With the stroke of a pen, Russian President Vladimir Putin on March 31, 2023 approved Russia’s latest foreign policy concept, its first since 2016. While Putin called the document “a basis for our practical actions in the mid-term and more distant future,” the release did not make much news beyond dedicated Russia watchers. This is in part because its cavalcade of fabrications and grievances about the world has been marched out by Putin in speeches for years. Yet this official distillation of Kremlin-approved ideas is worth reflecting on, especially for how it describes Russia itself. Doing so reveals a concerning inflection point in Russian imperial ambitions beyond Ukraine: Putin intends for Russia to contend against the West not just in terms of military power, but also in the realm of ideology.
The nine-thousand-word concept starts by describing Russia as “a unique country-civilization and a vast Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power.” It adds that Russia “brings together the Russian people and other peoples belonging to the cultural and civilizational community of the Russian world.” In the Kremlin’s formulation, then, Russia is not so much a nation-state among nation-states as it is a civilizational world unto itself. This kind of language has been used by Putin for years and is increasingly prevalent among Russia’s elite. It is used to explain the reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union and chart a course for Russia’s redemption. This redemption is the creation of a new russkiy mir—here translated as “world” but also meaning “peace.” It is a concoction designed to become Russia’s new civilization, its “Pax Russica” of sorts. Whether the new wave of Russian nationalism-cum-imperialism succeeds in defining the Russian mind will determine what the Russian Federation becomes going forward.
This shift in Russian culture may be seen as the “de-Westernization” and reconceptualization of Russia as a Eurasian state par excellence, with “Eurasia” understood in modern Russian history as an entity separate from the West—and not only separate from the West, but in a dichotomy of the West vs. Eurasia as well. It is about moving Russians’ point of reference for their country back to Russia’s pre-European era, before German administrators, Dutch ship builders, and French artists some three hundred years ago became fixtures at the Russian imperial court. This Westernizing impulse in Russia over several centuries helped the country to modernize and build a powerful military machine that would defeat the Poles, the Swedes, and, ultimately, the French and the Germans. But it was also this empire-building process that made it all but impossible for Russia to move past superficial “Westernization” and become truly Western. And so today, just like the “Europeanization” of the Russian empire was to be its rebirth in the nineteenth century, the “Eurasianization” of the Russian Federation is offered as a fundamental break with the past.
Eurasianists argue that Russian culture is sui generis and that anything that enters it from the West contaminates the Russian soul. Putin’s insistence that his war in Ukraine is civilizational and that he is defending Russia from NATO, the United States, and the collective West reflects this view. It is also a principal reason why much of the Russian population—whether overtly or tacitly—supports it. The Eurasian reorientation in Russia has reordered narratives about Russian history, with arguments about the incessant defense against evil coming from the West—be it the Poles occupying the Kremlin in 1610, the French meandering through the burning Russian capital in 1812, or the Germans standing at the gates of Moscow in 1941.
In this new Russia, with its aspirations to establish a russkiy mir, lie the drivers that will likely forge a Russia the West will need to contend with for years to come.
I pity those kids I saw on the news.
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