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Advances in Politics and Economics 
ISSN 2576-1382 (Print) ISSN 2576-1390 (Online) 

Vol. 4, No. 2, 2021 
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22 
 

Original Paper 

The Rebuilding of “Greater Russia”: From Kievan Rus’ to the 

Eurasian Union (Note 1) 

Roger E. Kanet1 

1 University of Miami and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA 

 

Received: January 1, 2021        Accepted: April 3, 2021       Online Published: April 15, 2021 

doi:10.22158/ape.v4n2p22           URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/ape.v4n2p22 

 

Abstract 

The purpose of the present examination is 1) to summarize briefly the evolution of historical Russia as 

the amalgam of multiple ethnic and cultural communities into a growing imperial domain; 2) to outline 

more specifically the policies pursued by the tsarist and communist regimes to integrate minority 

communities into the Russian majority; 3) to examine the impact on Russia of the collapse of the 

former USSR; and 4) to trace current efforts by the Russian government to reintegrate the disparate 

parts of the former USSR, including especially regions of other post-Soviet states with a significant 

ethnic Russian population, into a new “Greater Russia.” Although it will touch on Soviet integration 

policies that targeted national minorities who, by 1989, represented half of the population, the focus 

will be on recent and current policies intended to “Greater Russia.” 

Keywords 

Ethnic integration, Tsarist Russia, USSR, post-Soviet Russia, ethnic Russians, ethnic minorities, 

Eurasian Union 

 

1. Introduction  

Most Westerners who learn of a revival of Russian nationalism or of President Putin’s commitment to 

protect the interests of ethnic Russians in post-Soviet states where they represent a minority, do not 

think of the fact that the Russian population is quite diverse ethnically. This concerns not only the 

twenty percent of the population that is officially listed as non-Russian, but also the ethnic Russian 

population which results from the mixture and merger of various communities over the course of the 

last millennium. The first Russian state, Kievan Rus’, combined Eastern Slavs and Norsemen, or 

Vikings; in the Middle Ages Finnic groups in the far north and later Turkic populations in the south and 

east were absorbed by the expanding Russian state. While many remained culturally distinct from the 

ethnic Russian community, others were absorbed into that community over the course of later centuries. 



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In fact, russification, even forced Russification, became, at times, the official policy in both Imperial 

Russia and the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 and the 

emergence of fifteen new states—all but one of which was built around a titular non-Russian ethnic 

community—and the revival of what one might termed “ethnic identity politics” in the new Russian 

Federation, the leadership in Moscow has faced the issue of disintegration. It has pursued a new policy 

aimed at recreating a “Greater Russia,” that will tie together as much of former Soviet space as possible 

into a single economic, political and security regime, with the dominant Russian Federation at its 

center. 

The purpose of the present examination is 1) to summarize briefly the evolution of historical Russia as 

the amalgam of multiple ethnic and cultural communities into a growing imperial domain; 2) to outline 

more specifically the policies pursued by the tsarist and communist regimes to integrate minority 

communities into the Russian majority; 3) to examine the impact on Russia of the collapse of the 

former USSR; and 4) to trace current efforts by the Russian government to reintegrate the disparate 

parts of the former USSR, including especially regions of other post-Soviet states with a significant 

ethnic Russian population, into a new “Greater Russia.” Although it will touch on Soviet integration 

policies that targeted national minorities who, by 1989, represented half of the population, (Note 2) the 

focus will be on recent and current policies intended to rebuild what the Swedish scholar Bertil Nygren 

(2008a) terms “Greater Russia.” (Note 3) What are the central factors that are driving President Putin’s 

commitment—even to the point of military intervention in Ukraine—to creating a Eurasian Union, 

dominated by Russia? 

 

2. “The Gathering of the Russian Lands”: From Kievan Rus’ to Imperial Russia 

From its very inception the Russian political system was characterized by a diverse ethnic population, 

but increasing domination by Slavs. (Note 4) When Slavs first moved into the forest areas of what is 

now central Russia in the seventh century, Khazars, a Turkic group, dominated the Black Sea Steppe. 

By the ninth century the flourishing Volga River trade of the Khazars attracted the attention of the 

Norsemen (Vikings) who were at the peak of their aggressive expansion from Scandinavia. The trade 

route from northern Europe via the rivers of Eastern Europe to Constantinople became an important 

alternative route after the virtual closure of the Mediterranean by the Muslims. Over time the Norsemen 

built fortresses along these rivers, the four most important of which were along the Gulf of Riga, on 

Lake Ladoga, near Smolensk, and between the Upper Volga and the Oka. Other more isolated 

settlements included Kiev (Pipes, 1974, p. 29). From these bases the Norsemen were able to extract 

tribute from the indigenous populations of Finns, Lithuanians, and Slavs and protect their growing 

trade with the Byzantine Empire. Richard Pipes concludes that the collaboration between the Slavs and 

the Norsemen in conducting and protecting the trade represents the origins of the new state which 

traced its origins to Norse prince Hroerekr (Rurik). Although the Finnish name for the Norsemen was 

transposed to the larger population, the Norsemen rapidly assimilated in the east as in Western Europe. 



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But the initial gulf between the ruling elite and the masses of the population was one that dominated 

Russian/East Slavic politics in later centuries. 

By the middle of the twelfth century, a century before the Mongol conquest, this new state was in great 

disrepair, primarily because of the lack of an effective system of succession and the splitting of the 

political system into three major parts. The one in the northwest was eventually incorporated into the 

Lithuanian state, later Lithuanian-Polish, while the poorest in the northeast eventually became the 

center for a revitalized East Slavic state, Russia. Here the population was primarily Finnic, but was 

rapidly inundated and absorbed by Slavic immigrants, eventually emerging as Great Russians. Thus, 

even before the Mongol conquest of Kiev in 1240 “Russians consisted of a mixture of peoples, with the 

non-Slavs dominated and culturally overwhelmed; this diversity would be increased significantly in the 

following centuries. 

With the emergence of Muscovy as a political force in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries large 

numbers of non-Russian and non-Slavic peoples came under the control of the Russian state. In the 

north and northwest the majority of these groups were ethnically Finnish. Although the Mongol 

invasion in 1240 and indirect occupation for the next century and a half brought new Turkic (Tatar) 

populations into what would later emerge as Russia, it was not really until the sixteenth century and the 

rapid expansion under Ivan Grozny of Russian military control east and southeast to the major cities of 

the Golden Horde, Kazan and Astrakhan, in the 1550s that large numbers of Muslim Tatar or Turkic 

people came under the domination of Moscow. Russia viewed its culture and religion as superior to 

those of the peoples whom it conquered and generally treated these peoples as inferiors and resulted 

often in serious confrontations (see Khodarkovsky, 2004, pp. 34-39). 

Writing of the emergence of Muscovy and its conquest of other small East Slavic principalities in the 

fifteenth century—“the gathering of the Russian lands” in the euphemistic words of the Russian 

chronicles of the age—Marshall T. Poe points out that the rulers of Muscovy of the fifteenth and 

sixteenth centuries expanded the kingdom’s borders east beyond the Volga River, south to the Caspian 

Sea, west to the Dnieper River, and north to the White Sea. In so doing they came to rule peoples who 

had never been part of Kievan Rus’-Mordvinians, Chuvash, Mari, Samoyeds, Bashkirs, Tatars, Balts, 

Finns, Germans, Lithuanians, Poles, Cossacks, and Turks, among others. The once homogeneous 

Muscovite state . . . became a huge multiethnic empire (Poe, 2003, p. 34). (Note 5) 

Over the course of the next three centuries Russia continued to expand; in the west into the Baltic area, 

Finland and Poland; in the south by absorbing Ukraine and then systematically incorporating portions 

of the Ottoman Empire. Territorially the expansion across Siberia and the Far East and, ultimately, the 

conquest of the Muslim polities in Central Asia brought millions of non-Russians, non-Europeans, and 

non-Christians into the empire by the 1870s. The colonial empire was virtually complete and at this 

point the government in St. Petersburg began to pursue a policy of explicit russification as the means to 

absorb and integrate this population into the Russian state. 

Throughout its entire history—from Kievan Rus’ to Muscovy and the eventually the Russian 



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Empire—the population at large, whether ethnic Russian or one of the growing number of conquered 

peoples, had no voice in the political system. As Richard Pipes notes: 

Once an area had been annexed to Russia, whether or not it had ever formed a part of Kiev, and 

whatever the ethnic and religious affiliation of its indigenous population, it immediately joined the 

“patrimony” of the ruling house, and all succeeding monarchs treated it as a sacred trust which was not 

under any circumstances to be given up (Pipes, 1974, p. 79) 

Not only the territory, but also the population on that territory was seen as part of the extended 

patrimony of the monarch with no political rights. It is this view of the virtual ownership relationship 

between the monarch, the state, and the population that centuries later, although modified, continues to 

lie at the root of the Russian political system, for both ethnic Russian and non-Russian alike. 

 

3. Integration’ of National Minorities in Late Imperial and Communist Russia 

Russian historians of the imperial era focused on Russia’s right and duty to expand the boundaries of 

civilization and Christianity in dealing with the Muslim and other non-Russian peoples who now 

comprised a substantial part of the population (Khodarkovsky, 2002, p. 3). Religion served geopolitical 

purposes in relations with the various non-Orthodox Christian peoples of the steppe and the Caucasus. 

Ever since the fifteenth century the idea of Russia and its political and security interests were 

intertwined with the idea of expansion, which was justified on both ideological and theological grounds 

(Khodarkovsky, 2002, p. 49). This meant an ever-increasing number of non-Russians within the 

Russian Empire. The culmination of this process came in the years 1860 to 1880 with the final 

conquests of the various peoples of the Caucasus and the khanates of Central Asia. Given the repressive 

nature of the Russian political system, the new ethnic and religious minorities who were forcibly added 

to the population had no voice and were the object of repressive governmental policies. Since the 

middle of the sixteenth century, but especially during the eighteen century, major efforts were made to 

settle and civilize the regions taken from the Kamnyks and other Muslim peoples, thereby pushing the 

original population out of the region entirely. In addition, the Russians pursued a policy of forced 

conversion to Christianity and russification in much of the territory that they conquered (Khodarkovsky, 

2002, pp. 142-161). Throughout the eighteenth century this resulted in virtually permanent conflict 

between the Russians and the native populations on both sides of the ever-moving frontier. As Russia 

imposed its control, substantial numbers of the locals fled their homeland to beyond the Russian 

frontier areas to escape Russian military and administration and forced conversion (Khodarkovsky, 

2002, pp. 201-206; Mironov, 1988)—generally fruitlessly, since the frontier continued to follow them. 

Not until the reign of Catherine the Great did a degree of religious tolerance enter Russian policy 

(Khodarkovsky, 2002, p. 196).  

Although russification had been a central component of Russian policy in the areas that it colonized 

ever since the sixteenth century, with both Russian culture and the Orthodox religion of paramount 

importance, this policy was reinvigorated in 1881 when Emperor Alexander III concluded that all 



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minority cultures within Russia should be eliminated and replaced with a Great Russian identity 

(Weeks 2004, 2006). (Note 6) To be a loyal subject of the tsar one had to be a Russian. Russian became 

overwhelmingly the language of education, even in the vast areas of the country where it was not the 

dominant language. In portions of the empire, as in Armenia, non-Russian Orthodox religious schools 

were closed. Throughout the Central Asian lands of the empire major efforts were made to russify the 

population. However, Aneta Pavlenko concludes that russification measures were carried out only 

sporadically as an attempt to subjugate Polish and later Baltic German elites, to preserve the unity of 

the state, and to replace Polish, German, and Tatar with Russian as a high language. . . . These measures 

failed to turn peasants into Russians . . . . Most importantly, by imposing the russification measures late 

in the 19th century, the Russian empire created the pre-conditions for the consolidation of nations 

which would eventually turn against it (Pavlenko, 2011). 

On the whole the efforts were a failure and at the outbreak of World War I, the Russian government 

faced widespread resistance to its policies (“How Successful”, n.d.; see, also, Weeks, 2004)  

When the Bolsheviks seized power in fall 1917, they came with a clear view that past Russian policies 

toward ethnic minorities had been oppressive and exploitative and must be reversed for, in Lenin’s 

words, Russia was “the prison house of nations” (cited in Weeks, 2004). At one point he called for 

self-determination of all of the nationality communities within the emerging new communist Russian 

state. Before the revolution of 1917 Lenin had, in fact, supported substantial autonomy for national 

minorities and strongly opposed Great Russian chauvinism, going so far as to support minority 

secession. Soon after the Bolsheviks seized power and as the periphery of Russia was breaking away, 

Josef Stalin, in his capacity as Commissar for Nationalities, made clear that only workers possessed this 

right, not groups representing the bourgeoisie (Fainsod, 1963, pp. 57-58). In fact, independent states 

that had emerged in Ukraine and the South Caucasus were forcibly incorporated into the emerging 

Soviet state. 

In the early years of the Soviet state various institutional arrangements were introduced that were 

meant to give the national minorities a political voice and autonomy. But, Lenin and Stalin soon broke 

on the issue of the treatment of minorities and, since Lenin died soon thereafter, Stalin set the 

framework for Soviet nationalities policy—a framework that permitted little or no autonomy below the 

central government. Stalin eliminated communist officials in Georgia, Ukraine and Central Asia who 

opposed what they viewed as the assertion of central, Russian, domination over nationality affairs (see 

Daniels, 1960, pp. 177-187).  

As the new Soviet state system emerged in the period after Lenin’s death, a pseudo-federal system of 

government was established—pseudo in the sense that, de facto, political power and political decisions 

emanated from the top and were dispersed throughout the system. (Note 7) Moreover, the highly 

centralized communist party was the major source of power, not the formal institutions of the federal 

governmental system. Within this system the major units were republics named after the dominant 

titular population—Ukraine, Armenia, Kazakhstan, etc. Second and third level political units were also 



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established for smaller nationalities which represented minorities in the larger republics. Although the 

communist party encouraged cultural development of backward peoples within the overall federation, 

that cultural development was to occur only within the context of a monolithic communist culture, 

which was built substantially on Russian nationalism (Fainsod, 1963, p. 363; P;okhy, 2017, pp. 245 ff.). 

In the mid-1920s a major confrontation occurred between Josef Stalin, the new head of the Soviet 

Communist Party, and Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, a Tatar Bolshevik who advocated a single Muslim 

republic across Central Asia. He was charged with nationalist deviations and arrested and eventually 

executed in 1940 during Stalin’s Great Purge (Baker, 2011). Important for our concerns is the fact that 

Stalin divided the Muslim areas of Central Asia into five small republics that, presumably, would be 

easier to deal with from Moscow, rather than a single large and unified Muslim republic. 

It was not really until the 1930s that Soviet policy concerning national minorities shifted dramatically 

away from the attacks on Great Russian chauvinism and support for local and regional cultures. During 

the massive purges of the 1930s, although no national group was primarily targeted, de facto the impact 

of the purge was greater among national minorities than it was among Great Russians. However, as 

Dmitry Gorenburg (2006) points out, throughout the entire history of the Soviet Union an internal 

contradiction drove Soviet nationality policy. “The establishment of ethno-federalism, indigenization, 

and native language education were paired with efforts to ensure the gradual drawing together of 

nations for the purpose of their eventual merger.” (Note 8) Parallel to this is the fact that among 

Western students of Soviet nationality policy there are those who maintain that the Communists in 

effect strengthened the cultures of the minorities and those who focus on the Soviet russification and 

assimilation (Lapidus, 1984; Gorenburg, 2006). 

In the late 1950s, during the Khrushchev era, the Soviets introduced a new education policy which 

expanded the teaching of Russian in non-Russian areas and, de facto, cut into the teaching of local 

languages Bilinsky (1962) and Gorenburg (2006) concludes that “linguistic assimilation and 

reidentification in the Soviet Union were promoted by a combination of two factors, urbanization and 

the reduction of native language education.” Similar findings are presented in the research of Brian 

Silver (1974) and numerous other scholars. Although titular languages were taught, they were 

downplayed over time and career advancement required fluency in Russian. The assimilation of 

minority populations resulted from the education system, urbanization, marriage across ethnic lines, 

and physical moves to live and work in Russia proper. The political domination of Moscow and the 

ethnic Russians was ensured by the domination of the communist party and the fact that the second 

secretary of each republican communist party was invariably a Russian or Ukrainian, who in effect 

served as Moscow’s eyes and voice in the republics. 

But, despite the great optimism voiced among Soviet analysts (Note 10) that ethnic and national 

divisions among the multiple communities that comprised the Soviet population no longer existed and 

about the success of the communists in creating a new “Soviet Man,” ethnic and national identity—and 

hostilities between groups—remained strong and played the central role in the demise of the Soviet 



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Union in late 1991. When Mikhail Gorbachev opened the Soviet political system to discussion and 

debate as part of his policy of glasnost’ and democratization, ethnic and national issues soon dominated 

the political debate. They led, by December 1991, to the decision to dissolve the entire Soviet state and 

to the emergence of fifteen new, supposedly sovereign, states. 

 

4. The Collapse of the Soviet State and the Challenge to Russia’s “Great Power” Identity 

In a speech to the Russian people in 2005 President Vladimir Putin stated: “The collapse of the Soviet 

Union was the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. For the Russian people, it became a real 

drama. Tens of millions of our citizens and countrymen found themselves outside Russian territory. The 

epidemic of disintegration also spread to Russia itself” (Putin, 2005). As many analysts have noted, the 

collapse also brought with it for Russians a major identity crisis. Almost overnight Russia, in the guise 

of the Soviet Union, went from being a global power and the head of a broad and powerful bloc of 

states to one of fifteen new Soviet successor states—one suffering major economic decline and 

challenged by multiple internal political problems that would soon bring it to the verge of being a 

“failed state.” (Note 11) The Russian Federation that emerged had never existed before within its new 

boundaries. More important, as we have seen, Russia had since its emergence in Muscovy in the 

Middle Ages always been an imperial state that incorporated large numbers of non-Russians, starting 

with the other eastern Slavic groups in Belarus and Ukraine. The identity of Russia as a large, powerful, 

imperial state was shattered and much debate ensued about the very nature of the new Russia. (Note 12) 

Russians who thought of Kiev or Karkhov as part of Greater Russia could not imagine them in foreign 

countries. Upwards of twenty-five million ethnic Russians found themselves outside the boundaries of 

the new Russian state. Questions were posed concerning Russia’s political orientation. On top of this 

the experiment with democracy and a market economy contributed to what Russians saw as political 

chaos and economic collapse. 

The question soon arose whether Russia should continue its efforts to join the West and restructure its 

entire approach to both domestic and international politics, as those around President Yeltsin in the 

early 1990s advocated? Or, should Russia recognize its Eurasian heritage and unique history, challenge 

U.S. global domination and build closer ties with other like-minded states throughout Asia and beyond, 

as Prime Minister Evgenyi Primakov and later President Putin insisted? (Note 13) The latter is the 

option that has been chosen with the result of increasing confrontation with both the United States and 

the European Union. 

By the time that Putin took office as acting president at the very end of 1999 the Russian political and 

economic systems had bottomed out and were just beginning to recover. The new president announced 

that his central goal was to reestablish Russia’s regional dominance and its global importance. Essential 

preconditions for accomplishing these objectives, as noted in Putin’s first “Foreign Policy Concept” 

(2000), included the internal political stability and economic viability of Russia. (Note 14) 

Using increasingly coercive means, President Putin was able to re-impose central control over the 



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territory of the Russian Federation. Republic-level governors, many of whom had been elected, were 

now appointed directly by the president; political dissent was squelched and his opponents ran the risk 

of imprisonment or worse. (Note 15) Putin’s success in dealing with the major domestic problems 

challenging the Russian state at the turn of the millennium meant that Russia increasingly faced Europe 

and the United States from a position of vastly increased strength. Besides rebuilding the foundations 

of the Russian state, at great cost to political liberty and democracy, as a precondition for Russia’s 

ability to reassert itself as a major power, Putin and his associates benefited greatly from the 

exponential rise in global demand for gas and oil—at least until the global financial meltdown in fall 

2008—and the ensuing revitalization of the Russian economy. This, in turn, contributed to Russia’s 

ability to pursue a much more active and assertive foreign policy. (Note 16) This assertive foreign 

policy with its nationalist rhetoric, in turn, has proven to be an important factor in maintaining Putin’s 

popularity and in generating acceptance of his repressive domestic policies. 

In the foreign policy realm Putin sought allies who shared Russia’s commitment to preventing the 

global dominance of the United States that represents, in the words of the Foreign Policy Concept 

(2000), a threat to international security and to Russia’s goal of serving as a major center of influence 

in a multipolar world. Until the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001, there was little 

evidence that the disagreements dividing Russia and the United States during the 1990s would 

disappear soon—in particular since they derived from core elements of their respective foreign policy 

commitments.  

In the first half of 2001, immediately after George W. Bush entered the Oval Office in Washington, 

US-Russian relations reached their first post-cold war nadir. Bush expelled a group of Russian 

diplomats charged with espionage in spring 2001. This was followed by a tit-for-tat expulsion of 

Americans in Moscow. Over the first eight months of Bush’s presidency relations deteriorated further, 

as the United States refused to consider signing the Kyoto Accords on the environment, announced that 

it would withdraw from the 1972 ABM treaty and would proceed with the development of an 

anti-ballistic missile system. (Note 17) 

As we have already noted, part of President Putin’s initial plan for rebuilding Russia’s greatness was a 

reassertion of the central authority of Moscow over the vast territory of the country. This began in 

Chechnya with the brutal suppression by Putin as prime minister in fall of 1999 of the secessionist 

movement initiated. The elimination of elected governors in the constituent republics of the Russian 

Federation contributed to the taming of secessionist movements in Tatarstan, Buryatia, Sakha and 

elsewhere that had developed in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR.  

Along with ensuring unity within the Russian Federation itself, President Putin refocused Russian 

policy on what had been termed the “near abroad,” the post-Soviet states that had emerged out of the 

USSR along with Russia. To a substantial degree in the years immediately following the implosion of 

the USSR Moscow had virtually ignored these new states, as it focused on gaining acceptance as a full, 

equal and respected member of the Western-dominated community. With the shift to a Eurasianist 



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policy orientation, especially after Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency, Russia focused much more 

on rebuilding its relations with the other former Soviet republics—soon on support for dissident groups, 

often ethnic Russians, who challenged the unity of these states. (Note 18) 

Bertil Nygren (2008a, 2008b), among the first Western analysts who has systematically examined the 

policies and instruments employed by the Putin government in its attempt to rebuild what he terms 

Greater Russia, concluded that through 2007, or so, Russia relied primarily on economic instruments, 

including the supply of oil and gas, to influence the policies of neighboring states and to tie them more 

closely to Russia. At that point, in order to stop further NATO expansion into what Russian President 

Dmitri Medvedev termed an area of “Russia’s privileged interest” (Medvedev, 2008) the response 

became more assertive and Russia has been militarily supportive of dissident groups in Georgia, 

Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transniestria, and Ukraine. 

It was roughly around 2005 or 2006 when Russian policy toward both the “near abroad” and the West 

hardened for a multiplicity of reasons. (Note 19) In no particular order they included the West’s efforts 

to contain the reemergence of some of these states as dominant power, the West’s refusal to accept 

Russia as an equal player in international affairs, as had been demonstrated by the refusal to respond to 

Russian policy concerns about NATO’s interventions in former Yugoslavia, the continued march 

eastward of NATO, the development of a U.S. anti-ballistic missile program. Added to this was the 

regular and ongoing campaign by both the United States and the European Union to push Western 

governance models—especially political democracy, human rights, and related issues—in their 

dealings with former Soviet states. The color revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, as well 

as the new European Eastern Partnership were viewed as attempts to undercut Russia’s friends and 

Russia’s influence in post-Soviet space. As viewed in Moscow, these were but barely disguised efforts 

of Western governments and Western NGO’s to shift the political orientation of these countries toward 

closer ties with the West. (Note 20) It is at this point that Russia becomes much more assertive in its 

relations with both its near neighbors and with the West.  

 

6. Putin’s Eurasian Union: The Rebuilding of Greater Russia? (Note 21) 

We finally reach the point in this analysis that is most relevant to current Russian policy—namely 

efforts by President Putin and the political elite in Moscow to strengthen the Russian state and to 

rebuild, in so far as possible, the multinational empire that collapsed in 1991. These efforts have 

culminated in the recent flurry of activity surrounding the creation of a Eurasian Union meant to mimic 

the European Union and to enhance the development and modernization processes of all of the member 

countries. However, most Western analysts emphasize the role that the Union can play in reintegrating 

the smaller post-Soviet states into a Russian-dominated institution.  

President Putin’s (2007) wide-ranging attack on the United States and the West at the Munich Security 

Conference in 2007 represents a watershed in Russian foreign policy. It announced that Russia was 

once again major international actor and that Russia will no longer follow the lead of the West in 



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pursuing its foreign and security policy interests. But, it also indicated that Russia saw itself as a pole in 

the international system separate from and in conflict with the West. It is at roughly this time that 

Moscow also began to assert itself rhetorically in response to Western charges that it was corrupting or 

abandoning democracy. (Note 22) The Russian response was the assertion that Russia was not bound 

by Western definitions of democracy and that, in fact, it was in the process of establishing a superior 

form of “sovereign democracy” that was characterized first and foremost by independence from 

external standards or influences. In other words, Russian democracy is sui generis and will not be 

bound by any external criteria or rules. (Note 23) But, more than a framework for political 

developments in Russia, “sovereign democracy” was presented as a model for other countries and a 

justification of the type of top-down management that Vladimir Putin has fashioned in Russia. For 

authoritarian or semi-authoritarian political leaders across Eurasia, the arguments underlying 

“sovereign democracy” have proven to be quite attractive. (Note 24) 

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Georgia and Moscow’s formal recognition of the breakaway 

republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, then President Dimitri Medvedev laid out the “principles” on 

which Russian policy was to be carried out. These principles included “protecting the lives and dignity 

of our citizens, wherever they may be” and the claim that “there are regions in which Russia has 

privileged interests. These regions are home to countries with which we share special historical 

relations and are bound together as friends and good neighbours” (Medvedev, 2008). Given the 

continued large Russian minorities in some of the post-Soviet states and Russia’s policy of granting 

citizenship to large numbers of those living outside the Russian Federation, the first of these two 

principles de facto justifies intervention throughout most of former Soviet territory. The second calls 

for a sphere of Russian influence across Eurasia in which Russia has the right to protect its interests, 

including by economic coercion or military intervention. (Note 25) 

By the end of 2008 all the pieces were in place for Russia’s “taking back” at least some of the area that 

it was contesting with the West. By then Russia had rebuilt its economy. It had effectively moved to 

strengthen the economic dependence of most of the post-Soviet states on Russia—primarily via energy 

dependence, including increasing Russian ownership of the energy infrastructure of these states 

(Nygren, 2007). (Note 26) Presidents Putin and Medvedev had provided the rhetorical foundations on 

which to base the conflict by noting the threat to regional and global peace that the United States 

represented (Putin, 2007) and by emphasizing Russia’s legitimate role in the affairs of neighboring 

states (Medvedev, 2008). The Foreign Policy Concept issued in 2008 focused on external, rather than 

internal, challenges to Russian security—with U.S. global dominance at the very top of the list. In line 

with the extensive discussion of “sovereign democracy” in Russia, the Concept stipulated that global 

competition was acquiring a civilizational dimension, which suggested competition between different 

value systems and development models within the framework of universal democratic and market 

economy principles. The new foreign policy concept maintained that the reaction to the prospect of loss 

by the historic West of its monopoly over global processes now found its expression, in particular, in 



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the continued political and psychological policy of “containing Russia.” The document emphasizes 

throughout Russia’s independence and sovereignty as the foundation on which all of Moscow’s 

relations with the outside world must be built (“Foreign Policy Concept”, 2008). (Note 27) 

Moscow had already demonstrated through the use of economic pressures that the Russian leadership 

was quite willing to use its economic clout to achieve political goals. Finally, in Georgia it 

demonstrated that the use of military power was also an acceptable weapon in competing with the West 

for influence in the regions of “privileged” Russian interest. 

It is roughly at this time that Moscow began to push a variety of potential programs aimed at 

integrating post-Soviet space more effectively and, thus, reducing or expelling entirely Western 

involvement and influence (see, for example, Russell, 2012). In addition to the call of Dimitri 

Medvedev for a Eurasian-wide security system, the Russians moved, as well, to develop closer 

economic and security ties among those members of the Commonwealth of Independent States that 

were willing to go this route or who succumbed to growing Russian pressures. At that time, this meant 

Belarus and Kazakhstan for economic integration and a slightly larger group of countries for security 

cooperation.  

Although the Collective Security Treaty Organization was created by six post-Soviet states already in 

1992, it only recently expanded its role into a military alliance among the six member states [Russia, 

Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan] (Note 28) and overlaps with and 

collaborates with the Shanghai Treaty Organization, established in the mid-1990s as a means of 

facilitating cooperation in security-related activities between China and Russia and several Central 

Asian countries. Russia is clearly the dominant actor in the CSTO, which is now touted as part of the 

growing set of integrative projects that are tying together the peoples of the countries that emerged two 

decades ago out of the Soviet Union. 

Probably more important for the future of relations across Eurasia are the various aspects of President 

Putin’s vision of a Eurasian Union. (Note 29) This represents Moscow’s ongoing effort to knit together 

the disparate pieces that formerly comprised the Soviet Union and, thus, challenge what it views as 

Western efforts to undercut the position and role of Russia in former Soviet space, and globally. 

Drawing upon a proposal first made in 1994 by Kazakhstan’s then President Nazarbayev, President 

Putin broached the idea of an integration scheme for Eurasia based on the model of the European 

Union during his presidential election campaign in fall 2011. A month later Russia, Kazakhstan and 

Belarus agreed to a framework for developing the Union over the course of the next several years. By 

summer and fall of 2013 the Russian president was engaged in an all-out effort to attract—or 

coerce—other Eurasian states to the view that their future lay with the Union and not with closer ties to 

the West or to a “go-it-alone” strategy. 

For Moscow the EU’s Eastern Partnership (Simão, 2013), which foresees a closer relationship between 

the EU and six East European and Caucasian states, is seen increasingly as the West’s attempt to 

supplant Russian influence and to tie these countries into the Western orbit. (Note 30) In fall 2013, 



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when the president of Armenia announced that Armenia would abandon its negotiations with the 

European Union, in order to pursue membership in the Eurasian Union, it was reported that Moscow 

had threatened to reduce its security support for Armenia in its ongoing conflict with Azerbaijan, deny 

work permits to the tens of thousands of Armenian citizens working in Russia, reduce the flow of 

subsidized energy to Armenia, and generally make economic life more difficult for the landlocked and 

beleaguered country (Peter, 2013). Similar pressures were reported in the discussions between Russia 

and Ukraine in the run-up to President Yanukovych’s announcement in November 2013 that Ukraine 

also would opt for membership in the Eurasian Union rather than continue to pursue closer ties with the 

European Union (Walker, 2013). 

Russians present the Eurasian Union as the means to integrate and modernize the economies of the 

former Soviet republics, so that they can compete more effectively in the global economy (Lomagin, 

2014). However most Western analysts see the Eurasian Union primarily as a political tool for 

Moscow’s re-imposition of control over as broad a swath of post-Soviet territory and people as possible 

(Adomeit, 2014). It represents a continuation of Putin’s policy initiated more than a decade ago of 

rebuilding Greater Russia and undercutting the attempts of the European Union, NATO and the United 

States to expand their ties to former Soviet areas. Moreover, it is meant to ensure that challenges to the 

authoritarian and semi-authoritarian leaders in neighboring states will not succeed and, thus, influence 

potential Russian challengers to the system of top-down political management that now characterizes 

the Russian Federation. 

Although President Putin has experienced resistance to his proposal for a Eurasian Union, the decision 

by the Armenian president in fall 2013 to break off negotiations with the EU and join the Eurasian 

Union, (Note 30) followed little more than a month later by Ukrainian President Yanukovych’s similar 

announcement for Ukraine, seemed to put the matter at rest. Moscow’s plan for an economically and 

politically reintegrated Eurasia under Russian leadership seemed well on the path to realization. 

Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and also Ukraine, along with Russia, had all apparently 

“signed on” to the plan. Georgia, Moldova, and Azerbaijan continued to resist Moscow’s overtures and 

threats, and the route that Uzbekistan might take was not clear. But, with Ukraine in the fold, the likely 

success of creating the Eurasian project seemed enhanced—although its long-term impact in 

modernizing the economies of the member countries was by no means guaranteed. 

That was the situation in mid-February 2014, despite the ongoing challenges to the Ukrainian 

president’s announced decision to opt for closer ties with Russia and the Eurasian Union. Then came 

the unexpected events that toppled President Yanukovych, followed by de facto Russian military 

intervention in and annexation of Crimea—complete with propaganda about a fascist takeover in Kyiv 

that threatened the security of ethnic Russians in Ukraine—and the decision to hold a referendum in 

Crimea about union with the Russian Federation followed by incorporation of the region into the 

Russian Federation and paralleled the Russian recognition of and support for independence from 

Ukraine of regions in the east of the country. The confrontation in Ukraine has meant that, although 



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Russia has prevented Ukraine from pursuing membership in the European Union and/or NATO, it has 

also eliminated Ukraine as a realistic candidate for Eurasian Union membership (see Fedorov, 2019). 

Elsewhere in post-Soviet states—usually in areas with significant ethnic Russian or regional minority 

populations—Russia has also intervened, facilitated secession and granted some form of political 

recognition to the new secessionist statelets. (Note 31) In many respects, once the Russians had rebuilt 

their domestic economy and decided that focusing on reestablishing their dominant role in former 

Soviet space rather than integrating into Europe, they had clear advantages in competing with the West 

and for attracting other former Soviet republics into closer ties. Most important was the economic and, 

especially, energy dependence of most of the other states on Russia—and Moscow’s willingness to use 

that dependence to its advantage. Only Azerbaijan, with its energy wealth—plus several resource-rich 

Central Asian states—is in a position easily to resist Russian “invitations.” For countries such as 

Moldova and Georgia efforts to resist the Russian embrace and pursue stronger relations with the 

Europeans have continued and even expanded after Russian military intervention in Crimea (Secrieru, 

2014). As noted by Thomas Ambrosio, “Russia has sought to create near-exclusive spheres of influence 

within the former Soviet space, excluding the Baltics” (Ambrosio, 2019). 

 

7. Concluding Comments 

The Russia that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union was a Russia that had never existed over 

the course of the past millennium. Shorn of all but a small portion of the ethnic minorities that had 

always comprised such a large portion of the population of the country, including the fellow Slavs in 

Belarus and Ukraine, the Russian Federation was no longer the imposing international actor that it had 

been for most of the past two centuries, or more. Russia’s history had been one of continual expansion 

since the fourteenth century and the imposition of Russian policy domination and Russian culture on 

peoples usually viewed as backward and less developed. That was the history of the last century of the 

Tsarist regimes, as well as of the Soviet regime.  

Although the Russian Federation still extended across eleven time zones, had the largest population in 

Europe, and possessed nuclear weapons, it was no match, in terms of global clout, for the lost Soviet 

state. Moreover, the West took advantage of Russia’s weakness by extending its involvement and 

influence into areas in Central and Eastern Europe that were viewed as an integral part of the Russian 

sphere of influence. This is precisely the set of developments that Vladimir Putin set out to correct in a 

policy termed revanchist by Matthew Sussex (2015) because it aims at undoing major geopolitical 

developments of the past quarter century. A central aspect of the policy that he has pursued over the 

course of the past decade has been the attempt to reestablish an integrated economic, political and 

security space in the area of the former USSR somewhat akin to “the gathering of the Russian lands” 

by Muscovy in the fifteenth century.  

How the Eurasian Union will evolve, what the nature of Russia’s relations with the other former Soviet 

states and populations will be, how the crisis in Ukraine will unfold—none of these questions can be 



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fully answered today. Yet, it does appear clear that the intention of the current Russian leadership under 

Vladimir Putin is to bring together into a close economic, political and security union as much of 

former Soviet territory as possible in order to strengthen Russia’s economic and political position as it 

vies for a position as one of the poles in a new multipolar world intended to replace the current 

international system dominated by the United States and the West. It is hard to imagine such an 

integrated system much different from the Greater Russia discussed by Bertil Nygren (2008) in which 

the smaller states and their populations are subordinated to Russia, in ways similar to the way that their 

ancestors once were in Tsarist and Communist Russia. 

 

Acknowledgement 

The author is grateful to Dr. Dina Moulioukova for piquing his interest in the importance of integration 

throughout Russian history.  

 

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Notes 

Note 1. The argument presented here was originally developed in a course co-taught at the University 

of Miami in fall 2013 by the author with then doctoral candidate Dina Moulioukova entitled “From the 

Soviet Union to the Eurasian Union.” The author is especially grateful to Dr. Moulioukova for 

organizing that course and for piquing his interest in the importance of integration throughout Russian 

history. These ideas also formed the basis for a paper presented at a conference entitled “Colonizing 



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and De/Re-Colonizing Nations: A Research Inquiry into Communist Practices 25 Years Later,” Florida 

Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Fl., March 12-13, 2015.  

Note 2. For a comprehensive discussion of the nationality complexity of the population of the Soviet 

Union at the time of the last official census in 1989 see Anderson and Silver (1989). 

Note 3. The view of Russia’s self-perception as a great power and its impact on policy is dealt with, 

among others, by (Adomeit, 1995; Hopf, 2002; Kanet, 2007; Mankoff, 2009; Moulioukova, with Kanet, 

n.d.; and Neumann, 2008). 

Note 4. The following discussion draws on Pipes (1974). 

Note 5. For a superb treatment of this and later periods of Russian expansion see Serhii Plokhy (2017). 

He notes, for example, that by the middle of the seventeenth century it had resolved its internal 

problems and retuned to an offensive strategy in its international relations, “of which there would be 

great deal more in the decades and centuries to come” (Plokhy, 2017, p. 35). See, also, Plokhy (2008). 

Note 6. Plokhy points out how Russia attempted in the late nineteenth century attempted to suppress 

the development of languages other than Russian (Plokhy, 2017, pp. 137-156). 

Note 7. For an excellent discussion of Soviet nationalities policies, including its inherent contractions, 

see Carrère d’Encausse (1992). 

Note 8. The noted French historian of Russia, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, states that “Stalinism, with 

its open hostility toward nations and the officially endorsed supremacy of the Russian people (giving 

rise to the myth of the Russian ‘big brother’ in relation to the USSR’s minority groups), contributed 

considerably to.  

Note 10. When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 the population totaled 293 million, of whom 

approximately 51 percent were ethnic Russians. The population of the new Russian Federation was 

about 148 million, with Russians making up 81 percent of the population (Andreev et al., 1993).  

Note 11. This debate is discussed in detail in the work of Jeffrey Mankoff (2009), Regina Heller (2012), 

Andrei Tsygankov (2012, 2014), Valentina Feklyunina (2012), Stephen White and Valentina Feklyunina 

(2014), Dina Moulioukova-Fernandez (2012) and many other analysts of Russia. See, also, note 3, 

above. 

Note 12. Rapprochement with and incorporation into the Western system was the focus of Russian 

policy until about 1995, during the period in which Andrei Kozyrev was foreign minister. The shift to a 

more Eurasianist orientation came in early 1996, when Evgenyi Primakov replaced Kozyrev as foreign 

minister. Primakov was later prime minister in 1998-1999. For a discussion of the reorientation of 

Russian policy, see, Kozyrev (2019), Kanet (2010) and many others. 

Note 13. For this set of objectives see, also, ‘Kontseptsiia natsional’noi bezopasnosti” (2000).  

Note 14. For example, journalists, such as Anna Politkovskaya, were murdered and the billionaire 

owner of Lukos Oil Company, Mikhail Khodorkovsky was imprisoned in 2003 and his company 

confiscated after he challenged the politics of President Putin. Khodorkovsky was released from prison 

in late 2013 as part of a public relations gesture in the run-up to the Sochi Olympic games (Oltermann 



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& Walker, 2013). 

Note 15. However, as many analysts have argued, the revived role of Russia as a regional and global 

political actor is based extensively on oil and gas production and exports, despite recent improvements 

in other aspects of the Russian economy. See, for example, Hancock (2007); McFaul and Stoner-Weiss, 

2008); Menon and Motyl (2007).  

Note 16. George W. Bush brought into office with him a group of neo-conservatives who were 

committed to restructuring the world according to a U.S. model and to America’s benefit. The backing 

off from existing or new treaties was part of the effort to remove limitations on the U.S. freedom to act 

in world affairs (Kanet, 2005). 

Note 17. See, for example, Spechler and Spechler (2019), esp. pp. 81-98. 

Note 18. For a discussion of the shift in Russian policy and the growing rift in Russia’s relations with 

the West see Kanet (2015) and Kanet (2020). See, also Marten (2020). 

Note 19. On Russian policy toward its near neighbors see Humphrey (2009), Adomeit (2011) and 

Sakwa (2017). On resistance to color revolutions see Polese and Ó Beachán (2011). On the argument 

that the West de facto manipulated the revolutions see Roberts (2014) and Samphir (2014). On the role 

of Poland in supporting democratic elements in Ukraine see Petrova (2014). On the growing 

ideological divide between Moscow and the West see DeBardeleben (2015). 

Note 20. The following section draws on Kanet, (2015). Serhii Plokhy treats post-Soviet Russian 

behavior (Plohky, 2017. pp. 317-51).  

Note 21. As Dawisha (2014) demonstrates, Putin and his team never intended to establish a democratic 

political system and those who saw Russia as a flawed democracy rather than a new authoritarian state 

were simply incorrect. 

Note 22. For an extensive discussion of the concept, first used by Vladislav Surkov in 2006, and its 

place in Russian policy see Herd (2009). 

Note 23. For a definition of what the term competitive authoritarianism and its place in post-Soviet 

states see Levitsky and Way (2010). 

Note 24. Both of these arguments are central to the Russian justification for its military intervention in 

Crimea (Putin, 2014). 

Note 25. Russia systemically took over the control of the pipeline infrastructure of Belarus as a means 

of dominating the latter’s economy (Wierzbowska-Miazga, 2013). On the broad aspects of Russian 

energy policy see Ehrstedt and Vahtra (2008) and Nygren (2008a, 2008b). 

Note 26. For an extensive discussion of Russian criticisms of the United States and the West in general 

see Vladimir Shlapentokh (2008). 

Note 27. Azerbaijan, Georgia and Uzbekistan are former members. Ukraine, Turkmenistan, and 

Moldova have never been members of the CSTO. 

Note 28. For quite different assessments of the Eurasian Union see Lomagin (2014) and Arakelyan 

(2014). See, also, Adomeit (2014). The Eurasian Union is intended to build on the Customs Union of 



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Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia that became operational on 1 January 2010. 

Note 29. The general approach that Russia has taken as it stumped for commitments to join the Union 

is the one outlined by Nygren (2008)—i.e., the promise of economic rewards and, more important even, 

the threat of and application of economic punishment. In 2012, after Moldova noted its plans to pursue 

an agreement with the EU, Moscow cut off the import of Moldovan wine as a health threat, much as it 

had banned Polish meat imports a few years earlier after a political dispute with Warsaw (Emerson & 

Kostanyan, 2013).  

Note 30. Armenian membership was formalized in October 2014 (“Armenia Joins”, 2014). 

Note 31. On Armenia see Arakelyan (2019); on Georgia see Dunlop (2012) and March (2012); on 

Kyrgyzstan see Herd (2012). 


