Moscow has Lost the Slavic World Because It is Pursuing an Ethnic Russia First Policy, Tsipko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 1 – The pre-1917 Russian Empire promoted Pan Slavism to the point that it made the protection of Slavic peoples beyond its borders a central tenet of its foreign policy. But the Putin regime has subordinated Moscow’s foreign policy not to the Slavs but to the ethnic Russians, Aleksandr Tsipko says.

            Not surprisingly, especially in the wake of Moscow’s moves into Ukraine since 2014, the Moscow commentator says, even the Slavic countries which had been friendly to Russia earlier have turned away from it because it is no longer their defender but the promoter of ethnic Russia alone (mk.ru/social/2021/07/01/ottorzhenie-ot-rossii-pochemu-ot-nas-otvorachivayutsya-bratyaslavyane.html).

            “The annexation of Crimea to Russia and the victories of ‘the former miners and tractor drivers of the Donbass in fact were the cause of the conversion of the Czechs and Bulgarians from friends of Russia into its enemies,” something few focused on at the time but that now is a reality Moscow must somehow cope with.

            “In my view,” Tsipko says, “the current Russian Federation has combined Russianness with the ethnic factor and subordinated its foreign policy to a defense of ethnic Russians” rather than to the broader task of defending the Slavs of the world, a shift that has cost the country dearly in Eastern Europe.

            The reason this is such a shock, he continues is that “Russianness in the history of our country never was connected with the ethnic factor. Russianness always was linked either with Orthodoxy or with our cultural traditions of statehood.” That attracted Slavs abroad and some non-Russians at home; the link to ethnic Russians alone has alienated both.

            According to Tsipko, “it is time to recognize that the ethnicization of the foreign policy of the Russian Federation is leading to the enlivening of the almost extinguished separatist attitudes” among various peoples of the Russian Federation and for the leadership of our country to declare more often that we are a multi-national state which a union of peoples established.”

            Unfortunately, here lies “a profound contradiction” at the base of our Russian statehood, the senior Russian commentator says. “Undoubtedly, the Russians as Great Russians played a decisive role in the creation of Russian statehood but as soon as they begin” to insist on that, “Russia loses something very important.”

            And what it loses is obvious. “Great Russians established not an ethnic state like the ones the Poles or Hungarians did but a multi-national one.” The Soviet system for all its failures recognized that reality; the post-Soviet Russian one does not and is getting in increasing trouble because of that failure.

            According to Tsipko, it is not yet too late for Moscow to turn away from its Russian Spring language and approach. But time is running out both abroad and at home. And “the fate of the new Russia depends on whether we will recognize the causes of the alienation of the peoples of Eastern Europe,” the ethnicization of Moscow’s policies under Vladimir Putin.