absorbed into that community over the course of later centuries.
But the initial gulf between the ruling elite and the masses of the population was one that dominated Russian/East Slavic politics in later centuries.
By the middle of the twelfth century, a century before the Mongol conquest, this new state was in great disrepair, primarily because of the lack of an effective system of succession and the splitting of the political system into three major parts. The one in the northwest was eventually incorporated into the Lithuanian state, later Lithuanian-Polish, while the poorest in the northeast eventually became the center for a revitalized East Slavic state, Russia. Here the population was primarily Finnic, but was rapidly inundated and absorbed by Slavic immigrants, eventually emerging as Great Russians. Thus, even before the Mongol conquest of Kiev in 1240 "Russians consisted of a mixture of peoples, with the non-Slavs dominated and culturally overwhelmed; this diversity would be increased significantly in the following centuries.
With the emergence of Muscovy as a political force in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries large numbers of non-Russian and non-Slavic peoples came under the control of the Russian state. In the north and northwest the majority of these groups were ethnically Finnish. Although the Mongol invasion in 1240 and indirect occupation for the next century and a half brought new Turkic (Tatar) populations into what would later emerge as Russia, it was not really until the sixteenth century and the rapid expansion under Ivan Grozny of Russian military control east and southeast to the major cities of the Golden Horde, Kazan and Astrakhan, in the 1550s that large numbers of Muslim Tatar or Turkic people came under the domination of Moscow. Russia viewed its culture and religion as superior to those of the peoples whom it conquered and generally treated these peoples as inferiors and resulted often in serious confrontations (see Khodarkovsky, 2004, pp. 34-39).
Writing of the emergence of Muscovy and its conquest of other small East Slavic principalities in the fifteenth century-"the gathering of the Russian lands" in the euphemistic words of the Russian chronicles of the age-Marshall T. Poe points out that the rulers of Muscovy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries expanded the kingdom's borders east beyond the Volga River, south to the Caspian Sea, west to the Dnieper River, and north to the White Sea. In so doing they came to rule peoples who had never been part of Kievan Rus'-Mordvinians, Chuvash, Mari, Samoyeds, Bashkirs, Tatars, Balts, Finns, Germans, Lithuanians, Poles, Cossacks, and Turks, among others. The once homogeneous Muscovite state . . . became a huge multiethnic empire (Poe, 2003, p. 34). (Note 5) Over the course of the next three centuries Russia continued to expand; in the west into the Baltic area, Finland and Poland; in the south by absorbing Ukraine and then systematically incorporating portions of the Ottoman Empire. Territorially the expansion across Siberia and the Far East and, ultimately, the conquest of the Muslim polities in Central Asia brought millions of non-Russians, non-Europeans, and non-Christians into the empire by the 1870s. The colonial empire was virtually complete and at this point the government in St. Petersburg began to pursue a policy of explicit russification as the means to absorb and integrate this population into the Russian state.
Throughout its entire history-from Kievan Rus' to Muscovy and the eventually the Russian www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/ape Advances in Politics and Economics Vol. 4, No. 2, 2021 25 Published by SCHOLINK INC.
Empire-the population at large, whether ethnic Russian or one of the growing number of conquered peoples, had no voice in the political system. As Richard Pipes notes: Once an area had been annexed to Russia, whether or not it had ever formed a part of Kiev, and whatever the ethnic and religious affiliation of its indigenous population, it immediately joined the "patrimony" of the ruling house, and all succeeding monarchs treated it as a sacred trust which was not under any circumstances to be given up (Pipes, 1974, p. 79) Not only the territory, but also the population on that territory was seen as part of the extended patrimony of the monarch with no political rights. It is this view of the virtual ownership relationship between the monarch, the state, and the population that centuries later, although modified, continues to lie at the root of the Russian political system, for both ethnic Russian and non-Russian alike.

Integration' of National Minorities in Late Imperial and Communist Russia
Russian historians of the imperial era focused on Russia's right and duty to expand the boundaries of civilization and Christianity in dealing with the Muslim and other non-Russian peoples who now comprised a substantial part of the population (Khodarkovsky, 2002, p. 3). Religion served geopolitical purposes in relations with the various non-Orthodox Christian peoples of the steppe and the Caucasus.
Ever since the fifteenth century the idea of Russia and its political and security interests were intertwined with the idea of expansion, which was justified on both ideological and theological grounds (Khodarkovsky, 2002, p. 49). This meant an ever-increasing number of non-Russians within the Russian Empire. The culmination of this process came in the years 1860 to 1880 with the final conquests of the various peoples of the Caucasus and the khanates of Central Asia. Given the repressive nature of the Russian political system, the new ethnic and religious minorities who were forcibly added to the population had no voice and were the object of repressive governmental policies. Since the middle of the sixteenth century, but especially during the eighteen century, major efforts were made to settle and civilize the regions taken from the Kamnyks and other Muslim peoples, thereby pushing the original population out of the region entirely. In addition, the Russians pursued a policy of forced conversion to Christianity and russification in much of the territory that they conquered (Khodarkovsky, 2002, pp. 142-161). Throughout the eighteenth century this resulted in virtually permanent conflict between the Russians and the native populations on both sides of the ever-moving frontier. As Russia imposed its control, substantial numbers of the locals fled their homeland to beyond the Russian frontier areas to escape Russian military and administration and forced conversion (Khodarkovsky, 2002, pp. 201-206;Mironov, 1988)-generally fruitlessly, since the frontier continued to follow them.
Not until the reign of Catherine the Great did a degree of religious tolerance enter Russian policy (Khodarkovsky, 2002, p. 196 minority cultures within Russia should be eliminated and replaced with a Great Russian identity (Weeks 2004(Weeks , 2006. (Note 6) To be a loyal subject of the tsar one had to be a Russian. Russian became overwhelmingly the language of education, even in the vast areas of the country where it was not the dominant language. In portions of the empire, as in Armenia, non-Russian Orthodox religious schools were closed. Throughout the Central Asian lands of the empire major efforts were made to russify the population. However, Aneta Pavlenko concludes that russification measures were carried out only sporadically as an attempt to subjugate Polish and later Baltic German elites, to preserve the unity of the state, and to replace Polish, German, and Tatar with Russian as a high language. . . . These measures failed to turn peasants into Russians . . . . Most importantly, by imposing the russification measures late in the 19th century, the Russian empire created the pre-conditions for the consolidation of nations which would eventually turn against it (Pavlenko, 2011).
On the whole the efforts were a failure and at the outbreak of World War I, the Russian government faced widespread resistance to its policies ("How Successful", n.d.; see, also, Weeks, 2004) When the Bolsheviks seized power in fall 1917, they came with a clear view that past Russian policies toward ethnic minorities had been oppressive and exploitative and must be reversed for, in Lenin's words, Russia was "the prison house of nations" (cited in Weeks, 2004 (Fainsod, 1963, pp. 57-58). In fact, independent states that had emerged in Ukraine and the South Caucasus were forcibly incorporated into the emerging Soviet state.
In the early years of the Soviet state various institutional arrangements were introduced that were meant to give the national minorities a political voice and autonomy. But, Lenin and Stalin soon broke on the issue of the treatment of minorities and, since Lenin died soon thereafter, Stalin set the framework for Soviet nationalities policy-a framework that permitted little or no autonomy below the central government. Stalin eliminated communist officials in Georgia, Ukraine and Central Asia who opposed what they viewed as the assertion of central, Russian, domination over nationality affairs (see Daniels, 1960, pp. 177-187).
As the new Soviet state system emerged in the period after Lenin's death, a pseudo-federal system of government was established-pseudo in the sense that, de facto, political power and political decisions emanated from the top and were dispersed throughout the system. (Note 7) Moreover, the highly centralized communist party was the major source of power, not the formal institutions of the federal governmental system. Within this system the major units were republics named after the dominant titular population-Ukraine, Armenia, Kazakhstan, etc. Second and third level political units were also established for smaller nationalities which represented minorities in the larger republics. Although the communist party encouraged cultural development of backward peoples within the overall federation, that cultural development was to occur only within the context of a monolithic communist culture, which was built substantially on Russian nationalism (Fainsod, 1963, p. 363;okhy, 2017, pp. 245 ff.).
In the mid-1920s a major confrontation occurred between Josef Stalin, the new head of the Soviet Communist Party, and Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, a Tatar Bolshevik who advocated a single Muslim republic across Central Asia. He was charged with nationalist deviations and arrested and eventually executed in 1940 during Stalin's Great Purge (Baker, 2011). Important for our concerns is the fact that Stalin divided the Muslim areas of Central Asia into five small republics that, presumably, would be easier to deal with from Moscow, rather than a single large and unified Muslim republic.
It was not really until the 1930s that Soviet policy concerning national minorities shifted dramatically away from the attacks on Great Russian chauvinism and support for local and regional cultures. During the massive purges of the 1930s, although no national group was primarily targeted, de facto the impact of the purge was greater among national minorities than it was among Great Russians. However, as Dmitry Gorenburg (2006) points out, throughout the entire history of the Soviet Union an internal contradiction drove Soviet nationality policy. "The establishment of ethno-federalism, indigenization, and native language education were paired with efforts to ensure the gradual drawing together of nations for the purpose of their eventual merger." (Note 8) Parallel to this is the fact that among Western students of Soviet nationality policy there are those who maintain that the Communists in effect strengthened the cultures of the minorities and those who focus on the Soviet russification and assimilation (Lapidus, 1984;Gorenburg, 2006).
In the late 1950s, during the Khrushchev era, the Soviets introduced a new education policy which expanded the teaching of Russian in non-Russian areas and, de facto, cut into the teaching of local languages Bilinsky (1962) and Gorenburg (2006) concludes that "linguistic assimilation and reidentification in the Soviet Union were promoted by a combination of two factors, urbanization and the reduction of native language education." Similar findings are presented in the research of Brian Silver (1974) and numerous other scholars. Although titular languages were taught, they were    pursuing its foreign and security policy interests. But, it also indicated that Russia saw itself as a pole in the international system separate from and in conflict with the West. It is at roughly this time that Moscow also began to assert itself rhetorically in response to Western charges that it was corrupting or abandoning democracy. (Note 22) The Russian response was the assertion that Russia was not bound by Western definitions of democracy and that, in fact, it was in the process of establishing a superior form of "sovereign democracy" that was characterized first and foremost by independence from external standards or influences. In other words, Russian democracy is sui generis and will not be bound by any external criteria or rules. (Note 23) But, more than a framework for political developments in Russia, "sovereign democracy" was presented as a model for other countries and a justification of the type of top-down management that Vladimir Putin has fashioned in Russia. For authoritarian or semi-authoritarian political leaders across Eurasia, the arguments underlying "sovereign democracy" have proven to be quite attractive. (Note 24) In the wake of Russia's invasion of Georgia and Moscow's formal recognition of the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, then President Dimitri Medvedev laid out the "principles" on which Russian policy was to be carried out. These principles included "protecting the lives and dignity of our citizens, wherever they may be" and the claim that "there are regions in which Russia has privileged interests. These regions are home to countries with which we share special historical relations and are bound together as friends and good neighbours" (Medvedev, 2008). Given the continued large Russian minorities in some of the post-Soviet states and Russia's policy of granting citizenship to large numbers of those living outside the Russian Federation, the first of these two principles de facto justifies intervention throughout most of former Soviet territory. The second calls for a sphere of Russian influence across Eurasia in which Russia has the right to protect its interests, including by economic coercion or military intervention. (Note 25) By the end of 2008 all the pieces were in place for Russia's "taking back" at least some of the area that it was contesting with the West. By then Russia had rebuilt its economy. It had effectively moved to strengthen the economic dependence of most of the post-Soviet states on Russia-primarily via energy dependence, including increasing Russian ownership of the energy infrastructure of these states (Nygren, 2007). (Note 26) Presidents Putin and Medvedev had provided the rhetorical foundations on which to base the conflict by noting the threat to regional and global peace that the United States represented (Putin, 2007) and by emphasizing Russia's legitimate role in the affairs of neighboring states (Medvedev, 2008). The Foreign Policy Concept issued in 2008 focused on external, rather than internal, challenges to Russian security-with U.S. global dominance at the very top of the list. In line with the extensive discussion of "sovereign democracy" in Russia, the Concept stipulated that global competition was acquiring a civilizational dimension, which suggested competition between different value systems and development models within the framework of universal democratic and market economy principles. The new foreign policy concept maintained that the reaction to the prospect of loss by the historic West of its monopoly over global processes now found its expression, in particular, in  Moscow had already demonstrated through the use of economic pressures that the Russian leadership was quite willing to use its economic clout to achieve political goals. Finally, in Georgia it demonstrated that the use of military power was also an acceptable weapon in competing with the West for influence in the regions of "privileged" Russian interest.
It is roughly at this time that Moscow began to push a variety of potential programs aimed at integrating post-Soviet space more effectively and, thus, reducing or expelling entirely Western involvement and influence (see, for example, Russell, 2012). In addition to the call of Dimitri when the president of Armenia announced that Armenia would abandon its negotiations with the European Union, in order to pursue membership in the Eurasian Union, it was reported that Moscow had threatened to reduce its security support for Armenia in its ongoing conflict with Azerbaijan, deny work permits to the tens of thousands of Armenian citizens working in Russia, reduce the flow of subsidized energy to Armenia, and generally make economic life more difficult for the landlocked and beleaguered country (Peter, 2013). Similar pressures were reported in the discussions between Russia and Ukraine in the run-up to President Yanukovych's announcement in November 2013 that Ukraine also would opt for membership in the Eurasian Union rather than continue to pursue closer ties with the European Union .
Russians present the Eurasian Union as the means to integrate and modernize the economies of the former Soviet republics, so that they can compete more effectively in the global economy (Lomagin, 2014). However most Western analysts see the Eurasian Union primarily as a political tool for Moscow's re-imposition of control over as broad a swath of post-Soviet territory and people as possible (Adomeit, 2014 Russia has prevented Ukraine from pursuing membership in the European Union and/or NATO, it has also eliminated Ukraine as a realistic candidate for Eurasian Union membership (see Fedorov, 2019).
Elsewhere in post-Soviet states-usually in areas with significant ethnic Russian or regional minority populations-Russia has also intervened, facilitated secession and granted some form of political recognition to the new secessionist statelets. (Note 31) In many respects, once the Russians had rebuilt their domestic economy and decided that focusing on reestablishing their dominant role in former Soviet space rather than integrating into Europe, they had clear advantages in competing with the West and for attracting other former Soviet republics into closer ties. Most important was the economic and, especially, energy dependence of most of the other states on Russia-and Moscow's willingness to use that dependence to its advantage. Only Azerbaijan, with its energy wealth-plus several resource-rich Central Asian states-is in a position easily to resist Russian "invitations." For countries such as Moldova and Georgia efforts to resist the Russian embrace and pursue stronger relations with the Europeans have continued and even expanded after Russian military intervention in Crimea (Secrieru, 2014). As noted by Thomas Ambrosio, "Russia has sought to create near-exclusive spheres of influence within the former Soviet space, excluding the Baltics" (Ambrosio, 2019).

Concluding Comments
The Russia that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union was a Russia that had never existed over the course of the past millennium. Shorn of all but a small portion of the ethnic minorities that had always comprised such a large portion of the population of the country, including the fellow Slavs in Belarus and Ukraine, the Russian Federation was no longer the imposing international actor that it had been for most of the past two centuries, or more. Russia's history had been one of continual expansion since the fourteenth century and the imposition of Russian policy domination and Russian culture on peoples usually viewed as backward and less developed. That was the history of the last century of the Tsarist regimes, as well as of the Soviet regime.
Although the Russian Federation still extended across eleven time zones, had the largest population in Europe, and possessed nuclear weapons, it was no match, in terms of global clout, for the lost Soviet state. Moreover, the West took advantage of Russia's weakness by extending its involvement and influence into areas in Central and Eastern Europe that were viewed as an integral part of the Russian sphere of influence. This is precisely the set of developments that Vladimir Putin set out to correct in a policy termed revanchist by Matthew Sussex (2015) because it aims at undoing major geopolitical developments of the past quarter century. A central aspect of the policy that he has pursued over the course of the past decade has been the attempt to reestablish an integrated economic, political and security space in the area of the former USSR somewhat akin to "the gathering of the Russian lands" by Muscovy in the fifteenth century.
How the Eurasian Union will evolve, what the nature of Russia's relations with the other former Soviet states and populations will be, how the crisis in Ukraine will unfold-none of these questions can be fully answered today. Yet, it does appear clear that the intention of the current Russian leadership under Vladimir Putin is to bring together into a close economic, political and security union as much of former Soviet territory as possible in order to strengthen Russia's economic and political position as it vies for a position as one of the poles in a new multipolar world intended to replace the current international system dominated by the United States and the West. It is hard to imagine such an integrated system much different from the Greater Russia discussed by Bertil Nygren (2008) in which the smaller states and their populations are subordinated to Russia, in ways similar to the way that their ancestors once were in Tsarist and Communist Russia.