“Vot vam russkiy mir”, “Prishol k nam russkiy mir” – one could hear such comments from Ukrainians on videos depicting the atrocities of the Russian army during the invasion of Ukraine. The Russian attack revealed the criminal mask of the “Russian World”. By their brave resistance, the Ukrainians dug the grave of this doctrine. It has become a moral corpse. But like a sinister zombie, it can still frighten other Russian neighbours and the whole world.
The doctrine of the “Russian World” became unquestionably a doctrine of foreign policy when it was used by the Russian authorities to justify the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Its authorship in a conceptual sense is attributed to Pyotr Shchedrovitsky, and its operational application in state policy is associated with Gleb Pavlovsky. It flourished under the rule of Vladimir Putin. The ideas of ‘near abroad’ and the reintegration of the post-Soviet space, which were promoted in the 1990s, were no longer sufficient. There was a need for a new thought that would justify Russia’s superpower claims.
The concept of the “Russian World” was a reheated idea of a common civilization space connecting the nation, peoples and people identifying themselves with the Russian language and the culture grown on its basis. Deep historical roots have been found for it. Beginning with the Grand Duke Izaslav, who in the 11th century referred to the concept of the “Russian world” in a letter to Pope Clement. Today’s interpreters associate the development of the idea with related concepts such as “Russian soul”, “Russian spirit”, “Russian idea” (Berdyaev), “Russian universe” (Dostoyevsky), “Russian archipelago” (Solzhenitsyn), which appeared in the past centurie. One of the assumptions of the concept is the assimilation of the Herderian thought about the influence of language on human identity. Speaking Russian means being able to think in Russian and therefore be able to act “à la russe”.
The concept has remained vague to this day, which allows it to be bent and interpreted in a way that is useful for justifying Russian policy. The starting point was the thesis that Russia is only half of the “Russian world”, because the collapse of the USSR left millions of people identifying with Russia outside its territory.
The conceptualization of the community of language and culture made it possible to think about using it as a kind of adaptation to globalization processes. Small nations were to submit to these processes, passively accepting their effects. “Russkij Mir” was a factor helping to shape globalization processes in line with Russia’s interests. Which in some interpretations acquired almost messianic shades. “Russian World” was to be a cultural barrier against the rotten liberalism of the West and a seedbed of “healthy values” for the world. A way to counteract the progressive aggravation of the corrupting influence of globalization.
The concept had at least three dimensions.
The first and politically most important one concerned the immediate vicinity of Russia. This doctrine was intended to give Russia a special right to care for citizens of the former Soviet republics who are not only ethnic Russians but who speak Russian or identify themselves with Russian culture. “Russkij Mir” was a doctrine that allowed Russia to intervene in the affairs of the former republics, even undermine their territorial integrity, and force them to participate in integration projects with Russia.
Back in the nineties, Moscow coined the concept of the so-called “Russian-speaking” population. Acting as a spokesman for its interests has become an instrument of Russia’s foreign policy towards Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The term also included non-Russian ethnic groups, not only Slavic ones (i.e. Ukrainians, Belarusians but also Moldovans).
“Russkij Mir” was built on the axiom of “Ruthenian people”, which unites Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians into an inseparable whole. This axiom was explained by Vladimir Putin in a famous article on Ukraine, published in 2021. It is worth recalling how much effort Russian leaders, including Putin, put in persuading Western leaders that Ukraine is an artificial creation, a project of the Austro-Hungarian general staff from the times of the First World War, or the creation of the Bolsheviks, and the Ukrainian language is merely a defective dialect of the Russian language. These theses, with all their self-indulgence, made even before and on the occasion of the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, may have been embarrassing, but unfortunately had an impact on the views of some Western politicians.
In 2011, the head of an important European organization visited Warsaw. He was invited to a working lunch hosted by the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Radosław Sikorski. When the Polish minister raised the issue of the situation in Belarus, he heard a rhetorical question from the interlocutor about who these Belarusians really were. After all, they are Russians. They speak and think Russian. And the collapse of the USSR left them outside of Russia. Minister Sikorski was speechless. He advised the interlocutor to try to tell the Irish that basically because they speak and think English, they are only a split of the English tribe. And advised the guest to wait for how they would react.
The recognition by Constantinople of the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in 2019 was undoubtedly a political blow to the doctrine of a single All-Russian people.
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn back in the past called for the “Russian question” to be adopted as the basis of Russia’s integration policy and to focus on uniting Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians (including the territories of Kazakhstan and Moldova that they live in). But the concept of “Russkij Mir” goes beyond its desiderata. It combines ethno-cultural and civic elements, giving the right to identify with Russia to all those who derive their roots from the citizens (subjects) of the former USSR and the tsarist empire.
Its expression became the mass process of the so-called passporting, i.e. issuing Russian passports to citizens of other countries. Passporting was an instrument to support the separatist authorities in Abkhazia, South Ossetia (almost all of them have Russian passports there) and Transnistria. It has been implemented vigorously in the occupied Donbas. But over time, it gained a high pace even in the former Soviet republics in the South Caucasus or Central Asia. And the presence of Russian citizens in these areas gives Russia a pretext to claim the right to defend their interests, including their security (as in Donbas). And the deployment of the Russian troops to help quell the internal instability in Kazakhstan in 2022 confirmed the imperial intentions of Russia in the region and the readiness to use the pretext of protecting the Russian minority to keep Kazakhstan in its political orbit.
In other words, “Russkij Mir” was an embodiment of the doctrine of the Russian sphere of influence in the territory of the former USSR in the most revanchist, imperial edition. In his speech on March 18, 2014, Putin, while justifying the annexation of Crimea, expressed the hope that Germany in particular would understand the aspirations of the Russian World, resulting from Russian history, to rebuild unity. It is true that already in 2015 Lavrov tried to deny this intention and aspirations to “collect Russian lands”. He compared “Russkij Mir” to Francophonie, the Ibero-American community, the activities of the Goethe, Confucius and Cervantes institutes. “Russkij Mir” was supposed to be a project about culture, values, language and religious beliefs.
After all, “Russkij Mir” was not the same as the idea of Eurasian integration. “Russkij Mir” was a broad ideological formula, a concept of “soft power” to justify using even military power. Eurasian integration is a strictly geopolitical, strategic, institutional and regulatory project. “Russkij Mir” was also an instrument aimed mainly at the integration of areas ethnically close to Russia (Slavic ones, with a large number of the Russian minority or the so-called Russian-speaking people), but also those that escaped or escape Russian control (such as Ukraine, Georgia or Moldova). Eurasian integration has a range corresponding to Russia’s possibilities of geopolitical control. Thus, “Russkij Mir” was not a doctrine that is particularly targeted, for example, to Armenia, because Armenia is geopolitically dependent on the necessity to participate in Eurasian integration. But when Eurasian arguments fail, “Russkij Mir” may be invoked as an element of pressure. This was the interpretation of Putin’s statements, which reminded the Kazakhs of the lack of state tradition and suggested that the Kazakhs should be interested in being part of the “bigger Russian World”.
Secondly, the Russian World was a platform for communication with the Russian diaspora around the world. It was a way of building historical continuity in relations with emigration, in particular overcoming the divisions caused by the Bolshevik period in their common history. Initiatives, such as the Russian World Foundation established in 2007, very quickly went beyond the framework of building communication with Russian compatriots in the “near and far abroad” and began to include all foreign citizens who not only speak Russian and like Russian culture, but generally wish Russia well. The real problem is that in most Western communities of the Russian diaspora, although they wish to maintain a bond with Russian culture, they do not often want to identify politically with Putin’s regime and the values it proclaims (homophobia, etc.). But “people who wish Russia well,” with some exceptions, they combine sympathy for Russia with sympathy for Putin. The demonstrations staged by the Russians in several German cities during the war on Ukraine in 2022 showed inadvertently the power of the influence of the doctrine of the Russian World on the mentality of the diaspora.
Third, the Russian World was a vehicle for building Russia’s image in the world, and the ideological engine of Russian public diplomacy. Beginning in 2004, Russian public diplomacy became very intense. Its flagship was the TV channel “RT” and the news site “Sputnik”. They don’t have much in common with journalism. They are the mouthpieces of political propaganda. Only after the Russian invasion on Ukraine it became possible to prohibit their operation in Western countries.
In this sense of the image, in the public message “Russkij Mir” is the epitome of Pax Russica.
It builds the image of Russia as a separate civilization based on healthy values. In 2008, this kind of thinking was even reflected in the doctrine of Russia’s foreign policy. According to it, global rivalry has acquired a civilizational dimension and has become a rivalry between value systems and development models. Russia is positioned there as a defender of the moral and spirituality factor in the development of civilization. Russia has declared itself a separate, conservative civilization. Its annihilation, according to Moscow, would mean the inevitability of dominating the world (or at least its western part) of dystopian scenarios taken straight from Huxley’s visions.
The image of Russia as a state based on strong power and conservative values appealed to many Western politicians, especially those from the fringes of the political spectrum, nationalist and fascist. They tried to find in Putin a model of strong politician and patron of conservatism. And they were cynically used by Putin (as “useful idiots”) in his plan to support destabilizing tendencies in the West, weaken the integrity of the West, and lead by populism to an anomie that would tear Western societies apart from the inside. Even if these politicians could not be accused of dolus directus, their pro-Putinism was the most anti-Western political act of today. Some of confessed the sin and apologized. Were the apologies sincere?
The ideological, conservative dimension of Russian policy is supported by the Orthodox Church, but without using the term “Russkij Mir”. It prefers the concept of “Holy Russia.”
It is, in fact, the “Russkij Mir” doctrine that is so blurred and flexible that it could be used as an argument in negotiating by Russia its superpower role in the world and its status as a separate center of influence in Europe. But instead it has led to the ostracism of Russia and its moral and civilizational collapse.
