Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  There were problems outside of Moscow as well. The ethnically based autonomous units of the Russian Federation were not eager to buy into the rossiiskaia civic nation. The Chechens wanted outright independence, while Tatarstan and other autonomous republics wanted more rights. In December 1994, Yeltsin ordered Russian troops into Chechnia to end its de facto independence from Moscow. The Chechens fought back, forcing the Russian army to sue for peace in August 1996. Russian troops left the rebellious republic, postponing a decision on its status until the year 2001. If there were enclaves within the Russian Federation that did not want to be part of it, there were also those outside of Russia that wanted to join it. These included the self-proclaimed Transnistrian republic on the territory of Moldova, as well as Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia.

  The Russians faced a problem familiar to other ruling imperial nations: the implosion of the empire had produced a class of disenfranchised citizens who considered themselves either members of the formerly dominant nation or sufficiently compromised by cooperation with it to feel unsafe in the former colonial possessions. Russian citizenship laws allowed such individuals to claim Russian or dual citizenship without moving to Russia, which strengthened the cultural and legal components of Russian identity at the expense of its territorial component. According to some estimates, close to 30 million ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers who associated themselves first and foremost with Russia remained outside the borders of the Russian Federation. Many, especially in the Baltics and in the Russian enclave of the Crimea in Ukraine, were eager to claim Russian citizenship, but that desire brought them into conflict with local citizenship laws, which did not welcome dual citizenship and sometimes even prohibited it. The legal conflict turned the post-Soviet space into a powder keg ready to explode.

  19

  THE RUSSIAN WORLD

  ON DECEMBER 31, 1999, THE AILING BORIS YELTSIN USED THE occasion of his New Year’s address to make an unexpected announcement. He was stepping down as president of the Russian Federation. His address and the broadcast that followed left no doubt whom Yeltsin wanted to see as his successor—the forty-eight-year-old prime minister, Vladimir Putin, addressed the public immediately after Yeltsin’s unexpected announcement.

  Putin was a largely unknown quantity at the time of his first New Year’s address to the nation. He had entered high-level politics only a few months earlier, in the summer of 1999, when Yeltsin had unexpectedly appointed him as his prime minister. In that post he had been responsible for the country’s economic performance and day-to-day administration. Putin—who had been head of the Federal Security Service, post-Soviet Russia’s secret police, in 1998–1999, and earlier in his career had been an intelligence officer—had been chosen by Yeltsin’s inner circle as a counterweight to Yeltsin’s critics, who were planning to unseat him as president in the coming elections. One of the contenders had been the mayor of Moscow, Yurii Luzhkov, who had actively played the Russian nationalist card against Yeltsin, presenting himself as a defender of Russians abroad during his numerous and highly publicized visits to Sevastopol, whose port was home to the Russian navy base in Ukraine. There he had funded a number of social and cultural projects and opened a branch of Moscow University.

  Another contender, Yevgenii Primakov, who had become Yeltsin’s prime minister in the wake of Russia’s financial meltdown of 1998, had championed the reintegration of the post-Soviet space under Russian political control. During his tenure as head of Russia’s foreign intelligence and as foreign minister in 1996–1998, Primakov had turned Russian foreign policy away from its Western orientation, seeing the enhancement of Russia’s status in the “near abroad”—the term used in Moscow to describe the former Soviet republics—as a requisite for its revival as a great power. Putin was fast-tracked for the presidency by a group of oligarchs close to Yeltsin who were friendly toward the West. Like one of Putin’s backers, the multibillionaire Boris Berezovsky, they considered the Primakov reintegration project too costly and contrary to Russia’s economic interests.

  Yeltsin had helped create the Russian state, but the nation was still in the making. It was now up to his successors to define its character and establish its borders. In his surprising announcement on the eve of the year 2000, Yeltsin addressed himself to the rossiiane, members of the civic Russian nation. His heir, Vladimir Putin, who spoke after him, addressed the audience not only as rossiiane but also as compatriots. Whether the reference was to citizens of the Russian Federation or included Russians and Russian-speakers abroad was not entirely clear.

  THE PROTECTION OF THE RIGHTS OF RUSSIANS AND RUSSIAN-speakers in the Baltics and the countries making up the Commonwealth of Independent States had become a hot-button issue in Russian politics and a rallying cry uniting the nationalist and conservative opposition to Yeltsin and his government in the fall of 1993. After ordering his army to storm the Russian parliament building, which had been occupied by opposition leaders, and imprisoning them, Yeltsin used his 1994 New Year’s address to indicate that his government had not abandoned the Russians in the “near abroad.” He referred to them as compatriots—people sharing a common fatherland. But what to do about them was not clear. Yeltsin’s government originally pushed for dual citizenship for the “compatriots,” but it encountered resistance from newly independent countries, including Ukraine, that did not recognize dual citizenship.

  Yeltsin’s advisers then came up with the idea of Commonwealth citizenship—an idea proposed back in 1991 but shot down by Ukraine. This model was supposed to combine civic citizenship in the Russian Federation with ethnic and culture-based citizenship for Russians and Russian-speakers abroad. Once again, there were no takers among the post-Soviet republics, but Belarus showed readiness to move in a similar direction. In 1997, Yeltsin and the new Belarusian leader, Aliaksandr Lukashenka, signed a charter on the formation of a state union that envisioned common Russian-Belarusian citizenship. By that time, Belarus had reinstated a Soviet-style flag and Russian as its official language. If not entirely stopping its nationalization project, Belarus was scaling it down. The Russo-Belarusian Union presented one more challenge to the civic model of Russian nationality.

  The Russo-Belarusian Union never became a full-fledged reality with common government institutions or citizenship. Negotiations on the union were used to satisfy the post-Soviet nostalgia of a significant part of the Russian public still suffering from the shock of losing a larger state and identity. The Russian leadership refused to act on the idea of East Slavic unity to create one “Russian” state. Like Gorbachev’s union of 1991, it would have been incomplete without Ukraine. And Ukraine was moving in a direction opposite to the one chosen by the new government in Minsk. In 1997, when Yeltsin and Lukashenka signed their union charter, the Ukrainians negotiated a cooperation agreement with Russia that put a legal end to their lengthy political divorce. The agreement gave Russia a lease on a navy base in Sevastopol in exchange for recognition of the Ukrainian borders and refusal to support pro-Russian separatists in the Crimea. The notion of an East Slavic union now lacked one of its main pillars.

  The Russian leadership stuck to the idea of forming a new Russian nation on the political foundations of the Russian Federation. It was a difficult but not impossible task. In 1997, a poll in which respondents could express more than one preference found that 85 percent of citizens of the Russian Federation associated themselves with the ethnic Russian nation, 71 percent favored the civic nation, and 54 percent were still closely attached to the notion of the Soviet people. In 1996, Yeltsin appealed to Russian intellectuals, asking for their help in finding a new Russian national idea. Most responded with suggestions for basing the new Russian identity on statehood. But there were other ideas as well. The revived Russian Communist Party, whose popularity presented the main political challenge to the regime, tried to keep the all-Union identity of the Russians alive, reinforced by an attachment to East Slavic unity and the Orthodox religion. Radical nationalists advocated a rac
ially pure Russian nation that would not include non-Russian citizens. More moderate nationalists pushed for an East Slavic identity based on culture that would include ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers outside the borders of the Russian Federation.

  In 1996, the historical demographer Vladimir Kabuzan published a study of settlements of Russians and Russian-speakers outside Russia. In his new mental map of Russia as an ethnic and cultural entity, he included eastern and southern Ukraine, northern Kazakhstan, and parts of Estonia and Latvia. Kabuzan wanted those territories either to be attached to Russia or established as autonomous units with special linguistic and cultural rights in their respective states. He also suggested the possible separation from Russia of areas populated largely by non-Russians. It was an argument in favor not only of letting Chechnia go but also of forming a Russian nation-state on cultural grounds. The cultural model of Russian nationhood informed the imagination of many opponents of the government, although few of them were prepared to give up any part of the territory of the Russian Federation. They wanted the extension, if not of its territory, then of its extraterritorial powers to cover people whom they considered members of their nation.

  VLADIMIR PUTIN WON THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN MARCH 2000 and took office in May of that year. His opponents had planned for a June election and were caught off guard by Yeltsin’s sudden resignation, which advanced the date. The first sign that the election had resulted in the victory of Yeltsin’s man but not necessarily of his ideas came in December 2000, when Putin agreed to adopt the music, and, in part, the lyrics, of the old Soviet national anthem as the new symbol of Russia. During Yeltsin’s tenure, the music of a patriotic song by the nineteenth-century composer Mikhail Glinka had been adopted as the national anthem, but Russian political and cultural elites could not agree on the lyrics—a sign of problems in searching for Russia’s new identity. Against Yeltsin’s publicly expressed wishes, Putin resolved the conundrum by going back to the Soviet anthem.

  The eighty-six-year-old poet Sergei Mikhalkov, who had coauthored the lyrics in 1943, was asked to draft a new text. This was his third exercise of that kind, the first two having been performed under Khrushchev in 1956 and then under Brezhnev in 1977. Where there had earlier been mentions of Lenin and Stalin, then of Lenin, the party, and communism, there was now a reference to God. The opening reference to the unshakable union of peoples forged by Russia was replaced with praise of “Russia, our sacred state.” What remained unchanged in all the versions of Mikhalkov’s anthem was praise of the fatherland. The words “Glory to you, our free fatherland,” which had figured in the original version of 1943, were reprised in 2000. The immediately following reference to the “Firm bulwark of the friendship of peoples” was replaced with “Union of fraternal peoples for the ages.” The Union was thus restored to favor, along with the brotherhood of its constituent peoples. Whether the reference was to the old Union or the peoples of the Russian Federation was for future generations to decide.

  When it came to Russian policy in the post-Soviet space, Putin inherited from Primakov the vision of Russia as a great power whose status depended on its integrationist project. Putin believed in Russia’s right to dominate the post-Soviet space as its sphere of influence, but he hoped to achieve such dominance by political and economic means, without turning Russian ethnicity, language, and culture in the “near abroad” into instruments of Russian dominance there. In 1999, the parliament discussed different versions of a law on compatriots abroad extensively, and eventually adopted one of them, but it had minimal impact on foreign policy. Putin’s policy on Ukraine and Belarus, which did not differ substantially from his policies on other post-Soviet countries, was formulated in a document titled Strategy for Russia: Agenda for the President—2000 prepared by Russia’s Council for Foreign and Defense Policy.

  Its authors, who included both Yeltsin-era Westernizers and Primakov-type realists, argued that relations with the “near abroad” should benefit Russia economically. Political and economic reintegration of the post-Soviet space should proceed from below, with Russian businesses acquiring partial ownership of the transportation infrastructure and local enterprises in the former Soviet republics in exchange for debts accumulated by those countries for Russian natural gas. This strategy could be implemented on various levels—bilateral, subregional, including only selected post-Soviet republics or most if not all of them. The key was to win the loyalty of the new governments and local elites. Thinking of Russia as a divided nation or mobilizing ethnic Russians or Russian-speakers abroad to achieve integrationist goals seemed counterproductive.

  This new orientation became known in the first years of the millennium as Russia’s liberal empire project. Its ideological formulation came in 2003 in an article by Anatolii Chubais, one of the architects of Yeltsin’s privatization reform and then head of the Russian electrical-power monopoly. Chubais argued that Russia’s mission in the new century included the construction of a strong democratic state and the foundations of a capitalist economy, but he did not stop there. “It is my profound conviction that Russia’s ideology for the whole foreseeable historical future should be liberal imperialism, and Russia’s mission should be the construction of a liberal empire,” wrote Chubais. As of 2003, he was busy building that empire from below. A few months earlier, his company had acquired control of an atomic electrical-power station in Armenia, and it was eyeing assets in Ukraine, where it helped finance the construction of two nuclear reactors.

  Anatolii Chubais was the mouthpiece of the oligarchs—the new group of large business owners who had emerged out of the economic and political chaos of the post-Soviet transformation by being both more innovative and more ruthless than their competitors. They had gained control of the most lucrative parts of the Russian economy, including the oil and gas industry, in the rigged privatization of the mid-1990s. In return for preference from President Yeltsin, they had used their economic and media resources to help reelect him to office in 1996. They had also helped bring Putin to power in 2000. In return, they demanded Putin’s loyalty, which Putin was most reluctant to offer. He would spend a good part of his first term in office trying to establish his monopoly of power and free himself of Yeltsin’s entourage. Two of the leading oligarchs, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, had taken refuge in the West. A third, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was arrested. The rest did not challenge Putin’s rule.

  Putin won his second term as president in March 2004, taking 71 percent of the popular vote. Things could not have looked better for him. Revived by limited economic reforms in the first years of Putin’s presidency and by high oil prices, the Russian economy was doing well, growing at a rate of 7 percent per annum. The economic reintegration of the post-Soviet space was also moving forward. It had begun on the regional level in 2000 with the creation of the Eurasian Economic Community, which was joined by Belarus, Kazakhstan, and a number of Central Asian states. Ukraine refused to join, but in 2003 it signed an agreement with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan on the formation of a Single Economic Space. The agreement was ratified by the Ukrainian parliament in 2004.

  The key factor for the success of the liberal empire project was political stability in the region and continuity of policy in the neighboring states. Authoritarian regimes were preferred, since their leaders could be counted on to follow a steady policy course as they became dependent on Russia in economic or security terms. Democracies were hard to handle, because the outcomes of elections could be unpredictable. With the Baltic states joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union, Belarus getting an authoritarian ruler in the person of Aliaksandr Lukashenka, and Kazakhstan and the other Central Asian republics solidly in the authoritarian camp, the unpredictability of electoral politics in Ukraine and Georgia presented a major challenge to Russian foreign policy. Especially important was Ukraine, the crown jewel in any integrationist project in the post-Soviet space. In 2004, as in 1991, Ukraine remained the largest post-Soviet countr
y after Russia.

  Presidential elections were coming up in Ukraine in the fall of 2004. At stake was the future of post-Soviet integration and ownership of the largest network of pipelines linking Russian and Turkmen natural-gas fields with markets in Eastern and Central Europe. The outgoing Ukrainian president, Leonid Kuchma, had allegedly agreed to sell Russia a stake in his country’s gas-pipeline system in order to deal with Ukraine’s ballooning debt to Russia’s gas monopolist, Gazprom. Kuchma introduced his prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, to Putin as his successor, who would continue his policies. In the fall of 2004, Putin went to Kyiv in hopes of boosting Yanukovych’s ratings in his campaign against the pro-reform and pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko. In the weeks leading up to the election, Yushchenko was poisoned with a strain of dioxin that could not be produced in Ukraine but could be produced in Russia. He survived the attempt, but it hampered his further participation in the campaign.