Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 16 – Russia’s
existential problem, a Moscow commentator says, is that “Russia can be an
empire without Ukraine, but without Ukraine, it will not be able to remain
Russia,” an underlying reality that drives the Kremlin’s efforts to prevent
Ukraine from being truly independent and part of Europe.
Were Ukraine to leave the Russian
orbit, Moscow could still construct an empire in Central Asia and the Caucasus,
Aleksandr Vasiliyev writes; but that empire, because such a large part of it
would be Islamic, would ultimately destroy Russia as an Orthodox civilization
especially given the increasing number of Muslims in Russia itself (rus-obr.ru/ru-web/28934).
A Moscow-dominated empire of that
kind could still be a very powerful entity, despite suggestions to the contrary
by writers from Otto von Bismarck to Zbigniew Brzezinski, but it would not be
Russia in anything like its current sense, a historical sea change that sparks
fears among many Russians.
These reflections, Vasiliyev writes in “Russkoye
obozreniye,” are prompted less by von Bismarck’s writings than by Brzezinski’s
observation that “without Ukraine Russia will cease to be an empire” but with
it “Russia will automatically become an empire,” an observation many cite and
accept without looking at the historical record or considering the current
situation.
It is certainly true that the
absorption of Ukraine allowed Russia’s rulers to extend their borders to the south
and west, but these actions “did not produce an ‘automatic transformation’” of
Russia into an empire. Instead, Vasiliyev argues, “the key factor” was the
opening to Europe with the establishment of St. Petersburg.
(It is worth remembering, the Moscow
commentator says, that under Catherine the Great, Prince Potemkin pushed for
shifting the capital to the south to Yekaterinoslav and found some support for
that idea. “It is difficult to say what Russia’s fate would have been” had that
choice been made, Vasiliyev continues.)
“In any case,” he says, “the main
thing in the Russian imperial project was not Ukraine but rather an orientation
toward stormily developing Europe.”
Today, any suggestions that the
Kremlin wants “to swallow Ukraine whole or in part” are “exaggerated” and
certainly not necessary for the Russian state to build a new empire across Eurasia. What matters in this case, however, is
something else, Vasiliyev suggests, something not limited to Ukraine as a
consumer or pipeline route west.
“Geopolitically,” he says, even “with
the loss of Ukraine and the Baltics, Russia has preserved its way out to the
seas,” something that helps explain why Moscow has chosen to build pipelines
bypassing the two rather than assuming it had no choice but to build them
through those countries.
In the coming century, however,
Russia will be increasingly focusing on Asia, and Vasiliyev expresses the hope
that “the city of Vladivostok [which means ‘ruler of the east’ in Russian] will
live up to its name with new and real content.”
But at the same time, “Russia is
experiencing objective and extremely sharp social problems as a result of the
mass migration of people from Central Asia and the Caucasus,” a trend that is
challenging the existing ethnic balance inside the Russian Federation. And it is here that Ukraine matters in a
Russia-led Eurasia.
“Russia without Ukraine undoubtedly
will again be able to become an empire,” Vasiliyev concludes, but if it does so
without Ukraine being a part of that entity, Russia will hardly be able to
remain Russia” but rather become something unrecognizable to its own titular
nation and to everyone else.
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