Territorial Disputes Between Russia and Its Neighbors Rooted in Two Different Views of Reality

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 15 – Even as Vladimir Putin asserts Russia’s right to annex Crimea, Belarus and perhaps other parts of the former Russian Empire and Soviet Union, Russian commentators continue to lash out at the Russian Federation’s neighbors for suggesting they have justified claims to land and peoples now within the borders of that country.

            The latest example of such an attack is provided by Moscow commentator Aleksey Gryazev for the Lenta news agency who notes that “since the disintegration of the USSR, the former Soviet republics have regularly declared their pretensions to Russian territories” (lenta.ru/articles/2019/12/13/ushi_ot_mertvogo_osla/).

            “With few exceptions,” he continues, “the territorial aspirations of the neighbors have their roots in the wild 1920s when the Russian Empire was transformed into the Soviet state. Some of these demands were long ago formulated in official documents; others exist only in the consciousness of radical nationalists.”

            That is correct as far as it goes, but it fails to take into account three important historical realities which animate these disputes. First, prior to 1917, there were no national republics in the Russian Empire. Poland and Finland were ruled separately and two small dependencies in Central Asia were as well.

            But there was no Russian republic. Unfortunately, just as the Kremlin views the Russian Federation as the continuation of the USSR so too it considers the current state as the continuation of the Russian Empire and projects back in time, across two revolutionary eras, the idea that the Russian Empire was a Russian nation state, something it never was.

            Given that misreading of history, any entity that sought independence was taking away Russian land rather than escaping from a supranational empire, which was what the Russian Empire declared itself to be and what the Soviet Union was in fact, that had ceased to exist and opened the door to their creation of new states.

            Second, and as a result, it was only after 1917 that national republics, including the RSFSR, arose.  All of them were really or at least nominally based on a nation. Some achieved that status because they fought the center; others because they cooperated; and still others did so as a result of Moscow’s divide-and-rule policy.

            Even those that became independent and remained so de facto until 1940, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, did not secede from some Russian state; they instead formed states after the supranational empire had ceased to exist. Moscow even recognized them in treaties, even though once it illegally occupied them in 1940, it declared those agreements null and void.

            And third, after the disintegration of the USSR, yet another supranational state, the former union republics did not secede from that country. They became independent because the overarching political entity that had existed disappeared, and they were thus creating something new.

            That reality was complicated by the actions of Moscow and the West. The disintegration was managed in a nominally constitutional way despite the revolutionary situation; and thus the union republics which had the right to exit under Soviet law but no others were permitted to leave. Moscow cracked down hard on Chechnya most prominently and elsewhere as wel

            And the West generally deferred to this outcome, with the US government declaring in 1992 that Washington would not recognize any “secession from secession” on the territory of the former Soviet Union, thus providing unintended support to those in Moscow who then and now reject the principle of self-determination for any except ethnic Russians.

            What should be clear is that the territorial disputes between the Russian Federation and its neighbors are rooted in two different views of history. On the one hand, Moscow sees its predecessors as Russian national states. Such countries in its view cannot make any claims on Russia.

Clearly, for Moscow today, they are independent only because Russia tolerates that status. And meanwhile, Russia retains the right to make any claims it wants on their territories.

            On the other, the non-Russian countries that have established themselves base their existence on the principle of self-determination and their emergence occurred during revolutionary periods when the supranational central state had ceased to exist. That in turn means none of them seceded from Russia in 1917 despite what some seem to think.

            Territorial disputes among states are a frequent occurrence around the world historically, but rarely have they been so obviously the case of a clash of understandings like the one involving Moscow and its neighbors now.