At one point, the Russian Empire was the largest contiguous empire on Earth, covering 1/6th of the world’s land area. It stretched from Warsaw all the way to the Americas and, when Alaska was sold, down into the ancient Silk Road crossroads of Central Asia. But, like the other colonial empires of Europe, it was a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural empire.
This history of a racial elite dominating an underprivileged minority was a trademark of the empire from the beginning. The ancient eastern Slavic kingdoms had been founded by Viking raiders who made their home among the native Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe.
The two cultures eventually merged, however, and just in time for the Grand Duchy of Moscow to absorb its neighbors and drive east into Siberia, conquering and subjugating the indigenous peoples as it went. This began under Ivan IV (“The Terrible”) in the mid-16th century (1547–1584).
At one point, Russia was expanding up to 50 square miles a day. It maintained this pace for 200 years, almost exclusively into areas that were not ethnically Russian.
Areas around Crimea and the northern Black Sea were populated by Cossacks and Tatars. In the Caucasus, the Georgians, Armenians, Circassians, Chechnyans, and others were subjugated. Towards the east, Turkic peoples like the Bashkirs, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Tuvans, and others fell under the Russian yoke. And, through a combination of deportations, genocides, and migration of ethnic Russians, many of these areas were “Russified” and resistance to imperialism was crushed.
We tend to think of the Russian Empire as monolithicly Russian, and not like one of the overseas European colonial empires, with native peoples who are visually distinct from the conquerors. But, the only distinction from these other empires is that the Russian Empire is contiguous and land-based. Otherwise, it is a multi-ethnic colonial empire held together by force by a Russian-led government in Moscow.
The fate of this empire rested on its capability and willingness to use force, and the intimidation that came with that. When Russia lost a war with Japan in 1905, the power of the Tsar was placed into question and, 12 years later, there was no more Tsar and the Russian Empire had splintered and transformed into a battlefield of a civil war.
But, with a combination of forced conscription, violence, and terror, the Russian Empire was reconstituted as the Soviet Union under the leadership of the Bolshevik faction. The Tsar was replaced by a glorified party bureaucrat: the general secretary of the Communist party.
Despite a new name and ruling ideology, the Soviet Union was in practice the continuation of the Russian colonial empire, using violence or the threat of it to hold together a far-flung imperium.
After World War II, this imperium was extended into the heart of Europe itself, through the Warsaw Pact, and eventually enforced explicitly through the Breznev doctrine, introduced in 1968. This doctrine was that the Soviet Union had the right to use force in areas of the Warsaw Pact where its rule was threatened.
Then, a leader who wanted to eschew the use of force came to power. Instead of crushing resistence to the imperial government in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev sought to use political and economic reforms to pacify resistance and hold the Soviet Union together.
After refusing to use force to prevent the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fate of his empire was sealed. Soon, the presidents of the Soviet Republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia signed the Belovezh Accords in 1991, declaring the Soviet Union dissolved and assuming roles as leaders of independent nations.
Gorbachev refused to stop them, and hard-liners correctly understood that the dissolution of the Soviet Union would follow. Vladimir Putin has expressed sympathy with these hardliners, and understood the means necessary to hold what remained of the Russian Empire together.
Unique among the former Soviet Republics, the multi-ethnic Russian Federation forms the core of the original Russian Empire. During the dissolution of the Soviet Union, some non-majoriy Russian areas within the Russian Soviet Republic attempted to breakaway, and were accommodated as independent republics and kingdoms within the federation, such as Sakha, Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, and Dagestan.
Putin reinforced the integrity of Russia by turning these Republics into vassals of Moscow, dependent on revenues from the state-owned enterprises. This economic imperialism replaced the old imperialism by conquest, but with the same effect.
But, he understood that the only way to re-unite all the lands of the former Russian imperium was through force and intimidation. And he escalated his use of force in unison with the stabilization and growth of the Russian economy.
The first taste of this approach was in the Second Chechen War. Then, he escalated with the occupation of Georgia in 2008. Next, with the annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbass and with intervention in the Armenian-Azerbaijan War in 2020. Finally, he showed Central Asia it was next with intervention in Kazakhstan in 2022.
The coup-de-grace was, of course, the current invasion of Ukraine. This had the two-fold goal of subjugating Ukraine and disrupting the US-led order to smooth Putin’s path to reconquering the rest of the old Soviet empire.
But, Putin’s ability to use economic and military imperialism rested on Russia’s economic rebirth, particulary its natural resource exports and technological imports. The Western sanctions following the Ukraine invasion destroyed all of this.
In a classic example in international affairs of “might making right” the inability of Russia to quickly subdue Ukraine exposed it as weak, and the West united and pounced. Now, not even Russia’s “friends”, such as China, will save it.
Now, without its ability to coerce its imperial holdings, its only a matter of time for the Russian Federation to further disentegrate, and for the borders of Russia to be confined to its historical Russian heartland. Just as the British Empire was relegated to the British Isles, France and Spain to their European heartlands, and Germany to a restricted area of ethnic Germans.
Through its bravery in the the current war, Ukraine has shaken off the Russian yoke, and now Azerbaijan has recaptured Nagoro-Karbakh from Russian “peacekeepers”. An empire that has destroyed half its fighting force and equipment in a failed invasion can’t intimidate anyone into submission.
As long as Russia dreams of holding its empire, we will keep going through these repeated cycles of violence and repression. Now is the best time to put to bed the imperial ambitions of the worlds autocracies, and of Russia’s specifically, so it can join the ranks of peaceful nations in a peaceful order.
And to close the final chapter of European colonialism.