Annual Kenneth N. Waltz Lecture by Prof Ted Hopf – “Crimea is Ours!: a Discursiave History”

Ted Hopf has been a professor of Political Science at Ohio State University, Ohio University and the University of Michigan. His main fields of interest are international relations theory, qualitative research methods, and identity, with special reference to the Soviet Union and the former Soviet space. In addition to articles published in the American Political Science Review, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, International Organization, and International Security, and numerous book chapters, he is the author or editor of five books, including Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999 (Cornell University Press, 2002), which won the 2003 Marshall D. Shulman Award, presented by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies for the best book published that year on the international politics of the former Soviet Union and Central Europe. Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945-1958, was published in April 2012 by Oxford University Press. Hopf received his B.A. from Princeton University in 1983 and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1989. He was a Fulbright Professor in the autumn of 2001 at the European University at St. Petersburg and a former vice-chairperson of the Board of Directors of the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. His research has been supported by the Mershon Center, the Ford Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Olin and Davis Centers at Harvard University.

Annual Kenneth N. Waltz Lecture by Prof Ted Hopf – “Crimea is Ours!: a Discursive History” 3rd December 2015 David Davies Memorial Institute Aberystwyth University

‘Crime is Ours:’ A Discursive History

Ted Hopf

Department of Political Science

National University of Singapore

January 2016

Most of the world was surprised by Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Russians, however, did not seem to be so taken aback; indeed, from what we can gather from public reactions, on the streets, in interviews, from public opinion polls, they saw the annexation as Crimea’s return to its natural place, within the Russian Federation. This is of course as interesting as it is important. From the Western perspective, Russia’s actions were an act of war, a violation of international law, a seizure of sovereign territory, a rewriting of the rules of the post-Cold War world, and a sign of growing Russian aggressiveness. All these Western impressions were only reinforced by Russian support for the rebellion in Eastern Ukraine that soon accompanied the annexation of Crimea.

What is important to keep in mind is that none of these Western interpretations is necessarily inaccurate. It is a question of perspective. In fact, the annexation of Crimea can be both a violation of international law and Crimea’s return to its natural Russian home. It is just that there is very little overlap between Western understandings of reality and Russian understandings of the very same objective reality. Crimea is no longer part of Ukraine; it is now, along with Sevastopol, a new subject of the Russian Federation.

The question I try to answer in this paper is how the annexation of Crimea came to be regarded as so natural by Russians. I want to explore this question at several different levels. First, I sketch out the discursive terrain of Russia from the collapse of the Soviet Union until today. I do this more schematically at first, laying out the evolution of the predominant discourses of Russian national identity from 1992. I highlight major inflection points in the discursive terrain, in particular, the wars in Yugoslavia, Kosovo 1999, 911, and the Iraq War. Then I zero in on the last ten years or so, to concentrate on the critical changes that have occurred in Russian understandings of what it means to be Russia and Russian. Second, the moment of annexation itself requires untangling. I think we will see that an unfortunate concatenation of events made the Russian decision possible in March 2014, as opposed to any time earlier. This is important, because it goes to the issue of how generalizable Russian behavior in Crimea and southeast Ukraine is beyond the Ukrainian case.

The Soviet Collapse and its Discursive Fallout

When the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, Russia was born on its wreckage. As we can see from Figure One, Discursive Trends in Russian National Identity, the Russian discursive terrain was at first polarized between Liberal and Conservative discourses. At the same time there is a rapidly emergent Centrist discourse that would come to dominate.

The Liberal discourse identified with the United States and the West, against the Soviet Union, and understood Russia as part of the universal civilization of modern liberal market democracy. [1] It implied a foreign policy of alliance with the US and the West. It expected Russian great power identity to be restored only through economic development. It understood Russian interests in the Near Abroad as negligible because it saw no economic gains to be had from interacting with them, and saw no fraternal Russian peoples there as it understood Russia as a civic national, not ethnonational, project.

Conservative discourse was the mirror image of Liberal in most respects. It understood Russia in ethnonational terms. It identified with the Soviet past, especially its economic model. One could say it identified with the USSR in general, minus its Stalinist excesses. One major departure from the Soviet past that Conservatives valued as part of Russian identity was the Russian Orthodox faith. Conservative foreign policy implied an alliance with any country that would balance against the imperialist US. It stressed military power over economic power as part of the path to great power status. Given its ethnonational Russian identity, it understood the Near Abroad, the Former Soviet Union (FSU) as a critical national interest, as there were 25 million ethnic Russians now living in that abroad, in addition to a natural ethnonational brotherhood with Belarus and Ukraine.

The emergent Centrist discourse understood Russia as genuinely unique, although associated with European social democracy, but definitely not with US liberal market democracy. It too identified with a Soviet past, but shorn not only of Stalinist excesses, but also of its ineffective economic model. Moreover, this discourse rejected an ethnonational Russian identity in favor of the civic national “Rossisskii” identity shared by Liberals.[2] While unique, Russia was situated within a universal civilization of modern social democracy. [3] With time, as we will see, the Centrist discourse becomes a “catch-call” discourse, steadily co-opting parts of Liberal and Conservative understandings of Russia, leaving both of them with precious little constituency.[4]

Centrist foreign policy implied no particular alliances, but rather understood Russia as one of several great powers who would participate in multilateral international institutions to manage world affairs. Both economic development and military modernization were understood as necessary to restoration of great power status. While there were Russian interests in the Near Abroad, they were not nearly as critical as they were to Conservatives with their ethnonational identification with Russians in the FSU. Such interests as Russia did have could be successfully defended through participation in international institutions such as the OSCE and Council of Europe.

Liberal discourse was rapidly discredited by Russian realities. The economic collapse, rampant and rising crime, corruption and violence associated with privatization and democratization caused a mass Russian dis-identification with the Liberal understanding of what Russia should become. Moreover, Liberal discourse had no answer to the plight of Russia’s diaspora in the Near Abroad. Liberal expectations for an alliance with the US and the West, and a Marshall Plan to build a liberal Russia, were dashed by NATO expansion and the absence of any substantial economic aid or investment in the Russian economy. By the 2000s, the “bad Russian 1990s” would become a totemic Negative Historical Other for the predominant Centrist discourse of the time.

Meanwhile, just as the Centrist discourse profited from Liberal delegitimization, Conservative discourse understood Russia in ways that alienated, rather than resonated, with average Russians. Continued Conservative identification with the failed Soviet economic project, with an ethnonational Russian identity project in a multinational state, and calls to balance against the US despite having no material wherewithal to credibly do so, discredited Conservative discourse to the growing advantage of Centrists.

Foreign Minister Kozyrev, in defending the Liberal preference for relying on international institutions to defend the human rights of Russians abroad, painted the alternative as Soviet. “We of course are in favor of defending Russians outside Russian borders, but with methods acceptable to a contemporary sense of justice…Of course it is possible to defend human rights on the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) platform using tanks….,but one may also use legal methods….To cross the border of a sovereign state….is absolutely unacceptable.”[5] Kozyrev later identified Russian military interference in Georgia not only with Bolshevism, but with Nazi Germany. “The party of war and of neo-Bolshevism is rearing its head in our country….Massive transfers of arms are occurring in the Caucasus and Moldova….What is happening here resembles 1933 in Germany….”[6] As President Yeltsin put it in February 1994, “both neo-imperial (Conservative) and isolationist (Liberal) approaches for Russia are inadmissible.”[7]

The Kosovo Effect     

The NATO intervention in Yugoslavia, but especially in Kosovo in 1999, further delegitimized Liberal discourse in Russia. At the same time, however, by calling for an armed intervention in Serbia, Conservative discourse was unable to make any gains at Liberal expense. Instead, and once again, the Centrist discourse was strengthened by adopting the middle position of diplomatic resistance to NATO and support for Milosevic. Liberals were discredited by unilateral NATO action against a traditional Russian friend. Conservatives lost credibility by irresponsibly advocating military action that might escalate into a shooting war with the US and its NATO allies.

Conservative discursive identification with Serbians as fraternal Slavic brothers implied a Russian military intervention on their behalf against the US imperialists and their NATO allied lackeys. Conservatives accused Yeltsin of Munich-style appeasement of NATO, arguing that by failing to defend Yugoslavia Russia was inviting the US and NATO to intervene to dismember Russia too, beginning with Chechnia.

Liberal discourse implied no particular interests in the Kosovo War for Russia. Conservative discourse implied at least Russian involvement in ending NATO’s intervention and saving the Milosevic regime. Here there was overlap between Liberal and Centrist aims: end the war as soon as possible, with Russian participation in its resolution. This was the outcome that occurred, with former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin’s “shuttle diplomacy” aimed at inducing Milosevic to surrender before he was ousted by NATO military action.

Russia learned from Kosovo that the liberal alliance with the West was fanciful; that multilateral cooperation with the US and NATO was highly unlikely, except after decisions to use military force were already taken; that the West had “flexible” understandings of fighting terrorism, since the Kosovo Liberation Army, which Western countries had classified as terrorist before 1999, easily became a Western ally during the war; and that the US could count on the loyalty of its European NATO allies. The summary effect was to push Russia to consider more unilateral ways of securing its own interests.

The new Russian military doctrine published in October 1999 identified violations of international norms against interference in Russia’s internal affairs, i.e., support for the Chechen rebels coming from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, as not only “one of the main external threats” to Russian security, but also as aid for international terrorism.[8] The hope expressed long before 911 was that since terrorism, and indeed the very same terrorist, Osama Bin Laden, threatened both countries, the US would eventually follow the anti-terrorist norm.[9] The fact that the US was openly violating the anti-terrorist norm in Kosovo, by supporting the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), made US actions there threatening to Russian interests in Chechnia, and in the CIS more broadly.[10]

The 911 Effect

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 produced the most significant discursive effects on Russian identity since the economic collapse and political chaos of the early 1990s. 911 allowed a rapid and substantial rise of Liberal discourse at the expense of Conservatives. But this would be a very short-lived recovery, all of three months or so. Thereafter, the Liberals once again declined, and the Centrist discourse once again picked up support from the discredited Conservatives.

Liberal discourse was empowered by 911 because the US became an instant potential ally with Russia in a global alliance against terrorism, something the Center had been seeking for almost 20 years. [11] Conservative discourse, on the other hand, was discredited by treating 911 as an anti-imperialist act against the US, rather than as an act of terrorism that united Russia and the US by a common threat. [12] Just as Liberals were discredited by Kosovo and continuing NATO expansion, Conservatives were discredited by treating 911 as an opportunity to ally with Islam against the US, forgetting the centrality of the anti-terrorist war in Chechnia to Russian national identity. Only the Agrarian Party and the Communist Party of Russia (KPR) voted against the Duma resolution supporting Putin’s cooperation with the US in the war against terrorism. [13] Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s resolution calling for “the Moslem world to resist the global aggressor–the United States” was voted down in the Duma, as were Liberal Democratic Party and KPR resolutions condemning US aggression and Russian cooperation with the US on Afghanistan. In November 2001, Gleb Pavlovskii, Putin’s personal political “technologist,” advised Putin to “become a President of a Right majority and formulate a Right national-liberal ideology.” [14] In part through subsequent US unilateralism, a National Conservative ideology was to emerge in subsequent years.

The Centrist discourse, supplemented by Liberal regard for the US as a natural ally, and in contradistinction to Conservative anti-imperialism, was strengthened by understanding 911 through the war in Chechnia, and expectations for an anti-terrorist alliance with the US.[15] At the CIS Defense Ministers’ meeting in Moscow in November 2001, Russia’s centrality to this mission was reaffirmed.[16] Before the Crawford, Texas summit, Putin’s aides in the Kremlin told reporters that now Bush was going to make Putin the second “good sheriff” in the world, and Russia was to become a US “partner” in the maintenance of international security.[17] The fact that such Bush Administration hardliners as Condaleeza Rice and Richard Armitage had made public pronouncements in favor of a new relationship with Russia was treated as front page news.[18] Talk of multipolarity, and its periodic references to a potential alliance with China or India, has completely disappeared, replaced by a discourse of bipolar struggle between civilization and barbarism.[19] As Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the International Affairs Commitee of the Federation Council put it, “Russia should join not NATO, but some new world alliance…some kind of Union of Civilized States.”[20] The aim is, as Putin said at the Shanghai Asian Pacific Economic Council summit on 21 October 2001, “to construct new relations based on the common aims of world civilization.”[21] So, Conservative bipolar understandings had prevailed, but the US was not the Other; terrorism and barbarism were.

In the meantime, how the US prosecuted the Global War on Terrorism abroad and treated civil liberties at home reinforced the Center’s own strategy at home against Chechen terrorists. Russian commentators, for example, cited CNN Chief Walter Isaacson’s November 2001 memo to CNN reporters to not show civilian deaths in Afghanistan as the need for controlled media at home.[22] Kommersant Vlast, a most liberal Russian news magazine, declared US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld a “Hero of Russia,” for frankly admitting that it is impossible to avoid civilizan casualties when fighting terrorism, thus justifying Putin’s levelling of Grozny. [23]

Union of Right Forces liberal leader Girgorii Yavlinsky warned against the anti-terrorist alliance with the US being used as cover for a “Potemkin village of managed democracy” at home.[24] And he had reason to worry. Vladimir Voinovich, one-time dissident exile writer, ridiculed those who did not understand the need to suspend liberal rules when one is fighting against “barbarism.”[25] Georgii Bovt wrote that, regrettably, “to defeat terrorism, civilization must defeat itself, for international terrorism is the product of the present world social system.”[26]

This potential Center/Liberal alliance at home and Russia/US anti-terrorist alliance abroad lasted for about three months. In Putin’s phone call to President Bush in the immediate aftermath of 911, in the pages of Russian newspapers, and in conversations with Russian policymakers, intellectuals, and ordinary people on the street, there was a thread that somehow fused US and Russian identities: now you know, as we have always known, how vulnerable we all are.[27]

The unilateral US withdrawal from the ABM treaty came as no surprise to Russian officials.[28] But its occurrence resulted in the first post-911 expressions of fear that the new alliance with Washington, or at least the high hopes that it would go beyond merely a narrow tactical anti-terrorist operation, was in trouble. On the three month anniversary of the attack, a front page Kommersant headline warned that “Russia and the US have Begun to Argue Again.” US unilateralism on ABM and strategic arms control was the issue. The same day in Izvestiia, an article on Powell’s visit concluded with the question: “How will conversations be in Moscow after the victory in Afghanistan?”[29] Actions such as these were used by Conservative discourse to discredit Putin’s policy of allying with the US against terrorism, not to mention any more profound fusion with the West. Russia, in the words of Ziuganov, must end “the disgraceful flirtation with NATO.”[30]

Only days after the US war in Afghanistan had commenced, it was noted that US statements that the war would be expanded beyond Afghanistan were already threatening the anti-terrorist coalition. Although “neither Putin nor his ministers had publicly expressed their doubts” yet, leaders of Moslem states and even European allies had made their opposition to expanding the list of targets known to Washington.[31] And it was the foreign minister of Washington’s closest ally, Jack Straw of Britain, who remarked at a Kremlin meeting with Putin that the “agreement on the joint military operation is limited to the territory of Afghanistan.”[32] In particular, Bush Administration warnings that Iraq could be next were “opposed by the main European allies of the US in the anti-terrorist operation.” Even British Defense Minister Geoffrey Hoon, in response to American hints that Iraq was next on the target list, told the British Parliament that “I have not seen any evidence of a direct connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.” Opposition to US military action against Iraq was expressed as well by French Defense Minister Alain Richard and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.[33]

The unilateral US abrogation of the ABM treaty in November and clear US intentions to invade Iraq demonstrated that an alliance with the US was impossible. Russians who expected a sense of shared vulnerability were quickly disabused of this possiblity. Instead, US unilateralism was aimed at restoring illusory absolute security. A multilateral route to Russian great power status was foreclosed.

Russia Becoming Russia

Over the last ten years or so, Centrist discourse has consolidated itself as the predominant discourse of Russian national identity in Russia. It has co-opted many elements of both Liberal and Conservative discoures, while still excluding many. As Putin put it, “Russian identity is not Soviet, not fundamentalist conservatism, and not Western ultraliberalism.”[34] Citing Nikolai Berdiaev, “the sense of conservatism is not to prevent movement forward and upward, but rather to prevent movement backward and downward, toward a chaotic darkness or return to a primitive condition.”[35]

Figures Two, Three, and Four show the predominant discourses of Russian national identity during Putin’s first term, Medvedev’s interregnum, and Putin’s second term.[36]

If we look at the three word clouds, we see the most salient aspects of Russian national identity in the public remarks of Putin and Medvedev from 2005 to 2014. There are some salient continuities, some interesting disappearances or attenuations, and several significant recent appearances.

There are six identities that appear consistently across the ten years. First, Russia is, should, and will be neoliberal in its economic orientation. This element co-opts Liberal discourse while rejecting Conservative appreciation of the Soviet economic model. Russia persists as a raw material appendage of the world capitalist economy, and this identity is one which both Center and Liberal discourse wish to transcend, through neoliberal development. The consistent rejection of much of the Soviet experience, combined with continuing appreciation of many elements of the Soviet past both rejects some Liberal discourse, as well as co-opts many Conservative understandings.

Russia is, and should be, a regional leader. Each discourse has different understandings of what this means in practice. Liberals understand it along the neocolonial lines advanced by Chubais in 2001 as “liberal imperialism.” Centrist discourse identifies with Liberals in this regard. On the other hand, Conservative discourse often “militarizes” the idea of regional leader to imply forceful reunification of ethnic Russians with their Homeland, or a restoration of some version of the USSR. Centrist discourse rejects this, although of course Russia’s actions in Ukraine are perhaps a harbinger of movement in the Conservative direction.

Finally Russia is understood as a “developing” country, developing not only economically in a neoliberal direction, but also politically, as an emerging democracy. This element also co-opts Liberal understandings of Russia and rejects Conservative ideas of restoring the USSR, rather than becoming more liberal and democratic.

Three elements of Russian identity have abated in salience, or disappeared altogether. First, Centrist discourse constantly appeals to foreign ways of being, and doing things. But this treatment of the outside world as a significant positive other, or source of best practices, has markedly declined in the second Putin administration. The other two disappearing elements are directly related to the first. In Medvedev’s discourse, Russia is often understood as corrupt, and stunted political and economic development was attributed to this Russian characteristic. Moreover, foreign standards were often invoked to demonstrate to Russians what they should be like. Under Putin II, Russian corruption has dropped to insignificance.

Since 1992, being European has always been a prominent part of Centrist discourse. It still was under Putin I and Medvedev. But in recent years it has not only greatly declined in salience, but its meaning has been transformed. First, it has been diluted to signify merely adopting European best practices and standards, as instruments to become more neoliberal or democratic. Still more recently, Russia has come to be understood as the True Europe, while Western Europe is a corrupted version occupied, influenced, and suborned by the United States.

The result of these disappearances and attenuations is a Russian Russia, rather than a European Russia defined by external indices, metrics, and standards of evaluation. These changes also co-opt more of Conservative discourse, as well as feed directly into the two salient new arrivals.

The first new element under Putin II are repeated claims that Russia is equal to, if not superior in some respects, to the West. This is part of Russia becoming Russia, independent of others’ negative evaluations of Russian realities. The second new element of Putin II is an identification with Imperial Russia as a Positive Historical Other. All of these changes add up to a Center Conservative discourse leading into events in Ukraine.

The Six Critical Continuities

1. Neoliberal

Being neoliberal entails economic orthodoxy: free markets, balanced budgets, low foreign debt, fighting inflation, attracting foreign investment, and developing competitive exports.[37] It also entails Russian leaders warning Western countries from adopting socialist solutions to their problems. Medvedev repeatedly defended the market against its critics: “Lets be frank: we now hear that the very nature of the market economy leads to inequality, environmental destruction and periodic crises. This is simply not true.”[38] Or, at the start of the financial crisis: “The example of the US, and others too, has shown that it is just one step from self-regulating capitalism to financial socialism. What’s more, we see them ready to nationalize one asset after another.”[39] In a similar vein, Putin criticizes West European welfare states for “making work less rewarding than not working.”[40] He tells domestic producers that the WTO is good for them, as, for example, the end to barriers on imported farm machinery will make Russian producers more competitive.[41]

One of the benefits of using kremlin.ru as a source is that speeches come not only in text, but also in video. So, while I have repeatedly said that Centrist discourse stands in opposition to Conservative understandings of what Russia is and should be, we can actually watch the conflict as it unfolds. So, for example, at May 2013 meeting with Duma party leaders, KPR leader Gennady Ziuganov argues for nationalizing more industries; the camera shows Putin’s ironic smile. He then interjects: “I think that is a so-called counterproductive activity,” and lets the ridicule sink in. No neoliberal arguments are necessary. Putin just assumes that others around the table, let alone the larger viewing audience, will see how ridiculous this nostalgia for the good old Soviet economic performance is.[42]

2. Persistent Raw Material Appendage

The identity to which Russia is most averse is raw material appendage. There are historical connotations here that can hardly be missed by average Russians. During the Soviet era, Soviet leaders constantly warned developing countries that they would forever remain raw material appendages of the world capitalist economy unless they became independent of that economy and chose a “socialist orientation” instead. Ironically, today, Russia sees its route out of raw material appendage-hood as neoliberalism. Medvedev put the problem in historical perspective: “For centuries we have sent our raw materials abroad and bought all our ‘smart’ products there as well. Of course there have been some rays of light in the gloom, but unfortunately this is still one of our most serious problems.”[43] Later, he compared Russia to a drug addict: “One becomes drug-dependent very fast, and the trade in raw materials is like a drug.”[44]

3. The USSR as a Negative Historical Other

Western scholars, journalists, and policymakers alike frequently claim that Russians are nostalgic for the Soviet Union, revere Stalin, and wish for the good old days of the USSR.[45] These views are manifestly inaccurate. While it is true one can find examples of history books, newspapers, speeches, and other media that whitewash Stalin and skate over the Soviet past, (most of the articles cited below look at a carefully selected handful of unrepresentative texts) a larger sample such as the one in this article, with over 1200 pubic remarks from 2005-2014 by Medvedev and Putin, reveals a very negative view of the Soviet past.[46] Indeed, it is a view that most Western scholars, journalists, and policymakers would doubtless agree to.

Putin, for example, has condemned the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Russian civil war itself, the Bolshevik revolution, communist destruction of private property, Soviet authoritarianism, its universalist foreign policy of spreading revolutions abroad, Stalinist repressions, the Gulag, and Soviet economic policy for which he blamed the collapse of the Soviet Union.[47] This is worthy of note since Conservative discourse blames some coalition of imperialists, Zionists, liberals, and Gorbachev for bringing the Soviet Union down. Putin, instead, attributes the collapse, in part at least, to Soviet failure to listen to Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn “was a patriot, he wanted to preserve the country, it wasnt preserved because we didnt pay attention in a timely fashion to what he directed our attention to. “[48] This entire list resonates perfectly with Liberal discourse, and once again, shows the catch-all quality of the Centrists. [49]

Medvedev, while visiting Spain, compared fascist Francoist Spain to communist Russia, pointing out that Spain and Russia are “connected by the fact that both our nations experienced totalitarianism and self-isolation….Essentially, our countries have had to rid themselves of a terrible disease.”[50] Equating fascism with communism is part of Liberal discourse, as well and is of course anathema to Conservative understandings of the Soviet Union. Among other aspects of the Soviet past Medvedev criticized during his four years in office were Soviet treatment of non-Russian ethnic minorities, its militarization of society, its cultivation of dependence on the state, the arms race, its immigration laws, its treatment of the disabled, its disregard for worker safety, its handling of Chernobyl, environmental degradation, agricultural policies, dependence on raw materials, the criminalization of dissent, its distortion of history, and the repression of civil society and totalitarianism more generally.[51] It is perhaps most striking that Medvedev chose the eve of the 65th anniversary of victory in WWII, in an interview with Izvestiia, to condemn the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, Soviet population of the Gulag with returning WWII veterans, and its crimes and cover up in Katyn forest.[52]

Finally, in just the last several years, Putin has blamed the Soviet Union for forging a society without morality, for repressing religion, for excessive military spending, propagating a false ideology, repressing Chechens and other national minorities, including Tatars, for covering up Stalinist crimes, including the murders in Katyn Forest, and for its inability to house its own people properly.[53] Finally, and perhaps the only feature of the Soviet Union which Western analysts would not condemn, Putin has most recently lambasted the Soviet Union for surrendering to the Germans at Brest Litovsk in 1918, calling it a betrayal of Russia.[54]

The above is just an abridged list. But what it demonstrates is that Centrist discourse understands the Soviet Union as an Historical Other that must be avoided at all costs, a collection of political, social, cultural, and moral practices that must not only be condemned, but a set of lessons that must be taught and learned. This anti-Soviet discourse gives the Center ample opportunity to differentiate itself from Conservatives. Once again, we can watch this happen in an exchange between Putin and LDPR head Zhirinovskii on kremlin.ru. After Zhirinvoskii extols some features of the Soviet economic model, Putin asks: “What about consumer goods? Where were they? There werent any. Lets not lie to each other and the people. The people know what was and what wasnt.”[55]

4. Appreciating the Soviet Past

Both Putin and Medvedev identified elements of the Soviet past worthy of appreciation and emulation by contemporary Russia. It should be said that many of these are present in mass discourses of Russian national identity, as well.[56] FN Medvedev lauded the Soviet supranational civic national identity project, its educational system, youth programs and vocational-technical education.[57] Putin, as well singled out the Soviet program of affirmative action for national minorities, resulting in great upward social mobility, sports programs for youth, high mass culture, health care, the space and civilian nuclear programs. On Soviet foreign policy, both leaders pointed to the Soviet development of good relations with the decolonizing world, the fact that the Soviet Union had been strong and respected in the world, and had a powerful military.

In sum, we could say that the predominant Centrist discourse of Russian national identity understood Soviet foreign policy in the developing world and its social policies as a positive Historical Other for contemporary Russia, but its economic model was a disaster, and political system odious.

5. Russia as a Work in Progress

Russian political and economic development is an ongoing project, not a finished product. Sounding like Barrington Moore, Putin reminds his audience that Russia “of course needs time to build and develop our democratic institutions…..It takes time to form the middle class which is the…foundation for democracy in general.”[58] Medvedev observed that Russian democracy is “young, immature, incomplete, and inexperienced, but it’s a democracy, nevertheless.”[59] Im some cases, this argument is used to fend of Western critiques of Russian civil rights abuses, violation of property rights, and other civic failings.The argument is that you have had 100s of years and are still imperfect; we have only been at this for 25 years; give us a break! The Centrist commitment to neoliberal market democracy coopts Liberal discourse on these counts.

6. Russia as Natural Regional Leader

After the Soviet collapse Russian discourse was dominated by fears that Moscow could not govern, let alone control and integrate, regions within its own borders, let alone the FSU or Near Abroad.[60] FN Most important here were Chechnia and the Caucasus more generally, but also included Tatarstan, Sakhalin, Kaliningrad, and elsewhere. By the early 2000s, however, Moscow had seemingly secured the Center’s hold on itself, and concentrated more on former Soviet republics. There has been an abiding understanding of Russia as the natural leader of the FSU, minus the Baltic states. In “Liberal Imperialism,” Chubais elaborated the natural advantages Russia had vis-à-vis its post-Soviet periphery. When the USSR collapsed, its economic infrastructure remained. Pipelines, electricity grids, railroads, highways, airline routes, production networks, and much else still united Russia with all the other new post-Soviet states.[61] These were large fixed assets that only the Baltic states immediately aspired to abandon and instead turn toward Europe.[62] Moreover, Russia was the primary energy supplier to several countries, including Armenia, Georgia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Over the 1990s, each of them had accumulated large debts to Russia for imported energy. Chubais advocated following the tried and true Western neocolonial policy of debt for equity swaps, resulting in the next decade in Russian ownership of large parts of these countries’ industrial and infrastructural assets.

So far so Liberal. But Centrist discourse increasingly noted not just the common inherited infrastructure from the Soviet Union, but their common language, culture, “mentality,” and “civilization.” This understanding was accompanied by a growing appreciation and application of Russian “soft power” in the region, including scholarships for regional students to Russian universities, the opening of branch campuses of Moscow State University in these countries, the distribution of Russian language textbooks for their schools, as well as Russian language programs.[63] FN There was also a resuscitation of Soviet traditions of years of Russian and Uzbek culture, Pushkin Prizes for the translation of Russian literary works into local languages, and training of local officials in Russian training facilities.

In this way, Centrist understandings and practices addressed Conservative concerns with restoring the USSR, but until 2014 in Ukraine, on a peaceful, one could say, hegemonic and liberal imperialist basis, rather than coercively.

Three Ebbing Elements

Three elements of Russia’s predominant discourse of national identity waned over the last decade: 1. reference to foreign standards in evaluating what Russia is, and should be, although it still remains quite substantial; 2. Russia as corrupt; and 3. Russia as European.

1. Russia’s Foreign Standards of Reference

Putin and Medvedev often identified what Russia should become with what already existed in the outside world, especially the West, but in the developed world more generally, too. They both were very much taken with international rankings and ratings systems. Medvedev lamented that in 2008, Russian IT exports placed Russia not “even in 20^th or 30^th place, but closer to 70^th or 80^th. I myself was astonished by these figures.” In the “category of e-government: in 2005 we were 56^th and in 2007 92^nd? What does this mean? This means we don’t even have an electronic government.” He continues, sarcastically, “Regarding our preparedness to enter the network world, there is such a rating, we had the honor of occupying 72^nd place.”[64] In 2010, Medvedev pointed that in the area of ease of doing business, “we are now ranked 120^th out of 183 countries—I would like to note that our closest partners Belarus and Kazakhstan are ranked in 58^th and 63^rd,” and unlike Russia they are actually moving up the list. This, too, “is something to reflect on.”[65]  Medvedev’s list of Western models, standards, and achievements for Russia to emulate is long. He wishes Russia to achieve Western levels of labor productivity,[66] its Silicon Valley,[67] its Discovery Channel,[68] its energy efficiency levels,[69] agricultural productivity,[70] its quality of meat,[71] its private insurance companies,[72] quality of nature reserves,[73] senior citizen care centers,[74] antitrust laws,[75] civilian aircraft production, corporate governance,[76] private philanthropy,[77] historical preservation,[78] and on and on. He wants to change the name of the Russian militsia to police, with badges with names and id numbers, to emulate Western practice. He wishes Russia had US and Israeli airport security systems,[79] as well as US Miranda Rights for those who are arrested. As he says, “it wouldn’t hurt our citizens to hear this information.”[80] He tells a meeting of Russian trade union leaders that “Incidentally, in terms of compliance with laws, I believe that foreign companies often behave better than ours. They are used to complying with labour laws.”[81]

Putin never approached Medvedev’s level of identification with Western standards, and more importantly, he, unlike Medvedev, increasingly countered, as we will see below, with claims of Russian equality with, or superiority over, the rest of the world. That said, Putin too was taken by international league tables. He wanted five Russian universities to make it into the Top 100 by 2020;[82] for Russia to be in the Top 20 in investment climate and network society by 2020;[83] and the Top 10 in IT by the same year.[84] He touted the fact that Russia was in the Top 10 in budget transparency, 27^th in e-government according to the UN,[85] and had moved from 120^th to 92^nd in business climate rankings and from 120^th to 112^th in the World Bank’s investment climate rankings in 2012.[86]

Moreover, Putin still cited Western standards for Russian aspirations in salaries for scientists;[87] numbers of patents, academic publications and citations;[88] weight of small and medium enterprises in national output;[89] quality of hospitals,[90]export competitiveness,[91] pharmaceuticals,[92] and per capita consumption of polymers,[93] et.al.

2. Russia is not so Corrupt

For Medvedev, one of the most enduring and pernicious features of Russian identity was corruption at all levels of state and society. Putin not so much. Medvedev argued that corrupt practices had become a way of life in Russia over the centuries. This “legal nihilism had become deeply entrenched in the national psyche,” and its presence was an obstacle to both Russia’s neoliberal and demoratic aspirations. Putin both considered corruption to be less central to Russia’s identity, as well as attributed it to the phase of development in which Russia found itself; as such, it was a passing phase, not a deeply-rooted habit. Like Medvedev, Putin saw corruption “unfortunately, and without any exaggeration, as biggest threat to our development. The risks here are even more significantly serious than movements in the price of oil. The people and business are tired of the daily corruption in state institutions, in the courts, in law enforcement, and in state companies.”[94] Putin told the Federal Assembly that “the best manifestation of patriotism is to not steal.”[95] But Putin noted that “relatively big corruption in general is present in any transitional economy,” such as Russia’s.[96] In fact, he pointed out that “corruption is a problem for any country….even in European countries and in the US.” [97] Medvedev never equated Russia to the US or Western Europe on any dimension, least of all levels of corruption. Nor did Medvedev ever claim Russia was winning the war on corruption as Putin did at an October 2013 meeting on combatting corruption. He cited Russia’ s movement from 120th to 92nd in the World Bank’s investment climate rankings as evidence.[98]

3. Russia becomes less European and then more European than Europe

Over the years, Russia evolved from understanding itself as European to understanding European standards of doing and making things as aspirational for a developing Russia to becoming Real Russia and the Authentic Europe.

The average Russian understands herself as European, as part of European culture and civilization.[99] Putin spoke of Russia’s “European calling” and Russia’s place in “the common European home.”[100] There is no American or Asian calling, common home, common culture, or common civlization. Moreover, in Putin’s meetings with European and US leaders from 2000-2005, Putin refers to the Russian and European people as “narody,” and the Russian and American people as “liudi.”[101] This is not a trivial semantic issue, but one of profound significance for identity relations. Narod is formed around the root rod, which by itself means family, kin, clan, birth, origin, stock, and in science, genus. It gives rise to words, such as, roditeli/parents, rodina/Homeland or Motherland, rodit/to give birth, etc.,while liudi are simply a collection of unrelated people. In other words, Russians and Europeans are relatives in the same family, while Russians and Americans are just part of the human race with no particular closeness or similarity.

Over the last ten years, however, this almost ethnonational identification of Europe with Russia has disappeared; Russia has disidentified itself from Europe. Instead an authentic Russian Self has emerged that only appeals to Eurostandards for pragmatic reasons of best practices, not any deeper identification.[102] In general, “we agree that EU standards should be applied in Russia in cases where we dont have regulations of our own in place…Whats more, all future regulations and standards will have to be in line with EU standards.”[103]

By turning away from Europe, “Russia is returning to itself, is returning to its own history.”[104] “We must maintain our national and spiritual identity, and not lose ourselves as a nation. To be and remain Russia.”[105] What Russia has found out by becoming itself is that not only is Europe not a Significant Other with which it identifies, but is not even really Europe.[106] Instead, Europe has been deracinated through ultra-liberal values, secularism, and Americanization. European countries have become what Conservative discourse has argued all along, lackeys of imperialism who have lost true sovereignty over their internal and foreign affairs.[107]

Two New Arrivals

Consistent with movement away from relying on international standards of evaluation and identification with Europe, the New Russia understands itself as equal to the West in many respects, and superior in some. Imperial Russia becomes an Historical Other with which an authentic Russia can identify.

1. Russia is not inferior to the West

While Putin and Medvedev both frankly acknowledged that Russia was a work in progress had much to learn from the West and the developed world in general, Putin in particular was increasingly annoyed at the constant criticism from Western leaders. In a press conference in Moscow after a meeting with the visiting Portuguese prime minister, Putin declared: “Lets not see the situation as if one side is shining and white, clean and pure, while the other is some kind of monster that has just crawled out of the forest, with hoofs and horns instead of normal human features.”[108] But neither Putin, in his first term, nor Medvedev in his only term, ever compared Russia favorably to the West. This all changed in 2012, with a litany of comparisons with the rest of the world that put Russia in a more favorable light.

The Russian economy is doing better than European economies.[109] The Russian state spends more on research and development thatn France, Britain, Italy, at least when measured in terms of PPP.[110] Russia is no worse than Germany in gendered wage inequality. Russia is more sovereign than European countries because it has less official debt.[111] Russia’s GLONASS satellite navigation system is better than Europe’s Galileo and as good as the US’ GPS.[112] Russian income inequality is no worse than in the US.[113] Russia spends more on its space program than the US or Western Europe.[114] Russian birthrates are now equal to or higher than most West European countries.[115]

Putin also came around to a position that many Western social scientists would accept: Western citation counts are “not an absolute criteria for quality of work.” Indeed, addressing a meeting on Russian education, “many of your foreign colleagues think they have become dependent on leading scientific journals and are dictated to by them.”[116] Instead, we “need to create our own system of evaluations.”[117]

More acerbically and defensively: Russian laws on public demonstrations are more liberal than some West European laws.[118] The Russian law on the registration of foreign NGOs is no different than the 1938 US Foreign Agent Registrations Act. [119] Russia has more religious freedom than the US as Russian law protects religious sensibilities; the US allows the burning of the Koran. Russia is more democratic than the US because the US electoral college allows candidates with fewer votes to win the presidency. [120] Russian prisons are more humane than Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. Russian police behavior no worse than the US where you can get a bullet in your head. [121] Gay rights in Russia are more secure than in the US where states like Texas still have anti-sodomy laws.[122]

And recall all these comparisons are made on the background of a Russia in only the first couple decades of its development, so it need not be ashamed of how it compares to those who have taken centuries to get where they are.

2. Imperial Russia’s Usable Past

Putin, most recently, has found Imperial Russia to be an inspirational example for contemporary Russia. It had a respected merchant entrepreneurial class which should provide a sound historical foundation for neoliberalism to develop in Russia today. Unlike the Soviet Union it did not betray the nation in World War I, but fought valiantly.[123] Unlike the Soviet Union which repressed religion, Imperial Russia fostered a patriotic education carried out by the Russian Orthodox Church, synagogues, and mosques.[124] Unlike the Soviet Union, which had an ideological foreign policy, Imperial Russia “never imposed its will on anyone.”[125] Reminiscent of official Soviet celebrations of various peoples and republics voluntarily joining the Soviet Union, Putin marked the 100^th anniversary of the “unification/edinenie” of Tuva to Russia by highlighting the benefits of being part of the Empire. “As a result of Russia taking Tuva under its wing, the Tuvan people were able to preserve their way of life, culture, language, and faith of their predecessors.”[126] Finally, the Russian Empire was continually faced with external efforts to contain its power, to keep it down, just like Russia today.[127]

Summary

By 2014, on the eve of Moscow’s decision to seize Crimea and aid a rebellion in eastern Ukraine, elite discourse understood Russia as an aspiring neoliberal democracy trying to recover or restore an authentic Russian Self. It had absolutely rejected all the mistakes and crimes of its Soviet past, while appreciating the social and cultural policies that made the Soviet Union a multinational model of inter-ethnic harmony. One of the Soviet Union’s biggest errors was to rely on raw materials, rather than neoliberal market mechanisms, to develop its economy. One of the Soviet Union’s most useful legacies was the hard and soft infrastructure that binds former Soviet republics to Russia, and make Russia the natural center of a Eurasian Economic Union, which, of course, as we shall soon see, Ukraine should rationally and naturally join.

Becoming authentically Russian means reducing, if not ending, understanding Russia as European; it should be itself. While reference to international and European standards and best practices are absolutely necessary to move Russia forward both economically and politically, they should not affect the very essence of what it means to be Russian. For that, one needs to look to Russian history, imperial Russian history in the first instance. Nor should Russia tolerate any longer being lectured by the West for its many flaws, as if Europe and the US, centuries older, dont have enough of their own imperfections.

Making Crimea Ours Thinkable and Natural

The predominant elite discourse of Russian national identity makes the annexation of Crimea and the arming of rebels in Dontesk and Lugansk thinkable and natural in several ways. With Russia increasingly identifying itself as becoming authentically Russian once again, it can go it alone, create its own regional hegemony, including Ukraine. It can take advantage of the common historical Soviet legacies that unite post-Soviet states and elites. There is a realization that there is a “natural” order in the region with Russia at its head and center, just as in the imperial Russian (and Soviet) past. Putin’s increasing rejection of foreign standards and their replacement by domestic ones is accelerating the move to insulate Russia from the Western/US gaze that has continually, in his view, humiliated and ridiculed it over the last 25 years. By being Russia, remaining Russia, it can selectively engage with the world without, as Putin put it, “losing itself” in, or to, that world.

Since shortly after 911, Russian hopes to be a multilateral partner of the US and the West have been dashed, pushing it to establish its own unilateral regional hegemony. Other great powers have refused to acknowledge it as an equal collaborator at the global level, so the near abroad becomes the abroad. Finally, the belated recognition of Imperial Russia as a positive Historical Other for contemporary Russia makes Ukraine part of a single political, cultural, historical, and even spiritual unit. Since the Soviet collapse, Ukraine has been understood as part of a larger Russian community, including Belarus, and Slavic community, including Serbia and the Russian diaspora in the FSU, and even farther abroad.

Putin repeatedly mentioned how well Ukraine had done, economically and otherwise, under Imperial Russian rule, and perhaps even more insensitively, under Soviet rule as well. In Kiev to celebrate the 1025^th anniversary of the “Christianization” of Russia with Ukrainian President Yanukovich, Putin said this is “really our common holiday,” reminding us of our “spiritual unity and common roots.” We have “done a lot together in previous centuries and achieved outstanding things.”[128] In an interview with the Associated Press and Russian TV, Putin reminded his audience that even during the Russian civil war, when whites and reds were fighting to the death, and millions died, “they never raised the question of the secession/otdelenie of Ukraine.” Both believed in the “integrity of the Rossian state.” He went on to analyze Ukrainian history. Before becoming part of the Russian Empire, the Ukrainian people/narod had endured centuries of deprivations, essentially suffered like humiliated slaves.” But once “both parts of Rus were reunited,” Ukraine began to “develop and prosper.” Moreover, the USSR made Ukraine bigger by awarding it more territory.[129] At Valdai, Putin argued that the Soviet Union had been good for Ukraine, as well, skipping over the Ukrainian Holodomor (literally, death by hunger), the famine set off by collectivization in the 1930s in which millions of Ukrainians perished. He said that after World War II, the Soviet government had invested 1.5 trillion rubles in re-establishing its industries, a third of which went to Ukraine.[130] Indeed, “according to Western evaluations, the per capita national income of Ukraine in 1970 was more than that of Italy.”[131] It is just unnatural for Russia and Ukraine to be separate entities.

How Ukraine is understood in elite Russian discourse is crucial. Despite the fact that Medvedev and Putin continually reject Conservative discursive constructions of Russia as ethnically Russian, instead touting Russia’s multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, civic national Rossian identity, when it comes to Ukraine, ethnonational Russian identity predominates in relating to Ukraine.

Ukraine itself and Ukrainians are always referred to as fraternal by Putin and Medvedev.[132] In the years prior to March 2014, Medvedev referred to the two countries’ genetic links, calling them “our closest nearest relatives. He even cited his own “Ukrainian blood” from his mother’s grandfather.[133] Putin invoked their shared Orthodox heritage, their spiritual unity, that they were “divinely ordered together, that they are a single people, part of a big Rossian world.”[134] It should be said that these expressions of fraternal closeness have continued right through the annexation of Crimea and the continuing conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia are naturally one entity, “one people” with a “common Dnieperan, Kievan baptismal font/kupel.”[135] Referring to the two countries in a nationwide television call-in show, Putin avowed, “We will never part from each other.”[136]

About a year before the Crimean annexation, Putin began to elaborate an array of carrots and sticks with respect to Yanukovich’s upcoming meetings with the EU on an assocation agreement. He begins by enumerating the economic benefits for Ukraine if it is to join the Customs Union (CU) with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Citing a Ukrainian Academy of Sciences study, he tells Yanukovich that the Ukraine’s GDP is expected to grow from 1.5 to 6.5%, “depending on the depth of integration.” He combines this with a warning: if Ukraine stays out of the CU, Ukrainian workers will no longer be able to travel freely to Russia. Putin concludes by saying that “now Ukraine faces a political choice,” as the economics are obvious.[137] In a forum on the Rostov Oblast economy, Putin warns that if Ukraine signs an EU association agreement, Russia will have to consider controls on Ukrainian exports to Russia, as it will be hard to know if they are not really re-exported EU goods that would be subjected to higher tariffs.[138] He warned that if the Russian economy has to “protect itself” from such Ukrainian goods, Gazprom might have to raise its currently concessionary natural gas prices for Ukraine.[139]

Putin publicly worries what will happen to joint Russian-Ukrainian production, such as in the missiles and aviation, suggesting the Russian market might be closed to such exports from Ukraine.[140] Moreover, the moment Ukraine signs up with the EU, its free trade agreement with Russia will become null and void, so higher tariffs will be imposed on Ukrainian exports.[141] He promises Ukraine a better deal from the EU if Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan negotiate as one.[142]

On the day before demonstrations erupted in Kiev over Yanukovich’s delay in presenting the EU association agreement to parliament for ratification, Putin says “Ukraine can make its choice; we respect it, but it will have negative consequences.” No matter what, “the fraternal status of our peoples isnt being cancelled, its not going anywhere.”[143] By early December, Putin is accusing the Maidan demonstrators of “trying to overthrow the legitimate, I want to stress, authority” in Ukraine.[144]

By 8 December, there were 500,000 protestors on the Maidan. The Russian counteroffer to Ukraine included a reduction in gas prices from $400 to $269 per 1000 cubic meters, an agreement to resume production of the An-124 transport plane, construction of a bridge on Kerch Peninsula to Crimea, and $15 billion in debt relief.[145] Putin later justifies the aid package by saying “if we really say this is a fraternal people and country, then we must act like close relatives.” But he warns that if Ukraine joins the EU, they will become an agricultural appendage; their industries will not survive. They will need 100s of billions of dollars to bring themselves up to European standards and they don’t have the money, and nobody will give it to them.[146]

The day after 80 people died on the Maidan, on 21 February, Putin’s representative, Aleksandr Lukin, and the foreign ministers of Poland, Germany, and France, reached an agreement that an interim government would be established in Ukraine, with elections to be held in November. Yanukovich fled Kiev the next day. On 27 February 2014, the occupation of Crimea began. A referendum was held on 16 March. EU& US sanctions against Russia were announced the next day. In his 18 March speech welcoming Crimea and Sevastopol as two new subjects of the Russian Federation, Putin revealed his thinking: “Our Western partners have stepped over the line, behaved crudely, irresponsibly and unprofessionally….Without Russian sovereignty over Crimea, both Russia and Ukraine can lose it.”[147]

While the predominant discourse of Russian national identity, and the the discursive constitution of Ukraine within that discourse made the annexation of Crimea and support for eastern Ukrainian rebels reasonable, it was the precise concatenation of circumstances that favored Crimean annexation at that moment. The first is the sense of betrayal. Russia had reached agreement with the US and Western Europe on a negotiated solution to the Ukrainian crisis, and yet Yanukovich was forcefully driven from power. At the least, the West had gone for the “exploitation payoff” in this Prisoners’ Dilemma game, refusing to try to convince the Maidan demonstrators and their political representatives to abide by the 21 February agreement. After all, the latter were very likely to have won the November elections foreseen by the agreement. At worst, the West had put the Maidan demonstrators up to the coup and been conniving all along in Yanukovich’s ouster.

Either account of the West’s in/actions made it appear that Ukraine was not just heading toward the EU, but was also heading toward NATO. This possibility made the occupation of Crimea absolutely essential; there could not possibly be a NATO naval base in Crimea, especially given Imperial Russia’s valiant military struggles over centuries to secure this territory for Moscow. As Putin more evocatively characterized the threat, “This would have excluded Russia from this region, for which so many Russian bones have been buried over previous centuries.”[148] Speaking to Russian ambassadors, Putin warned that “everything Russia has fought for since Peter the Great was threatened” by the coup in Kiev.[149] In a very real sense, Russia launched a preventive war in Crimea to deny NATO this opportunity.

These understandings of Western motives are arrived at against the background of years of accumulated resentment against US unilateralism in world affairs: in Eastern Europe with NATO expansion; in the former Soviet Union; and the world in general. Neither the annexation of Crimea nor the support for rebels in eastern Ukraine would have been possible absence numerous discontented Russians in these Ukrainian territories. One could say that there is a self-limiting aspect to Russian strategy, and its limits may well have been reached as far as Ukraine is concerned.

Conclusion

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and subsequent military intervention in eastern Ukraine were surprising and troubling to most in the West. The discursive history of Russian national identity over the last 25 years perhaps does not make Russian actions any less troubling, but should make them a bit more understandable. Russia’s discursive terrain began polarized between the Conservative neo-Soviet identity of the system that was just overthrown, and a the Liberal Western future promised by Gorbachev and his still more Liberal opponents. But the realities of 1992 and thereafter rapidly opened the ground for an understanding of Russia that would reject the purist visions of both Liberals and Conservatives. The economic collapse, political chaos, corruption, violence, and uncertainty of the 1990s discredited the Liberal understanding of Russia and its future. [150]Western failure to invest economically in Russia in the 1990s in sums expected by Russians and reqiured to make a difference, combined with creeping NATO expansion and the war in Kosovo undermined Liberal discourse, apparently fatally.

But continued Conservative adherence to the rejected Soviet model of economic management, ethnonational Russocentrism, and a foreign policy predicated on eternal conflict with the US, steadily eroded this discourse’s creditability, as well. The final blow to Conservative understandings of Russia was support for Islamic terrorism against the US after 911, in the face of the terrorist threat from Chechnia at home.

Within the predominant discourse, Ukraine was always part of a broader Slavic and Orthodox Christian family. Ukraine was therefore understood as a natural part of Russia’s regional project, whether the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Eurasian Economic Union, or a restored Soviet Union. Over the last several years, Ukraine’s identity relationship with Russia critically changed as Russia came to understand itself increasingly as an authentic Russia apart from Europe and the West. This made Ukraine still more important to constituting the Russian Self, rooted as it was in historical Rus’, Orthodoxy, and Empire. Those social and cultural aspects of the Soviet Union that were evaluated positively in Russian discourse were seamlessly and naturally applied to Ukraine, who was assumed to share this common mentality, culture, history, and physical and ideational infrastructure. Ukraine was becoming an increasingly intrinsic constititutive part of the Russian self, one whose separation from Russia was increasingly understood as unnatural, unthinkable, and indeed, dangerous. The February 2014 overthrow of Yanukovich did not just threaten Russian geopolitical interests in Crimea; the fear of a possible NATO base in the Black Sea was real. But the removal of Yanukovich was also an existential threat, as Ukraine was, and is, an inalienable part of Russia itself.

Bibliography

[1] While I derive these discourses from popular novels, history textbooks, film reviews, and newspaper articles in Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 153-210, it is encouraging that other scholars, relying on vastly different sources, have developed taxonomies of Russian foreign policy thought itself in the 1990s that track quite well with my intepretation. See, for example, James Richter, Khrushchev’s Double Bind: International Pressures and Domestic Coalition Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 207-10; James Richter, “Russian Foreign Policy and the Politics of Russian Identity,” in Celeste Wallander, ed. The Sources of Russian Foreign Policy after the Cold War (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), 69-94; Andrew Bennett, Condemned to Repetition? The Rise, Fall, and Reprise of Soviet-Russian Military Interventionism, 1973-1996, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 306-9; Johan Matz, Constructing a Post-Soviet International Political Reality: Russian Foreign Policy Toward the Newly Independent States (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2001); Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press); Ilya Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy: Nationalism and Leadership in Poland, Russia and Ukraine, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 220-68; Margot Light, “Post-Soviet Russian Foreign Policy: The First Decade,” in Archie Brown, ed. Contemporary Russian Politics: A Reader (New York: Oxford, 2001), 419-28; Neil Malcolm, “Russian Foreign Policy Decision-Making,” in Peter Shearman, ed. Russian Foreign Policy since 1990 (Boulder: Westview, 1997) 3-27; Andrei Tsygankov, Pathways after Empire: National Identity and Foreign Economic Policy in Post-Soviet World (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); and William Zimmerman, The Russian People and Foreign Policy: Russian Elite and Mass Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

[2] Kolsto, Political Construction Sites: Nation-building in Russia and the Post-Soviet States, (Boulder: Westview, 2000), 203-27 and Tadashi Anno, “Nihonjiron and Russkaia Ideia: Transformation of Japanese and Russian Nationalism in the Postwar Era and Beyond,” in Gilbert Rozman, ed. Japan and Russia: The Tortuous Path to Normalization, 1949-1999 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 344-7.

[3] Matz, Constructing Post-Soviet Reality, 169 and English, Russia and the Idea of the West, 237.

[4] Otto Kirchheimer, “The transformation of the Western European party systems,” in Political Parties and Political Development, eds. Joseph LaPolambara and Myron Weiner, (Princeton University Press, 1966), 177-200. I chose this concept to capture a key feature of Russian politics, “the vanishing opposition,” one of the consequences of a catch-all discourse.

[5] Interview in Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 1 April 1992.

[6] Izvestiia, 30 June 1992.

[7] 9 February 1994 Rossisskie Vesti

[8] “Military Doctrine,” 3-7. Colonel-General Manilov identified Chechnia as the reason for these passages, and others. See Manilov, “Russia’s New Military Doctrine,” 1. On Russia’s desire for a “world of sovereign equality [and] international legal norms,” see also Leonid Ivashov, “We succeeded in defending Russian interests,” KZ, December 10, 1999, 1, 3. Colonel-General Ivashov was chief of the section on international military cooperation in the Russian Defense Ministry.

[9] The equation of Russian and US interests against terrorism was common and widespread across discourses. For example, Anatolii Andreev, “The MVD and FBR Will Cooperate,” Trud, September 10, 1999, 4; Elena Tregubova, “Istanbul waits for Yeltsin and extremists,” Kommersant, November 17, 1999, 1; Vladislav Dunaev, “America is in the Gun Sites of Terrorism,” NG, February 10, 1999, 6; Oleg Moroz, “Foreign countries are again against us,” LG, October 20-26, 2000, 3; Dmitrii Gornostaev, “The State Department has Give Us an Order?” NG, November 10, 1999, 3; and Pyotr Aleksandrov, “Russia should not lose its own dignity,” Pravda, December 9, 1999, 3.

[10] Valeriya Sycheva, “Geopolitics textbook for bomber pilots,” Segodnia, April 10, 1999, 3; Dmitrii Privalov, “Russia and China are as Close as Ever,” Trud, December 10, 1999, 1. The Conservative’s binarized hostility to its Historical Other, the US, results in the most alarming inferences. See Richard Ovinnikov, “Imperialism will get on the rack,” Pravda, July 9-12, 1999, 3 and Vadim Markushin, “NATO abolishes ‘non-offensive defense’,” KZ, June 10, 1999, 3. For the Liberal’s most benign spin, see Leonid Sborov, “He who can, separate!,” KV, April 13, 1999, 32-35.

[11] Siuzanna Farizovaya, “Congress of Dreamers,” Kommunist, 15 December 2001, 2. See also Grigorii Yavlinsky, interviewed by Svetlana Babaeva, “On a Two-Hour Flight Everything Exists in Practice,” Izvestiia, 17 December 2001, 4.

[12] Valerii Paniushkin, “Red and Brown. Communists and Fascists United against America,” Kommersant 9 October 2001, 9.

[13] “Communists have Rejected the Struggle with Terrorists,” Kommersant, 18 October 2001, 2.

[14] Reported by Andrei Kolesnikov, “The Russian Complex,” Izvestiia, 20 November 2001, 2.

[15] In interviews and conversations with representatives of the Liberal intelligentsia in Moscow and Petersburg in the autumn of 2001 I was repeatedly told that, unfortunately, Putin had been right about the threat from terrorism, and that Russia’s role in defending against it had been underestimated by Liberals. Until 911, many Liberals had assumed that the war in Chechnia, and indeed the apartment house bombings in Moscow, were perhaps executed by political supporteres of Putin to cement his authoritarian rule. 911 undermined these interpretations. Indeed, Secretary of State Colin Powell, in October 2001, laid a wreath of condolences in the Pushkin Square underground where a bomb had been exploded over a year before. At that time, no official US sympathies had been offered.

[16] Ivan Safronov, “Vladimir Putin Reminded Allies Who Pays for the Joint Struggle Against Terrorism,” Kommersant, 22 November 2001, 11. A week later Putin described the CIS at its presidential summit as an Anti-Terrorist Center. Iurii Chubchenko, “The President will Return to the Commonwealth,” Kommersant, 1 December 2001, 2. Belarussian and Armenian participation in the collective security treaty of course have other motivations.

[17] Leonid Galkin, “They Will Give Vladimir Putin a Star as a Good Sheriff of the World,” Kommersant 13 November 2001, 2. See also Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov’s speech to the Royal Belgian Military Academy, in which he stressed the importance of “international legal norms” multilateral security institutions, and the “sovereign right” of Baltic states to join NATO as the principles underlying Russia’s new alliance with the West. Reported by Svetlana Babaeva, “Sensible Decision,” Izvestiia, 20 December 2001, 4.

[18] Evgenii Bai, “Absolutely New Relations. Condaleeza Rice Considers Russia an Ally,” Izvestiia, 10 October 2001, 1 and Evgenii Bai and Mikhail Kozhokin, “The Struggle with Terrorism will Show How We Will be Allies,” Izvestiia, 11 October 2001, 1.

[19] Svetlana Babaeva, Andrei Lebedev, and Aleksandr Chuikov, “Base Value,” Izvestiia, 18 October 2001, 1. The authors proclaimed that “the multipolar world has ended.”

[20] Andrei Kolesnikov, “The Russian Complex,” Izvestiia, 20 November 2001, 2.

[21] 22 October 2001 Izvestiia.

[22] Maksim Iusin, “Self-censorship. American TV is learning to cover the war from patriotic positions,” Izvestiia 3 November 2001, 6. See also Nikolai Zubov, “The English are saying good-bye to freedom,” Kommersant Vlast 20 November 2001, 38.

[23] “Hero of Russia. Donald Rumsfeld, US Defense Minister,” Kommersant Vlast 23 October 2001, 38.

[24] Quoted in Babaeva, “Two Hour Flight,” 4.

[25] Vladimir Voinovich, “Terrorists and Pacifists,” Izvestiya September 2001, 2. See also Vladimir Dunaev, Izvestiia, for the related lesson that one can suspend “normal” liberal rules when fighting terrorism.

[26] Bovt, “The Pure Among the Impure,” Izvestiia, 15 October 2001, 1.

[27] At the highest level, this expectation of mutual vulnerability was expressed by Iulii Vorontsov, UN Deputy General Secretary, former Soviet Ambassador to the US, and former Russian UN representative, in an interview with Maria Kiselevaya, “NATO Will Die in Five Years,” Izvestiia, 17 December 2001, 6.

[28] For example, the Russian General Staff, reported in Ivan Safronov, “Washington is Close to Violating the ABM Treaty,” Kommersant, 1 December 2001, 2. Andrei Lebedev, “To the Unarmed Eye the US takes yet another Step Toward the Creation of a NMD System,” Izvestiia, 4 December 2001, 3

[29] Georgii Bovt, Valerii Volkov, and Ekaterina Grigorieva, “Colin Powell Searches for the Liberal Intonation,” Izvestiia, 11 December 2001, 3. See also Leonid Gankin, “George Bush Has Turned Out to be a Unilateral Man,” Kommersant, 13 December 2001, 1. For a variety of voices about how Bush has now revealed the limits of the alliance, see “How Can Putin Respond?” Kommersant, 15 December 2001, 16.

[30] Gennadii Ziuganov, ”What do You Expect from This Week?” Kommersant, 17 December 2001, 12.

[31] Maksim Iusin, “Who else will They Bomb?” Izvestiia 10 October 2001, 7. The Belgian Prime and Foreign Minister Louis Michel, representing the EU, asked Putin to “communicate Europe’s unease” over expanding the war to Iraq to Bush during the upcoming Crawford summit. Reported in Iurii Andreev and Iurii Chubchenko, “The EU is Trying to Solve Asian Problems,” Kommersant, 3 November 2001, 3.

[32] As reported by Aleksandr Reutov, “The Circle is Wider,” Kommersant 9 October 2001, 1.

[33] Aleksandr Reutov, “Iraq has Threatened the US with Retaliation against Israel,” Kommersant, 30 November 2001, 10. For Schroeder’s opposition, see Sergei Strokan, “The US Deputy Secretary of State has Come to Moscow for Saddam,” Kommersant, 19 December 2001, 10.

[34] At Valdai international discussion club, 19 September 2013.

[35] 12 December 2013 Message to Federal Assembly. Berdiaev was a philosopher of religion expelled from the USSR by the Bolsheviks in 1922. Berdiaev is not the only author repressed in Soviet times cited by Putin in his public remarks, reproducing a deeply negative image of the Soviet past. During his visit to the South African embassy in Moscow to sign the condolence book for Mandela’s death, he compares Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for example, to Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi. 9 December 2013. See also his invocation of the White émigré religious philosopher, Ivan Ilyin, who was reinterred in Donskoi Monastery in 2005. In his address to the Federal Assembly, 4 December 2014.

[36] The data in these figures are derived from a discourse analysis of all the public comments made by Medvedev and Putin that are located on kremlin.ru for the ten years from 2005-2014. All translations from Russian are the author’s unless otherwise noted.

[37] For example, on free markets, Putin, 25 January 2007; balanced budgets, Putin, 5 September 2006; openness to foreign trade, 10 February 2007 (at Munich security conference); on reducing debt, 24 May 2007; international competitiveness, 27 December 2007; and Medevedev on fighting inflation, 5 June 2009.

[38] Medvedev, 7 June 2008.

[39] Medvedev, 8 October 2008.

[40] Putin, 14 June 2013 Novosti interview.

[41] Putin, 19 December 2013 big press conference.

[42] 31 May 2013. See also Putin’s rebuke of Ziuganov and Zhirinovksy’s recommendation that Russia impose barriers on foreign investment in retaliation for Western economic sanctions after the annexation of Crimea. 14 August 2014. Putin also reminds them of the need for central bank independence in setting interest rates. 18 September 2014

[43]18 June 2009.

[44] 7 November 2009.

[45] For example, Sarah E. Mendelson and Theodore P. Gerber, “Soviet Nostalgia: An Impediment to Russian Democratization,” Washington Quarterly 29:1 (2005), 83-96; Nina Khrushcheva, “‘Rehabilitating’ Stalin,” World Policy Journal 22:2 (2005), 67-73; Sarah E. Mendelson and Theodore P. Gerber, “Failing the Stalin Test: Russians and their Dictator,” Foreign Affairs 85:1 (2006), 2-8; Sarah E. Mendelson and Theodore P. Gerber, “Us and Them: Anti-American Views of the Putin Generation,” Washington Quarterly 31:2 (2008), 131-50; Arkady Ostrovsky, “Reversal of Fortune,” Foreign Policy 171 (2009), 70-4; Orlando Figes, “Putin vs. the Truth,” New York Review of Books, 56:7 (2009); David Brandenberger, “A New Short Course?: A.V. Filippov and the Russian State’s Search for a ‘Usable Past’,” Kritika 10:4 (2009), 825-33 (evaluates one textbook); and David Wedgwood Benn, “The Teaching of History in Present-Day Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies, 62:1 (2010), 173-7 (reviews two textbooks). Mendelson and Gerber rely on Russian national survey data showing positive views of the USSR and Stalin, but they dont enquire into what Russian responsdents actually mean when they make their postiive evaluations. The discourse analysis here provides a possible answer.

[46] For an analysis of a sample of Russian high school history textbooks on this issue, see Hopf 2013. More recently, I have reviewed Aleksandr Kiselev and Vasilii Popov, eds., Istoriia Rossii: XX—Nachalo XXI Veka, 11 Klass (Moscow: Drofa, 2014); Dmitrii Danilov, Valerii Klokov, et.al., eds., Istoriia Rossii. Uchebnik 9 Klass, XX—nachalo XXI Veka (Moscow: Balass, 2012); and Andrei Levandovskii, Iurii Shchetinov, and Sergei Mironenko, Istoriia Rossii: XX—nachalo XXI Veka, 11 Klass (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 2014). What these seven textbooks have in common is not a whitewashing of Stalin, whose rule is portrayed mostly negatively, but of Putin.

[47] 29 August 2014 at Seliger youth forum. Medvedev also blames Soviet economic policies for the Soviet collapse, 7 May 2010.

[48] 24 December 2014.

[49] On Hungary, 28 February 2006; on Czechoslovakia, in a meeting in Moscow with President Vaclav Klaus, 28 April 2007; on Soviet authoritarianism and its revolutionary foreign policy,14 September 2007, 27 September 2012, 20 June 2013; on the revolution, 22 July 2012 in meeting with youth in Seliger, 10 December 2012, 4 September 2013, 3 December 2013; on the Gulag, 21 November 2013; on disastrous economic policies, 25 October 2012, 26 December 2013, and 18 November 2014; and on nationalization of private property, 5 November 2014.

[50] 2 March 2009.

[51] On militarization, 12 September 2008; on agriculture, 2 October 2009, 13 July 2010, 18 June 2011; on totalitarianism and raw material dependence, 7 November 2009, 22 January 2010; on treatment of non-Russian minorities, 19 May 2010; on state dependence, 10 September 2010, 18 June 2011; on the arms race, 20 November 2010; on immigration, 29 November 2010; on emigration, 25 April 2011; on worker saftey, 5 April 2011; on the disabled, 25 April 2011; on Chernobyl, 25 April 2011; on environmental despoliation, 8 June 2011; on criminalization of dissent, 5 July 2011, 7 July 2011; and on historical distortion, 22 July 2011.

[52] 7 May 2010.

[53] On housing, 16 August 2012; on excessive military spending, 16 August 2012, 10 December 2012, and 8 December 2014; on religious repression, 6 September 2012, 12 November 2012, 11 April 2013, 13 June 2013, 23 July 2013, 21 November 2013, 16 May 2014; on moral bankruptcy, 6 September 2012, 21 November 2013; on historical distortions, 12 September 2012 at a meeting on the patriotic upbringing of youth; on false ideology, 13 June 2013; repression of ethnic minorities, 6 September 2013, 17 April 2014, 16 May 2014;

[54] 27 June 2012, 31 July 2012, 1 April 2013, 17 April 2014, 1 August 2014,

[55] 8 May 2012

[56] On mass discourses of Russian national identity, see Ted Hopf, “Common-sense Constructivism and Hegemony in World Politics,” International Organization 67:2 (April 2013), 344-8, and Ted Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002),

[57] Since it is not controversial that aspects of the Soviet past are appreciated in contemporary Russia, I will dispense with the citations.

[58] 24 May 2007

[59] 10 September 2010

[60] See Hopf 2002 on this

[61] See Putin’s discussion of this issue at Valdai, 25 October 2012.

[62] See Rawi Abdelal, National Purpose in the World Economy: Post-Soviet States in Comparative Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001) and Andrei Tsygankov, Pathways after Empire: National Identity and Foreign Economic Policy in the Post-Soviet World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).

[63] For example, Russia was the number one choice for students from Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, and Ukraine to study abroad in 2010. For data, see Hopf 2013,

[64] 12 February 2009. See also 31 August 2009

[65] 12 February 2010

[66] 15 May 2009

[67] 12 November 2009

[68] 18 September 2009

[69] 31 October 2010 and 30 September 2010

[70] 2 October 2010

[71] 4 December 2009

[72] 30 August 2010

[73] 8 September 2010

[74] 24 September 2010

[75] 26 January 2011

[76] 30 March 2011

[77] 8 April 2011 and 22 February 2010

[78] 22 July 2011

[79] 25 January 2011

[80] 23 September 2010.

[81] 21 July 2011

[82] 22 May 2012

[83] 21 June 2012

[84] 16 November 2012

[85] 18 June 2013

[86] 7 May 2013 and 21 June 2013.

[87] 22 May 2012

[88] 29 October 2012

[89] 15 November 2012

[90] 29 March 2013

[91] 21 November 2012

[92] 23 May 2013

[93] 15 October 2013

[94] 21 June 2012 at Petersburg International Economic Forum. See also 12 December 2012.

[95] 22 December 2014.

[96] 7 August 2012 answering reporters’ questions in Zerkalnyi, Leningrad and 10 December 2012.

[97] 6 September 2012 on Russia Today. See also 10 December 2012

[98] 30 October 2013

[99] Hopf 2002 and 2013.

[100] 29 May 2000.

[101] 6 November 2003 joint statement with Berlusconi in Rome and 9 May 2005 meeting with Schroeder in Moscow.

[102] A much abridged list would include the quality of locomotives and rolling stock (24 October 2007), the European Social Charter (21 July 2011), anti-monopoly regulations (11 July 2013), average lifespan (4 December 2014), corporate salaries (18 December 2014),

[103] Medvedev, 7 December 2007.

[104] Putin, At the Valdai international discussion club, 19 September 2013.

[105] In Putin’s 12 December 2012 presidential message to the Federal Assembly.

[106] On Russia as the “real” Europe, see: Sergei Prozorov, “The narratives of exclusion and self-exclusion in the Russian conflict discourse on EU–Russian Relations.” Political Geography26.3 (2007): 309-329; Prozorov, “Belonging and inclusion in European–Russian relations: Alain Badiou and the truth of Europe.” Journal of International Relations and Development 11.2 (2008): 181-207; Andrey S. Makarychev, Andrey S. “Russia’s search for international identity through the sovereign democracy concept.” The International Spectator 43.2 (2008): 49-62; and Viatcheslav Morozov and Bahar Rumelili. “The external constitution of European identity: Russia and Turkey as Europe-makers.” Cooperation and Conflict 47.1 (2012): 28-48.

[107] Putin, 4 December 2014 message to Federal Assembly.

[108] 29 May 2007. In September 2013, Putin tells a meeting of the Russian Civil Society and Human Rights Council that, contrary to Western critiques, “we are not wild beasts.” 4 September 2013.

[109] 19 July 2012. This is oft-repeated.

[110] 29 October 2012

[111] 30 November 2012

[112] 20 December 2012

[113] 29 March 2013

[114] 12 April 2013

[115] 22 June 2013

[116] 15 October 2014

[117] 5 November 2014 meeting with history teachers.

[118] 23 May 2012

[119] 31 July 2012

[120] 12 November 2012

[121] 20 December 2012

[122] 4 June 2014

[123] 27 June 2012. In a talk to military academy graduates in June 2014, Putin even singled out the White (anti-Bolshevik) tsarist generals Denikin and Kornilov as “legendary military commanders.” 26 June 2014

[124] 12 September 2012

[125] 27 September 2012

[126] 6 September 2014

[127] 18 March 2014

[128] 27 July 2013

[129] 4 September 2013

[130] 19 September 2013

[131] 27 July 2013, at a Kiev conference on “Orthodox-Slavic Values–The Foundation of Ukraine’s Civilizational Choice.”

[132] From Putin with Yanukovich in Moscow, 9 October 2017 until Putin’s message to the Federal Assembly, 4 December 2014, and over a dozen times in between.

[133] 15 May 2010 interview with Ukrainian media.

[134] Putin at a Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Kiev, 27 July 2013.

[135] 4 September 2013. See also Putin’s answers to journalists after the APEC Summit in Bali, 8 October 2013. See also 18 March 2014 and 29 August 2014.

[136] 7 April 2014.

[137] 4 March 2013. He later cites the same Ukrainian study to argue Ukraine will gain $9 billion from joining the CU. 19 September 2013.

[138] 22 August 2013

[139] 8 October 2013.

[140] 4 September 2013

[141] 24 October 2013 Putin press conference in Minks at meeting of EEU.

[142] 19 September 2013

[143] 21 November 2013.

[144] At press conference in Yerevan, 2 December 2013.

[145] 17 December 2013

[146] 19 December 2013 press conference. In response to a question from an LA Times reporter, Putin says Russia isnt going to invade Crimea; it is not Abkhazia or South Osetia; and they arent ready to invade the Baltics either.

[147] See also his remarks at his “big press conference”, 18 December 2014.

[148] 17 April 2014

[149] 1 July 2014

[150] Medvedev tried to convince Russians that democracy should not be equated to Russia in the 1990s, 10 September 2010.