next - main - previous
The Eurasian Politician - Issue 3 (February 2001)
By: Anssi Kullberg, 22nd Nov. 2000.
* * *
"Empires are not born or killed, but they just transform themselves, disintegrate and reintegrate, reduce and enlarge their territory. An empire is preserved even though its dynasty would change, because the change of regency does not necessarily mean changes in the culture of governance, and in the strategic position of the empire." (Antero Leitzinger: "Russia and the Kipchak Curse", translation mine, The Eurasian Politician, Issue 1/2000, http://www.the-politician.com)
In his article, the political historian and researcher of the Finnish Directorate of Immigration Antero Leitzinger points out that the Russian imperial ideas can be traced back to the Kipchak Khanate rather than to the Byzantine heritage, which was actually taken over by the Ottoman Empire and preserved by Turkey, Constantinople as her capital, up until Atatürk’s reforms. For Russia, the Byzantine legacy needed to be claimed for the imperialist mission that the grand-duchy of Muscovy adopted against the other khanates and principalities of the region we today know as Russia. Many cynical minds have ever since noticed that the Byzantine purple (though prominently imitated in the manner of court intrigues) hardly covered the grin of Genghis Khan in Russian strategic behaviour.
Following the mission of the Kipchak Khanate that aimed at conquest of the other parts of the disintegrated Genghis Khan’s empire, the Russian mission of conquest has for centuries been primarily directed towards the eastern and southern lands in Eurasia, not towards West. The completion of the Kipchak legacy with Christian mission and colonialism led Russia imagine herself as the prime crusader empire. A significant shift in the direction of Russia’s imperialist expansion only occurred whenever a "Zapadnik" or "atheist" regent rose to the throne - for example Peter the Great and Stalin. By the Georgian Iosif Dzugashvili, Russia pushed her biggest imperial expansion to the West, governing Berlin, Budapest and Prague for half a century. Maybe this proves the age-old Georgian supposition that the Georgians, descending from a Mediterranean-Oriental heritage, are more European than the Asiatic Russians.
Russia aimed at completing the great task that the Golden Horde had left unfinished: to unite all Eurasia from the Adriatic to the China Sea, and from the Polar Sea to the Indian Ocean under one rule. Thus, Russia conquered Siberia in the 1500s, and Turkestan in the 1800s. Finally in Stalin’s era Russia’s power stretched as far as to the whole vast continental China. The only part that remained non-conquered (of the Golden Horde’s task) was the empire of the Il Khan, which had become the Sunnite empire of Turkey and the Shi’ite empire of Iran. Russia never managed to defeat any of them, although the conquest of Constantinople has been close, and Täbriz was occupied by Russians in the 1900s.
Throughout the more modern Russian empire - whether czarist, communist or post-communist - the very same Kipchak idea of expansion has dominated Russian foreign policy. Catharine the Great and Count Potemkin desired the conquest of Jerusalem. Nicholas I, who bound his empire to the eternal colonial war of the Caucasus, was feared to threaten India. General Yermolov finally managed to impress the Persian Shah to become a vassal of Russia - Iran having ever since been a southern partner of Russia against the Caucasian and Turkish nations - by claiming that Russians were the inheritors of the Mongol Empire and Yermolov himself descended from Genghis Khan. Immediately after the shift from Stalin’s untypically Western-directed atheist empire to the more traditional Russian tasks, the Soviet Union started to concentrate in its influence in the Middle East. Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 brought this task to its apex. Namely, throughout all the history, North Caucasians in the West and Afghans in the East have deprived Moscow from her megalomaniac plans of sole Eurasian hegemony.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky - former KGB captain who was instituted to contrast the "moderation" of true Kremlin regents in the post-Soviet situation, but whose ideas are not so different from the very norm of Russian geopolitical thought - explained the Russian ambitions to the West in 1997: "We don’t want to conquer the whole world. Besides the legitimate area of Russia [read: all former Russian empire, including Finland, the Baltics, Transcaucasia etc.], we only want to rule three countries: Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan." In Britain this year, Vladimir Putin expected the West to understand and to support this task as a common interest of the Christianity against the "expansion" of Islam - no need to pay too much attention on the fact that no Islamic nations have expanded or attacked against Christianity in Eurasia for some hundred years. Still, Samuel Huntington demands the West to "accept Russia as the core state of Orthodoxy and a major regional power with legitimate interests in the security of its southern borders" ("Clash of Civilizations", 1996, 312). The "legitimate interests" Huntington describes as "maintaining and conquering a cordon sanitaire consisting of various Islamic nations in the south".
The emergence of this idea tells more about the unilateral end of the Cold War in the West than about a true shift in Russian imperial thought: the latter has remained surprisingly identical throughout the ages, only ceasing for short interregnums characterised by such figures as Rasputin, Kerenski and Gaidar. The interregnums may have indicated more imperatives of an historical moment than a real shift in the supra-dynastic regime of imperial state-idea: Who would think that Boris Yeltsin - who, having gained the regency, had the Russian army invade Tajikistan, Transnistria, Georgia, Karabagh, Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia - was sincere when he on 19th November 1990 in Kiev stated: "Russia does not aspire to become the centre of some sort of new empire... Russia understands better than others the perniciousness of that role, inasmuch as it was Russia that performed that role for a long time. What did it gain from this? Did Russians become freer as a result? Wealthier? Happier? ... History has taught us that a people that rules over others cannot be fortunate."
The last interregnum - characterised by Gaidar and "early post-communist Yeltsin" - lasted no longer than until 1993. No later than in 1994 even Andrei Kozyrev, considered as a devoted Zapadnik, stated that "Russia must preserve its military presence in regions that have been in its sphere of interests for centuries". In September 1995 Boris Yeltsin declared "to consolidate Russia as the leading force in the formation of a new system of interstate political and economic relations on the territory of the post-Soviet space". (Zbigniew Brzezinski: "The Grand Chessboard", 1997, 107.)
For a short and mild fortune for Finns, Baltics, Poles, Romanians and Ukrainians, Russia is again facing severe resistance on its primary Kipchak front - against southern, Islamic states. Although Russians generally do not consider Ukrainian independence as a permanent phenomenon - as pointed out by Brzezinski - and although the Russian analyst Sergei Karaganov was concerned that "if the Baltic states are not returned to the Russian sphere of interest by 2005, they will be lost forever" (Mart Nutt in Eesti Päevaleht, 17th Aug.), the primary Russian mission of conquest is in the south. Ukraine is one of the few CIS states where Russia has not used military force.
Though the dominant Slavophile element in Russian foreign policy is messing things in the Balkans and supporting Serbian "Slav brethren" in their genocidal endeavours, the actual "great task" is directed against Turkey, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. That is why Russia has so eagerly, from the czarist times to the present day, emphasised the antagonism of Islam and Christianity trying to market its anti-Islamic (and earlier anti-Semitic) ideas to the West with varying success. That is why Israel is presently allied with Turkey and seeking similar collaboration with Jordan, against Russia’s southern satellites such as Syria and Iraq.
While Russian foreign political rhetorics always mirrors the West, and is addressed to the West, and while the age-old Kipchak expansionism and aggression is directed against the south and Islamic nations, the dimension that the Russian foreign political action has traditionally ignored - though it, too, has popped out in theory and in rhetorics - is the Far East. Equally much as Russia traditionally exaggerates and agitates the idea of "an Islamic threat", Moscow has traditionally neglected the power of the main Eurasian rival of Russia aspiring a major imperial conquest: China.
Already more than three million Han Chinese have crossed the border into Russian Far East during the most recent years, and the amount of Chinese colonisation in Russian imperial territory is growing all the time, without Russia being able to control it at all. At the same time, Chinese influence over the Central Asian states and even Afghanistan is growing every passed year. Glancing at the uniquely rapid colonisation of East Turkestan by China, which is turning the Uighurs into a minority in their own land within a couple of decades, one can only imagine the changes that would take place in all Eurasia, was Chinese hegemony to become explicitly manifested and realised. On the Russo-Chinese border areas one can realise today that Russia has become the inferior one, and defeated by the tiny Chechen nation, the Russian army could hardly resist the Chinese might that does not know even those few "democratic hindrances" that Russia today may find troubling its aggressions.
As an heir of the Kipchak heritage, Russia has always been more interested to reflect its imaginary might for the eyes of the West than to recognise foreign political realism and the true benefit of the Russian nation. Thereby it is understandable that before the condescending Western eyes, Moscow prefers a glorious crusade against an imagined threat of Islam - a Don Quixote’s windmill war, but a most destructive and dangerous one since it can finally turn the windmills into reality - to facing its humiliating loss of prestige and hegemony in the East.
Thus, the major long-term change in the Russian geostrategic position throughout the modern times has been the emergence of a rising Eastern Empire that might challenge Russia in the contest of gaining back Genghis Khan’s legacy. Moscow had better forget Potemkin and Yermolov, let the relatively unimportant areas of North Caucasus go, and concentrate in a more constructive, and more European, task of co-operation with the emerged "Sub-Russias" Ukraine and Belarus. Instead of continuing the age-old Mongol rivalry over the legacy of the disintegrated empire of Kublai Khan, Russia could indeed return to the faded glory of the trinity of Muscovy, Kiev and Novgorod, which Russia, Ukraine and Belarus today may represent.
In relation to the Chinese threat, Russia should abandon colonialism in the South and support the Central Asian states to build up strong legitimacy - not weak illegitimate vassalship of corrupted nomenclature dictatorships that Russia presently supports. That would strengthen the true Russian buffer against China, and also against any potential threat in the form of Taliban-type movements, generated by constant state of war. Russia should also seriously improve the horizontal legitimacy of the remaining parts of the empire. Centralism can only damage the legitimacy and alienate the regions - especially all non-Slavs but also ethnic Russians - from any remaining loyalty at Moscow.
Present Russia stands in a crossroads. The question should no longer be, which direction (Western, Slavophile or Eurasianist) the Russian imperial identity should choose, but rather, how Russia could abolish the imperialist heritage that has brought about enough misery for Russia and all her neighbours, without bringing about the total collapse of the whole society. This is, however, not the first time in history when Russia stands in the same crossroads. Traditionally, Russia has preferred not to choose any consistent strategy. That is why she has behaved like a schizophrenic bear in a porcelain shop. How much freedom, wealth or happiness it has brought to Russians?
AKK