Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  Fed up with Kuchma’s corrupt regime, Ukrainian voters had no intention of electing his and Putin’s protégé to the presidential office. According to the exit polls, Yushchenko won the race. But that was not the result announced by the head of the government-controlled electoral commission, who told shocked Ukrainians that victory had gone to Yanukovych. The Orange Revolution, named after Yushchenko’s campaign colors, followed immediately. At its forefront were students organized in civic youth groups such as Pora! (It’s Time!).

  Hundreds of thousands of people went into the streets of Kyiv and did not leave until the government agreed to repeat the presidential election, this time under the strict control of international observers, most of them from the West. As expected, Yushchenko won, and Putin congratulated him on his victory, but few doubted that the Russian president perceived the outcome of the Orange Revolution as a major defeat. Putin blamed the West and its pro-democracy campaign in the post-Soviet space for what had happened in Ukraine. He felt threatened not only by the coming to power of a pro-Western candidate in the largest post-Soviet republic, but also by the example that the democratic movement in Ukraine had now set for opponents of his increasingly authoritarian regime in Russia. The exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky made no secret of his support for the Orange Revolution.

  The Russian elites had to regroup both at home and abroad. At home, Putin mimicked the tactics of the leaders of the Orange Revolution by creating numerous youth organizations that would support his regime. The most notorious of them was Nashi (Ours), established in 2005 by a former official of the Russian presidential administration, Vasilii Yakemenko. For years, Nashi would harass real or imagined opponents of the regime. Abroad, Putin did everything in his power to stop what he regarded as Western encroachment on his turf, the post-Soviet space. Of special concern to the Kremlin was Georgia, where the Rose Revolution of 2003 brought to power the pro-Western Mikheil Saakashvili, and Ukraine, where Yushchenko had no illusions about Moscow’s role in supporting his opponent and its plans for his country. He launched a pro-Western policy, trying to get Ukraine admitted to the European Union and NATO.

  Putin went on record opposing Ukraine’s membership in NATO but declared that Russia had nothing against its membership in the European Union. Nevertheless, he used gas supplies to Ukraine—and, through Ukraine, to member nations of the European Union—as a political weapon to bring Ukraine under his economic control and complicate its relations with the West. Earlier, Russia had forced Turkmenistan, the second-largest producer of gas in the post-Soviet space, to sell its gas through Russia, and had used debts accumulated by other post-Soviet countries for gas supplies from and through Russia to exert political pressure.

  In March 2005, soon after Yushchenko’s inauguration, Russia raised the price of natural gas supplied to Ukraine. On January 1, 2006, it cut all supplies to Ukraine, claiming that Ukraine was stealing natural gas destined for Europe. Supplies were restored four days later, but a new crisis erupted in January 2009, when supplies were cut off again for twenty days for Ukraine, and thirteen days for European customers, leaving southeastern Europe without natural gas in the depths of winter. Depicting Ukraine as an unreliable partner not only for Russia but also for the European Union, Moscow imposed conditions that eventually made Ukraine pay more than Germany for its natural gas.

  EU membership was not in the cards for Ukraine. Gas-supply problems aside, the European Union was still dealing with challenges caused by its large expansion of membership in 2004. But NATO membership, which was backed by the United States, could have become a reality for Ukraine. In April 2008, Putin traveled to the NATO summit in Bucharest to campaign against NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. He gained the support of Germany and France, and the decision was postponed until December 2008. Putin decided not to wait. After returning from the NATO summit, he established official relations with the self-proclaimed governments of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the two regions of Georgia that had rebelled against rule from Tbilisi in 1991 and enjoyed Russian support ever since.

  In August 2008, the Russian army invaded Georgia, first taking over the separatist enclave of South Ossetia and then marching on the Georgian capital. Thanks only to Western diplomatic intervention, the fighting was stopped, and Russian troops withdrew from Georgia proper. But the two separatist republics remained under Russian control and were formally recognized by Russia as independent states. For the first time in Russia’s post-Soviet history, its army had been used beyond its borders to subdue a rebellious neighbor. The liberal empire was gone: the military empire was about to rise.

  In December 2008, NATO refused to provide either Georgia or Ukraine with a NATO membership plan. Barack Obama, who assumed the American presidency in January 2009, pressed the “reset” button in relations with Russia. Putin had lost to pro-democratic forces in Ukraine and Georgia in a contest of ballots but won in a war of bullets, stopping the rebellious republics from evading his embrace in the ranks of NATO. One of the lessons that he learned from the outcome of the Orange Revolution was that dealing with governments in the post-Soviet states was not enough for success. One also had to engage with people on the street. The old ideas of his political opponents about a divided Russian nation and its compatriots abroad came in very handy in that regard and were soon put to use in Putin’s new foreign policy.

  “HAVE YOU READ DENIKIN’S DIARIES?” VLADIMIR PUTIN ONCE asked Larisa Kaftan, a Ukrainian-born reporter of Russia’s leading newspaper, Komsomol’skaia pravda (Komsomol Truth). The reference was to the memoirs of a leader of the Russian White Army of the revolutionary era, General Anton Denikin. “No,” responded Kaftan, who promised to read the work. “Be sure to read them,” suggested Putin, and then added: “Denikin discusses Great and Little Russia, Ukraine. He writes that no one may meddle in relations between us; that has always been the business of Russia itself.” Kaftan did as promised and later published an article that included a selection of quotations from Denikin’s writings. The one Putin had in mind read as follows: “No Russia, reactionary or democratic, republican or authoritarian, will ever allow Ukraine to be torn away. The foolish, baseless, and externally aggravated quarrel between Muscovite Rus’ and Kyivan Rus’ is our internal quarrel, of no concern to anyone else, and it will be decided by ourselves.”

  The conversation took place on May 24, 2009, when Putin, then prime minister of Russia, was visiting the Donskoi Monastery in Moscow. He laid flowers on the grave of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had died the previous year, and on the graves of several Russian historical figures and intellectuals who had died in the emigration after 1917 and whose earthly remains had now been reinterred in Russia. Among them was General Denikin. The Orthodox archimandrite Tikhon, who was close to Putin and accompanied him on his visit, explained to the journalists that Putin had personally paid for the tombstones on the graves of Denikin and his wife, as well as on the graves of two émigré intellectuals, the philosopher Ivan Ilin and the writer Ivan Shmelev. Russia was taking back its long-lost children and reconnecting with their ideas.

  The Russian president was particularly impressed by the writings of Ivan Ilin, who had emerged during the interwar period as one of the leading ideologues of the White movement. At the start of the Cold War, he had written an article titled “What the Dismemberment of Russia Promises the World,” directed against what he considered the Western conspiracy to dismember the Soviet Union. “Russia will not perish as a result of dismemberment,” Ilin warned Western governments, “but will begin to repeat the whole course of her history: like a great ‘organism,’ she will again set about collecting her ‘members,’ proceeding along the rivers to the seas, to the mountains, to coal, to grain, to oil, to uranium.” Putin first cited Ilin in his address to the Russian parliament in 2006, when he laid out his plans for reform of the armed forces.

  Putin’s interest in the graves of Russian nationalist thinkers and generals developed at a time when he was reconsidering the importance of
Russian history and culture in the continuing effort to secure and enhance Russian influence in the post-Soviet space. In June 2007, Putin established a special foundation, the Russian World. Its cofounders were the federal ministries of foreign affairs and education. Putin placed Viacheslav Nikonov, the grandson of Viacheslav Molotov and a historian and political consultant close to the Kremlin, in charge of the foundation as its executive director. The officially declared goal of the foundation was to promote the Russian language and culture abroad.

  Putin had first gone on record speaking about the “Russian World” (Russkii mir) as a concept in 2001, when he had addressed the First Congress of Compatriots Living Abroad. The Russian World, he said, transcended the borders of the Russian state and ethnicity. Five years later, in December 2006, when he addressed a meeting of Russian artists, writers, and intellectuals in his home town of St. Petersburg, he had more specifics: “The Russian World,” said Putin, stressing the linguistic and cultural aspect of his vision, “can and should unite all who cherish the Russian word and Russian culture, wherever they may live, in Russia or beyond its borders.” He then exhorted the audience to “use that expression—the Russian World—as often as possible.” This was the opening salvo of a long-term ideological and geopolitical campaign that became a key factor in asserting Russian influence abroad.

  The term “Russian World” has its origins in the mid-nineteenth century and can be found in the writings of Panteleimon Kulish, who was a member of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius and one of the fathers of the Ukrainophile movement. He used the term to define the population that came out of Kyivan Rus’. With Ukraine more of an intellectual project than a political reality at that point, the term did not threaten the foundations of the Ukrainophile movement per se. But the situation would change. The term would later be used by the Russian Slavophiles, who applied it to the ethnic and cultural community within the borders of the Russian Empire. The Revolution of 1917 made it all but obsolete.

  The term was rediscovered in the late 1990s by the Russian political consultant Petr Shchedrovitsky, who was trying to formulate policy for the Russian government toward the “near abroad” in the turmoil of the post-Soviet transformation. Starting in 2007, which the government proclaimed the international year of the Russian language, the concept of the Russian World became an integral part of Russian foreign policy. Its “citizens” were located and supported not only in the post-Soviet space but also in Western countries to which Russians had emigrated after 1991. The promoters of the new concept defined Russian identity not only in ethnic or civic terms but also in terms of culture, and they mobilized support for Russian government policies on the basis of attachment to such figures as Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.

  The concept soon attracted the attention of a key figure in the formulation of Russian national identity in the first post-Soviet years, the former minister of nationality affairs in the Russian Federation, Valerii Tishkov. In one of his publications, Tishkov defined the Russian World as a “trans-state and transcontinental association united by its attachment to a particular state and loyalty to its culture.” There was irony in his embrace of a cultural notion of Russian identity after having promoted a civic one in the early 1990s, but Tishkov distinguished between Russia and abroad. Immediately after the collapse of the USSR, he had argued that most ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers outside the Russian Federation would not leave their places of residence or assimilate to the local cultures but would stay where they were, preserving their linguistic and cultural characteristics. “My opinion,” he said in retrospect, “was originally voiced in support of the view that Russians did not spend centuries settling the territories of eastern Ukraine, the Crimea, and Northern Kazakhstan in order to narrow the Russian World now by so-called repatriation.”

  In 2007, Tishkov responded to the new signals coming from the Kremlin by presiding over a number of academic initiatives that considered the status of the Russian language in the post-Soviet space. In the following year he delivered a paper on the preliminary results of work conducted by Russian ethnographers and sociologists. Tishkov saw language as the key marker of membership in the Russian World. He asserted that the Russian language was losing its privileged Soviet-era status in the “near abroad,” and that Russia had to take measures to protect that status. Tishkov wanted the Russian language to be given official status equal to that of the local language in the countries of the “near abroad.” (In Belarus, where Russian had acquired that status, it maintained its dominance over the local language.)

  Tishkov proposed that Russia support demands for such status in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Latvia, Moldova, and Kyrgyzstan. His other idea was to obtain “personal autonomy,” meaning individual linguistic rights, for Russian-speakers, whom he also called compatriots, in their countries of residence. Tishkov also saw the Russian World as a means of achieving Russian foreign-policy objectives. “The Russian World is more than present-day Russia,” he argued. “That is how it was, and that is how it should be, and the task of specialists is to help people of Russian culture and language preserve their spiritual origins for themselves and their descendants and, along with that, to strengthen Russian influence and authority.”

  The Russian government put its resources behind the concept of the Russian World in 2007 by creating the Russian World foundation, whose first mandate was to open Russian World centers abroad with the support of a budget of 1 billion rubles provided by the Russian government. By 2013, there were 90 centers in 41 countries tasked with promoting the Russian language and culture. Among the beneficiaries of foundation grants were Natalia Narochnitskaia’s Fund for Historical Perspective, which promotes a Russian nationalist vision of history abroad. Among the foundation’s partners is the International Council of Russian Compatriots, created in 2002, which has 140 organizations in 53 countries and has been headed by Vadim Kolesnichenko, a longtime member of the Ukrainian parliament from the city of Sevastopol. Kolesnichenko has personally submitted close to twenty bills to the Ukrainian parliament intended to maintain the dominant position of the Russian language in the Ukrainian economic, social, and cultural spheres, which has not changed since Soviet times.

  In 2009, the Russian World as an idea and as an integrationist project acquired a new enthusiast in the person of the newly elected sixty-three-year-old patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kirill (Gundiaev). He was the main speaker at the third congress of the Russian World foundation, which took place in 2009, the year of his election to the patriarchal throne. Kirill had spent the previous two decades as head of the international department of the Moscow Patriarchate, where he had presided over the church’s efforts to stop the disintegration of its structures all over the former Soviet Union and preserve its unity.

  The main threat to church unity came from Ukraine, where close to 60 percent of the Moscow Patriarchate’s parishes had been located before the Gorbachev era. Kirill was instrumental in stabilizing the church after the loss of thousands of parishes in western Ukraine to the revived Ukrainian Catholic Church in 1989–1990. The rebirth of that church, which had been suppressed by Stalin after World War II but maintained an underground existence, had long encumbered ecumenical dialogue between Moscow and the Vatican, turning an already anti-Western institution—the Russian Orthodox Church—into a bulwark of opposition to the outside world.

  The rise of national identities and agendas among the clergy and the Orthodox faithful in the post-Soviet space presented another challenge to the dominance of the Moscow Patriarchate in the region and established the Russian Orthodox Church as a watchdog of all-Russian unity. The Orthodox Church had never changed its official name or its concept of the Russian nation, which it regarded, as in imperial times, as consisting of the three East Slavic peoples. When it came to the preservation of all-Rus’ unity, Ukraine was again the key. In the early 1990s, in his capacity as head of the international department of the church, Kirill had successfully beaten back the efforts of
Metropolitan Filaret of Kyiv to create an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church out of those parishes.

  Caught between Moscow and Kyiv, the Ukrainian Orthodox divided, with two-thirds of them recognizing the jurisdiction of Moscow and the rest going their own way. Coupled with the loss of thousands of parishes to the revived Ukrainian Catholic Church, the new split increased already existing anxiety in Moscow about the fate of its heritage in the post-Soviet era. Nevertheless, Kirill managed to keep most of the Ukrainian Orthodox under Moscow’s jurisdiction. Moscow lost a significant number of parishes in the Baltics but maintained control over those in Belarus.

  At the turn of the twenty-first century, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus remained the core areas claimed and controlled by the Moscow Patriarchate, just as before the Revolution of 1917. Kirill’s new role as a promoter of the Russian World helped put East Slavic unity close to the center of the patriarchate’s ideology. The church’s contribution to the concept of the Russian World was a rhyming slogan, “Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus / There you have it: holy Rus’.” The authorship was ascribed to a Ukrainian cleric who had revived Orthodox religious life in the city of Chernihiv during the German occupation, under which religion had been tolerated to a much greater extent than under the Soviets. Kirill recited the slogan on one of his visits to Kyiv. Although his vision of the Russian World expanded to include Kazakhstan and Moldova, Ukraine remained at the center of his attention. As patriarch, he would often visit Ukraine to celebrate Orthodox holidays and real and imagined ecclesiastical anniversaries.

  Vladimir Putin joined Patriarch Kirill on his annual pilgrimage to Kyiv in July 2013, when they came to celebrate the 1,025th anniversary of the baptism of Rus’. It was there that Putin first publicly embraced the idea, previously articulated by the church, that Russians and Ukrainians were one people: “We understand today’s realities: we have the Ukrainian people and the Belarusian people and other peoples, and we are respectful of that whole legacy, but at the foundation there lie, unquestionably, our common spiritual values, which make us one people.”