RUSSIAN WORLD The annexation of Russia to itself

Two years have already passed since September 30, 2022, when the farcical annexation of the four occupied regions of Ukraine: Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson was solemnly announced in the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin gave a long and confusing programmatic speech, which was nothing more than the repetition of the various propaganda refrains that accompany the “special military operation.” Russia’s “new territories” could not, on the other hand, arouse the same enthusiasm as the annexation of Crimea in 2014, both because the Black Sea peninsula has a very different historical and symbolic meaning, and because the lands of Donbass have never really been completely conquered and to this day they remain the different “Ukraines”, that is, the “borders” of the two faces of the Russian world, the eastern and the western.

Little more than a month after the proclamation, in fact, the Russian armies had to hastily abandon Kherson, the capital of the southernmost region, without even having time to remove the banners that said “Russia is here forever”, and In the other capital, Zaporizhzhia, they did not even manage to enter. However, the rhetoric of annexation remains total and unappealable, despite the continuous changes on the war front in these regions. The inhabitants of the occupied territories are, meanwhile, divided into different categories: fugitives relokantythe zhduny“those who wait” for the liberation of the occupiers, whom they call colonization in a derogatory sense, or varjagilike the ancient Scandinavians who came down to found Kievan Rus’ at the origins of ancient history.

This reference to the Varangians (also called Normans or Vikings, depending on the context) is one of those that best explains the origin of the theories of the “Russian world”, because it places the ideal of annexation or conquest at the very beginning of the collective identity: the Russian people do not really have a “territory of their own”, but rather recognize themselves in the continuous search and unification of “new territories”. The Varangians are as foreign as the Asians, the Caucasians, the Europeans or the Turanians, who at different times have recomposed and expanded “Russianness”, understood as a sum and not as a specificity of an eastern branch of the Slavs. In the ancient annalistic narratives that illustrate the “call of the Varangians”, the groups of Russians who ventured to the northern seas in the 9th century were called by the Scandinavians as the group of Gardarikithose who come from the land of the gard or villages, inhabited centers of a society that was just beginning to form.

Putin himself had made a statement that summarizes this new and old history, when he participated a few years ago in a television program where some very well-prepared young people answered questions about history, geography and other subjects. When they asked “where the borders of Russia end”, one of them listed the ends of the federal map in all coordinates, but Putin interrupted him, saying a little seriously and a little jokingly that “the borders of Russia do not end at any part”. This is the true founding reason for the bribesthe “universal communion” that feeds the multiple variants of Russian sociality: going beyond, not letting oneself be trapped in any dimension, that attitude that in Russian is called bezpredelnostthe “absence of limits”, which can be understood as adventurism or also incontinence, inability to respect any norm, including international agreements on the borders of States.

Putin is just the latest heir of the many varjagi of Russian history, who tried to “bring civilization” to the lands on the other side of the border and to the entire world. Today annexation is calculated not so much in square kilometers, but in sums of “traditional values”, such as the socialist revolution or the tsarist defense of autocracies, the “third international” or the “third Rome” of Ivan the Terrible, to today’s “Orthodox sovereignty.” It is not the other States that must be annexed to Russia, it is Russia that “annexes” the lands and peoples in search of the new and definitive civilization. That is why the banners of “Russia forever” are maintained even in defeats and retreats, as in Kherson and in many other situations in the past. In fact, Russia has never won a war of occupation and annexation, but rather has demonstrated the ability to expel from itself the enemy, from the Tatars, the Teutonic Knights and the Swedes to Napoleon and Hitler, to assert itself in Paris and Berlin as “new capitals” of Russia itself.

At bottom, annexation is a defining concept, unlike simple “occupation”, such as that of the Ukrainians in the Kursk region, who have no intention of annexing, although mirror arguments could be used, since many Kurians, The inhabitants of the area prefer to speak the Ukrainian language rather than Russian. In conflicts, when a country occupies a territory, the annexation is the result of a complex process of justifications and international agreements, such as when China annexed Tibet in 1951 thanks to a formal agreement with the local government, or when Israel appropriated East Jerusalem with a national law. Today Ukraine considers Crimea and the Donbass as “temporarily occupied” regions, and it is likely that they will remain so for decades or centuries, while Russia exalts itself to the cry of Krym Nash!: “Crimea is ours!”, and also, although with less enthusiasm, Donbass Nash!.

In both Sevastopol and Donetsk the annexation was consecrated with a “popular referendum”, without even bothering to give it the illusion of legitimacy. Already in 2014, when an open military conflict had not yet begun, the polling stations were controlled by the Russian army. The concept of “sovereignty” is very random in these territories and responds only to impositions of force that produce fictitious consensus, 95% in Crimea and even 99% in Lugansk and Donetsk, 93% in Zaporizhia and “only” 87 % in Kherson. Autocracies in general love “referendums”, and not so much to confer an appearance of democracy as to flaunt the consensus of the entire population and demoralize those who are against, convincing them that they can do nothing about it, and at the same time At the same time, discourage “palace coups” by those in the power elite who sought to oppose the dominant regime.

In authoritarian countries, referendums are opportunities to harden positions, boasting of a landslide victory. As the Center for Research on Direct Democracy in Switzerland calculated, of 876 plebiscites held between 1945 and 2005, dictators received an average support of 70%, with a turnout of 77.3%. Achieving these results requires effective propaganda and fierce censorship, as well as various forms of electoral manipulation and fraud. Now the “new territories” of Russia are the subject of special attention, especially since Putin and Patriarch Kirill do not like the word “new”, and prefer to call them “historical territories” of Russia, knowing full well that these are areas in dispute for centuries, where groups of Cossacks gathered in search of “free territories”, not subject to any authority.

On the other hand, Russia does not want to be tied too much to the territories and prefers the expansion of the “spheres of influence” that transcend all borders, as was typical of the Soviet regime, in which the fifteen official republics coexisted with the numerous “brother” states. , today reduced to the distinction between “friendly” and “unfriendly”. A discriminating factor is undoubtedly the proportion of “Russian-speaking” citizens in each country, which is most evident in neighboring countries such as Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Armenia in the Caucasus and in the countries of Central Asia, where Russian can be freely spoken. Russian with those over fifty, and with some difficulty with young people. In Ukraine, anyone speaks Russian freely, regardless of the region, although since the beginning of the conflict they prefer not to use it, and in any case for Moscow “Russophony” justifies any type of interference and invasion, because the person who speaks Russian is by definition a member of the “Russian world”, even if it is in Kenya, India or Venezuela, and its “reannexation” to Russia is nothing more than a restoration of historical justice.

The new or “historic” territories annexed today are the showcase of Putin’s project and are financed at least three times more than the other hundreds of regions of the Russian Federation, to the great satisfaction of the various speculators and corrupt people. The same thing happened with the Baltic countries in Soviet times, with Chechnya in Putin’s first period, not to mention Crimea in the last decade. For now, the inhabitants of Donbass are especially needed to support the official ideology, as “heroes and victims of kyiv Ucronazism”, but they will have to be attentive to future developments. It is not known how long Russia will remain “annexed” to these lands, but already in the desertified city of Mariupol, in addition to the military, 50 thousand people from Russia and Central Asia have settled to create a “new world” on the banks of the Black Sea. Russia is a concept in perpetual evolution, it is created and destroyed according to the times and regimes, always in perspective of an eternal kingdom that is increasingly unpredictable.

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