RUSSIAN WORLD Russia between sovereignty and empire

Russian President Vladimir Putin held his long-awaited year-end press conference on December 19, along with a “hotline” to give citizens the opportunity to ask him questions. As announced by the Kremlin, there were almost two million connection requests, selected by an artificial intelligence network of Sberbank, the Russian Savings Bank, and priority was given to “veterans of the SVO”, the special military operation in Ukraine – now in its third year of invasion and conflict – and especially to those who have suffered disabling injuries.

Last year the “urbi et orbi” meeting with the president did not take place, but this year Putin wanted to show the face of the victor, not only for the new fragments of territory conquered in the Donbass, but to convey the feeling of superiority of Russia in the face of the multiple uncertainties of the West, at the end of an electoral year full of contradictions and which has closed with the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and the government crisis in Olaf Scholz’s Germany. Throwing down the gauntlet to an American journalist, the tsar proposed a “technological duel” to the Western enemy: choose a target in kyiv to concentrate all the air and anti-missile defense forces there that Russia will try to hit with the Oreshkin hypersonic missile, ensuring that ” We are ready to do the experiment.”

In the heat of war rhetoric, Putin declared that “Russia’s army is in the best condition ever,” and that the fall of the Assad regime in Syria is not a defeat for Moscow, which only had the task of “preventing the creation of a terrorist enclave,” and “somehow we have achieved that objective.” On the other hand, he noted that many Western countries want to maintain normal relations with the new regime in Damascus, and all groups currently active in Syria want Russian bases to remain in the country, therefore, “rumors about my death have been exaggerated,” he concluded, quoting Mark Twain.

In the same verbal dispute with American journalists, Putin responded to one of them that “you and those who pay your salary in the United States would like Russia to be in a position of weakness (…). I think, on the other hand, that we have become much stronger in the last three years, we have become a sovereign country, we depend on few people and we are strengthening our defense capabilities. Therefore, the main objective of this war is “sovereignty”, not only and not so much for the defense of the borders, which in the immense Russian territory always have a relative meaning, but for affirming its independence and its greatness against the whole world.

Precisely these days, it was published in the Parliamentary Bulletin from Russia an article by the political philosopher Aleksandr Shipkov, rector of the Russian Orthodox University of St. John the Theologian, one of the main ideologues of “Orthodox sovereignty.” In it he tries to explain precisely the theory of war sovereignty, which is fundamental not only “for the material survival and resources of the country, but above all for the historical-cultural significance.” According to Shipkov, “our people are defining their own national goals, and this is a historical turning point of exceptional importance.” With the recovery of sovereignty, according to this reasoning, “the need for a true national ideology is reinforced,” because if there is no clarity about its content, Russia’s true position in times of war cannot be defined.

Victory, according to the ideologist, depends “on the formulation of historical objectives and the image of the future of the nation”, and he asks who really has the right and duty in Russia to determine them: the national authorities? The religious leaders? The community of experts? The protagonists of the world of culture? It is essential to decipher the ideology of the adversary to overcome disorientation, when people “become confused about what they themselves want and what they live for”, a condition in which Russia found itself from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, when under Putin he began to recover his identity. Shipkov compares this pass with the Smuta, the time of “Troubles” at the beginning of the 17th century, which ended with the victory over the Polish invaders and the beginning of the Romanov dynasty.

Historians Jaroslav Shimov and Nikita Sokolov also reflect on this topic in the program Radio Svoboda “Life and death of the great empires”, and they wonder if the Russian Empire has definitively disappeared or is rather re-emerging. The words of the Minister of Economy of the last Tsars, Sergei Witte, probably the best administrator Russia has ever had, come to mind, who stated: “I don’t know the word Russia, for me there is only the Russian Empire.” For centuries, the empire has been the meaning and predominant form of Russia’s existence, to which the sacrifices of the people, the entire economic system and the well-being of citizens were devoted.

The Russian Empire has disintegrated at least three times, in the Smuta of the 17th century and more recently with the revolution of 1917 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and each time it has been reborn in a new form. Putin’s “sovereignty” is the current attempt to restore the imperial structure and, above all, the mentality, as also stated by the Scottish historian Geoffrey Alan Hosking, one of the patriarchs of British Russian studies, who compares the British Empire with the Russian Empire, and states that “from Moscow to Washington, we continue in the same dimensions,” going back to the first Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible and Elizabeth I of England, the “virgin queen” of the mid-16th century, until reaching our days.

Shimov also remembers the difference between maritime empires, such as the British, which have always had possessions far from the homeland, and those, such as Russia or even China, the Habsburgs and the Ottoman Empire, spread “in bites” through space. land. These “continental” empires are based on the close link with the capital metropolis, the nucleus from which the expansion begins and to which all the provinces refer. This type of empire has always withdrawn into itself, it does not integrate with other peoples and other cultures, but rather it subjects them and adapts them to its own identity, and this is precisely the meaning of “sovereignty”, which imposes a vertical hierarchy. of values ​​and expressions, otherwise he runs the risk of losing himself.

The cradle of all empires, ancient Rome, summarized both dimensions, the vertical and the horizontal, encompassing the entire Mediterranean Sea and extending to the different continents, granting citizenship even to those who had never seen either the capital or the original territory. of Italy, as happened to the apostle Paul, providing him with the legal justification to evangelize pagan Rome. Russia always aspires to be reborn as the “Third Rome”, Russifying peoples and cultures by land and by sea, and in the contemporary world also through virtual information spaces and artificial attraction.

In the current structure of the Russian Federation there are many “imperial relics”, as Sokolov says, with uncertainties in the definition of the “supranational” units that are intertwined in the more than a hundred Russian regions, which often refer to dynastic principles of the families of the powerful, as in Siberia and Central Asia, or to the religious principles of Orthodoxy and Islam, with the aftertaste of the “inversely religious” Soviet ideology, of which traces remain evident in the leadership of the State and in the souls of the citizens. In this sense, the imperial principle is the opposite of the national principle, and in today’s Russia this is evident: Putin speaks of “sovereignty” in the imperial sense, while “nationalism” refers mainly to the separatist impulses of the minor peoples, or to the xenophobia of the Russian radical right movements.

The war for Ukraine is the war for empire, so it constitutes the “original bite,” and Moscow cannot take its teeth out of kyiv, regardless of possible peace negotiations that are likely to begin in the new year. Ukrainian sovereignty is the end of the Russian empire, and Ukrainian identity will be the real stake for the future, as it was never really defined in the past struggles between European empires and the Soviet Cold War. All the great European empires have disappeared in the 20th century, and with the current anti-globalist turn of the United States, the American one, which had symbolically put an end to its global pretensions when it left Afghanistan in 2022, also withdraws. Only the anachronistic empire of Russia remains. , the sovereignty of zombies who wander the planet looking for a country to conquer so they can find themselves.

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