Russian Exceptionalism between East and West: The Ambiguous Empire 3030697126, 9783030697129

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Russian Exceptionalism between East and West The Ambiguous Empire Kevork Oskanian

Russian Exceptionalism between East and West

Kevork Oskanian

Russian Exceptionalism between East and West The Ambiguous Empire

Kevork Oskanian Department of Political Science and International Studies University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-69712-9 ISBN 978-3-030-69713-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69713-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Mother

Preface

This book was, among others, the result of a chance re-reading of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ in the immediate aftermath of the Russo-Georgian War of 2008. For an individual with both personal and professional roots in the Caucasus, it triggered all manner of questions and associations with what, up to that point, had remained disparate observations. Why did ‘Mimino’—a favourite comedy featuring a Georgian pilot and his Armenian sidekick on adventures in Moscow—feature the kind of ethnic stereotyping that would be quite unpalatable to contemporary Western standards? Were Saakashvili’s rhetorical humiliations during the conflict related to the portrayal of Caucasian men portrayed as brutes or hotheads in so many parts of Russian literature? Why was Russia—with its huge and partly oriental Empire—largely absent from Said’s pages? And if Russia was not quite ‘Western’, how did it end up justifying an empire that, for so long, looked in both directions? As so often is the case, these questions prompted greater engagement, only intensifying my interest in what I found to be an under-explored area with considerable implications for the whole former Soviet space. Scholarly reflexivity would prompt me to admit that I am not, in the main, a postcolonial scholar of International Relations; but I am, most certainly, a post-imperial subject. This positionality is, no doubt, a doubleedged sword. On the one hand, I have little doubt that it will invite accusations of a certain bias; on the other hand, I have always believed that power—in whatever form—is there to be questioned, critiqued, all the

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more so when it is felt on one’s own skin. Russia was, and is, a great power which has, at various points in recent years, imposed itself forcefully onto some of its neighbours—Georgia and Ukraine—and smaller minorities, like the Chechens and the Crimean Tatars. Speaking truth to power from a scholarly position born of post-imperial subjecthood therefore becomes both a right and an obligation. All the more so in view of the tendency of the debates between Russia and the West to ignore or sideline voices from the region that do not fit certain expectations or templates on either side of an increasingly troubled relationship so often defined in simplistic binary, either/or terms. Importantly, as I note at several points in the text, this work should neither be seen as an exoneration of Western empire and hegemony— on whose imitation so much of the Russian version is based—nor as a carte blanche for Russophobia. Russia is, and remains, a subject-matter of great complexity, a unique society made so precisely by its hybrid culture that should not be subject to demonisation through reification and essentialism: in fact, its struggles with an imperfect Western modernity lie at the core of many of its hierarchical claims. This book is an attempt to step outside of the often-toxic and polarised Russia debates, by neither indulging in confrontation, nor in apologia, while attempting to understand Russia’s long-term struggle with both its exclusion from the Western core and its self-view as a great power. I hope its conclusion—sceptical of cut-out templates and grand prefabricated projects—reflects this fact: instead, I end up advocating an incrementalist strategic patience that would enable a long-term resistance, a war of position based on self-determination of the very kind taught by the early anticolonial thinkers and activists. In that sense, it would perhaps be a positive step if the various peoples of the former Soviet space were allowed to delve into their—and the Global South’s—own substantial experience and knowledge in confronting the challenges of imperial power, and an imperfectly post-imperial condition, instead of looking Westwards for standardised solutions that so often fail to live up to their promise, among others by disregarding the agency, and the risks run by those most directly affected by their former imperial metropole. Every monograph is a collective effort, and the present one is no different. A depth of gratitude is owed to my former and current colleagues at the University of Birmingham’s Department of Politics and International Studies (POLSIS) and Centre for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies (CREES), in particular Derek Averre, Richard

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Connolly, Nino Kemoklidze, Jeremy Morris, and Kataryna Wolczuk for crucial feedback on the early ideas formulated in this publication, and to Roy Allison, Adeeb Khalid, Natasha Kuhrt and Jeremy Smith for their constructive, and deeply formative engagement and encouragement. Special mention should be reserved for Richard North who, as Head of Department, enabled the completion of my research through an Honorary Research Fellowship at the same institution. I also have to thank my partner, Mu, for patiently bearing all the shenanigans that come with having a grumpy scholar wrestle with a manuscript at home during the long periods of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown with all her much-appreciated and -required patience. Birmingham, UK

Kevork Oskanian

Contents

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Introduction

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Conceptualising an Empire in Between

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Hybrid Exceptionalism Under the Romanovs

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The Soviet Union as a Hybrid Civilising Project

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Hybrid Exceptionalism in Contemporary Russia

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Looking East, Looking West

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Conclusion: Beyond Empire’s Shadow

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Index

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List of Tables

Table 7.1 Table 7.2

Russia’s Hybridities Russia’s Exceptionalisms

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Among the many persistent myths to have emerged about what remains the largest territorially contiguous state on the planet, the idea that Russia is a case apart, that it functions according to a logic that escapes easy categorisation and is quite removed from ‘Western’ notions of free-thinking, liberal rationality is perhaps the most persistent. From Churchill’s (1939) mystifications, over Kennan’s (1946) ‘long telegram’, to Billington’s (1970) ‘Icon and the Axe’, modern practitioners and scholars have ascribed qualities to the country’s various—Tsarist, Soviet, contemporary—manifestations that put it apart from its counterparts in the West, as something alien, functioning according to principles almost beyond Western comprehension. There is, certainly, an underlying truth behind the claims that Russia is culturally exotic, different from its Western counterparts: as the outcome of often violent collisions between Vikings, Slavs and Tatars, Europe and Asia, Occident and Orient, it maintains a claim to being the spiritual successor to Byzantium, with its Christian Orthodox— rather than Catholic or Protestant—heritage; for decades, it was the main proponent of a political and socio-economic experiment emanating from, but simultaneously directed against, the enlightenment as realised in the West. And spread over the Eurasian landmass, its geographic breadth and cultural diversity are, in themselves, seen as sufficient reason for difference—difference from the contemporary late modern states of Western

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 2021 K. Oskanian, Russian Exceptionalism between East and West, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69713-6_1

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Europe, difference from—in the eyes of some contemporary Russian narratives at least—their decadent, self-indulgent, individualistic cultures. And yet, throughout the modern era, Russia’s apparent separateness from and simultaneous tantalising affinity to the West has made its foreignness especially intriguing: for centuries—and certainly after the Westernising reforms by Peter the Great—the vast country has become, and remained, European, but not quite. Its brand of Tsarist autocracy was but an extreme manifestation of an absolutism that, before the French Revolution, was the norm in the West, briefly turning Russia into the ‘saviour of Christian Europe’ (Hartley, 1992, p. 374) in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815; many of its political movements found their inspiration in Western ideologies, with figures like Lenin and Bakunin, in turn, becoming global influential thinkers in their own right; and in the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet Union was not alone in its very European adherence to totalitarianism. Culturally, the complex, ambiguous relationship between Russia and the West has been just as pronounced: while retaining their own distinctiveness, from Pushkin to Nabokov, from Tchaikovsky to Shostakovich, from Aivazovsky to Rodchenko, Russian artists were inseparably bound to their Western counterparts, contributing to broader cultural movements in their specific ways. This same ambiguity can be seen in Russia’s imperial legacies, which, in truth, are not as ‘foreign’ and ‘un-Western’ as Russia’s detractors have, throughout the centuries, alleged. While Russia’s initial, pre-modern expansions—its takeover of the Tatar khanates, or its conquest of the Siberian expanse—were often justified through references to Muscovy’s position as heir to Byzantium’s Orthodoxy, its modern imperialism was recognisably bound to the West’s. In the heyday of imperialism, as much as difference, Russia’s position between East and West, its cultural ambiguity ensured an affinity with the equally hierarchical empires of Britain, France, and other Western states. It is precisely this ambiguity, this combination of Western-ness and foreign-ness, that left many observers confused—and has also often led them to pejoratively overstating the case for Russian difference. Certainly, early Russophobic narratives of dissimilarity—from the likes of De Toqueville (1889), Urquhart (King, 2007; Salt, 1968), and Kipling (1890)—served to somewhat self-interestedly obscure the fundamental similarities between Russian and Western Empire, especially at the height of the openly imperialist age, before 1914. Russia and the Western powers employed very similar methods to manipulate, conquer, and, subsequently, ‘discipline

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and control’ their respective subalterns: the co-optation of elites, deportation, genocide, settler colonisation, assimilation, resource extraction and, in later stages, the ‘scientific’ management of subject populations were methods equally familiar to the French, the English, the Dutch, and the Belgians (Delmas et al., 2010; Moses & Stone, 2007). So were claims to a ‘civilising mission’, a feature of Western empire-building since the genocidal conquest of the Americas by the Spanish in the name of the ‘Holy Faith’ (Schwaller, 2011, p. 58). The most important difference with the West lay in the considerably more intense hybridisation of Russia’s metropole with its periphery. Straddling both ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ subaltern groups, and itself not quite unambiguously part of the Western core, Russia found itself in the unique position of having to simultaneously justify dominion over ‘Western’, and, by definition therefore ‘civilised’ peoples—most notably Poland—and ‘inferior Orientals’, while itself not being quite part of the uncontested pinnacle of imperialism. This simple fact made its civilising missions different from that of its counterparts: rather than straightforwardly identifying with ‘Western’ civilisation, its respective civilising missions ended up imitating the West in their impositions onto ‘oriental’ lands, while also creating a basis for the domination of borderlands separated from the West. Thus, while Russia’s modern imperial projects were not different from Western Europe’s in their methods and consequences—the latter were just as hierarchical, and in some cases even more genocidal and extractive—they were so in their justifications, a pattern that continued into the Soviet era. Russia was both orientaliser and orientalised, core and periphery, superior and subaltern, and, because of its position ‘in between’, had to draw the lines between itself, and its conquests in ways different from Europe’s colonial, overseas empires. At the height of the imperialist era—the end of the nineteenth century—it thus used a combination of othering from and identification with both Western and Oriental subalterns to establish its dubious legitimacy as master of territories as culturally diverse as the Baltics, Finland, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Far East. Russian policymakers and intellectuals styled themselves the guarantors of the authenticity of subject peoples from Western ‘Jesuitical’ encroachment in Poland, and irrational Sufi Islamic ‘Muridism’ in the Northern Caucasus. To become ‘a brother to the conquered’ (Grant, 2009, p. 57) was the conquerors’ aim, and narratives used Russia’s ambiguous status to argue difference from the West in the West, while justifying lordship over the East in the East.

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Tsarist Russia ‘othered’ itself from the West in the former case, also drawing its subject peoples away from ‘Europe’ in an effort to stress their difference from it as well. It became the orientaliser in the latter case, in ways eminently similar to the West’s, simultaneously instrumentalising its own part-oriental nature by arguing it lent it a superior understanding of—and, therefore, a greater legitimacy in ruling—the East. Associating the Soviet Union with this form of imperialism and empire seems a less than obvious a leap to make; after all, the Bolsheviks, and the USSR they created defined themselves in opposition to what they saw as the Tsars’ ‘prison of peoples’ (Lenin, 2003 [1915]), did they not? But the patterns discussed above—with hybridity legitimising a civilising mission over both East and West—did continue after 1917: there is, in fact, a permanency in imperial form and method that the ideological break of 1917 manages to conceal. Not unlike its predecessor, the Soviet Union was based on a universalist project that simultaneously set it apart from its Western capitalist adversaries and justified a top-down imposition of a Marxist normativity on to-be-civilised Orientals, Ukraine’s kulaks, the ‘enemy peoples’ of World War II, and the Balts. Again, with Marxism-Leninism a product of the Western enlightenment, but one that simultaneously distinguished the Union from its Western counterparts, this exceptionalism was combined with a hybridity that created a boundary with the West, while justifying hierarchy over the East. The ideology might have been different; the narratives and practices of domination over ‘Occident’ and ‘Orient’ displayed tropes that harked back to an earlier era, when Russia also saw itself as a defender of a certain kind of instrumentally bounded authenticity for ‘its’ peoples. While the Tsars’ ‘becoming a brother to the conquered’ turned into the Bolsheviks’ ‘brotherhood of peoples’, Moscow, and the Russians remained the elder, leading its younger siblings towards socialism—especially after the demise of korenizatsiya—or ‘nativisation’ —in the early 1930s. In how far are these top-down imperial practices relevant today? At the end of the Cold War, Tsarist Russia was but a distant collective memory, and the Soviet Union’s ideological certainties had disappeared. But any redefinitions of Russia’s identities remained complicated by the two interrelated, but separate themes that had recurred during its previous incarnations outlined above: Russia’s status as an imperial great power, and its situation between West and East. How should Russia relate to its (former?) subalterns—both inside and outside the Russian Federation— and how should it relate to the outside world, particularly the West? The

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first aspect related to Russia’s view of its role in its ‘near abroad’—as it has styled the fellow republics of the former Soviet Union since the latter’s implosion in 1991—or, more formally, its ‘sphere of privileged interest’, a term especially emphasised following the August 2008 Russian-Georgian war (Clover, 2008). The second aspect equally presented a stark choice— between Russia becoming a ‘normal’, Western-style power, fully accepted into the post-Cold War Liberal International Order’s Western core, and it remaining outside the select circle of states whose liberalism appeared that order’s unchallenged new normal. These questions were asked in the corridors of power in Moscow, and in the think-tanks and universities of Brussels, London, and Washington DC (see, e.g., Blum, 2008; Hopf, 2002; Kassianova, 2001; Tsygankov & Tarver-Wahlquist, 2009). And, as the twentieth century came to a close, they remained largely unanswered, with both the Russians themselves, and those studying them confronted by—and prevaricating between—a variety of options in the reshaping of their ever-complex identities. As pointed out by early students of this redefinition, having identified with the Soviet project for so much of their recent history, both policymakers and society drew on a wide variety of modern and pre-modern, civic, and primordial elements to construct a largely incongruent array of possible national identities. With Russia marked by precipitous decline through multiple centrifugal forces, economic crises, and political uncertainty, in spite of various attempts by its elites to settle on a definition of ‘Russianness’, the issue remained very much in flux—at least until the turn of the century. This changed with the coming to power of Vladimir Putin. Around 2002–2003, some scholars, perhaps rather prematurely, proclaimed the acceptance by Moscow of the fragmentation of this traditional zone of influence into sovereign, independent states (Buszynsky, 2003), of Western involvement within it (Stent & Shevtsova, 2002), or of an albeit tenuous ‘Western choice’ in its foreign and security policies (Baev, 2003). But put mildly, over the past decades, a slew of long-term processes and shorter-term events have put this view in serious doubt. Putin’s military interventions in Georgia and Ukraine provide ample evidence of Moscow’s determination to prevent perceived Western encroachment into ‘its’ region, overriding its neighbours’ preferences, and his Eurasian Union was seen by many observers and commentators as an attempt—however ineffective (Stronski, 2020)—to re-constitute a twenty-first-century informal version of the various Russian-led empires

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and hegemonies that straddled this geopolitical space, separate from the long-dominant Western liberal core from which it had become alienated (Gvosdev, 2012; Shevtsova, 2014; Voloshin, 2012). As I shall argue in this monograph, these dominant—or domineering— foreign policy behaviours should not be seen as a free-standing temporary quirk, resulting solely from the Putin regime’s specific ideological proclivities. It has, in fact, often been argued that the current Russian regime is post-ideological, instrumentalising a curious mix of left-wing disaffection with the existing, liberal world order and right-wing conservative nationalism in an opportunistic justification of a thinly veiled authoritarianism. A curious co-mingling of apparently liberal discourses—on ‘economic integration’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’—with more civilisational elements—Tsarist-Orthodox conservatism and pride in some aspects of the Soviet experiment—underlies a broader set of attitudes, apparent in contemporary narratives. In fact, the present regime’s (and society’s) governmentality (Foucault, 1991) incorporates, yet again, a topdown civilising mission, against the West, and over the East, again as the preserver of a cultural authenticity against Western encroachment on the one hand, and the defender of order against oriental—Islamist, Caucasian, Central Asian—irrationality on the other. Instead of being an ideological quirk emanating from the Putin regime’s opportunisms or convictions, this hierarchical world view of contemporary Russia is sustained by a long-standing power-knowledge nexus similar—but not identical—to the one identified by Edward Said (1985, 1994) in the unequal relations between ‘West’ and ‘East’. In fact, the long-term discourses underlying Russia’s foreign and security policies, both at an official and a wider societal level, contain implicit—and sometimes explicit—justifications of hierarchy through claims to Russian pre-eminence in a specific civilisational sphere with a ‘shared history’— the ‘near abroad’. Such imperial narratives and practices are rooted in elements of both its predecessor states—the Romanov Empire and the Soviet Union—but adapted to the postcolonial conditions of twentyfirst-century International Society, where ‘naked’ imperialism remains anathema. Particularly when it comes to relations between Moscow and its historic ‘Eastern’ dominions in the Caucasus and Central Asia, these discourses are still at times recognisably ‘orientalist’, mimicking the Western narratives of superiority over a ‘degenerate’ Orient identified by Said. But, as in previous periods, these narratives are accompanied by a specific, simultaneous dissociation from the West: Russia’s present

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leaders tap into a vast reservoir of historic cultural ambiguity in denying the agency and cultural authenticity of both their ‘irrational’ oriental and pro-Western occidental subalterns. These attitudes have a long history in Russia, and their recurrence in different guises over two centuries points to their longer-term staying power in the contemporary era. Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s work on hybridity in addition to an appropriately adapted version of Saidian Orientalism, and echoing others who have described Russia as ‘hybrid’ (Morozov, 2013; Turoma & Waldstein, 2013), I shall refer to these contemporary Russian discourses and practices of hierarchy as ‘Hybrid Exceptionalism’. Denoting the driving ideology, the hegemonic ideational superstructure underwriting Moscow’s imperial self-positioning since the time of the Romanovs, ‘exceptionalism’—defined in Holsti’s (2010) vein—will refer to the recurring hierarchical form taken by civilising projects pursued by Russia’s various incarnations—Tsarist, Soviet, contemporary—whose variability in ideological substance cloaked an element of consistency in narratives and practices of Empire. Meanwhile, ‘hybridity’ will point to Russia’s abovementioned liminal position between West and East, Core and Periphery, Superior and Subaltern, as well as the current Russian elite’s tendency to combine historical, civilisational elements of the various iterations of empire with contemporary hierarchical discourses, drawn from liberal economic rationality and interventionism. Taken together, these two aspects allow one to, on the one hand, discern specifically Russian, nonWestern orientalising ‘discourses of Empire’, and, on the other hand, identify elements of continuity—despite of wildly differing ideological contexts—over two centuries. This is what makes ‘Hybrid Exceptionalism’—this monograph’s central concept—relevant to this day. Its main point is that Russia has, in its various—Tsarist, Soviet, contemporary—forms, always ended up pursuing civilising missions over mostly unwilling subalterns in West and East; its position between Occident and Orient both necessitated and allowed for a type of mission that created difference and hierarchy on both sides of Orientalism’s civilisational ‘divide’, by emphasising the distinctiveness of its ‘Western’—Slavic, Baltic—subordinates, while simultaneously stressing the need for disciplining power over ‘Eastern’ Chechens, Georgians, Avars, and Kazakhs. The formal post-imperial sovereignty of the states in Russia’s ‘near abroad’ might preclude the more openly imperious practices and narratives of previous eras, but this does not impede a continuing claim to a right to hierarchical imposition over these states, either through

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an appropriative imitation of liberal international norms—like free trade, or humanitarian intervention—or through a more openly civilisational discourse. Imposition can therefore be rationalised as the ‘prevention of genocide’—as it was in the 2008 Georgian war. Or it can be justified through historically based narratives de-legitimising associations with the West, as when one hears Lavrov alleging Ukraine’s takeover by ‘fascists’ and ‘Nazis’. In Russia’s ‘Orient’, these same rationalisations can often take on recognisably orientalist overtones, as with Medvedev describing Georgia’s former president, Saakashvili, as a ‘madman’—and worse (see Chapter 6). There is a difference in nuance in the justification for those interventions, a difference rooted in centuries of imperial practice that echo to this day, and a perceived need to reconcile them with present international normative conditions. Is this hybrid-exceptionalist standpoint something that sets contemporary Russia morally apart from a more ‘enlightened’, ‘egalitarian’, ‘genuinely post-imperial’ West? Far from pointing a finger and asserting their superiority, Western observers should consider the way Russia’s imperial aspirations are the product of a paradox: on the one hand, of its particular interpretation of great power status; and, on the other, of its position as an unequal participant in today’s Liberal International Order. Indeed, Russia is a product of what Rosenberg (2006)—following Trotsky—has referred to as the ‘Uneven Combined Development’ of the International System of which Russia became part during the eighteenth century: its Hybrid Exceptionalism is, in no small part, the result of its stigmatised imitation of Western modernity (Zaraköl, 2010, pp. 201– 239), made imperfect by the vagaries of its historic, geographic and socio-cultural predicament. Russia and the West are, therefore, entwined to a great degree, the latter a ‘significant other’ by which the former measures the recognition of its rightful great power status during any given period in history. One important note before the overview of the book’s upcoming chapters: this monograph’s focus on Russia’s imperial legacies should thus not serve to somehow excuse, or diminish, the West’s own post-imperial gaze. That the West’s imperial legacies are less visible today is, among others, the result of their hitherto dominant, almost hegemonic position in world affairs. Their colonialism of old has been replaced by a norm-shaping and -making ability that few states and societies outside the narrow group of developed liberal democracies independently possess; as shown over and over again in a vast body of postcolonial literature, the attitudes

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inherent to past global domination are readily visible in contemporary policies in places as far-flung as Iraq, Central Africa, and Afghanistan. The West is a rule-maker, and often, in the case of the United States, a rule-breaker, and, together with a weakening of the Liberal International Order, this inconsistency affects Russia’s own perceptions of the nature of, and requirements for great power status in the twenty-first century. While, in the best traditions of postcolonial scholarship, it will attempt to restore a measure of agency to those often neglected in Eurasia’s hard political calculus—the subalterns of a half-Western empire—it will do so by proposing a more fundamental transformation of the ‘Heartland’ than that provided by the geopoliticians in the various capitals of the great powers surrounding it. What is, in fact, needed, is a critical dialogue, a gradual coaxing of Russian society away from the reflexes of the past, towards a political culture that looks upon its neighbours as partners, rather than underlings. The imperial ship has sailed long ago, and most—if not all—societies of the former Soviet republics have developed identities that place themselves outside of Russian domination as envisaged by the more nostalgic-thinking in Moscow. That will require a kind of strategic patience and cultural sensitivity that goes beyond the dictats of ‘spheres of influence’ and ‘alliances’; and whether these will ever be mustered by the relevant decisionmakers very much remains to be seen.

Structure of the Book The subsequent chapters will develop the above argument as follows. The next chapter will start by delivering an overview of various conceptualisations of ‘Empire’ to have emerged in the International Relations literature, from formal or structural conceptualisations like Watson’s (2007), Keene’s (2002), and Wallerstein’s (1984), to the more ideational approaches found in the postcolonial Humanities literature of Bhabha (1994), Spivak (1999) and Said (1985, 1994). The existing postcolonial literature on Russia—sparse albeit growing, and overwhelmingly covering the Tsarist and Soviet eras—will be surveyed in a subsequent section. The general absence of a link between this body of work and political realities in post-Soviet Russia will subsequently be questioned, and tied to a number of factors, including: Russia’s status as territorial empire; the Soviet Union’s avowed anti-imperialism; post-Cold War Russia’s instability; and the continuing reluctance of postcolonial scholars

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to apply theories developed in the context of Western colonialism to not-quite-Western Russia. While each of these elements will be addressed in turn, a final engagement with an early debate on Russia’s position as both ‘Orientaliser’ and ‘Orientalised’ in Kritika (Adeeb, 2000; Knight, 2000; Todorova, 2000) will provide the impetus for the book’s central argument in the third section, introducing ‘Hybrid Exceptionalism’ as a concept. After a short discussion of both ‘exceptionalism’ and ‘hybridity’, the terms will be combined to denote Russia’s tendency—previously identified by Zaraköl—to both imitate the West, and double down on civilisational difference in its problematic relationship with modernity. Its resulting position as an orientalising and simultaneously orientalised great power results in a continuity in the patterns underlying the various civilising missions pursued by itself over the past three centuries in spite of at times revolutionary social and political transformations, through the bounding of a civilisational space separate from, yet related to both West and East. A final section will concentrate on the discursive, intertextual methodology used throughout the text, with variously combined primary and secondary sources providing the material for an analysis of the relevant ideological and policy debates, and the broader media, scientific, and artistic outputs for each of the periods surveyed. The first part of the chapter three will analyse the beginnings of Tsarist Russia’s imperial distinctiveness, the pre-modern foundations of which can be identified in its combination—and gradual incorporation— of Varangian—Viking—Byzantine, Mongol, and Tatar elements (Perrie, 2006; Romaniello, 2012). The reforms of Peter the Great imposed Westernisation on Russia’s elites, and the Empire itself gradually came to incorporate Western and Eastern lands—Poland, the Caucasus, and, later, Central Asia. Russia’s gradually intensifying encounter with both Western modernity and its oriental borderlands spurred debates on Russian identity: Uvarov’s well-known official doctrine of ‘Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Narodnost ’ occasioned varying interpretations by Westernisers and Slavophiles, both of whose arguments were situated at the crossroads between the ‘Western’ and the ‘Oriental’, while retaining distinctly hierarchical claims (Anisimov, 1993; Hunter, 2004, pp. 3–41): Russia’s imperial civilising mission was, respectively, seen as consisting of an improved version of Western modernity, or of a distinct, mystical

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Slavic ideal, either of which were to be imposed on a separate civilisational sphere where Russia, with its superior traditions of statehood, ruled supreme. The chapter will then examine the differing ways Tsarist Russia’s Hybrid Exceptionalism operated in its Eastern and Western borderlands as the Empire expanded and modernised throughout the nineteenth century. Traditional methods of imperial governance—based on elite co-optation and the differential granting of privileges—were gradually abandoned in favour of more modern—and intrusive—methods, aimed at the active management—and repression—of restless minorities, like the Poles and the peoples of the North Caucasus, and, later, groups with nascent modern forms of nationalism, like the Ukrainians, the Balts, the Georgians and Armenians. After the violent suppression of revolts in Poland and the North Caucasus—genocidal in the latter case—this was achieved at first through scientifically established and bureaucratically enforced notions of ethnic authenticity compatible with the imperial project; towards the latter decades of Romanov rule, these policies moved towards efforts at outright russification. The chapter will conclude by detailing the role of the nascent social sciences, humanities, and arts in sustaining these policies: Russian versions of Orientalism were visible in historiographic, anthropological, linguistic approaches towards the Caucasus and Central Asia—‘Russia’s Own Orient’ (Tolz, 2011)—and in literature, the fine arts, music. Efforts at managing and denying the specificity of ‘Western’ subalterns— like the Ukrainians and Poles—through all manner of historiographic, linguistic, and anthropological stereotypes could similarly be discerned in the arts and sciences of the era, from the myth of unity based on the ‘Kievan Rus’, over the scientific denial of linguistic specificity, to the literary differentiation between —bucolic, ‘Russian’—and treasonous — Polish-influenced—Ukrainians. The subject of chapter four will be the hybrid-exceptionalist nature of the Bolsheviks’ ‘affirmative action empire’ (Martin, 2001), the USSR. Ostensibly anti-imperialist, this Marxist-Leninist project still implied a hierarchical civilising mission, one that, while based on an undoubtedly Western Enlightenment ideology, was not quite Western because of the capitalist nature of the USSR’s ‘other’, and the influence of older, distinctly Russian intellectual traditions carried over from the Tsarist era.

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The chapter will first look at how the Marxist-Leninist ideological underpinnings of Soviet Nationalities Policy (SNP) contained hierarchical civilising assumptions from the start, by examining the early debates between Lenin and fellow—Russian, Polish, Austrian, and Jewish—Marxists (Baier, 2011; Lenin, 1913; Shelton, 1987; Szporluk, 1988; Walicki, 1983), the rigid and evolutionist ideas behind nativisation in the 1920s (Haugen, 2003, pp. 138–164), and the move towards more open Russocentrism during the Stalinist period—a feature retained in the ‘homo Sovieticus’ ideal of the remainder of the Soviet era (Blitstein, 2001; Grenoble, 2003, pp. 54–57). This will be followed by a similar, chronological exposé of policies that resulted from these ideological underpinnings, starting with the reconquest and creation of the federal USSR as a top-down, often violently imposed emancipating and civilising mission in the 1920s. The imperial continuity inherent to Hybrid Exceptionalism will then become more clearly visible in Stalin’s application of harsh disciplinary practices towards ‘deviant’ nations—including near-genocidal forms of minority management (Brandenberger, 2002; Burds, 2007; Chang, 2016; Naimark, 2010, pp. 80–98), and his role in restoring the role of the Russian language and history as mobilising anchors of a nascent, all-Union identity, particularly before and after the ‘Great Patriotic War’ (Brandenberger, 2010; Vujacic, 2007). The discussion will then proceed onto the Cold War era, when that emancipatory-civilising mission was expanded to include both Central and Eastern Europe, and the global South, resulting in a ‘double hierarchy’: the Soviet Union—led, in turn, by the Russians—came to differentiate its ‘Western’ subalterns—in the Baltics, Ukraine, and the wider Eastern bloc—from the capitalist West, all the while claiming leadership over a liberating anti-colonial struggle in the global South, often in a distinctly paternalistic fashion (Matusevich, 2008; Quist-Adade, 2005). Nikita Khrushchev’s post-Stalinist thaw and Leonid Brezhnev’s era of stagnation—‘zastoi’—then led to oscillations between greater openness to ethnic differentiation, and centralisation, until the final collapse of the USSR under Gorbachev. The chapter’s final sections will discuss the scientific and artistic underpinnings of Soviet Hybrid Exceptionalism by examining how claims to the ‘scientific management’ of minorities involved the full subordination of the social sciences and humanities to this Soviet civilising mission; there, as in the arts, tropes and stereotypes

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inherited from the Tsarist era—now cast in varying Marxist-Leninist or Socialist-Realist forms—remained as relevant as ever. In the fifth chapter, attention turns to how a renewed form of Hybrid Exceptionalism re-emerged in post-Cold War Russia. The first part starts with the Russian elite’s and society’s decade-long identity crisis during the turbulent 1990s (see Hosking, 1998; Shevel, 2011; Tolz, 1998), when the collapse of the USSR prompted the emergence of a number of competing restatements of Russian distinctiveness. These came with a number of conflicting worldviews, based on, among others, the redefinition of Russia as a ‘normal power’—as a fully accepted member of the nascent Liberal International Order’s Western elite—and more openly hierarchical and civilisational alternatives, sourced from the imperial legacies of the Tsarist and Soviet periods. This is when the various components of the current version of Hybrid Exceptionalism—liberalism, traditional ethno-linguistic and religious elements partly sourced from the Tsarist era, and an imperial form of Soviet nostalgia—take form. The discrediting of liberal alternatives and the gradual alienation of Russia from the West are then seen as crucial in understanding developments during the Putin years. The latter parts of the chapter accordingly engage with Hybrid Exceptionalism’s two main components as formulated by state, and wider societal discourse and practice following the turn of the century. Firstly, it discusses what shall be referred to as ‘feigned liberalism’—the appropriation, and distortion of liberal norms including democracy, the free market, international law—to hierarchical ends in a search for status and influence. And, secondly, it tackles more openly civilisationist components, based on the construction of a separate civilisational sphere from shared ethno-linguistic and religious elements— ethnicity, language, Orthodoxy, conservatism—and appropriately adapted common, Russocentrically defined, Soviet legacies—industrialisation, the Great Patriotic War, and the like. These quasi-liberal and civilisational elements will finally be tied to Homi Bhabha’s ideas regarding the subversive power of mimicry, as well as Zaraköl’s points on the role of imitation and doubling down in late entrants’ complex relationship with Western modernity. The penultimate—and final empirical—chapter then interrogates contemporary Russia’s relations with the ‘oriental’ and ‘Western’ parts of its ‘near abroad’. Hybrid Exceptionalism came to not only define the claimed authenticity of Russians—and a related, broader interaction with Western modernity—but was also expanded to impose a pro-Russian

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genuineness throughout the former Soviet space. Turning to its consequences for the Caucasus and Central Asia, the chapter concentrates in particular on the conflicts in Chechnya and Georgia, examining how discernibly orientalist discourses have emphasised the need to impose order in the face of the irrationality and impulsivity of Russia’s ‘Eastern’ subalterns. Feigned liberal disciplinary practices—including migration, the co-optation of elites, and outright military repressions—have echoed those of the Tsarist era in updated form, as have civilisational discourses denigrating the independent agency of Chechen and Georgian oriental subalterns as ‘bandits’, and ‘madmen’ (e.g. Hughes, 2007; McChesney, 2013; Medvedev, 2008; Russell, 2002; Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, pp. 64–69). The subsequent section then surveys how the elements of contemporary Hybrid Exceptionalism have figured in Russia’s justifications of policies towards its Western neighbours, like Ukraine and Belarus. It first queries how the instrumentalisation of seemingly liberal hierarchical practices—economic integration, trade, humanitarian intervention—has also served to bolster hybrid-exceptionalist claims to (neo-)imperial hierarchy; it then details how a ‘Potemkin conservatism’ (Rodkiewicz & Rogoza, 2015) has combined with references to a shared Soviet past to construct and maintain claimed civilisational differences with the West. Again, this leads to an engagement with familiar themes: dismissals of pro-Western attitudes as resulting from ultraliberal corrupting influences on Russia’s Western subalterns, or associations of pro-Western groups and individuals in those territories with the fascist enemy of World War II. The chapter concludes by exploring how certain facets of the contemporary Russian humanities, social sciences, and arts—history, IR, ethnography, literature film—end up reinforcing these twenty-first-century versions of Russia’s ambiguous, hierarchical claims. The concluding chapter examines how Hybrid Exceptionalism— and a broader engagement with Russia’s civilisational and hierarchical discourses—can help scholars and policymakers identify and facilitate potential moves away from more assertive claims to regional dominance. It first cautions against reifying Russian worldviews and their imperial aspects as risking either of two extremes: excessive Russophobia—by securitising Russia’s aggressive imperialism as an unchanging threat— or excessive Russophilia—by accommodating these taken-for-granted hierarchical claims without question. Instead, Hybrid Exceptionalism is argued to provide a potential middle way by balancing the continuity

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of Russian narratives and practices—in view of the historical record and Russia’s Eurasian geographic predicament—against their socially constructed nature. While radical change through revolutionary disruption is seen as unlikely, other, less dramatic factors both extraneous and inherent to Hybrid Exceptionalism are proffered the basis for more gradual change: the material, power-political limitations to Russia’s hierarchical ambitions, and the changing nature of Russia’s relationship with both the West, and its subalterns. The chapter will then look at the policy implications of these insights, both for the West, and the subalterns affected. For the former, it surveys four possible scenarios for interaction with Moscow: intensified NATO enlargement, regional disengagement, condominium, and a nonexpansionist ‘flexible containment’. It subsequently argues in favour of the last alternative as the preferred answer to Russia’s fraught relationship with Western late modernity, its hierarchical claims over the former Soviet space, and the need to recognise the agency of its subalterns. For those subalterns, the chapter finally proposes a combination of enlightened realist statecraft, and a continued critical dialogue with Russian society and its political and intellectual elites, as a necessary prerequisite for transforming the former Soviet Union into a genuinely post-imperial region. An understanding of Moscow’s Hybrid Exceptionalism thus becomes a potentially emancipating device, enabling the formerly dominated to navigate between Russia’s long-held presumptions, and the need to counter-pose and assert their own independent agency through principled resistance.

References Adeeb, K. (2000). Russian History and the Debate over Orientalism. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 1(4), 691–699. Anisimov, E. V. (1993). The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress Through Coercion in Russia (J. T. Alexander, Trans.). M.E. Sharpe. Baev, P. (2003). Putin’s Western Choice: Too Good to Be True? European Security, 12(1), 1–16. Baier, W. (2011). Von Nationen und »Natiönchen«, Historischen und »Geschichtslosen« Völkern – Rosa Luxemburg, W. I. Lenin und Otto Bauer. In M. Brie & F. Haug (Eds.), Zwischen Klassenstaat und Selbstbefreiung: Zum Staatsverständnis von Rosa Luxemburg (1st ed., pp. 145–169). Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge.

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Holsti, K. J. (2010). Exceptionalism in American Foreign Policy: Is It Exceptional? European Journal of International Relations, 17, 381–404. Hopf, T. (2002). Social Construction of International Politics: Identities & Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 & 1999. Cornell University Press. Hosking, G. A. (1998). Can Russia Become a Nation-State? Nations and Nationalism, 4(4), 449–462. Hughes, J. (2007). Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad. University of Pennsylvania Press. Hunter, S. (2004). Islam in Russia: The Politics of Identity and Security. Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Kassianova, A. (2001). Russia: Still Open to the West? Evolution of State Identity in the Foreign Policy and Security Discourse. Europe-Asia Studies, 53(6), 821– 839. Keene, E. (2002). Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and World Politics. Cambridge University Press. Kennan, G. F. (1946). Telegram. Available at: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/col dwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm. Accessed 1 September 2020. King, C. (2007). Imagining Circassia: David Urquhart and the Making of North Caucasus Nationalism. The Russian Review, 66(2), 238–255. Kipling, R. (1890). The Man Who Was. Available at: http://www.telelib.com/aut hors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/LifesHandicap/manwhowas.html. Accessed 3 September 2019. Knight, N. (2000). Grigor’ev in Orenburg, 1851–1862: Russian Orientalism in the Service of Empire. Slavic Review, 59(1), 74–100. Lenin, V. I. (1913). “Cultural-National” Autonomy. Available at: https://www. marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/nov/28.htm. Accessed 5 February 2020. Lenin, V. I. (2003 [1915]). The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Aations to Self-Determination. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/arc hive/lenin/works/1915/oct/16.htm. Accessed 5 September 2019. Martin, T. D. (2001). The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Cornell University Press. Matusevich, M. (2008). An Exotic Subversive: Africa, Africans and the Soviet Everyday. Race and Class, 49(4), 57–81. McChesney, A. (2013, September 27). Russia Walks Out During Saakashvili’s ‘Crazy’ Speech. The Moscow Times. Medvedev, D. (2008, August 27). Why I Had to Recognise Georgia’s Breakaway Regions. Financial Times. Available at: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ 9c7ad792-7395-11dd-8a66-0000779fd18c.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3ZGxV TLjz. Accessed 5 May 2015. Morozov, V. (2013). Subaltern Empire? Problems of Post-Communism, 60(6), 16–28.

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Moses, A. D., & Stone, D. (Eds.). (2007). Colonialism and Genocide. Routledge. Naimark, N. M. (2010). Stalin’s Genocides. Princeton University Press. Perrie, M. (Ed.). (2006). The Cambridge History of Russia: Volume 1—From Early Rus to 1689. Cambridge University Press. Quist-Adade, C. (2005). From Paternalism to Ethnocentrism: Images of Africa in Gorbachev’s Russia. Race and Class, 46(4), 79–89s. Rodkiewicz, W., & Rogoza, J. (2015). Potemkin Conservatism. An Ideological Tool of the Kremlin. Available at: https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/ point-view/2015-02-03/potemkin-conservatism-ideological-tool-kremlin. Accessed 8 May 2015. Romaniello, M. P. (2012) The Elusive Empire: Kazan and the Creation of Russia 1552–1671. The University of Wisconsin Press. Rosenberg, J. (2006). Why Is There No International Historical Sociology? European Journal of International Relations, 12(3), 307–340. Russell, J. (2002). Mujahedeen, Mafia, Madmen: Russian Perceptions of Chechens During the Wars in Chechnya, 1994–96 and 1999–2001. Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 18(1), 73–96. Said, E. W. (1985) Orientalism. Penguin Books. Said, E. W. (1994) Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books. Salt, J. (1968). Local Manifestations of the Urquhartite Movement. International Review of Social History, 13(3), 350–365. Shelton, A. K. (1987). Rosa Luxemburg and the National Question. East European Quarterly, 21(3), 297–304. Shevel, O. (2011). Russian Nation-Building from Yel’tsin to Medvedev: Ethnic, Civic or Purposefully Ambiguous. Europe-Asia Studies, 63(2), 179–202. Shevtsova, L. (2014). Putin’s Attempt to Recreate the Soviet Empire Is Futile. Available at: http://carnegie.ru/2014/01/07/putin-s-attempt-to-recreatesoviet-empire-is-futile/gxrl. Accessed 19 February 2014. Spivak, G. C. (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Harvard University Press. Stent, A., & Shevtsova, L. (2002). America, Russia and Europe: A Realignment? Survival, 44(4), 121–134. Stronski, P. (2020). There Goes the Neighborhood: The Limits of Russian Integration in Eurasia. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Todorova, M. (2000). Does Russian Orientalism Have a Russian Soul? A Contribution to the Debate Between Nathaniel Knight and Adeeb Khalid. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 1(4), 717–727. Tolz, V. (1998). Forging the Nation: National Identity and Nation Building in Post-communist Russia. Europe-Asia Studies, 50(6), 993–1022. Tolz, V. (2011). Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods. Oxford University Press.

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Trenin, D., & Malashenko, A. (2004). Russia’s Restless Frontier: The Chechnya Factor in Post-Soviet Russia. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Tsygankov, A. P., & Tarver-Wahlquist, M. (2009). Duelling Honors: Power, Identity and the Russia-Georgia Divide. Foreign Policy Analysis, 5, 307–326. Voloshin, G. (2012, September 24). Russia’s Eurasian Union: A Bid for Hegemony? Geopolitical monitor. Available at: http://www.geopoliticalmonitor. com/russias-eurasian-union-a-bid-for-hegemony-4730/. Accessed 19 June 2013. Vujacic, V. (2007). Stalinism and Russian Nationalism: A Reconceptualization. Post-Soviet Affairs, 23(2), 156–183. Walicki, A. (1983). Rosa Luxemburg and the Question of Nationalism in Polish Marxism (1893–1914). The Slavonic and East European Review, 61(4), 565– 582. Wallerstein, I. (1984). The Politics of the World-Economy: The States, the Movements, and the Civilizations. Cambridge University Press. Watson, A. (2007). Hegemony and History. Routledge. Zaraköl, A. (2010). After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West. Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 2

Conceptualising an Empire in Between

Introduction Are empires still relevant to our understandings of the contemporary, ‘post-imperial’ world? And can we still see the behaviour of states like Russia—historically shaped through conquest and empire—as formed by these historical legacies? This chapter will provide the theoreticalconceptual framework for the subsequent empirical analysis by positing that in contemporary (post-)modernity, the legacies of empire are still very much relevant, within and outside the West. The former insight— that the contemporary West is inherently shaped by its colonial experience—is not new in itself: over the past half century, an expansive body of postcolonial work has challenged the multiple shadows cast by the West’s imperial and colonial histories into the present (Epstein, 2014; Hayes, 2017). Where the present framework will depart from most postcolonial scholarship to date is in its attempt to integrate the experiences of an empire that has, at the very most, ambiguously formed part of the Western core of modernity, over three ideologically distinct—Tsarist, Soviet, contemporary—periods. In fact, its partial aim is to challenge a paradox that lies at the centre of much of mainstream postcolonial theory: in that, in its effort to challenge Western hegemonic assumptions on ‘the Rest’, it has mostly maintained a perverse kind of Western-centrism (Anand, 2012; Choi,

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2003; Matin, 2013), by concentrating on the Western legacies of colonialism and empire. As such, the subalterns of such theorising have been the West’s; most of its scholarship still ends with the West and ‘its’ rest. This is certainly not to diminish the significance of this scholarship: an initial critical focus on the West naturally emerged from its status as the core of International Society, and the source of the standards of modernity (and civilisation) that shaped, and still shape, informal global hierarchies to this day. Western empires were by far the most relevant in shaping the modern world, through multiple, problematic legacies; they lay at the basis of both material and cultural inequality, through their role in globalising capitalism and their claims to civilisational superiority (and inferiority), elements which are still visible in the global politics of the early twenty-first century (Linklater, 2016; Stroikos, 2014). A dissection of their particular presumptions, inequities and inequalities was therefore the natural starting point for a scholarly challenge of empire and its legacies. But a focus on the West—and only the West—leaves out important narratives as to the status of non-Western imperial hierarchies, their interaction with this fundamentally unequal modernity, and the legacies of these interactions in the present day: the Ottoman and Qing Empires (Fiskesjö, 2017; Kayao˘glu, 2010), ‘subaltern imperialist’ (Sand, 2014) Japan after the Meiji restoration, and, of course, Russia come to mind. Each of these were empires in their day, with their own subalterns, their own claims to civilisational superiority, their own political economies of inequality, and their contemporary legacies, for both the conquerors and the conquered. Like these other non-Western empires, Russia entered the modern age as a subaltern to the Western core, combining its cultural specificity with the ideologies and methods of European colonialism, with varying success; in so doing, it maintained its own claims to superiority through these mediated forms of modernity. With Russia itself going through several transmutations in the centuries since its entry into European International Society under Peter the Great—with 1917 and 1991 as moments of fundamental ideological disruption—the question remains as to the effects of these formative experiences with modernity into the present day: to what extent does Russia’s hierarchical positioning as (partially) subaltern to the West—but in turn superior to its own subalterns—influence its policies towards these subalterns, and, indeed, the rest of the world, into the twenty-first century? The argument I put forward in the

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following sections aims to capture precisely this question, and while it is applied, in this case, to the Tsarist and Soviet Empires, and their presentday legacies in Russia’s perceptions of its role in ‘its’ region and the wider world, it could, in effect, also be relevant to other contemporary major powers with similar historical backgrounds, as empires initially absorbed as civilisational inferiors into an unequal International Society. This chapter will therefore enable a longue durée perspective on Russia’s hierarchical self-positioning through the introduction of Hybrid Exceptionalism as the conceptual framework for subsequent analysis. It refers to a Foucauldian governmentality—emerging from a special adaptation of Edward Saïd’s Orientalism to Russia’s hybridity, and its specific—exceptionalist—civilising missions, and reconciles claims to civilisational superiority by a non-Western—or ambiguously Western—empire like Russia’s with its incorporation into, at best, the semi-periphery of International Society. As Zaraköl (2010) points out, as in the case of other non-Western powers, such late and partial entry into Western modernity and its attendant stigma resulted in an incongruous combination of imitation of the West, and ‘doubling down’ on its non-Western specificity: in Russia’s case, this led to a hybridity that has operated in two directions throughout the three periods under review, one that is fundamentally entwined with Russia’s claims to civilisational exceptionalism. As shown here, it entails a sustained, if precarious, claim to civilisational superiority and universal mission, claims reconciled with an inferior or outsider status in modernity through a simultaneous emphasis on difference from the Western core. The result has seen the construction of ‘orientalist’ claims over subalterns in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and of ‘protective’ ‘self-orientalising’ civilisational difference over Western subalterns, like Ukraine and Poland. The following sections will, accordingly, first discuss the notion of ‘empire’ and introduce Edward Saïd’s ‘Orientalism’ as one way of capturing their narrative legitimisations of hierarchy, and their continuing relevance even in the contemporary absence of formal empire. A subsequent section will then lay the groundwork for the introduction of Hybrid Exceptionalism by adapting Saïd’s framework—initially applied to British and French forms of colonialism—to specifically Russian circumstances. Three issues in particular will be addressed: Russia’s status as an overland rather than overseas empire; its ambiguous relationship to the Western ‘core’ of colonialism; and the applicability of Saïd’s framework— and the characterisation of Russia as a continuous ‘empire’—in light of

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the ‘ruptures’ in Russian history—notably the revolution of 1917, and the fall of the USSR in 1991. A third section will then elaborate on Hybrid Exceptionalism itself by conceptualising its two components of ‘exceptionalism’ and ‘hybridity’. The chapter will then conclude with a few points on methodology.

Empires Between the Objective and Intersubjective Empires and hierarchies have been extensively conceptualised, both within and outside IR Theory. If one takes a restrictive, legalistic or formal approach—defining empire as the ‘direct administration of different communities from an imperial centre’ (Watson, 1992, p. 16), or an ‘extensive polity incorporating diverse, previously independent units, ruled by a dominant central polity’ (Donnelly, 2006)—empires are very much a relic of the past. In effect, such formal definitions see empires as combining diversity and hierarchy: both in their overland and overseas iterations, claims to the latter have become anathema in the contemporary, postcolonial era. With Sovereign Equality now the norm in relations between the states that make up contemporary International Society, the principle of suzerainty is very much a thing of the past, albeit in its formal, explicit manifestations; and even in multi-ethnic, decentralised sovereign units, legitimate rule is based—in theory at least —on notions of human equality. But scholarship has now moved beyond the mainstream Westphalian IR narrative—exemplified by Watson (1992)—positing a relatively seamless move from a hierarchical International Society centred on the West, to a genuinely global one where human and sovereign equality reign supreme. Postcolonial scholarship has, since the 1970s, firmly established the continued empirical (if not normative) reality of hierarchy in international affairs, beyond the differentiation in the unequal material capabilities of great, middle and small powers posited by realism: the ideologically rooted hierarchies of the past persist, and empires, far from having become irrelevant, shape the global political economy just as they shape the hegemonic assumptions governing the high-politics conduct of international affairs and the low-politics interactions between societies. Indeed, ‘empire’ is a multi-faceted term, whose meaning has expanded considerably from the strictly legal context outlined above, with various well-established traditions now piercing through the largely fictional nature of today’s ‘equality’ narrative.

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The materialist approach to empire actually started in the twentieth century (arguably even earlier), when writers like Hobson (1902) and Lenin (1916) employed the term in a socio-economic—rather than formal-legalistic—vein. Building on classical Marxist thought, both saw empires (and their corollary, imperialism) as products of the global capitalist system, the result of a quest for markets and resources by a core faced with capital surpluses. This rough division of the world into a dominant core and exploited periphery was taken over and reproduced in the postcolonial era by authors like Wallerstein (1984, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2011d) and Galtung (1971), whose systemic theories conceptualised an unequal relationship that persisted into the contemporary era, even in the presence of formal sovereign equality. With or without the formal institution of decolonisation, the underlying global socio-economic infrastructure of capitalism remained the same. Others including Doyle, Hobson and Sharman, and Lake took a less socio-economic structural view of empire and hierarchy: for Doyle (1986), ‘Empires [were] relationships of political control imposed by some societies over the effective sovereignty of other political societies’, while Hobson and Sharman (2005) referred to them as ‘hierarchic formations’; Lake (1996) placed ‘empire’ at the hierarchical extreme in a continuum of security relations between states, with informal empires existing ‘where one state controls indirectly residual rights in the other. This normally occurs through a nominally sovereign but functionally dependent and therefore controllable agent in the subordinate state’ (p. 9). Stivachtis (2013), meanwhile, refers to ‘non-imperial empires’ in a corrective to Watson’s formal—and thus dated—English School conceptualisation when arguing that, in their informal iterations, they function as mediators of the institutions of International Society in any ‘sub-global international societies’ (i.e. ‘regions’) they may dominate. In a conceptual approach aimed at capturing the imperial nature of Soviet Union and contemporary Russia beyond the age of explicit ‘empire’, Beissinger (2005, 2008) provides a combined objective and intersubjective approach to the question. To start with, he critiques Doyle’s view of empires as the effective, hierarchical control of a metropole over a periphery, arguing that such a focus on effective control neglects the ‘illegitimate and nonconsensual character of control, and the nature of the political societies being controlled’ (Beissinger, 2005, pp. 20–21). Following Lake, he identifies this non-consensual

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control of distinct communities as the crucial factor distinguishing contemporary empires from other heterogenous forms of government—say, neo-medieval arrangements like the European Union, or federated states, and other multi-national entities (p. 32). In that vein, modern-day empires become empires in the contemporary—and pejorative—sense because national communities resist rule by a centre recognised as such by virtue of their nationalist claims to self-determination (empire as claim), which are then accepted in the wider discourse, achieving hegemonic status (empire as outcome); thus, for Beissinger, the Soviet Union only became an empire once its various ethnic groups—which had arguably come to accept its rule as legitimate by the time of glasnost and perestroika (p. 29)—started agitating against it, something reflected in its characterisation as empire in much of the literature from that date, a characterisation now generally accepted in wider discourse. The advantage of Beissinger’s approach is clear: in combining the objective element of hierarchical control —with an intersubjective complement—lack of consent by distinct communities to that hierarchical control—it enables the characterisation of not just openly imperial Tsarist Russia, but also the (avowedly anti-imperialist) USSR, and, contemporary Russia and its ‘near abroad’, as ‘empires’, in an age where ‘empire’ has become anathema. It can, of course, also be applied to other hierarchical, multinational entities, unmasked as ‘empires’ once they have to rely on repression, rather than legitimacy, in maintaining their rule over their distinct minority populations. There are, nevertheless, two questions that are left open in this conceptualisation: firstly, as to the ontological necessity of resistance as a criterion for empire; and, secondly, as to the metropole’s justifying mechanisms of hierarchical control. Is the status of multi-national entities as ‘empire’ truly dependent on resistance, or does it emerge from certain claims to (legitimate) hierarchical control that may be unmasked as such by scholarship, rather than the subjects of hierarchy themselves? The first problem—the stated empirical necessity for resistance even in the presence of hierarchy—refers to Beissinger’s propagation of the lack of consent by national subalterns as an empirical prerequisite of modern empire: contemporary forms of imperial control thus become contingent upon the identification of these minorities as subaltern ‘nations’ opposed to imperial rule, and the consequent intersubjective constitution of a core and periphery. But does an empire cease to be an empire because of the consent, or a lack of national consciousness among those subjected to its

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hierarchy? Or, to put it in terms of a stark analogy: does slavery cease to be slavery because of the slaves’ acceptance of their condition, or capitalism cease to be capitalism in the absence of class consciousness? After all, as Gramsci teaches us, apparently repression-free consent can be based on hegemonic ideologies that lead to the self-erasure of the oppressed: it can, in fact, even lead to the oppressed themselves towards defending the very repressive system itself, with false consciousness, not oppression, upholding consent to fundamentally unjust conditions. Just as in Gramsci’s Marxian scheme, the absence of class consciousness did not preclude the existence of a hegemonically justified class hierarchy, the absence of national identity should not preclude the existence of oppressive, imperial structures, and hegemonic ideological claims justifying the same. What Beissinger in fact captures is the transformation of ‘empire’ from a signifier of status to a term of abuse, rather than a fundamental change in its overriding ontological status as a hierarchy, justified through an attendant set of hierarchical claims of varying effectiveness. This makes these claims, rather than the resistance to them, central to the emergence of empire: empires emerge intersubjectively, not from resistance, but from claims to hierarchy, and attendant practices made by the conquerors themselves—a conceptualisation closer to an earlier view of ‘Empire as Bourdieusian habitus’, proposed by Beissinger (1995). To continue on the analogy: slavery did not emerge from the decision of Spartacus to resist the Romans, it emerged from the property claims of slave-owners on slaves, justified through any number of narratives, including the division of the world behind ‘civilised Romans’ and ‘barbarians’, reified ideas as to the ‘laws of nature’, and norms. This is one of the central insights of Gramscian and other Marxian critiques of empire and imperialism, which have viewed the phenomena as entwined with the hegemonic ideologies normalising persistent hierarchy in both the colonial and postcolonial eras, and also see the role of the scholar in calling out these normalised relations, a priori—even when and where the subalterns cannot speak, or resist. From Fanon’s (1986, 2005) view of the ‘colonial’ as fundamentally entwined with—and destructive of—the subalterns’—and colonists’— psychologies, to Hardt and Negri’s (2001) notion of the ‘multitude’ as a point of resistance against a complex, global, neoliberal, hegemonic empire, over Keene’s (2002) de-reification of the traditional, taken-forgranted Western-centric English School narrative, ideational approaches

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to postcolonial scholarship have come to be dominated by distinctly critical paradigms that don’t merely ‘objectively’ analyse the legal-formal, or the empirical, but question the hegemonic assumptions—both in scholarship and the wider world—that hide historical and contemporary hierarchies, often in plain sight. In this frame empire does not emerge, ex post facto, from resistance—it actively calls for it, starting with the de-reification of the assumptions that are often embedded deeply in the narratives and discourses of both oppressors and oppressed. Such views do not shy away from characterising the empires of today, and yesteryear, as such, in continuous accounts that are not interrupted by occasional periods of acceptance and submission.

Enter Sa¨id Edward Said’s Orientalism (1985a, 1985b; MacFie, 2000) is perhaps the best-known of these critical, ideational approaches to the issue of informally, culturally reproduced empire and hierarchy. Said’s broad attack on ‘orientalist’ narratives underpinning European colonialism in effect employed a Foucaultian hermeneutical approach, a broadly critical ‘archaeology of knowledge’ (Foucault, 2012), incorporating two distinct lines of attack (Said, 1985a, pp. 201–225): on the one hand, it dissected deeply held cultural prejudices underlying the construction of a ‘barbaric, Asiatic East’ as the other of the ‘civilised, European West’, in what he referred to as ‘latent orientalism’. His second line of attack was more specifically aimed at the ‘manifest ’ orientalism of the formal scientific study of the ‘Orient’ that emerged during the nineteenth century, very much in parallel to the colonisation of increasingly extensive territories in the Islamic (and non-Islamic) East. Both variants of orientalism imbued the Western arts and sciences with ‘theses of Oriental backwardness, degeneracy, and inequality with the West’ (p. 206) and were closely associated with biological ideas of racial inequality, which it served to consolidate, either indirectly—in literature, fine art, music—or directly—in the emerging humanities and social sciences—history, philology, anthropology—of the age. Latent Orientalism was, for instance, imbued with a masculinist world view: apart from it being an ‘exclusively male province’, it portrayed women—especially oriental women—as part of a ‘male power fantasy’, as ‘more or less stupid, and above all […] willing’, while the oriental male was looked upon with ‘contempt and fear’ (p. 208). The thus problematised and de-legitimised

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nature of oriental masculinity was part of a narrative that invited more enlightened domination, with Oriental femininity as a stand-in for a receptive East. This theme was repeated more clearly in the reified generalisations of manifest Orientalism, where ‘….Orientals were rarely seen or looked at, they were seen as […] problems to be solved, or confined, or […] taken over’ (p. 207). Such tropes were repeated throughout the body of cultural and scientific output that constituted Western orientalism at the height of colonial Empire, in the nineteenth century; combined, they served to justify the conquest and dominance of a degenerate Oriental ‘other’ by civilised Western powers as their proponents engaged directly in the colonial administration of ‘oriental lands’. As stated above, the contemporary norms of International Society preclude a formal, legal recognition of direct imperial or colonial domination and ambition; empires in this nineteenth-century sense of the word are non-existent. The advantage of a Saidian postcolonial analysis lies precisely in its ability to uncover the structures of domination that lie implicit in the assumptions that underpin what Foucault (1991) would have referred to as the ‘governmentalities’ of the dominant, reproducing hierarchy as the result of a continued interweaving of discourse and power. This interweaving has been instrumental in legitimising the manifold practices sustaining unequal relations between West and East in the past, and, in fact, between North and South in the present. Said’s central contribution was positing empire and (neo-)colonial domination as a complex of reified hegemonic discourses reproducing the hierarchical relations between (former) colonisers and colonised: in his words, ‘…neither imperialism nor colonialism are simple acts of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination’ (Said, 1994, p. 8). Crucially, his approach allowed the scholar to pierce through the appearances upheld by established narratives to uncover the unequal relations they enabled and legitimised, over the ‘longue durée’, as shall be attempted in this volume. These unequal relations were (and are) underpinned by a radical cultural separation of the metropole and the subaltern that often does not conform to reality. While the ‘Orient’ is, without a doubt, ‘othered’ as alien and inferior—at least in its contemporary manifestations, often opposed to a past of faded glory—orientalist discourse also serves to hide

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the historical entanglement of both: the fact that ‘West’ and ‘East’ influenced each other—with the latter often playing a civilising role that would not fit well with claims to superiority found in contemporary mythology— is more often than not set aside. In fact, such entanglement is not just part of history; it becomes part and parcel of the processes underlying imperial domination. In what Homi K. Bhabha (1994) refers to as ‘hybridity’, empire and the dominated end up imitating each other in the ‘interstices’ created by their encounter, appropriating elements of each other cultures, the former so as to better rule and dominate, the latter so as to survive, either through adaptation, or through the subversive bending to its advantage of the imperial narrative (Easthope, 1998; Hutnyk, 2005; Kapoor, 2003). As products of these fundamentally antagonistic aims, hybridity and ‘mimicry’, paradoxically, do not preclude the posited difference and hierarchy between the two, but, rather, end up simultaneously reinforcing and (on the part of the subaltern) subverting it. In the West, historical and contemporary latent orientalist imaginaries of the ‘Orient’ could and can be seen in products of both ‘high’, and everyday culture, normalising a view of Arabs and Muslims as inherently violent or irrational, inviting domination or intervention. Said, among others, referred to writings of authors like Gustave Flaubert, the operas of Verdi and Puccini, the paintings of Gerôme and Delacroix as examples of such cultural output in earlier times (Said, 1987; Locke, 1993); their contemporary counterparts can be found in products of mass culture: magazine articles, music, films and television series, and so forth (Iwamura, 2011; Pavan Kumar, 2012; Roh et al., 2015; Rosenblatt, 2009). And just as manifest orientalist scholarship categorised, reified and generalised on the ‘oriental’ societies under observation from a distinctly Western perspective presented as objective, and fed into the policies of imperial administrators of the day, modern-day equivalents can be found in think-tanks and institutions of higher education where the study of the ‘East’—particularly the ‘Muslim East’—is all too often reduced to terrorism, instability, irrationality, and danger, again feeding into the—often disastrous—policies in these parts of the world (Little, 2008; Kerboua, 2016). For far from being of merely historic significance, orientalist ideas can be seen to feed into contemporary societal attitudes towards the Middle East and, more broadly, the Global South, remaining clearly visible in the discourse and practice of today’s policymakers and scholars (Said, 1985a, pp. 284–354; 1994, pp. 341–408). A significant body of work

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directly relevant to International Relations has reinforced this point by studying the contemporary effects of both latent and manifest orientalism on issues as diverse as Western foreign policy (Little, 2008), contemporary representations of the Middle East and Islam in the media (Bernstein & Studlar, 1997; Rane et al., 2010), their roles in shaping the narratives on terrorism in the post-9/11 world (Dabashi, 2009; Morton, 2007; Salaita, 2006), and, more generally, the (neo-)liberal division between the civilised ‘self’ and the un-civilised ‘other’. Each of these studies lays out the role of discourse in excusing and normalising unequal power, and, ultimately, informal variants of empire, following or assisted by the methodology pioneered by Said. For a number of reasons, postcolonial scholarship has been slow in including the political heirs to the one-time Grand Duchy of Muscovy in its analyses: from a broad, theoretical perspective, the question is whether a framework that was specifically applied by Said to relations between mainly France and the United Kingdom with the Islamic world can be transposed to the Russian imperial experience—the subject of a (now mostly resolved) debate among historians at the beginning of this century. The second, related issue emerges from Russia’s specific characteristics: its status as an overland rather than overseas empire, its straddling of territories traditionally associated with both ‘West’ and ‘East’, its own occasional ‘orientalisation’ by the West, and the revolutionary disruptions of 1917 and 1991. In the following section, I shall address these complications by modifying Russia’s particular ways of ‘othering’—during its Imperial, Soviet, and contemporary periods—to take account of these complexities; these adaptations of Saïd’s Orientalism to Russia’s long-term claims to hierarchy and civilising mission will lead the argument towards Hybrid Exceptionalism, and its integrated, long-term account of Russian imperial narrative and practice.

Russia’s Hybrid-Exceptionalist Empires At first sight, orientalist tropes can easily be identified in Russian discourses and practices over the past two centuries: where the United Kingdom had Byron, Russia has Pushkin (Hokanson, 1994); where France had Flaubert, Russia had Lermontov (Scotto, 1992); the cruel and erotic orient captured in Delacroix’ paintings could also be seen in those by Vereshchagin (Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, 2010b); and both Russia and the West saw the emergence of the formal ‘scientific’ study

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of the Orient, from the mid-1800s—starting with the creation of an ‘Asiatic Museum’ in Saint Petersburg in 1818, and of the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow in 1814 (Kemper, 2018). And as in the West, a considerable body of twentieth- and twenty-first-century output— straddling the great revolutionary disruptions of 1917 and 1991—has shaped Russian and Soviet approaches to the ‘East’, feeding into presentday Russia’s attitudes towards its ‘own Orient’ (Tolz, 2011): be it in the characterisation of Chechen independence fighters, Central Asian and Caucasian populations and leaders in ways that aim to justify a continued Russian presence in or dominance over these regions. But while the study of ‘Empire’ and ‘Orientalism’ in imperial Russia, and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union, is now well established, the largest land empire of the modern age was slow to be included in postcolonial scholarship in particular: there is relatively little work from such a perspective on how the discourses and practices of yesteryear affect contemporary Russia’s attitudes towards its ‘near abroad’, especially in the realm of international politics. In fact, two interrelated complications inhibited Russia’s early inclusion in postcolonial studies of a Saidian vein. Firstly, initial postcolonial scholarship was mainly focused on the core—Western—source of modern colonialism and empire, for obvious, aforementioned reasons: if one was to challenge hegemony, the primary progenitors of that hegemony would have to, first and foremost, subjected to critical inquiry. In his lifetime, Said himself thus left the orientalising tendencies of the Soviet Union (and its Tsarist predecessor) largely unaddressed, famously incurring the wrath of one of his Western orientalist targets, Bernard Lewis (1982). While authors like Bhabha (1994) and Spivak (1999) subsequently provided important correctives to his relative neglect of the agency of the West’s subalterns, postcolonial IR scholarship—and critical IR theory more broadly—remained mired in what Hobson and Sajed have recently referred to as ‘Eurofetishism’ (Hobson & Sajed, 2017): a tendency to over-estimate Western agency at the expense of its nonWestern counterparts. As a result, the study of non-Western empires was slow to develop, often hindered by the question as to whether postcolonial theories aimed precisely at modern manifestations of Western hegemonic dominance and control could be applied to modernising non-Western states and societies. Secondly, and relatedly, apart from its exclusion (or, at best, partial inclusion) in the Western colonial ‘core’, Russia was an overland rather

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than overseas empire. This is significant, in that much of early postcolonial—and certainly Saidian—scholarship had relied on the firm geographic and racial boundaries set by the oceans between the conquerors, and the conquered (Adeeb, 2007; Sharp, 2008), a point reinforced by Saïd himself (1994, pp. xxii–xxiii). The distance and cultural differentiation between France, Britain and their Asian and African colonies was always stark and clear, and made it relatively easy to conceptualise the ‘othering’ that underlay much of orientalist discourse as somehow ‘unique’. The Russian empire, on the other hand, did not have the advantage of the stopping power of water, and gradually bled—both geographically and civilisationally speaking—from a centre into both Asian and European borderlands. The co-optation of native elites, and their frequent assimilation into the Empire’s complex social hierarchy (a practice continued in more modern form in the USSR), was quite unlike anything seen in Western colonial empires as well: neither Britain nor France had the equivalents of prince Bagration, or count Loris-Melikoff, respectively, Georgian and Armenian aristocrats who reached the highest levels in the administration of the imperial metropole (Lincoln, 1976; Pollock, 2010). ‘Othering’ would thus have to function very differently in the Russian context. But both of these ambiguities can and have been overcome. The general question on the applicability of postcolonial theory on nonWestern forms of empire was answered in the affirmative, in cases ranging from India, over China, to Japan (e.g. Anand, 2012, 2019; Choi, 2003; Tierney, 2010; Watson, 2007), as was the more specific question of Orientalism’s relevance to the Russian experience. During the early years of the previous decade, the latter generated some debate on whether the Romanov empire could truly count as an ‘orientaliser’, particularly among historians (see Adeeb, 2000; Knight, 2000a, 2000b; Todorova, 2000). On one side, Knight echoed other historians in arguing that Russia’s position outside the West made any application of Orientalist analysis to its experience as empire problematic; on the other side of the debate, Adeeb and others argued that Said’s scholarship could be applied to the Russian experience, considering the similarities between its narratives and practices with the West’s. The debate was concluded by Todorova, who opened the door to a modified application of orientalism, and its notions of alterity, by arguing in favour of a reconciliation between universal and historical specific approaches to Orientalism.1 This in effect underwrote Saidian scholarship on the Tsarist period, whose ‘orientalisms’ have now

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been extensively analysed mostly by historians, anthropologists and Russicists like Layton (1994, 1997), Jersild (2002), Schimmelpenninck van der Oye (2010a) and others (see Cronin, 2015). This has nevertheless left several historically and geographically conditioned imbalances and blind spots in scholarship on Russia’s postcolonial legacies. Firstly, there is a concentration of such scholarship on Tsarist Russia’s Orient, which emerges from its status as an openly imperial entity, in an era when ‘empire’ was a conveyor of status; but this has left colonial narratives and practices in twentieth and twenty-first-century Russia—as the less straightforwardly imperial USSR and Russian Federation—relatively underexplored.2 Secondly, apart from resulting in the unequal treatment of various historical periods, the ruptures of 1917 and 1991 have so far inhibited an integrated account of the historical legacies of empire on contemporary Russia’s world view. Thirdly, with a few exceptions (e.g. Annus, 2012; Chernetsky, 2003; Raˇcevskis, 2002; Velychenko, 2004; Von Hagen, 2014), much of postcolonial scholarship has also failed to account for Russia’s hierarchical interactions with its Western rather than its Oriental subalterns: a curious omission considering the admitted ambiguity of Russia’s civilisational positioning, but one that no doubt emerges from the core ideas behind orientalism, with their traditional focus on hierarchical interactions of ‘West’ or ‘North’ over ‘East’ or ‘South’. What Russia’s ‘position-in-between’ meant for the legitimising narratives of an empire that looked in two directions, and whether these legitimising narratives and attendant practices survived the two transformative revolutions of 1917 and 1991 into the present day has thus, more often than not, been left open to question. Accordingly, this monograph’s central concept—Hybrid Exceptionalism—extends an adapted view of orientalism towards not just Tsarist Russia, but the Soviet Union and contemporary Russian Federation, resulting in a transhistorically and geographically integrated account; and it allows the view of Moscow as an imperial power to survive the glaring discontinuities in its history—the 1917 revolution, the fall of the USSR, and periods when its subalterns might have accepted hierarchical rule as ‘legitimate’—by placing the skewed symbiotic relationship between metropole and periphery within a long-term analysis. At the same time, it integrates a narrative that justifies imperial policy towards a perhaps notso-alien ‘Orient’, with one that has to legitimise rule over a (nominally superior) ‘Occident’.

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Building on a broad, adapted interpretation of Said’s critical view of imperialism as ‘the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory’ (Said, 1994, p. 9), rather than formal legal arrangements or overt and already resisted ideological claims, Hybrid Exceptionalism thus sheds light on two continuous aspects in Tsarist, Soviet and contemporary hierarchical Russian relations with both spheres of ‘its backyard’. ‘Exceptionalism’ refers to the tendency of states—especially great powers—to adopt narratives justifying universal ‘civilising missions’, something Russia did in all three of its modern manifestations. The element of ‘hybridity’ accounts for Russia’s specificity not just by acknowledging its long-term position between ‘East’ and ‘West’, but also by accounting for its role as an empire that, in contrast to its Western counterparts, was both ‘orientaliser’ and ‘orientalised’, never an unequivocal part of the Western metropolitan ‘core’, throughout modernity.

Introducing Hybrid Exceptionalism Exceptionalism Within the context of my argument, ‘exceptionalism’ goes beyond a mere claim to legal or empirical exceptionality: it refers to a foundational myth, a claim to uniqueness, combined with a special sense of religiously and politically defined mission. In that sense, it was originally applied to the United States and its sense of divinely ordained ‘manifest destiny’: a mission to create an ever-expanding new liberal order, at first on the North American continent, and—especially after the Wilsonian turn— throughout the world (Ceaser, 2012; Hodgson, 2009; Lerner, 1957). The term has now been expanded to encompass other states and societies: defining it broadly, as the ‘unique qualities – from a particular set of political and social values to the special historical trajectory and foreign relations experience – that differentiate one country from another’, Zhang has, for instance, identified China as having its own version of ‘exceptionalism’, along with Alden and Large (2011), and Callahan (2012), while such exceptionalist thought has also been identified in France (Imbert, 1989; Lovecy, 1999). Perhaps the most explicit in uprooting ‘exceptionalism’ from its American origins, Holsti (2010) has identified five key characteristics that make

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a given state and society ‘exceptionalist’, including: a responsibility, obligation or mission to liberate others; its freedom from external constraints in realising that mission; the hostility of the surrounding world; a need for external enemies; and a tendency to portray itself as a victim. Holsti includes the foreign policies of the United States, but also of postrevolutionary France, and, notably, of the Soviet Union as falling under this definition. Most relevant to the argument presented here, the exceptionalism Holsti has identified in the USSR encompassed all five of these elements: while the expectations of world revolution were dashed during the first years of Bolshevik rule, the Soviet Union nevertheless clung onto ‘a permanent obligation and responsibility to promote the liberation of the proletariat’ (p. 387). After the start of de-colonisation following World War II, this obligation shifted towards the developing world, and a struggle against colonialism and imperialism, just as it had been earlier applied to the subject peoples of the Russian Empire. Apart from that, the USSR also rejected conventional notions of International Law as ‘bourgeois’, and defined the capitalist West as a threat and an adversary throughout its existence (with the short exception of World War II), all the while maintaining its position as the victim of a hegemonic capitalist system. This narrow definition of ‘exceptionalism’ can actually be applied to Russia’s other historical manifestations under review here: in fact, the five criteria enumerated above could not only be discerned within the foreign policy narratives of the Soviet Union. As shall be seen in subsequent chapters, Tsarist and contemporary Russia also had, and have, an obligation to liberate or safeguard (Orthodox Christians in the Tsarist case, Russians— broadly defined—and ‘authentic’ Ukrainians under threat from either European ‘Nazism’ or dissolute liberalism in the contemporary case); a claimed freedom from external constraints in these missions (emerging from a claimed great power status in both the Tsarist and contemporary cases—although the latter case is punctuated by the perceived imposition of the international normative environment by the West); a hostility to other, Western and non-Western powers in both the Tsarist and contemporary cases, one that fluctuated depending on geopolitical developments, but was—and is—nevertheless necessary in portraying Tsarist Russia as a misunderstood victim of the Western enlightenment, and the contemporary Russian Federation as prey to humiliation by a ‘decadent’ West.

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But if Russia has an exceptionalism, it is one of a quite peculiar kind: one that is intricately bound with its status as an empire with a very specific civilisational outlook. In that sense, it is not by accident that Holsti’s two other case studies—the United States and France—also were empires; they were, however, firmly situated in the (post-)enlightenment West, with exceptionalisms to match. Russia’s various exceptionalisms are different in that they contain within them ambiguous elements of both association and dissociation from the Western core of modernity: Russia is Christian, but Orthodox; the Soviet Union’s Marxism is a product of the Western enlightenment that paradoxically pitted it against the West; and Putin’s rhetorical embrace of ‘authentic European’ conservativism sets him apart from a ‘decadent, liberal’ West. Hybridity The underlying factor behind this paradox is Russia’s civilisational ‘hybridity’, its civilisational self-positioning between ‘East’ and ‘West’3 : the various Russias of modernity have tended to simultaneously identify with, and reject the West—and this much is apparent in their various exceptionalisms. From the point of view of orientalist scholarship, this ambiguous self-positioning has several, important implications. Much of the ‘othering’ in orientalism is based on claims to civilisational distinctiveness, the creation of an artificial and reified, hierarchical distinction between a ‘civilised West’ and ‘to-be-civilised’ rest by the colonial subject. But what happen when a society—like Russia’s—sees itself as neither entirely Western nor entirely Oriental? The suggestion in orientalist scholarship on Russia is that the concept would have to be adapted to specifically Russian circumstances; in its case, by theorising the governmentality of a metropole that partly places itself, and is placed by others, outside the West, and is, therefore simultaneously the subject and object of orientalising discourse. The imperial geography of successive incarnations of ‘Russia’ adds another complication: these have included subalterns that are not merely situated in what one would identify with the ‘East’. Russia’s conquered have included ethnicities that defined themselves as ‘Western’ (or, at the very least, more ‘Western’ than the Russians themselves): Germans, Poles, the Baltic nations, the Finns, some Ukrainians, and a minority of Belarusians. This suggests that discourses of exceptionalism would not merely have to be aimed Eastward: they would have to maintain some claim

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to legitimate rule over ‘Western’ subalterns as well. The Orientalism of Russia is therefore not merely a lighter, or modified form of ‘Western’ orientalism: it lays claim to a civilisational specificity and superiority, and attendant civilising mission, that faces in two directions, in addition to having to reconcile itself with a merely ambiguous membership with Orientalism’s posited Western civilisational ‘core’. Hybrid Exceptionalism Taken together, these two factors significantly complicate the ‘hybridity’ of Russia’s exceptionalisms: they do not merely involve a civilisational selfpositioning between ‘East’ and ‘West’, but are intricately bound with the tenuous position of Russia as a modern Western metropole in this space ‘in between’, having to justify lordship over both Western and Eastern subalterns. This dubious membership of the Western core of modernity has important implications: as pointed out by Zaraköl (2010, pp. 201– 239), in the case of other late imperial entrants into Western modernity,4 it results in Russia’s stigmatisation (by the members of that core), and a consequent relative lack of social capital. The result is a habitus incorporating historical vacillations between imitation and doubling down, with Russia incongruously adopting—imitating—certain trappings of Western modernity while at the same time stressing its civilisational distinctiveness, rhetorical and pragmatic moves which it then uses to reinforce its contradictory westward/eastward imperial gaze. This tension between imitation on the one hand, and ‘doubling down’ on one’s specific characteristics is visible in all three iterations of Russia— Tsarist, Soviet, Contemporary. In Tsarist times, Russia entered modernity only partially, with its elites adopting select elements of Western civilisation, while Russia usually remained situated between short-lived moments of full membership of the European core—as during the postVienna ‘Concert of Powers’—and periods of near-complete banishment outside of it—as during and immediately following the Crimean war (Bridge & Bullen, 2014; Hartley, 1992). These same tensions were visible in the curious mix of modern and pre-modern elements that shaped nineteenth-century Russian politics, culture and society: a feudal, rural autocracy increasingly co-existed with modern capitalism in the late Romanov empire, while Russia’s intellectual elites were torn between, among others, ‘imitating’ Westernisers and ‘doubling down’ Slavophiles (Chapman, 2001; Clowes et al., 1991; Rogger, 2014). The Soviet Union

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in large part borrowed its founding ideology—Marxism-Leninism—from the West, but also ended up separated from and subversive to that West because of that very ideology (Bochenski, 1963); contemporary Russia’s elites have similarly taken up elements of Western (neo-)liberalism while remaining highly suspicious of, and, in fact, subverting, crucial elements of Western (post-)modernity: liberal democracy domestically and the liberal institutional order internationally (Clunan, 2018; Romanova, 2018). These latter points about the subversive tendencies of Soviet and contemporary Russia’s hybridity also chime with the broader postcolonial interpretation of that very concept elaborated by Homi K. Bhabha, for whom the hybridity that emerges from unequal relationships of power ends up creating a ‘third space’ where both adaptation and resistance can occur (Bhabha, 1994; Kapoor, 2003). Thus, just like objects of colonial power subvert that power through mimicry—the adoption of often imposed elements of their colonial rulers’ culture— Russia adopts elements of Western civilisation so as to better assert itself against that very hegemonic West. Russia’s relationship with the West thus becomes imbued with a constant wish for recognition as an equal, without ever being granted that status: the result is the usage of only partially adopted—mimicked—Western elements—Christianity, Marxism and Conservatism—in an effort to subvert that very Western dominance to its West.5 These vacillations have created a hybrid form of exceptionalism that, while distinct, carries with it many elements of Western (post-)colonialism, in both thought and practice. Russia’s incongruous attempts at compensation through a combination of imitation and doubling down have led to the mimetic adoption of the colonial trappings of that core and a reassertion of its specificity: hybridity has therefore also had an effect on its interactions with its own subalterns, as with the Western core. In Western dominions, narratives of ‘specificity’ have allowed Russia to lay claim to a civilisational or ideological superiority that separates its Western subalterns from the rest, be it through claims of protecting Orthodox Christians against the decadent vagaries of the enlightenment, freeing these peoples from Capitalism, or protecting them from a dissolute West forgetful of its roots. In the ‘East’, partial identification with Western modernity has allowed Russia to, again, lay claim to the same sense of superiority underlying much of ‘mainstream’ Western Orientalism, while at the same time arguing that its own ambiguous

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‘Westernness’ made it uniquely suited to lead its oriental part-relations into modernity. In both directions, Russia’s hybridity, its vacillations between imitation and doubling down thus come to function as a reinforcing mechanism for its own imperial projects, expressed through a sequence of civilising mission that are, precisely, situated in and defined by that ‘space in between’. And this status of modern Russia as an empire of many guises, but with a continuous underlying logic is what Hybrid Exceptionalism captures. Beyond the changes in international society and the disappearance of empire as a respectable enterprise, irrespective of the emergence of nationalism and periods of resistance, and the claims of the ‘Affirmative Action Empire’, and in spite of the formal sovereignty of former imperial subalterns, lies a prerogative to legitimate hierarchical control that, at core, has been shaped by similar civilisational and geographic realities throughout the past few centuries. This Foucaultian ‘governmentality’, this complex of cultural, scientific and political discursive tropes feeding into practice, will be explored in the remainder of this monograph, with a critical and reflexive mind, working towards the all-important question as to whether this condemns Russia and its neighbours to a seemingly but not necessarily never-ending imperial predicament.

A Note on Method This last point indicates a need for caution, against Hybrid Exceptionalism’s reification into a monolithic approach to the always-complex Russian attitudes towards the outside world, and against its misclassification into positivist, or interpretivist—rather than critical—epistemologies. On the first point, as implied above, Hybrid Exceptionalism does not aim to capture a pre-set ‘Russian identity’ as expressed in the periods under review: there is much that is spoken and done outside the narratives and practices described in this book. But much like Said’s Orientalism, Hybrid Exceptionalism captures a distinct set of discourses and practices that enable and justify an unequal power relationship, between a metropole and a diverse set of subalterns, as a first step towards their critique. Identifying this particular aspect of Russian elite and societal discourses through their presence and their real-world effects should not mean dismissing the presence of other, competing ideas and attitudes; but insofar as Hybrid Exceptionalism—like Orientalism—is crucial to upholding Empire through its embeddedness in a complex web of

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discourse and practice reaching to the very top of state and society, it becomes central to a potential emancipating mission, in the traditions of postcolonial and critical theory. To that end, Russia’s imperial predicament will be identified through the intertextual analysis of key primary sources, supplemented by secondary literature on ideas and practices in wider society. This book’s wide chronological sweep will require a certain selectiveness in that regard. A broad range of historiographic literature will be used to identify key primary texts and pronouncements by key figures in relevant debates during the Tsarist and Soviet eras; in the contemporary period, the relatively shorter time frame will allow emphasis to shift towards widely available electronic sources of elite discourse—archived extensively on the Russian Federation’s official government websites. Broader secondary sources will be used in the treatment of underlying societal discourses, so as not to reinvent the wheel in the light of the extensive literature available in multiple disciplines. The study of scientific activity will include wide historical and sociological overviews on the emergence and development of the humanities and the social sciences from the early nineteenth-century onwards, specifically relating to the historiographic, anthropological and linguistic treatment of ‘subject peoples’, and their insertion into narratives of the hierarchically imposed civilising mission of the day. The discussion of cultural output will be primarily based on a interdisciplinary reading of the literary, fine and performing ‘high’ arts during all periods under review, in addition to artefacts of mass culture as it emerged in the twentieth century. These analyses will be guided by questions sources from the two constituent elements of hybrid exceptionalism. The former—hybridity— sees Russia as positioning itself ‘in between’ East and West; accordingly, the intertextual analysis will aim to identify intertextually constituted tropes that signify both an identification with, and a differentiation from both. In ‘Russia’s orient’, this will be evident in narratives that, on the one hand, mimic Western orientalism in its claims to civilisational superiority, but, on the other, legitimise Russian dominance through its own partly orientalised (and self -orientalised) nature. In territories like Central Asia and the Caucasus, this allowed nineteenth-century administrators to claim themselves superior in ruling ‘orientals’ to their Western counterparts; it underlay the narratives of Soviet Russia as a ‘big brother’ to its fellow Eastern and Southern republics; and it is still visible in Russian

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neo-Eurasianist thought and, more relevantly, official discourse towards countries like Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan today. In Western territories—Poland, the Baltics, Finland, Ukraine—the onus will be on identifying core narratives and practices separating these claimed subalterns from the West through the inverse discursive devices: here, the focus will be on turns of phrase and practice that imply an identification with these subalterns, in a way that differentiates them, and Russia, from the West, again relying on ambiguous definitions of modernity partly at variance with contemporaneous Western interpretations. The result will be on overview of Russian approaches to its ‘own occident’—to coin a phrase—at an elite level, as grounded in broader social reality, where Russia has, in its three guises, been variously positioned as a guardian against ‘Jesuitism’ and the vagaries of the Enlightenment, ‘bourgeouis nationalism’ and capitalism, and European decadence or ‘fascism’. These hybrid narratives will moreover be combined with exceptionalist civilising missions that, while distinct for all three periods, loosely reflect this ambiguous relationship with the West within the five criteria for exceptionalism identified by Holsti. For Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, and the contemporary Russian Federation, intertextual readings will pay attention to elite and societal narratives indicating a responsibility, obligation or mission to liberate others; its freedom from external constraints in realising that mission; the hostility of the surrounding world; a need for external enemies; and a tendency to portray themselves as victims. Imperial Russia thus saw itself as the protector of Christianity— but of the orthodox, non-Western kind, surrounded by both Eastern and Western enemies; the Soviet Union’s universalism was based on an eminently Western philosophy—Marxism—that also ended up differentiating the superpower from a hostile, capitalist West; and contemporary Russia—particularly under Putin—has become an advocate of a particularly conservative world view that combines elements of the imperial and Soviet experience with a claim to a Western cultural authenticity ‘lost’ to moral and civilisational decline, in an inimical, unipolar world. And it is to the first of these exceptionalisms—the Russian Empire’s under the Romanovs—that we now turn in the following chapter.

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Notes 1. In Knight’s (2000a) words, ‘the stark dichotomy between Orient and Occident around which Said’s analysis hinges transforms in the Russian context into an awkward triptych…. Russia, after all, was not only the subject of Orientalist discourse, but also its object’ (p. 77). In combination with the interpenetration of the ‘Orient’ with the Russian heartland, this led to important aspects of Western orientalism—including its tendency to essentialise and equalise ‘Oriental’ complexity and diversity—to be inapplicable in the (Tsarist) Russian context. Manifest Orientalism’s disciplinary power was also highly circumscribed within the context of Russia’s traditional autocratic state. In his response, Adeeb rejected these arguments, pointing to the often elusive nature of the power/knowledge discourse posited by Orientalists, and the ability of Western orientalism to distinguish between ‘different types of Orientals’. Importantly, he argued that the stark division between Russia and Europe posited by Knight in his evocation of a ‘triptych’ was itself a faulty product of Western orientalism. In fact, ‘The important thing to recognize here [was] that the latter claim, and indeed, all Russian discourse about Asia, [had] rather little to do with Asia, and everything to do with Russia’s awkward, often unrequited relationship with Europe. The “affinity” for Asia [had] been little more than a justification for conquest and always intertwined with anxieties about Europe’ (p. 697). 2. Coupled with its at times apparently legitimate federalism, the Soviet Union’s explicit anti-imperialism complicated matters; it did not prevent the eventual characterisation of the former superpower as ‘empire’ in the 1990s after its various minorities had started to agitate against the centre, resulting in some postcolonial analysis (see Hirsch, 2005; Martin, 2001; Northrop, 2004; Rusinko, 2003; Skandrij, 2001; Suny & Martin, 2001; Verdery, 2002). The collapse of the erstwhile superpower muddied the waters even further: the formal sovereign equality of the various successor states, Russia’s post-Soviet identity crisis, and the stigma attached to empire and hierarchy in the post-imperial/post-colonial era made applying postcolonial concepts to the former Soviet Union less than straightforward, as apparent in several roundtables and papers published on the issue (e.g. Adams, 2008; Collier et al., 2003; Moore, 2001; Spivak et al., 2006). 3. It is important here to point out the discursive—and, hence, intersubjective—nature of the civilisational elements of Russia’s Hybrid Exceptionalism: rather than being objectively defined givens—as they would be under a positivist epistemology—they feature as here as tropes and assumptions within the discourses and practices of Russia’s elites, and its broader society. Consequently, ‘East’ and ‘West’ do not feature as objective categories—in fact, Edward Said (1985b, pp. 89–91) warned against their reification into a static, simplistic binary—but as elements within Russia’s narratives: the

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question is not so much where Moscow is situated in the complex space between Orient and Occident, but where it places itself within it —as would have to be expected considering the strongly poststructuralist slant within Saidian/Foucaultian analysis. 4. Zaraköl (2010) argues that the partial inclusion of non-Western imperial projects—including Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Japan—as late entrants and part-subalterns into Western-dominated International Society and its ‘standard of civilisation’ could not compensate for their lack of social capital: non-Western empires reacted to their resulting stigmatisation as ambiguous parts of that Society through compensatory strategies, through either an imitation of the West or through a ‘doubling down’ on their distinctiveness, all the while adopting (or attempting to adopt) the elements of modernity. 5. A similar application of Bhabha’s concept can be found in Japan’s ‘mimetic imperialism’, as discussed by Tierney (2010, pp. 15–18).

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CHAPTER 3

Hybrid Exceptionalism Under the Romanovs

Introduction What form did Hybrid Exceptionalism take in the Tsarist period? As laid out in the previous chapter, this would require an analysis of the different ways in which Russia managed, understood, and imagined its empire, in the East and in the West. In the East, an ‘orientalist’ civilising mission would have to be supplemented with some admission of affinity with the colonial subject; on the Western boundary, again, Russia’s ‘inbetween’ identity would have to entail a partial cultural and intellectual identification with the West, uneasily combined with the separation of a claimed civilisational sphere from its Occidental rivals. The Empire of the Tsars displayed all of these characteristics: as it expanded Eastward, it brought with it Orthodoxy, and subsequently Enlightenment to lands it considered both alien and familiar, based on a combined acknowledgement of centuries-old entanglement with Asia on the one hand, and cultural-religious difference on the other. Conversely, as it became part of European International Society, it both adopted Western forms, while also drawing a clear distinction between itself, its Empire, and dangerous Catholic and Liberal currents, not least to the detriment of the hapless Poles. Save for a brief initial overview of pre-modern mechanisms of imperial expansion and control, this chapter takes the nineteenth century as the starting point of its analysis of Russia’s modern-day encounter with © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Oskanian, Russian Exceptionalism between East and West, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69713-6_3

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its imperial subalterns, for two reasons: firstly, while elements of Hybrid Exceptionalism—specifically the civilisational identification as partially Western and non-Western—could be identified in earlier narratives of the Russian state, they matured into modern, specifically Russian forms at the time of the empire’s nineteenth-century colonial encounters. This is the time when Russia’s experience with both its Western and Eastern subaltern moved away from tradition, to modern policies founded on the positivist age’s nascent social-scientific methods, and grounded in the broader cultural output of the period (Porter, 2003). While such attempts at modernisation were made in the eighteenth century, these were often based on the direct (and often selective) application of Western ideas under ‘enlightened’ rulers like Catherine the Great, rather than emerging from a specific world view shaped primarily by Russian historians and scientists, within a high cultural context set by Russian poets, authors, painters, and composers (De Madariaga, 1981; Gorbatov, 2006; Jaques, 2016). The creation and expansion of a specifically Russian academe dates from this period,1 as does the coming into its own and subsequent blossoming of modern, secular Russian literature—under the likes of Pushkin, Turgenev, Gogol, and Tolstoy. It is this modernity that combined with more traditional forms of empire to create the Hybrid Exceptionalism referred to in the previous, conceptual chapter: a product of the emergence of mass politics, and the requirement to manage these populations and their cultures in ‘rational’ ways compatible with a modernising imperial project. This also makes the nineteenth century fundamentally different from the eighteenth, as the factors of ethnicity and nationality slowly gained in importance in the hierarchies of an empire previously based on estates: Russia moved away from a cosmopolitan outlook, which, at the beginning of the century, even made citizenship irrelevant to service to the Tsar (Kivelson & Suny, 2017, pp. 140–226). Secondly, the nineteenth century is also the period when Russia’s long-running imperial project came to completion: in short, it is where Russia reached its maximum territorial extent, defining the cultural and geographic areas under the shadow of its empire to this day. It had done so to its West during the eighteenth century, by incorporating Ukraine, the Baltics, and the larger part of the defunct Kingdom of Poland, with Finland following as a late addition, in 18092 ; the conquest of formerly Persian, Ottoman, and Chinese lands in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Far East completed this expansion, which reached its final limits

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during the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese war (Wolff, 2015). Most territories under nineteenth-century Russia’s control would remain under Russian domination for most of the twentieth century as well, providing an element of continuity when thinking about its perceived ‘sphere of influence’ to this day. This was also the time when Russia’s ambiguous position in Europe’s political order became firmly established—at first, as a pillar of that order (following the Congress of Vienna), then, increasingly, as an outdated, increasingly foreign and backward element of disruption, culminating in the Crimean war, and the rivalries of the ‘Great Game’ (Jarrett, 2013; Malia, 1999, pp. 85–231). The justification of Empire to West and East, and Russia’s struggles with a subaltern position in Western modernity were most expressly formulated in the ideological soul-searching that took place during that period, in the debates between conservatives and Decembrists, Slavophiles and Westernisers, socialists and liberals. Accordingly, the following three sections will cover imperial policy, intellectual and scientific activity, and cultural output, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars—arguably the starting point of much of specifically Russian artistic and scientific engagement with questions of empire—to the 1917 revolution. The first will provide a general overview of the Russia’s imperial(ist) policies; these will then be traced back to major intellectual debates, and developments in the emergent Russian humanities and social sciences during the nineteenth century. The subsequent section will then focus on the broader cultural environment, as apparent in Russia’s artistic treatment of its imperial borderlands. The chapter will conclude by placing the historical and empirical insights of the cultural, scientific and political aspects within the previously elaborated dual context of ‘exceptionalism’ and ‘hybridity’.

Debating Modernity Russia itself was born between East and West: its foundational mythology stretches back to the Kievan Rus, and the adoption, by Vladimir the Great, of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, in 988 AD. A loose confederation of Varangian—Viking—and Slavic tribes, the Rus’ history was entwined with that of the Byzantine Empire, and of the Mongol steppe empires which would eventually prove its downfall (Raffensberger, 2012). A few centuries later, its ‘rebirth’ as the Grand Duchy of Muscovy occurred under the shadow of remnants of Tamerlane’s Golden Horde,

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and a declining Constantinople’s Orthodox Christianity. Ivan the Terrible’s coronation as ‘Tsar’ thus followed his defeat of Turkic rivals in Kazan and Astrakhan, and was an explicit claim to the succession of the previously disintegrated Byzantine Empire, with Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’, and the last independent outpost of the ‘true faith’ (Payne & Romanoff, 2002, pp. 44–78; Yanov, 1981).3 By the time Peter the Great ascended the Romanov throne, his predecessors had already established the Empire’s territorial presence in Asia’s Siberian expanses, with its population concentrated on its ‘European’ lands; from a cultural perspective, while Christian, it had largely been bypassed by the Reformation in Western Christianity, and the Renaissance (crucial elements in the emergence of Western modernity), instead engaging extensively with the non-Christians to its South and East (Poe, 2003; Treadgold). Politically—save for a brief Polish invasion during the Time of Troubles—it had remained outside of affairs of Central and Western Europe, where it very much came to be seen as an indeterminate, barbaric borderland outside of the Westphalian international order proper. With Russia’s entry into European International Society, Peter’s Westernising reforms—and their subsequent strengthening by his German successor, Catherine the Great—would reinforce this ‘in between’ identity of this newly (and very partially) Europeanised Great Power. At first forcibly westernised, the Russian aristocracy came to embrace Western ‘high culture’ as its standard of civilisation (Anisimov, 1993; Cracraft, 2003): their equal status confirmed after the formal proclamation and subsequent recognition of Peter the Great as Emperor (‘Imperator’), in 1721, Russia’s ruling elites intermarried with their Western counterparts, educated their children in the French language, and came to engage extensively with the Enlightenment debates raging in the West (Anisimov, 1993; Cracraft, 2003; Marasinova, 2006). Slowly but surely, the Western Enlightenment idea of ‘secularism’—and, consequently, of secular art and science—also entered Russian society, to complement and supersede the religious foundations that had so far accounted for much of Russia’s world view (Cracraft, 2003, pp. 75–113; Jaques, 2016; Lipski, 1959). But, apart from its relevance to a small proportion of the population, this acceptance of Western modernity was always accompanied by a keen consciousness of how Russia’s ‘otherness’ limited its cultural ‘Europeanness’. Indeed, much of Russia’s eighteenth-century westernisation had consisted mostly of the importation and imitation of alien cultural forms,

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with Western scientists, architects, artists, and philosophers (particularly the French philosophes ) still playing a crucial role at the courts of the Empire’s elites—albeit one that was increasingly complemented by the end of the century by their Russian counterparts. This changed following the Napoleonic wars: until then, Russia had been quite content in its role as a ‘disciple’ of Western Europe, even if a small intellectual class had already emerged, and engaged in debates with its Western counterparts towards the latter half of the century (Walicki, 1979, pp. 1–52). Russia’s position as ‘Europe’s Saviour’ and the maturation of social, institutional, and intellectual frameworks now opened the way to towards distinctly Russian approaches to the arts and the sciences; while still— at times uncomfortably—entwined with the ongoing debates in the West, these became increasingly specific to the expanding educated sections of Russian society (Raeff, 1991, 1994). This had consequences, both for Russia’s Weltanschauung, and for the ways in which it managed its empire. Previously, its policies towards subalterns had been shaped by a reliance on a combination of co-optation and arms-length suzerainty; during the eighteenth century, it had oscillated towards and away from more centralised forms of governance depending on the modernising tendencies of its rulers—with the great modernisers Peter and Catherine more centralist and assimilationist than their more ‘traditional’ counterparts.4 But if the civilising mission adopted by the reformist monarchs of the eighteenth century consisted of a superficial, imitative addition of a Western rationality to the traditional mechanisms of imperial domination, the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a distinctly Russian modern intellectual foundations to these claims, in the typical, contradictory way that would mark out its experience with both modernity and empire. Thus, while romanticism was very much a Western intellectual movement, it interacted with the imperial expansion, revolutionary ferment, and official conservatism of early nineteenth-century Russia to produce specifically Russian forms of literature, music, performing and fine arts (Mersereau & Lapeza, 1988; Thaden, 1954). The gradual opposition between modernity and anti-modernity also prompted a fundamental intellectual re-examination of the ways Russian society viewed itself, its history, and its place in the wider world. Four broader intellectual developments were particularly important in shaping the hybridexceptionalist outlook that would define the Russian state’s perspectives

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on its minorities: the emergence of a Russian official historiography— starting with Nikolai Karamzin’s ground-breaking and highly influential ‘History of the Russian State’; the promulgation of Russia’s first official doctrine on nationality, by Nicholas I’s education minister, Sergei Uvarov, in 1833; the subsequent debates on Russia’s civilisational identity, between Slavophiles and Westernisers in the middle of the century; and the requirements and challenges of modernisation, from Alexander II’s ‘Great Reforms’ to the end of the Tsarist period (Leatherbarrow, 2010; Robinson, 2019). Russia’s systematic study of history—and formulation of a comprehensive official account thereof—is often traced back to the first decades of the nineteenth century, and the work of one influential conservative intellectual, Nikolai Karamzin. The influence of his officially sanctioned work on Russian history-writing in subsequent decades, its reflection of the self-view of Russia’s elite, and its role in spawning the historical and civilisational debates in the middle of the century cannot be overstated. In effect, Karamzin’s multi-volume ‘History of the Russian State’ was a masterpiece of imperial apologia, a statement of Russia’s civilising mission, in the East, as well as the West: its main thrust lay in the Russians as the heirs to the Kievan Rus and Byzantine Empire, their Christian Orthodox religion and autocratic mode of governance best adapted to the challenges posed by a geopolitical environment fraught with dangers emerging both from the West and from the East. Russia’s subduing of its Eastern foes, and its ‘gathering of the lands’ formerly held by the Kievan Rus to the West was, therefore, nothing more than the realisation of historic destiny, of a civilisational mission, themes taken over, and challenged, by other Russian and non-Russian historians in the decades that followed (Becker, 2006; Black, 1975; David B. Saunders, 1982; Kohut, 2001). These conservative leitmotifs —of Orthodoxy and Autocracy—could also be discerned in what would become Russia’s first formulation of a policy on nationality, under Sergei Uvarov, in 1833 (Riasanovsky, 1959, 1960, pp. 73–183). Coming immediately after the Decembrist and Polish uprisings of 1825 and 1830—and, in fact, partly prompted by a need to ‘re-educate’ the ‘unreliable’ Polish elite (Flynn, 1986)—it aimed to co-opt and redirect the potentially dangerous liberal idea of popular sovereignty by legitimating an official form of citizenship—or, rather, subjecthood: one based on a shared Orthodox Christian religion, a deference to absolute monarchic authority—two elements ‘in relationship to vast Russia what gravitation is to [the] planet’ (Bulgarin as quoted in

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Riasanovsky, 1959, p. 78), and a vaguely defined, self-sufficient sense of national identity. Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and ‘Narodnost ’ —a term with multiple possible interpretations that are only partially captured by its direct translations as ‘nationality’ or ‘national essence’5 —became its central concepts and reverberated throughout the rest of the century: the Russian nation was united in almost mystical fashion with God— through Orthodox Christianity—and the Tsar, through its embrace of his divinely and historically ordained autocratic rule. This formulation was not ‘nationalist’ in the modern sense of the term: in its reliance on religion, and dynastic rather than popular forms of sovereignty, it was rather an attempt to combine traditional and more modern forms of identification in ways compatible with the requirements of a multi-national empire. Together with the ground-breaking philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev’s (1965 [1836]) earlier assertion that Russia belonged to neither Europe nor Asia, Uvarov’s doctrine on nationality prompted intellectuals to question Russia’s and Russians’ place in the world, and its relationship to West and East, in debates that would last through the middle of the nineteenth century (Engelstein, 2011; Kotov & Amosova, 2018; Malinova, 2008; Neumann, 2016, pp. 28–38; Stein, 1976; Vladimir Shlapentokh, 2014 ).6 One side of those debates, the Slavophiles’, emphasised the nation’s mystical aspects, contrasting its ‘narodnost ’ —here interpreted as the ‘national character’—of the Russian Volk to that of Western peoples as peoples, and formulating their ‘civilising mission’ in terms of the rediscovery of an authentic, Orthodox self, lost to the inauthentic modernising and Westernising tendencies of subsequent autocratic rulers, including, most controversially, Peter the Great. The implication was of the individualistic, rational West as a corrupting influence, from which a more collectivist, spiritual Russia had to protect itself and its fellow Slavs, while at the same time performing a civilising mission in a more familiar East (Pandey, 2007, p. 325). The Slavophiles’ main detractors—the Westernisers—saw Russia as rightfully part of the West, torn from it by the misfortunes of history, and their early domination of barbaric Oriental peoples—like the Mongols and Tatars—who had now been rightfully subdued. Here, the narodnost’ of the Russians was interpreted in terms of their (and their imperial state’s) as yet untapped, progressive modernising potential, based on Russia’s political prowess, and Russians’ superior ability to adapt to, absorb, and improve upon ideas originating in the

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West, a superior ability which justified their continued dominance over other, less politically sophisticated peoples (Kaczmarska, 2016). These tensions and contradictions—between tradition and modernity, religious orthodoxy and diversity, mass politics and autocracy, Slavophile and Westernising interpretations of identity—came to a head in the latter half of the century, as the Empire moved towards a period of reform following the shock of the 1856 defeat in the Crimea, a period with implications for its minorities in the West, as in the East. Two elements within Uvarov’s triad—Orthodoxy and Narodnost ’ —were particularly relevant to Russia’s attempts to integrate its empire in nineteenth century in a Hybrid Exceptionalism vein. The former represented the Empire’s traditional element, and came to be increasingly interpreted in uncharacteristically exclusivist and repressive fashion, as a crucial element of distinction between the ‘more authentic’ Orthodox Slavs, and nonOrthodox populations in the Western borderlands, or a colonial form of ‘othering’ against the peoples and tribes of the North Caucasus and Central Asia. The latter—narodnost ’ —was interpreted in ways that first enabled an acknowledgement of the specificity and identity of minorities in East and West—albeit on the Empire’s terms—and then aimed to erase them through outright forced Russification (a policy largely unknown before the later nineteenth century). The Slavophiles’ distrust of the West and the Westernisers’ claim to a superior grasp of modernity dialectically combined into a modern Russian nationalism that displayed similarities and differences in the Empire’s Western and Eastern borderlands, before the early twentieth-century age of revolutionary ferment brought it to an end.

Managing Empire, to the East and to the West Before the nineteenth century, the religious and linguistic affinities of minority populations at large were not considered a matter of state concern. This changed during the nineteenth century, when the elements of ‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘Narodnost ’ within Uvarov’s triad interacted with modernity to produce more exclusivist and intrusive approaches to the religious and linguistic management of subaltern populations. The Polish uprisings and Imam Shamil’s Caucasian wars, and the failure of proselytising and immigration into overwhelmingly Muslim Central Asia and the Caucasus pointed to the inability of traditional methods to provide

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cohesion; alongside the gradual emergence of nationalism and mass politics, and a related push towards administrative modernisation in the latter half of the century, this led to more intrusive—and secular—forms of imperial governance (Crews, 2017; Miller, 2014, pp. 320–368). The Tsars and their administrators could no longer rely on (now discernibly undependable) co-opted elites and their dynastic or religious allegiances; they had to directly address the religious and ethno-linguistic loyalties of broader segments of their subaltern populations, in both West and East. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the authorities decided on actively integrating these subject populations into the Empire through a mixture of policies, increasingly supplementing traditional methods with the management of religious affinities, and the promotion of ‘authentic’, scientifically managed forms of identification compatible with their imperial project. As part of its traditional identity, Christian Orthodoxy had interacted with Russian empire in various ways during the first centuries of Romanov rule. In combination with migration—as during the preceding conquest of Siberia—Orthodox proselytisation reinforced imperial authority in the Empire’s borderlands; Orthodoxy also played a role in the co-opting conquered elites into the empire’s mechanisms of control, not least by encouraging—but not forcing —their conversion to the Russian Orthodox faith7 : this is how large sections of the Tatar nobility were incorporated into the Russian ruling class following Muscovy’s conquest of Kazan (Romaniello, 2012, pp. 125–126), and even if the Polish and Baltic German aristocracies had at first been given special privileges and allowed to maintain their religious and cultural specificity after their incorporation into the empire, conversion to the Russian Orthodox faith was still expected for a move into the very highest reaches of the Empire’s ruling bureaucratic-aristocratic elite (Kappeler, 2001; Rhinelander, 1975; Thaden, 1984, pp. 63–80). Nevertheless, pre-modern Russian rule did not bring with it a pressure to convert for the vast majority of conquered peoples: the traditional role of religion in imperial disciplining practices had remained rather limited—especially after Catherine the Great’s 1773 Edict on Religious Tolerance—with other mainstream Christian denominations, Islam, and Buddhism generally acknowledged as part of, and integrated—at times uneasily—into Russia’s imperial fabric. In fact, save for the privileged position of Orthodox Christianity, and the over-arching condition of political subservience to the state, religious tolerance (or ‘veroterpimost’ ) was seen

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as a characteristic of Russia’s ‘enlightened’ imperial rule (Crews, 2006; Werth, 2014): control over religious authority in other religions was not much different from that seen in broader relations between the imperial state and the official Russian-Orthodox Church, privileged mainly through its access to the highest echelons of power, and its monopoly on proselytisation (Geraci & Khodarkovsky, 2001). The management of religious authority took on a more intrusive character in the nineteenth century, as the imperial authorities became concerned not just with the religious affiliations and political loyalties of subjugated elites, but with the active management of broader, popular forms of identification. Orthodox Christianity thus came into direct competition with an Islamic revival during Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus (apart from also rationalising its engagement with the retreating Ottoman Empire in the Balkans)8 : in the Northern Caucasus and its foothills, the genocidal military campaigns and policies of exile during and after the uprising by Imam Shamil between 1832 and the 1860s thus had a religious component in trying to counteract the form of Islam adopted by the native rebels—a form of Sufism called ‘Muridism’—as fundamentally incompatible with Russia’s imperial project (Khodarkovsky, 2011; Mostashari, 2006). Limiting the role of this particular form of religion in North Caucasus society thus became part of the authorities’ attempt to shape local minorities’ authenticity—their samobytnost’ —both by encouraging adherence to ‘Adat ’—local non-Islamic traditions—and by eliminating pagan/Christian/Muslim syncretism in favour or Christian Orthodoxy.9 Similar efforts at Orthodox conversion were directed against the Islamisation of the Chuvash in the Middle Volga region (Austin Jersild, 2000); meanwhile, concern with provoking Muslim sensitivities led Russian authorities to ban Orthodox proselytisation in Central Asia— relying mostly on colonial migration to consolidate their territorial gains, with limited results (Brower, 2003, p. 35). In the West, a divide between Catholicism and Orthodoxy had long formed a major dividing line. The nineteenth century saw the salience of this divider increase substantially, with the Poles and Ukrainians the two nationalities most clearly affected by this process. While the former’s aristocracy had been integrated into the empire with its privileges largely intact—an autonomous ‘Congress Poland’ was, in fact, granted a constitution by Tsar Alexander I in 1815—that self-rule was diminished, and pressure to assimilate and convert increased, as the century wore on and the Polish aristocracy directly challenged Russian

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rule in several uprisings—in 1830 and 1863 (Elizabeth Harrison, 2014; Kappeler, 2004; Weeks, 2001a).10 In contrast to previous periods, where the state concentrated mostly on co-opting and converting the upper layers of society, the participation of ordinary peasants in the 1863 uprising in particular demonstrated the importance of controlling populations at large: along with restrictions on the Catholic church’s ability to operate, and Catholics’ ability to hold government office (Weeks, 1994, pp. 33–34), proselytising towards the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and, to some extent, Lithuanian peasant populations of the Western borderlands thus increased substantially, as Catholicism became an indication of unreliability, and modernisation turned authorities’ attention towards the ‘proper’ education and acculturation of the general population into ‘proper’ Orthodox Russian subjects, away from the threat of Catholic ‘Polonisation’ (Dolbilov, 2006; Weeks, 2001a). Apart from managing their minorities’ religious identities, modernity also brought with it a concern with the second relevant component of Uvarov’s triad: Narodnost ’. Here, the pressures to modernise—especially following the Crimean defeat of 1856—led to two distinct approaches towards the Empire’s minorities: in an initial period, policies often concentrated on managing the diverse cultures and identities—the narodnost ’ —of the empire’s various ethnic groups in ways that would make them compatible with the requirements of empire, in the light of modernity’s requirements for mass education, especially after the freeing of the serfs during Alexander II’s Great Reforms. Towards the latter end of the century, however—and with the emergence of modern ethnonationalism among both the Russians and its minorities—these policies veered towards the cruder modernising option of simply imposing the Russian language and cultural forms through outright Russification (Pavlenko, 2011). But in keeping with the hybrid-exceptionalist imperative to justify dominion in both directions, these aspects of Russia’s civilising mission—the conscious shaping of minorities, and their assimilation—were formulated slightly differently in East and West. This linguistic form of imperial management came into stark relief during and following the incorporation of the Caucasus and Central Asia into the Empire during the nineteenth century (Baddeley, 2013; Pierce, 1960). As national identities emerged among the larger ethnic groups of these ‘oriental’ regions from about the middle of the nineteenth century, Russian administrators at first found themselves tolerant of these new forms of collective identification; among Georgians and

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Armenians, this led to a cultural renaissance, with publications, theatres, operas (modelled on their Russian counterparts) emerging in provincial capitals like Tbilisi, where these minorities happily submitted to Russia as either their Orthodox protector or civilisational gateway to ‘Europe’, in a situation that is quite different from what we see today. Russians—and Russified local elites—were also very much involved in devising written languages for the largely illiterate tribes under their control, in an effort to facilitate their march towards ‘civilisation’, with the Georgians very much doing the same for ‘their’ own mountain kinsmen (Manning, 2008). Similar ‘civilising’ efforts were applied to the tribal and linguistic groups of Central Asia. The underlying idea behind this more relaxed attitude— developed by Westernisers like Belinsky in preceding decades—was that peoples went through a number of developmental stages—from narod to full-fledged, organically united and politically capable natsia—or nation— but that only a chosen few—among them, the Great Russians—had the capacity to engage in the ‘high culture’ and politics required for statehood: the rest—including the ‘Asiatics’—could only reach such heights through imitation (Rutherford, 1995). The Russian empire thus came to define itself as a guardian or enabler of authenticity on its terms, and made sure that any emerging mass cultures would fit into the broader fabric of its society. These efforts often led to essentialist outcomes, doing away with subtle variation and the hybridity of various Caucasian and Central Asian cultures; essentialist outcomes which—so the imperial administrators hoped— would conform to more modern forms amenable to integration into an autocratic empire (Austin Lee Jersild, 1997; Brower, 1997). But the nationalism that inevitably emerged put an end to this management of diversity: if among the smaller tribes, embryonic ethnic identities formed where there had been none, larger groups—like the Armenians, the Georgians, the Tatars—developed nationalist political aspirations, denying the Russians’ claims to a monopoly on ‘high cultural’ and political nationhood (Dundua, 2018; Suny, 1993, pp. 52–62). As in the West, during the final decades of the nineteenth century, state policies thus moved towards outright Russification in reaction, through the more vigorous imposition of the Russian language through education, rather than the previous ‘enabling’ of hitherto illiterate, or a-political cultures.11 In the West, it was, of course, difficult to argue that Poles or German Balts—with their established Western cultures, looked up to with some

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resentment by at least parts of Russian society—were in need of ‘civilisation’; initial policies therefore centred on their conversion to Orthodoxy, as outlined above, and the ‘protection’ of the mass of the population— consisting mostly of Belarusian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian peasants—from their potentially pernicious influence. Some of these peoples—like the Lithuanians—lacked a written language, and Russia’s imperial administrators made sure that any attempts to provide them with this element of civilisation would occur on their terms, for instance by banning use of the—Western—Latin script in favour of Cyrillic (Dolbilov, 2005; Stali¯unas, 2005). But the emphasis on national ‘authenticity’ was especially complicated when it came to the non-Russian Eastern Slavs—Belarusians (‘White Russians’) and Ukrainians (‘Little Russians’). Here, Russian imperial policies remained rather inconsistent, ranging from an acknowledgement of the linguistic and cultural specificity of these groups—albeit always together with the ‘Great Russians’, as part of a triune Russian nation— to their outright erasure, an approach that gained in importance during the later decades of the century (Kappeler, 2004). Measures therefore included a cleansing of their respective cultures and languages of ‘artificial’ Polish and Catholic influences in favour of their ‘authentic’ Russian and Orthodox roots—by, for instance, imposing Cyrillic lettering and standardised forms of spelling close to Russian (Tokt’, 2005; Remy, 2005). The emergence of Ukrainian nationalism—punctuated by the brief, but significant existence of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood (Papazian, 1970; Pelech, 2004)—and the Polish uprising of 1863 hardened attitudes in St. Petersburg, leading to an outright banning of the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages from public written use, through measures like the outlawing of Ukrainian translations of the Bible (Bulpius, 2005), the Valuev Circular of 1863 (Remy, 2007), and the Ems Ukaz of 1876, which explicitly denied the legitimate existence of a separate Ukrainian language (David Saunders, 1995; David B. Saunders, 1993; Stali¯unas, 2004, 2007b).12 Civilisation was now more straightforwardly defined as homogenous assimilation into a supreme, distinct Russian culture, with even the unassimilated members of local, non-Russian elites—like the long-privileged Baltic German aristocracy—seen as somehow less reliable in high government service than ‘real Russians’ (Riasanovsky, 1959, p. 144). Late Romanov Russia’s civilising project thus became clearly discernible as one of direct, top-down cultural imposition, an approach that was only partially and temporarily brought to an end in the era of

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revolutions, from 1905 to 1917 (Kappeler, 2001, pp. 283–327; Weeks, 1996). This final period was one of flux: conservatives, liberals, and radicals debated on the nature of Russian empire, and the need for reform (Dmitry Shlapentokh, 1999; Weeks, 1995). In the newly instituted Duma, pragmatic conservatives, including figures including Stolypin— dominant after his appointment as prime minister in 1907—stressed the autocratic centralism and hierarchy of Empire, as well as invoking the familiar theme of the dangers of ‘Polonisation’, and the need to defend ‘Russians’—including those of the ‘Little’ and ‘White’ variety—from the depredations of Polish nobles through administrative measures. More right-wing Russian nationalists—unapologetically reactionary heirs to the one-time Slavophiles and pan-Slavists—continued to push for Russification, while liberal Kadets urged accommodation and change. While, along with the pressures of the 1905 Revolution, this resulted in the partial and temporary repeal of many of the harsher Russifying policies of the pre-1905 period, the fluidity of Russia’s semi-constitutional setup and the dilemma posed by emerging nationalist movements (including the Russians’) meant a return to more repressive, discriminatory policies directed at bolstering the influence of the dominant nationality in the Empire (Löwe, 1992). These prevarications were brought to an abrupt end in 1914, when the Empire entered what would prove to be its final, fatal war: the revolution of 1917—and the coming to power of the vehemently anti-imperial Bolsheviks—would subsequently open the road to a new era in Russia’s hybrid-exceptionalist imperial history, marked by the difficult relationship between Marxism and ethnic diversity. Thus, throughout the preceding period of modernisation, Russia had tried to manage the emerging mass cultures of its subalterns in ways that would remain compatible with the requirements of Empire. In the West, this often implied the protection of minorities from Western— read ‘Polish’—influences through the active shaping of their religious and linguistic affinities, before moving towards cruder ‘Russification’; in the East, it displayed the hallmarks of ‘orientalisation’ in that Russia saw itself as the bringer of civilisation to more ‘backward’ populations. This West/East divide could also be discerned in the broader, administrative and disciplinary methods employed by the empire towards its ethnic minorities. The pre-modern system of estates and the differential treatment on which much of Russia’s traditional imperial rule had been based

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became much more explicitly founded on the idea of a ‘hierarchy of civilisations’, with Russians and the other Orthodox Slavs at the top, followed by the Orthodox Georgians, other Christians, Muslims, and Inodorodtsy (or ‘natives’, including Jews13 ) at the very bottom. This hierarchy could also be discerned in the mechanics of imperial administration and control. The zemstvo reforms of 1864—providing for some measure of representative local government—were largely applied in unmodified form in the ‘core’ regions of Russia (Morrison, 2012). In the Western borderlands, they were skewed in such a way as to deny the ‘unreliable’ Polish gentry a dominant position; in the more ‘backward’ regions of the East, they were simply not introduced, or skewed towards the Slavic inhabitants, as local populations were deemed not to have reached the level of development required for participation. In fact, in these regions of the empire, minorities were often deemed ‘inorodtsy’ — natives—incapable of full incorporation into the imperial citizenry, much like colonial subjects in the West: here, Russia administered either through direct military governance (as in the North Caucasus and the steppes of Central Asia), or through colonial protectorates based on Western models (as in Turkestan’s Khanates of Khiva and Bukhara). If reforms were introduced at all, this was done in a way that favoured the local Russian settler population (Morrison, 2012, pp. 354–356). A similar hierarchy could be discerned in the 1897 census, which treated peripheral areas—including Poland, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, different from the imperial core (Darrow, 2002, pp. 166–167). When it came to the violent suppression of restless minorities, Russia’s Oriental campaigns were also far bloodier than anything seen in the Western borderlands: the suppression of the 1830 and 1863 Polish revolts, while violent, could not be compared to the large-scale ethnic cleansing in the Caucasus after the wars of 1840–1860, followed by the similarly ruthless suppression of Central Asian nomads revolting against the imposition of the draft, in 1916. Migration was also disproportionately employed—with varying success—in attempts at disciplining the rebellious lands in the East: as during the earlier Siberian conquest, the Caucasus’ genocidal pacification (Willis Brooks, 1995) was followed by (largely unsuccessful) efforts at Russifying the lands forcibly vacated by the Northwest Caucasian tribes through the migration of ‘loyal’ Slavic and non-Slavic—and often religiously non-conformist—Christian settlers (Breyfogle, 2005), something also attempted (equally unsuccessfully) in the Central Asian ‘colonial frontier’ (Clem, 1992).

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But Russia’s imperial method did not emerge ex nihilo—it was embedded in the emerging humanities and social sciences—historiography, linguistics, ethnography, geography—which were actively complicit in the ‘scientific’, rather than traditional management of minorities. There, what started as the open acknowledgement and toleration of difference—and its shaping into forms compatible with the requirements of Empire—veered increasingly towards its erasure and negation, and back again. As such, it interacted with Russians’ views of their place in the world, within their empire, and with their borderlands, uneasily negotiating between East and West. In the East, this manifest Hybrid Exceptionalism—the scientific study of minorities—clearly took on orientalist forms, limiting the agency of the irrational and to-be-civilised native, while, in a deviation from its Western counterpart, at the same time acknowledging an affinity with ‘the Asiatic’. The picture in the West was similarly complicated by Russia’s self-positioning between Orient and Occident. Here, Russian thought stressed its difference from the West, while at the same time fully participating in Europe’s political and cultural currents; Ukraine played the role of a crucial borderland between itself, and the often demonised Poles acted as a stand-in for the dissolute, ‘rational’, threatening West. It is to this intellectual background to Romanov Russia’s Hybrid Exceptionalism that I now turn.

Thinking the ‘Empire’ In Between In-Between Manifest Orientalisms Russia’s formal study of the ‘East’—Said’s ‘Manifest Orientalism’—started as the combined result of its exposure to the ideas of the Western Enlightenment, and its imperial projects in Asia: by the early nineteenth century, the idea that the management of oriental peoples required an approach based on science rather than tradition and momentary expediency took hold, just as the Empire was expanding into the Caucasus. Over the next century, it broadened to involve a number of steadily expanding institutions, starting with the creation of the Asiatic Museum under the Imperial Academy of Sciences in 1818, and the spread of similar centres of research and higher learning in other major cities throughout Russia, partly encouraged by Sergei Uvarov himself (Khismatulin, 2015; Kizilov & Prokhorov, 2011, pp. 441–446; Whittaker, 1978). As in the West, it came to be tightly bound to the practices of Empire, shaping policies

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towards ‘Eastern’ minorities from about the second half of the nineteenth century; one important difference, however—bound with the hybridity of Russia’s self-view—was the Russian scholars’ uneasy combination of ‘othering from’ and ‘identification with’ their objects of study. Many Russian Orientalists at least partially identified with some aspects of the ‘East’ they were studying—almost always bearing in mind, however, their higher status in the hierarchy of civilisation: thus, the acknowledgement of Russia’s partially oriental identity served, rather than undermined, the legitimacy of its imperial aims. This emerging scientific approach to the study of oriental peoples justified practices that denied the agency and rationality of the subjugated, and shaped them in ways befitting their imperial masters’ civilisational design: just as in its Western colonial counterparts, the emerging disciplines of ethnography, linguistics and archaeology became tightly interlinked in Russia’s imperial rule (Austin Jersild, 2002; Catherine B. Clay, 1995). The emergence of orientalist-scientific ethnography in the Russian Empire followed a broadly Western pattern, and a familiar Western orientalising logic in its combination with imperial administrative practice (Austin Jersild, 2002, pp. 110–125; Gutmeyr, 2017, pp. 135–168; Morrison, 2006): Russian orientalists thus played a major role in the study (and subsequent instrumentalisation) of Caucasians’ and Central Asians’ traditional legal frameworks (their aforementioned ‘adats ’ ), while also redefining the history and languages of the ‘orientals’ on distinctly imperial terms. One of the ironies was that, having eliminated or dispersed a good proportion of the mountain peoples, Russian scientists proceeded to study their origins through excavated artefacts, as part of their efforts to delve into history in search of these peoples’ long-lost ‘originality’— free from the foreign, hostile, and detrimental influences of Islam—clearly reflecting Western orientalist concerns with discovering the long-lost achievements of the great civilisations of the East that had degenerated into their contemporary form. But, as argued by Schimmelpenninck Van Der Oye (2010a) and Kemper (2018) there was a crucial difference in nuance between Western and Russian oriental studies, in that the Russian school tended to place itself closer to its subject-matter. From the beginning, the ‘othering’ of the East was not as pronounced and absolute as that seen in the West: in fact, Russia’s special affinity with the East, its hybridity was argued by a slew of Russian orientalists—who often doubled as imperial administrators—to give them an advantage in ‘understanding the oriental’.14

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As documented by Tolz (2005, 2008, 2011), this culminated in the emergence, during the final, revolutionary years of empire, of a Russian school of ‘Orientology’. This ‘Rosen School’ of Oriental studies placed the scholar closer to the subject-matter, and the subject-matter closer to scholarship by encouraging the latter to himself engage with the study of his own society and culture: rather than arguing the superiority and separateness of a to-be-imposed Russian culture over and from its subaltern, the stress was on similarity and kinship. While this was certainly different from the West’s and the Russian administration’s confident proclamations of civilisational superiority and otherness, it still served to justify an alternative view of Empire—this time, of autonomous imperial subjects united by their shared position outside the West. This ‘Rosen School’ eventually became influential in the development of both early Soviet Nationalities Policy—based on nativisation. This identification with the Oriental should not be overstated: in fact, late Imperial Russia’s social sciences also shared some of their darker aspects with its Western counterparts, reinforcing what the Bolsheviks would later refer to as ‘Great Russian Chauvinism’ through unmitigated imperial apologia. As in the West, physical anthropology had come to embrace of ‘scientific racism’ as a complement to broader ideas of ethnic hierarchy: here, Russia’s imperial mission was often presented as founded on its unique ability to civilise, integrate, and assimilate ‘its’ many—European and Asiatic—ethnic groups. In broader society, such hierarchical pseudo-science also interacted with modern forms of racial supremacism, manifesting itself in ethnographic exhibitions (Knight, 2001), popular imagery (Jeffrey Brooks, 2010), or, in a more sinister sense, in late imperial Russian society’s fierce anti-Semitism—culminating in that infamous mainstay of antisemitic conspiracy theories, the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ (Cohn, 1967; Weinerman, 1994). Yet even there, as in the case of manifest Orientalism, more reactionary forms were counteracted by more liberal versions of anthropology that, inspired by the less clear distinction between core and periphery in Russia’s territorial empire, rejected the conflation of ‘race’ with ‘culture’ that one more often saw in the West (Mogilner, 2007, 2009, 2013). Thinking the West Away The civilisational argument also worked inversely in the Empire’s West: again, before the moves towards pro-active Russification during the late

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Tsarist, pre-revolutionary period, the humanities and social sciences fed into the management and disciplining of ‘Western’ subalterns, and their shaping in different ways compatible with the imperial project through the discovery of their (freely interpreted) Narodnost ’. But here, the stress was not so much on the denial of agency through the subalterns’ association with a barbaric and (mostly) alien and stagnant orient but—in case of the Slavic Poles, Ukrainians, and Belarusians—through the full-throated assertion of a shared Slavic past separate from the Catholic, wrongly enlightened West, with Great Russians in the leading historical and contemporary role in their self-realisation. For non-Slavic nations, meanwhile, science was used to discredit nascent nationalisms by discounting the ability of these—often agrarian—smaller peoples to create ‘high culture’ and statehood. In all cases, the inability of non-Russian peoples to independently create the foundations of modern statehood was discounted, again, in favour of the Great Russians’ proven empireand state-building skills. Spurred on by the Polish revolts of 1830 and 1863, and the emergence of Ukrainian nationalism, the treatment of the Polish-UkrainianRussian narrative triangle became particularly pertinent during the debates between Slavophiles and Westernisers, from about the middle of the century (Bilenky, 2012; Florinsky, 1947; Grier, 2003; Malia, 1965). On the one hand, the anti-Western Slavophiles—like Yuri Samarin, Fyodor Tyutchev, Alexei Khomyakov, Apollon Maykov, and others— followed the official historiography founded by Karamzin in depicting the Ukrainians as either an archetypal version of Orthodox Russian (‘Russkii’ ) slavdom itself, or its free-spirited Cossack defenders, emphasising their shared history in the Kievan Rus as the cradle of Russia; Poland’s Catholicism, the dangerously sophisticated ‘westernness’ of its aristocratic elite, its long inclusion in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth became a marker of ‘bastardised’ exclusion from the community of authentic Slavs, contrasting with more positive depictions of other antiCatholic Western Slavs (like the Czechs) and fellow Orthodox Southern Slavs (like the fellow Orthodox Serbs) in Slavophilism’s pro-Russian panSlavic variant (Elizabeth Anne Harrison, 2013, pp. 78–136; Lavrin, 1964; Lecke, 2015, pp. 150–184; Lukashevich, 1965, pp. 76–115). In this scheme, Russia, by virtue of its girth, and its own tradition of uniquely organic, Slavic-Orthodox statehood assumed inevitable leadership over its brethren, among others by protecting the ‘Little Russian’ peasants

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of the ‘Western Rus’ against Polish oppression, and corruption through Polonisation-as-Westernisation. Westernisers—like Vissarion Belinsky and Alexey K. Tolstoy—did not entertain such mythical notions of shared Slavic brotherhood; but while they might have been expected to look more favourably onto Ukrainians, and the ‘Westernised’ Poles in particular, reality presents a more complicated picture. A minority—including the exiled, proto-socialist editor of the London-based Russian magazine ‘Kolokol’, Alexander Herzen, did indeed sympathise with the Poles, and advocate autonomy for Ukraine (Horak, 1983; Prymak, 1982). But most Westernisers followed Vissarion Belinsky in defining the Russian empire in terms of a mission leading ‘less developed’ peoples—including the ‘Asiatics’, and crucially, fellow Slavic, but vulnerable Ukrainians—into modernity: one built on the ‘blank slate’ of the Russian empire, that would present an improvement over rather than a mere imitation of its imperfectly executed Western counterpart. In that scheme, Poles were either seen as having partaken in the deficient civilising processes in the West, or they were portrayed as pining for the reestablishment of a fundamentally retrograde, feudal aristocratic order. Ukrainians, meanwhile, presented a more challenging picture. Some Westernisers—including Belinsky—who harboured a dismissive attitude towards the ‘Little Russian’ language and its most prominent exponent at the time, Taras Shevchenko—stressed Ukraine’s underdeveloped sense of nationhood, and its provincialism and ‘folk culture’ as arguments against its ability to a progress towards modernity without Russia as the intermediary and enabler of ‘high culture’ (Rutherford, 1995; Swoboda, 1961). Others—including Alexei Tolstoy—stressed Ukrainians’ European Varangian (Viking) ancestry, and their relative lack of contact with the Asiatic Tatar-Mongol yoke: Kiev (and Novgorod), not Moscow, were therefore the real historical antecedents to Russia (Lecke, 2015, pp. 175189). Ukraine was therefore key to restoring Russia’s path towards an idealised form of Western-inspired modernity—a modernity which had been preserved in the freedom-loving spirit of the Ukrainians. Either way, only Russia, with its traditions of statehood and high culture, could realise the modernising aspiration by either saving Ukraine from its backwardness or putting its liberating spirit to full use (Potulnytskyi, 1998). Towards the middle of the century, with the emergence of Ukrainian nationalism, this tug-of-war between Poles and Russians turned into a triangle, or even a foursome, depending on whether one counts only the Ukrainian nationalists themselves, or their (tenuous) association with the

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part of Ukraine under Austrian control, Galicia. The Ukrainian language formed part of the battleground: whereas in earlier, less nationalist years, Russian linguists had had no problems in terming Ukrainian a dialect or language with both Polish and Ukrainian elements, the emergence and suppression of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood—promoting written forms of the vernacular once associated with the ‘Little Russian’ peasants, alongside a federal political relationship between Russia and Ukraine— forced the issue. Against a distinct, emerging Ukrainian intelligentsia—led by figures like Mykola Kostomarov, Panteleimon Kulish, and Mykhailo Dahomanov—arguing for the Ukrainians’ specificity, official imperial linguists took great pains to argue that Ukrainian was, in fact, merely a dialect of the Great Russian language, at most corrupted by centuries of Polish influence (Grabowicz, 1992; Kruglashov, 1999; Yekelchyk, 2001). While ethnographers did accept the distinctness of Ukrainians from Great Russians, their differences—conservatism, simplicity, contentment—served to stress their distinctness from the rebellious and treacherous Poles, while emphasising their subordination to and kinship with the more state-minded Great Russians: according to Shkandrij (2001, p. 161) ‘[a] serviceable history, anthropology, and ethnography had, therefore, to be developed out of the denial of difference’ (see also Kuzio, 2001). These efforts only subsided in the revolutionary period of 1905– 1914, when, among others, linguists contributed to the legal recognition and standardisation of the Ukrainian language, albeit ensuring its closeness to Russian by working against the Polonising/Latinising influences emanating from Austrian-ruled Galicia (Cadiot, 2008). These broad intellectual currents could also be discerned in the arts. With the conquest of the Caucasus at the start of the century, the Orient entered modern Russian literature during its formative years, and remained a major source of fascination for Russian artists throughout the imperial period; Russia’s ‘Latent Orientalism’ paralleled much of its Western equivalent in its metaphorical justification of imperial hierarchy, while at the same time positing a closer relationship between its protagonists and the exoticised East. In the Western borderlands, much of Russia’s artistic output centred on managing a difference of a quite dissimilar nature: between the West on the one hand, and Russia’s legitimate realm, on the other: the main area of fascination for Russian artists remained the problematic Polish-Ukrainian-Russian triangle, with Ukraine as an intellectual battlefield between the potentially

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encroaching West—represented by the ‘treacherous’, ‘Jesuitical’ Poles— and Ukrainians’ and Russians’ shared Kievan legacy. Here, the main challenge was how to argue Russians’ right to rule over a people with whom they claimed a close affinity; this was done first by embracing their distinctness while stressing their naïve vulnerability to encroachment, then, by erasing that distinctness, closely mirroring the moves seen in official policy, and intellectual thought.

Russian Art and Empire between Orient and Occident Imagining the Orient Coinciding with the Empire’s Eastward expansion, and the intellectual debates on Russian national identity, the emerging secular art forms— literature, painting, music—became entwined with a civilising mission, formulated very much in hybrid-exceptionalist terms. In broader culture, Russia’s imperial expansion was in no small part justified by a ‘latent orientalist’ cultural output, where Russia’s ambiguous position invariably legitimised its overall superiority—and necessary rule—over ‘its’ colonised ‘Orient’. Sometimes referred to as ‘Russia’s Algeria’ (Layton, 1994, pp. 157–160), the Caucasus mountains in particular became part of ‘a powerful symbolic economy of belonging’ (Grant, 2005, p. 40) in Russia’s nineteenth-century arts, first through the works of its still-revered poet—and great admirer of Karamzin’s—Alexander Pushkin, and subsequently through the oeuvre of other literary greats (like Lermontov and Tolstoy), in addition to minor writers of what we would nowadays refer to as ‘pulp fiction’ (Gutmeyr, 2017, pp. 95–134; Hokanson, 1994). In many cases, this glorification of imperial conquest and civilising mission as a ‘taming of the Orient’ was stated explicitly, and linked to the historic mythologies surrounding the Rus, and Muscovy, as typically apparent in the famous final verses of Pushkin’s (2005, pp. 147–148) Byronic epic poem, ‘A Prisoner of the Caucasus’15 : Hushed now are the furious shouts of war: all is in subjection to Russian arms. The proud sons of the Caucasus fought on, they suffered dreadful losses; but nothing could save them – […] Like the Mongol hordes,

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the mountain folk of the Caucasus will not stay true to their ancestral ways: they’ll forget the call of hungry conflict and put aside the arrows of war. The traveller will ride without fear up to the mountain fastnesses where they used to lurk and sombre tales will be told of how their murderous raids were punished.

With a few exceptions, including parts of Lermontov’s oeuvre (Scotto, 1992) and the older Tolstoy’s (1996, pp. 7–14) highly critical HajiMurat, much of this early Russian literary treatment of conquered lands and peoples thus functioned as a justifying metaphor for Russian imperial domination in ways largely paralleling the East’s treatment in the Western orientalist literature surveyed by Said. These literary metaphors included tropes that were also the mainstays of Latent Orientalism in the West, engaging in the exotification of the ‘Orient’—in this case, the Caucasus—as a place of adventure, the reduction of the local population to stereotypes conducive to the justification of imperial rule. Many of the works of the age were, therefore, written in the forms of ‘récits de voyage’—travelogues—with Russian protagonists escaping the trappings of quotidian life in the ‘civilised’ world for a life of exploration and conquest in the wild borderlands of empire, and beyond (Andreeva, 2007, pp. 36–58); they included mostly reductionist portrayals of Oriental men—as noble but brutish, or as wily savages, or as dissolutely effeminate, decadent, and irrational. Meanwhile the metaphorical figure of the oriental—Caucasian—woman as both desirous and to-be-conquered was reproduced in several major literary works on by Pushkin, Lermontov, Griboedov, Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, and others (Layton, 1992). As pointed out by Said and others, such juxtapositions of hypermasculine or effeminate Oriental masculinity with a willingly subordinated—but sometimes dangerous—feminine counterpart had a broader, metaphorical role in justifying the subsequent governance of the East by a rational, ‘appropriately masculine’ West (Said, 1985a, 1985b; Shafi, 2014; Yegenoglu, 1998) However, a crucial difference set Russian orientalist literature apart from its Western counterparts: the Russians themselves were only part-European, and this relative closeness to their ‘oriental’ subject-matter did manifest itself in several, often contradictory ways within their literary output. On the one hand, there was a constructed difference between the civilised and uncivilised, Russian and oriental

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(Layton, 1992, 1994, pp. 192–211), even in the case of the Georgians, who, in spite of their shared Orthodox faith, tended to be presented as irrational, dissolute drunkards without the partially redeeming features of ‘noble savagery’ found in their North Caucasian counterparts. On the other hand, there was a greater self-identification with some Oriental protagonists and antagonists than in the Western orientalist literature, with Muslim North Caucasian tribesmen in particular eliciting a sense of tragic admiration largely absent in European literature (one that is palpable in Pushkin’s imperialist verse quoted above). Both of these processes—identification and othering with ‘Orientals’—played a crucial role in the formation of Russia’s own identity: these works and their tropes ended up influencing Russia’s own search for its narodnost ’ by defining it in terms of Russia’s mission to discover and civilise an empire marked by diversity (Andreeva, 2007, pp. 22–35; Hokanson, 1994, 2008b). Orientalist forms also marked Russia’s Fine Arts, and its emerging classical musical tradition: notably, works by painters like Vasily Vereshchagin, Alexander Russov, Konstantin Makovsky, and Stanislaw Chlebovsky depicted the newly conquered lands of the Caucasus and Central Asia in unmistakeably orientalist ways, with the stereotypical eroticisation of their subjects, and the depiction of exotic cruelty central to their works. As in the works of their Western counterparts—Delacroix, Gérôme—their themes included the mysteries of the harem, the chaos of the oriental bazaar, the violent cruelty of the oriental subject.16 In music, Mikhail Glinka—seen as the first truly Russian composer—mostly explored nonWestern Slavic themes, and more expressly oriental motifs were unmistakably present in a number of subsequent works, notably his ‘Ruslan and Lyudmilla’, and his adaptation of Pushkin’s orientalist poem, ‘Georgian Song’. In the second half of the century, with the creation of Russian conservatories, and the emergence of a Russian sense of national identity, ‘Slavophile’ Russian composers extensively used oriental motifs to differentiate themselves from their Western counterparts, in works often inspired by Russia’s conquests in the East.17 Picturing Western Borderlands The Russian arts engaged to a lesser extent with the Empire’s Western non-Slavic subalterns, with portrayals of peoples like the Finns and the Balts—who did not really pose a challenge to imperial authority

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before the emergence of nationalism in the final decades of Romanov rule—quite rare. To some extent, this was a reflection of the general, outsized nineteenth-century fascination with the novelty of Russia’s Eastern conquests: these peoples had been part of the Empire since the early eighteenth century, and they moreover lacked the exoticism of ‘Orientals’. But a sense of kinship and familiarity with the region’s Slavic minorities—the Poles, and the ‘White’ and ‘Little’ Russians as the Belarusians and Ukrainians came to be called—did engender extensive engagement with these populations: here, a radical ‘othering’ occurred only in the Poles’ case, while the kinship of the ‘Eastern Slavs’ with the Russians was emphasised: instead of being based on these populations’ general ‘otherness’ from and submission to Russia, imperial artistic output legitimised imperial rule as their protection from illegitimate and inauthentic Western influences which might ‘lead them astray’. Russian authors treated these two nationalities differently from each other, and differently from the ‘Oriental’ Caucasians and Central Asians they were confronted with: the main distinction with their Eastern conquests lay in the Slavic nature of these groups, and their civilisational and geographic positioning to the West of Russia proper. This led to approaches that cannot be classified as ‘orientalist’ per se: while Russian artists did acknowledge an element of difference from and hierarchy over the peoples of their borderlands, these assertions did not quite involve the more radical civilisational othering seen in the East. Instead, here were populations that had long been—in the Poles’ case, but also that of the Baltic Germans’, for instance—part of the Western civilisational core, or had a clear linguistic, cultural, and historical affinity with the Russian self (an affinity which, in the latter decades of the century, would lead to the outright erasure of difference). Discourses of ‘noble savagery’— contrasting barbarism with civilisation—could therefore not be readily applied to this imaginary space.18 Instead, much of Russian literary output justified imperial domination through either the de-legitimisation, or the ignoring and erasure of difference, in what could be seen as a triangular relationship between itself, and these two main populations of its Western borderlands. Russian authors thus de-legitimised the political aspirations of the Westernised Poles by constructing them as inauthentic, while conversely presenting Ukrainians as idealised versions (or inseparable parts) of the Russian self. The Poles and their aristocracy—with their history of separate statehood,

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and their record of warfare and rebellion against Russia—were consequently presented as treacherous, fallen, wrongly civilised Slavs, or, in the words of Shkandrij (2001, p. 68), ‘a treasonous, revolutionary “hydra”, a latinized renegade of Slavdom’; in fact, according to two students of nineteenth-century Russian cultural attitudes towards the Poles: …[they] played the role of the West to Russia as Orient. […] Russian thinkers’ views of Poland built upon exaggerated stereotypes of the antiorientalist idea of the West, namely, that Poland was aggressive, arrogant, greedy, and domineering. (Ransel & Shallcross, 2005)

Ukrainians, meanwhile, were presented in a rather more complex vein, as a ‘Little Russian’ alter ego to the ‘Great Russians’, their authentic Orthodoxy and Slavicness often portrayed as always threatened by the subversive lure of their Westernised Polish counterparts, and, conversely, enabled by the traditions of strong statehood of their Eastern ‘Great Russian’ protectors through a number of contradictory tropes (Lecke, 2015): Ukrainians were thus varyingly depicted as brothers, duplicitous and disloyal subjects, or ignorant serfs (Shkandrij, 2001, p. 20). The actual dynamics of this triangle—of Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians—shifted somewhat as the century wore on and new events, tensions, and debates—notably, between Slavophiles and Westernisers, and, later, the various nationalisms of these groups—emerged. But its underlying logic—of differentiation from the West, and an appropriation and shaping of both peoples’ identities to imperial ends—remained the same. Poles were a threat, both to the Empire and the Ukrainians themselves; Ukrainians’ identity was only legitimate insofar as it stressed kinship with Russia—deviations were either treacherous or ignorant. Russia’s implied role was to discipline and ‘protect’ these minorities from any such divergences from the imperial norm: needless to say, this usually meant disciplining the inherently deviant Poles, and ‘protecting’ the ‘little Russian’, potentially treasonous, or ignorant Ukrainians.19 During this earlier period, the cultural differences within this RussianUkrainian-Polish triangle were, to some extent, acknowledged, even if the identities were often defined in ways convenient to Russia’s empire, a tendency that was also visible in the intellectual debates between Slavophiles and Westernisers discussed above. While Ukrainians were tied to the Russians, their specificity—as an indelible, yet distinct part of the all-Russian ‘Russkii’ ethnos—was nevertheless recognised in a narrative

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that did not enhance the political legitimacy of empire at the expense of the cultural distinctiveness of the minority; in fact, up to the 1850s, a certain ‘philo-Ukrainianism’ (Bushkovitch, 1991, p. 341; Rutherford, 1995), a positive fascination with ‘Little Russia’, permeated Russian cultural attitudes. From the second half of the century, with the emergence of mass politics and Ukrainian nationalist thought, these narratives shifted more strongly to a erasure of difference through the outright denial rather than mere management of cultural specificity (Morison, 1968; Potulnytskyi, 1998): thus, from the 1860s—partly in reaction to the surge in nationalism following the 1863 Polish uprising (Maiorova, 2005)—Russian ‘hegemonic’ literature more forcefully relegated the Ukrainian language to its status as a ‘Little Russian’ peasant dialect, incapable of producing the ‘high cultural’ output of standard Russian. Ukrainian distinctiveness was also presented as a dangerous aberration from the Great Russian norm, and, as the Empire neared its end, both liberals and conservative Russians—like Struve and Shulgin—increasingly saw the solution in complete assimilation of Ukrainians (and other minorities) into the dominant Russian ethnos, or—as in the case of Miliukov—the exclusion of their cultures from the realm of high culture and politics.20

Conclusion Under the Romanovs, Hybrid Exceptionalism was clearly visible in the variety of civilising projects that placed Russia, ever so ambiguously, between East and West; but regardless of whether they involved the imposition and control of religion, the manufacture of self-serving ‘national authenticities’ for subject peoples, or the enforcement of modernity as Russification, they were justified through an intellectual and cultural suprastructure always aimed at reinforcing Russia’s leading role in a distinct imperial sphere of influence. Russia’s ambiguous position enhanced this claim to supremacy. In the Orient, this hybridity allowed it to style itself as part of civilised Europe, the harbinger of Western Enlightenment to alien, stagnant, ‘barbaric’ lands, in broader Western orientalist style; at the same time, an element of ‘self-orientalisation’ also allowed it to put forward its greater affinity with the Orient as an argument for its enhanced ability to ‘understand’ and therefore manage and civilise the East. A mirror image of this process existed in the West. Cognisant

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of their society’s troubled, complicated relationship to Western modernity, Russian artists and intellectuals either excluded their empire from the West entirely or defined it as the latter’s flawed, but perfectible iteration; here, the hybrid empire’s exceptionalist claim to supreme civilising, ordering abilities was maintained through a dividing line between itself, and the West ‘proper’, in an unequal confrontation between fellow Great Russian, ‘Little’/’White Russian’, and Polish Slavs. To the East and to the West, the leading role of the heirs of Muscovy over the Eurasian landmass—from Warsaw to Vladivostok—was presented as entirely justified: the nineteenth century saw this claim evolve from one based on a traditional submission to dynastic legitimacy and the differentiated treatment of a plethora of ethnic groups in an estatesbased context, to one founded on the top-down imposition of a Russian cultural template, in an age marked by mass politics. If the age of revolutions following Russia’s 1905 defeat in the Russo-Japanese war upended many of the preceding certainties, World War I posed a fatal challenge to the Russian imperial system: fought on two fronts, it found itself simultaneously engaging with enemies in the West—Germany, Austria—and in the East—the Ottoman Empire.21 There were attempts at mobilising the very diverse population behind a composite form of patriotism—encapsulated in the image of Russia as either a patriarchal family (under the Tsar), or a fraternal one, with its various nationalities united as the children of ‘Mother Russia’. But as the realities of war hit home, the centrifugal forces that were at play in the peripheries took centre stage, particularly following the multiple defeats of the war, and two revolutions, in February and October 1917. In the end, Russia could no longer maintain the ‘autocratic’, dynastic element in its empire’s legitimacy; but there was a national element as well in the centrifugal forces confronting it—which were partly of its own making. As seen above, the empire has itself been involved in the initial shaping of many of its ethnic groups’ modern identities, before turning its policies towards Russification in realisation that these identities could not necessarily be ‘benignly’ shaped. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was clear that little could hold back the tide of modernity: modern nationalism had surfaced even among populations that had long been left largely unaffected, like the Central Asian Muslim populations, where modernising Jadidists and Musavatists joined other nationalists in the Caucasus and the Western borderlands to demand changes ranging from federal reform, to—albeit rarely—an exit from the

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Russian Empire. The attempt to control modernisation through its imposition had, quite evidently, had unexpected results (Semyonov & Smith, 2017; Ybert, 2013). During World War I, the deprivations of war, and the machinations of rival territorial empires—whose own fate would also soon be sealed by those very same forces of modernity—provided a final, centrifugal impetus leading to the destruction of Romanov Russia (Rieber, 2014; Von Hagen, 2000). For a brief period, collapse and chaos subsequently opened the doors of this ‘Prison of Nations’ and allowed several ethnic groups to experience independent modern statehood, often for the first time in their existence. For most—except the somewhat luckier Poles, Finns, and Balts—this experience proved ephemeral (if highly significant). And once Russia emerged from its revolutionary travails, it did so as a different type of state, one ruled by an elite professing an adamant opposition to the imperialism that had come before. As we shall see in the following chapter, that did not preclude that state—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—or its Communist rulers from falling back into familiar patterns seen in the nineteenth century: by imposing a distinct civilisational mission on both East and West. And it is to this seven-decade long period that I now turn.

Notes 1. Russia’s first universities were founded in the eighteenth century, in St. Petersburg (1724) and Moscow (1755), as was its Academy of Sciences (1724), although older universities did exist in the previously incorporated Baltic and Ukrainian territories, notably Vilna and Kiev. Initially staffed almost exclusively by foreign—Western European—experts, by the end of the eighteenth century, they began to employ an increasing number of subjects of the Russian crown of various ethnicities; this network of higher education institutions professionalised, and expanded exponentially during the late nineeenth century, with the founding of both general and specialised centres of higher learning throughout the Empire (Jarausch, 1982; Kahn et al., 2018; Kaplan, 2007; Lipski, 1953; Schulze, 1985). 2. The Poles had been incorporated into the empire by Catherine the Great after centuries of independent statehood; like the Russians, they had a feudal aristocratic elite, but unlike their Eastern counterparts, they lacked an autocratic monarch—Polish kings were merely primi inter pares —and were devoutly Catholic, having thus been engaged with cultural developments in Western Europe—the reformation, the renaissance—from the

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very beginnings of modernity. Ukrainians on the other hand were, for the most part, Orthodox—save for a minority of Uniate Catholics in what was referred to as ‘Right-bank Ukraine’; they spoke an East Slavic vernacular closely related to Russian, and, outside the areas of traditional Polish control, had managed to create areas of militarised self-rule in Cossack territories called ‘Siches’—of which the Zaparozhian Sich had been the most important (Longworth, 1971; O’Rourke, 2007). After the gradual incorporation of Ukraine into the Empire following the Treaty of Pereieslav and the battle of Poltava, the institution of serfdom—the rejection of which stood at the centre of Cossack autonomy—was imposed at the end of the eighteenth century, and, with the abolition of the Hetmanate, the cooptation and assimilation of the Cossack leadership and Ukrainian aristocracy into the Russian elite was finalised (Griffiths, 1973, pp. 329–331; Kappeler, 2001, pp. 60–69; Kohut, 1988). 3. While Orthodox Christianity was a central element in the narratives of the emergent Russian state, much of Muscovy’s—and, subsequently, Russia’s—initial expansion occurred eastwards, with the submission of the native peoples of Western and Eastern Siberia culminating in the nascent empire reaching the Pacific coast, as early as in 1639. Relations with the subaltern groups incorporated into this pre-modern empire were quite varied, going from the direct assimilation of their elites into the Russian nobility, over the recognition of their rank and privileges in their own right, to (more or less) loose alliances involving a recognition of fealty to the Russian Crown—in what Neumann and others have referred to as the ‘steppe tradition’ in diplomacy and International Relations (Kappeler, 2001; Neumann & Wigen, 2018). 4. Kappeler (2001, pp. 60–113) thus describes how both Peter and Catherine the Great curtailed the specific rights of various subaltern groups that, up to that point, had been ruled through the acknowledgement of difference rather than the imposition of uniformity (see also Leppik, 2012). Catherine the Great famously abolished the Ukrainian Hetmanate’s autonomy, and extended the institution of serfdom to her Ukrainian lands—where peasants had long been exempt; policies towards newly incorporated elites also switched from co-optation to assimilation, under both Peter and Catherine, with the Ukrainian nobility in particular pressured to a greater extent to convert to Orthodox Christianity and adopt the Russian language as a precondition for membership of the elite. 5. The term ‘narodnost ’ was especially flexible and open to interpretation: originally created by the poet Viazemsky in a 1819 letter to Turgenev as the translation of the French ‘nationalité’, its precise meaning was unclear even to its inventor (Miller, 2008, p. 381). In subsequent debates, it was varyingly interpreted as ‘national self-sufficiency’ (i.e. from the West, a

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term initially preferred in official circles), ‘the lowest stratum of the state’, ‘nation’, ‘a specific ethnic group’s lower stage of development towards full nationhood’, or ‘national spirit’. More than any political connotations, its primary reference appears to be to a defining, and yet elusive, specificity found in the collective, authentic character—or samobytnost’—of a given cultural group (Knight, 2000; Lemagnen, 2011). 6. The origins of these debates can be found in the explicit rejection of the imitation of the West by Russian intellectuals in the aftermath of the 1825 Decembrist revolt. One prominent impetus for their emergence was the first of a series of Eurocentric ‘Philosophical Letters’ published between 1826 and 1831, in which Chaadayev (1965 [1836])—identified by some as the ‘mythical founder’ of modern Russian philosophy (Dobieszewski, 2018)—lambasted a backward Russia’s inability to attain the standard of civilisation set by a superior, rational West, partly due to its Orthodox legacy (Glazov, 1986; Lavrin, 1963; Tempest, 2017). Censored, and officially declared insane, Chaadayev subsequently tempered his claims in another, corrective essay—‘Apology of a Madman’—where he declared Russia to be ‘a most favoured nation, destined by its preordained position, historically and geographically, to best accomplish the earthly realization of the dictates of universal Reason’ outside of European influence (Peterson, 1997, p. 561). These ideas prompted a reaction throughout Russian intellectual circles: Slavophile thinkers—including Alexeyi Khomyakov, Aksakov, and Kireevsky—emphasised Russia’s separateness and projected the superiority claimed in the ‘Apology’ onto the Russians as a culturalspiritual collective, firmly rooted in a rediscovered past marked by their Orthodox religion (Brodsky, 2016; McNally, 1966, 1971); Westernisers— including Alexander Herzen and Vissarion Belinsky—countered with more modern arguments, interpreting the apology as pointing to Russia’s ability in overcoming a historically and geographically conditioned backwardness to improve upon the universalism of the West, through an organic link between the state and a vibrant civil society (or ‘obshchestvennost’ ) founded on individual freedom. While the Slavophiles were generally more open to associating Russia with the ‘Orient’—as a way of emphasising its difference from its more significant Western ‘other’—they both argued for Russia’s right to conduct a civilising mission to its ‘East’ (Kara-Murza, 2012; Teslya, 2013). During the final decades of empire, one particular outgrowth of Slavophilism, and forerunner of ‘Eurasianism’—the ‘Vostochniki’ or ‘Easterners’—fully identified with this leading Russian role in the orient (Laruelle, 2007, pp. 25–26; Pandey, 2007, pp. 325–327). 7. Religion was a major element of pre-modern identity for Russia’s ruling elite. While forced conversion was an exception, proselytization was legally

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reserved for the Orthodox church, and non-orthodox elites were encouraged to convert into Orthodoxy in a number of ways—including a requirement that children from mixed marriages be raised in the faith. Deviant forms of Orthodoxy were treated more harshly than other denominations or religions: Old Believers, Molokans, and Eastern-Rite Uniate Catholics—especially in Ukraine and the other Western provinces of the Empire—felt greater pressures to convert at regular times (Eugene J. Clay, 2001; Weeks, 2001b). Following the Polish insurrections, the Poles’ Catholicism likewise came to be seen as a problem, and subsequent Russian governments therefore made conversion and assimilation a much more stringent requirement for elevation into the highest reaches of the elite. 8. Not without a considerable degree of imperial self-interest, Orthodoxy also allowed Russia to portray itself as the natural protector of the—overwhelmingly Orthodox—Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire, over and above the non-Orthodox—and therefore alien—West. As characteristically stated in one 1815 memorandum, ‘[T]he emperor is the natural protector of Christians of the Greek Oriental rite placed under Ottoman domination […] All the stipulations with the Porte bestow on him the right to watch over the maintenance of their prerogatives in several parts of the Ottoman empire, and the emperor of Russia exercises that [right] of protecting them actively in placing them under his immediate jurisdiction through the services of his agents’ (quoted in Jelavich, 1991, p. 22). 9. With the help of ethnographers, imperial administrators thus codified and systematised the application of ‘adat’—the non-Islamic, tribal forms of jurisprudence of Eurasian Muslim peoples—and integrated it into the broader imperial judicial system, partly in an effort to displace the role of Sharia, or Islamic law—closely associated with Imam Shamil’s Muridist (Sufi) rebels—in these societies (Kemper, 2005; Kisriev & Ware, 2006; Mostashari, 2001). The religious identity of many of the tribes in the empire’s mountainous borderlands was also far from clear-cut. Whereas Georgians functioned as the ‘exemplary’, Orthodox Christian subjects of the Tsar, other tribes—including the Svans, the Ossetians, the Adigeys, the Abkhaz—practiced an eclectic mix of pagan-ancestral customs, (highly localised) Christian rituals, and/or Islamic teachings. Eventually, this led to the active conversion of local peoples to Orthodox Christianity, their incorporation—in the Slavophile tradition—into the mystical, orthodox spiritual fabric of the empire. The Society for the Restoration of Orthodoxy was specifically created in 1860 for the purpose of, on the one hand, ridding these groups of ‘alien’ Islamic influences, and, on the other hand, perfecting their incomplete conversion into a canonical version of uncorrupted Orthodox Christianity (Austin Jersild, 2002, pp. 36–58;

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Gnolidze-Swanson, 2003). However, efforts to consolidate control of the Caucasus through the migration of Christian Orthodox settlers failed; certain ethnic groups—in Chechnya and Daghestan—were, moreover, entirely unreceptive to conversion. Following the 1830 insurrection, the 1815 constitution was thus suspended in favour of a far less extensive ‘Organic Statute’, granted by the Tsar in 1832. The role of the Russian language in education and administration was increased—particularly after the abolition of the Old Lithuanian statute, in 1840—reserving judicial and administrative posts for Russians (Wandycz, 1974, pp. 122–131). While the 1830 insurrection was mostly an elite affair—led by the Polish aristocracy and gentry, the 1863 January rising involved the participation of large numbers of ordinary Polish, and ‘Polonised’ (i.e. Catholic) Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian peasants, leading to the more assimilatory measures—partly aimed at creating a division between the Poles and the other, ‘peasant’ nationalities of ‘Western Russia’—of subsequent decades (Stali¯ unas, 2007a; Weeks, 1994). Among other measures taken under the conservative successors to Alexander II—Alexander III and Nicholas II—the traditional laws and administrative mechanisms which had previously been incorporated into imperial judicial rule were rolled back in the North Caucasus; state schools came to prioritise the Russian language, and local self-government and religious autonomy were further restricted: in the South Caucasus, this led to the dissolution of the Armenian Apostolic Church, and its forcible incorporation into the Russian Orthodox Church (Mostashari, 2006, pp. 91–146; Onol, 2014). Top-down cultural modernisation imposed on Russia’s Muslims—including those in the Volga-Urals region—similarly prompted the alienation of their intelligentsia from an increasingly ‘paranoid’ empire (Tuna, 2015). The rather conflicting nature of the resultant policies led one Interior Minister to comment in 1864: ‘[There is a] contradiction between acknowledging the area as quite Russian and historically Russian … and the subsequent measures. If it is acceptable to act like this in a Russian region, what would we do in a non-Russian one? […] But how can one introduce the Russian element into a region that is already Russian?’ (as quoted in Dolbilov, 2004, p. 249). The Jews in the Tsarist Russia were traditionally discriminated against through a number of ‘legal disabilities’. Confined to a ‘Pale of Settlement’ in the Western reaches of the Empire since the days of Catherine II, banned from certain professions, from higher education and, for the most part, larger cities, their status was equivalent to that of ‘inorodtsy’ or ‘aliens’, counter-intuitively applied to the nomadic, indigenous peoples of Siberia and Central Asia. If anything, except for a brief—and largely

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failed—attempt at ‘selective integration’ by the reformist Alexander II, modernisation aggravated the situation as the aggressive, exclusivist, and virulently anti-Semitic Russian nationalism of the latter decades of the Empire—spurred on by the reactionary Alexander III and Nicholas II— resulted in several major pogroms, between 1880 and 1905—often led by Cossacks and ultra-conservative groups like the ‘Black Hundreds’—as well as mass emigration (Nathans, 2002; Staliunas, 2018). 14. In the words of one such early orientalist-administrator, Andrei Snesarev: ‘The conquest of Asia was cruel and boorish, particularly in the areas where the purer representatives of Europe came into contact with the local population. Our [Russian] mode of conquest was distinguished by its soft, subdued approach. Thanks to the long presence of Turko-Mongol– Finnish peoples, both on our territory and in the neighborhood, [and] our familiarity with their world and their way of life, we appeared neither arrogant nor disdainful during our conquest, and we differed little from the nations we conquered’ (as quoted in Volkov, 2015, pp. 695–696). The implication was that the Russian Empire likewise had a civilisational advantage and augmented legitimacy over its Western counterparts in lording over its various ‘oriental’ peoples. 15. Universally regarded as one of his most important works, the plot of Pushkin’s ‘A Prisoner of the Caucasus’ incorporates many of the Orientalist tropes identified here. Disillusioned by his life in Russia’s elite, the aristocratic protagonist decides to leave for adventure in the newly conquered Caucasus, only to be taken prisoner and taken to a local ‘aul’ (village). There, he witnesses the simple life of the Caucasians—very much portrayed in ‘noble but cruel savage’ terms—while being helped by a local maiden, who falls in love with him against the wishes of the unsympathetic male members of her family. Spurned, she nevertheless helps the Russian to escape to his own, before meeting her untimely death in self-sacrifice. The themes of exotic adventure, honour-bound (but cruel) oriental masculinity, and vulnerable and available oriental femininity can all be discerned in that one formative piece—but are repeated throughout much of subsequent ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature of the Tsarist period, The escapist theme of ‘adventure’ is similarly present in Tolstoy’s (2005) iteration of Pushkin’s poem, a novella entitled ‘Prisoner in the Caucasus’, and Lermontov’s (1947) ‘A Hero of Our Time’, whose protagonists again leave the mundane surroundings of Saint Petersburg society to end up in the object of Russia’s conquests, confronted with the noble-but-savage beauty of its mountains, and its willing and inevitably attracted womenfolk. In Lermontov’s case, Pechorin—a young, dissolute Russian officer in search of himself—falls in love with a local chieftain’s daughter, Bella, who is killed by a tribesman in revenge for the theft of a horse. Tolstoy’s two

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protagonists—like himself, two officers serving in a hostile but beautiful Caucasus—similarly end up in Caucasian captivity, with one, again, being helped towards his escape by an inevitable attracted oriental maiden. For an excellent catalogue of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian orientalist art, see Strachan and Bolton (2009). Vereschchagin— a student of Gérôme’s—perhaps best exemplified the amalgamation between art and empire, documenting the Russian conquests in ‘Turkestan’ or Central Asia in the employ of the military—himself at times participating in the fighting: his works depicted the newly conquered lands in typical orientalist fashion, as civilisations in full decay, providing a backdrop for Russian conquest, and the attendant tragedies of war (Chernysheva, 2014; Medvedev, 2009; Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, 2010a, pp. 76–91; 2010b). Thus, as the best-known—and most controversial—piece in his so-called Turkestan series, produced after his return from Central Asia, ‘The Apotheosis of War’ featured a heap of skulls, with the desert steppe around a ruined Samarkand as a backdrop, in a clear reference to the conquests of the nemeses of Muscovy—the Oriental, Tatar-Mongol inhabitants of the Eurasian steppe. Such works included Balakirev’s symphonic poem, Tamara, Borodin’s opera, Prince Igor, the dance of the Persian slave girls in Musorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina, and, perhaps most famously, Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite, Scheherazade, non-Western musical forms were either employed to stress the Slavic—and therefore part-Asian—identities of the Russians themselves, or their difference from—even more distinctly oriental—conquered peoples. Quite a few composers went beyond mere inspiration, however, with greats like Borodin, Musogorsky, and Tchaikovsky expressly placing themselves at the service of Russia’s imperial project in purposely commissioned works glorifying conquests in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia (Taruskin, 1992; Umetsu, 2010). The Jewish population in the ‘Pale of Settlement’ constituted an exception to this rule: invariably exoticised in works by the likes of Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, they were at best marginalised, at worst vilified as a foreign element in cultural output that displayed strong orientalist strains (Katz, 2008). A literary backlash against anti-Semitism did emerge in the final, revolutionary decades of the Romanov empire, however (Akao, 2008). These themes were apparent in the writings of Alexander Pushkin, among others: ‘Poltava’—an epic poem on the ‘treason’ of Mazepa, the subsequently anathemised Cossack hetman who sided with Swedish king Charles XII, against Peter the Great; Boris Godunov—a play based on Russia’s Time of Troubles, when Poland briefly occupied Moscow and helped a Catholic impostor onto the throne; and, especially, the poems written by the artist in response to the 1830 Polish rising—also known

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as his ‘anti-Polish trilogy’: ‘Before the Sacred Tomb’, ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’, and ‘The Anniversary of Borodino’ (Dixon, 2005; Hokanson, 2008a; Pauls, 1963). In these works, Poles are invariably presented as a danger to the Russian self, the representatives of a ‘Westernness’, whose cause is often unjustly taken over by Europeans ignorant of the longstanding internal family quarrels of the Slavs; the mistaken choice by the Ukrainians in favour of the Poles and the West—as in the case of the Polish-allied Cossacks in Godunov, and Mazepa in Poltava, themes taken up by other artists throughout the nineteenth century—is presented as a tragic and treasonous aberration (Emerson & Oldani, 1994; Kovalchuk, 2017). Similarly, early Russian novels like the 1842 edition of Gogol’s ‘Taras Bulba’ reinforced the above-mentioned stereotypes by presenting the image of the ‘good’ Orthodox Cossack, with the main character and his sons defending Ukraine’s, and, by extension, Russia’s land and people against the machinations of the menacingly Westernised Poles (and, incidentally, their Jewish accomplices) (Bahrij-Pikulyk, 1980; Grimstadt, 2002; Yoon, 2005); ethnically Ukrainian but thoroughly Russified, the same author also became known for his equally stereotypical depictions of Ukraine as an arcadian Slavic wonderland (Glaser, 2012, pp. 24–56; Ilchuk, 2009; Lecke, 2015, pp. 103–137), which themselves prompted debates on the place of Ukraine in Russian notions of narodnost ’ (David B. Saunders, 1981). 20. In the Fine Arts, representations of Ukraine in particular took on a similar outlook, mixing the themes of Ukraine’s simple, peasant take on the ‘Slavic condition’ with that of its status as the home of freedom-loving Cossacks; the differences in these depictions of Ukraine are particularly stark when contrasted with those of the ‘East’ by Vereshchagin. The former’s depictions of decapitation, war, and dangerous exoticism contrast even with the depiction of Ukrainians at their probable wildest— Ilya Repin’s ‘Reply of the Zaparozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV’ (Prymak, 2013): rather than noble savages or a dangerous horde, it depicts a band of jolly renegades making light of their situation—fitting rather perfectly with the perceived role of Ukraine’s Cossacks in Russian imperial history. Other paintings—notably by Aivazovskyi, Zhemchuzhnykov, and others—tend to depict Ukraine in more pastoral terms, as a land of Slavic peasants, village fairs, and carol-singers, themes not usually associated with the ‘Orient’ (Pikulicka-Wilczewska & Sakwa, 2015; see also Euromaidan Press, 2020). Finally, Russian composers also extensively used the rich tradition in Ukrainian folk music in constructing a ‘Russian’ classical musical repertoire, every often contrasting it with ‘Oriental’ music as a ‘foreign other’. From the earliest days of Glinka, they also incorporated crucial elements from the historical mythology of Russia’s Western

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borderlands—the Kievan Rus, the Times of Troubles—into their works. In their librettos, their characterisations of Poles and Ukrainians generally conformed to the tropes present in the literature on these territories and their peoples (Avkhimovich, 2017; Soroker, 1995). 21. The Russo-Japanese war saw an outpouring of Orientalist anti-Japanese racism, at a time when ‘Great Russian Chauvinism’ was at its zenith (Mikhailova, 1998, 2001). In fact, Tsar Nicholas II had visited Japan during his grand tour as crown prince, in 1890, remarking on how, with the West not at home in Asia, Russia would be able to acquire the Orient by virtue of its ‘attractiveness’ to the Eastern races (Bartlett, 2008, p. 13). After a period of ‘Japanophilic’ fascination with the country’s aesthetic mirroring a similar trend in the West, the 1904 war prompted the emergence of a racially charged, at times extreme, Japanophobia; the ensuing defeat was aggravated by the idea that the Russians had been the first ‘civilised’ power to be defeated by ‘uncivilised Orientals’.

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CHAPTER 4

The Soviet Union as a Hybrid Civilising Project

Introduction The revolutions of 1917 should have marked a radical break with the top-down civilising missions of the previous hundred years: with the empowerment of the long-repressed liberal and radical elements, many of the assumptions that guided Russian policies during the previous century were upended during that one year. But while there were a range of views on the level and type of autonomy required to resolve Russia’s ‘national question’, dual power, and the general chaos of the revolutionary and civil war years meant that few of these ideas could be enacted1 : events on the ground soon placed the fragile authorities before multiple faits accomplis, when advances by the Central Powers and the October revolution of 1917 led to declarations of outright independence by peoples in the borderlands. The Russian Empire’s Western boundary was pushed eastward, with Finnish, Polish, and Baltic states surviving the few years of statehood seen by their more unfortunate Belarusian and Ukrainian neighbours (Stachura, 1998; Upton, 1980; V. S. Vardys & Misiunas, 1978). Meanwhile, in the East, a short-lived Transcaucasian Federation disintegrated into three ‘democratic republics’ that would last until 1920–1921; shorter-lived independent statelets and confederations also emerged in the North Caucasus, and Central Asia (Khalid, 1999, pp. 245–280; Kobakhidze, 2020).

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Ironically, the independent statehood of most of these nations was suppressed by the very political force that had, in previous decades, emerged as the most vociferous opponent of Russian Empire, and its attendant ‘Great Russian Chauvinism’. In fact, its leader had, a few years earlier, written a tract excoriating imperialism as an inevitable part of the capitalist system and its contradictions (Lenin, 1916a); for the Bolsheviks to, in effect, return to a ‘gathering of the lands’ of the former prison that they had so adamantly opposed, and whose destruction they had set themselves as a goal, seems incongruous. Not so, however, if one combines the universalist nature of their ideology—through which these reconquests were justified—with the isolated Bolshevik state’s immediate requirement for survival: both provided plenty of reasons—or, less generously, rationalisations —for a return to a top-down imposition onto unwilling non-Russian nationalities. In fact, the Bolsheviks’ idea of themselves as a vanguard kindling the class consciousness of the proletariat was simply internationalised: these incursions—into Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Central Asia—were assiduously presented not as imperial conquests, but as the liberation of previously oppressed classes from their bourgeois-nationalist, imperialist, or feudal oppressors. Once the territories under their control had been pacified and reorganised into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Bolsheviks—under the influence of Vladimir Lenin—adopted a nationalities policy that combined their Marxist universalist vision with the right to self-determination in a federal structure. Paradoxically, this gave Russia’s empire a new lease of life: times had changed, and Europe’s traditional, multi-national land-based empires—Austro-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire—had finally succumbed to the fatal principle of selfdetermination—applied somewhat selectively to the ‘civilised’ peoples of Europe, rather than the ‘inferior’ ones in the overseas colonies, whose eradication would take another half-century. The embrace by the Bolsheviks of this principle in theory—albeit not in practice—put the Soviet Union on a different ideological footing; but the practical application of Soviet Nationalities Policy (SNP) still embraced assumptions of hierarchy and civilising mission, some elements of which could actually be traced back to Tsarist times, even before its renewed embrace of Russo-centrism after the coming to power of Joseph Stalin. Thus, from its inception, the Soviet Union defined itself against the imperial nature of its Tsarist predecessor, rejecting Great Russian chauvinism in favour of the emancipatory national consciousness of subject

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peoples. This early Bolshevik challenge to empire would, however, remain quite partial and temporary: minorities would still come to be seen within the context of a civilisational project that, while radically secular, modern, and avowedly anti-imperialist, still implied a developmental hierarchy, managing and shaping minorities for its purposes through de-facto colonial practices that echoed some of the Romanov empire’s. As remarked by one student of Soviet policies in the Baltics: Soviet ideology, together with totalitarian practice and colonial ideologies, created a complex fusion, whereby Soviet, colonial and totalitarian features merged, whereby communism signified colonialism, and whereby the colonial regime was enforced by totalitarian measures. (Annus, 2012, p. 39)

Through the veil of a vastly different ideological context, continuities with the Hybrid Exceptionalism of Tsarist Russia could still be clearly discerned: like Christian Orthodoxy, Marxism-Leninism was a religionlike ideological peculiarity with Messianic overtones2 which enabled the imposition of a civilising project on often unwilling subjects in both West and East; and through its nationalities policy, the USSR still laid claim to the ‘folk authenticities’—the ‘narodnost ’—of its various peoples in ways compatible with that civilising project; and when Russian nationalism was partially rehabilitated under Stalin, the position of the Russians and Russian culture at the head of this ambiguous civilisational project—Western, but not quite—was once again restored. The USSR’s liminal position between East and West was reinforced through its ideological and socio-economic peculiarity. MarxismLeninism was a product of the Western enlightenment, while at the same time providing an element of radical difference from the capitalist—or fascist—West. At the same time, Marxist-Leninist Orthodoxy justified a civilising mission over a ‘backward’ East, while allowing for closer identification with that very East: the Soviet Union’s mission was as much the Orient’s liberation from its own retrograde traditions, as from the malevolent imperialism of pre-revolutionary Russia, and the West. This Messianic mission took on a practical global dimension following World War II and de-colonisation, when the USSR styled itself a guardian of MarxismLeninism in Central and Eastern Europe, and the active proponent of emancipation in the Global South. Like its imperial Russian predecessor, the Soviet Union found itself laying claim to an orthodoxy—albeit one of

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a radically secular kind; and once again, that orthodoxy lay at the centre of a civilisational project that profiled itself in two directions: against the capitalist nature of the West, and the backwardness of the traditional East.

An Anti-imperialist Empire Why did Marxism-Leninism’s promise of revolutionary liberation turn into a top-down imposition for many of the peoples whose selfdetermination it purported to respect? And how could it be seen as another iteration of Russia’s ‘habits of empire’ that had emerged during Tsarist times? After all, the Bolsheviks’ fierce ideological opposition to imperialism should have represented a radical break with past practice; but for all their revolutionary fervour, even the Bolsheviks could not escape many of the basic long-term assumptions behind imperial Russia’s Hybrid Exceptionalism. Bolshevik and Soviet Communist ideas on the centre’s relationship with the more ‘backward’ peoples within its territories thus remained imbued with a strong sense of civilisational mission, if anything intensified by their totalising universalist claims. And its topdown imposition onto peoples at varying stages of development—usually higher in the West, than in the East—emerged from a combination of factors. Some were inherent to Marxism-Leninism itself; others related to specifically Russian intellectual legacies. Still others emerged from the practical requirements of Soviet Nationalities Policy, initially imposed on an expansive territory under wildly diverging local conditions, and everevolving in the light of the vast changes seen during the seven decades of Soviet rule—to the extent that some (Smith, 2019) have questioned its very existence. Marxism-Leninism and the Question of Nationality The roots of Soviet Hybrid Exceptionalism can, among others, be found in the early Bolsheviks’ ideological treatment of the relationships between the Russian Empire’s various nationalities, in the light of their claimed emancipatory, Marxist version of modernity. In fact, the Bolshevik iteration of Marxist ideology was in itself an adaptation to the particular circumstances of the Russian Empire. To begin with, it was deeply rooted in the country’s nineteenth-century intellectual traditions, in addition to being skewed towards its local, socio-economic realities. Marx himself—while fascinated by the interest generated by his philosophies in

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Russia—saw its backwardness, and the near-complete absence of a proletarian class, as an impediment to socialist revolution. Russia’s first Marxist theorist—Georgi Plekhanov—was also intellectually indebted to his country’s own populists or ‘Narodniki’ in attempts to adapt Marxist thought to a more activist version of ‘scientific socialism’ (Clarke, 1998). In 1903, arguments on this point led to the split between the Bolsheviks—who believed in the propagation of a revolutionary class consciousness by a small activist vanguard in the then emergent Russian working class—and Mensheviks—who advocated a more passive approach, more accepting of ‘bourgeois’ parliamentarism. Important ideological disagreements also emerged between Russia’s Bolsheviks, on the one hand, and their Western ‘renegade’ Kautskyist counterparts on the other, disagreements which became the basis of the Russian, Marxist-Leninist iteration of Communist thought, one with a much more explicitly militant, vanguard Messianic content (Carr, 1950; Lenin, 1974 [1918]). Such ideological differences were also visible in the Bolsheviks’ views on nationality and self-determination up to and following the 1917 revolutions. Marx and Engels themselves had left a contradictory legacy when it came to their treatment of ‘nationality’, to the point that, as argued by Szporluk (1988, p. 192), the ‘Marxist theory of the nation [was] that nation requires no theory’—although their treatment of nationalities did make a sharp distinction at times between advanced historic nations, and backward, non-historic peoples, with a preference of the progressive, nation-building qualities of the former (p. 176). By the early twentieth century however, questions of nationality became a major topic of discussion—indeed, dispute—among the socialists of, especially, multinational territorial empires of Austria, Russia, and, to a lesser extent, Germany. Confronted with the by-now incontrovertible power of nationalist agitation, three basic attitudes emerged in these debates, represented, respectively, by the German Rosa Luxemburg, the Austro-Marxists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, and, lastly, Vladimir Lenin himself (Baier, 2011). Alongside his better-known critique of ‘imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism’ (Lenin, 1916a), Lenin’s concrete ideas on nationality emerged from these debates. Against Luxemburg’s assertion that nationalism was, in fact, a regressive force of history—especially in Eastern Europe—that should be ignored and subordinated to greater socioeconomic forces (Shelton, 1987; Walicki, 1983), he argued that the issue of nationality was an ‘objective fact’, whose instrumental value socialists ignored at their peril; on the other hand, he accused Bauer and

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Renner—members of ‘the opportunist, philistine intelligentsia of Austria’ (Lenin, 1913b), with its advocates in the Russian-Jewish Bund—of abandoning socialism’s internationalist aspirations by advocating nonterritorial, autonomous cultural spaces where divisive ‘petty-bourgeois nationalism’ could persist (Lenin, 1913a). Instead, Lenin argued forcefully in favour of a territorial right to self-determination—including secession—for ethnic groups: control over territories where they could be duly emancipated from the nationalism of ‘oppressor nations’—including the ‘Great Russian nationalist poison’ (Lenin, 1903)—was a precondition for their development into the levels of civilisation required for the emergence of class consciousness. Such secession could, if necessary, be brought about through a temporary alliance with the local bourgeoisie, but the central role of the proletariat of oppressed nations—duly aided by their counterparts in oppressor metropoles—was an absolute requirement, to ensure any secession would result in real—socialist—emancipation (Lenin, 1916b). Once that had been achieved, and formerly oppressed peoples had reached their full potential, they would lose their fears and prejudices—including towards former oppressor nations—and dialectically gravitate towards unification with their fellow proletarians in foreign lands—principles that were formally restated at various points during and after the 1917 revolution (Lenin, 1917, 1918, 1920; Lenin and Stalin, 1917),3 and, of course, within the Soviet Nationalities Policy (SNP) itself, which had ‘rastvët ’, ‘zblizhenie’, and ‘zliyanie’—respectively, the flowering, approximation, and eventual fusion of ‘brotherly’ Soviet peoples into one—as its stated aims. Hierarchy and Soviet Nationalities Policy These ideological foundations of the SNP—including its language policy and its insistence on territorial autonomy (Blank, 1988; Ezergailis, 1971)—thus incorporated several tensions, from the very start: tensions that reverberated throughout the existence of the Soviet Union, but proved especially salient during its first, formative years. Firstly, while the interpretation of self-determination as including a ‘right to secession’ appeared quite radical, it also came with universalist conditions attached. Secessions with a traditional, nativist goal were, in themselves, undesirable: instead, for the self-determination of smaller peoples to be progressive, it would have to open the door to the development of class

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consciousness (Vaidyanath, 1971). Local cultural forms were legitimate, but only insofar as they enabled internationalist socialist substance, if necessary against the substantive traditional native cultures upheld by feudal or bourgeois elites, always assumedly to the detriment of their unknowing masses. The acceptance of local cultural forms and languages served only one purpose: the facilitation of populations’ conversion by socialism’s missionaries—in an almost literal sense (Kreindler, 1977)—and the kneading of their cultures into ones geared towards the goals of the revolution. Secondly, the commitment to liberating oppressed from oppressor nations did not preclude a clear acceptance of hierarchy: Lenin followed both Marx’ historical determinism and earlier Russian thinkers’ ideas on development in identifying the varying positions of various peoples and ethnic groups in the ‘scientific’ arc of history, with those subject to feudal, traditional structures openly described as ‘backward’, and in need of greater civilising intervention from the class-conscious proletarians of more advanced—capitalist, socialist—nations: unlike in the case of bourgeois’ forms of nationalism, the universal goal of equality mandated, indeed required, active intercession by the progressive proletariat of more advanced nations, ensuring a unity of purpose in the light of the fragmenting effects of secession (Connor, 1989; Lenin, 1916b; Monogarova & Andrianov, 1976; P. Duncan, 1988). This sense of top-down hierarchy was intensified by Leninism’s adherence to the notion of a democratically centralist ‘vanguard party’, and the Bolshevik vanguard’s willingness to lend the Marxist forces of history a proverbial helping hand (Lenin, 1999): not only was there a top-down process between the ‘advanced’ and ‘emerging’ proletariats themselves, both were to be led by a universal, revolutionary elite, to the exclusion of any individuals, or cultural forms counter-acting their desired flow of history. As argued below, these ideas would become the basis of the at times violent imposition of the Bolsheviks’ own top-down civilising mission on often unwilling populations, whose recalcitrance could either be dismissed as emerging out of ‘ignorance’, or as the product of the machinations of retrograde, feudal or bourgeois elites. This top-down civilising interventionism was further enhanced by two factors: firstly, the rigid views on nationality that emerged in the pre-revolutionary period and were subsequently integrated into Soviet Nationalities’ Policy, and, secondly—at least in the initial period—the

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recognition by the Bolsheviks themselves of Russia’s own backwardness. Even if his influence was initially limited (Smith, 2005), Stalin’s (1913) definition of a nation as ‘…a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture’ was representative of much of Bolshevik thought on the matter and became central to the SNP as it emerged, and evolved, during the next seven decades (T. Martin, 2001a; Semyonov & Smith, 2017). In an empire like Russia’s, where the populations of territories were often intermingled, languages and cultures bled into each other, and individuals often held multiple, overlapping identities—as in Central Asia—this rigid definition was a recipe for cultural violence and imperial erasure, the sweeping away of old, often hybrid and intermingled—‘backward’—forms in favour of the simplified, rarefied modern counterparts more suitable to Marxism-Leninism’s universal goals (Haugen, 2003, pp. 138–164). That activist imposition of a mass modernity over backwardness fit into the Bolsheviks’ Marxist view of their own revolutionary role in history, however (Kotkin, 2001); what’s more, it applied equally to Russia’s periphery, and its core. Like Marx, Lenin and his party were eminently conscious of the fact that Russia itself, while fast-growing in the decades before 1914, was at the lower stages of capitalist— and, hence, socio-cultural—development (Kenez, 1989; Kingston-Mann, 1983; Wolfe, 1967). Both Russia and its peripheries were therefore targets for the forcible imposition of a socialist modernity, through either their ‘enlightenment’, or the dictatorship of a proletarian vanguard. While some have argued that this negates the idea of the Soviet Union as an imperial power (e.g. Raffass, 2012), this optical illusion emerged from Russia’s own subordinate position within Western modernity—including, quite explicitly, Marxist notions of that modernity: it fit into a long tradition of Russian elites—from Peter the Great to the Westernisers—applying or advocating civilising missions onto their own, metropolitan society alongside more ‘backward’ peripheries, and their attendant tendency to ‘orientalise’ Russia itself, in an effort at ‘internal colonisation’.4 While that mission had now been stripped of its Russian nationalist, Orthodox religious, and Tsarist autocratic elements, and turned into universalist aspiration transcending and opposing national difference, it still assumed a clear hierarchy of development; Russia might not yet have been expressly placed at the top of that hierarchy, but its proletariat and vanguard party had assumed a leadership position in that programme

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that, under Stalin, would become gradually more explicit. The seeds of this return to a greater Russian element in Soviet cultural narratives were already contained in Lenin’s thinking, and the ever-present tension between the centrifugal right to self-determination and the centripetal role of party and proletariat within that scheme. While, in Lenin’s lifetime, Bolshevik ideology stressed the former, centrifugal element by advocating policies of nativisation or korenizatsiya, against the threat of Great Russian chauvinism, this was always within bounds and with constant pushback from the less tolerant elements of the party’s rank-and-file.5 A leadership less ideologically inclined to the autonomous development of ‘backward’ nationalities could easily push the ideological and policy pendulum back towards more culturally centralising tendencies, tendencies which, considering the overwhelming dominance of the Russians as the largest demographic element within the Party and the Union, would in all likelihood contain a strong, implicit or explicit Russian—or even Russifying—cultural element within them. Restoring Russia In fact, such an ideological shift started with the emphasis on a Russocentric form of ‘Soviet patriotism’ in the 1930s and culminated in Stalin’s revival of Russian nationalism—and even his partial rehabilitation of the Orthodox Church—during the ‘Great Patriotic War’, as World War II came to be known throughout the Soviet Union (D. Brandenberger, 2002). The logic behind this was complex and did not so much emerge from a direct concern with forcibly assimilating the Union’s various nationalities into one—something vocally rejected by Stalin (1929) as ideologically mistaken. Rather, it was partly based on the need for a more concrete form of shared allegiance than the abstract internationalism of old, especially in the light of the new doctrine of ‘Socialism in One Country’ (D. Brandenberger, 2002, pp. 27–42), as well as emanating from Stalin’s evolutionist views on development as gradual absorption of ‘higher’—read ‘Russian’—cultural-linguistic elements (Bychkov Green, 1997), and his highly essentialised and ‘heroic’ views of ‘national character’ and history (Tateishi, 2011; Van Ree, 2007). As affirmed by one student of Stalin’s approach to the teaching of languages, ‘the nonRussian languages enjoyed the right to autonomy but not the right to equality. The government allowed them to develop in various ways, but

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never so much as to become coequal with the status and prestige of Russian’ (Smith, 1998, p. 175). In subsequent decades, the ideological tug-of-war between Russification and nativisation continued, always justified through references to Leninist thought, but with the emphasis turning increasingly towards the former. Even if Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin was followed by a—very short-lived—relative thaw that allowed non-Russian nationalities more leeway in their interpretations of history and culture—in what some have even termed a second wave of nativisation (Tavolja, 2018, p. 334)— the subsequent years saw a move towards the idea of linguistic, if not cultural assimilation into one ‘Soviet people’ as part of the promised move towards Communism (Low, 1963; V. S. Vardys, 1965). The ideological premises narrowed again under Brezhnev, with the pendulum swinging back towards the repression of ‘bourgeois nationalist excesses’ in the republics, and further upgrading of the idea of cultural-linguistic assimilation—as apparent in the controversial revisions to the Soviet constitution, in 1977 (Pennar, 1981; Shcherbak, 2019). Thus, while the titular nationalities retained their own cultural forms in ‘their’ republics—in fact, they had their ethnicity immutably stamped on their passports—it was nevertheless clear that the Homo Sovieticus that stood as the ideal of a citizen’s acculturation into perfect class consciousness, his or her ‘graduation’ from the parochialism of a particular ethnic culture, was both culturally Russified and even ‘imperial’ in character (Gudkov, 2008, p. 16; Sharafutdinova, 2019, p. 178). The final years of the USSR’s existence would dramatically resolve this contradiction in favour of the nationalities, many of which had been inadvertently created by an ideologically driven civilising mission, which, despite its failure, would reverberate to the present day in its effects. These final years also brought an end to the universalist aspects of the Soviet Union’s civilising mission: with the Cold War and decolonisation, these universalist elements had been reinvigorated, as Moscow proceeded to justify dominance over ‘Western’ subalterns in Central and Eastern Europe, and their ‘Southern’ counterparts through the requirements of socialism—and, of course, the ideological confrontation with the capitalist West. But in both ‘West’ and ‘South’, the tension between selfdetermination and centralisation, emancipation and hierarchy remained. For all their emancipatory, ideological rhetoric, later practical, strategic Soviet approaches to the ‘Third World’ often maintained a host of instrumentalising and paternalistic—even patronising—assumptions about the

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targets of their aid, subordinating their agency to the requirements of the inevitable Soviet-led victory of socialism, based on orthodox MarxistLeninist hierarchical views regarding the progression of history (Cohn & Hazard, 1972; Saivetz & Woodby, 2019). Meanwhile, the Brezhnev doctrine explicitly used the centralising elements in Lenin’s views on selfdetermination being subject to central control by ‘the proletariat’ and its party to justify the ‘limited sovereignty’ of its often unwilling Eastern and Central European ‘allies’ (Jones, 1990; Mitchell, 1972; Ouimet, 2003). A double hierarchy emerged in Soviet thought—and, as we shall see in the subsequent section, in practice—with the Russians at its zenith within the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union at the top globally expressed differently in East/South and West.

Socialist Empire as Civilising Mission A Very Hierarchical Union Following the 1917 revolution, and, in particular, in the run-up to the XIIth party congress of 1923, there was an intense debate within the Bolshevik leadership on how the above-mentioned ideological premises would be translated into the administrative structures of the Soviet Union. Lenin’s solution—territorial autonomy in a federal state held together through the disciplining power of a centralised party—was the result of a debate between those who advocated a weak centre, and those—including Stalin—whom Lenin saw as underestimating the dangers of a centre dominated by Russia (Pipes, 1997, pp. 242–297). Self-determination— albeit based on the primordialist, linguistic notions of nationhood and territorial autonomy specified by Stalin a few years earlier—would eventually allow this ‘affirmative action empire’s’ (T. D. Martin, 2001b) various peoples to develop in their own, culturally specific ways to eventually transcend ethnic division in favour of internationalist class identification. On paper at least, the USSR emerged as the voluntary union of Soviet Socialist Republics: Lenin’s idea of territorial self-determination— including a sovereign right to secession—was thus inscribed in articles 3 and 4 of the first Soviet constitution, as well as being maintained in all subsequent revisions (USSR, 1924, 1936, 1977). But the ideological assumptions outlined in the previous sections had combined with the exigencies of the civil war to make the Bolsheviks’ establishment of authority over the majority of the already seceded non-Russian lands of

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the former ‘prison of nations’ more akin to a renewed—and very imperial—‘gathering of the lands’, than the product of genuine, locally rooted proletarian revolutionary zeal; the crucial difference was that the rationale for that ‘gathering’ lay in a future socialist project, rather than a mythical Kievan past. While Finland, Poland, and the Baltics gained and retained their independence, Ukraine and the republics of the Southern Caucasus had been more or less forcibly subjected to Bolshevik rule (Blank, 1993; Gilley, 2014; Pipes, 1997, pp. 114–241; Prymak, 1979); in almost all these cases, the idea of a proletarian vanguard, and the automatic attribution of any lack of intent on joining the revolutionary Russian state to ‘bourgeois nationalism’ provided a useful, ideologically driven rationale for the disregarding of any local opposition. In effect, the Bolsheviks co-opted mostly unrepresentative sympathetic (counter-) elites to justify and fit the ‘liberation’ of these republics into their overall, deterministic scheme of history: the recurring pattern was that of a small minority of local communists rebelling, and subsequently ‘inviting liberation’ by the forces of their Russian brothers-in-arms, forcing the ideological view of history whereby the proletarians of ‘oppressor nations’ would come to the aid of their oppressed brethren. The administrative structure that emerged following the forcible subordination of these territories was the result of a combination of factors (Mark, 2008; Slezkine, 1994; Smith, 1997): the idea of self-determination, combined with the hierarchical, historical views on ‘national development’ of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy that, incidentally, echoed some of the assumptions made by the Bolsheviks’ Russian intellectual forebears; security considerations, particularly near the newly founded state’s external borders (T. Martin, 1998a, pp. 829–832); opportunistic temporary alliances with local ‘progressive’ elites—specifically, in the case of Central Asia, the modernist pan-Islamic Jadids (Adeeb, 2001); a rather rigid and reifying ‘scientific’ approach to the delineation of ethno-linguistic groups and their respective territories (Cadiot, 2007, pp. 156–158; Hirsch, 2005, pp. 7–10); and the interests of various groups within the prospective administrative entities, and in the new-born Soviet state’s central administrative apparatus itself. The first of these—selfdetermination, combined with Marxism-Leninism’s hierarchical world view—underlay the creation of the USSR as a federation of nominally sovereign Soviet Republics, supplemented by lower-level autonomies, including—in descending order—Autonomous Republics, Oblasts, and Okrugs.

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The need for unification within one state arose soon after the reconquest of Ukraine and the South Caucasus, and a tug-of-war between the local, ‘national communists’ and Moscow itself (Pipes, 1997, pp. 242– 293). The co-ordination between the proletarian elites of the nominally independent Soviet republics and Russia itself—through a unified, disciplined party—appeared not to run as smoothly as predicted by Lenin’s combined theories of self-determination and democratic centralism, and this prompted Moscow to move towards extending the centralising elements in their ideological assumptions to state structures, creating a new, federal level of governance above both the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and the other Republics. The resulting structure uneasily combined an evolutionist view of national development—familiar from earlier iterations of Russian Empire—with claims to egalitarianism. On the one hand, the place of a given ethnic group in the resulting complex hierarchy of autonomies was dependent on its level of development: as a rule, ‘historic’ or ‘potentially historic’ nations got received full ‘Union Republic’ status, while groups judged unable to independently achieve that level of development in modern, socialist times were given lesser rank; on the other hand, in theory at least, the initial policy of nativisation ensured the guaranteed dominance, and autonomous development of the local titular nationality, through positive discrimination, and the privileging of its language and cultural forms within the given territory (Fowkes, 1997, pp. 35–61; G. Liber, 1991; Shabad, 1946). Nativisation as Civilising Mission In reality, however, both the allocation of such territories and nativisation itself included a heavy top-down—and at times downright concocted— element. The centre—initially in the guise of Stalin’s Commissariat for Nationalities or Narkomnats and a host of other agencies—adjudicated between a number of factors in determining the delineation of ethnic groups and territories and an ethno-linguistic group’s level of development to engineer the world’s first ‘scientific state’ (Blinov, 2017): claims from ethnographers, linguists, cartographers, demographers, economists; contradictory bureaucratic pressures from various central agencies; and the—often equally contradictory—demands and expectations of local populations and co-opted elites. In some cases, these complex processes involved the reaffirmation, re-statement or reinforcement of pre-existing

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identities, as in the instance of, say, the Georgians, Armenians or Ukrainians—who, until the creation of the USSR in 1924 had been ‘recognised’ as nominally independent Soviet Republics, albeit naturally subservient to the party in Moscow, as per Leninist principles; in others— notably in Central Asia—it led to the wholesale creation of new nations through the disaggregation, elimination, and recombination of complex, interwoven social, linguistic, regional, and religious identities (Farrant, 2006; Smith, 2013, pp. 72–96). Thus, the USSR ended up creating—and, where ethnic groups and other forms of identification were overlooked, eliminating—nationalities at the stroke of a pen. In so doing, the ‘activist, interventionist, mobilizational’ Soviet state (Adeeb, 2006) was, in fact, much more culturally intrusive and manipulative than its French or British counterparts, who, while certainly advancing their own civilising missions, did not necessarily aim to force their imperial ‘charges’ towards an ideologically imposed—and explicitly stated—historical end-point, beyond a vague and conveniently open-ended commitment to their ‘civilisation’. To the Bolsheviks, the ‘backward’ nationalities of the East had to be taught how to free themselves by being told—almost literally—exactly who they were; those in the Western borderlands, or with well-developed identities, had to be saved from the excesses of their bourgeoisie and clergy, and of their Western (Polish, German) neighbours. And—for all its emphasis on ‘self-determination’—this civilisational project still displayed parallels with the Hybrid Exceptionalism of Tsarist Russia in its creation of ‘authentic’ forms of narodnost ’, compatible with a novel, purportedly emancipatory, but often unwillingly and even violently enforced, civilising mission: even during nativisation, the process of shaping ‘socialist societies’ in non-Russian republics was led by hand-picked, imposed, coopted elites guaranteed to produce the abstracted, reified local cultural forms with the socialist content desired by the centre, often with very little support from—and, in quite a few cases, against the violent opposition of—local populations.6 In the East—after a temporary alliance with the Jadids and other modernising pan-Islamists, who had been actively courted during the first revolutionary years—this meant a full-scale assault against the quite varied Islamic traditions of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Granted, the marginalisation and persecution of local religious elites, the enforcing of bans on the veil, and on traditional bride price and the dowry, and the latinisation of traditionally Arabic alphabets chimed with the demands of

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a small, but locally rooted and handpicked ‘progressive’ elite, as well as displaying marked similarities with similar reforms in other, non-colonised Islamic societies like Turkey or Iran (Edgar, 2006; Freni, 2013; Northrop, 2001). In all these cases, however, it was the result of an acceptance of one’s own ‘backward’ position vis-à-vis a cultural hegemon. Outside the Soviet Union, that hegemon was the West; inside of it, it was a particular version of Western modernity, mediated by predominantly Russian Bolsheviks who, not incidentally, viewed themselves, and were viewed by local populations, as ‘Europeans ’. Thus, local Russian (and Slavic) populations—who still maintained a leading role in the Muslim Republics, in spite of the formal nativisation of local cadres—maintained orientalist attitudes in upholding an East/West binary between European ‘civilisers’ and Asiatic ‘natives’ (Keller, 2001, pp. 141–174; Ware and Kisriev, 2009, pp. 26–31),7 while the outlook of those directing the civilising mission from Moscow often replicated the orientalist prejudices typical of the more openly colonial ‘civilisers’ of the West. Ample use of the term ‘backward’ by the Bolsheviks—including Lenin himself (see Lenin, 1920)—already indicated the continued relevance of a civilisational hierarchy in what Khalid (2007, pp. 141–143) has referred to as an ‘Imperialism of Benevolence’. For all the Bolsheviks’ emancipatory claims, Zinoviev’s speech at the 1920 Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East was typical in asserting that: …the working masses of the East are in some places, through no fault of their own, very backward: illiterate, ignorant, they are sunk in superstition and believe in spirits, they are unable to read newspapers, they do not know what is going on in the world at large, they do not understand the most elementary principles of hygiene. […] The task of the more civilised, more literate, more organised workers of Europe and America is to help the backward toilers of the East. (Marxists.org, s.d.)

In the Western borderlands, including Ukraine and Belarus, korenizatsiya appeared to have finally resolved the question of the non-Russian Eastern Slavs’ linguistic and ethnic specificity that had proven so contentious during the previous century: both Ukrainians and Belarusians were granted Soviet Republics, with both their languages achieving official status and, in fact, being actively promoted during the period by ‘national communist’ leaderships in their republics (Szporluk, 2006; T. Martin,

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1999). Rejections of imperial-era Great Russian chauvinism were encouraged, and, like their counterparts in other Soviet republics, Ukrainian communist leaders did stake out their competencies based on Leninist ideas on self-determination, within the confines of the newly founded federation. This self-determination came with certain limits, however: in fact, not all Russian Bolsheviks easily accepted the Ukrainians’ and Belarusians’ claim to separate ethnicity, and Moscow’s unease at the Ukrainian Bolsheviks’ independent-mindedness during the earliest period of Communist rule had been part of the reason for the formal creation of the USSR in the first place, apart from leading to continued frictions during the period of nativisation itself.8 And, of course, their leadership was contingent on their ability to drive their republics on a path towards a pre-set, socialist modernity through the destruction of ‘bourgeois nationalism’, religious superstitions, and the creation of identities and cultures that were ‘national in form and socialist in content’ (G. O. Liber, 1992; Luckyj, 1990). The Return of Great Russia The period of nativisation ended in a purge of the formerly co-opted and culturally assertive non-Russian elites at the beginning of the Stalin era, usually for supposed ‘bourgeois nationalist’ deviations (Rudling, 2015, pp. 290–303). The subsequent ‘national-Bolshevik’ ideological reformulation of Soviet nationalities’ policy in the 1930s and, in particular, the Great Patriotic War then led to a gradual turn to Russo-centrism in this already highly essentialised and hierarchical system, through a renewed emphasis on Russian language and culture, the explicit rehabilitation of Russia’s imperial past and a more stringent persecution of minority ‘chauvinist’—more often than not anti-Russian—aberrations (D. Brandenberger, 2002; Weitz, 2002). Starting from the 17th Party Congress, in 1932, Soviet policymakers thus increased the role of the Russian language as the ‘lingua franca’, making it a compulsory subject in the educational systems of all republics; this was also often accompanied by the ‘cyrillisation’ of the various Latin scripts that had proliferated in the various ethnic-minority languages throughout the USSR, and an increased emphasis on the Russian, rather than multi-ethnic nature of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) (Blitstein, 2001; Grenoble, 2003, pp. 54–57; Smith, 1998, pp. 143–160; T. Martin, 1998b). The rationale for this rehabilitation was always couched in the

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language of Marxism-Leninism and of economic necessity; not least under the influence of Stalin himself, it was nevertheless accompanied by a more explicit acknowledgement of the Russians’ leading—‘heroic’— role in leading the revolution, combined with a move towards the essentialisation—or even implicit racialisation (Weitz, 2002)—of ethnicity. The increased need for mobilisation, and, in particular, the mobilising of the USSR’s largest ethnic group, the Russians, during World War II, further intensified this ‘populist’ move towards Russian cultural forms as the defining element of Soviet culture and identity (Barghoorn, 1952; D. Brandenberger, 2010; Vujacic, 2007): in official propaganda, imperial heroes who had previously been ostracised—including Marshall Kutuzov, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great—were rehabilitated and put forward as role models. At the same time, many elements of Tsarist imperial practice—the ethnic cleansing of ‘unreliable’ groups, migration as an instrument of hierarchical control—intensified from the 1930s onwards and were once again directed against national minorities rather than the exponents of Great Russian chauvinism, as they had been in earlier years. Stalin’s previous ruthless suppression of the Ukrainian Kulaks during the Holodomor, and his deportation of ‘enemy peoples’—the Koreans, the Poles, the Volga Germans, the Chechens, the Crimean Tatars, the Kalmyks, and Meskhetian Turks—before, during and following World War II echoed, in more ways than one, the scorched earth policies applied against Northwest Caucasian and Central Asian groups deemed unreliable by the Tsarist authorities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Burds, 2007; Chang, 2016; Naimark, 2010, pp. 80–98). In the Baltics, immigration of ethnic Russians was actively encouraged by the centre; migration flows by Slavs into Central Asia resumed; and the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ and the Soviet state’s campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ finally saw a return to that oldest of Russian prejudices—antisemitism.9 The years following de-Stalinisation showed a mixed picture. On the one hand, and as shall be argued in the following section, criticism of Russian Empire by non-Russian nationalities was allowed to some extent, and the harsher imperial practices outlined above were abandoned; on the other hand, tolerance of such criticism remained limited and was counteracted by the expansion of the role of the Russian language— through, for instance, the educational reforms of 1958/9. Beyond these scholarly-historical debates, and the partial rehabilitation of some ‘enemy peoples’, the position of the Russians and the Russian language at the

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top of a distinct, Soviet civilisational hierarchy remained an enduring feature of official everyday narratives. As typically stated in the 1961 Party Programme: With reciprocal fraternal assistance, primarily from the great Russian people, all the Soviet non-Russian republics have set up their own modern industries, trained their own national working class and intelligentsia and developed a culture that is national in form and socialist in content. Many peoples which in the past were backward have achieved socialism by-passing the capitalist stage of development. (CPSU, 1961, p. 13)

If anything, the final decades of stagnation saw a reinforcement of this hierarchical view, as the USSR moved away from Khrushchev’s reformism to return to some of the orthodox certainties of the late Stalin era: the removal of ‘national Communists’ in a number of Soviet Republics and intensified efforts at increasing the role of the Russian language—partly in response to the demographic growth of non-Russian nationalities— were a clear indication of this reversion (Bilinsky, 1981; Solchanyk, 1982, pp. 23–24). This implicit return to Russification did not go unnoticed in the various Soviet Republics, where discontent was registered through samizdat critiques, and the occasional public demonstration of dissatisfaction (Solchanyk, 1982, pp. 33–38), including, most prominently, the protests in Georgia following a proposed—and abandoned—upgrading of the Russian language in the republic in the 1978 constitutional reforms (Bilinsky, 1981, pp. 329–330). Self-congratulatory professions of gratitude towards ‘fraternal’ Russian leadership also did little to hide the continued unequal division of labour between Russia, the Slavic, and ‘Western’ Republics on the one hand, and the ‘Oriental’ republics of the South Caucasus and, especially, Central Asia, on the other (Khalid, 2007; Loring, 2014). By the Khrushchev era, the economic relations between these republics—while intertwined— had become permanently unequal. In fact, it could be argued that there was a continuum of increasing economic development, running from East to West: the much poorer Central Asian Republics were disproportionately based on the extraction of raw materials—cotton, oil—while more sophisticated industries—particularly within the bloated militaryindustrial complex—tended to be located in the wealthier RSFSR, and the Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs (Medvedkov & Medvedkov, 1990; Stringer, 2003). The advantaged position of titular nationalities did not

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prevent the disproportionate role of Russian—and other, more ‘Western’ nationalities—in the economic management, and the political leadership of especially these Central Asian republics; similarly, non-Slavic, and, especially, Muslim ethnic groups remained woefully under-represented in the highest echelons of central power, notably the CPSU Central Committee and Politburo, the all-Union scientific and cultural organisations, and the Red Army’s officer corps.10 Moreover, by that time, the Soviet Union’s East/West liminality and sense of hierarchy had also come to expand outwards with the incorporation of Eastern and Central Europe into the socialist camp, and the collapse of the Western colonial empires, resulting in the double hierarchy mentioned above, with Russians leading the peoples of the Soviet Union, and the culturally distinctly Russian Soviet Union in turn leading the world towards the Communist ideal. In Eastern/Central Europe, Moscow acted as the guardian of Marxist orthodoxy against Westerninspired counterrevolution—through force of arms if need be (Ouimet, 2003). The structures that governed the relations between the various states in the socialist camp incorporated the centrifugal and centripetal elements in Marxist-Leninist thought. On the one hand, in the post-Stalin era, organisations like COMECON and the Warsaw Pact did develop a measure of formal multilateralism, with their Central and Eastern European members often challenging Soviet designs on their internal mechanisms and structures—with Ceausescu’s Romania as perhaps the most prominent example; on the other hand, as seen in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, the Soviet Union retained its leading role by enforcing ideological—and geopolitical—limits to the margins of manoeuvre of its nominal ‘allies’ through the paramount role of its Communist Party. But while fellow socialist nations in the ‘Third World’ were ostensibly included as equals in, for instance, COMECON, and the Soviet Union justified much of its involvement in the Global South in terms of Marxism-Leninism’s ‘anti-imperialist’ ideology, the evolutionist views of Orthodox Marxism-Leninism led to considerably more paternalism in new-born African and Asian states’ interactions with the Soviet Union.11 Long-held cultural prejudices have, in fact, been cited as one of the reasons for the Sino-Soviet split, and the Chinese balking at what they perceived as their counterparts’ ‘great power imperialism’ and ‘fatherly arrogance’ (Radchenko, 2009, 2017).12 The ‘logic’ of Cold War confrontation also led to the adoption, by the USSR, of many of the methods employed by the ‘imperialists’ it claimed to be struggling

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against, including subversion, proxy wars, and the manipulation of local elites, leading one author to refer to them as a ‘New Imperial Policy’ (Rubinstein, 1988, pp. 32–38), resembling, in more ways than one, the methods of the Tsarist Empire. In fact, the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 in particular displayed many of the imperial mechanisms honed and perfected in the Caucasus and Central Asia over the previous two centuries (Modrzejewska-Le´sniewska, 2014; Timothy Nunan, 2011).

The Scientific Way of ‘Emancipation’ As an eminently modernist venture, and the first practical application of Marx’ ‘scientific socialism’, the Soviet Union was, from the very start, wedded to the idea of the scientific management of all aspects of social life: as extensively documented by Beissinger (1988), within the overall ideological confines of Marxism-Leninism, science stood at the centre of its grand theoretical claims and guided party and government policy. But all its emancipatory ambitions notwithstanding, the Soviet mobilisation of the humanities and social sciences in its efforts to shape and reshape its various nationalities also tapped into a long tradition of Russian imperial rule, which, at an earlier age, had also sought to ‘scientifically’ manage its populations by shaping their languages, religions, and customs in ways that fit an over-arching civilising project, at least, before a later, cruder emphasis on outright Russification. Ironically, the same move from an emphasis on diversification—during the years of korenizatsiya—to gradual homogenisation—from the 1930s—could be seen in Soviet instrumentalisations of historiography, linguistics, and the broader humanities and social sciences. The role of linguists and historians—and, for ‘lesser developed’ groups, the relatively less influential anthropologists and ethnographers— consisted, among others, of realising Soviet Nationalities Policy, helping the USSR’s various peoples along the historically determined path of flowering, approximation, and eventual fusion; but the scientific knowledge produced to that effect differed depending on the particular permutation of the policy, and the place of these scientists themselves in the Union’s overall hierarchy of nationalities. The Soviet humanities and social sciences thus exhibited a division of labour of sorts, with scholars at the centre producing the kind of knowledge required to move the overall Soviet project forward according to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, and their ‘titular’ counterparts negotiating their histories, studying their respective

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societies, and managing their languages, within the shifting confines of these general theories. To that end, the ideologically driven priorities of the scientific management of nationality were always set by the political centre—the Party; these ideological priorities—the internalisation of which was referred to as ‘partiinost ’ (Skalnik & Krjukov, 1990, p. 186)— were transmitted through a host of scientific organisations—including the Union and Republican Academies of Sciences, journals expounding the ‘official’ line, and regular conferences—and varied according to prevalent ideological interpretations and more immediate political requirements of the day, to be subsequently fed back into official Republic- and Union-level Nationalities Policy.13 These confines were, on the whole, broader during the period of korenizatsiya. In the 1920s, much of knowledge-production inside Russia was based on confronting its imperial past; outside Russia, on the other hand, much autonomy was given to either local scholars with an ‘ideologically correct’ outlook, or—in less ‘advanced’ republics—to scientific cadres socialised into Bolshevik ideas on ‘progressive’ scholarship by their Slavic counterparts. Their autonomy declined during the Stalinist period, when the requirement for conformity encompassed both ideology, and theories and—at times very dubious—truth-claims specific to the various disciplines relevant to engineering socialist societies.14 It fluctuated upwards in the post-Stalinist period, while remaining subservient to acknowledgements of Great Russians’ cultural and historical ‘leading role’ in the construction of Socialism.15 The effects of scientific study and management were nevertheless similar throughout the Union: they produced a form of knowledge on history, language and society that was highly standardised and reified, bereft of complexity because of its at times contradictory subservience to the construction of a national identity within individual republics, and a conformity to the universal requirements of the Soviet Union’s Marxist-Leninist civilising mission. During the years of nativisation, Bolshevik scholars thus actively pressed for a move away from the ‘archeologisation’ seen in previously established oriental studies—focused on history and linguistics—towards the study of the really existing, contemporary East, through organisations like VNAV—the ‘All-Russian (later Soviet) Association of Oriental Studies, and journals like Novyi Vostok’ (Kemper, 2010; Kemper & Conermann, 2011). One of the most direct links between the humanities and social sciences of the Tsarist and Soviet periods also lay in the important role played by native students of the ‘Rosen School’ of ‘orientology’.

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Identified by Tolz (2011, pp. 134–167) as a comparatively more selfcritical approach to the study of the East than what was seen in the West at the time, many of its members ended up putting their scholarship at the service of the Bolshevik cause of ‘nativisation’ during the first years of the SNP, in the 1920s. In fact, many of the Central Asian Jadidists—coopted as ‘progressive’ elites by the Bolsheviks during the period of ‘korenizatsiya’ —had been students of the School before the 1917 revolution; together with—and under the watchful eye of—Russian colleagues, they played a major role in the identification of various ethnic groups in the pêle-mêle of Central Asian identities, the demarcation of ‘their’ republics’ borders, the writing of—necessarily invented and homogenised—national histories and the devising of their artificially purified and standardised languages. But for all their claims to a ‘scientific’ basis, even during korenizatsiya, these processes were still a matter for constant negotiation between the local and central Bolshevik hierarchies; nativisation had, after all, been an ideologically conditioned goal from the beginning, and it remained a political rather than purely scientific project. Science was, therefore, always subservient to politics, and the interests, and relative power of the scientists themselves, local elites, and the centre: the latter often adjudicated between the former, and ensured both ideological conformity, and respect for the party and the Soviet state’s broader over-arching interests. Thus, early Soviet censuses were accompanied by extensive ideological wrangling over the boundaries and inclusion of smaller (and at times larger) nationalities, and their place on the hierarchical evolutionary ladder (Hirsch, 1997, pp. 257–264). Historiographic and anthropological visions of Central Asia remained highly diachronic and evolutionist, based on Marx’ and Engels’ partial acceptance of Morgan’s theories, which posited ‘clan-based’ societies as primitive, but highly ‘communistic’ (Krader, 1959; Tolstoy, 1952, p. 10). Through its role in this political project, the ‘red orientalism’ that emerged following the 1917 revolution ended up replicating—and, in some cases, even surpassing—the interventionist ‘civilising mission’ of its Western, ‘imperialist’ counterparts. While the guiding ideology shifted the discipline from a classical—historical, archaeological, and linguistic— tradition towards Marxism-Leninism’s class-based, political-economic approach, the ‘Orient’ remained an undifferentiated, to-be-educated, ‘amorphous mass’ (Kemper, 2010, p. 452), without much agency outside the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary messianism and its requirements. Local

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processes were explained from the narrow point of view of class struggle, and ‘backward’ features that stood in the way of the universalist project were systematically de-legitimised as either ‘feudal’ or ‘bourgeois’, if necessary with the help of carefully selected ‘Oriental voices’ (Kemper, 2010, p. 449).16 While, indeed, the Great Russian chauvinism of old was seen in a negative light during the 1920s, only a slight change would be required to restore the Russians —rather than the Bolsheviks —at the top of this civilisational-revolutionary hierarchy of ‘orientologist’ knowledge; and this is exactly what occurred during the Stalinist era, as the histories, languages, and societies of non-Russians came to be explained according to the ideological and political requirements of the day. The Stalinist era subsequently saw a return to the classical, historicallinguistic approach to ‘orientology’, and a gradual, rather odd combination of Marxist-Leninist eschatology with an emphasis on the ‘Great Russians’ in a leading, progressive historical role. During the 1930s, historical narratives on Russian Empire thus shifted away from describing it as a ‘prison of nations’: Tsarist imperial expansion and state-building was partially rehabilitated and differentiated, through the ‘lesser evil’ thesis, from the inferior, and more exploitative Western forms of empire as a movement preparing the ground for modernity and hence, socialism and Soviet power (Schwarz, 1952).17 School textbooks presented Soviet history as Russian rather than multi-national, with the teaching and study of non-Russian ethnic groups left to the individual republics, and academia. In the name of the ‘Friendship of Peoples’, institutions like the Academy of Sciences and their associated journals were limited in their ability to criticise Tsarist excesses in particular. The colonial experiences of the peoples of the Caucasus, Central Asia, and elsewhere were to be presented as unfortunate, but still preferable to those of their counterparts living under non-Russian rule on balance, their interests and propensities were best served by incorporation into the Russian Empire (D. L. Brandenberger & Dubrovsky, 1998, p. 872). The histories and languages of subject peoples—and, disproportionately, ‘oriental’ nations whose very existence was conjured up by Soviet scientists and officials—thus remained at the mercy of both shifting ideological orthodoxies and political expediency. The shift from Latin to Cyrillic alphabets for non-Russian languages, in the 1930s (after a ‘Leninist’ shift from Arabic to Latin only a few years earlier), was thus justified on scientific grounds, but made for reasons of economy, culture, and geopolitics: it was easier to teach one single alphabet in literacy drives;

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Sovietisation was being defined increasingly as Russification; and, especially for the Turkic languages, the Latin alphabet created openings for interaction and identification with the Republic of Turkey (Alpatov, 2017; Sebba, 2006, pp. 101–105).18 The historiographies of Soviet republics like Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan shifted according to the foreign policy requirements of the day, and Soviet designs towards, respectively, Turkey, Iran, and China.19 And Stalin himself weighed in on the issue of language and nationality, combining his own highly rigid and reified views on the latter concept with a vision of the USSR as horizontally and vertically bilingual: a vast country where ‘language learners always remembered the native language, but “assimilated the spirit of the new language” (Russian) only by forgetting “in it” (if only intermittently) their “ancestral tongue”’ (Smith, 2010, p. 119). While de-Stalinisation subsequently did create an opening for more criticism of the Russian imperial record—especially by scholars in nonRussian, Central Asian, and Caucasian republics and autonomous entities, who did once again critique Tsarist colonial policies (L. R. Tillett, 1961, 1964, pp. 260–269; Rogger, 1965; Tateishi, 2013)—these openings were always temporary, and partial: by the second half of the Soviet Union’s existence, the centre enforced a social-scientific orthodoxy that saw Russian domination as a fundamentally progressive and civilising experience, often actively sought out by the dominated peoples themselves. Frequent, acrimonious historiographic debates emerged between the centre and the periphery, and within the periphery itself; they were often aimed at pulling this historical orthodoxy one way or another, with Moscow an imperfect arbiter on the ‘correct’—Marxist-Leninist and usually Russocentric—version of history, a dependence on unidimensional, ideologised historical accounts that would come to haunt the societies of the republics affected.20 This very appropriation of the humanities and social sciences turned the idea that the ‘Eastern’ nations of the Soviet Union were developing autonomously into nothing more than a convenient fiction: their views of history, the nature of their languages, and the study of their societies were always at the service of a messianic mission aimed at defining their own liberation, guided by a Communist Party explicitly described as a Russian-led bringer of civilisation (Oberländer, 1963, pp. 7–8). In the ‘Western’ borderlands—like the Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs—the humanities and social sciences did have relatively more leeway in defining the parameters of local identity than at any point in the

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previous centuries under Russian imperial rule. Thus, during korenizatsiya, local scholars like Mykhailo Hrushevsky contrasted the new MarxistLeninist order with its old imperial predecessor by openly and aggressively attacking imperialism through class-based analysis; this ideological transformation also allowed them to openly explore the identities of ‘their’ peoples as separate from the ‘Great Russians’ in ways that would have been unthinkable before 1917—and that were, not surprisingly, met with some resistance in certain Russian quarters.21 A similar effort at standardising and modernising local languages opened the way towards higher education in the local tongue (long dismissed by Russian Slavophiles and Westernisers alike), apart from prompting a spurt in cultural production (discussed in the following section) (Horbyk & Palko, 2017, pp. 72–76; Rudling, 2014, pp. 123–163). This relative intellectual autonomy did not last long, however. By the 17th Party Congress in 1932, the ideological changes enacted by the centre severely limited the leeway given to non-Russian intellectual (and cultural) elites in their production of knowledge (and artistic expression), and this limitation applied to both ‘Oriental’ and Slavic members of the USSR—although the latter, rather than being centrally controlled through specialised ‘orientalist’ institutions, saw their scholarship steered in more general departments subservient to the All-Union Academy of Sciences.22 In the Ukrainian and Belorussian cases, this meant greater limits on criticism of past Russian policies in these regions and on claims of ethnic and linguistic specificity; ‘bourgeois nationalism’ was defined more broadly, as anything that could be construed as scholarly formulations of anti-Russian sentiment. In fact, along with the national intelligentsia of other non-Russian groups, Ukrainian, and Belarusian intellectuals were particularly vulnerable to disciplining for such nationalist (‘objectivist’) aberrations during the period of Stalinist repression. Similar limits were imposed on language policies, with the standardisation of both Ukrainian and Belarusian brought closer to Russian forms (Horbyk & Palko, 2017, pp. 76–84). This was but the first in a series of fluctuations in the permissive and restrictive attitudes towards the interpretation of the historical relationship between the Eastern Slavs—no doubt complicated by the Great Patriotic War, and the subsequent involuntary incorporation of the Baltic states and Moldova into the USSR. After a brief period of tolerance for Ukrainian narratives of national heroism and anti-Polish

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and anti-German resistance during the Great Patriotic War,23 Russocentrism re-emerged in historiographic accounts of crucial moments in Ukrainian-Russian history, duly dressed in the rhetoric of the ‘friendship of peoples’, and enforced through a renewed series of post-war repressions known as the ‘Zhdanovshina’ (Reshetar, 1953). These reformulations included such mainstays of the Tsarist narrative as the Kievan Rus, the Treaty of Pereieslav, and the Battle of Poltava: the common Slavic origins of Russians and Ukrainians were unfailingly stressed, and the ‘progressive’ role of Greater Russia in aiding the Ukrainian Cossacks in their endeavours against Polish feudalism became a theme echoing—in almost literal ways—that of earlier, nineteenth-century accounts (Pelenski, 1964; Yekelchyk, 2002, 2004).24 While, as in the case of ‘Oriental’ peoples, de-Stalinisation did present a short-lived window of opportunity for the assertion of—especially—Ukrainian specificity, strict limits remained—notably on a need to assert the Russians’ leading, progressive historic role—and narrowed considerably during the Brezhnev years: in fact, historiographic deviations were cited to justify the purge of Ukraine’s Khrushchev-appointed ‘national-communist’ leader, Petro Shelest (L. Tillett, 1975). The historical justifications for incorporating the Baltic republics (and Moldova) were necessarily rather more contorted, having to be based on much more recent arguments. As in the case of the Bolsheviks’ earlier incorporation of unwilling republics into the USSR, and the Communist takeovers in Central and Eastern Europe, the convenient fiction that local proletarians had actively agitated for membership of or alignment with the Soviet Union formed the basis of historical accounts until the unravelling of Communist rule, in the late 1980s. In the case of the Baltic republics in particular, these historical accounts were combined with either the justification, or downplaying of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and the erasure of post-World War repressions, orthodoxies that remained in force until their challenging during the perestroika years (Petrov, 1968; Senn, 1990; Sherlock, 2002). There was even something of a reversion to the earlier nineteenth-century ethno-linguistic arguments of the previously maligned pan-Slavists in Soviet accounts of the Russians’ role during and immediately following the Great Patriotic War, although discourse then evolved towards the idea of the double hierarchy propounded above, with the Russians leading the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union leading the world towards the Communist endpoint of history (Kohn, 1952).

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This theme of the Soviet Union—and, through it, Russia itself—as a fundamentally progressive force, realising a universal mission driving forward the course of history against both oriental obscurantism / imperialism in the East and capitalism in the West was thus forcibly upheld, both internally and externally. In the process, historians, linguists, and social scientists ran roughshod over the autonomous preferences of those whose liberation they claimed to be pursuing: they made facts fit the narrow confines of an ideologically pre-determined, paramount civilising mission, often combining old imperial tropes—drawn from Russia’s ambiguous position between East and West—with the requirements of MarxismLeninist for class-based views on history and nationality. These same inconsistencies—combining a top-down, paternalistic view drawn from a previous, openly imperial age with claims to emancipation—could be seen in Soviet cultural output on both its Eastern and Western subalterns, both within and—during the Cold War—outside the USSR proper.

Soviet Imaginings of East and West As in the case of the production of knowledge on both East and West, Soviet cultural output —broadly defined—went through several phases, each marked as much by what was being produced, as by what was being censored and censured. Literature, the fine arts, music, and the newer art forms of film and photography—all means of artistic expression were subject to a state monopoly and entwined with propaganda through a sophisticated bureaucratic machinery centred on exercising varying levels of control that, as in the sciences, was dependent on the changing ideological interpretations and political requirements of the Marxist-Leninist Party and the Soviet state. Thus, during korenizatsiya, the newly established ethnic and national groups were granted relative cultural autonomy, and the centre’s cultural production concentrated on the discrediting of old, imperial forms—all, of course, within the limits of the new, revolutionary order; under Stalinism, the repression of excessive traditionalism and bourgeois minority nationalisms then recreated many of the old tropes of Russian superiority, albeit in etatist, socialist-realist form (D. Brandenberger, 1999; Ermolaev, 1991). These Russo-centric foundations first set by Stalin remained remarkably persistent, in spite of subsequent oscillations between tolerance and repression of minority nationalisms, which were given more leeway during World War II, and during the first few years of the Khrushchev era. The hierarchical

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assumptions behind Russia’s civilising mission remained recognisable, and distinctive, in both East and West: according to Cosgrove (2004), Russian nationalism even became a ‘shadow ideology’ through its relative toleration in the Soviet Union’s literary ‘thick journals’. Soviet latent Orientalism could already be clearly discerned during the period of nativisation, in the cultural treatment of relations between the centre and the East. In a crucial difference with past practice, early Soviet artists viewed the ‘East’ through the lens of the Bolshevik civilisingemancipatory mission: against the Tsarist Empire’s obsession with the stagnant and heavily historicised nature of Eastern societies, the nonRussian ‘oriental’, while still ‘backward’, was now able, and indeed had to attain ‘civilisation’, even if it was still a form of civilisation that had been predefined for him or her. Artists were thus to portray the ‘real East’, of Oriental toilers waiting to be enlightened by Marxism-Leninism, contrasting the remnants of the old order with the new (Hirst, 2017, p. 39). Tellingly, the old Tsarist-era claim that Russians were uniquely placed to understand and represent the East was updated to endow the Russian Bolshevik with that ability, by both gist of his or her cultural background and class consciousness. In literature, authors from the Tsarist period were, for a while, criticised for their chauvinist tendencies, with even Pushkin not escaping such critique; Soviet literary output was systematically expunged from terms that were deemed offensive to minority nations. But old traditions died hard: for one, the genre of the travelogue remained alive, with Russian authors like Osip Mandelstam and Nikolay Tikhonov describing their experiences in the Caucasus and Central Asia in ways that could be traced back ‘in a direct line’ to their nineteenth-century predecessors, as ‘ancient’ ‘objects’ fundamentally different from their author- ‘subjects’ (Kazimov et al., 2016; Nakamura, 2007). More expressly ‘civilising’ assumptions could be discerned in a wide range of other art forms, ranging from the visual arts to music. In the former, Soviet documentary-makers presented the advent of a distinctly Western form of modernity into a backward, to-be-civilised Central Asia to Western audiences through avant-garde documentaries like ‘Goluboi Ekspress ’ and ‘Turksib’, or photographic exhibitions like ‘SSSR na Stroike’ (‘USSR in Construction’) (Hirst, 2017; T. A. Nunan, 2010). In the latter case, the genuinely local, often intermingled musical traditions of the ‘Soviet East’ were standardised and relegated to the status of folklore; national ‘classical’ traditions were then invented—virtually out

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of thin air—by forcibly moulding their ‘national’ motifs into Russianmediated Western templates. In an echo of an earlier era, the Bolsheviks defined the ‘narodnost ’ of their subaltern ‘charges’—in music as elsewhere—by trying to capture the ‘popular authenticity’ of their traditions, this time removed of their feudal or bourgeois elements, in keeping with the new Marxist-Leninist creed (Frolova-Walker, 1998, p. 363).25 Much of this process continued under Stalin, following his ‘cultural revolution’, when the term ‘national in form, socialist in content’ emerged in an attempt to reformulate the priorities in the creation of local forms of ‘high culture’ (Stalin, 1930), becoming the Leitmotif for much of the cultural aspect of SNP during the rest of the Soviet Union’s existence. Throughout the arts, it implied a move away from the avant-garde forms of the 1920s, towards a rigid socialist realism based on an amalgam of ‘authentic’ local, and classical, Western forms, creating uneasy at times kitschy mixtures, including, most discernibly, in the—invented—‘national architectures’ of the ‘Oriental’ republics, where Soviet urban planning similarly ran roughshod over centuries of tradition (Castillo, 1997). The Stalinist period also saw the restoration of both post- and prerevolutionary Russians in their traditional, pacifying, progressive, heroic role: along with other prominent figures from the Tsarist era, classical Russian authors previously deemed too imperialist for the Soviet age— including Tolstoy, Lermontov, and Pushkin (D. Brandenberger, 1999, p. 90)—were thus rehabilitated in an ‘epic revisionism’ (Platt & Brandenberger, 2006). In pictorial and photographic representations of their interactions with their Caucasian and Central Asian—and, later, ‘Southern’—brethren, Russians were routinely depicted as successful bringers of knowledge and civilisation to nations on a lower level of development, partly in an effort at promoting the Soviet model in an increasingly decolonising world (Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen, 2016; Bonnell, 1999, pp. 257–258; T. Nunan, 2016). Old latent orientalist tropes related to Western and Eastern masculinity, femininity, and sexuality were reproduced in much more recognisable form in music, and film, something also assisted by the shifting parameters of censorship: this was perhaps best exemplified by the emergence of the Soviet ‘Eastern’—situated in the wild frontier of early Soviet Central Asia—as a counterpoint to the American ‘Western’, with local ‘Basmachi’ rebels in the role of Native Americans, although more subtle iterations of Orientalism could be found in other artistic output as well (Haliloˇglu, 2018; Prusin & Zeman, 2003).26 Regardless of the subsequent oscillations in the tolerance of local, and

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more abstract cultural forms following the Khrushchev thaw, these orientalising and Russocentric elements remained a feature of Soviet cultural output well into the socialist state’s final years.27 A similar return to familiar tropes—after a period of nativisation— could be seen in cultural depictions of the Soviet Union’s Western borderlands. While korenizatsiya saw the active promotion of local art forms, through linguistic and cultural Ukrainisation (and Belarusisation), processes were not as heavy-handed and concocted as in the ‘oriental’, Central Asian republics. Cultural-linguistic nativisation posed something of a challenge in both republics in view of their large Russian-speaking populations; but while a small core of Belarusian activists had to define the contours of a titular culture in a relative absence of national consciousness (Lubachko, 2014, pp. 80–92; Rudling, 2014, pp. 123–163), Ukrainian artists in particular had already generated a substantive body of native modernist cultural output during the final pre-revolutionary years. The burgeoning local national intelligentsias that emerged following the 1917 revolution took great pains—and were allowed—to stress their republics’ cultural specificity from Russia, with an upsurge in avant-garde publications in titular—and minority ethnic—languages tackling contemporary themes and issues in their respective societies (Palko, 2019). But Russian attitudes in particular died hard: even during this most ‘tolerant’ period in the SNP, much of the effort of Ukrainian literary figures was aimed at countering resistance to Ukrainisation from a local Communist Party dominated by Russians, and Russian intellectuals sceptical of Ukrainian cultural specificity, including the likes of Mikhail Bulgakov and Maxim Gorky.28 A similar scepticism could also be seen across the republican border, in the face of Belarusisation. These assertions of Ukrainian and Belorussian distinctiveness were severely curtailed under Stalin, with the repression of much of both republics’ national intelligentsia: as in the East, the emphasis in cultural output moved towards ‘heroic’ themes, with the ‘friendship of peoples’ once again stressing the historic role of Ukrainians and Belarusians in particular as parts of the Russian-dominated, Soviet state-building enterprise (Lubachko, 2014, pp. 107–126; Rudling, 2014, pp. 275–303). Before and during the Great Patriotic War, as in the case of historiography, cultural output did move towards a more explicitly Ukrainian form of patriotism—with Soviet novels and the visual arts stressing historic Ukrainian-Polish antipathy in particularly rabid terms in the aftermath of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, to be joined by the struggle against

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the German Teutonic knights following the Nazi invasion of 1941 (Thompson, 1991). This resurgence was then severely repressed during the post-World War ‘Zhdanovshchina’, with a return to a deference to the leading role of the Russians as a ‘great brother’ whenever the subject of their relationship with Ukraine and Belorussia was directly (and indirectly) broached (Tromly, 2013, pp. 82–92). Together with the anti-Semitism that emerged during Stalin’s concurrent campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’, these familiar themes remained an on-and-off feature of the Centre’s cultural policies towards the ‘lesser’ Slavic SSRs in subsequent decades (Ermolaev, 1991; Korey, 1995). Policies did oscillate somewhat between nativisation and Russocentrism, with the post-Khrushchev rule of Petro Shelest providing a short ‘national communist’ interlude in Ukraine, when cultural specificity was given somewhat more leeway in local forms of artistic expression, including literature and film,29 also prompting one particularly well-known intervention by the Ukrainian public intellectual, Ivan Dziuba, in 1965. When the hapless Ukrainian party leader was eventually demoted in favour of the more Russophile Volodymyr Shcherbitsky, an effort at ‘normalisation’ returned the general thrust of cultural policies towards Russification, not least by purging or disciplining intellectuals—like Dziuba—also deemed too Ukrainophile. The episode nevertheless did play a role in the emergence of a dissident intelligentsia that would feed into the struggle for independence during the later glasnost years.30 Having been conquered and incorporated as a direct result of MolotovRibbentrop and Yalta, the Baltic republics of the USSR formed something of a special case in Western-oriented Soviet cultural policies. After a period of intrusive rule by Russian-dominated administration, a partial ‘nativisation’ of these Union Republics saw the emergence of a carefully curated, loyal urban intelligentsia (Annus, 2016; Davoli¯ute, ˙ 2016). If there were elements of cultural colonialism, they were aimed more at the elimination of ‘bourgeois’ artistic influences emanating from the inter-war years of independence—which had led to the development of a distinct national identity within the mainly peasant populations—than the creation of Soviet cultural identities from the bottom up (Balockaite, 2016; Karnes, 2008). But whether in the Slavic or Baltic Republics, or in Moldova: separation from Western-leaning cultural forms of expression and acknowledgement of the ‘Friendship of Peoples’ ensured their ‘Eastward’ orientation, at least until the Gorbachev years.

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Conclusion The October revolution of 1917 was meant to represent a break with past practices: it brought to power a highly disciplined party whose ideology had opposition to Russian Empire at its core. And, for a while at least, the Soviet Union that emerged in its wake granted its nonRussian subjects a level of autonomy unseen in pre-revolutionary times, while expressly—but imperfectly—denying Russian claims of superiority. But, even in that short period of nativisation, and in their acknowledgements of Russia’s own ‘backwardness’, the Bolsheviks could not escape the claims to an—albeit alternative—civilising mission, and the heavily hierarchical implications within their own, historically deterministic, world view. Like the modernising Tsars before them, and both the Westernisers and Slavophiles of the nineteenth century, they looked upon the polity they had created as both a to-be-civilised and civilising force, both a recipient and transmitter of an ideal, not rooted in the modern West, or in some mystical Slavic past, but Marxist-Leninist ideology. The assumptions behind many of the ideas and methods they had claimed to abjure were now once again adopted and adapted to a highly imperfectly emancipatory, universalist Messianism. In the West, as in the East, minorities were forcibly incorporated into their project, micro-managed, pushed towards modernity in ways open only to limited negotiation, between local elites chosen by a centre based on their ideological conformity; for all their benevolence, these processes were much more intrusive in the Union’s ‘backward’, oriental republics and regions, resulting in their imperial management and, in many cases, erasure, by bureaucratic fiat. Stalinism, its ideas on ‘socialism in one state’, its explicit rehabilitation of both Russian history and empire, and the transformation of that Marxist-Leninist Messianism into a global, ideological struggle created a dual hierarchy, with the Russians leading the peoples of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union leading the world, towards Communist salvation. While the need for mobilisation during World War II created a brief opening for the nationalisms of most peoples of the former Soviet Union (alongside the quasi-genocidal disciplining of minorities deemed unreliable), the legacies of that period—the ‘lesser evil’ thesis, cultural Russo-centrism, institutionalised anti-Semitism—remained a feature of Moscow’s official world view for the decades that followed. The USSR’s ideology may have been Marxist-Leninist, and Russia’s place at the pinnacle of the project indirect, but in its rejection of Western

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norms, and its claimed familiarity with groups at the lower levels of an internal and global hierarchy, the Soviet Union’s behaviour nevertheless echoed, however distantly, earlier claims made in Tsarist Russia regarding ‘its’ Western and Eastern subalterns. These claims were materialised, modernised, and globalised: as the leading socialist state, the Soviet Union saw itself as the guardian of a once-subjugated South/East against Western capitalist encroachment; and Russians were the ‘first among equals’ within this socialist state, at the top of a hierarchy going all the way down to newly de-colonised nations in need of Moscow’s guidance and protection. Both imperial Russia and the USSR thus defined themselves as ‘exceptional’ through their very different, top-down civilising projects: a varying combination of Orthodoxy, narodnost and/or Russification in the case of the Tsars, a Russian-led socialist modernity in the case of the Soviets. These projects involved a clear hierarchy of peoples, and in both late imperial Russia and the (post-)Stalinist USSR, this hierarchy came to place Russian culture at its pinnacle. In their civilising zeal, both imperial Russia and the USSR essentialised their minorities and endeavoured to shape them in ways that would be compatible with continued dominion over them, whether in terms of Christian Orthodox autocracy or a dictatorship of the proletariat, through both science and culture. Both entities periodically employed similar disciplinary practices—ethnic cleansing and forced migration—towards recalcitrant ethnic minorities. And, crucially, both situated themselves, simultaneously, outside and inside the West and the East, by taking over and adapting Western ideologies and social-scientific technologies to their specific circumstances, and positing intrusive civilising projects over and above colonial subjects with which they paradoxically identified themselves to some degree. ‘Western’ subalterns were politically, scientifically, culturally, placed outside the West through the stressing of difference (from Poles, Germans); ‘Orientals’ were placed under a benevolent Russia’s tutelage, with the latter in many cases literally acting as a conduit of Western civilisation towards these to-be-civilised parts. By the time Gorbachev’s glasnost subsequently de-stabilised the USSR and swept away its ideological assumptions, the Russian and Soviet identities had become so intertwined that, unlike many of its sub-alterns, the nation once at the pinnacle of the worldwide socialist experiment was left without a coherent sense of self. Moscow had to redefine itself once

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again, and, after about a decade of doubt and prevarication, it eventually settled on an appropriately adapted version of Hybrid Exceptionalism, uniquely combining elements of Russia’s imperial and Soviet legacies with contemporary elements in once again justifying Russian leadership over a distinct—and now internationalised—civilisational space. Having already survived one revolution, Hybrid Exceptionalism was to re-appear, in rejuvenated form, in the aftermath of ideological collapse and geopolitical retreat; these contemporary expressions of Russia’s perennially imperial Westward and Eastward gaze form the subject of this monograph’s final chapters.

Notes 1. The provisional government itself deferred any decisions on the future structure of Russian inter-ethnic relations to a ‘constituent assembly’, which never took place. Most ethno-national parties advocated some form of autonomy—rather than outright secession—in the earlier stages of the revolution, as apparent in early interactions between the provisional government and the Ukrainian Rada (Remy, 2017), and the—ultimately indeterminate—‘First All-Russian Muslim Congress’ organised in May 1917 (Bospflug, 2017). Opinions went from the unflinching centralism of conservative forces, through those advocating personal or territorial autonomy, to the calls for full territorial self-determination by the Bolsheviks within the various Soviets that contested power with the Provisional Government itself (Holquist, 2006; Semyonov and Smith, 2017). 2. The parallels between Russian Marxism-Leninism and religion have been made by numerous authors, including Berdiaev (1947), Duncan (2000), Halfin (2000), Riegel (2005), and Ryan (2015). 3. Not surprisingly, an idea forcefully dismissed by Luxemburg (1976). 4. A tendency extensively documented by Etkind (2013). It also echoed the lamentations of Chaadayev (1965 [1836]), almost a century earlier, regarding Russia’s hopeless backwardness, and the Westernisers’ ideas on Russia as a historically hobbled, but ultimately promising, ‘modernising force’ within the vast, multi-ethnic expanses of its empire. Moreover, as pointed out by Hosking (2006, p. 5), the disadvantaging of the own ethnos is often a feature of ‘national messianism’ in other societies with comparable civilising missions, where nationhood is often subordinated to the universalist national ideal. 5. For examples of such pushback, see Sabol (1995) and Jääts (2012). 6. From the early Soviet period, the associated practices of imperial control thus included technologies of terror developed under a different ideological context—under the Romanovs, providing yet another element

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of continuity; as pointed out by Holquist (2001) and Weitz (2002, p. 9), the commissars used the same techniques to very dissimilar, revolutionary ends. All groups deemed unreliable and counter-revolutionary became the object of these disciplining practices; some of these—like the Chechens and other North Caucasian ‘bandits’, in addition to the Central Asian ‘Basmachis’—had also been the target of Tsarist repression (Bennigsen, 1983; Olcott, 1981; Werth, 2006, pp. 352–354). Others, like the Cossacks, had actually been agents of colonisation under the Tsars and were now seen as remnants of an imperial Great Russian chauvinism incompatible with the new order (Holquist, 1997). The early Bolsheviks’ opposition to Russian nationalism also meant the reversal of migration flows, with Russian settlers removed from areas assigned to minority ethnic groups in Central Asia, the North Caucasus, and elsewhere (Holquist, 2001, pp. 131–132; T. Martin, 1998a, pp. 827–828). Finally, the absence of reliable cadres—because of a near-complete lack of local support for the Bolsheviks—was one of the reasons for the amalgamation of Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan into the Transcaucasian Federative SSR from 1922 to 1936, against strong local—particularly Georgian Bolshevik—opposition (Blank, 1990). 7. As documented by Northrop (2001, p. 206), ‘…[m]ost Russians living in Uzbekistan made a point of calling themselves “European,” rather than “Russian”; in reports, statistics, and propaganda exhortations, they drew the contrast starkly between “European” and “local national” ways. (The “European” label was also claimed by other Slavs and, indeed, by nearly every non-Muslim group living in the area, with the exception of the indigenous Jewish community.) If anyone in Central Asia had to change, it was clear who it would be: “European” practices were the (modern) model to which (backward, primitive) Uzbeks would need to adjust’. 8. In fact, according to Velychenko (2018), this clash between the Russian Bolsheviks’ ‘red imperialism’ and their subaltern Ukrainian counterparts’ ‘red nationalism’ was based in no small part on the fact that ‘…[b]eneath the Bolsheviks’ language of liberty lay assumptions and preconceptions that can as often be traced to imperialist Russian Slavophiles as to Marx and Engels’ (p. 162). 9. These Stalinist repressions were, in fact, tied to the ideologically conditioned, rigid views on nationality that influenced the SNP. These combined with ‘Soviet xenophobia’—i.e. the perennial Soviet fear of outside subversion—to subject the (mostly non-Russian) peoples in the border regions, or peoples with substantial diasporas, to additional scrutiny. During korenizatsiya, this often implied additional attention to their needs as titular nationalities of their newly founded territories; under Stalin, their suspected receptiveness to outside interference led to

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the intensified and targeted repression—and sometimes deportation—of specific ethnic groups like Finns, Poles, Latvians, Koreans, and others, even before the deadly measures taken against ‘enemy nations’ during World War Two (T. Martin, 1998a). The combined percentage of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian delegates to the Central Committee thus amounted to 86% in 1981 and 87.2% in 1986—a significant overrepresentation compared to their 70% proportion of the population that was only addressed during the final, short-lived Central Committee of 1990. Inequalities were even more pronounced at the very top of party and state—the Politburo and the Council of Ministers (Farmer, 1985; Mawdsley, 1991, p. 909; Rigby, 1972). Non-Slavic nationalities—especially Central Asians—were also very much underrepresented within the Red Army officer corps and combat units (Szayna, 1991; Wimbush and Alexiev, 1980). Matusevich (2008, p. 67), for instance, describes how ‘…in their quest for racial equality [with sub-saharan Africans], the well-intentioned Soviets inadvertently displayed the kind of self-abnegation that […] smacked of paternalism’. Quist-Adade (2005) similarly identifies a transition from ‘communist paternalism to outright negativity’ in Soviet reporting on Africa during the periods before and during Gorbachev’s reforms. Soviet attitudes towards other ‘brotherly socialist nations’ similarly upheld surprisingly orientalist stereotypes: Asians, Arabs, and Africans were clearly cast in a friendly but always subservient role, ready to receive the guidance of their Soviet (and, more often than not, Russian) elder brothers. The Soviets clearly saw China on a lower level in the hierarchy of modernity, a hierarchy which was apparent in this comparison, by Khrushchev’s of relations between the USSR, the PRC, and the German Democratic Republic: ‘China is a destroyed peasant country. We are ambassadors of an industrially developed country …. In giving these tractors to our Chinese friends... they will learn from us …. But imagine if you take buses with you to Germany …. After all, we learned how to build buses from the Germans. What will they say?’ (as quoted in Hopf, 2009, p. 306). It is notable in that respect that, unlike its non-Russian counterparts, the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR) lacked an Academy of Sciences of its own; the overarching production of knowledge on Russian history and society thus took place under an all-Soviet institutional set-up, further adding to the amalgamation of Soviet and Russian identities (David-Fox, 1998; Graham, 1967; Guins, 1953). In other republics and territories, local academies and institutes were active in the scientific studies of ‘their’ titular nations; their ability to push back and negotiate these perspectives varied, depending on the particular period, and the centre’s ideological priorities. Broadly speaking, it was at its highest during the 1920s (the period of Korenizatsiya), diminished

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considerably under Stalin (with the restoration of Russian pre-eminence), then improved slightly under Khrushchev’s thaw, only to diminish again under Brezhnev. In historiography, for instance, bourgeois ‘objectivism’ was rejected in favour of a Russo-centric application of Marxism-Leninism, one that stressed the progressive Russian elements in the thought of nineteenthcentury thinkers like Chernishevsky and Belinsky (Schlesinger, 1950). In linguistics, the ideas of Marr—influential in Stalin’s time, until his demotion in an article written by Stalin himself—have been compared to the better-known ‘Lysoenkoism’ in genetics, as has Bromley’s influence on the—in any case neglected—ethnography during the era of stagnation. In the former case, the rejection of ‘Indo-Europeanism’ as racist and Western-centric, and the idea of a universal—proletarian—proto-language conformed to the expectations of Marxist universalist dogma (Slezkine, 1996); in the latter instance, a ‘sterile’ conceptualisation of ethnography was reduced to the ‘study of (rigidly understood) ethnoses’, and their incorporation into the ‘progressive historical community of the Soviet people’ (Skalnik and Krjukov, 1990). Throughout, Soviet anthropology maintained a commitment to evolutionist schemata, stemming from its Marxist-Leninist imperatives (Gellner, 1977). See, for instance, Wynar (1979) on the shifting negotiated boundaries of Ukrainian historiography. A process also visible in Soviet historiography on Russian-Mongol relations, which showed remarkable continuity (albeit with the abovementioned ‘class-based’ modifications) with its Tsarist predecessor’s negative views (Halperin, 1982, p. 322). Not incidentally, it was Stalin himself who inaugurated the ‘lesser evil’ thesis when praising the state-building abilities of the Great Russian people in a set of commentaries on proposed history textbooks, and a toast to Marshall Voroshilov, in 1937 (D. Brandenberger, 1999, pp. 90–92). The question of the Turkic languages’ alphabets was resolved in a number of ‘Turkological Congresses’—starting in 1926—where linguists and party members weighed the various—Arabic, Modified Arabic, Cyrillic, and Latin—writing systems against the ‘scientific’—i.e. linguistic—requirements of the languages themselves, alongside the need for ideological conformity to the needs of Marxism-Leninism; indeed, the Latin script was even proposed at various points as a progressive, modernising replacement for Russia’s Cyrillic (see Alpatov, 2017, pp. 9–14; s.n., 2009). Between 1926 and 1937, narratives shifted away from advocating the Latin script and rejecting both Arabic and Cyrillic as markers of, respectively, religious and imperial backwardness. By 1937, the changing priorities set by the centre had led to a change in the ‘scientific consensus’ in favour of the modernising capabilities of Cyrillic. Slightly modified

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versions of the alphabet were then imposed on each of the very similar Turkic languages of Central Asia: quite unnecessarily from a purely linguistic point of view, but understandably in the light of the previously ‘designed’, separate national identities there (Sebba, 2006, pp. 103–105). 19. In the cases of Georgia, and Armenia, old territorial grievances were notably resurrected immediately following World War Two, when the Soviet Union laid claim to parts of Eastern Turkey (Hasanli, 2011, chapter 3). Azerbaijan had at first been allowed to stress the Turkic elements in its identity—notably in the early 1920s, when relations between the Bolsheviks and Kemal Atatürk’s nationalists were friendly; in the late 1940s, by contrast, with the creation of the short-lived ‘Red Azerbaijan’ on Iranian territory, historians started emphasising its Persian cultural heritage. Narratives then reverted to emphasising the Azeri population’s Caucasian Albanian roots, in a bit to create cultural distance from the new US-allied Turks and Iranians. Identification of Turkic Central Asian groups with their counterparts in Xinjiang (‘East Turkestan’) was similarly encouraged or discouraged, depending on the state of relations between the USSR and China. The Uyghur nationality similarly emerged in 1920s Central Asia—at a time of Bolshevik-Jadidist cooperation—partly to gain influence in Xinjiang (Klimeš, 2015, pp. 96–97), with Stalin going so far as to distribute passports among local Soviet Central Asian emigrants in the aftermath of World War Two as a pretext for possible intervention (Schachner, 1980, pp. 230–231). 20. These fluctuations were visible in treatments of Imam Shamil. Gammer (1992) describes how, in the former case, the leader of the resistance against the Tsarist conquest of the Caucasus was, under korenizatsiya, ‘described in the most glowing terms’, as a ‘progressive’ force—albeit under a ‘religious cloak’ (p. 731). Historiographies shifted under Stalin, when—after much hesitation—Soviet orthodoxy started presenting Shamil and his movement as being in the thrall of British and French imperialism, opposed to the progressive incorporation of his people into the Russian empire. Khrushchev’s thaw then prompted a riposte by North Caucasian historians, always limited by the requirement that interaction with Russia be presented—in spite of everything—as a ‘progressive force’. A fierce debate between the Centre, Georgian and Armenian historians on one side, and North Caucasian counterparts on the other resulted in a series of articles and conferences in the 1960s and 1970s, through which the party established the paramount requirement of ‘emphasizing the historical dimension of the friendship, the mutual contacts and interests, and the common destinies of the peoples of the Caucasus among themselves and between them and the Russian people’ (p. 752). The resulting predominantly negative portrayals of Shamil were only to be questioned again

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in the late 1980s, during the period of Glasnost and Perestroika. Similar debates and fluctuations could be seen in descriptions of historical interactions of many other groups, going from open criticism of Russia during Korenizatsiya, through open imperial apologia during Stalin, and a brief Khrushchev thaw, and finally settling on the formula on the ‘Friendship of Peoples’ and Russian progressiveness in the Brezhnev era. Similar ‘negotiations’ between the centre and ‘oriental’ peoples could be seen in the development of Tatar historiography (Lazzerini, 1981). 21. Plokhy (2005) describes in detail how Ukraine’s ‘national historian’, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, figured prominently in this short-lived Bolshevik ‘Ukrainian revival’, alongside others. Politically and academically active in Austrian-ruled Galicia before the 1917 revolution, he became the head of Ukraine’s revolutionary Central Rada during that year. His increasingly pro-Bolshevik inclinations led him first into exile, before a return to Kyiv in 1924, and the assumption of a leading role in the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Departing from Karamzin’s state-centric view of ‘Little Russian’ and Russian histories as intertwined (with the former subservient to the latter), he posited the separateness of Ukrainian history, with the Kievan Rus as a distinctly Ukrainian phenomenon, its ‘Western orientation’ a result of its Varangian influences (p. 295), and Pereieslav as a ‘recognition’ of Cossack independence, rather than a ‘reunification’ (pp. 295–297). Marxist historians, like Matvei Iavorsky, also produced Ukrainian histories from a class-based, ‘scientific’ perspective that rejected Russian chauvinist historiography by subscribing to the ‘independence of the “Ukrainian historical process”’ (p. 357), while also criticising Ukrainian ‘bourgeois nationalists’ for constructing a ‘Chinese wall’ (p. 360) between Russian and Ukrainian history. 22. The downfall of the Ukrainian historical paradigm from 1927 thus culminated in Hrushevsky’s denunciation and arrest for ‘nationalism and subversive dissemination of bourgeois ideology’ in 1931 (Plokhy, 2005, p. 399) similar processes occurred in the Belorussian SSR, where members of the local national intelligentsia similarly began to be denounced, and increasingly persecuted, in the late 1920s (Rudling, 2014, pp. 275–303). 23. Much was thus made in the run-up to and during the Great Patriotic War of resistance by the ‘Great Ukrainian People’ against the Polish gentry, and the unity of Western and Eastern Ukraine—driven by the territorial gains of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in the run-up to 1941, and the need for resistance against a Western foe afterwards (Yekelchyk, 2002, pp. 61–68). Ukrainian authors even laid claim to the Kievan Rus as ‘Ukrainian’ (p. 64) and argued for the rehabilitation of Ukrainian national figures once dismissed as bourgeois nationalist’, but as the tide turned, the authorities made sure to ‘reconcile the Ukrainian and Russian historical

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narratives within the imperial hierarchy of the “friendship of peoples”’ (p. 68), albeit not without some difficulty. Similar disciplinary action was taken in the East following a similar emphasis on nationalist history during the opening stages of the war, with the suppression of a ‘History of the Kazakh SSR’ for nationalist deviations as a particularly well-known example (Carmack, 2014). 24. In the Belarusian case, this implied the removal of pro-Polish sentiment from historiography—as in the case of local participation in the 1863 Polish uprisings, for instance (Backus, 1963, p. 81)—in favour of antiPolish peasant uprisings and early cultural links with Moscow (Backus, 1963, pp. 89–92). In the Ukrainian case, even during de-Stalinisation, Hrushevsky remained a ‘falsifier’ for having stressed the sovereignty of the Ukrainian nation—against both Tsarist and Soviet historiography (Horak, 1965, p. 260). Within mainstream Soviet Ukrainian scholarship, the ‘Pereieslav Orthodoxy’ came to see the treaty as a ‘reunification’ of the ‘brotherly’ Russian and Ukrainian peoples, rather than the latter’s ‘incorporation’ (Yekelchyk, 2004, pp. 96–102). Any negative analyses of Russian imperial rule—if at all mentioned—were to be formulated in terms of class conflict, the result of collusion between the autocratic Tsarist state and Ukrainian gentry, against the Ukrainian and Russian ‘toilers’: Mazepa—the excommunicated anti-hero of Poltava in Tsarist times— was restored in his status as traitor, while many Ukrainian intellectuals of old were either (mis)appropriated (as in the case of poet-serf Taras Shevchenko), or dismissed as ‘reactionary’ or ‘bourgeois nationalists’ (as in the cases of nineteenth-century intellectual Panteleimon Kulish, and Mykhailo Hrushevsky), condemned according to the class-based criteria of Marxism-Leninism, and their attitudes towards Russian rule (Pelenski, 1964, p. 414). 25. Frolova-Walker (1998) intricately describes how the various territories of the USSR were instructed to ‘create’ musical traditions whose sophistication would vary according to their place in the federal hierarchy. Union republics were thus ‘required to build a national opera house and to create a repertory for it […] by the end of the 1930s’ (p. 335). Autonomous republics could content themselves with a mere repertory of folk songs (ibid.). Because of the shortage in appropriately trained composers, mainly Russian musicians were tasked with conjuring ‘national’ lyrical and operatic traditions by following a template set by Russia’s first composers a century or so earlier, when combining Russian folklore with Western classical music (pp. 339–363). In the artificially created republics of Central Asia, this necessarily involved the standardisation—and, hence, mutilation—of often interlocking traditions; locally developed, and existing

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forms of opera—like those based on Azerbaijan’s ‘mugham’ traditions— were deemed not ‘Westernised’ enough and simply ignored (p. 340). It also led to ‘absurd’ results, with some composers travelling from republic to republic to establish a local, ‘national’ repertoire (pp. 335–336). The ‘colonial cultures’ created under ‘Moscow’s directives’ were subsequently absorbed by local intelligentsias, who ‘made their own contributions within the boundaries set by Moscow’s rules’ (pp. 338–339), resulting in works that heavily reproduced orientalist tropes, as in the work of the establishment’s favourite Armenian composer, Aram Khachaturian (Schultz, 2016, pp. 87–88). 26. ‘Beloe Solntse Pustyini’ (‘White Sun of the Desert’, 1972)—about a Russian officer saving a harem of Central Asian women from their murderous and manipulative husband—is a particularly blatant example of such orientalism, with visuals that could easily be tied to Vereshchagin’s depictions of ‘oriental cruelty’. Notable examples of light comedies with less blatantly obvious orientalist themes include Mimino (1977)— featuring a venal Armenian lorry driver and hot-headed Georgian pilot, with the latter unsuccessfully pursuing a Russian love interest to Moscow—are saved from trouble by a female Russian lawyer; and ‘Kavkazskaya Plennitsa’ (‘Kidnapping, Caucasian Style’, 1967), (very) loosely based on Pushkin’s and Tolstoy’s ‘Prisoner of the Caucasus’, about a clumsy Russian ethnographer freeing a kidnapped Caucasian bride from her conspiring co-nationals. 27. The Bolshoi theatre’s various productions of one of the best-known works with such orientalist musical tropes—Aram Khachaturian’s Spartacus —gives a good indication of the shifting priorities during that time; according to Searcy, consecutive productions in 1958, 1962, and 1968 gradually went from acting as a metaphor for the ‘friendship of peoples’, towards emphasising assimilation into a Russian-dominated Soviet culture (Searcy, 2016). The libretto of Khachaturyan’s other well-known ballet, Gayané—set on a collective farm in the Caucasus—contains a most classic orientalist trope involving an oriental maiden, her brutish local suitor, and a white—Russian—saviour (Robinson, 2007, pp. 432–433). 28. Two of Bulgakov’s plays—‘Dni Turbynikh’ (‘Days of the Turbins’, 1926) and, in particular the extremely popular ‘Belaya Gvardiya’ (‘The White Guards’, 1925)—thus depicted Ukrainians’ aspirations for independent statehood in the aftermath of the 1917 in distinctly unflattering terms, as ‘an operatic display of nationalist regalia behind which stood the German army’, or ‘as the “peasant horde” so detested by the author’ (Abensour, 1993; Shkandrij, 2001, p. 215); Gorky, meanwhile, expressed himself in terms recognisable from an earlier era when he ‘“categorically opposed” the translation of his work and expressed amazement at the fact that

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efforts continued to transform the “dialect into a language”’ (Shkandrij, 2001, p. 219). In response to such disparaging attitudes, Ukrainian literary figures mounted a vigorous counter-offensive stressing the specificity of the Ukrainian condition and the inherent complexities in their relationship to Russia. Fowler (2019) provides a good example of this kind of cultural output, with the Mykola Kulish’ popular 1920s play ‘Myna Mazailo’. In this piece, Ukrainian characters openly grapple with the tensions between Russification and Ukrainisation, and the search for a Soviet Ukrainian identity. The play was banned once korenizatsiya came to an end, in 1931, and not performed till 1988 (pp. 362–363), in contrast to Bulgakov’s ‘White Guards’, which became a mainstay of Soviet theatre after a brief ban between 1929 and 1932 during the campaign against ‘rightist’ forces. 29. Ukrainian film was, in fact, a good indication of these increasing and decreasing spaces for independent cultural expression. After having played a major—independent—role in the production of avant-garde, culturally Ukrainian output during the era of korenizatsiya, Stalin’s crackdown on Ukraine’s independent film studios saw a socialist-realist template imposed on the republic’s film industry; now subordinated to an allUnion monopoly, it concentrated mainly on propagandistic themes like industrialisation, the Ukrainian role in the great patriotic war, often reducing Ukrainian national identity to the status of a homogenised and instrumentalised folkloric curiosity so familiar from the previous century (Baraban, 2014; Fowler, 2014). The 1960s thaw saw an upsurge in independent, and distinct auteur’s cinema exploring national themes— including Ukrainian folkloric traditions—independently from the broader Soviet context, actively encouraged by the national-communist, Shelest, with Sergei Paradzhanov’s ‘Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors’ a particular outlier (First, 2019). The ‘normalisation’ of the 1970s put an end to this upsurge in independent artistic expression—to the detriment of its main proponents—and Ukrainian cinema became once again subsumed in the more conventional stylisations and priorities of its dominant Russian-language all-Union counterpart. 30. The Ukrainian author Ivan Dziuba’s book-length polemic was, in effect, a call to implement the original ‘Leninist principles’ in Soviet Nationalities Policy that had been betrayed by the more Russo-centric policies of Stalin’s time, which had only partially been rolled back under Khrushchev. Written at a time when Ukraine was headed by the relatively Ukrainophile Shelest, it was, in fact, an internal document aimed at the Ukrainian party leadership, before leaking into broader society through samizdat/samvydav, and being published in the UK in 1968 (Nahaylo,

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1977). In spite of formulating the frustrations of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in a Marxist-Leninist language, it prompted a press campaign aimed at its author, and a backlash from Moscow, with Dziuba disciplined, and eventually forced to publicly recant in 1973; but it arguably helped revive a Ukrainian dissident movement—including more radically anti-Soviet elements—that would prove crucial to the Ukrainian drive for independence during the final years the Soviet Union’s existence (Rudnytsky, 1981).

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Smith, J. (2019). Was There a Soviet Nationality Policy? Europe-Asia Studies, pp. 972–993. Smith, M. G. (1998). Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR, 1917– 1953. Mouton de Gruyter. Smith, M. G. (2010). The Tenacity of Forms: Language, Nation, Stalin. In C. Brandist & K. Chown (Eds.), The Politics and the Theory of Language in the USSR, 1917–1938: The Birth of Sociological Linguistics. Anthem Press. Solchanyk, R. (1982). Russian Language and Soviet Politics. Soviet Studies, 34(1), 23–42. Stachura, P. D. (1998). Poland Between the Wars, 1918–1939. St. Martin’s Press. Stalin, J. (1913). Marxism and the National Question. Available at: https:// www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03.htm. Accessed 10 February 2020. Stalin, J. (1929). The National Question and Leninism. International Publishers. Stalin, J. (1930). Political Report of the Central Committee to the Sixteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U.(B.). Available at: https://www.marxists.org/refere nce/archive/stalin/works/1930/aug/27.htm. Accessed 2 June 2020. Stringer, A. (2003). Soviet Development in Central Asia: The Classic Colonial Syndrome? In T. Everett-Heath (Ed.), Central Asia: Aspects of Transition (pp. 146–166). RoutledgeCurzon. Szayna, T. S. (1991). The Ethnic Factor in the Soviet Armed Forces: The Muslim Dimension. Rand Corporation. Szporluk, R. (1988). Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx Versus Friedrich List. Oxford University Press. Szporluk, R. (2006). Lenin, “Great Russia”, and Ukraine. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 28(1/4), 611–626. Tateishi, Y. (2011). Writing About Heroes in the “History of the USSR”: The Interpretation of Individuals in History During the Stalin Period. Japanese Slavic and East European Studies, 32, 107–128. Tateishi, Y. (2013). Reframing the “History of the USSR”: The “Thaw” and Changes in the Portrayal of Shamil’s Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century North Caucasus. Acta Slavica Iaponica, 34, 95–114. Tavolja, K. (2018). The Official Art of the Khrushchev Thaw: The Severe Style as an Ambassador of the Estonian National School at Baltic Art Exhibitions in Moscow. Journal of Baltic Studies, 49(3), 333–350. Thompson, E. M. (1991). Soviet Russian Writers and the Soviet Invasion of Poland in September 1939. In E. M. Thompson (Ed.), The Search for SelfDefinition in Russian Literature (pp. 158–166). John Benjamins Publishing. Tillett, L. (1975). Ukrainian Nationalism and the Fall of Shelest. Slavic Review, 34(4), 752–768. Tillett, L. R. (1961). Shamil and Muridism in Recent Soviet Historiography. American Slavic and East European Review, 20(2), 253–269.

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Tillett, L. R. (1964). Soviet Second Thoughts on Tsarist Colonialism. Foreign Affairs, 42(2), 309–319. Tolstoy, P. (1952). Morgan and Soviet Anthropological Thought. American Anthropologist, New Series, 54(1), 8–17. Tolz, V. (2011). Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods. Oxford University Press. Tromly, B. (2013). Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Intellectual Life Under Stalin and Khrushchev: New Studies in European History. Cambridge University Press. Upton, A. F. (1980). The Finnish Revolution 1917–1918. University of Minnesota Press. USSR. (1924). Konstitutsiya SSSR 1924g.: Sait Konstitutsii Rossiiskoi Federatsii. Available at: http://constitution.garant.ru/history/ussr-rsfsr/1924/. Accessed 10 February 2020. USSR. (1936). Konstitutsiya SSSR 1936g.: Sait Konstitutsii Rossiiskoi Federatsii. Available at: http://constitution.garant.ru/history/ussr-rsfsr/1936/. Accessed 10 February 2020. USSR. (1977). Konstitutsiya SSSR 1977g.: Sait Konstitutsii Rossiiskoi Federatsii. Available at: http://constitution.garant.ru/history/ussr-rsfsr/1936/. Accessed 10 February 2020. Vaidyanath, R. (1971). Lenin on National Minorities. India Quarterly, 27 (1), 28–39. Van Ree, E. (2007). Heroes and Merchants: Stalin’s Understanding of National Character. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 8(1), 41– 65. Vardys, V. S. (1965). Soviet Nationality Policy Since the XXII Party Congress. Russian Review, 24(4), 323. Vardys, V. S., & Misiunas, R. J. (1978). The Baltic States in Peace and War 1917–1945. Pennsylvania State University Press. Velychenko, S. (2018). Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red: The Ukrainian Marxist Critique of Russian Communist Rule in Ukraine, 1918– 1925. University of Toronto Press. Vujacic, V. (2007). Stalinism and Russian Nationalism: A Reconceptualization. Post-Soviet Affairs, 23(2), 156–183. Walicki, A. (1983). Rosa Luxemburg and the Question of Nationalism in Polish Marxism (1893–1914). The Slavonic and East European Review, 61(4), 565– 582. Ware, R. B., & Kisriev, E. (2009). Dagestan: Russian Hegemony and Islamic Resistance in the North Caucasus. M.E. Sharpe. Weitz, E. D. (2002). Racial Politics Without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges. Slavic Review, 61(1), 1–29.

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CHAPTER 5

Hybrid Exceptionalism in Contemporary Russia

Introduction When it came, the end to the Soviet Union emerged, in no small measure, from the still-unresolved contradictions between the centrifugal and centripetal forces built into its Nationalities Policy. Indeed, the system envisaged by Lenin and established by Stalin had created a federal state ruled by a ‘democratically centralised’ Communist party: a nominally voluntary union held together in a rigid, authoritarian party-state framework, simultaneously an incubator and assimilator of nationalities. Its last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was surprisingly oblivious of the considerable significance of national identity to its various peoples, as apparent in his reactions to stirrings of nationalist unrest during that period.1 This blind spot proved fateful: within six years of glasnost and perestroika—from 1985 to 1991—a Union which had, in the words of its own anthem, been seen as ‘unbreakable’ and ‘eternal’, loosened as one republic after another declared independence, or its intention to break away, with some descending into open armed conflict. The Communist Party’s own loss of legitimacy and monopolistic control untied the bonds holding the Union together further, and a revised Union Treaty—endorsed by nine out of fifteen republics in a referendum boycotted by many—precipitated this process in 1991. Following the failed August coup—aimed among others against that treaty, and, more generally, a loss of control by a Communist Party increasingly © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Oskanian, Russian Exceptionalism between East and West, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69713-6_5

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challenged by liberal forces centred on the RSFSR—the three East Slavic republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia put the final nail in the USSR’s coffin at Belavezha, in December of that same year, by formalising the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and announcing the creation of a—largely yet to be defined—Commonwealth of Independent States ( Dunlop, 2003; Odom, 1991; Tuminez, 2003). In many ways, 1991 was as transformational a year as 1917 had been. Of course, by that time, the Soviet Union’s ‘external’ empire—Eastern Europe, and most of its clients in the global South—had already been abandoned in an abrupt switch from the Brezhnev to the Sinatra doctrine (Jones, 1990; Ouimet, 2003). But most of the newly independent states emerging from the Soviet collapse—often containing substantial ‘stranded’ ethnic Russian diasporas (Kolstø & Edemsky, 1995)—had been part of Russia’s imperial history and of its cultural zone of influence for centuries: they had entered modernity together—and under Russian tutelage—in Tsarist and Soviet times. The identities of two East Slavic republics—Belarus and Ukraine—had long been entangled with, and subordinated to, Russia’s own; some, including the Central Asian republics, had even been created in their current form by the Soviet Union—to many Russians, an entity now commensurate with their own sense of self. Together with the thorough discrediting of its organising ideology, the ‘catastrophe of the century’ (Osborn, 2005) had denuded the Russians of the internal empire which had become so central to their identity during the previous seven decades, not least because of an at times professedly burdensome ‘leading role’ within it (Billington, 1992, pp. 35–38; Suny, 2012, pp. 29–30). The Soviet Union’s double hierarchy was gone; Russian identities were up in the air, with a variety of possible redefinitions—some based on elements of the past, others firmly rooted in untried visions for a different future—presenting themselves. This chapter will detail Russia’s internal struggles with the competing worldviews that resulted from this collapse, and their precarious settlement into a contemporary hierarchical self-positioning, stuck between ‘East’ and ‘West’. A first section will examine the contending versions of Russian identity that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the downfall of the USSR—the chaotic 1990s2 —and their respective repercussions for Russians’ sense of their place in the world. At the time, more liberal redefinitions—implying ‘normal’ great power Russia’s conformity with, and active participation in Western definitions of world order—had to compete with more openly hierarchical and civilisational alternatives,

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founded on the historical—and distinctly neo-imperial—legacies of the Tsarist and Soviet periods. A subsequent section will discuss the iteration of Hybrid Exceptionalism that resulted after the turn of the century, during the ‘Putin years’: a fragmentary combination of partially appropriated—and increasingly feigned—appeals to liberal normativity, of Tsarist and Orthodox Christian elements, and of selective Soviet historical nostalgia. Through these, Moscow once again cast itself as the transmitter and interpreter of a peculiar version of ‘civilisation’, grounded in the broader, contradictory societal narratives that emerged in the 1990s, which themselves often arose from historical-civilisational narratives with a far older pedigree. The implications of this new hybrid-exceptionalist outlook for contemporary Russia’s interactions with Eastern and Western neighbours will form the subject of the subsequent, final empirical chapter.

Chaos and Flux: Russian Worldviews in the Nineties After the end of the Cold War, Russians—now citizens of a newly constituted Russian Federation—had to redefine themselves within an entirely novel context: a victorious Western-centric ‘Liberal International Order’ now laid down the global criteria for elite status through a standard of civilisation that, among others, rejected formal empire and spheres of influence, and required liberal democratic, free-market governance. But meanwhile, the imperial ideational legacies of the Soviet—and, increasingly, the Tsarist—pasts lingered and re-emerged in force: the contradictory push and pull between these various factors resulted in a varied set of narratives on Russia’s historical and contemporary place in the world. Redefinitions of ‘Russianness’ had already started emerging during the final years of Soviet rule (Szporluk, 1989) and competed for acceptance by both the state and society in the general atmosphere of political, social and economic decline of the 1990s (Billington, 2004, pp. 47–66); their variety and complexity led various authors to divide and characterise these rival forms of identification in a wide variety of ways. According to Tolz (1998b), for instance, ‘Union’, ‘Eastern Slavic’, ‘Russian-speaking’, ‘racial’, and ‘civic’ redefinitions competed for pre-eminence in post-Soviet Russian society. Shevel (2011), meanwhile, identified five nation-building agendas: two based on civic notions of citizenship encompassing Russian,

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or Soviet territorial imaginings, and three based on ethnic redefinitions, alternatively incorporating Great Russians, the East Slavs, and Russian speakers into ‘imagined communities’. Hosking (1998), finally, identified four different ways in which the ‘Russian nation’ could be redefined: imperial, Slavic, Russophone, and civic.3 At a more elite, policy level, these grassroots redefinitions of ‘Russianness’ resulted in competing policy discourses which were variously sub-divided in existing scholarship.4 When it came to Russia’s hybrid-exceptionalist outlook, this smorgasbord of possible post-Soviet identities presented a potential fork in the road: clearly, some of the available options were more explicitly hierarchical than others, based as they were on the rejection or embrace of select elements of an imperial past, and attendant claims to Russian civilisational specificity. Those redefinitions that tended towards civic notions of belonging—positing Russia as a multi-ethnic community of its citizens—were perhaps the most conducive to a ‘liberal’, Westernised definition of ‘Russianness’, open to seeing Russia as a great power operating from within a broader Liberal International Order5 ; but, while certainly considered by elements of the elite in view of Russia’s federated, and multi-ethnic nature,6 the possibility to coherently redefine state ideology and national identity was hampered by the continuing atmosphere of disorder and state weakness, Russian liberals’ general predisposition against clearly specified state ideologies in the Soviet vein, and the overall discrediting of liberalism as the decade wore on. As a result, ‘Yeltsin’s government […] veered back and forth between […] versions of Russian nationhood’ (Hosking, 1998, p. 458) and ‘…[the Russians were] still a long way from the nation-state as we understand it’ (ibid., p. 461): throughout the 1990s, elite identity narratives remained largely indeterminate.7 Nevertheless, in spite of the general reluctance and inability of the Russian state to push an official ideology in Soviet fashion,8 the turbulent nature of the debates on identity during that decade once again reflected elements of Russia’s long-standing liminal and hierarchical world view: firstly, almost all sections of the emerging elites and counter-elites, except perhaps for a minute liberal fringe, continued to see Russia as a great power, with a clear leading role within its Eurasian ‘near abroad’. Secondly, elements of traditional, pre-Soviet Russian identity—including Christian Orthodoxy, the Tsarist imperial past, and Slavic/ethno-linguistic Russian definitions—were already being appropriated by the Russian state,

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partly displacing purely civic interpretations of citizenship and belonging as the decade proceeded and elite preferences moved away from the explicit liberalism of the first post-Soviet years, in favour of an as yet elusive ‘new Russian idea’ (Batalov, 1997; Feifer, 1999; Goode, 2019; Kathleen E Smith, 2002, pp. 158–172). Thirdly, while the Soviet past was largely rejected at an official level, it remained a factor in broader society, where a communist-nationalist coalition uneasily combined a ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth with the status of the Russians and Russia as, simultaneously, heirs to and victims of Empire. During the Putin years, these elements would combine with a distorted ‘liberal’ discourse to see Hybrid Exceptionalism restated for the twenty-first century (Slater, 1998). On the first point—Russia’s continuing status as a great power—there was wide intra-elite and societal agreement from the very beginning, even during the most liberal few years following the collapse of the USSR: at most, the debate between liberals and the rest revolved around the question as to whether Russia would be a ‘normal’ great power (Kozyrev, 1992, p. 10)—integrated into the international liberal institutional order—or one standing outside of and separate from the West, on its own, historically and geopolitically defined, terms (Hopf, 2005, p. 226; Light, 2003, p. 46). This priority—of retaining great power status—was visible in foreign policy narratives throughout even the most liberal period, between 1991 and 1993. This did not necessarily imply an abandonment of Russia’s hierarchical claims—as part of a ‘normalised’, Westernised Great Power status—over the ‘near abroad’, however: these claims would merely be made part of the Liberal International Order, and be exercised in liberal fashion. The assumption was that Russia could, and would Westernise, and become part of the global elite of ‘developed’ great powers, ensuring security and economic integration within the former Soviet space as part of a remade world order.9 Regardless of the identity crisis in broader society, an entitlement to hierarchical status thus remained built into the worldviews of Russia’s policymakers from the very beginning, even in those sections of the elite when they most intensely strived for integration into the West. Secondly, pre-Soviet Orthodox Christian, Tsarist, and Slavic elements in Russia’s historical legacies were already being actively encouraged in the 1990s: the state started its engagement with the church under Yeltsin—most ostentatiously with the rebuilding of the Christ the Saviour

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Cathedral in Central Moscow, the restoration of church property elsewhere, and the adoption of restrictive laws regulating religious freedom in favour of established religions, especially the Russian Orthodox Church (Davis, 2002, pp. 660–664; Knox, 2004, pp. 105–128; Krasikov, 1998). The Russian Federation adopted the Tsarist-era flag, and a modified version of the Tsarist double-headed eagle as its official coat-of-arms, and the Romanovs were restored to pride of place in the pantheon of Russian historical heroes, most demonstrably, with the re-interment of the remains of Nicholas II and his family, in 1998—they would eventually be canonised by the Church, soon after the coming to power of Vladimir Putin (Chernyshov, 2017). Echoes of the Tsarist past could also be seen in Russia’s emerging world view, and its support for Serbia during the Bosnian and, especially, the Kosovo wars (Ambrosio, 1999; Levitin, 2000; Nation, 2001; Simic, 2001), as well as its at times hierarchical approach to Ukraine, where both Orthodox Christianity and Slavic ethno-linguistic affinity combined with geo-strategic arguments to justify an unequal ‘special relationship’: they may not have been as explicit and consequential as they would later become, under Putin, but references to a community of Orthodox faith, of shared historical experience, of a community of Russian speakers—with a diaspora of ‘compatriots’ at its core—and, more broadly, of fellow Slavs, could already be discerned during the Yeltsin years, as forerunners of what would later grow into claims to a civilisationally specific geopolitical space (see also following chapter). Thirdly, the Soviet legacy remained largely—but not completely— marginalised within the elite’s accounts of ‘shared historical experience’, especially during the more liberal early 1990s, when tackling its more ‘problematic’ aspects, and stressing its differences with the ‘New Russia’ still featured in official policy (Janack, 1999). The emphasis in looking back to 1917–1991 was on Communist crimes—particularly those of the Stalinist era—and the discrediting of Marxist-Leninist ideology as having put Russia and its fellow republics on the wrong path; if there was a ‘shared experience’, it was one that would have to be overcome together. The Great Patriotic War and Russia’s role in the defeat of fascism constituted one important positive Soviet element that remained part of the official narrative, however, as a moment of Russian—rather than Soviet communist—greatness. Depending on the status of relations with the West, it remained embedded in a narrative of a collective effort, by the peoples of the USSR—led by the Russians—and their

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Western allies, combined with a general acknowledgement of the crimes— forceful collectivisation, the purges, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Katyn massacre—committed by a Stalinist regime, to many of which the Russians themselves had also fallen victim (Malinova, 2017, pp. 44–46; Szymczak, 2008, pp. 437–440). But divergent, more comprehensively favourable views of the Soviet project persisted and increasingly challenged liberal critical narratives as the decade wore on; they survived most obviously among Gennady Zyuganov’s Communists—after the lifting of the short-lived ban on the Communist Party in 1992—but also in their strange nationalist bedfellows in what had become a ‘Red-Brown Coalition’, as well as in considerable parts of the Russian state machinery—not least the security services, from where Putin would later emerge to become president.10 While these constituencies obviously differed on the merits of MarxismLeninism and the precise interpretation of the 1917 October revolution, they were united around three important assertions that would survive, and become part of official historiography after the Yeltsin era: that the Soviet Union was an expression of Russian imperial greatness, particularly during the Great Patriotic War; rather incongruously—that Russians had both been the driving force, and the main victims of the Soviet project; and that the collapse of the Soviet Union was an avoidable geopolitical disaster emerging from a ‘stab in the back’ orchestrated by the West.11 The Russians—once again cast in their historic civilising role—had freed Eastern Europe from Nazism, provided industrialisation and modernisation to the former Soviet republics at great cost, with little to nothing to show for it in the end except a formative historical experience shared with their largely ungrateful neighbours. Claims to a maltreated Russia’s separateness from the West resonated more strongly as the decade proceeded, liberalism became discredited through economic crisis and NATO expansion, and more conservative policymakers started prioritising the Eurasian aspects in Russia’s worldviews by adopting—outside a few areas of possible co-operation, including terrorism and arms control—a mostly zero-sum geopolitical perspective on international affairs (Lo, 2002, pp. 98–122). While not part of the ‘neo-Eurasianist’ (pseudo-)intellectual movement12 which had reemerged after a period of marginalisation and repression in Soviet times, policymakers including foreign and Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov refocused Russia’s external identity away from the West through an official, statist form of Eurasianism centred on Great Power status, control

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over the near abroad as a core sphere of geopolitical and geo-economic interest, and a Russian diasporic space, while also implying a move away from Atlanticism and a pivot towards Asia (Graham Smith, 1999, pp. 487–492). In a civilisational adaptation of the Western neo-realist notion of ‘multipolarity’, the Russian Federation was seen as part of a ‘polycentric’ world, composed of great powers with distinct civilisationalgeopolitical spheres of influence (Oskanian, 2018). While already briefly alluded to in the 1993 Foreign Policy Concept (Russian Federation, 2005a, pp. 30–31), and very much wishful thinking the late 1990s—when Russia was still in the throes of its post-Soviet crises—such civilisational thinking would become more relevant in the subsequent Putin era. And it would increasingly define Russia as in familiar ambiguous terms: as simultaneously indebted to, and civilisationally distinct from the West, in ways drawn from the previous—Tsarist, Soviet—incarnations of Hybrid Exceptionalism.

Hybrid Exceptionalism Redux When it came, this redefinition of Hybrid Exceptionalism under Putin still did not emerge from a clearly formulated, coherent official ideology, as it would have in Soviet times. The ultra-conservative thought of figures like Nikolai Berdyaev and Ivan Ilyin, and Lev Gumilev’s and Alexander Dugin’s versions of neo-Eurasianism have, for instance, been suggested as central to the Kremlin’s geopolitical vision.13 But as pointed out by others, tracing the discourses and narratives of the contemporary political elite back to a single thinker and an explicit, coherent system of thought—as could be done in Soviet days—would provide a distorted picture (Kalinin, 2019; Laruelle, 2018; Schmidt, 2005; Shekhovtsov, 2014 ): its official narratives emerged from a complex interplay between a loose set of taken-for-granted assumptions, and political expediency, rather than an imperative, coherent system of thought. The Kremlin’s much-vaunted conservatism at most provided an ideological ‘meta-frame’ (Bluhm, 2019), a loose hegemonic discourse (Prozorov, 2005) through which elites debated, and justified, their at times competing and contradictory visions of Russia’s identity, first and foremost as a great power; their association with the works of any single thinker was, at most, partial and fragmented—and, more often than not, instrumental (see also Robinson, 2019, pp. 181–212).

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This did, however, not preclude the assumptions inherent to these discourses displaying a certain, more broadly defined view of the world. While they rejected the notion of a Western ‘victory’ during the Cold War, Russia’s elites were still conscious of the liberal international normative context, whose norms excluded manifestations of formal empire, while at the same time normalising a de-facto global hierarchy with a core of Western states—conforming to a liberal standard of civilisation, and led by the United States—at its pinnacle (e.g. Barkawi & Laffey, 1999; Donelly, 2006; Duffield & Hewitt, 2013; Hinnebusch, 2012; Pieterse, 2004). Attempts by Westernisers to entirely remake Russia according to the norms of the Liberal International Order ‘as is’—and turn their state into a fully-fledged participant in that order’s elite—had failed during the 1990s, something Putin himself pointed out on numerous occasions. But so had Primakov’s ‘Eurasian turn’, aimed at revalidating the idiosyncrasies and Russia’s hierarchical claims in spite of the requirements of membership of the Western core, with Russia retaining Great Power status and regional primacy on its own terms: crises and foreign policy debacles during the closing years of the 1990s had made the illusive nature of such aspirations clear (Tsygankov, 2007, pp. 391–392). Underlying these contradictory narratives was, once again, Russia’s hybrid-exceptionalist outlook: Russia’s long-standing aspiration to join the Western standard of civilisation, and its countervailing claim to specific civilising missions that left it perennially stuck in a space ‘inbetween’. This had resulted in numerous debates in Tsarist times on the nature of Russia’s imperial mission civilisatrice; it had also been reflected in the Marxist-Leninist ideology—universalist, Western in origin, but simultaneously opposed to the capitalist West—that had underlain the Soviet Union. The problem was the nature of that space—now composed, for a large part, of sovereign, independent states outside the Russian Federation itself—and the LIO’s global monopoly on any civilising mission. Formally at least, the Western liberal norms of the post-Cold War era did not recognise spheres of interest with special entitlements for great powers; they only allowed for institutionalised disciplining practices that were duly adjudicated by the ‘international community’—i.e., in most cases, ‘the West’; in reality, however, the ‘world’s last remaining superpower’—the United States—regularly put itself above these rules, sanctioning and intervening unilaterally as it saw fit, a unilateralism that, if anything, increased after the Kosovo intervention, and the 9/11 attacks (Deudney & Ikenberry, 1999, 2018; Glaser,

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2019; Sørensen, 2011). How could Russia fit its aspirations into a framework that denied it regional supremacy, adherence to which was required as a marker of respectable international civility, and exemption from which was simultaneously a subjective marker of the so desired great power status? The solution was a familiar one: Putin’s way of reconciling Russia’s desire to join the elite of International Society on its own, hybridexceptionalist terms was to mimic select elements of a liberal, Western standard of civilisation redefined towards Russia’s own exceptionalist purposes, and to double down on the idea of civilisational difference, using building blocks that had emerged during Russia’s debates on identity during the turbulent 1990s between liberal Westernisers and those of a more conservative bend.14 On the one hand, Moscow thus partially appropriated liberal (political, economic, international legal) normativity to allow for the reproduction of informal hierarchies at a regional scale: it at least feigned compliance with the global normative environment, all the while pursuing regional domination and claiming exceptional status in imitation of the increasingly unilateralist ultimate great power, the United States. Domestically, it ostensibly adhered to democracy—albeit ‘sovereign’—and the free market. Regionally, it pushed for economic integration, albeit on its terms; it imposed international law, more often than not opportunistically interpreted according to the requirements of its own hierarchical disciplining purposes. On the other hand, it combined these mimicked, liberal, hierarchical entitlements with a doubling down on more conventional Tsarist, Christian Orthodox, Slavic civilisational claims, and Soviet ‘great powerness’ denuded of Marxist-Leninist eschatology, increasingly so as the feigned liberal discourses became less credible. Mimicked liberal narratives were thus complemented, and, in the end, overshadowed by an adapted form of civilisational discourse— one that, once again, emphasised a self-positioning between East and West —in an attempt to uphold a distinct, exclusive cultural space, and rhetorically justify a hierarchy through appeals to freely interpreted—and distorted—liberal norms governing International Society. Feigning Liberalism In domestic politics, with the coming to power of Putin, Russian elites thus adopted a competitive authoritarian system only half-heartedly legitimated, both internally and externally, through a make-believe liberalism,

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perhaps best expressed in their claim to ‘sovereign democracy’ (Krastev, 2006b; Roth, 2009): in fact, according to Makarychev (2008b), that very concept was emblematic of Russia’s desire for respectability and status. To that end, ‘democracy’ placed it within the select elite of mostly liberal democratic, Western states, upholding the appearance of a system based on liberal(-democratic) norms by distorting their practical application towards autocratic ends. Meanwhile, ‘sovereignty’—applied in a Schmittian sense (Krastev, 2006b, pp. 116–117) as the right to determine the exception, in imitation of the United States—allowed it to lay claim to great power status, and specify the parameters of its particular interpretation of ‘democracy’. Through such ‘managed democracy’ (Krastev, 2006a), or ‘virtual politics’ (Wilson, 2005), elections were regularly held; a systemic opposition in parliament maintained—rather ineffectively— the sheen of political pluralism; token opposition outlets were tolerated so as to excuse the total dominance of the Kremlin and perpetuate the appearance of freedom of the press and the media. ‘Extra-systemic’ oppositionists and journalists were also seldom persecuted for their political stances: ordinary criminal charges, charges of espionage and vaguely defined crimes against national security, or, in extremis, plausibly deniable assassinations were used to uphold the appearance of a ‘rule of law’ that existed on paper—though not in practice. The same came to apply to Russia’s economy: from the beginning, the Putin regime paid lip-service to the requirement that the country be reformed towards the free market. And, indeed, on paper at least, some of the reforms pushed through—especially during the 2000s—did fit into a neoliberal, laissez-faire pattern (Åslund, 2004; Lopez-Claros & Zadornov, 2002). This was, however, belied not just by the state takeover and control of strategic enterprises—imposed at the expense of at times recalcitrant oligarchs in the energy sector, as during the ‘Yukos affair’— but also by the emergence of a complex network of informal and corrupt ties between those at the centre of political power, and those in control of the most important parts of the Russian economy (Åslund, 2019, pp. 97– 131; Hanson & Teague, 2005). If there was a right to property in Russia, for those at the very top, it became contingent on staying in the good graces of those in control of the state. Again, nowhere was this formally stated: the Russian economy remained, in theory, subject to the rule of law; but as a sovereign great power, it had the right to interpret, and feign the rules of the free market, resulting in a thinly veiled state—or, more

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appropriately, crony or kleptocratic—form of capitalism, in yet another subversion of an inherently liberal concept (Åslund, 2019, pp. 132–153). The same mechanisms of ‘feigned liberalism’ could be seen abroad, in Russia’s peculiar appropriation of both the neoliberal logic of regional economic integration, and the notion of a rules-based international order, in its foreign and security policies. The concept of regional economic integration thus provided the Kremlin with a convenient way of funnelling an apparently egalitarian, ostentatiously positive-sum narrative towards the building of what Anatoly Chubais called a ‘liberal Empire’ (Asia Times Online, 2003). Similarly, Russia’s appropriation of the liberal language on ‘humanitarian intervention’, and its involvement as a ‘peacekeeper’ in various conflicts in its neighbouring states—conflicts often instigated or artificially prolonged by itself—placed the ostensible provision of international law and order in Russia’s great power hands throughout the ‘near abroad’. In an imitation of relations between the West and ‘the Rest’, hierarchical practices were legitimised through references to supposedly neutral mechanisms of economic expediency and impartial requirements of international legality that, in Moscow’s view, served to justify Western global dominance, and America’s version of exceptionalism; adapted to the regional context, they were appropriated and distorted to do the same for Russia, in ‘its own’ neighbourhood. Under Putin (and, arguably, before), Russia’s leadership in pushing regional integration was always clad in a language of sovereign equality and economic rationality, with the direct comparisons of the Eurasian Economic Union and the European Union in Putin’s (2011) landmark article as perhaps the best example. What often escaped the many authors who argued that Russia had become a quasi-corporate entity— ‘Russia, Inc.’ (Trenin, 2007)—was the extent to which these narratives, in combination with fundamentally unequal practices and legacies of dependency, served the surreptitious reproduction of hierarchical relations in a (neo)liberal age. Thus, the presenting of selected, ostensibly technical disciplinary measures against recalcitrant neighbours in an apolitical, economic language became a hallmark of Russian policies since the early 2000s. For all the open talk of Russia becoming an ‘energy superpower’ (Baev, 2008, pp. 117–154; Blank, 2011), vital gas supplies were never cut off for openly geopolitical reasons; instead, they were usually presented as being subject to the impersonal mechanisms of the market, as during the ‘gas wars’ with Ukraine following the Orange revolution

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of 2004 (Balmaceda, 2012; Feklyunina, 2012; Nygren, 2008). Agricultural produce were, similarly, never openly banned as a disciplinary measure, despite the frequent coincidences of deficiencies in agricultural produce and geopolitical expediency following pro-Western reorientations in Moldova, or Georgia (Cenusa et al., 2014); only occasionally, they were accompanied by more thinly veiled threats of ‘sanctions’ and ‘bankruptcy’ from figures close to the Kremlin (e.g. Socor, 2014; Spillius, 2013). A similar, only lightly disguised hierarchical view was also present in Russia’s mimicry of liberal, Western-style discourses on International Law—and especially International Humanitarian Law (Rotaru, 2019). As early as in 1993, Boris Yeltsin thus argued in favour of an open-ended United Nations mandate to address threats to international security in Russia’s immediate neighbourhood (Hill & Jewett, 1994, p. 1); when this failed, subsequent foreign policy and security concepts incorporated such a right to intervene in case of threats to Russia’s national interest, including—broadly defined—Russian ‘compatriots’ living abroad (Russian Federation, 2000, 2005a, 2005b, 2005c, 2008). At least up to the Crimean annexation, any military interventions within the former Soviet space were generally justified through appeals to International Humanitarian Law that, however spuriously, mirrored those of the West’s, in Kosovo and Libya, and, more generally, in its references to a ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (Kuhrt, 2015; Ziegler, 2016). ‘Feigned liberalism’, first and foremost, constituted a way for Russia to appropriate, and adapt liberal norms to its own needs in its quest for great power status. It is an adaptation to its status as, in Morozov’s (2013, 2015) words, a ‘subaltern empire’: an entity with imperial ambitions, but with structurally subordinate status in the contemporary liberal world order. The (mis)appropriation of liberal language became an act of mimicry designed to justify hierarchical interventions in a distinct geopolitical space, in much the same way such interventions are justified globally by the dominant West: as Makarychev (2008a, p. 30) explains: ‘it is Russia’s denial of politicised practice that underpins its claims to being a “normal country” […], which does not need to be “normalised” by others’. But the problem for Russia is that it is not part of the hegemonic West, and that it therefore places itself outside the consensus on ‘normalcy’ by presenting its particular interpretations of the norms propounded by the hegemonic core. Lacking that consensus’ hegemonic authority and structural power after its failed early attempts to ‘join the West’, contested by that Western core, Russia’s claims—liberal in form,

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imperial in content—therefore take on a forced, artificial appearance, providing an at best imperfect justification for regional hierarchy in the contemporary world. Russia’s initial hopes for acceptance on its own terms lay at the core of these mimicries, especially in the early 2000s, when the Putin regime still held out some hope of a condominium or partnership. As the decades wore on, these hopes—and the associated feint—became increasingly implausible15 : the colour revolutions, proposed NATO expansion into the former Soviet space (Greene, 2012; Tsygankov, 2018, pp. 105–109), a failure to substantially reform, or to counter-act the attractions of the West through its own soft power (Feklyunina, 2016; Sherr, 2013, pp. 109–112) underlay a move towards a much more subversive—and simultaneously more incredible—form of mimicry. Liberal discourses were now used to distort and throw back at the West those norms that Moscow found unattainable or undesirable, norms which were themselves often interpreted unilaterally by the leading state within that order, but were nevertheless inscribed in the LIO as markers of elite status. Russia was just as entitled as the West to interpret ‘democracy’ and the ‘free market’ in its specific ways; it had a right to move ‘its’ region towards regional economic integration; as a great power, it had the same right as the West—and the United States—to unilaterally practice humanitarian intervention, interpreted for its own—imperious—benefit. Whether or not the Russian elites believed the West itself to be feigning and abusing these norms to further its own interests—and a very strong case can be made that they did (e.g. Morozov, 2002)—is not the issue: paying lip-service to International Law while claiming a right to exceptionalism—just like the United States —was an important element in their claim to ‘civilised’ great power status, providing superficial legal cover to a world view demanding great power recognition, preferably inside but, if necessary, also outside ‘the West’. After the 2008–2012 ‘Medvedev interlude’, when President Putin and his erstwhile Prime Minister Medvedev temporarily switched places in an attempt to maintain an apparent adherence to—liberal—term limits in the constitution, any hopes of joining a West redefined to accommodate its specificities were abandoned, and Russia started directly challenging— rather than merely feigning—crucial aspects of the LIO. Apart from the increasingly subversive aspects of these ‘faked’ liberal narratives, another shift occurred, away from mimicry, and towards a doubling down on difference and outright rejection of its norms. Between 2007—when Putin

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delivered his well-known Munich speech enumerating Russia’s various grievances towards the West—and the Crimean annexation of 2014, discourses moved increasingly towards stressing Russia’s and the ‘near abroad’s’ civilisational difference from the West, in a more explicit return to Primakov’s notions of a ‘polycentric’ world order. Such discourses had been present from the beginning of the Putin era; they gained in importance as Russia increasingly turned towards a frustrated rejection rather than mere imitation of Western liberal interpretations of International Society. Russia’s domestic politics has now taken on a more openly conservative, nationalistic and authoritarian turn—as evidenced in the 2020 changes to the constitution, and purely nationalist arguments directly rejecting any authority for liberal international norms. As in the cases of the Tsarist empire and the Soviet Union, these discourses serve not to claim great power status through imitation, but through the doubling down on a civilising mission specific to Russia. Constructing Difference The eventual lack of credibility in Russia’s liberal discourses has thus been compensated for by a shift towards a broader narrative aiming to dissociate ‘state-civilisation’ Russia (Putin, 2012) as a distinct ‘pole’ separate from the Western core (see also Kremlin.ru, 2013c, 2014a, 2019, 2020); such narratives first re-emerged in the 1990s, and were, to some extent, embraced by the Putin regime itself—alongside the above-mentioned feigned liberalism—from the very beginning. Their prominence in the official discourses has increased as feigned liberalism has become less plausible to uphold, in the light of transparently illiberal events like the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, the 2011–2013 election protests, various assassinations, and the events following Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan. Faced with the growing incredulity of—and rejection by—the West, the elite has gradually moved from stressing narratives couched in liberal terms— Russia as a participant in a self-interpreted international order—to a more particularist civilisationism displaying both statist and ethnic characteristics (Linde, 2016). As during Tsarist and Soviet times, Russians have increasingly been presented, as the authentic state-building carriers of a mission within a specific civilisational pole. In Vladimir Putin’s own words:

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Russia – as philosopher Konstantin Leontyev vividly put it – has always evolved in “blossoming complexity” as a state-civilisation, reinforced by the Russian people, Russian language, Russian culture, Russian Orthodox Church and the country’s other traditional religions. It is precisely the state-civilisation model that has shaped our state polity (Kremlin.ru, 2013a).

As with feigned liberalism, these civilisational discourses emerge from Russia’s ambiguous relationship with the West, and Russia’s long-term predicament as both orientaliser and orientalised. But their expressly civilisational nature also means that continuities of Russia’s contemporary Hybrid Exceptionalism with its previous, Tsarist and Soviet versions— asserting hierarchy over an ambiguous civilisational space—are much more clearly visible: once again excluded, Moscow now lays claim to a Russo-centric authenticity that, drawing on its own historical experience, asserts both differences from, and affinities with West, and East, while projecting a hierarchical vision in both directions (see Kremlin.ru, 2002, 2005). Under Putin, such central markers of Russian imperial power as the Romanov territorial expansions, Orthodox Christianity, and a selective, Russo-centric view of the USSR have largely been rehabilitated, and subjected to apologia (Adler, 2012). These narratives of Russia’s role combine the country’s traditional East/West ambiguities in both the imperial and Soviet eras into a hierarchical view of the ‘near abroad’, through what one observer has referred to as a clumsy meshing together of the Communist triad of ‘Lenin Party, Komsomol’ with Count Uvarov’s Tsarist-era ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality’ (Kolesnikov, 2020; see also Laqueur, 2014). This creation of a Russian exclusive civilisational space starts at home, with a selective reliance on both traditional and Soviet historical markers of identity that re-emerged in both official and broader societal narratives during the 1990s. Thus, the Russian people are seen as bound by their common practice in Orthodox Christianity: while allowing for some identification with an idealised Christian West mostly situated in a long-lost, traditional past, Orthodoxy also underlies a fundamentally conservative worldview setting Russia, and both its Western and ‘Oriental’ subalterns apart. Furthermore, while autocracy can no longer be relevant in its monarchist interpretation, its more broadly implied authoritarian statism has been fully embraced by the Putin regime. Russians

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have always been state-builders in their ‘near abroad’, both for themselves, and for previously stateless others. Whereas that state-building took on Tsarist and Soviet forms in the past, in its current incarnation, it is marked by ‘sovereign democracy’, and a paternalistic relationship between Moscow, and the rest. And, finally, having been shaped by centuries of Russia’s values-driven imperial rule and state-building, any manifestations of narodnost ’ deviating from these above-mentioned precepts—both within Russia, and its surrounding societies—would have to be inauthentic, and subject to ‘correction’: real Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, Kazakhs […] appreciated the cultural enrichment given them by the Tsarist and Soviet empires, and revelled in their collective efforts— including conservative values, the Russian language, the sacrifices made during the quest for industrialisation, and the Great Patriotic War. In Russia proper, the Christian Orthodox Church has become one of the main elements of civilisational authenticity, as a major part of Romanov imperial identity, whose rehabilitation had begun under Yeltsin, to be completed under the prime ministership/presidency of Putin. In fact, the Church is now actively promoted as a core component of national identity, its moral authority secured and amplified by the state.16 The Kremlin has complicated the activities of non-Orthodox Christian denominations and cults—in Medvedev’s words ‘very dubious ideologies and all sorts of rubbish’ (Kremlin.ru, 2011)—throughout the Russian Federation, and defers to the Church in social matters, legitimising policies that strongly demarcate Russia and the Russians from an immoral and individualistic, ‘genderless and infertile’ West, in language mirroring that of the Eurasianists, and the Slavophiles of the nineteenth century (Sharafutdinova, 2014, p. 618). Within Russia proper, regulation of foreign(usually Western-) funded NGOs is clearly based on the association of such foreign funding with the corruption of authentically Russian politics. The values they espouse—individualism, democracy, human rights, gender, LGBT rights—are designated as un-Russian, dismissed as instruments of Western cultural intrusion: the Putin government’s use of homophobic legislation, and his rehabilitation of a—moralising, very conservative and subservient—Russian orthodox Church feeds into this association of a conspiratorial pro-Western stance with ‘moral degeneracy’, and its contrast with the Russian Orthodox quality of sobornost’ — loosely translatable as ‘collectivist spirituality’—creates a major rallying point for conservative and pro-Russian forces throughout the former

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Soviet Union (Lomagin, 2012; Verkhovsky, 2002; Yablokov, 2014; see also Agadjanian, 2017; Kremlin.ru, 2013b, 2014b, 2017).17 This Tsarist marker of identity is then combined with the unique status of the Great Russians as the state-building and -sustaining element on the Eurasian landmass: the ‘state’ component within the concept of state-civilisation. A major claim of not just the contemporary neoEurasianists, but also of Slavophile and Westernising apologists of empire since the nineteenth century, this has become more visible in narratives at the highest levels of government, in a contemporary expression of the statist form of Russian nationalism which can be traced back all the way to the histories of Karamzin. Gosudarstvennost’ —an intrinsically Russian statism, committed to strong statehood and great power status—is thus a major theme in the Kremlin’s discourses, starting with its central role in Putin’s own Millennium Manifesto (1999), reappearing in the discourse of various leading figures within the elite (Linde, 2016), and perhaps best exemplified in the adoption of Russian as the language of the ‘statebuilding element’ within the Russian Federation in article 68.1 of the revised 2020 constitution. This is significant in the broader, regional and historic context, and the traditional dismissal of Russian intellectuals—from Belinsky to Dugin—of the capacity for statehood of Russia’s subalterns: the much-lamented collapse of the USSR is blamed on the misguided concessions made by the Bolsheviks to the principle of selfdetermination, with the independence of the former Soviet republics is implicitly reduced to a quirk of twentieth-century constitutional history.18 This claimed Russian adherence to strong statehood is often linked to an adequately sanitised view of Soviet history whose foundations were laid by the communists and nationalists during the 1990s: further stripped of its Marxism-Leninist ideological meaning and Stalinist excesses, the USSR is presented as an expression of lost Russian superpower status. While criticism of the Bolsheviks as a disruptive revolutionary force, and of the Soviet Union as a failed socio-economic experiment persists, the familiar theme of Russian generosity and self-sacrifice dominates a historic orthodoxy promoted at the highest levels: the USSR is, among others, seen as an incubator of nations created thanks to the above-mentioned Bolshevik miscalculations, at Russia’s expense; it is similarly presented as the harbinger of progress and industrialisation at the cost of great— mostly Russian—benevolence; but, above all, it is defined through its messianic mission in saving the world through defeating Nazism during the Great Patriotic War, a collective effort of all Soviet nations under

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Russian leadership (Adler, 2012; Nelson, 2015; Wood, 2011). Apart from having partially rehabilitated Stalin—at least as the victor of that war— an intensified revisionism has excused the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and largely ignored the repressive rather than liberating role of the Red Army in Eastern Europe following World War II, a line assertively upheld at the very highest levels of government (see Putin, 2020).19 Identification with and dissociation from this historic orthodoxy becomes a marker distinguishing friend from foe, and Russia from an ungrateful West and errant former subalterns, allowing for a ‘war against Nazis’ to be fought and refought in places from the Baltics to Eastern Ukraine, not least through the resurrection of symbols like the orange-black ‘Saint George’s ribbon’, through co-opted veterans’ groups like the ‘Immortal Regiment’.20

Conclusion Contemporary Russia is a revisionist state: it invades; it annexes, meddles, redraws borders, de-stabilises; it subverts Western democracies. Some maintain that it intends to rebuild its lost Soviet empire, that it is in a perennial ideological struggle with the West, standing in opposition to Western liberal-democratic values. While such claims may very well be overstated—a subject broached in the conclusion to this volume—there is no doubt that Russia has asserted—and still asserts—a special role for itself, both globally, and within its immediate neighbourhood. In any case, its track record over the past 20 years—since the accession to power of Vladimir Putin—lends credence to this image of the Russian Federation as an outsider to the elite of mostly Western, liberal powers that have shaped global politics since the ‘End of History’. It would be all too easy to put this revisionism down to Putin, and his siloviki entourage’s illiberalism—a ‘Putinist’ (McFaul, 2020), ideologically driven ‘first-image’ opposition to the West’s norms and values. It would likewise be simple to blame it—as once suggested by Pipes (1997)—on some sort of imperial and authoritarian reflex, eternally imprinted onto Russian political culture. As argued above, the longue durée background to Russia’s revisionism is complex and lies in the country’s perennially entangled relationship with the West, and Western modernity: contemporary Russia’s worldviews are the result of a major identity crisis that provided a crossroads of sorts in the 1990s, but that for a variety of reasons, resulted in the Russian leadership pushing narratives and discourses sourced from more than two centuries of Russian history.

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Indeed, that history was one of empire, of a civilisational self-definition betwixt West and East, and of—in Russia’s original nineteenth-century philosopher of identity Pyotr Chaadayev’s (1965 [1836]) words—a lesson to be taught by Russia to the world; but the move, in Russian discourse, from a feigned—or, alternatively, broadly interpreted—liberalism, to open illiberalism was conditioned as much by these historical legacies, as the Russian state’s, and society’s, specific experiences at the end of the twentieth century. The liberals within the new-born Russian Federation’s elites still saw their state performing a special role in the former Soviet space, duly inserted into the post-Cold War liberal order. Russia would turn itself into a post-imperial great power precisely by becoming a member of the global, hegemonic Western core, seeing its particular concerns integrated into a rules-based order. Instead, that rules-based order started developing in ways that largely excluded Russia: from NATO expansion, over the Russian elite’s inability—or unwillingness—to fundamentally democratise and liberalise, to the side-lining of the United Nations Security Council in Kosovo and Iraq, Russians saw their status as outsiders, in the eternal waiting room to elite status reinforcing their frustration at their internal inability to conform. This is what underlies Putin’s initial move towards a combination of feigned liberalism and civilisational discourse: much like the subversive mimicry of imperial subalterns captured by Bhabha (1994), Russia’s mimicry of Western liberal norms was born from both frustration—at its exclusion from the dominant liberal elite—as an act of subversion against that late modern order. Russia was not anti-liberal per se; instead, confronted with a standard of civilisation it was not confident in achieving, its leaders decided to pretend: there was ‘democracy’, but it was ‘sovereign’—managed to the extent that it was hollowed out; there was much talk of ‘free market reforms’ just as the state simultaneously retook control of the strategic sectors in the economy; individual rights existed, but within the confines required by regime stability and continuity. The expectation or hope was that the Western elite would play along, closing its eyes to this semi-authoritarianism—something it did do, accepting Russia into the G8 and the WTO—and/or, less likely, that Russia would, at some point in the future, no longer have to ‘feign’ these liberal norms. Feigned liberalism was thus a result of Russia having to look up to the more adequately liberal-democratic states whose elite ranks it wanted,

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but was chronically unable to join as a full-fledged, bona-fide member; it was the ‘imitation’ part of Zaraköl’s (2010) imitation-doubling down reaction to the subordinate status of late entrants to modernity. The ‘doubling down’ aspects consisted of Putin’s civilisational discourse: the idea that Russia and ‘its near abroad’ was a separate cultural space, with a unique legacy that placed it in the space—or intersection—between West, and East, within which it would maintain a special, historically anointed role as the leading power. Again, this emerged out of a insecurity and frustration at the inability to attain the requirements of ‘real’ elite status. But rather than ‘faking it’, Russia used this kind of discourse to construct a separate realm within which it could reign supreme, this time looking down on, and projecting its preferences upon its traditional subalterns: if imitation was one upward-looking claim to membership in a global hierarchy, this doubling down ensured a hierarchical, downward gaze towards states and societies whose ‘authenticities’ had long been managed from Saint Petersburg and Moscow. By basing itself on the narratives that emerged during the country’s reinvigorated post-Cold War identity debates, Putin’s Russia has seen the emergence of a postmodern mélange of these earlier narratives. Today’s hybrid Exceptionalism is thus doubly hybrid: through either a liberalism of a ‘feigned’ sort, or direct civilisational discourses, it situates Russia between East and West, but simultaneously reaches across time to combine the country’s historic experiences into a ‘bricolage’ (Sherlock, 2016) of various elements; and while these multiple hybridities contribute new levels of complexity to its approaches to its imperial subalterns, they also add elements that are readily recognisable. In fact, some of these twenty-first-century narratives (and their attendant policies) contain variants of tropes and practices that existed in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Today’s version of Hybrid Exceptionalism therefore once again places Russia, and a host of familiar—but now often nominally independent— former imperial subjects between East and West, in a combined ambiguity and separation upheld through official narratives, and broader journalistic, scholarly and artistic output. And, echoing past experience, depending on where perceived contemporary challenges to these projected authenticities originate, they tend to be either dismissed as or irrational oriental, or coldly rational, Western deviations from an ambiguous, neither fully oriental, nor occidental self. Familiar themes emerge in the Kremlin’s— and broader Russian society’s—treatment of non-conforming subalterns: of Chechens or Georgians as ‘bandits’ or ‘madmen’ incapable of selfrule, or of Ukrainians and Belarusians as victims of Polish, German/Nazi

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manipulation. In all cases, both the agency and authenticity of actors moving against Russia’s perceived interests are minimised and denied. The interplay between these official, scholarly and artistic narratives in East, and West, will provide the point of focus for the next, final empirical chapter in this monograph.

Notes 1. In Gorbachev’s words, ‘If the nationality question had not been solved in principle, the Soviet Union. would never have had the social, cultural, economic, and defense potential it now has. Our state would not have survived if the republics had not formed a community based on brotherhood and cooperation, respect and mutual assistance.[…] the USSR represents a truly unique example in the history of human civilization’ (as quoted in Samuelian, 1991, p. 176). During Glasnost and Perestroika, the CPSU also dropped it’s the ‘merger’ of nationalities as an explicit goal, with the proposed Union Treaty presented as a return to the genuine spirit of ‘Leninist’ nationalities policy (Samuelian, 1991, p. 159). 2. The first half of the decade was marked by economic implosion, and a dramatic assertion of presidential authority in the violent imposition of the 1993 constitution onto a recalcitrant Supreme Soviet; a carefully managed presidential election in 1996 was then followed by another economic crisis, and several years of ineffective governance by an increasingly erratic Boris Yeltsin (Shevtsova, 1999). To make things worse, the ‘parade of sovereignties’ (Kahn, 2000) during the late Soviet period had included many of the RSFSR’s own constituent units, and, as a result, the Russian Federation itself struggled with its own centrifugal forces, among which Chechnya was only the most prominent—and violent—exponent. From Tatarstan to Bashkortostan, the centre’s authority remained in question until the reassertion of central control by Vladimir Putin, in the early 2000s (Sharafutdinova, 2013). 3. For Tolz (1998b), most Russian intellectuals of the 1990s agreed on the formative influence of empire on Russians’ national consciousness, and on the West as their relevant ‘constituting other’ (pp. 994–995). A host of historical intellectual influences resulted in very different interpretations of Russian identity, classified by Tolz as ‘Union’—Russians as the progenitors of a supra- and multi-national state, often congruous with the former Soviet Union; Eastern Slavic—stressing commonalities with the Ukrainians and Belarusians; Russian speakers—implying a linguistic form of identification; ‘racial’—limiting ‘Russianness’ to narrowly defined ethnic Russians; and, finally, ‘civic’—tied to citizenship of the new-born Russian Federation

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(see also Tolz, 1998a). Shevel’s (2011) distinctions are similar and classified along civic/ethnic and irredentist/non-irredentist axes. Civic forms of identification with the Russian Federation thus stand out as the only nonirredentist identity; a civic association with the Soviet Union, and ethnic identities subsuming (ethnic) Russians, Eastern Slavs, and Russian speakers are, by contrast, all potentially irredentist in nature. Hosking’s classification followed a similar pattern, in redefining Russia as a reconstituted multi-ethnic Eurasian empire, as a community of East Slavs—a ‘stripped down semi-imperial Russian nationalism’ (p. 457), a body of Russiansspeakers, or as a society of ‘citizens of the Russian Federation’. In all these classifications, the prominence of imperial or potentially irredentist forms of identification stands out, as does the relative precariousness of civic/non-irredentist forms of identity. 4. Tsygankov, for instance, identified three such elite foreign-policy discourses: ‘Westernisers’, ‘Statists’, and ‘Civilisationists’ (2016), or, alternatively, ‘West’, ‘Euro-East’, and ‘Eurasia’ (2007), with only the first (quickly marginalised) categories—best exemplified by Russia’s first postSoviet foreign minister, Andrey Kozyrev—committed to full integration with the West. Other, similarly three-pronged, and largely overlapping categorisations have been made by Legvold (2001)—‘West’, ‘West and the Rest’, and ‘Fortress Russia’—Light (2003)—‘Liberal Westernists’, ‘Pragmatic Nationalists’, and ‘Fundamentalist Nationalists’—Arbatov (1993)—‘Pro-Westerners’, ‘Moderate Liberals’, ‘Centrists and Moderate Conservatives’, ‘Neo-Communists and Nationalists’, and Hopf (2005)— ‘Liberals’, ‘Centrists’, and ‘Conservatives’. 5. While not entirely intellectually commensurate with ‘civic’ notions of nationalism and identity (which can actually be of an imperial/irredentist nature), in practice, the proponents of a (Western-style) liberal-civic national identity also usually advocated integration with the West. Tsygankov (2007, p. 380), for instance, describes the ‘Westernisers’— including Kozyrev and Yeltsin, and largely commensurate with ‘liberals’ identified by other authors—as displaying a ‘“natural” affinity […] with the West based on such shared values as democracy, human rights, and a free market’. However, crucially, the ‘Westernisers were weaker on making a temporal cultural connection and offering the nation productive historical parallels for reconnecting with its past’ (pp. 380–381). 6. Russia’s post-Soviet authorities struggled with a redefinition of Russian national identity away from the Soviet template—Russians as, primarily, Soviet citizens, and the territorial-linguistic, federal structure of the Russian Federation inherited from Soviet Nationalities Policy— throughout the 1990s. The principal proponent of civic national identity during the Yeltsin years, the ethnographer—and short-lived minister for

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7.

8.

9.

10.

nationalities—Valery Tishkov, argued for a redefinition of Russia into ‘Rossia’, a community of equal citizens, retaining a federal structure denuded of its Soviet-era titular ethnic character (Tishkov, 1995, 2009). This was never seriously considered, and his successors, and Yeltsin himself, would gradually move the implicit definition of ‘Russianness’ closer to the more reactionary ethno-linguistic and imperial definitions of their more conservative challengers, while maintaining the country’s federal structure. This was perhaps most clearly visible in the failure of a 1996 statesponsored conference aimed at defining ‘Russianness’; it could also be seen in the realm of state symbols: throughout the 1990s, Russia’s first post-Soviet national anthem—Glinka’s ‘Patriotic Song’, adopted in 1990—remained without lyrics, with the State Duma unable to muster the 2/3 majority needed to give it final form. In the end, the Soviet anthem—composed by Alexandrov during World War II—was readopted with modified lyrics in 2000, at the behest of Vladimir Putin. Article 13 Para. 2 of the 1993 Russian Constitution actually prohibited— and, as amended in 2020, still prohibits—the adoption of an official state ideology (Russian Federation, 2020). In the words of Kozyrev (1992, pp. 10–12), ‘Russia’s main foreign policy priority is relations with our partners in the Commonwealth of Independent States. […] Russia entered the C.I.S. on the principle of full equality with the other independent states. However Russia cannot afford to forget about the particular responsibility conferred on it by history’. Post-Soviet Russia’s first Foreign Policy Concept also clearly characterised its goals as including the acceptance of the Russian Federation as ‘a great power that boasts a centuries-long history’ with a ‘unique geopolitical situation’ (Russian Federation, 2005a, p. 27). Newly independent states would come to realise that ‘the resolution of their national problems can be facilitated if they choose to rely on their ties with the renewed Russia’ as a result of complex processes, whose outcome would be facilitated ‘through persuasion or even -in extreme cases- through power methods’ (p. 29). Regardless of the identity crisis in broader society, claims to a regional hierarchical status thus remained built into the worldviews of Russia’s policymakers from the very beginning, even at a time when they most intensely strived for integration into the West. ‘Zyuganov’s thinking [was] characterized by such terms as sobornost’ (conciliarism or collegiality, but in practice suggesting the organic unity of the nation), derzhavnost’ (great power status), narodnost ’ (community, in effect populism), quite apart from commitment to the state (gosudarstvennost’ )’ (Sakwa, 1998, p. 140), familiar themes that could be traced back beyond the Soviet period, to the conservatism of the Tsarist empire. Neoimperialist themes were far more openly visible in the rhetoric of a wide

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array of avowedly ultranationalist parties and groupuscules like Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s misleadingly named Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, Pamyat, Eduard Limonov’s now banned National Bolshevik Party, and many others. 11. While the assertion that Russians were a driving force behind the Soviet Union and its victims seems contradictory, the Soviet-era Russian sociologist Yuri Levada identified a similar ability to hold two such apparently contradictory opinions—for instance, pride in the greatness of the Union, and a simultaneous identification with a specific ethnic group—as a form of doublethink associated with what he referred to as an ‘imperial syndrome’ typical of the late homo sovieticus. Within the ‘red-brown’ coalition of communists and ultra-conservative nationalists, this contradiction was, moreover, resolved by distinguishing between ‘patriotic’ and ‘internationalist’ versions of Soviet communism. The former was seen as the continuation of nineteenth-century Russian intellectual Pyotr Chaadayev’s assertions on Russia’s authentic role in ‘teaching the world a historic lesson’; the latter—internationalist—version was one corrupted and distorted by non-Russian—specifically Jewish—elements towards an antiRussian orientation. Moments of liberalisation—like korenizatsiya, or the Khrushchev thaw—were attributed to internationalism, while the most conservative—and Russo-centric—periods—Stalin’s, Brezhnev’s— were given a patriotic slant. This created a continuous narrative of Russian imperial might that, combined with the ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth—that the internationalists unnecessarily gave up on the Soviet project in collusion with the West—would provide an essential element in Putin’s redefinitions of ‘Russianness’, particularly following the annexation of Crimea (Slater, 1998). 12. It must be stressed here that Hybrid Exceptionalism is conceptually distinct from the neo-Eurasianist ideologies that have emerged in Russia following the fall of the Soviet Union, placing Russia in a proper civilisational area, between Europe and Asia (Ingram, 2001; Kerr, 1995; Laruelle, 2012). In sum, Hybrid Exceptionalism is an implied metanarrative broadly capturing the entanglement of discourse and power in the former Soviet Space; Eurasianism, by contrast, is a much narrower category, an explanatory and prescriptive ideology explicitly formulated by a certain number of individuals, forming part of a much broader and longer-term power/knowledge nexus. Hybrid exceptionalism has been and is expressed in a number forms—Orthodox Christian messianism, imperialism, Marxist-Leninist determinism, neo-liberal interventionism/economism, and Eurasianism: all of these are philosophically at times antithetical discourses that share but one aspect, namely the

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hegemonic reproduction of hierarchical practices between St. Petersburg/Moscow and ‘the rest’ through their naturalisation and reification. 13. While these thinkers are rooted in a variety of intellectual traditions, what they do have in common is a generally conservative, and antiWestern, Russian particularist outlook. In case of Ilyin (b. 1883-d. 1954), this particularism was based on the rejection of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and an embrace of fascistic, ultra-conservative, monarchist values during the 1930s and 1940s; after World War II, Ilyin predicted the fall of the Soviet Union—which he saw as a temporary territorial manifestation of Russian empire—because of Western machinations, and advocated for a centralised, authoritarian Russian state in response. Gumilev (b. 1912–d. 1992), for his part, combined the earlier geopolitical Eurasianism of Russian emigrés, including Trubetskoi and Savitskii, with mystical, pseudo-scientific notions like ‘passionarity’—the almost biological connection between a population’s cultural development, and its environment—to argue that the Russians, with their links to the Eurasian steppe and their tradition of state-building, are the over-arching ‘superethnos’ best positioned to be the leading power over that landmass. Dugin has similarly argued for a fundamental difference between Western, seabased—Atlanticist—‘thalassocracies’ and Russia’s status as a land-based ‘tellurocracy’, with traditional characteristics ideally suited to ruling over a varyingly defined Eurasian landmass spanning Europe and Asia (Barbashin & Thoburn, 2015; Dunlop, 2004; Eltchaninoff, 2018, pp. 107–111; Gardels, 2014; Ingram, 2001; Snyder, 2018). 14. First hints of these countervailing pressures could already be discerned in Putin’s emphasis on the importance of Russia’s role as a ‘Derzhava’ in his landmark ‘Millennium Manifesto’ (Putin, 1999) where a great-power Russia was defined as a responsible participant in global governance, but a highly essentialised ‘mentality of the Russians’—based on a purported adherence to a strong, not necessarily liberal state founded on social solidarity—was also directly linked to a faith in its greatness. This manifesto thus provided an early indication of its differentiation from the West through his specification of the ‘Russian idea’, which, in itself, finds its origins in the writings of Vladimir Solovyev, a prominent Slavophile of the nineteenth century (McDaniel, 1996). In Putin’s words, ‘Russia was and will remain a great power…’ and ‘…It will not happen soon […] that Russia will become the second edition of […] the US or Britain…’. Putin also continued to lay claim to the former Soviet Union as a ‘sphere of special interest’, with claims to Russia’s special role often couched in both liberal discourses, and the language of cultural and historical commonality. 15. This mix of fear, hope and, increasingly, frustration in Russia’s discourses on the West has been extensively documented by Tsygankov (2014), and

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linked with changes in its relations with the former, with low support eliciting ‘fear’, rising support leading to ‘hope’, and declining support— from 2011—causing ‘frustration’ (pp. 351–353). 16. Thus, for Putin, ‘the Church is an essential prerequisite for the restoration of the lost unity of the entire Russian world, a world in which the Orthodox faith has always acted as a spiritual foundation’ (Kremlin.ru, 2007), while for Medvedev, ‘[t]he desire to understand the truth and justice is a moral imperative that every person in this country has carried in his or her soul for some time. […] This is why our state, which is secular, is interested in involving the Church in the education of children and young people, in creating new role models and supporting the defenders of our homeland.[…] the history of our country—Russia, the history of Russia—is at the same time the history of Orthodoxy’ (Kremlin.ru, 2011; see also Kremlin.ru, 2010a). A broader resulting corollary of these narratives is the dismissal of pro-Western groups as either inauthentic or corrupt, not quite conform to the different—assumedly more restrictive—Russian notions of liberalism pointed at by Putin in his manifesto. 17. This revival of Russia’s orthodox Christianity has coincided with the reinstatement of the Cossacks in their role as defenders of imperial, orthodox traditions. Although to some extent contrived—in view of their marginalisation in Soviet times—this ‘neo-Cossack’ revival has been encouraged by both conservative oligarchs and regional authorities in their traditional areas of habitation, the Don and the Kuban basins, often resulting in acts of vigilantism against non-Russian minorities (Markedonov, 2004; Popov, 2018). Cossacks groups—or, more accurately, paramilitary groups describing themselves as ‘Cossack’—have also notably been involved in the ongoing armed intervention in Eastern Ukraine. The Crimean and Donbas crises have also seen the involvement of ultra-conservative ‘Orthodox adventurists’ like Konstantin Malofeev, a major funder of projects aimed at an religious revival inside Russia, and, allegedly, of the Donbas insurgency itself, with close connections to high-ranking clergy, the Kremlin, the neo-Eurasianists around Dugin, and the Donbas separatists (Laruelle, 2016, pp. 61–66). 18. Putin has, for instance, repeatedly called Lenin’s insistence on the Soviet Union’s federal structure—including republics’ right to self-determination through secession—a ‘time-bomb’, contrasting it unfavourably with Stalin’s more centralised approach. He is also on the record as lamenting that this laxity had enabled former Soviet republics to leave after ‘receiving in [their] baggage a huge part of Russian land, traditional, historical Russian territory’ (BBC Monitoring, 2020; Russia & CIS General Newswire, 2020; Zee News, 2016).

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19. As stated by Putin in 2005: ‘…9 May is a sacred day for all nations in the Commonwealth of Independent States. We are united by our anguish, our memory and our duty to future generations. And we must pass on to those who will come after us the spirit of historic connection, common aspirations and common hope’ (BBC News, 2005; see also Kremlin.ru, 2010b, 2012, 2014c). Commemorations have become major ritualistic spectacles in the political calendar, and Russia’s diplomatic corps has spent considerable social capital in attacking actions deemed as insulting or degrading their views on the Soviet role: a dispute on the removal of a memorial to the Red Army in Estonia was thus tied to a large-scale cyber-attack on the country in 2007 (McGuinness, 2017), and Russian diplomacy has protested vigorously against the removal of various Soviet monuments throughout Central and Eastern Europe (Dománska, 2019; MacKinnon, 2020). After having been included as potentially threatened by attempts at external redefinition in several National Security Concepts (Russian Federation, 2009, 2015, p. 29), Russian views of history have even been granted special protection under article 67.3 of the amended 2020 constitution, whose provisions emphasise an obligation to ‘honour the memory of the defenders of the fatherland’ and uphold ‘historical truth’. In what Miller (2010) has referred to as ‘history politics’, historical orthodoxies are upheld by recently revived, state-sponsored organisations like the Russian History Society (https://historyrussia.org/) and the Russian Military History Society (https://rvio.histrf.ru/), and even units within the armed forces and security services engaged in ‘memory wars’ (see Darczewska, 2019; Miller, 2020; Persson, 2013; Petrov, 2020). 20. The St. George’s ribbon’s origins are themselves situated in Russia’s imperial history (Fedor, 2017; Kolstø, 2016; Tipaldou, 2019). Based on the Order of St. George, established by Catherine the Great as Russia’s highest military decoration during her conquest of the Crimea, it was resurrected by Yeltsin in 1998, although its tell-tale ribbon was also used for differently named decorations during the Great Patriotic War. These were again adopted by the ‘Immortal Regiment’—initially a civil society grouping dedicated to commemorations of the War outside of ‘official’ channels, but co-opted by the Putin regime as a vehicle for mass mobilisation surrounding the commemorations of World War II. Its extensive use during and after the takeover of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 has turned it into a symbol of Russian neo-imperialism, with Western-oriented former Soviet republics banning its display as such, and pro-Russian groups elsewhere using it as a marker of geopolitical preference.

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Schmidt, M. (2005). Is Putin Pursuing a Policy of Eurasianism? Demokratizatsiya, 13(1), 87–99. Sharafutdinova, G. (2013). Gestalt Switch in Russian Federalism: The Decline in Regional Power under Putin. Comparative Politics, 45(3), 357–376. Sharafutdinova, G. (2014). The Pussy Riot Affair and Putin’s Démarche from Sovereign Democracy to Sovereign Morality. Nationalities Papers, 42(4), 615– 621. Shekhovtsov, A. (2014). Putin’s Brain? New Eastern Europe, 4(13), 72–79. Sherlock, T. (2016). Russian Politics and the Soviet Past: Reassessing Stalin and Stalinism under Vladimir Putin. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 49(1), 45–59. Sherr, J. (2013). Hard Diplomacy and Soft Coercion: Russia’s Influence Abroad. Chatham House. Shevel, O. (2011). Russian Nation-Building from Yel’tsin to Medvedev: Ethnic, Civic or Purposefully Ambiguous. Europe-Asia Studies, 63(2), 179–202. Shevtsova, L. (1999). Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Reality. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Simic, P. (2001). Russia and the Conflicts in the Former Yugoslavia. Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 1(3), 95–114. Slater, W. (1998). Russia’s Imagined History: Visions of the Soviet past and the New ‘Russian idea.’ Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, 14(4), 69–86. Smith, G. (1999). The Masks of Proteus: Russia, Geopolitical Shift and the New Eurasianism. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 24(4), 481–494. Smith, K. E. (2002). Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory during the Yeltsin Era. Cornell University Press. Snyder, T. (2018). Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism. New York Review of Books. Available at: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/ 03/16/ivan-ilyin-putins-philosopher-of-russian-fascism/. (Accessed: 20 June 2020). Socor, V. (2014). Rogozin Threatens Moldova with Sanctions over Association Agreement with the European Union. Eurasia Daily Monitor, 10, 155. Available at: http://www.jamestown.org/regions/europe/single/?tx_ttn ews%5Btt_news%5D=41312&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=669&cHash=45b 5159070315ecd43d25e291972a3ff#.V0RJrFcYL5o. (Accessed: 24 May 2016). Sørensen, G. (2011). A Liberal World Order in Crisis: Choosing Between Imposition and Restraint. Cornell University Press.

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CHAPTER 6

Looking East, Looking West

Introduction In Tsarist and Soviet times, Hybrid Exceptionalism emerged from stunted or alternative versions of Western modernity. Imperial Russia always retained an equivocal relationship to the West, presented both as an example to be imitated, and a threat to be addressed; the ambiguity in the Soviet experiment emerged from the nature of Marxism-Leninism as an emancipatory enlightenment ideology. In both cases, specially adapted civilising missions led to the imposition of these versions of modernity onto Western and Oriental subalterns: Russia acted as the conduit for a specific mission civilisatrice over ‘Orientals’ in ways similar to its Western great power counterparts: through an emphasis on the ‘irrationality’ and ‘backwardness’ of its subjects. Alternatively, in places like Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland, any ties to the West were minimised by privileging certain forms of authenticity—Russian, Orthodox, Slavic—over others. In both periods, Russia’s own hybridity enabled the denial of agency, and the imposition of top-down discipline, with the metropole determining the authenticity—or lack thereof—of its subalterns. Imposed forms of narodnost ’ —national authenticity—thus played a role in justifying empire during both the Romanov and Soviet periods. In the romantic nationalist context of the nineteenth century, this multifaceted third element in Uvarov’s famous triad spurred discussions on the nature of Russian authenticity. But crucially, as is clear from previous © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Oskanian, Russian Exceptionalism between East and West, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69713-6_6

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chapters, this notion of authenticity never applied only to the Russians themselves; in the nineteenth century, it was also employed as a major legitimising argument in favour of the imperial subjugation and management of ethnic minorities, with Russia cast as the facilitator of their discovery of ‘authentic’ roots that could fit into its various messianic missions—as opposed to corrupting foreign influences like, say, Muridist Islam in the Caucasus, or Catholicism in Poland and the western borderlands. Under the early Bolsheviks, during the period of korenizatsiya, the idea of developing an authentic national identity under Moscow’s guidance was, again, relevant to the Marxist-Leninist Soviet civilising mission; such essentialist redefinitions of ‘authentic’ national identities continued in the more Russo-centric Stalinist and post-Stalinist periods. Today, contemporary Russian narratives combine elements of imperial and Soviet history to similarly construct authenticities that are distinct from both East and West, while questioning the genuineness of individuals and groups throughout the former Soviet Union that do not fit its updated civilisational mission—in much the same manner as during Russia’s previous imperial incarnations. Orthodox-based conservatism, the shared Soviet historical experience, and other perceived cultural affinities allow the contemporary incarnation of authenticity to be expanded to include the former Soviet Union as a whole: its are thus distinguished from the rest of the world through claimed ‘shared values’, shaped and transmitted during centuries of imperial Russian and Soviet rule. Ukrainians and Belarusians are ‘brotherly nations’, united in the common experience of the Kievan Rus, the closeness of their languages—not to mention the presence of Russian speakers—the spiritual bond of Orthodoxy, and the collective heroism of the Great Patriotic War; further afield, the former Soviet republics all have the civilising experiences of Russian imperial rule and the USSR in common. Deviations from these tenets—a questioning of historic spiritual bonds, devaluations of the Soviet collective effort, in particular the Great Patriotic War—and perceived attacks on Russian cultural legacies are seen as to-be-disciplined, inauthentic betrayals of those links. Together with a broadly and varyingly defined Russian diaspora, this Russian World (or ‘Russkii Mir’) becomes a transnational cultural-linguistic entity over which Moscow assumes a special—civilisational—responsibility, justifying interventions that challenge the existing tenets of a Western-dominated liberal order.1

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The aim is, as in the past, to justify a separation of a distinct, now post-imperial space from the West, through either a claim to liberal disciplining practices, or the emphasis of civilisational difference and the continued orientalisation of more ‘Eastern’ subalterns. Corruption by the West and Oriental irrationality thus become deviations to be corrected by a Russia situated ‘in between’, acting as both the preserver and transmitter of a freely reinterpreted world order, and a more specifically regional civilisational authenticity. Much like the Russia of the Tsars was positioned as the ‘Third Rome’—the defender of the true values of Christianity—contemporary Russia is portrayed as the champion of genuine, traditional European values against their perceived degeneracy in ‘Gayropa’ (Riabov & Riabova, 2014) through what has been called a ‘Potemkin Conservatism’ (Rodkiewicz & Rogoza, 2015). At an elite level, the exceptionalist aspects of this outward-looking discourse must be adapted to post-Cold War conditions, where naked claims of empire over subalterns have become unacceptable, and many of those subalterns have, in fact, achieved juridically sovereign statehood. If order, or civilisation are to be imposed and upheld, this often has to happen over targets that are formally beyond Russia’s jurisdiction. It is here that the combination of feigned liberalism, and the civilisational discourses seen in Putin’s Russia since the turn of the century come into their own: combined, they allow elites to construct, and maintain, hierarchies over the smaller states, and nations in a sphere of interest that functions, very much, as a shadow of former empire. Reified civilisational discourses provide a general backdrop ordering a still-hierarchical world; feigned liberalism provides a way to enact these hierarchies in ways adapted to post-imperialism. Thus, authenticity demands an orientation towards Moscow—even in the face of post-Soviet states’ formal sovereignty; deviations from this norm are seen as abnormalities to be addressed over the shorter or longer term. Feigned liberalism then provides a contemporary justification for the disciplining of any aberrations, formulated in the normative language of a liberal era. With the shift from feigned liberal to mainly civilisational narratives, these ‘excuses’ have also declined: Russia’s interventions in the ‘near abroad’ have become increasingly brazen and expressly illiberal. These narratives have been visible in depictions of both Eastern and Western former republics and territories of the Soviet Union, throughout the post-Soviet period, in official statements, reports, opinion pieces,

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scientific works and forms of artistic representation. They have been especially pronounced in treatments of periods of crisis between Russia and its subalterns, during episodes like the Chechen Wars, the 2008 War with Georgia, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Gas Wars, the Euromaidan, and the Belarusian protests of 2020. This chapter will deal with these narratives in the two directions—East and West—faced by Russia, by examining how its elites, the media, and the sciences and the arts have depicted, and justified, relations with Chechens, Georgians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and others. Two initial sections will each look at Russia’s contemporary eastward and westward-facing discourses and practices—feigned liberal and civilisationist—in the ‘near abroad’; these will be followed by sections on their grounding in present-day scientific and artistic output. The result will be an overview of the familiar, and the novel, in Russia’s still ambiguous, and hierarchical, worldview.

Russia’s Continuing Orientalist Gaze The ideologies mentioned above express themselves in noticeably orientalist narratives towards those republics that emerged—or, in Chechnya’s case, wanted to emerge—from the Tsarist Empire’s, and the Soviet Union’s ‘East’. As in the past, the independent agency of their populations is dismissed in ways that reflect a mix between Russia’s claimed representation of ‘Europeanness’—as a bringer of rationality and geopolitical stability in an otherwise ungovernable and irrational geopolitical sphere—and its embrace of its own part-orientalisation through a claimed familiarity with its ‘oriental’ subalterns. And, again as in the past, these narratives then serve to justify the separation of ‘authentic’ expressions of ethnicity from their inauthentic, corrupted, unreasonable anti-Russian counterparts as the backdrop to disciplinary action. The Tsars attempted to ‘civilise’ Northern Caucasians in ways compatible with the needs of imperial rule; they condemned those who did not conform to the needs of empire to genocide and exile. The Soviets dismissed those ‘Orientals’ not invested in their grand project as ‘backward’ and ‘reactionary’, and went on to once again use collective punishment—through internal exile—as a disciplinary measure. Today’s equivalent is of a Russia rationalising its ideas of a regional order centred on itself through combinations of normative and civilisational discourse that, in its Caucasian and Central Asian ‘East’, show strong orientalising undertones.

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Russia’s hybrid-exceptionalist discourses are perhaps best visible in Chechnya, and, more generally, the North Caucasus: as elsewhere, they have combined feigned liberal discourses with civilisational elements throughout recent history, increasingly switching to the latter as things have progressed. During the 1994–1996 campaign against the separatists in Grozny, these discourses were still indeterminate, reflecting the ongoing debates within Russian society itself. Yeltsin and his officials justified his intervention through a number of familiar arguments, beyond the need for a restoration of Russia’s territorial integrity: they ranged from the liberal—e.g. the characterisation of the Dudayev regime as criminal, and lacking in popular legitimacy—over the imperial—e.g. the need for Russia to assert its great power status—to the openly racist—Chechens as to-becivilised bandits’, a trope taken up by Yeltsin himself (see Lodge, 1996). Only a small minority within Russian officialdom stood against the intervention and for Chechen independence. A similar confusion of opinions could be seen in wider society, marked by a dislike of Chechens, a distrust of the government’s actions, and opposition to the war (German, 2003, pp. 114–116; Kovalev, 1997; Petersson & Wagnsson, 1998). The official narratives became more specific by the time of the second Chechen war, under Putin, in addition to enjoying wider popular support (Koltsova, 2000; Pain, 2000). As the uprising radicalised (Hughes, 2007, pp. 94–127), elite discourses started combining the Western liberal narratives on ‘terrorism’ with more traditionally Russian ‘Caucasophobic’ (Dimitri Trenin & Malashenko, 2004, pp. 64–69) civilisational narratives.2 In what Moore (2010, p. 100) has referred to as ‘enemification’, ‘the popular stereotype of the Chechen as a noble highlander was manipulated first into a bandit and into an Islamic terrorist’. The ‘Global War on Terror’ thus provided the new Russian president with his feigned liberal element, by tying of what, in the beginning, had been a mainly secular-nationalist uprising to the liberal core’s new main perceived security threat: terrorism. The Chechen resistance could now also be tied to a departure from authenticity through a very familiar trope: of an outside influence—Wahhabism, the twenty-first-century’s counterpart to the nineteenth-century’s Muridism—corrupting the originality of the Chechen nation, which, as in the case of other North Caucasus nationalities, is portrayed as accepting of Russian domination (see Kremlin.ru, 2002, 2005; Kolossov & Toal, 2007). The other parallels with old Tsarist and Soviet imperial discourses are also striking: just as the North Caucasian tribal rebels of the early

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nineteenth century, or their twentieth-century anti-Soviet counterparts were dismissed as brigands and—albeit at times noble—savages, Chechnya’s subsequent separatists were criminalised, infantilised, and scorned as inauthentic aberrations from the required Russophile norm (Hughes, 2007; Russell, 2002, 2005). Russia’s official narrative and its press were replete with references to the supposed inability of Chechens in particular, and North Caucasus peoples in general, to maintain law and order without Russia’s ‘civilising’ imprint (e.g. Aleksandrov, 2001; Degoev, 2001; Markov, 1997; Putin, 1999; Soldatenko, 1994). These assumptions—and imperial practices—have continued after the ‘pacification’ of Chechnya, and, conversely, the Kremlin’s current policy of ‘Chechenisation’ (Russell, 2011; Sakwa, 2010; Souleimanov, 2015). In much the same way as imperial Russia co-opted local elites in its imperial conquests, Ramzan Kadyrov and his kadyrovtsi thugs have been co-opted by the Kremlin, and, as in the imperial past, the defining criterion of civilisational legitimacy and authenticity in the eyes of the state has remained loyalty to Russia, with broad autonomy allowed subject to that condition.3 To emphasise this point, Imam Shamil himself—the hero of the North Caucasians’ nineteenth-century resistance against Russian rule— has been brazenly appropriated by Vladimir Putin as an agent, rather than an opponent, of Russian empire, as he had been earlier, in Soviet times (Kremlin.ru, 2004): The North Caucasus is a major centre of diverse but united Russian spiritual culture. Any attempts to break this unity have always met with resistance, including from the Caucasus peoples themselves…I would like to recall Imam Shamil’s testament to his sons. He called upon them to remain loyal to the Russian state and to live in peace and harmony with its peoples.

Similar ‘orientalisms’ were repeated on an international scale and at the highest levels in Georgia, especially during the presidency of Mikheil Saakashvili. After having supported the separatist forces during the hot phase of the conflicts between Tbilisi and its breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Russia presented itself in its trusted role as responsible mediator and peacekeeper during much of the 1990s (Dmitri Trenin, 1996; Lynch, 2004, 2000). Georgian disillusionment with Russian mediation from about 1999 and the 2003 Rose Revolution

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brought to power political forces that were very much against the country’s continued participation in Russia’s various regional projects: instead, an active effort was made towards Euro-Atlantic integration (Oskanian, 2016; Jones & Kakhishvili, 2013). Russia’s hybrid-exceptionalist discourse again came to be on full display in response: conveniently timed technocratic arguments were used in the prohibition of the importation of Georgian foodstuffs at various points in the run-up to the 2008 war, and—as in the past—Russia employed restrictions on migration to discipline a subaltern which, in its eyes, was seen as becoming increasingly unruly.4 Such feigned liberalism culminated during the 2008 Georgia war, which was thus presented as an attempt to carry out a Responsibility to Protect and prevent genocide, echoing justifications for NATO’s earlier unilateral intervention in Kosovo (see AFP, 2008; Allison, 2013, pp. 150–169; Kremlin.ru, 2008; UNI, 2008), the recognition of which by Western powers was similarly used as a justification for the recognition of the breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (see Allison, 2009, 2014; Kremlin.ru, 2014a; Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, 2014a, 2014e). Civilisational discourses were also involved in this campaign against Georgia’s westward moves. From the beginning, the aspiration was belittled as irrational, the product of outside manipulation, going against the centuries of age-old ‘friendship’ between the Russian and fellow orthodox Georgian peoples; such discourses took a more aggressive tone as relations deteriorated—for instance, with the expulsion of suspected Russian spies in 2006, and the closure of Russian bases in 2007. But during and after the 2008 war, they reached fever pitch. In numerous generalisations, these actions were attributed to the hot-headedness of the Georgian leadership. The former president of Georgia was described by high-ranking Russian officials as ‘a madman’ (Medvedev, 2008), ‘crazy’ (McChesney, 2013), a ‘blank space’ (Kremlin.ru, 2012), a ‘bastard’ (CIS & Presidential Bulletin, 2008), his pro-Western orientation seen as an inauthentic betrayal of the age-old ‘brotherhood’ between the Georgian and Russian nations, based on the shared experience of the Great Patriotic War and the spiritual bonds of Orthodoxy (Kolstø & Rusetskii, 2012; Kremlin.ru, 2006, 2009; Medvedev, 2008).5 The 2008 war reportedly also provided a boost to sexualised orientalising discourses against Saakashvili—with even higherlevel discourses reportedly descending to the level of sexual humiliation (denial of masculinity being one recurring element within orientalism).6 These practices and discourses may have become less intense after the

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change of power in Georgia in 2012–2013. But they nevertheless remain relevant: sanctions have thus been removed and reimposed by Moscow in an on-and-off attempt by Moscow to punish Georgians’ loosely defined ‘Russophobia’ (Kucera, 2019). More generally patronising views—where Russia’s civilising imprint is stressed, the agency of subalterns is minimised, and deviations from a proRussian line are threatened with sanction—have also been regularly aimed at other states and peoples of the Caucasus and Central Asia—although considering their less explicit challenges to Russian authority, they tend to be less pronounced. Examples include casual—and very negatively received—suggestions at increasing the role of the Russian language in the Armenian educational system (Kucera, 2017; Jardine, 2017), implicit threats against Armenia and Kyrgyzstan in the run-up to their joining the Eurasian Economic Union (Blank, 2013; Perovic, 2019, pp. 57– 58), or expressions of discontent at Central Asian states abandoning the Cyrillic script for the Latin (Rickleton, 2019; Tolipov, 2017). Even praise for Kazakhstan’s ‘very wise’—and generally pro-Russian—first post-Soviet president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was famously combined by Putin with an obvious belittling of Kazakh statehood.7 In these less challenging cases, feigned liberalism and civilisational claims usually remain in the background, occasionally resurfacing at the top when Russia’s dominance is seen as directly questioned, and a resort to disciplinary narratives appears necessary. But as in the ‘postcolonial’ West, Russia’s continued orientalist attitudes are perhaps most visible in a pervasive, normalised racism, directed especially against North Caucasians, but also towards the large communities of migrant labour originating from the South Caucasus and Central Asia, expressed at an official level, in the media, and in everyday life (Hutchings & Tolz, 2012; Iarskaia, 2012; Kislov & Zhanaev, 2017; Kuznetsova & Round, 2019). Without the mitigating effects of the ‘brotherhood of peoples’ which would have kept such ethnic prejudice at bay during Soviet years, such forms of chauvinism have mostly been directed against Russia’s oriental —non-Slavic—former and current imperial subjects (Roman, 2002). In Moscow, this has resulted in systemic abuses by a police force in its targeting of illegal migrants from these regions (Light, 2010); elsewhere, more ‘traditional’ forms of persecution have involved the revived Cossacks taking on their role as vigilante enforcers, often aided and abetted by local and regional authorities, especially near the southern border with the Caucasus (Light, 2010).

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The harsh, systematically discriminatory—and seemingly officially sanctioned—treatment of the Crimean Tatars in the wake of the 2014 annexation has similarly evoked memories from the more repressive treatment of smaller, ‘oriental’ peoples, in both the Soviet Union and the Tsarist empire (Coynash & Charron, 2019; Muratova, 2019). Indeed, Russia’s ‘Western’ subalterns—Ukrainians, Belarusians, or Moldovans— are seldom, if ever, subjected to such overt discriminatory treatment, save for the use of ‘kokhol ’ as the occasional ethnic epithet, and the more political generalisations on pro-Western groups and individuals as ‘fascist’ or ‘ultraliberal’.

Russia’s Western Fears A similar combination of feigned liberalism and an increasingly vocal civilisationism can be seen in Russia’s discourses and practices towards its ‘Western’ subalterns. If, during the turbulent 1990s, a variety of attitudes could be discerned regarding Russia’s Western neighbours—the Baltics, Moldova, and, more importantly in the light of their role in historical definitions of Russian identity, Ukraine and Belarus—the Putin years saw narratives shift towards more openly hierarchical feigned liberal and civilisational claims, especially regarding ‘significant other’ Ukraine, and particularly in the aftermath of the Orange and Euromaidan revolutions. As in Soviet and Tsarist times, their main aim was to construct and maintain a difference from the West by asserting a belonging to, an affinity with a separate ‘Russian World’ for subalterns whose authenticity was defined in a corresponding way. If such issues were approached with a certain degree of pluralism and self-critique in the earlier post-Soviet period—sometimes acknowledging injustices against the Baltic nations, or Ukrainian or Belarusian separateness—by the 2000s, the idea that the Balts had betrayed Russian benevolence, and that Ukraine and Belarus were accidents of history had gained considerable ground in Russian state and society. Pro-Western tendencies were, as a rule, dismissed as either inauthentic foreign manipulations or expressions of an equally inauthentic, Russophobic fascism or ultraliberalism, rather than the results of free geopolitical and societal choices that might have diverged from Moscow’s preferences. The various elements of Russia’s contemporary version of Hybrid Exceptionalism were visible in Russia’s narratives and practices from the early stages of the post-Soviet era. In the Baltics, for instance, Russia’s

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liberals initially accepted independent statehood, and Estonia’s, Latvia’s, and Lithuania’s drift away from the post-Soviet space; but this was accompanied, from the start, with vocal concern over the rights of substantial ethnic Russian minorities. With Moscow’s move away from the liberalism of the initial post-Soviet years, the latter half of the 1990s saw increased alarm at the prospects for NATO membership, in addition to a return to orthodox official accounts of the Baltic states’ ‘voluntary’ incorporation into the USSR; this did not, however, prevent Moscow from continuing to propound and pursue pragmatic policies towards its smaller northwestern neighbours (Dimitri Trenin, 2001; Kirch et al., 1993; Mihkelson, 2003). Paradoxically, in the century’s first decade, these states opened up their citizenships to Russian minorities as part of their eventual entry into the EU and NATO—reluctantly accepted by Moscow. But they were subjected to increasingly harsh Russian criticism for other policies deemed insulting’ to what had now been upgraded to a core element in Russia’s Hybrid Exceptionalism: the officially sacralised memory of World War II, and of their ‘liberation’ by the Soviet Union (Denisenko, 2015; Sherlock, 2002). Estonia’s 2007 decision to remove a memorial to this ‘liberation’ during the Great Patriotic War triggered a wave of condemnation in Russian official circles, in addition to alleged cyber-attacks (Brüggemann & Kasekamp, 2008; McGuinness, 2017). This pointed to the way World War II was not merely used to mobilise Russian society (see previous chapter), but also to impose a particular version of history onto Western neighbours: a self-serving, conventional Soviet view of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and subsequent Soviet dominance thus became particularly pronounced following the 2014 events in Ukraine (see below). These processes were even more evident in those parts of the Soviet Union that, unlike the Baltic states, remained outside of Western institutions, and inside Russia’s claimed, post-Soviet ‘sphere of special interests’. In the 1990s, republics like Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus presented a mixed picture: on the one hand, the two Slavic Soviet republics among them had, together with Russia, put a formal end to the Soviet experiment through the Belavezha accords (Abrams, 2016; Shushkevich, 2013). On the other, Russia clearly maintained its claim to a leading position within the former Soviet space through various—mostly unsuccessful or partially successful—integration projects, like the Commonwealth of Independent

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States (CIS) and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO)— and later, the Eurasian Economic Union (Busygina and Filippov, 2020; Buszynsky, 2003; Kubicek, 2009). Although Belarus chose a clearly proRussian line under Alexander Lukashenko—moving towards a ‘Union State’ with Russia in 1996—there was also pressure on Ukraine and Moldova to stay within the Russian orbit: the Transnistrian conflict was clearly used as a way to discipline Chisinau (Dressler, 2006; King, 1994), and the threat of Crimean annexation was regularly heard in Moscow— and Simferopol—until the conclusion of a Russian-Ukrainian friendship treaty, and the extension of Russian basing rights on the peninsula, in 1997.8 However, while Russian society at large did maintain its traditional—unequal—association with especially Ukraine and Belarus, the Yeltsin regime itself, and the still-raging debates on Russia’s identity and world view made policies, and official discourses inconsistent, at best, not least because of the tug-of-war between various part of the Russian bureaucracy with different conceptions of Russia’s—and Ukraine’s—place in the new, liberal world order (Bukkvol, 2001). As in Georgia’s case, the feigned liberal and civilisational elements in those discourses emerged much more clearly as Western subalterns— especially Ukraine, but also to some extent Moldova—moved towards a pro-Western orientation. In Ukraine’s case, in the years following the 2004 Orange Revolution, familiar stereotypical characterisations of Ukraine’s pro-Western political forces re-emerged in force: Putin’s famous quip on ‘Ukraine not being a real country’ and it ‘ceasing to exist’ if it joined NATO dates from this period (The Economist, 2008), as do the dismissals of Ukrainian agency through a variety of dismissive tropes in both the official and media discourses. The following years also saw the use of gas debts and Ukraine’s dependence on Russia in feigned liberal attempts at dissuading Kyiv from its Westward moves, including its quest for NATO membership: much of the Russian press was also largely supportive towards its government’s policies towards Ukraine during the subsequent ‘gas wars’, although less reticent in (rather gleefully) acknowledging the disciplinary nature of actions which the Russian government usually formulated in more neoliberal terms—as merely financial disputes over the non-payment of debts, as in the case of sanctions on Georgia and Moldova (A’Beckett, 2013, pp. 142–147; Nygren, 2012, pp. 222– 228).9 After a period of relative relaxation in Ukrainian-Russian relations under the more pro-Russian Yanukovych, both the feigned liberal and civilisational perspectives would return, with a vengeance, during and

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immediately following the 2014 Euromaidan, with the latter in particular playing a more clearly defined part in the public rationalisation of intervention than during the previous decade. Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan Revolution itself was the result the main feigned liberal integration project pushed by Russia during this decade, the Eurasian Economic Union: an organisation modelled on the EU and touted among others as an alternative to the latter’s proposed ‘Association Agreements’ with several former Soviet republics.10 Its attempted imposition onto Ukraine—after the successful strong-arming of Armenia and Kyrgyzstan into its structures—was precisely what triggered the 2014 events in Kyiv, and the subsequent turmoil in Crimea and the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. As in the cases of the gas wars, or the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, these events saw the deployment of spurious ‘liberal’ arguments on unilateral humanitarian intervention and self-determination, and a simultaneous adherence to (im)plausibly deniable hybrid warfare—rather than open intervention—in pursuit of Ukraine’s continued submission to a Russian sphere of influence: Russia’s interest in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea was thus based on protecting their populations from the threat of the ‘Nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites’ who had seized power in Kyiv through a ‘coup’, and Crimea’s ‘secession’ was merely an expression of the local popular will, fully conform to international law—and, specifically, the ‘Kosovo precedent’ (Kremlin.ru, 2014a; see also Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, 2014e; Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, 2014a; Allison, 2009, 2014). But Euromaidan was also where Russia’s recent civilisational discourses came into their own to an even greater degree than one decade earlier, during the Orange Revolution. Just as Catholicism or the Enlightenment were under the Orthodox Tsars, or fascism and capitalism were under the Soviets, Western influences were constructed as a threat to something distinct, something authentic, now centred on the notion of ‘traditional values’,11 or on the shared Soviet history of the Western former Soviet republics. As Prime Minister Medvedev (2014) put it: There are many things that unite us. Our relations have their roots in ancient times. Unfortunately, in order to pit our two nations against each other, official Ukraine is denying objective facts, including our common culture, faith and centuries-long common history. They are speculating on

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the past, imposing ideological constructs that have nothing to do with historical reality.

Politicians and groups taking a pro-Western line were thus portrayed as ‘inauthentic’ either from the ‘traditional values’ perspective, or through a more insidious link to shared Soviet history, and, in particular, the Great Patriotic and Cold Wars.12 The portrayal of Ukraine’s Euromaidan as a Western, NATO-led conspiracy harked back to Soviet, Cold War elements within Russia’s new imperial identity (Hutchings & Szostek, 2015; Kuzio, 2015, pp. 161–162; Laruelle, 2016). But little could be more indicative of that lack of authenticity than, for instance, the frequent associations of the current government with Nazi collaborators like Bandera and Shushkevich—the ultimate marker of treason within a Soviet context (e.g. Kremlin.ru, 2014a; Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, 2014b, d), made relevant by the Kremlin’s ‘re-stalinisaton’ (Kuzio, 2016) of discourses on Ukraine.13 Other elements of a shared past history that should by now be familiar—the Kievan Rus, the treaty of Pereieslav, shared Orthodox Christianity—featured prominently in such claims to common civilisation in both official discourses, and the media, as did denigrations of Ukrainian distinctiveness, or statehood, or territoriality.14 Since 2014, these characterisations of a ‘deviant’ Ukraine have remained a fairly constant feature through the differentiation between the ’authentic’—i.e. Russified or Russophile—Ukrainians of the occupied East, to be protected against their inauthentic, misled, manipulated counterparts in the remainder of the country, a trend reinforced by the recent creation of a unified autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, separate from the Russian patriarchate,15 and the hardening of Ukrainian attitudes towards Putin’s Russia (Pifer, 2017; Levada Center, 2020). Recent developments in Belarus also illustrate the continuation— and intensification—of this trend, with the Kremlin now pushing for a resumption and acceleration of the Union State’s integration processes based on a mix of (feigned liberal) economistic and more conventional civilisational arguments (Crowcroft & Davlashyan, 2020; CzerewaczFilipowicz & Konopelko, 2017; Tass, 2020). But while Belarusians have hitherto been mostly pro-Russian in their geopolitical attitudes, there is very little desire for such deeper integration: periodic prevarications by Lukashenko’s regime, and its encouragement of a ‘patriotic’, statecentred form of Belarusian national identity, along with the attractions

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of the West, have created a generation attached to the idea of independence, less nostalgic of a Soviet past (Manaev et al., 2011; Marples, 2014; Rudling, 2017). The protests that erupted following the presidential elections of September 2020—widely seen as having been rigged in favour of Lukashenko—have put Russia on the spot: although not overly geopolitical in nature, the use of symbols drawn from the more pro-Western opposition, and the extensive interactions between the West, and the main opposition candidate—Sviatlana Tikhanouskaya—have at the very least opened up the possibility of Belarus moving away from its ‘authentic’ status as a minor version or extension of Russia, to a more distinct in its domestic and external policies (Liubakova, 2020). The Kremlin was slow in condemning these protests as the result of Western interference, and it did not wholeheartedly embrace Lukashenko’s claims that Polish and Lithuanian meddling was behind the mass demonstrations demanding his removal; but Putin did, on several occasions, warn off the West from intervening directly or indirectly in the ‘internal processes’ of Belarus, while lower-ranked officials and the media eventually focused their ire on those in the West most actively agitating in favour of sanctions, resuscitating old Polish-Lithuanian ghosts, in addition to clinging on the symbols used by the opposition—the white-red-white flag, and the emblem with the Pahonia, a charging knight—as Nazi symbols, as a proverbial shot across the bow of any attempted geopolitical move by the opposition (Barros, 2020b; Sullivan, 2020). At the time of writing, Russia appears to be supporting Lukashenko, and the possibility that he might be replaced with pro-Russian elements from the opposition at some point—once held as realistic by observers (Barros, 2020a)—now appears to be dwindling.

The Scientific Way of Hierarchy As in the Soviet and Tsarist pasts, the hybrid-exceptionalist discourses described above are grounded in post-Soviet Russia’s humanities and social sciences. Here, as in society at large, one could perceive a move from the relatively chaotic—and often experimental—indeterminacy of the 1990s, towards far more specifically Russian—illiberal, imperialistic— forms of scientific output. Much—though, it must be stressed, far from all—of the humanities moved from a relatively critical attitude towards the recent and distant pasts in the 1990s to—often legally sanctioned— ‘patriotic’ forms of scholarship, particularly in historiography. In the social

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sciences, the presence of approaches foreign or at the very least suspect to Western scholarship—crudely civilisational approaches to international relations like ethnogeopolitics, or highly reified forms of ethnography— also enabled the restatement of familiar tropes regarding Russia’s oriental and occidental neighbours. All of these developments ultimately helped sustain—and were sustained by—the broader hybrid-exceptionalist elite and society narratives described above, and their hierarchical, civilisational views of Russia’s environs—and often resulted in contemporary restatements of familiar, historically grounded themes. In the humanities, before and during the 1990s, there was an upsurge in historiographic work on the crimes of the Soviet period—specifically, in the case of groups like ‘Memorial’, the Stalin era—within the context of the wider debates taking place in Russian society; critical attitudes towards the Soviet Union and its incorporation of unwilling minorities existed alongside work that was more apologetic of both the Tsarist and Soviet empires, often replicating the identity debates visible in broader society (Davies, 1997; Keep & Litvin, 2005, pp. 48–85; Merridale, 2003, pp. 17–28; Rosalind J. Marsh, 1995). This situation was exacerbated by the centrifugal tendencies within the Russian Federation itself, with work done under the auspices of individual subjects of the Federation—Autonomous Republics, Oblasts—far more critical of Russia’s past expansionist policies than work carried out in the— admittedly weak—centre, within the surviving remnants of organisational structures inherited from the Soviet past: the formerly Soviet—now Russian—Academy of Sciences, its various satellites and publications, and other institutions like the Institute of Slavic Studies (Bagger, 2007).16 Eventually, the imposition of a ‘Russian idea’ and the legal enforcement of civilisational discourses outlined above came to have a stifling effect on historiography (Kolesnikov, 2020; Sherlock, 2011). In the Social Sciences, after a period of post-Soviet crisis and disintegration, a split emerged between organisations and individuals engaging with the broader academic community in the West, and types of more insular scholarship founded on domestic intellectual (or pseudointellectual) civilisationist currents. While neo-Eurasianism’s dubious academic respectability has been one expression of the latter in the realm of geopolitics, other post-Soviet social sciences—including anthropology, ethnography, political science—experienced a similar split that set those engaging with ‘Western’ templates apart from those remaining in paradigms often strongly influenced by Soviet legacies (Ovsiannikov,

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1998; Tishkov, 1998). Within International Relations, for instance, an expressly civilisational view of world affairs has—quite separately from its more specific neo-Eurasianist expression—dominated the foundational training at Higher Education institutions, not least through the discipline of ‘ethnogeopolitics’; anthropological studies—especially of non-Russian ethnic groups—similarly employ concepts that would be unthinkable in the Western scholarly mainstream, including essentialist ideas like ‘the incompatibility of cultures’ (Shnirelman, 2009a).17 As seen below, prejudices and preconceptions inherited from the Soviet era— towards Chechens and other Eastern subalterns, and Ukrainians and other Western subalterns—were then readily visible in resulting work. This more ‘particularistic’ type of scholarship has gained in importance as the Putin regime’s discourses consolidated around narratives of ‘civilisational specificity’, and of—Tsarist, and especially Soviet—great power glory. As a result of these developments, the manifest orientalising element of Hybrid Exceptionalism can again be seen in the treatment of the Caucasus and Central Asia in the social sciences and the humanities. For one, the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oriental Studies—and its associated ‘Institute of Oriental Manuscripts’—still largely engages in what can be referred to as ‘classical’ orientology, focusing on linguistics and history, a far cry from the kind of postcolonial and de-colonial scholarship seen in comparable Western institutions, like the School of Oriental and African Studies (Saint Petersburg Institute of Oriental Manuscipts, 2020). Historiography also tends to present a sanitised view of the interactions between the post-Soviet ‘oriental’ peoples and Moscow. Whereas in much of the post-Soviet world, this relationship is duly problematised—with an extensive accounting of the various imperial legacies—more mainstream scholarship tends to maintain the ‘civilising’ role of Russia, in a restatement of the lesser evil thesis devoid of Marxist-Leninist theoretical scaffolding (Yanchenko, 2018).18 In the social sciences, as in Soviet and earlier Tsarist times, the taken-for-granted place of Russia has also led to a relative neglect of Central Asia in IR scholarship, although China’s recent forays into the region may change this in coming years (Abashin & Jenks, 2015; Laruelle, 2010). Peoples throughout Russia’s ‘East’ are often subjected to an essentialism that denies their independent agency—making a Russian presence beneficial to their governance and security—and at times borders on racist stereotyping, especially in civilisationally inspired tracts: essentialist concepts like ‘national character’ or ‘ethnic character’ can be found extensively in such literature.

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Representation of Russia’s Western subalterns—especially its Slavic ones—in the humanities and social sciences follow a similar pattern in constructing historiographic and linguistic barriers—albeit with an ‘othered’ West—in ways often reminiscent of the past. In a large proportion of the Russian historic and ethno-linguistic literature, Ukrainians are once again depicted as part of an ethnos uniting them with Belarusians and Great Russians, a tendency that increased after the turn of the century (Kosmeda, 2020; Yermolenko, 2019; Tolz, 2002). Stressing the common origins of the three nations, a large amount of scholarship presents the independence of the Ukrainians and Belarusians as a historic anomaly, based on familiar themes that were already apparent in the nineteenth century: the linguistic affinity of the three East Slavic languages, and accounts of important moments in history that defined their relations with the ‘Great Russians’ conforming to well-known orthodoxies copied from the imperial and Soviet eras: the Kievan/Kyivan Rus, the battle of Poltava and the still-anathemised Mazepa’s treason, the treaty of Pereieslav as a ‘reunification’, the nature of Ukraine’s Cossacks, and others. This has led to a growing rift between the Western subalterns and Russia, as the former developed their own national histories, with very different interpretations of these events (Gerner, 2009–2010; Kuzio, 2005 Plokhy, 2001; Vushko, 2018). The same kind of scholarship has provided historiographic backing to unapologetic approaches to elements of Soviet history that were usually treated with a shameful silence in Soviet times: the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact—cast as a response to machinations in the West that obliged the Soviet Union to fraternise with the Nazis—Holodomor—now defined as necessary evils, and set in the broader context of a suffering shared by all Soviet peoples, including the Russians—and others (Keep & Litvin, 2005, pp. 77–81). In the process, an orthodox view of modern Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltics and Moldova has emerged that contorts itself towards arguing the voluntary nature of their membership the Soviet Union, while discrediting those working against this narrative as Nazi collaborators, in spite of the great variety of anti-Soviet nationalisms that might not have had a pro-German component (Kappeler, 2014, p. 114; Schwarcz, 2017; Sokolov, 2004). Together with more contemporary social-scientific claims on shared linguistics and values, these historical accounts thus once again maintain a civilisational barrier with the West seen in much of Russia’s mainstream geopolitical output.

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Art, Hierarchy, and In-Betweenness In the arts—the popular arts in particular—after a period of partial introspection, imperial nostalgia has become a standard staple, particularly in certain types of popular literature, and film: self-critical works like the ones seen in the 1990s have been relegated to the side-lines, or, more precisely, to the realm of ‘high culture’, aimed at, and accessible to Russia’s cognoscenti elite, and the broader, global arts scene. Nowadays, such critical attitudes emerge in the audio-visual arts only occasionally—with rare works like Andrey Zvyagintsev’s ‘Leviathan’ subverting the narrative of Russian state authority and authenticity, and through ‘biopolitical’ performance art by the likes of Pussy Riot and Pyotr Pavlensky doing the same towards the other orthodoxies—both religious and secular—of the Putin era.19 As in the case of the constrained independent media, such independent cultural output has remained marginal to the shaping of Russia’s broader narratives, including in its subversions of neo-imperialist narratives during various crises, like the Euromaidan or the Georgian-Russian war. Instead, a large part of mass-production art—in literature, on television, in film—now engages in the glorification, rather than the critique, of an imperial past, and an attendant, uncompromisingly Russo-centric world view (Romashko, 2018).20 As part of this conservative turn, a new genre of Russian ‘utopian fiction’ has emerged, imbuing a wide range of art forms with a distinctly ‘identitarian fixation’ on Russia’s position between ‘East’ and ‘West’ (Engström, 2019, p. 61; Suslov & Bodin, 2019). This movement has, among others, seen the emergence of the ‘right-wing political’ and ‘imperial’ novels as a fully fledged literary field: centred on a group of authors known as the ‘New Petersburg Fundamentalists’ and have played on unbridled anti-Western imperial nostalgia, fully engaging in traditionally Russian antisemitic and racist themes (Rosalind Marsh, 2013). Some of their authors, including Aleksandr Prokhanov—also known as the editor of the ultranationalist newspapers Den and Zavtra—and Pavel Krusanov, have employed what Noordenbos (2011, 2016, pp. 111–143), has referred to as ‘Imperial Stiob’ in their work: an ironic reaffirmation of Russia’s imperial mission as stated by neo-Eurasianist revanchists like Dugin and Limonov through stories involving, among other, the fictitious destruction of the United States, and the establishment of a Eurasian-Russian empire ‘From Vladivostok to Gibraltar’ (Noordenbos, 2011, pp. 152–155).

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These ‘fundamentalists’ project utopian visions of Russia—often related to the mystical quest for perfectibility earlier sought by the nineteenth-century Slavophiles—into a grandiose future, an alternative present, or an idealised past, as a ‘type of therapy for the historical traumas Russians have experienced, primarily the trauma of the disintegration of the Soviet Union’ (Suslov, 2016, p. 567). A common thread running through these utopian works is the reaffirmation of Russia’s civilisational specificity against an eternally conspiratorial West, aimed at denying it its rightful place in world history, specifically in leading the Eurasian landmass. They have a political objective in projecting Russia’s current enmity with liberalism and the West backward or forwards, denying the legitimacy of newly independent former Soviet states—among others through the very familiar amalgamation of Ukraine’s and Belarus’ histories or futures into that of a restored, or idealised Russian empire, including, of course, over its rightful Eurasian ‘oriental’ lands (Laruelle, 2012, p. 579).21 In film, Russian artists have also moved away from the more critical 1990s, when works including Aleksandr Rogozhkin’s ‘Checkpoint’ (‘Blokpost’, 1998) and Sergei Bodrov’s ‘Prisoner of the Caucasus’ (‘Kavkazskii Plennik’, 1996) lambasted Russia’s ‘imperial pretensions’ during the first Chechen war (Hutchings, 2008, pp. 16–17; Michaels, 2004; Monastireva-Ansdell, 2017).22 Instead, a more ‘patriotic’ style of film-making has been actively promoted, presaged in the 1990s by openly racist, or civilisationist productions—like the ‘Brother’ series or Nikita Mikhalkov’s Eurasianist ‘Urga’. With state funding for the arts improved, these civilisationist and conservative/nationalist themes in treatments of Russia’s ‘Orient’ have become more prominent: the Putin era saw several high-profile productions dealing with Russia’s Eurasian identity and its imperial history—with at times problematic or Russo-centric depictions of the oriental—and this trend has continued into the present, both on television and in cinemas.23 A similar construction of Russian civilisational specificity against the West—and superiority over its Western ‘brothers’—can be seen elsewhere on Russia’s small and silver screens. While there was a move towards stressing co-operation or an aspiration towards the West in the 1990s, nowadays ‘…in most feature films the image of the West is treated as something that is “foreign” or an “other” and often as a culture that is hostile and alien to Russian civilization’ (Fedorov, 2017, p. 450). This trend has only intensified, with ‘memory wars’ between Russia and its

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Western subalterns—not surprisingly centred on World War II—finding their way into the audio-visual arts, reproducing, among others, the tropes on ‘bad’ and ‘good’ (Russified) Ukrainians from earlier times.24 Television series focusing on historical figures and events central to Russian identity—like Alexander Nevskii and the Time of Troubles—similarly tend to stress the de-stabilising, threatening role of familiar Western actors—the Teutonic knights, the Poles—against Russia as the bulwark of Orthodoxy and Slavdom (Wijermars, 2019, pp. 84–163). As in the sciences, and in media and elite discourse, the parallels with Russia’s contemporary predicament—and with past hybrid-exceptionalist discourses—are all too visible. If, in the 1990s, the literatures of Russia and its Western neighbours converged in a more critical or playfully postmodern attitude (Shkandrij, 2001, p. 262) towards their immediate past, this moment of agreement did not last long. While most of the newly independent states have come to concentrate on the postcolonial nation-building processes—among others through re-interpretations of the distant and immediate past—Russia’s artistic and literary output has taken a distinctly civilisational and imperial turn, exposing the very different ‘political subjectivities’ of the metropole and its former subaltern (Dzyadevych, 2019; Howell, 2016). As in previous periods, this problematic—hierarchical, yet familiar—relationship with ‘Oriental’ and ‘Occidental’ subalterns has remained a constant theme in some of Russia’s artistic output—especially in its more popular manifestations—in the presses, the cinemas, and on television—providing the intellectual backdrop to a society, and elite still steeped in a hybrid-exceptionalist view of the region, and the wider world.

Conclusion And so, Russia has ended up projecting the latest version of Hybrid Exceptionalism eastward and westward, as it did in its previous modern manifestations. Both feigned liberalism, and the more openly civilisational discourses have provided narratives for its civilising missions, updated to the—formally—post-imperial era, and the Liberal International Order. The nominal sovereignty of most subalterns populating Eurasia makes their direct management and disciplining—as during the Tsarist and Soviet periods—a challenge; since the advent of Vladimir Putin and the end of the contentious 1990s, Moscow’s solution has consisted of trying to insert these missions into the predominant liberal order through its

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imperfect imitation, or through a doubling down on difference, and the resulting separation of a distinct civilisational sphere from that Westerndominated order. The discourses and practices of the past have combined in various ways, depending on whether its gaze was directed east or west. And they have emerged from the complex interaction between elite discourses, and more deeply rooted, and long-held narratives in broader society—the media, the sciences, the arts—following the clash of competing possible worldviews in the turbulent 1990s. In Russia’s ‘own Orient’—the Caucasus, Central Asia—old themes have re-emerged in recognisable form. While the campaign in Chechnya ended up subsumed into liberalism’s ‘Global War on Terror’, the discourses employed harked back to earlier periods: Wahhabist terrorists became the twenty-first-century equivalent of Muridist bandits, and, as during the Tsarist and Soviet periods, North Caucasian authenticity was defined in ways that bent it towards conformity with (neo-)imperial domination, most visibly through yet another appropriation of that central figure of resistance, Imam Shamil, not to mention the—very familiar— co-optation of the local Kadyrovtsi elite as an agent of imperial power. In independent Georgia, these narratives and discourses were more subtle, but, again, the agency—and rationality—of people and leaders diverging from the pro-Russian norm was negated, sometimes in ways whose vulgarity would be unlikely in the case of more ‘Western’ adversaries. Even in the feigned liberal humanitarian and ‘technical’ disciplining means, echoes of the past can be found: apart from the obvious use of military force, migration is deployed as a disciplining tool—through the actual or threatened expulsion of migrant labour, and, as in the West, the everpresent spectre of racism provides one of the clearest legacies of Empire. Russia’s civilisational claim to a Eurasian, conservative closeness to its subalterns is still often combined with a claim to superiority that ends up in dismissive attitudes towards those former imperial subjects, proforma professions of respect for their new-found ‘accidental’ statehood notwithstanding. In Russia’s ‘West’, feigned liberalism and civilisationism have created a similar separation between Russia’s claimed environs, and an increasingly hostile Western world, most clearly visible in Ukraine, but also relevant in Belarus, Moldova, and, to some extent, the Baltic States and Poland—now situated outside of that sphere, but still the target of anger and rationalisation. Again, the move from the feigned liberalism of the 2000s and their thinly veiled disciplinary measures—the cutting

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of gas supplies, the ban on food exports—has seen the re-emergence of new versions of familiar civilisational discourses. The Russian elite and society never fully reconciled itself with the loss of Ukraine and Belarus, and recognisable claims of ‘unity’—shared Eastern Slavdom, the Russian language, Christian Orthodoxy—have re-emerged in force as state and society moved towards more explicitly civilisational discourses. The major point of reference here became the Soviet experience and the Great Patriotic War: its reinforcement of a threat from the West—Nazis, ‘Banderists’ —was uneasily combined with a conservative rejection of a dissolute ultraliberal West. Again, as in previous periods, subalterns were divided between an ‘authentic’ pro-Russian variant, and a pro-Western counterpart, with the latter seen as an aberration, a corruption from the civilisational norm; while not racially or ethnically charged—in contrast to what was seen in the East—the dismissal of any agency as a politically suspect betrayal still justifies a claim to Russian (geo-)political and cultural predominance, particularly against Western—NATO, rather than Polish, or Nazi—encroachment. How should the West, and—especially—the new-born states surrounding their former metropole approach the challenge of Russia’s post-imperial predicament? The next chapter will approach this question in three stages. It will first ask in how far a focus on Hybrid Exceptionalism helps us identify the potential for fundamental change in Russia, and in how far such change is possible: in other words, whether Russia, in its various—and, above all, its more recent—incarnations was, and is doomed to revert to the hierarchical and civilisational claims present throughout its present-day discourses. Cautioning against both reification and excessive optimism, and pointing out both potential sources of, and impediments to change, it will then examine what role the West, and Russia’s now formally sovereign subalterns can play in encouraging a possible move away from the more challenging elements in Hybrid Exceptionalism. Is this an issue that can be resolved through the values-laden geopolitics that was so successfully applied in Central and Eastern Europe, for instance, and that perhaps could be used to push back at the Russia’s hierarchical/civilisational embrace? Or is this a far longer-term effort that will mostly fall on the shoulders of the countries of the former Soviet space, in a Gramscian ‘war of position’, a combination of critical dialogue and principled resistance aimed at changing Russia’s motivations, rather than merely containing its power? This is where the hitherto mostly historical

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discussion will turn to the crucial question as to want can be, and what is to be done by those living inside, and around Russia’s claimed ‘sphere of special interest’. And—as the following, final chapter will show—its answer will not be lacking in complexity.

Notes 1. Russian official attitudes towards its ‘stranded diasporas’ varied over time, but gradually took shape under the presidency of Vladimir Putin. At first limited to facilitating the return and reception of ‘compatriots’ to the Russian Federation, they have expanded to now include the active defence of the interests of a broadly and quite varyingly defined group of people: Russian policy documents have thus varyingly referred to the Russian diaspora ‘as “ethnic Russians” (russkie), “Russian speakers” (russkoiazychne), “cultural Russians” (rossiiane), “compatriots” (sootechestvenniki), “countrymen abroad” (zarubezhnye sootechestvenniki) or “fellow tribesmen” (soplemenniki)’ (Pieper, 2020, p. 760). The concepts of ‘diaspora’ and of a Russian cultural sphere are clearly flexible; combined with the liberal distribution of passports to (non-ethnic Russian) former Soviet citizens living abroad, this enables Russia to instrumentalise it to various foreign policy ends, while diasporan ‘lobbies’—usually led by more extreme Russian nationalist—also function as advocates for more imperial foreign and security policies (Batanova, 2009; Laruelle, 2008; Naydenova, 2016). The defence of—mostly ‘passportised’—Russian ‘compatriots’ thus featured prominently in justifications for the 2008 war with Georgia, and in support for the separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, and is specifically mentioned, alongside the ‘safeguarding of the all-Russian cultural identity’, as a task for the Russian state under article 69.3 of the revised constitution (Russian Federation, 2020; see also Klimkin et al., 2020). To this end, the Russian government has also set up a range of official and semi-official organisations, including the fully state-controlled Rossotrudnichestvo, and the Russkii Mir Fund government-organised NGO (Laruelle, 2015; see also Feklyunina, 2016, pp. 781–785). 2. Terrorist attacks against civilian targets—raids into Dagestan, bombings of apartment blocks in 1999, the Beslan siege in 2002, and the ‘Nordost’ theatre hostage-taking in 2004—were often met with racist diatribes against ‘individuals of Caucasian nationality’ in the Moscow press that, in their de-humanisation of Chechens as ‘bandits’, ‘spooks’, ‘wolves’, ‘blacks’, reflected de-humanising language during previous campaigns against these ethnic groups (Francois, 2000; Russell, 2005). A poll taken immediately after the 1999 apartment bombings revealed that 64% of

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the Russian population wanted all Chechens expelled—i.e. ethnically cleansed—from the country (Russell, 2005, p. 108). 3. Following Chechnya’s violent ‘pacification’, Chechenisation and the ensuing handover of authority to local warlord Ramzan Kadyrov involved ‘not simply the transfer of authority to institutions consisting of local inhabitants, but an encouragement and legitimisation of those who are prepared to participate in punitive operations against their own population’ (Anna Politkovskaya, as quoted in Russell, 2011, p. 514). Seen as a product of Russia’s ‘dual state’ (Sakwa, 2010)—where informal authority often overrules formal structures—Kadyrov’s reign of terror has been compared by Russell (2011, p. 518) to that of a ‘satrap’, a ‘“protector of the realm”, […] used to describe those indigenous vassal rulers who were chosen to represent the king’s interests in the various provinces of the Achaemenid Empire’, in much the same way as Russia’s co-opted ethnic-minority vassals were during the early modern imperial period. 4. Georgian wines and mineral waters were thus banned—officially for regulatory violations—as relations deteriorated in 2006, and ‘the Kremlin also supported an unofficial campaign by Russian nationalists to encourage a boycott of Georgian goods’. That same year, 2,300 migrant workers were expelled in reaction to Georgia’s arrest of an alleged Russian spy ring. Transportation links were cut, and Georgian-owned establishments in Russia were also demonstrably raided in what appeared to be a concerted campaign at intimidation. While the Georgian economy did re-direct its exports away from the previously all-important Russian market in response, the economic damage arguably helped hasten the departure of the famously anti-Russian Saakashvili and his United National Movement party from power in 2012–2013 (Newnham, 2015). 5. The idea that the Georgian leadership’s pro-Western orientation was not representative of the Georgians’ traditional love for Russia was also widespread in the Russian commentariat (for select examples, see Gorupai, 2006; Kommersant, 2006; Leontiev, 2006). Some influential commentators even went so far as to claim Georgian ingratitude at having been ‘saved’ from Persian conquest by Russia in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, thus owing their very statehood to Russian domination (see Matsaberidze, 2007; Migranyan, 2006). One favourite play of words taken over by a political leader then at the beginning of his career—Alexei Navalny—referred to Georgians (‘Gruziny’ in Russian) as rodents (‘gryzuny’); for good measure, Navalny also openly advocating their wholesale expulsion from Russia in response to the 2008 war, and— in a double insult—suggested the writing of Belarusian was invented by ‘khachiky’—a derogative term for Armenians (Ablogiya, 2020; Navalny, 2008).

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6. Putin is thus widely reported as having stated—in the aftermath of the 2008 invasion—that he would like Saakashvili ‘hung by his private parts’, in a turn of phrase not likely to be reproduced towards a leader outside the ‘oriental’ parts of Russia’s perceived sphere of interest (Levy, 2009; McGuinness, 2011). For good measure, the colourful language appears to have been frequently reciprocated (Lomsadze, 2010). 7. In Putin’s words, ‘[Nazarbayev] has created a state on a territory where there has never been a state. The Kazakhs never had a state of their own, and he created it’. In the same interview, Putin proceeds to make the link between the liberal and civilisational discourses that form part of contemporary Hybrid Exceptionalism: ‘Philosophers know where this idea of a Eurasian union came from and how it developed, who supported it in Russia. The Kazakhs picked it up proceeding from the understanding that it is good for their economy, it helps them stay within the so-called “greater Russian world”, which is part of world civilisation, it is good for the development of their industry, of advanced technologies and so forth. I am convinced that this will continue in the same vein for the midand long historical term’ (Kremlin.ru, 2014b). 8. There was, indeed, a lingering inability to recognise and accept the reality of Ukrainian independence in broader Russian political culture: ‘for Russians, Ukraine [was] not that different from Russia proper: a former hinterland that managed to break free. Consequently, Ukrainian “otherness” [was] perceived as something quite new and unexpected by not only Russian general public, but also politicians and intellectuals’ (Molchanov, 1997, p. 6; see also Kohut, 1994, pp. 138–140). Similarly, while much of Belarus’ integration with Russia during the 1990s was driven by its authoritarian second president, Alexander Lukashenko, ‘…most Russian officials regard[ed] an independent Belarus as an oxymoron; most fully expect[ed] Belarus to rejoin the Russian fold […] however, on terms set by Moscow’ (Blacker & Rice, 2001, p. 245; see also Dimitri Trenin, 2005). The Russian Supreme Soviet passed resolutions in 1992 and 1993, respectively, questioning the validity of the transfer of the territory by Khrushchev in 1954, and claiming Sebastopol—base of its Black Sea fleet—as a ‘subject’ of the Russian Federation (Sherr, 1997, p. 37). Moves towards separatism also emerged and intensified throughout the early 1990s, allegedly with the encouragement of at least parts of the Russian government apparatus, resulting in a tug-of-war on sovereignty and a Crimean constitution between the peninsula’s authorities, and Kyiv (Wydra, 2004). These tendencies diminished and eventually disappeared after the signing of the (now expired) Ukrainian-Russian Friendship treaty and Black Sea Fleet accords—granting the Russian navy a lease of 20 years

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9.

10.

11.

12.

in the strategic port of Sebastopol—in 1997 (Sherr, 1997; The Moscow Times, 2018; Yost, 2015). Paralleling some of the tropes seen during earlier periods on Polish or Catholic manipulations, the Russian media thus portrayed the revolutions as the result of a subservience to Western interests, or as a fateful error on the Ukrainians’ part, the product of psychological manipulation by ruthless Western-backed politicians, or a pathology from which the Ukrainian ‘Slavic brothers’—often referred to through the collective ‘we’—had to be rescued. In fact, ‘…[t]he ubiquitous motif of Western “intervention” in the political affairs of former Soviet Republics stirs Cold War fears: America and its allies undermine stability in the region and unity within the “family” of “brother nations” that gather around “mother Russia”’ (A’Beckett, 2006, p. 26; see also Khineyko, 2007). The ‘Eurasian Union’ was first proposed as a supra-national institution by Vladimir Putin (2011) in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election. Based on previously less ambitious efforts at economic integration in the post-Soviet space, in envisaged supra-national political and economic institutions strongly modelled on an EU template. With Belarus and Kazakhstan relatively willing participants, Putin reportedly strong-armed Armenia and Kyrgyzstan—both highly dependent on Russia in various ways—into joining, with the former abandoning its plans to join the EU ‘Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement’ in September 2013. The political aspects of the Union were whittled down considerably in the run-up to the signing and coming into force of the relevant legal instruments in 2015, under strong Belarusian and Kazakhstani pressure (Delcour et al., 2016; Roberts & Moshes, 2016). Thus, according to Sergey Lavrov, ‘…people are tired of the attempts of neo-liberals to impose values, which have nothing to do with traditional values. They cannot even be called values. They are simply some mannerisms, which occurred in the situation of the current stage of development of western communities and are alien to the Orthodox religions, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism – all main world religions, which share the nature of their concepts’ (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, 2014c). One speech by Putin—notably at the 2013 ‘Orthodox-Slavic Values: The Foundation of Ukraine’s Civilisational Choice’ Conference—is typical in rehabilitating and tying together specific values, the Tsarist and Soviet experiences, and contemporary integration projects. After pointing out the many advantages bestowed on Ukraine as part of the Russian Empire and the USSR, the Russian president concludes: ‘We live in different countries today, but this fact in no way crosses out the common historic past that we share, and that is our asset and the foundation upon which we can

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build new integration ties’ (Kremlin.ru, 2013; see also Adler, 2005; Liñán Vazquez, 2010). 13. The collective naming of the separatist Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics as ‘Novorossiya’ in apparent preparation to their westward expansion into southern Ukraine during the first weeks and months of the separatist uprising in 2014 was also instructive in its reference to imperial imagery. The name harked back to imperial times, when territories roughly approximating those claimed by this ‘project’ were incorporated by Catherine the Great into the Russian empire in the eighteenth century, as a gubernia composed of lands formerly controlled by the Southern and Zaparozhian Sich and the Crimean khanate. As Laruelle moreover points out, three strands of Russian imperial thinking—red (Soviet/Eurasianist), white (ultraconservative/Tsarist) and brown (fascist)—came together in its creation, with the first two identifying at least to some extent with official circles in Moscow. Some have argued it might have provided the option for a full-fledged Russian invasion of Ukraine in the aftermath of the Euromaidan; the ‘project’ eventually petered out as Russian objectives became more limited (Laruelle, 2016; Kuzio, 2019). 14. As stated by Putin ‘…only as a result of Polonization, the part of the Ukrainians who lived in the territory under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, only around the 16th century the first language differences appeared. In general, the Ukrainians [with an accent on the first a] were called the people who lived […] on the frontiers of the Russian state. There were Ukrainians in Pskov; Ukrainians were the people who defended the southern frontiers from attacks by the Crimean khan. Ukrainians were in the Urals. Ukrainians were everywhere. We had no language differences’ (Kremlin.ru, 2020). Meanwhile, according to Lavrov, ‘we know the historical facts of Ukraine’s emergence as a state: Stalin’s name is repeatedly mentioned in this regard, as well as the decisions dating back to the Soviet times regarding the transfer of certain native Russian territories to Ukraine. We want to see peace and calm in Ukraine. To achieve this, Ukraine must remain united. No one should be allowed to tear it apart. We hear such sentiments already being voiced in certain circles’ (BBC Monitoring, 2015). 15. After the end of the Cold War, Ukraine’s Orthodox Christians had remained split between the ‘Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kiev Patriarchate’)’, the ‘Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church’, and the ‘Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate)’, with the latter a formal part of the Russian Orthodox Church. The 2014 annexation of the Crimea and the war in the Donbas precipitated state-led efforts to unify these various denominations into one ‘Orthodox Church of Ukraine’

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(OCU) recognised as independent from Moscow by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (Marangé, 2019; Shestopalets, 2019). The move was given sanction in 2018, precipitating a schism between the Moscow and Constantinople patriarchates; the Russian Orthodox Church remains unchallenged in the Crimea and the Donbass, while its still-dominant position in the rest of Ukraine has been shrinking in recent years, not least because of official pressure to unite with the now officially and ecclesiastically recognised OCU (A. Mudrov, 2019; Wesolowsky, 2020). In the 1990s, autonomous republics at the heart of these centrifugal tendencies—like Tatarstan and openly separatist Chechnya—devised historiographies that were critical of Russian imperial domination, as visible in both academia and school textbooks (Gammer, 2002; Shnirelman, 2009b; Zverev, 2002). Over time, the centre re-asserted its authority, imposing more Russo-centric versions of history and displacing the teaching of region-specific histories; this tendency has only intensified in recent years with an increased role for the state in setting the parameters of ‘appropriate’ history-writing. According to Bassin (2009, p. 133) ethnogeopolitics ‘argues that ethnicity—in all of its various manifestations—represents the most fundamental force driving the political life of the 21st Century’. Emerging partly from the neo-Eurasianist thought of Lev Gumilev, its extreme essentialisation of ethnos has very strong hierarchical undertones, with ethnic groups—assumed not to have the right to self-determination—inserted into a hierarchy where civilisationally defined ‘super-ethnoses’ shape world politics. Such civilisational approaches were accompanied by the widespread use of pseudo-scientific concepts like ‘“archetypes,” “national character,” “ethnopsychology,” the “civilization factor,” “national psychological code,” “cultural ecology,”’ (Shnirelman, 2009a, p. 73), with such civilisational approaches feeding directly into textbooks (e.g. Dergachev, 2012; Nartov, 1999), and xenophobia and chauvinism in wider society. This is perhaps best visible in works on the Caucasus, where the Russian conquests’ civilising role is often still stressed, as in Soviet times, while the genocide of the Circassians is minimised or ignored; the legacy of Imam Shamil, leader of the Caucasus rebellion—is also often defined as his eventual submission to, instead of his resistance against, Russian imperial power, in a line eagerly picked up by—or picked up from?—Russian officialdom (Gammer & Kaplan, 2013; Garunova, 2014). Leviathan—a film depicting a lone family’s doomed struggle against attempts by local powers in the remote Russian north to expropriate their house—is thus a comment on the corrupt social contract between the state and its citizens under Putin, going against the orthodox narratives of this period as a ‘restoration of order’ after the chaos of the 1990s (Wengle et al., 2018). Pussy Riot’s provocative acts—including, famously, a punk

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rock performance in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour cathedral—touch on a number of biopolitical issues related to the patriarchal conservatism espoused by the Putin regime, in close co-operation with the Church (Prozorov, 2014; Sharafutdinova, 2014); Pavlensky’s various performances have involved the sewing of his lips in front of a church, the nailing of his scrotum to Red Square, all protests against the Putin regime’s attempts to control the ‘correct’ nature of Russian bodies (Makarychev & Medvedev, 2018). The societal appeal and influence of such high-brow, critical cultural output remains rather limited. 20. Nikita Mikhalkov’s output has thus been referred to as an ‘Imperial Reclamation Project’ (Condee, 2009, p. 85); his later work—through his TriTe studio—‘as come to play a central role in Russia’s cultural life inseparable from Kremlin politics.’, directly tied to the need for a ‘patriotic education’ of Russian citizenry, through themes like the restoration of order following the Time of Troubles (1612), wars with the Ottoman Empire (Turetskii Gambit ) (pp. 88–89). As Norris (2012)argues, after a period of underfunding and post-Soviet drift in the 1990s, the state-sponsored ‘Russian blockbuster’ emerged from the renewed desire for patriotism during the first years of this century; while their styles often followed an American template, these popular ‘historical films not only attempted to wrestle with contentious pasts; they also offered visual and aural menus of Russianness that audiences could consume … [providing] an à la carte menu of Russianness for audiences to select from and to reinterpret as the basis for a new nationhood. Contemporary Russian films certainly carried traces of empire within them; they also contained elements of nationhood’ (p. 17, see also Van Gorp, 2011). 21. Partly because of the regularly changing and competing versions of official historiography, fiction and science have amalgamated into ‘alternative histories’ with something of a therapeutic function against the perceived humiliations of the recent past. Sometimes, they have done so as nostalgic think-pieces incorporating the grievances of the twentieth century, asking ‘what if’ questions regarding Russia’s possible development had Stolypin’s reforms not been cut short by his murder, or had Nicholas II decided not to participate in World War I, or had the monarchy been restored after the failed Bolshevik revolution (Laruelle, 2012, pp. 569–570); at other times, they take wild liberties with the historical truth through works like Fomenko’s pseudo-scholarly ‘New Chronology’ of world history, which posits the start of the pre-history at the ninth century AD and makes all manner of extreme inferences from that absurd starting point (Laruelle, 2012; Sheiko, 2012; Sheiko & Brown, 2014). Fomenko, a mathematician by training, thus posits that Jesus Christ lived in the eleventh century, that Russia and the Slavs were at the basis of all major civilisations in

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history, and that the West has, throughout history, conspired to obfuscate these facts. Thus, the Mongol Empire was actually a Russian attempt to resist the—Western—Teutonic knights, and the Romanovs were part of a Western plot to corrupt Russia, among many other outlandish claims. While his theories are dismissed by serious historians, they have proved wildly popular among the broader public, and have indirectly influenced academic and university milieus, having had ‘some of their ideological articulations and thematic fetishes included in the domain of the politically or academically correct, in particular in such new disciplines as Culturology, Geopolitics, Ethno-politology, and so on’. According to Laruelle (2012, p. 580), they act as a ‘Bourdieusian habitus’ giving members of the Russian intelligentsia ‘a form of symbolic compensation for their loss of values, of status, and of Weltanschauung, as well as reassuring explanations which stage the individual and collective drama in an objective form.’ 22. In fact, as revisions to the ‘prisoner’ paradigm (Grant, 2009) long established in Russian orientalist artistic output, both films used the theme of soldiers engaged in conflict in the Caucasus to enact the Russian identity crises of the 1990s. In ‘Checkpoint’, soldiers manning a remote outpost surrounded by hostile locals thus end up buying sex for bullets, reflecting ‘a range of imperial attitudes to a prized oriental trophy that literally backfires against them’ (Monastireva-Ansdell, 2017, p. 118); ‘Prisoner’— a contemporary film adaptation of Tolstoy’s eponymous work—deals with two soldiers taken prisoner, an act of mercy on the part of the local inhabitants towards the ‘better’ of the two, and ends with the destruction of the local village in a Russian punitive strike (Michaels, 2004, pp. 67–72). According to Monastireva-Ansdell (2017, p. 117), these films showed how ‘[t]hree major discourses—the emerging postcolonial critique, the popular anti-totalitarian rhetoric, and the traditional prejudice against “hostile Others”—became important facets of the Prisoner myth as interrogated and revised in the cinema of the first post-Soviet decade, and employed in the official and independent media coverage of the conflict’. 23. The foundations of a more ‘patriotic’ style of film-making already existed in the 1990s, with early crime blockbusters like the immensely popular ‘Brother’ series (‘Brat’ and ‘Brat 2’, respectively, 1997 and 2000) already quite straightforward in their depictions of Russian alienation from the West, their rejection of the Soviet-era ‘Brotherhood of Nations’ and simultaneous ‘othering’ of Caucasians and Central Asians—not surprising in light of the open racism and misogyny of one of their frequent directors, Aleksey Balabanov (Condee, 2009, p. 233; Merrill, 2012). Nikita Mikhalkov’s evolution during the 1990s also presaged his, and

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others’ subsequent move towards unapologetically nationalist or ‘patriotic’ cinema: acclaimed for his anti-Stalinist screed ‘Burnt by the Sun’ (1994), his other major work of the 1990s—‘Urga’(1991), positively depicting the chance encounter between a Mongolian herdsman and a Russian truck driver—dwelled on the mythical links between ‘Eurasians’ proffered by neo-Eurasianist ‘scholarship’. This Eurasianist theme has, for instance, been taken up, and repeated throughout the Putin era in productions like ‘Mongol’ (2007), ‘The Secret of Genghis Khan’ (‘Taina Chingis Khaana’, 2009), and ‘The Horde (‘Orda’, 2012), films which, in the aggregate, demonstrated the ambiguous relationship of Russia as part of, and, simultaneously, superior to, the Orient (Engel, 2017). Meanwhile, historical adaptations like ‘Turkish Gambit’ (‘Turetskii Gambit’, 2005)— set in the Balkans during the Turko-Russian war of 1877—have harked back to the times of imperial greatness by reproducing the Pan-Slavist themes, and the ‘othering’ of the ‘Oriental’ in the original work by the immensely popular Boris Akunin (Baraban, 2004; Hashamova, 2015). 24. Ukrainian speakers are thus portrayed in distinctly negative collaborationist terms, in Russian-produced films like ‘We Are From the Future 2’ (2008) and ‘The Match’ (2012)—the latter banned in Ukraine—where ‘the modern states and national identities of the former empire’s nonRussian nationalities are presented as fakes […T]he producers of the Russian cultural myth introduce “good” and “bad” Ukrainians or show the “bad” ones discovering their “true” Russian selves’ (Yekelchyk, 2013, p. 5).

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CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Beyond Empire’s Shadow

Introduction Many states maintain narratives of exceptionalism; in that sense, at least, there is nothing extra-ordinary to the exceptionalism displayed by Russia in its various—Tsarist, Soviet, contemporary Federative—guises. Some exceptionalisms are more important than others, however, and, as a great power straddling much of the Eurasian landmass, how Russia’s elite and society define their place in the world was and remains of major significance. St. Petersburg and Moscow developed discourses of empire and hierarchy that simultaneously stood apart from and imitated elements of their Western counterparts in reaction to their imperfect position within a modern and late modern world shaped and dominated by those Western powers; Russia’s cultural self-positioning between East and West added to the specificity of its narratives. The result is an ambiguity that, even today, colours Russia’s relationship with its claimed periphery and the West. I have decided to call this ambiguous common thread running through the various justifications for hierarchical rule proffered by Russia’s various incarnations Hybrid Exceptionalism, because of its simultaneous delineation of a Russian/Slavic/Eurasian civilisational sphere as separate from the West, and its orientalisation of a partially related Eastern ‘other’, usually situated in the Caucasus and Central Asia. It was hybrid in its combination of a ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ gaze, its repeated selfpositioning between a West towards whose modernity it long aspired, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Oskanian, Russian Exceptionalism between East and West, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69713-6_7

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and an Orient with which it combined affinity with a claim to superiority; and it was exceptionalist according to Holsti’s definition—introduced in chapter two—and five central claims made by Russia in its three major historical periods: an assumed responsibility, obligation, or mission to liberate others; its freedom from external constraints in realising that mission; the hostility of the surrounding world; a need for external enemies; and a tendency to portray itself as a victim. Where its hybridity was concerned (Table 7.1), the Empire’s problematic nineteenth-century journey towards modernity saw it placed between a Catholic or enlightened West, and an exotic, yet familiar Orient by Slavophilic or—to a lesser extent—Westernising narratives. The Soviet Union’s Marxism-Leninism created a barrier with a capitalist (and fascist) West, while ensuring a part-identification with, and leading role over, the oppressed, yet obscurantist East (and South). Contemporary Russia, finally, combined these two historic experiences into discourses and practices combining freely interpreted elements from the liberal international order with Orthodox and Soviet civilisational aspects, with Western liberal decadence or ‘Nazism’ as threats on one side, and ‘terrorism’ or, more broadly, oriental ‘irrationalism’ on the other. Russia also moved through various exceptionalist claims during its three major, modern historical periods, as seen in Table 7.2. The Tsars liberated their Slavic or Christian brethren from rival empires; they justified their missions through Orthodoxy or naked imperialism, in a hostile world marked by Western Catholic—or enlightenment—intrigue and Oriental irrationality; and they saw themselves as under-appreciated and short-changed by their more modern European rivals. The Soviets similarly saw themselves surrounded by a hostile Capitalism—or Fascism— from which they aimed to free the global proletariat and the Global South, in a mission justified by Marxism-Leninism, aimed at enemies including the Nazis and, during the Cold War, the capitalist West. After the prevarication of the 1990s, and alongside its feigned liberalism, these two exceptionalisms were combined into Russia’s current, regionally focused version: maintaining the Soviet/Orthodox authenticity of the ‘near abroad’, justified through its naturalised claim to Great Power status against a hostile global Liberal hegemony inhabited by ‘Western’ and ‘terrorist’ enemies, after the humiliation of the ‘stab-in-the-back’ at the end of the Cold War.

Capitalism/Bourgeois Nationalism/Fascism Western Decadence/Fascism

Soviet Union

Cont/ary Russia

Catholicism/Enlightenment

Western Threats

Russia’s Hybridities

Tsarist Russia

Table 7.1

‘Feigned’ Liberalism Russian (Eurasian-Orthodox-Soviet) Authenticity and Order

Orthodox Slavdom/Alternative Modernity/‘Russianness’ Marxism-Leninism

Civilising Mission

Irrationality/Terrorism (‘Wahhabism’)

Feudalism/Tribalism/Obscurantism

Islam (‘Muridism’)

Eastern Threats

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The Global Proletariat/South The ‘Russian World’ ‘Eurasia’ ‘Traditional’ Europe

Soviet Union

Contemporary Russia

Slavic/Christian Brethren

Liberating Mission

Russia’s Exceptionalisms

Tsarist Russia

Table 7.2

Great Power Status

Socialism

Imperialism

Complete Justification Liberal Enlightenment’Jesuitism’ Islam Capitalism Fascism Obscurantism Liberal International Order

Hostile World

Nazi Germany United States The West Terrorists

Poles/Imperial Rivals/Jews

Enemy

‘Sacrifice in World War II’ ‘Stab in the back’

Crimea

Sense of Victimhood

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In their three varieties—Tsarist, Soviet, contemporary—the above combinations of hybridity and exceptionalism have thus differed considerably in substance, while at the same time maintaining their ambiguous and hierarchical form. Chaadayev, Uvarov, and their intellectual successors struggled with the onset of modernity in a world where the hierarchies of imperialism stood at the very core of that modernity; Lenin and the Bolsheviks explicitly rejected a capitalist version of that modernity for an alternative that, while disavowing, and even combating those hierarchies, still ended up surreptitiously reproducing them through a civilising mission based on that very alternative; and post-Cold War Russia’s quest for status in a liberal, nominally post-imperial world ended in a frustrated post-modern mingling of a feigned liberalism, and elements of Russia’s previous, Soviet, and Tsarist experiences. Onetime discourses of imperial hierarchy and Marxist-Leninist civilising missions may now have sublimated into something more conforming to a postcolonial, post-Soviet era—by adopting the quasi-liberal language of economic rationality and international legality—both in discourse and practice. But echoes of a notso-distant Tsarist and Soviet past can still be heard in Moscow’s various justifications for the more fundamental civilisational separateness of ‘its’ sphere of privileged interest. In fact, as the Putin regime’s alienation from the Western core of International Society has intensified, the emphasis has been moving towards the latter, civilisational discourses. One important consequence flows from this realisation of the longtime centrality of hybridity and exceptionalism in Russians’ world views. Indeed, empire-as-hybrid-exceptionalism appears to be a constant in Russia’s consecutive narratives of (post-)modernity, despite its wildly fluctuating formal political makeup and the changes in international society: it is almost as if Russia is inescapably drawn towards discourses marked by an East/West ambiguity and a tendency towards hierarchical control. But one should always be cautious of excessive determinism, even if this feature appears to be a deep-seated element of Russia’s various identities, and the regional and global perspectives of its quite disparate Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet elites. ‘Hybrid Exceptionalism’ should not only bring this constancy to the fore; it should also provide future researchers and analysts with a conceptual tool by which to gauge the deviance of Russian elite discourses from this narrative, by which to identify the emergence of the green shoots of possible change. A fundamental shift in Russia’s world view is indeed unlikely, because it will only occur once it moves away from the various, at times dramatically divergent tropes that

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reproduce and keep reproducing this particular form of exceptionalism; that does not mean, however, that it is impossible, or that less dramatic change—say, alternative forms of exceptionalism that are more compatible with the aspirations of its former imperial possessions—could not provide a mutually acceptable framework for its at times problematic relationship with its neighbours and the West. And this is one of the great challenges of our times: Russia’s increasing revisionism, its outright rejection, and undermining of the Liberal International Order in favour of a discourse of civilisational polycentrism—with itself on top of a separate pole—present a challenge, both for the states and societies surrounding it, and for those behind the protective shield of NATO’s article 5. While its hierarchical claims to a ‘sphere of interest’ may seem anachronistic, they do emerge from a frustrated nuclear-armed great power, with both the capabilities and the motivation to act as a spoiler in the regional and domestic politics of its neighbouring states and, increasingly, within the democracies of the West (Diresta & Grossman, 2020; Radin et al., 2020). Total defeat or fundamental transformation from the outside—as in the cases of post-World War II Germany and Japan (Dobbins et al., 2008, pp. 11–36)—appears to be out of the question. More broadly, while it is clear from the above that Russia can and does change, it is far from apparent whether it can be changed, in a deliberate, calculated way: whether, in other words, some form of outside—or even inside—agency, rather than the shifting structural environment, can provide the impetus for transformation, including transformations away from the particularly confrontational form of Hybrid Exceptionalism it has adopted today, or even from Hybrid Exceptionalism itself, towards more amenable and pragmatic forms of interaction. The following three sections will therefore look at the present, and into the future, in an attempt to tie the insights of the previous four chapters to contemporary practice, weighing the advantages and disadvantages of various options in both state policy and broader societal practice in response to the former Soviet Union’s continuing post-imperial predicament. A first section will build on the questions posed above as to the possibility for change within Russia: how does the notion of Hybrid Exceptionalism help us understand potential shifts in a country where it has appeared to be a recurring, and seemingly quite persistent feature? And—in how far would such shifts be subject to external and internal agency—i.e. to conscious action by actors outside and inside Russia?

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In light of this discussion, a subsequent section will examine the various policy options of the West—the European Union, the United States, NATO—towards Russia’s hierarchical-civilisational claims, going from complete disengagement from the region, to a redoubling of the values-based geopolitical approach adopted since the 1990s—envisaging the gradual expansion of a Euro-Atlantic, Kantian ‘zone of peace’ into the former Soviet space. Last but not least, a final section will consider the implications of all of the above for the former imperial subalterns themselves: will a move towards the West, or all-out resistance provide the best solution for their efforts at full emancipation? Or does the answer lie, by contrast, in some form of accommodation with their former metropole? These questions have plagued the states and peoples of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia since 1991; and taking the long view adopted in this volume might help them provide at least part of an answer.

Russia Between Empire and Reality Over the past decades, Russia has proved true to its status as a multilayered enigma. It has certainly disappointed the optimistic expectations that led some to proclaim its possible emergence as a ‘normal’—i.e. Western—great power during the 1990s. To be sure, expecting Russia to become just another Western power had set the bar rather high to begin with: a Russia devoid of its hybridity and its claim to regionally predominant great power status would no longer have been Russia as we have known it over the past two centuries. To turn into just another Western state, it would, among others, have had to resolve its difficult relationship with (post-)modernity and negate much of its resultingly complex, perennially ambiguous identity. Instead, Russia has, both culturally and geopolitically, remained in a space it has occupied for centuries: between the Orient and the Occident, in a civilisational world in which it sees itself—at times more explicitly than at others—as reigning supreme. The updated form of Hybrid Exceptionalism adopted in the post-Soviet era appears to simply represent a return to what had been seen as normalcy for most of Russian history after a period of confusion and prevarication. But should states, societies, and elites in the former Soviet Union and beyond accept this element in Russia’s narratives as a constant, rather than something that could be subject to change? While its longer-term persistence may point to the unchanging nature of Russia’s imperial predicament, two potential dangers spring from such a reified view of

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what remains a socially constructed and discursively reproduced reality: of excessive Russophobia on the one hand, and neo-imperial apologia on the other. A blind acceptance of Russia’s imperial condition could lead some to conclude that the emancipation of its subalterns would either require the complete isolation of the Russian state, or a blind acceptance of its hierarchical claims as beyond debate. While extreme, such views do exist both within and outside the former Soviet space, among Western neoconservatives and post-Soviet nationalists—adherents to Manichaean, black and white visions of the world—or, on the other side of this equation, Kremlin apologists (Andrei Dalibor et al., 2017; Smith, 2019; Tsygankov, 2009). Hybrid Exceptionalism provides the possibility of a third way, one that takes a realistic view of both the limits and the possibilities of change: from that perspective, while it appears to emphasise the continuity of Russia’s hierarchical and hybrid world views, it also provides a way of assessing any possible changes away from their narratives and discourses. Indeed, Russia has reverted to different iterations of hybrid-exceptionalist rhetoric and behaviour at various points in its modern past; but focusing on these ambiguous and imperious discourses and practices could also provide an indication of both the limits and the potential for either their abandonment, or their modification into something less hierarchical, less domineering. Even if continuity has been the norm, sensitivity to the imperial legacies in Russia’s discourses and practices can help us assess potential, or real change that might go beyond more superficial adaptations to changed circumstances. Being attentive to these claims may help us separate fundamental redefinitions towards less hierarchy from pragmatic tweaks; it may help us distinguish ideological changes that do not change fundamental hierarchical assumptions from those that do. Between Continuity and Change The major disruptions of Russian history—the revolutions of 1917 and the collapse of the USSR—certainly reinforce the element of continuity in the country’s hybrid-exceptionalist discourses. After both 1917 and 1991, its policymakers, and broader society, eventually ended up reproducing significant aspects of their predecessors’ narratives, in spite of often radically different foundational ideologies. Following a twentieth-century ‘gathering of the lands’ appropriately justified in Marxist-Leninist terms, the Bolsheviks ended up redefining the national authenticities of their

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subject peoples in ways that fit their particular civilising mission, often drawing on knowledge pioneered during the Tsarist era, before Stalin and his successors returned the USSR to an adapted form of the Russocentrism also seen in the late Tsarist period. The centrifugal tendencies seen during the short liberal interlude of the early 1990s were soon replaced by an emphasis on power verticals at home, and a commensurate attempted—though hitherto equivocally successful—reassertion of Russian authority over a claimed sphere of interest, in the completely different international environment of the late twentieth/early twentyfirst centuries. The continuity of these imperial patterns poses a challenge to anyone aiming at a more egalitarian relationship between Moscow and its former subalterns. In between these moments of crisis, Hybrid Exceptionalism also fortifies a view of Russian history as always pushed towards liminality and hierarchical imposition, precisely because of its roots in Russia’s complex relationship with the West. As argued in preceding chapters, Russia’s Hybrid Exceptionalism originally emerged out of a frustration with, and as a challenge to, Western modernity. In the 1830s, Uvarov’s triad and the discussions of the Westernisers and Slavophiles that followed were intrinsically connected with Russia’s inability to ‘properly’ modernise, its position outside the European modern mainstream after the decay of the conservatism of the post-Vienna European order; the Soviet form of Hybrid Exceptionalism was, similarly, a challenge to the Western, capitalist form of modernity. In both cases, the reference point for aspiration was the West, while an internal empire functioned as the receptacle to a civilising mission. Contemporary Russia has similarly moved from a period of prevarication in the 1990s, through attempted imitation in the 2000s, to one of more open confrontation today. These conservative leanings of Russia’s Hybrid Exceptionalism could also be seen as being bolstered by Russia’s Mearsheimerian tendency— because of its complex geopolitical predicament and its sheer size—to fall into a leading role vis-à-vis its for the most part weaker immediate neighbours (Mearsheimer, 2001, 2014b, pp. 82–84): their domination becomes a geopolitical necessity, the only certain way of averting geopolitical threats. Much of the Tsarist Empire’s expansion, the Soviet Union’s domination of Central and Eastern Europe, and contemporary Russia’s pushback against NATO and the European Union in places like Ukraine and Georgia can be credibly explained this way. Seen from this angle, the hybrid-exceptionalist narratives become a recurring, convenient

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rationalisation emerging from more fundamental, ‘objective’ structural, power-political realities: Russia’s location in Eurasia and its oscillating— but, on the whole, disproportionate—material power ensure a reiteration in form, in spite of radically differing substance. But, in difference to Mearsheimer deterministic causal framework, looking at Russia’s narratives through the hybrid-exceptionalism lens allows us to keep an open mind as to the possibilities of future change. Neither history, nor structural assumptions should mean that change away from hierarchical-civilisational claims inherent in Hybrid Exceptionalism should out of the question, or that their longer-term modification into forms more amenable with peaceful cohabitation with the West, and Russia’s subalterns, should be excluded. After all, Hybrid Exceptionalism’s ontology posits the world as socially—discursively, practically—constructed, and therefore subject to change. Even allowing for a continued claim to status, history might see the emergence of more pragmatic adaptations: the phenomenon is, after all, shaped by historical ‘events’—the very moments of disruption mentioned above—Russia’s relative power, and its changing relationship with both the West as its major ‘significant other’ and its immediate geopolitical environment, now populated by nominally sovereign former subalterns. To start with, just as they offer a firm reason to expect continuity in Russia’s behaviour, the two major moments of disruption mentioned above also provide prospects for possible change: a counterfactual approach to history could, for instance, ask how imperial Russia’s relationship with its nationalities could have changed had the February Revolution not resulted in the Bolshevik takeover in October that year, but a more liberal Russia, where a less pervasive civilising mission would not insist on the imposition of Marxism-Leninism on the new-born surrounding ‘bourgeois’ states, like Ukraine, or the South Caucasian republics; or if the Bolshevik experiment in nativisation had not been cut short by Stalin’s ham-fisted approach to both industrialisation and nationalities policy; or if the liberals of the early 1990s had not been discredited—or, alternatively, had not discredited themselves — through economic implosion, and Russia’s continued exclusion from the Western core of the liberal global and regional security order. Against Russia’s reversion to imperial form following these disruptions stands the potential for change that their de-stabilisations of prevailing discourses represented; and it is precisely these kinds of de-stabilisations that may offer hope for positive, post-imperial change in future.

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Granted, this hope should not be overstated: radical transformations of great powers are rare. Britain and France arguably retained forms of exceptionalism partly based on their imperial pasts after the end of their empires, albeit in adapted form (Chafer & Godin, 2010; Hood, 2008), and Germany and Japan only abandoned their militaristic claims to great power status after their—and their ideologies’—comprehensive defeat in total war. History has also shown how Russia came tantalisingly close, but never achieved the transformative potentials enumerated above; the question is also whether such a revolutionary scenario would be desirable in the nuclear age, with the prospect of a de-stabilised, revolutionary nuclear-armed power (Crawford et al., 1999; Dower, 1999). Nevertheless, should such disruptions occur in future, a focus on the discourses of hierarchy and hybridity described in previous chapters would facilitate the identification of at least a potential for change. This does not mean, however, that we would have to wait for such radically transformative periods of instability to look at changes in Hybrid Exceptionalism as harbingers of a shift towards greater acceptance of an end of empire. Competition with the West can take many forms— both imitation and doubling down—and Russia’s current tendency to double down and dominate is, after all, both driven by the nature of that competition and limited by its ability to successfully project power into ‘its’ claimed sphere of influence. ‘Change’ might therefore emerge as a result of the realities and limitations of power, or be prompted by gradually modified perceptions of Moscow’s relationship with the West, rather than a more dramatic systemic shock resulting in a change of regime, or regime type (Bashkirova et al., 2019; Petrov and Gel’Man, 2019), as in the case of the move from the stultified conservatism of Nicolas I to the dynamic reformism of Alexander II in the nineteenth century, or— rather less successfully—from Brezhnev’s zastoi to Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika in the twentieth century. A sensitivity to Russia’s hierarchical discourses and their context will thus allow us to discern the potential for changes within the evolving iterations of Russia’s hierarchical Weltanschauung when its elite makes similar pragmatic adaptations in response to changing realities. Russia Today What does this mean for the future of Russia’s current incarnation—the Russian Federation? The hardening of hybrid-exceptionalist discourses

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in recent decades doesn’t offer much cause for optimism for change. In fact, the gradual move away from the mimicry of feigned liberalism appears to have reinforced the hierarchical assumptions of Russian civilisational distinctiveness in Russian elite and society. Russian civilisationist discourses have become more engrained at an official level and have intensified since Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, reinforcing a trend observed since at least the mid-2000s. Russia’s general internal political landscape does not provide much hope for a radical move away from this entrenchment either: there are no forces like the Bolsheviks before 1917, or the reformists before 1991, that could become the standard-bearers of a revolutionary move away from the more unpalatable version of Hybrid Exceptionalism Russia expounds today. The clearly liberal, pro-Western parties of the 1990s have long withered into insignificance; the one major extra-systemic opposition grouping—centred on anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny—lacks a coherent ideology beyond populist amalgamation of nationalist, democratic, and liberal elements, and opposition to the Putin kleptocracy (Glazunova, 2020; Laruelle, 2014). With the recent jailing of its leader, and a crackdown on its organisational structure, it has possibly weakened beyond recovery. And those systemic parties that have at times challenged the authority of the Kremlin—Zyuganov’s Communists and Zhirinovsky’s ‘Liberal Democrats’—are, if anything, holdovers from the 1990s, as the original carriers of the red-brown civilisational discourses employed by the Kremlin today. Change could therefore either not occur at all—with the current Russian regime firmly entrenched in at least the short to medium term; or it might actually evolve towards a worsening of Russia’s alienation from the West and its neo-imperial claims over the former Soviet space. The evolution of these discourses is palpable: at the beginning of Putin’s term, Russia still styled itself a ‘partner’ to the West, taking great pains to portray its involvement in the former Soviet space as that of a responsible stakeholder in the liberal world order. Some Russian policymakers—most notably Putin himself—even went so far as to suggest Russian membership in NATO as a possibility (Baker, 2002; Bosworth, 2002); the prospects of some form of pan-European security architecture were also still seen as an option, and, while attitudes towards unilateral NATO expansion were still negative, Moscow appeared to have accepted the inclusion of Central and Eastern Europe—including the Baltic states—as a fait accompli, while EU involvement in the former

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Soviet space was not necessarily looked upon negatively (Baranovsky, 2003; Karabeshkin & Spechler, 2007). One should not overstate the egalitarian content of these Russian attitudes: the idea behind it still appeared to be a condominium, a concert of great powers; but it was still more amenable to co-operation with the West and a possible stabilisation of relations with former subalterns into an acceptance of their sovereignty than what we have today. But, as we now know, this attitude has evolved towards a much more hostile narrative, to the extent that individuals once considered on the nationalist-imperialist fringe—including Alexander Dugin and Dmitry Rogozin—can today identify with aspects of Russian foreign policy. By now, Russia has clearly chosen the subversion of the Westerndominated post-modern liberal order over its imitation. And in this effort, Russia’s hybridity has actually emerged as a strength—which Bhabha (1994) identified in other contexts involving cultural domination and inequality. The positioning of Russia between East and West, and its awkward combination of conservatism with pride in the Soviet past become attributes that allow for its challenge against Western late modernity. Russia is a subaltern empire, and, just as colonial subalterns used the hybridisation of local with imperial forms to undermine the authority of their imperial masters, Moscow’s combination of its own historical narrative with the ideologies of its Western ‘significant others’ provides for a particularly effective subversive mix: it allows Russia to be all things to all people—an opponent of US-led hegemony to the Western illiberal left—based on its Soviet heritage; and, simultaneously, the saviour of a traditionally defined ‘national identity’ to the West’s far right—based on Orthodox and Tsarist claims (Laruelle, 2020, pp. 123–125; Oliker, 2017). Its own status as empire is, in the process, respectively camouflaged in the mantle of its own subalterity, or excused as the natural expression of conservative-nationalist politics. But this posture is not inevitable: it is, in fact, subject to change, either from within or through pressure from without. I have already indicated that the realities of Russia’s internal politics don’t offer much hope for change. But, as stated above, there are two potential mitigating factors— one extraneous to Hybrid Exceptionalism and the other at its very core—to Russia continuing to double down on difference, subverting the West, and imposing itself on its subalterns. One is posed by the realities of power as a finite resource, and one that always stands in relation to others—notably, the West and Russia’s subalterns; the other is inherent

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in Hybrid Exceptionalism’s status as co-constitutive of the country’s complex relationship with the West as its ‘significant other’. The limitations of power and the co-constitutive role of the West’s own behaviour could thus become key drivers in any move towards a reformed Russia, at peace with—or at the very least, more accepting of—its post-imperial condition. Firstly, several power-political elements could drive Russia towards a more pragmatic and accepting attitude towards its own subalterns, and the West, placing limits on Russia’s ability to maintain the doubling down on civilisational specificity into which its Hybrid Exceptionalism has recently evolved. Its economy remains dependent on primary materials, with only the defence industry truly competitive at the global level (Saradzhyan & Abdulllaev, 2020); its demographic situation is dire, with a population projected to possibly fall to below 130 million by 2050 (United Nations, 2019); and attempts to subsume unwilling and restless neighbours into various integration projects driven more by imperial nostalgia than economic rationality weigh it down even further (Stronski, 2020). The looming presence of China in Central Asia, and, most recently, of Turkey in the South Caucasus also poses a challenge to its claims to dominance over the region (Borshchevskaya, 2020; Kuhrt & Buranelli, 2017). Perhaps most importantly, Putin’s Russia has not been able to redefine itself as a pole of attraction in the same way Germany redefined itself in its ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ (Kotkin, 2016, p. 6) following World War II, from within the broader European project: it must, therefore, impose itself, onto both the West and its neighbours, to realise these narratives of civilisational exclusivity. The legitimacy of its political system is, moreover, dubious—based on a highly managed form of semi-authoritarianism in no small justified through the memories of 1990s chaos and humiliation that are increasingly fading into the distance. Staying the course or doubling down might therefore achieve little in positive terms and prove quite costly in terms of hard power resources, while leaving Russia’s most pressing problems unresolved. Out of a pragmatic confrontation with changing structural realities, Russia’s existing elites may thus move to redefine their state in ways more amenable to cohabitation with its former imperial subalterns, retaining its ambiguous position between East and West, but performing its claims to hierarchical leadership in an updated manner. When such a shift—or partial shift—occurs, it will be important to remember that, for all the

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constancy in Russia’s hierarchical world views, and its enduring search for status, Hybrid Exceptionalism could be filled in a variety of ways. Russia could take the German example—of leading in its neighbourhood through attraction rather than imposition; or it could end up constructing pragmatic relationships with both the West and its neighbours that would accommodate both its own aspirations and security concerns, and its subalterns’ yearning for true self-determination and emancipation, for instance by abandoning grand civilisational claims undergirding major integration projects in favour of a return to pan-European models of security governance, or, alternatively, more limited objectives, like a narrowly defined concern with excluding perceived military threats from its environment. Some have already seen possible indications of such an emerging, more cautious approach (Moshes & Rácz, 2019; Trenin, 2020). The grand integration projects appear to have been recently put on a back burner; instead, Russia engages pragmatically with its neighbourhood, concentrating not so much on a positive project—like, for instance, a revived form of the Soviet Empire—as on a negative one—keeping its surroundings free from threats, most importantly, the West. Whether this is a reaction to the particularly difficult period represented by 2020—replete with pandemics and a wave of crises in its neighbourhood—is not yet clear. But keeping a critical eye on how Russia discursively and practically ‘performs’ its great power status will, in coming years, help us understand whether this is a temporary adaptation, or the route to a rather more fundamental redefinition. The second driver of potential gradual change is the very relationship between Russia and the West referred to above, from which Russia— and its relations with its subalterns—cannot be disentangled. Rather than seeking explanations for its more assertive attitude in an innate, in this case kleptocratic imperialism (e.g. Åslund, 2008; Belton, 2020; Dawisha, 2014; Giles, 2019), or some kind of unidirectional causality emerging from Western actions alone (e.g. Kennan, 1997; Mearsheimer, 2014b; Plokhy & Sarotte, 2019; Sakwa, 2020), Russia’s behaviour over more than two centuries has to be seen as a co-constitutive, interactive search for status vis à vis one all-important point of reference: the West. How that search for status evolved cannot be separated from the recognition or rejection of Russia by its most significant ‘other’, as an equal participant in the management of regional—pan-European— and global affairs. Well before the advent to power of Vladimir Putin,

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Russia’s Hybrid Exceptionalism thus entailed a simultaneous desire to participate in the Western order, and a potential wish for its disruption emerging from a frustration with unattainable modernity. The dual elements of imitation—feigned liberalism—and doubling down—civilisationist discourse—apparent from the turn of this century were the latest iteration of this much-longer term tendency; the shift towards the latter—doubling down—happened when it became clear that Russia would, once again, not fit into the liberal (post-)modernity that the West had defined as the new standard of civilisation. If Russia could not become liberal, or if the West could not accept its feigned liberalism as a legitimate, civilised alternative, Moscow would have to subvert and redefine for itself that frustratingly unattainable Western marker of status, as it did in Soviet times, and during select periods of the Tsarist era. Alongside the earlier point on the limits of Russian power, this makes a future focus on Russia’s relationship with the West absolutely essential in any evaluation of the potential for change in its Hybrid Exceptionalist discourses. Again, a continued focus on the nature of Russia’s hierarchical rhetoric and practice—through the framework elaborated here—will prove useful in determining the extent of change when— indeed if —that time comes. In so doing, one would have to be realistic about the possibilities for radical, as opposed to gradual and partial change from the hierarchical claims described throughout this book. Change would not necessarily mean the re-emergence of Western-style liberal alternatives to Russian claims of hierarchy; more introverted forms of Russian nationalism may themselves come to contain within them the potential for a post-imperial future. The main task would consist of remaining open-minded and attentive to any potential or actual moves away from the cruder civilisational and hierarchical claims made by Russia to this date. It will then be up to the West and Russia’s subalterns to have formulated responses that avoid the pitfalls of the 1990s, through clear-eyed, realistic engagement, rather than reflexive Russophobia, or complacent Russophilia; in the meantime, both can, at the very least, take stances that would maximise the chances of that occurring at some point, not least by adopting a golden mean that manages Russia’s geopolitical fears (including its problematic relationship with Western post-modernity), while containing its neo-imperial ambitions as part of a principled, longterm strategy. And the possible responses available to these two actors are the subject of the following two sections of this chapter.

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Matching Values and Reality For the West, a combination of critical engagement with an effort at containing or tempering Russia’s neo-imperial ambitions must start with one over-arching realisation: that any assumptions that Russia can be transformed from the outside are bound to be contradicted by reality. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, conditionality has been a major element in both the European Union and, to a lesser extent, NATO’s relations with the countries to its east, with the expansion of a Kantian zone of liberal democracies at core (Schimmelfennig & Scholtz, 2008; Schimmelfennig et al., 2006); more recently, the West has also applied sanctions in the hope of affecting change in Russian behaviour in response to a number of events, ranging from the Crimean annexation to the poisoning of opposition leaders (Klinova & Sidorova, 2019; Merz, 2020). Neither approach has been able to fundamentally reshape Russia’s behaviour, let alone its identities in ways intended by the West: Russia is, of course, not a potential member of either the EU or NATO, and sanctions have, at most, had an impact on limited aspects of Russian foreign policy, apart from their unintended—and counterproductive—effects on its political economy (Connolly, 2018; Gould-Davies, 2020). Indeed, the historical record suggests that Russia cannot be changed by external actors, even if it has changed in the past: major transformations were never the result of active exhortation or coercion by outsiders, least of all Western outsiders. But its position as something of a yardstick in Russia’s world views also gives the West the possibility of either facilitating or impeding—rather than actively shaping or determining—Moscow’s attempts at reform and transformation. Looking back from this angle, two oversights can be identified in the West’s post-Cold War relations with Moscow. Firstly, the inability to adequately support the potential for change when it was still there, in the 1990s—perhaps because of a hubris born of the triumphalism of the age; and, secondly, its own disregard for the contradictions within the Liberal International Order itself as an essential context to Russia’s current predicament. Russia did have a short-lived liberal moment, in the early 1990s; and, while the country was indeed in the throes of deep crisis, the West’s mistaken policies—in not alleviating Western-inspired liberal reform through outside aid, in supporting the authoritarian suppression of an elected parliament, in pressing its advantage over Russia’s beleaguered liberal foreign policymakers, or in displaying an excessive tolerance for ‘political technologies’—did account

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for much of the damage done in Russia to the idea of liberalism itself (Light, 2013; Oskanian, 2019; Rutland, 2013, pp. 340–345). Many in the West simply thought that, at the end of history, Russia would not have an alternative: it would either liberalise and accept the Western world and regional orders, or see its economic and political power descend further towards irrelevance, save perhaps for its status as a nuclear power (Åslund, 1999; Hanson, 1999; Reddaway, 1997; Tayler, 2001). In the end, Putin only partially liberalised Russia’s economy and turned back any attempts at political liberalisation; and yet, Russia remains as relevant as ever. The second mistake comprised the elements of inconsistency in a Liberal International Order which, in itself, was never entirely rules- and values-based, partly because of the United States’ own claim to exceptionalism (Acharya, 2018; Glaser, 2019; Mearsheimer, 2019; Sørensen, 2011). Membership of that order therefore implied submission not just to its rules, but also to that particular claim to exception; while other— fallen—great powers, including the United Kingdom, and, to a much lesser extent, France, had done just that—save for occasional murmurings of discontent at unilateralism in Iraq, or regarding global issues like climate change, or the global humanitarian legal regime—the barriers to Russia doing the same were far more formidable. Continued claims to ‘equal’ great power status, and the failure of the liberal experiment placed its society outside of the normative—and power-political—consensus combining liberal internationalist rules with American ‘leadership’. That it increasingly saw exceptionalism, and a sovereign ability to bend the rules as part of great power status against the claims of such liberal legality did not emerge ex nihilo: it could be seen as part and parcel of its mimicry of that order, warts and all. A greater self-awareness would therefore be required from the West on these contradictions, going forward: a rulesbased order freely interpreted and imposed by itself is bound to clash with Russia’s sense of great power status and deepen the attempt at cynical mimicry of what it sees as a double-standards West. What is the West supposed to do, in view of the failures of previous attempts at coaxing or facilitating liberal change, and the contradictions inherent to the Liberal International Order? Today’s Russia can’t be changed from the outside and is likely to remain illiberal in the foreseeable future; but if it is bound to maintain the West, and its claims to elite status as a yardstick of its own success—leading to Zaraköl’s (2010) imitation and doubling down—how the West behaves will nevertheless have an impact on its own behaviour, and hence, its interactions with

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its ‘sphere of special interests’. The tempering of expectations regarding possible change must therefore not necessarily lead to a complete abandonment of the question as to how much, and what the West should do, in coming decades, to at least facilitate Russia’s move towards the kind of internal re-examination that would result in a change in its attitudes towards its lost empire(s). The West’s efforts should start with a realisation of the need for balance between two countervailing pressures: on the one hand, the shaping of Russia’s structural environment in such a way as to facilitate the fundamental changes mentioned above, and, on the other, the need to limit Russia’s sense of inevitable exclusion—and threat—from Western modernity—which, after all, is a central driver to both its feigned liberalism and its alternative civilisational claims. Russia should be constrained; but it should be constrained in a way that offers it an honourable way out, one that acknowledges its position as a veto-wielding, nuclear power, but at the same time makes its claim to that position less imposing on its immediate neighbours. The question is whether these apparently contradictory pressures can somehow be reconciled. Let us consider four hypothetical scenarios for future engagement with Russia from that perspective. At one extreme, the West could double down on its trusted policy of open-door engagement with the region, aiming to liberate the former imperial subalterns through military and economic convergence, and redoubled efforts at NATO expansion and EU involvement, thus pushing Moscow back as it did at the end of the Cold War. At the other, the West could retreat from the former Soviet space and acknowledge it as the exclusive sphere of influence of Russia’s, accepting its inability to affect positive, emancipatory change. In between lie two intermediate hypothetical options: the establishment of some form of pan-European condominium with Russia, with many, if not most of its former subalterns reduced to a ‘Finlandised’ buffer between the former imperial power and the outside world, or a policy of ‘flexible containment’, not necessarily involving NATO or EU expansion, but instead focusing on ongoing cautious—and realist ic—engagement between Russia, the West, and more resilient—and resistant—subalterns. Each of these options is based on a different set of assumptions; each results in a number of advantages and risks, and each interacts in different ways with Russia’s hybrid-exceptionalist world view, both in its long-term form and in its contemporary substantive iteration.

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First, a ratcheting up and acceleration of EU engagement and plans for NATO expansion seem like an obvious solution: as in the cases of Central and Eastern Europe, and the Baltics, this would take former Soviet states outside of Russia’s orbit, granting them a clear roadmap towards Western late modernity, in addition to article 5 protection. And although this appears to give a certain finality to Russia’s imperial ambitions— at least where countries like Georgia and Ukraine are concerned—this ideal outcome does not appear likely, while the road towards it comes with well-known costs and risks, especially for the former Soviet states themselves. The problems with such efforts at actively rolling back Russian influence in the former Soviet space are twofold. Firstly, they put the former subaltern states striving for membership in an indefinite waiting room, with the prospect of NATO expansion without its actual realisation turning the former Soviet republics targets for Russian spoiling, as happened, and is happening, in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Eastern Ukraine (Babayan, 2015; Kuzio & D’Anieri, 2018). And secondly, their inherently geopolitical nature—challenging Russian power without changing the country’s fundamental motivations —ratchets up the perceptions of threat and inferiority emerging from the West (Radchenko, 2020; Tsygankov, 2018). Combined, these two realities enable the continuation of Russia’s imperial outlook precisely by feeding both its fears and its sense of humiliation: an alarmed and spoiling Russia knows how to play this game, which moreover does not disturb its fundamental assumptions about the world as a never-ending struggle over spheres of interest. This also threatens to leave the former imperial subalterns without the protection of article 5, while fully exposing them to Russian efforts at subversion; it also increases the threshold at which Russia would consider some form of accommodation with more genuinely post-imperial identities. On the one hand, Russia could be expected to continue doubling down to a far greater extent than if left without that threat when confronted with encroachments by a US-led Alliance its elites and population view as fundamentally hostile (Lussier, 2019; Ponarin & Sokolov, 2014; Werning Rivera & Bryan, 2019), without being presented with a viable alternative. On the other hand, the structurally moderating effects of its waning relative capabilities would also be relatively limited in light of the comparably little power needed to subvert and de-stabilise any neighbours aiming for NATO—or EU—membership—as opposed

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to the considerable effort needed to coax them into positive alternative projects of its own. This would risk turning the countries of the former Soviet space into a constant low-intensity strategic battleground: extrapolating from the cases of Ukraine and Georgia, they would have to pay the costs of intensified Russian interference for the remote chance— considering recurring Western divisions on the matter—that their ultimate membership goals might at some point be realised. However, the above does not make the other extreme—retreating from the former Soviet space—the superior option in any way: this would entail the recognition of a Russian sphere of influence, something long resisted by the West and most former Soviet subalterns themselves, but desired by consecutive post-Cold War Russian regimes. In effect, it would involve a ‘Yalta 2.0’ (Person, 2019, p. 7)—a return to a previous era, when the fates of smaller nations were decided upon through lines and percentages on a map. Such a scenario remains highly unlikely, as it would require either the West’s complete abandonment of the principles which have guided its world view since the 1990s, and/or their acceptance of the risk for a resurgent and reconstituted neo-imperial Russia pushing at the boundaries of NATO. It would take a complete transformation in both the ideological and power-political set-up in Eurasia, something that would be difficult to envisage even in the light of the current crisis of liberalism. The end result of such a move would depend on a number of factors, including the ability and willingness of former Soviet states to resist; alternative sources of external support in the form of third-party actors, like Turkey and China; and the ways in which Russia itself would react. Now unchallenged by the West, chances are that opportunism would combine with the imperial legacies described in previous chapters to tempt Russia towards filling any opened-up geopolitical voids. The extent to which Russia would be able to impose its will without a major fightback would be an open question. Absent interest from the West, the former Soviet states might see no alternative to some form of uneasy accommodation with Russia; but nationalism and a concomitant adherence to sovereign, independent statehood have grown throughout the former Soviet space during the past three decades, and that may also make any move towards a bolder reassertion of Russian hegemony a messy and potentially violent affair, especially in the more anti-Russian sections of Ukrainian and Georgian society. Judging by developments during the Trump presidency’s period of relative disinterest, the opened-up geopolitical voids may also end up contested by other powers, like Turkey in the Caucasus, or China

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in Central Asia, resulting in new forms of geopolitical competition (Kirisçi & Özkan, 2020; Umarov, 2018). Whether a lack of a challenge from the West would prompt Russia to revise its world view towards something more or less accommodating of its neighbours’ choices therefore remains highly uncertain. Two intermediate options thus remain between these two extremes for the West: firstly, a ‘Finlandisation’ of, or condominium over the space ‘in between’ Russia and itself—as often proposed in the context of Ukraine (Kissinger, 2014; Brzezinski, 2014; Mearsheimer, 2014a); or, alternatively, a Western policy based on cautious, long-term containment rather than active, NATO-centred pushback. The first of these might have been possible during the first years after the Cold War, or at the beginning of the Putin era—provided one believes in the non-premeditated nature of the regime’s move from feigned liberalism to its more recent civilisationism. During these times, the Kremlin was open to arrangements based on a pan-European, inclusive security system providing for co-operative regional leadership between itself and its Western counterparts; it might also have been accepting of a pledge not to expand NATO into the former Soviet space, in return for the neutrality of states like Ukraine or Georgia, or their subsumption into a common ‘Atlantic to Pacific’ security structure (Lo, 2002, pp. 43–44; Lynch, 2003, pp. 94–95; Radchenko, 2020; Stent & Shevtsova, 2002). But not to put too fine a point on it: that ship appears to have sailed long ago, and has possibly sunk with the breakdown in relations following Ukraine’s Euromaidan. Such arrangements would require a long-lost level of trust between Russia, the West, and, most importantly, the ‘countries stuck in between’. Judging by the evolution of both Russian discourse and policy as it stands today, it remains a highly unlikely outcome: the very risk that it might de-generate into option two—a restoration of an unstable Russian regional hegemony—in the event of a breach of trust makes it far-fetched, at least over the shorter and medium term. In fact, the above option could, over the longer term, be made possible by the final alternative, which I will refer to as the ‘flexible containment’ option. Applied to a full spectrum of policies towards the former Soviet space, it is aimed at a reversal of the spoiling advantage currently enjoyed by Russia through the fostering of resilience and a capacity for resistance within the states and societies surrounding Russia, combined with a simultaneous reduction of Russia’s incentives to intervene through

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an end to NATO expansion. In an adaptation of Kennan’s idea of ‘containment’ to the realities of the twenty-first century, it would adopt a flexible approach to the former Soviet space based on realist pragmatism over liberal idealism, prioritising the survival and strengthening of the region’s states, rather than their active inclusion into a rival alliance through a fixed set of conditionalities. The maintenance of sovereignty and the strengthening of independent statehood, rather than conversion to an external normative ideal and absorption into a formal alliance, would become the principal goals: interactions with the region would, first and foremost, be based on the individual situational needs of its formerly subordinated states, rather than the ‘prefabricated multilateralism’ (Sarotte, 2011) inherited from the Cold War and early post-Cold War eras. This makes sense from both rationalist and more small-c critical perspectives. Fostering resilience and self-reliance in a way that would complicate forced absorption by Russia without necessarily holding out the possibility of membership in an alliance that Moscow perceives as hostile reverses Russia’s spoiling advantage and challenges the latter’s imperial ambitions without, however, adding the complications that emerge from its fears of external encroachment. At this lower level of strategic escalation, Moscow would not have the same level of incentives to subvert states that are, in any case, not moving in an unpalatable geopolitical direction; the states and societies themselves would take a lead in counteracting Russian neo-imperial aspirations, first and foremost, through homegrown strategies of resistance. From a constructivist perspective, making these states independently resilient would give the younger states of the former states the opportunity and time to talk back at—and resist—Russia’s neo-imperial claims more effectively than if left unprotected or subsumed in an in any case unattainable Western, Kantian project. They would be holding the fort, prioritising the maintenance of their independence and the strengthening of their respective agencies and self-determined identities as something now beyond negotiation, until Russia’s governmentality adapted to something more amenable to and accepting of their independent existence. Indeed, the aim would be to base a future arrangement between Russia, its former subalterns, and the West not merely on a change in Russia’s capabilities —which, as argued above, would likely only have limited, temporary and/or potentially counterproductive effects—but on

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a variation in its motivations. Moving Russia away entirely from its hybridexceptionalist, in-between outlook would, of course, be the holy grail in these changes—but considering its long-term embeddedness at the very core of Russian narratives, a different form of Hybrid Exceptionalism— one that still places Russia in between the West and the East but mitigates its hierarchical claims—could also become an acceptable outcome. While, again, a direct, actively driven changing of Russia would be unlikely, structuring both the long-term material and ideational environments in ways that would maximise the chances of that happening—and grasping the opportunities offered by the kinds of potential changes seen after 1917 and 1991, when they do occur again—would be the aim. As implied above, it is Russia’s former subalterns who themselves would have to play a central role in this long-term challenge. While considering the considerable imbalance of power between themselves and Russia, this task of ‘holding the fort’ and resisting Russia’s imperial temptations relying mainly on their own capabilities—albeit with tailored assistance from the West—rather than the ever-promised security of a broader alliance like NATO would no doubt be daunting. But neither would it doom them to continued servitude: the requirements would be, on the one hand, for a degree of realism on what the West can do—to be sure, rhetoric and reality have diverged in this regard in the past—and, simultaneously, a dogged tenacity of governments and, failing that, broader populations, in maintaining their hard-gained independence. Beyond practical statecraft, this will require an intellectual effort aimed at speaking truth to power, questioning and undermining the many assumptions that maintain Russia’s imperial gaze. It is with this most important war of position—between the societies of Russia and its former imperial possessions—that I’d like to conclude this monograph, not least because it gives pride of place to those societies themselves— rather than the Russian and Western capitals—as the central, agential actors with the final say in any potential solution to Russia’s post-imperial conundrum.

Emancipation Through Critical Engagement Since 1991, most newly independent states of the former Soviet space have found themselves torn between the two extremes of bandwagoning with Moscow, or moving towards the West. Particularly in pro-Western states like Georgia and Ukraine, full emancipation from Russian Empire

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has been assumed to mean a move away from its orbit, beyond its various, disparate attempts to re-integrate the former USSR, towards the prosperity offered by the European Union, or the protection provided by NATO. Others—including Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan— have maintained their relative independence thanks to more ‘multivectoral’ (or isolationist) foreign policies; the emergence of China as an alternative has, more recently, provided a further and increasingly relevant alternative to these states of Central Asia. Still others—Belarus, Armenia, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan—have chosen full alignment with the Russian Federation. All have had to tread carefully in the light of the growing power and assertiveness of their former imperial power, with any mistakes and miscalculations costing them dear—as in the cases of Georgia and Ukraine. How can these increasingly variegated newly independent states, and their societies, solidify their continued existence alongside Russia still imbued with hierarchical claims? The most obvious answer appears to be the realignment affected by the most pro-Western states, a move away from Russia’s orbit towards NATO. But, quite apart from its questionable effectiveness, as stated above, left beyond the protection of article 5, the states most vigorously pursuing that option have de-facto ended up at war with, and partitioned by their invidious former imperial power, both capable and willing to use force in order to thwart any concrete possibility for membership in the short and medium term. The other alternative— of giving in to Russia’s neo-imperial ambitions—doesn’t provide a sound alternative either: even in pro-Russian states like Belarus and Armenia, societies have grown attached to their statehood, and—apart from its moral implications—renewed neo-colonial submission to Moscow would likely elicit much resistance as a crucial red line (Huseynova et al., 2019, pp. 4–13; Marin, 2020). Submitting to a former imperial power therefore seems out of the question; but, simultaneously, there is something half-finished about postimperial peoples looking for benevolent others to save them from their former metropole. Indeed, becoming a part of the West would appear an ideal solution, with the Baltic states as a shining example of states that have shed their Soviet legacies, and become part of the Western ‘promised lands’ of both the European Union and NATO (Kasekamp, 2020). But the Baltics are not Belarus, or Ukraine, or the South Caucasus, and the 2020s are not the 1990s: neither Estonia, nor Latvia, nor Lithuania are as engrained in Russia’s sense of self as its East Slavic neighbours, and the

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propitious conditions that existed during that period in time for Western Eastward expansion—Soviet withdrawal and collapse, Russian weakness— have now disappeared. Russia is both able and willing to push back—and push back hard—in the former Soviet space that remains, and history might not repeat itself in quite the same way it evolved between 1985 and 1999. To assume that there would be a repeat of Gorbachev’s sudden turn towards the Sinatra doctrine in future might be unrealistic: the fact that the Soviet Union could have clung on violently in the absence of his prudence—as once so convincingly argued by Kotkin (2001)—may, in fact, inspire future leaders to be far more intransigent about strategic abandonment, as Putin arguably already is. Moreover, apart from aspiring to something that might remain unattainable for decades, and might only come about violently, such a reliance on outside powers does not challenge the geopolitical logic at the root of the imperialist gaze—including Russia’s imperialist gaze. Far from affirming one’s agency, it risks making emancipation dependent on the interests, and level of commitment of outside powers, and the ebbs and flows of great power politics, in a game that Russia has been comfortable in playing for several centuries. NATO membership appears to be a distant aim, unacceptable to a great power that will, in all likelihood, remain a spoiling neighbour in the foreseeable future; and the road to emancipation thus does not necessarily lead through the pinning of all hopes on a momentous, potentially dangerous geopolitical shift that may or may not ever occur—and would, in all likelihood, still leave Russia a not necessarily chastened great power neighbour to be dealt with. Moreover, for those striving for emancipation, an excessive belief in the ability of a divided West, in secular crisis, to live up to the promises and exhortations made by these voices presents a clear and present moral hazard: risks are taken that would otherwise not be taken, with these peoples themselves often ending up as victims, as in Georgia, in 2008 (Oskanian, 2016). While, of course, Russia remains the primary culprit for these outcomes, the opportunity was provided in no small part by miscalculations based on a false sense of security created through assurances of—in reality limited, and ultimately unrealised—alliance and ‘solidarity’ by Western hawks. Instead, finding a dignified modus vivendi with that great power may necessitate a combination of realism—on the part of the governments of these newly independent states—and a determination to speak truth to power by the peoples and nations of the former Soviet space, rather than merely an aspiration to move West that might remain unrealisable in the

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near to medium term. The realist aspects of this approach would require considerable small-power statecraft from the governments of the newly independent states of Eurasia: in terms of foreign policy, an ability to balance and bandwagon appropriately, and to—where necessary—adjust their policies and calibrate their alignments in ways that ensure state survival. Rather than being predicated on a firm, either/or geopolitical choice and an excessive reliance on third parties to jump to one’s defence, it should be based on a flexible manoeuvring between—and, where necessary, even a playing off of—the competing powers in the ‘near abroad’. Engaging with the West, Russia, and—not to forget—an increasingly relevant China does offer possibilities that would go beyond the West/Russia binary choice that was imposed on Ukraine in 2014—with disastrous results that remain, at present, unresolved. They would have to take a fully-fledged role in constructing the geopolitical realities of the Eurasia of the twenty-first century, rather than passively agreeing to, or rejecting, the predetermined projects and frameworks offered them by NATO, the European Union, Russia, and China. The objective would be to survive in an increasingly fluid, and unpredictable world, one that is moving decisively beyond the unipolarity seen in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the USSR. But this would have to be combined with an ongoing fostering of resilience and the maintenance of a dogged determination and attachment to independent statehood, and geopolitical emancipation within the societies concerned. Indeed, many of Russia’s hierarchical and civilisational claims are based on—often illusory—claims made about other nations by those in Russia’s political and intellectual elite. These illusions can, and must, be contradicted by reality: first and foremost, by those onto which they are projected, by a refusal to play along. While Russia can contemplate the use of hard power in places like Georgia, Ukraine, and, most recently, Belarus, such a reliance on power politics can only go so far: an empire with unwilling subjects cannot survive for long, and if Russia’s experiences in 2008 and 2014 have proven anything, it is that, whatever temporary advantages territorial gains or hybrid warfare may provide, these are more than counteracted by the loss of the hearts and minds of the populations concerned. This refusal to be cowed, and a willingness to talk back, and contradict—in word and deed—the claims of the Kremlin—regarding the absence of modern traditions of statehood,

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oriental ‘irrationality’, or an automatic link between linguistic and religious affinity and geopolitical subordination, and other such claims—will thus prove crucial in challenging the discourses of empire prevalent in Russia’s elite and its broader society. A modern-day equivalent of what Machiavelli referred to as virtú (Hankins, 2019, pp. 449–475; Russell, 2005) will therefore be required in the societies of the subalterns of the former Soviet space: an enlightened dedication to one’s own—and respect for others’—statehood, and self-determination as a stepping stone to freedom, and emancipation. Statespeople will have to chart a course that combines prudence and a consciousness of the realities of power with a will to survive, and thrive; citizens will have to develop a principled—but open-minded and reflexive—attachment to the betterment of their societies, their polities, and the region at large. Some may scoff at such state-centredness, and, indeed, the above should not come with an idealisation of the nation-state, or deviation into more aggressive—confrontational—forms of nationalism. But, far from places—mostly situated in the powerful West—where self-determining polities can be taken for granted, independent statehood has been seen as the first step towards full liberation. Actually, throughout the history of de-colonisation, the protagonists who led the great liberating movements in other former empires have seen an element of pragmatic realism as more than justified in struggles of weak against strong. It is, in fact, a necessity that the nations in Russia’s shadow will not be able to ignore. In this endeavour for realistic statecraft and for long-term resistance aiming for a changed Russia, the civil societies and the intelligentsias of the newly independent states—and, in fact, of the former imperial metropole itself—will have to play a central role, by subverting these hierarchical narratives through a critical, decolonial dialogue. In all parts of the post-Soviet space, scholars, artists, and activists have been at the forefront of efforts at decolonising knowledge and culture, since independence (Tlostanova, 2017, 2018); redoubling and fine-tuning these efforts will be crucial in chipping away at the fundamental justifying mechanisms of Hybrid Exceptionalism not least through the kinds of scholarship and art that continue to speak truth to power against denials of human equality. The aim should be to foster a critical debate—a Gramscian ‘war of position’—involving intellectuals and the broader societies in Russia, its imperial subjects, and beyond.

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Ukrainian and Belarusian historians and linguists talking back at Russia’s stereotypical assumptions and distorted historiographies, Caucasian intellectuals exploring—and expunging—the distinctly imperial legacies in their countries, and Central Asian artists creating forms of expression that go beyond the legacies of Russian and Soviet colonialism already are and will continue to be important elements in these societies quest for a post-imperial position. This need not be combined with the Russophobia one has, in the past, seen in such endeavours: on the contrary, combining such critiques with an acknowledgement of Russian contributions to one’s society denuded of civilisational claims may create the kind of subversive hybridity referred to by Bhabha, one that helps penetrate and change Russian society in ways a complete dissociation might not. Clarifying that there is no going back, that an emancipatory independence is a non-negotiable, fundamental value that need not threaten the Russian Federation will be key in pushing back at, and transforming the Kremlin’s ambitions for itself, and for its surrounding societies. In so doing, Russia might be changed into something more accepting of the self-determination of former subalterns, a novelty that might, in the end, also benefit those minorities now left within its own claimed borders, like the Chechens, and the Crimean Tatars.

Conclusion Until a few years ago, postcolonialism largely concentrated on the multiple legacies of Western empire in today’s world, and—in a rather perverse form of Western-centrism—largely ignored the discourses of inequality outside the West/Rest binary. Students of Russia had also been reluctant to apply the insights of such scholarship to an object of study so uncomfortably lodged between the colonising West and the formerly colonised East/South. But, as the above shows, orientalism and more broadly conceived narratives and discourses of empire are essential to an understanding of current conditions in Eurasia, and the liminal position of contemporary Russia does not stand in the way of critical, postcolonial scholarship as it relates to such a geopolitically significant part of the world. Quite on the contrary: appropriately adapted, it adds to an ongoing, and growing research programme on non-Western imperial legacies by looking at imperial and post-imperial hierarchical claims that do not emerge from an unequivocally ‘Western’ society, but from that most ambiguously situated entity called ‘Russia’.

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This ambiguity—of Russia itself as both subaltern and empire—has consequences for the way one approaches the former Soviet space. On the one hand, Russia is both of the West and outside the West. It is, at best, an insecure part of the elite of International Society, where Western Europe and North America have long provided the standard of modernity to which it aspired as a great power. If Uvarov’s triad was a reaction to the modernity that Russia aimed for in the nineteenth century, Putin’s postmodern concoction of various elements of Russian identity and liberal normativity is still a mechanism for coping with this familiar frustration: Russia’s inability to keep up with its ‘significant other’. But what such Western-centred accounts often leave out is the important role played by Russia’s periphery in driving these discourses: as much as an aspiration to reach the West’s modernity as its subaltern, the Russian ‘subaltern empire’ also had to construct narratives that drew in—and justified its rule over— its own claimed domain, in East and West. In also bringing out this other civilisational aspect, Hybrid Exceptionalism points to both Russia’s insecure relationship to the West and the role of its subalterns in reinforcing the myths inherent to the recurring exceptionalisms it constructed in a distinct, claimed civilisational sphere. For the West, the various options expounded above each have their risks and advantages. However, the current crisis of Liberalism and the rise of an illiberal China will complicate interactions with Russia and the near abroad. This may make the continued application of solutions that were devised in an age when Western power—and triumphalism— stood unchallenged no longer feasible. The West’s tendency not to practice what it preaches—whether it is the facilitation of kleptocratic behaviour by regional elites, including the Russian, in its financial centres, or the unilateral breaking of the publicly espoused rules-based order in ways that Russia is tempted to emulate—should be seen as part of this ‘Russia debate’. The promise of NATO expansion has also ceased to be the panacea it once was, and the Western tendency to impose cut-out solutions onto a region that is becoming increasingly diverse and complex should therefore be reviewed. The diverse states and societies of the former Soviet space did not leave one messianic, top-down universal mission to have it replaced with another, reducing their agency to the simplistic—and arguably toxic—pro-Western/pro-Russian binary. Their specific requirements, not the West’s readiness to supply based on outdated cut-out templates, should form the basis of interaction.

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For the subalterns themselves, it is the combination of realism and an adherence to emancipatory forms of political organisation that offers the best hope for maximising the chances of a Russia transformed—or at the very least adapted—into a more amenable neighbour. Balances between excessive Russophobia and an overreliance on Western promises on the one hand, and fatalism and compliance with Russian civilisational claims and geopolitical demands on the other must be found. All too often, the frustration of nationalists in the former Soviet Union degenerates into a demonisation of all things Russian, and a misplaced idealisation of the West; on the other side of the equation, pro-Russian conservative groups are often co-opted by Moscow to do its bidding. In between these two extremes lies a more critical attitude towards both global Western hegemony and the Russian imperiousness born of frustration at exclusion from that hegemony: with the latter partly the result of the former, a less starry-eyed vision that takes into account Russia’s viewpoints, and its ability to change, over the longer term, may be more productive than an unnecessary confrontation which distracts from the problem at hand, which should not be the expansion of a Kantian, Western sphere— however denied—but the independence of the states themselves, within the realities they are faced with. This hope for a changed, less expressly hierarchical and civilisationally charged relationship between Russia and the territories formerly under its control should be put in perspective: it is a long-term aspiration, and, when it occurs, it may, at most, involve an adaptation of that civilisational-hierarchical discourse rather than its complete abandonment. Russia’s political economy, the rigid nature of identities, and its internal empire—for instance, its often-problematic rule over the North Caucasus—may pose serious limitations on the possibilities for wholesale change; nevertheless, a pragmatic redrawing and final, genuine acceptance of the independence and sovereignty of the formerly Soviet republics could occur as part of the periodic reformulations of Russia’s place in the world. If this happens at some point in future, both Russia’s great power ‘significant others’ and its subaltern ‘significant others’ might have helped encourage changes through the long-term realistic-critical interactions outlined above, rather than the grand liberal transformative over-ambition which has often dominated policy up to now. To most in the West, Russia remains ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’ (Churchill, 1939); but, as a result, it has, more often than not, been treated as a caricature, slid into a stereotype inside a cliché.

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The one potential advantage that the peoples and societies once ruled by Russia—in its various incarnations—have is a deep knowledge of Russia and its propensities, which they have felt on their own proverbial skins. In fact, the very closeness that Russia uses as a basis for its top-down civilisational claims may provide a potentially subversive and transformational strength to these subalterns themselves: an ability to translate aspirations that may one day seep into Russian society itself by virtue of the Belarusians’, or Ukrainians’, or Kazakhs common historical and cultural links. And this would be the ultimate irony of all the hybrid-exceptionalist claims made by Russia in its various guises: namely, if, rather than transforming its claimed civilisational sphere in a civilising mission, or being transformed by its main significant other—the West—the former subalterns ended up changing it in unexpected ways. It may very well be a future worth hoping for.

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Index

A Abkhazia, 202, 203, 260 Adat, 60, 67, 82 Alexander II, 56, 61, 83, 84, 251 Annexation, 169, 171, 181, 205, 207, 223, 257 Antisemitism, 85, 117 Armenia, 102, 124, 135, 138, 204, 208, 222, 265 Armenians, 11, 33, 62, 83, 114, 138, 141, 173, 204, 220 Art, 11, 12, 14, 28, 41, 55, 71, 72, 74, 85, 86, 127–130, 200, 214–217, 268 Assimilation, 3, 33, 61, 77, 80, 82, 110, 141 Autocracy, 2, 10, 38, 56, 58, 133, 172 Autonomy, 70, 80, 83, 101, 106, 109, 111–113, 121, 125, 127, 132, 134, 202

B Backwardness, 28, 70, 81, 104, 105, 108, 132, 134, 137, 197 Baltic, 3, 7, 12, 37, 42, 52, 59, 63, 75, 79, 101, 103, 112, 117, 125, 126, 131, 175, 205, 206, 213, 217, 252, 260, 265 Basmachis, 129, 135 Bauer, Otto, 105 Belarus, 14, 115, 158, 197, 205–207, 209, 210, 213, 215, 217, 218, 221, 222, 265, 267 Belavezha accords, 206 Belinsky, Vissarion, 62, 70, 81, 137, 174 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 164 Bodrov, Sergei, 215 Bolsheviks, 4, 11, 36, 64, 68, 102–105, 107–109, 111, 112, 114–116, 121, 122, 126, 128, 132, 134, 135, 138, 139, 174, 181, 182, 198, 225, 245, 248, 250, 252 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 130, 141, 142

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 K. Oskanian, Russian Exceptionalism between East and West, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69713-6

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280

INDEX

Bund, 106

C Capitalism, 22, 25, 27, 38, 39, 42, 105, 127, 168, 208, 242–244 Catherine the Great, 52, 54, 59, 79, 80, 117, 184, 223 Catholicism, 60, 61, 69, 82, 198, 208, 243 Caucasus, 3, 6, 10, 11, 14, 23, 41, 52, 58, 60, 61, 65, 66, 71–74, 78, 83–85, 101, 112–114, 118, 120, 123, 128, 135, 138, 141, 198, 201, 202, 204, 212, 215, 217, 224, 226, 241, 247, 254, 261, 265, 271 Central Asia, 3, 6, 10, 11, 14, 23, 41, 52, 58, 60–62, 65, 74, 83, 85, 101, 102, 108, 112, 114, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 128, 129, 135, 138, 140, 204, 212, 217, 241, 247, 254, 262, 265 Chaadayev, Pyotr, 57, 81, 134, 176, 181, 245 China, 33, 35, 124, 136, 138, 212, 254, 261, 265, 267, 270 Chubais, Anatoly, 168 Class consciousness, 27, 102, 105–107, 110, 128 Cold War, 4, 12, 110, 119, 127, 159, 165, 209, 222, 223, 242, 259, 262, 263 Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), 207 Collectivisation, 163 Colonialism, 8, 10, 22, 23, 28, 29, 32, 36, 39, 131, 269 COMECON, 119 Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), 158, 180, 183, 184, 203, 207

Communist Party (CPSU), 118, 119, 124, 130, 157, 163, 178 Conditionality, 263 Congress of the Peoples of the East, 115 Co-optation, 3, 11, 14, 33, 55, 80, 217 Core, 3, 5–7, 21–23, 25, 32, 34, 35, 37–40, 65, 68, 75, 108, 130, 132, 162, 164, 165, 169–171, 173, 176, 201, 206, 245, 250, 253, 257, 264 Cosmopolitanism, 117, 131 Cossacks, 69, 80, 84–86, 126, 135, 139, 183, 204, 213 Crimean war, 38, 53 Cyrillic alphabet, 63, 123, 137, 204 D Decolonisation, 25, 110 Democratic centralism, 113 Derzhava, 182 Derzhavnost’ , 180 Donbas, 183, 208, 223 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 85 Doubling down, 13, 23, 38–40, 166, 170, 177, 217, 251, 254, 258, 260 Dugin, Alexander, 164, 174, 182, 183, 214, 253 Dziuba, Ivan, 131, 142, 143 E Economic integration, 6, 14, 161, 166, 168, 170, 222 Empire, 2–7, 9–11, 21–36, 38, 40, 42–44, 51–62, 64–70, 72–85, 101–105, 108, 111, 113, 117, 119, 120, 123, 128, 132, 134, 138, 158, 159, 161, 165, 168, 169, 171, 173–176, 178–180,

INDEX

182, 197, 199, 200, 202, 205, 211, 214, 215, 217, 220, 222, 223, 225–227, 241, 242, 245, 249, 251, 253, 255, 259, 264, 267–271 Energy, 167, 168 Equality, 24, 107, 109, 136, 180, 268 Eurasian Economic Union, 168, 204, 207, 208 Eurasianism, 81, 163, 181, 182 neo-Eurasianism, 163, 174, 181, 214, 227 Euromaidan, 86, 171, 200, 205, 208, 209, 214, 223, 262 European Union (EU), 26, 168, 206, 208, 222, 247, 249, 252, 257, 259, 260, 265, 267 Exceptionalism (separately), 4, 7, 8, 10–15, 23, 24, 31, 34–43, 51–53, 58, 66, 77, 103, 104, 114, 134, 157, 159, 161, 164, 168, 170, 172, 177, 181, 197, 205, 206, 216, 218, 221, 241, 242, 244–255, 258, 264, 270

F Foucault, Michel, 6, 28, 29

G Georgia, 5, 8, 14, 42, 102, 118, 124, 135, 138, 169, 200, 202–204, 207, 217, 219, 220, 249, 260–262, 264–267 Glinka, Mikhail, 74, 86, 180 Gogol, Nikolai, 52, 85, 86 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 12, 131, 133, 136, 157, 178, 251, 266 Gorky, Maxim, 130, 141 Gosudarstvennost’ , 174, 180 Governmentality, 23, 29, 37, 40, 263

281

Great Russian chauvinism, 68, 87, 102, 109, 116, 123, 135 Great Russians, 62, 63, 69, 71, 76–78, 106, 118, 121, 123, 125, 137, 160, 174, 213 Gumilev, Lev, 164, 182, 224

H Habitus, 27, 38, 226 Hegemony, 6, 32, 242, 253, 261, 262, 271 Herzen, Alexander, 70, 81 Hierarchy, 4, 6, 7, 12, 14, 22–31, 33, 43, 52, 64, 65, 67, 68, 71, 75, 102, 103, 106–108, 110, 111, 113, 115, 118–120, 122, 123, 126, 132, 133, 136, 140, 158, 165, 166, 170, 172, 177, 199, 210, 214, 224, 241, 245, 248, 251, 256 Holodomor, 117, 213 Hrushevsky, Mykhailo, 125, 139, 140 Humanitarian intervention, 6, 8, 14, 168, 170, 208 Humanities, 9, 11, 12, 14, 28, 41, 53, 66, 69, 120, 121, 124, 210–213 Hybridity (separately), 4, 7, 10, 23, 24, 30, 35, 37–41, 53, 62, 67, 77, 177, 197, 242, 243, 245, 247, 251, 253, 269

I Identity, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 40, 43, 51, 54, 56–59, 61, 62, 67, 72, 74, 76, 78, 81, 82, 85, 108, 114, 116, 117, 121, 122, 124, 125, 131, 133, 136, 138, 142, 157, 158, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166, 172–180, 198, 205, 207, 209, 211, 215, 216, 219, 226, 227,

282

INDEX

245, 247, 253, 260, 263, 270, 271 Ilyin, Ivan, 164, 182 Imam Shamil, 58, 60, 82, 138, 202, 217, 224 Imitation, 8, 13, 23, 38–40, 54, 62, 70, 81, 166–168, 177, 217, 249, 251, 258 Imperialism, 2–4, 6, 9, 14, 25, 27, 29, 35, 36, 43, 44, 79, 102–105, 115, 119, 125, 127, 135, 138, 181, 242, 244, 245, 255 Industrialisation, 13, 142, 163, 173, 174, 250 International society, 6, 22–25, 29, 44, 51, 54, 166, 171, 245, 270 Islam, 31, 59, 60, 67, 198, 222, 243, 244 Ivan the Terrible, 54 J Jadidism, 78, 122, 138 Jadids, 112, 114 Jews, 65, 83, 244 K Kadyrov, Ramzan, 202, 220 Karamzin, Nicolai, 56, 69, 72, 139, 174 Katyn massacre, 163 Khachaturian, Aram, 141 Kievan Rus, 11, 53, 56, 69, 87, 126, 139, 198, 209 korenizatsiya, 120–122, 125, 127, 130, 136, 138, 139, 142, 181 nativisation, 109, 122, 130 Kozyrev, Andrei, 161, 179, 180 Krusanov, Pavel, 214 L Latin alphabet, 124

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 2, 4, 12, 25, 102, 105–109, 111, 113, 115, 157, 172, 183, 245 Lermontov, Mikhail, 31, 72, 73, 84, 129 Levada, Yuri, 181, 209 Liberal International Order (LIO), 5, 8, 9, 13, 159–161, 165, 170, 216, 242, 244, 246, 257, 258 Liberalism, 5, 13, 36, 39, 160, 161, 163, 166, 168, 169, 171, 172, 176, 177, 183, 199, 203–206, 215–217, 242, 243, 245, 252, 258, 259, 261, 270 Limonov, Eduard, 181, 214 Literature, 8, 9, 11, 14, 26, 28, 41, 52, 55, 71–74, 77, 84, 87, 127, 128, 131, 212–214, 216 Lithuania, 206, 265 Little Russia, 77 Lukashenko, Alexander, 207, 209, 210, 221 Luxemburg, Rosa, 105, 134

M Mandelstam, Osip, 128 Marr, Nikolai, 137 Marxism, 37, 39, 42, 64 Marxism-Leninism, 4, 103, 108, 137 Mazepa, Ivan, 85, 86, 140, 213 Medvedev, Dmitri, 14, 170, 173, 183, 203, 208, 225 Mensheviks, 105 Migration, 14, 59, 60, 65, 83, 117, 133, 135, 203, 217 Mikhalkov, Nikita, 215, 225, 226 Mimicry, 30, 39, 169, 170, 176, 252, 258 Modernisation, 52, 56, 59, 61, 64, 79, 83, 84, 163

INDEX

Modernity, 8, 10, 13, 15, 21–23, 35, 37–40, 42, 44, 52–55, 58, 61, 70, 77–80, 104, 108, 115, 116, 123, 128, 132, 133, 136, 158, 175, 177, 197, 241–243, 245, 247, 249, 253, 259, 260, 270 Moldova, 125, 126, 131, 169, 205–207, 213, 217 Moscow, 4–7, 9, 15, 32, 34, 44, 54, 79, 85, 110, 113–116, 119, 124, 132, 133, 140, 141, 143, 159, 162, 166, 168, 170, 172, 173, 177, 182, 198, 199, 204–207, 212, 216, 219, 221–225, 241, 245, 249, 251–253, 257, 259, 263–265, 271 Muridism, 3, 60, 201, 243 Music, 11, 28, 30, 55, 72, 74, 86, 127–129, 140 N Narodniki, 105 Narodnost , 10, 57, 58, 61, 69, 74, 80, 86, 103, 114, 129, 133, 173, 180 Narodnost, 197 National consciousness, 102, 130, 178 Nationalism, 6, 11, 40, 42, 58, 59, 61–63, 69, 70, 75–78, 84, 103, 105–107, 109, 112, 116, 125, 127, 128, 132, 135, 139, 174, 179, 213, 243, 256, 261, 268 Natives, 33, 60, 65, 66, 80, 107, 115, 121, 124, 129, 130, 223 NATO, 15, 163, 170, 176, 203, 206, 207, 209, 218, 246, 247, 249, 252, 257, 259–267, 270 Navalny, Alexei, 220, 252 Nazarbayev, Nursultan, 204, 221 Nevskii, Alexander, 216 Nicholas II, 83, 84, 87, 162, 225 Novorossiya, 223

283

O Opposition, 4, 55, 79, 104, 112, 114, 132, 135, 167, 175, 201, 210, 252, 257 Orientalism, 7, 11, 23, 28, 29, 31–34, 37–41, 43, 66, 68, 71, 73, 122, 128, 129, 141, 202, 203, 269 latent, 31, 71, 73 manifest, 29, 31, 43, 66, 68 Orthodox Christianity, 53, 54, 57, 59, 60, 80, 82, 162, 172, 183, 209

P Pahonia, 210 Pavlensky, Pyotr, 214, 225 Periphery, 3, 7, 23, 25, 34, 68, 78, 108, 124, 241, 270 Peter the Great, 2, 10, 22, 54, 57, 85, 108, 117 Poland, 3, 10, 11, 23, 42, 52, 60, 65, 69, 85, 112, 119, 197, 198, 217 Poles, 11, 37, 51, 60, 62, 66, 69–72, 75, 76, 79, 82, 83, 86, 87, 117, 133, 136, 171, 216, 244, 246, 254 Postcolonial theory, 21, 32, 33 Primakov, Yevgeni, 163, 165, 171 Prokhanov, Alexander, 214 Pushkin, Alexander, 2, 31, 52, 72–74, 84, 85, 128, 129, 141 Pussy Riot, 214, 224 Putin, Vladimir, 5, 6, 13, 37, 42, 159, 161–168, 170–178, 180–184, 199, 201, 202, 204, 205, 207, 209, 210, 212, 214–216, 219, 221–225, 227, 245, 252, 254, 258, 262, 266, 270

R Racism, 68, 87, 217, 226

284

INDEX

Rationality, 1, 7, 55, 67, 168, 200, 217, 245, 254 Red army, 119, 136, 175, 184 Renner, Karl, 105, 106 Responsibility to Protect, 169, 203 Revolution, 2, 24, 34, 36, 53, 64, 78, 101, 105–107, 111, 117, 122, 129, 130, 132, 134, 139, 163, 168, 170, 182, 200, 202, 205, 207, 208, 222, 225, 248, 250 Rogozhkin, Alexander, 215 Russia, 1–11, 13–15, 21–23, 25, 26, 31–43, 51–61, 63–72, 74–87, 101–105, 108, 111, 113, 121, 126, 127, 130, 132–134, 137, 138, 140, 142, 158–162, 164–184, 197–222, 225, 227, 241–272 Russian language, 12, 61, 62, 116–118, 123, 172, 173, 204, 218 Russians, 2–4, 6, 7, 9–15, 23, 24, 31–38, 40–43, 52–87, 101, 103–113, 115–117, 119, 120, 122–142, 158–184, 197, 198, 201–203, 205–216, 218–227, 241, 243–245, 247–249, 251–253, 256, 257, 260–266, 269–272 Russification, 11, 61, 64, 68, 77, 78, 118, 120, 131, 133, 142 Russocentrism, 12, 131 Russo-Georgian war, 171, 208 Russophobia, 14, 204, 248, 256, 269, 271

S Saakashvili, Mikheil, 8, 202, 203, 220, 221 Said, Edward W., 6, 28–33, 35, 40, 43, 66, 73

Sanctions, 169, 204, 207, 210, 224, 257 Secession, 106, 107, 111, 134, 183, 208 Self-determination, 26, 102, 104–106, 109–114, 116, 134, 174, 183, 208, 224, 255, 268, 269 Shevchenko, Taras, 70, 140 Slavophiles, 10, 38, 53, 56–58, 64, 69, 74, 76, 81, 82, 125, 132, 135, 173, 174, 182, 215, 249 Sobornost’ , 173, 180 Social science, 11, 12, 14, 28, 41, 53, 66, 68, 69, 120, 121, 124, 210–213 South Ossetia, 202, 203, 260 Sovereign democracy, 167, 173 Sovereign equality, 24, 25, 43, 168 Sovereignty, 7, 25, 40, 56, 57, 111, 140, 167, 178, 199, 216, 221, 253, 271 Soviet Nationalities Policy (SNP), 12, 68, 102, 104, 106, 108, 120, 122, 129, 130, 135, 142, 179 Stalinism, 127, 132 Stalin, Joseph, 12, 102, 103, 106, 108–111, 113, 116–118, 124, 127, 129–131, 135, 137–139, 142, 157, 175, 181, 183, 211, 223, 249, 250 Subalterns, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29, 30, 34, 37– 40, 42, 52, 53, 55, 58, 59, 64, 68, 69, 74, 80, 110, 127, 129, 133, 135, 169, 172, 174–177, 197, 199, 200, 203–205, 207, 212, 213, 216–218, 247–250, 253–256, 259, 260, 263, 264, 268–272 Sufism, 60 Suzerainty, 55

INDEX

T Tajikistan, 42, 265 Tatars, 1, 2, 10, 57, 59, 62, 70, 85, 117, 139, 205, 269 Tikhanouskaya, Sviatlana, 210 Tikhonov, Nikolay, 128 Tolstoy, Alexey K., 70 Tolstoy, Lev, 73 Tropes, 4, 12, 29, 31, 40, 41, 73, 74, 76, 84, 87, 127, 129, 130, 141, 177, 201, 207, 211, 216, 222, 245 Turkey, 115, 124, 138, 254, 261

U Ukraine, 4, 5, 8, 12, 14, 23, 42, 52, 66, 70, 71, 80, 82, 86, 102, 112, 113, 115, 126, 131, 139, 142, 158, 162, 168, 171, 175, 183, 197, 200, 205–209, 213, 215, 217–219, 221–224, 227, 249, 250, 260–262, 264, 265, 267 Ukrainian language, 63, 71, 77 Ukrainian Orthodox Church, 209, 223 Ukrainians, 11, 36, 37, 60, 61, 63, 69–72, 75–77, 79, 80, 83, 86, 87, 101, 114–118, 124–126, 130, 131, 134–137, 139–143, 173, 177, 178, 198, 200, 205, 207, 209, 212, 213, 216, 221–223, 227, 261, 269, 272 United States (US), 9, 35–37, 138, 165–167, 170, 182, 214, 244, 247, 253, 258, 260 USSR, Soviet Union, 4, 11–13, 24, 26, 33, 34, 36, 103, 110–112,

285

114, 116–120, 124–128, 131– 133, 136, 138, 140, 158, 161, 162, 172, 174, 178, 198, 206, 222, 248, 249, 265, 267 Uvarov, Sergei, 10, 56–58, 61, 66, 172, 197, 245, 249, 270 Uzbekistan, 135, 265 V Vereshchagin, Vasily, 31, 74, 86, 141 Virtual politics, 167 W Wahhabism, 201, 243 War of position, 218, 268 Westernisers, 10, 38, 53, 56–58, 62, 69, 70, 76, 81, 108, 125, 132, 134, 165, 166, 179, 249 White Russians, 63, 78 World War I, 225 World War II, 4, 14, 36, 103, 109, 117, 127, 132, 136, 138, 175, 180, 182, 184, 206, 216, 244, 246, 254 Great Patriotic War, 109, 174, 184, 206 Y Yeltsin, Boris, 160–163, 169, 173, 178–180, 184, 201, 207 Z Zaparozhian Sich, 80, 223 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, 181, 252 Zinoviev, Grigory, 115 Zvyagintsev, Andrey, 214