Russian Neo-imperialism

Russian imperialism is the political, economic and cultural influence, as well as military power, exerted by Russia and its predecessor states, over other countries and territories. It includes the conquests of the Tsardom of Russia, the Russian Empire, the imperialism of the Soviet Union, and the neo-imperialism of the Russian Federation. Some postcolonial scholars have noted the lack of attention given to Russian and Soviet imperialism in the discipline.

After the Fall of Constantinople (1453), Moscow named itself the third Rome, following the Roman and Byzantine Empires. Beginning in the 1550s, Russia conquered, on average, territory the size of the Netherlands every year for 150 years. This included Siberia, central Asia, the Caucasus and parts of Eastern Europe. Russia engaged in settler colonialism in these lands, and also founded colonies in North America, notably in present-day Alaska. At its height in the late 19th century, the Russian Empire covered about one-sixth of the world's landmass, making it the third-largest empire in history.

In the late 18th century, the emperors promoted the concept of an "All-Russian nation" made up of Great Russians, Little Russians (Ukrainians) and White Russians (Belarusians), to bolster Russian imperial claims to parts of the partitioned Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Emperor Nicholas I made "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality" the official imperial ideology, which sought to unite the empire's many peoples through Eastern Orthodox Christianity, loyalty to the emperor, and Russianness.

In the Russian Civil War, the Russian Bolsheviks seized control of the former empire's territories and founded the Soviet Union (USSR). Although claiming to be anti-imperialist, it had many similarities with empires. It was involved in many foreign military interventions and in regime change throughout the world, as well as Sovietization. Under Joseph Stalin, the USSR pursued internal colonialism in Central Asia by massive forced resettlement. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany divided eastern Europe between themselves. At the end of World War II, most eastern and central European countries were occupied by the USSR; these Eastern Bloc countries were widely regarded as Soviet satellite states.

Since the 2010s, analysts have described Russia under Vladimir Putin as neo-imperialist. Russia occupies parts of neighboring countries and has engaged in expansionism, most notably with the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia, the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine and annexation of its southeast. Russia has also established domination over Belarus. The Putin regime has revived imperial ideas such as the "Russian world" and the ideology of Eurasianism. It has used disinformation and the Russian diaspora to undermine the sovereignty of other countries. Russia is also accused of neo-colonialism in Africa, mainly through the activities of the Wagner Group and Africa Corps.

Views on Russian imperialism

Montesquieu wrote that "The Moscovites cannot leave the empire" and they "are all slaves". Historian Alexander Etkind describes a phenomenon of "reversed gradient", where people living near the center of the Russian Empire experienced greater oppression than the ones on the edges. Jean-Jacques Rousseau in turn argued that Poland was not free because of Russian imperialism. In 1836, Nikolai Gogol said that Saint Petersburg was "something similar to a European colony in America", remarking that there were as many foreigners as people of the native ethnicity. According to Aleksey Khomyakov, the Russian elite was "a colony of eclectic Europeans, thrown into a country of savages" with a "colonial relationship" between the two. A similar colonial aspect was identified by Konstantin Kavelin.

Russian imperialism has been argued to be different from other European colonial empires due to its empire being overland rather than overseas, which meant that rebellions could be more easily put down, with some lands being reconquered soon after they were lost. The terrestrial basis of the empire has also been seen as a factor which made it more divided than sea-based ones due to the difficulties of communication and transport over land at the time.

Russian imperialism has been linked to the labour-intensive and low productivity economic system based on serfdom and despotic rule, which required constant increase in the amount of land under cultivation to legitimise the rule and provide satisfaction to the subjects. The political system in turn depended on land as a resource to reward officeholders, and thus the political elite made territorial expansion an intentional project.

Internal colonization

According to Vasily Klyuchevsky, Russia has the "history of a country that colonizes itself". Vladimir Lenin saw Russia's underdeveloped territories as internal colonialism. This concept had first been introduced in the context of Russia by August von Haxthausen in 1843. Sergey Solovyov argued that this was because Russia "was not a colony that was separated from the metropolitan land by oceans". For Afanasy Shchapov, this process was primarily driven by ecological imperialism, whereby the fur trade and fishing were driving the conquest of Siberia and Alaska. Other followers of Klyuchevsky identified the forms of colonization driven by military or monastic expansion, among others. Pavel Milyukov meanwhile noted the violence of this self-colonizing process. A similarity was later noted between Russian self-colonialism and the American frontier by Mark Bassin.

Ideologies of Russian imperialism

The territorial expansion of the empire gave the autocratic rulers of Russia additional legitimacy, while also giving the subjugated population a source of national pride.} The legitimation of the empire was later done through different ideologies. After the Fall of Constantinople, Moscow named itself the third Rome, following the Roman and Byzantine Empires. In a panegyric letter to Grand Duke Vasili III composed in 1510, Russian monk Philotheus (Filofey) of Pskov proclaimed, "Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. And there will be no fourth. No one shall replace your Christian Tsardom!".Mashkov, A.D.
Moscow is the Third Rome (МОСКВА – ТРЕТІЙ РИМ)
Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia.'' This led to the concept of a messianic Orthodox Russian nation as the Holy Rus. Russia claimed to be the protector of Orthodox Christians as it expanded into the territories of the Ottoman Empire during wars such as the Crimean War.

After the victory of monarchist Coalition in 1815, Russia promulgated the Holy Alliance with Prussia and Austria to reinstate the divine right of kings and Christian values in European political life, as pursued by Alexander I under the influence of his spiritual adviser Baroness Barbara von Krüdener. It was written by the Tsar and edited by Ioannis Kapodistrias and Alexandru Sturdza. In the first draft Tsar Alexander I made appeals to mysticism through a proposed unified Christian empire, with a unified imperial army, that was seen as disconcerting by the other monarchies. Following revision, a more pragmatic version of the alliance was adopted by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The document was called "an apocalypse of diplomacy" by French diplomat Dominique-Georges-Frédéric Dufour de Pradt. The Holy Alliance was largely used to suppress internal dissent, censoring the press and shutting down parliaments as part of "The Reaction".

Under Nicholas I of Russia, Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality became the official state ideology. It required the Orthodox Church to take an essential role in politics and life, required the central rule of a single autocrat or absolute ruler, and proclaimed that the Russian people were uniquely capable of unifying a large empire due to special characteristics. Similar to the broader "divine right of kings", the emperor's power would be seen as resolving any contradictions in the world and creating an ideal "celestial" order. Hosking argued that the trio of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality" had key flaws in two of its main pillars, as the church was entirely dependent and submissive to the state, and the concept of nationality was underdeveloped because many officials were Baltic German and the revolutionary ideas of nation states were a "muffled echo" in a system that relied on serfdom. In practice, this left autocracy as the only viable pillar. Despite its underdeveloped and contradictory nature, the imperial " All-Russian" nationality was embraced by many imperial subjects (including Jews and Germans) and thus did provide some cultural and political support for the Empire. This national concept first demonstrated its political importance near the end of the 18th century, as a means of legitimizing Russian imperial claims to the eastern territories of the partitioned Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

In the 19th century, pan-Slavism became a new legitimation theory for the empire. Though it originated in Western Slavic (Czech and Slovak) intellectual circles in the 1830s, and found support from anti-imperial Ukrainian movements like the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, pan-Slavism was later co-opted by conservative Russian nationalists as an ideological support for the Empire's power projection, particularly in the Balkans. "By the second half of the 19th century, Russian publicists adopted--and transformed--the ideology of Pan-Slavism. Convinced of their own political superiority and armed with self-confidence in their self-professed role as protector against the threat from German and Ottoman Turkish enemies, Russian publicists argued that all Slavs, for their own best interests, might as well merge with the 'Great Russians.'"

The "Russian geography" poem by a notable 19th century Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev was considered by philologist to express ideology of the worldwide Slavic empire:

One of the leading theorists and political leaders of the Eurasianist movement, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, considered the predecessor of the Russian state to be the Mongol Empire founded by Genghis Khan, and not the principalities of Kievan Rus'. Genghis Khan was the first to unite the entire Eurasian continent, and as Trubetzkoy put it, "by its very nature, Eurasia is historically predestined to comprise a single state entity."

Russian colonial expansion

From the 16th century onwards Russia conquered, on average, territory the size of the Netherlands every year for 150 years.

Siberia and the Far East

Russian expansionism has largely benefited from the proximity of the mostly uninhabited Siberia, which has been incrementally conquered by Russia since the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1530–1584). The Russian colonization of Siberia and conquest of its indigenous peoples has been compared to European colonization of the Americas and its natives, with similar negative impacts on the natives and the appropriation of their land. Other researchers, however, consider that settlement of Siberia differed from European colonization in not resulting in native depopulation, as well as providing gainful employment and integrating indigenous population into settlers' society. The North Pacific also became the target of similar expansion establishing the Russian Far East.

In 1858, during the Second Opium War, Russia strengthened and eventually annexed the north bank of the Amur River and the coast down to the Korean border from China in the "Unequal Treaties" of Treaty of Aigun (1858) and the Convention of Peking (1860). During the Boxer Rebellion, the Russian Empire invaded Manchuria in 1900, and the Blagoveshchensk massacre occurred against Chinese residents on the Russian side of the border. Furthermore, the empire at times controlled concession territories in China, notably the Chinese Eastern Railway and concessions in Tianjin and Russian Dalian.

Central Asia

The Russian conquest of Central Asia took place over several decades. In 1847–1864 they crossed the eastern Kazakh Steppe and built a line of forts along the northern border of Kyrgyzstan. In 1864–1868 they moved south from Kyrgyzstan, captured Tashkent and Samarkand and dominated the Khanates of Kokand and Bokhara. The next step was to turn this triangle into a rectangle by crossing the Caspian Sea. In 1873 the Russians conquered Khiva, and in 1881 they took western Turkmenistan. In 1884 they took the Merv oasis and eastern Turkmenistan. In 1885 further expansion south toward Afghanistan was blocked by the British. In 1893–1895 the Russians occupied the high Pamir Mountains in the southeast. According to historian Alexander Morrison, "Russia's expansion southwards across the Kazakh steppe into the riverine oases of Turkestan was one of the nineteenth century's most rapid and dramatic examples of imperial conquest."

In the south, the Great Game was a political and diplomatic confrontation that existed for most of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century between the British Empire and the Russian Empire over Central and South Asia. Britain feared that Russia planned to invade India and that this was the goal of Russia's expansion in Central Asia, while Russia continued its conquest of Central Asia. Indeed, multiple 19th-century Russian invasion plans of India are attested, including the Duhamel and Khrulev plans of the Crimean War (1853–1856), among later plans that never materialized.

Historian A. I. Andreyev stated that, "in the days of the Great Game, Mongolia was an object of imperialist encroachment by Russia, as Tibet was for the British." In the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, the Russian Empire and British Empire officially ended their Great Game rivalry to focus on opposing the German Empire, dividing Iran into British and Russian portions. In 1908, the Persian Constitutional Revolution sought to establish a democratic civil society

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