Lost in Russified Whataboutistan

Russia’s empire: not too big to fail

Russians’ Rocky 500 Year Marriage to Empire Headed For Divorce

Russia’s western useful idiots, from Chomsky and Greenwald on the anti-interventionist left to the Trumpster/MTG/Berlusconi-Salvini/Orban populist right, ignore the biggest geopolitical elephant in the room plain to see in the map above: the Russian Federation is the most misnamed political entity on the planet. The name “federation” erroneously implies Russia resembles its western European Union neighbor, a voluntary rule of law union of shared sovereignty.

In five centuries of Russian empire-building under Tsars, Bolsheviks and post-Soviet Yeltsin and Putin there’s never been anything federal or voluntary about it. Ask any Chechen or Crimean Tatar if there was a difference between the Tsars, Stalin and Yeltsin/Putin.

Yeltsin and his Belarussian and Ukrainian counterparts engineered the breakup of the USSR in December 1991 to prevent, not to promote a democratic revolution. The top-down USSR breakup they negotiated prevented the imminent spread of bottom-up secession from the Baltics, Ukraine and the other constituent republics of the USSR to the commodity-rich Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Komy, Urals, Yakutia, Vladivostok and the others.

Essentially, the 1991 dissolution of the USSR left the breakup of the Russian empire half done. The only viable route to permanent peace, vs frozen conflict until the next round, is to finish the empire breakup job. Have doubts? Ask any Slovene, Pole, Czech, Bulgarian or other inhabitant of the defunct Austro-Hungarian, German or Ottoman empires.

The inhabitants of Whataboutistan who view Ukrainian sovereignty as contingent and negotiable and Russia as permanent have it exactly backwards. It’s the enserfed Russian people’s top-down abusive marriage to empire that’s contingent and Ukraine’s bottom-up civic nationalist contractual governance model of sovereignty that’s permanent and fits the EU’s model of shared sovereignty.

The misnamed Russian “Federation”

Russia has always been, and still is, a land-based kleptocratic colonial empire. It’s now an institutional cross-dresser — a militarized and hyper-centralized resource-cursed commodity extraction business cross-dressing as a federation.

Under the Tsars Russia was a family business with a flag whose business model imposed relentless Russification on its subjugated peoples. Under the Soviets and Putin, it transitioned to a mafia with a flag dressed up as a country. It still pursued Russification, though less repressively than the Tsars’ language and media prohibitions. Lenin formed the USSR as a fictionally voluntary union of national republics as a bait and switch workaround for Ukrainian and other national secession movements.

The genocidal Stalinist Holodomor (collectivization famine) that claimed four million Ukrainian lives marked the covert revival of Great Russian chauvinism. The revival of Big Brother Russia’s supremacy over the empire’s other nationalities continued under Stalin’s purges and their divide and rule “national operations”: from Karelians, to Poles, Georgians, Jews, Armenians and Ukrainians.

In order for things to remain the same, things have to change

For at least two centuries Ukrainians have seen how Great Russian chauvinism has dressed up in new clothes under each Russian imperial regime replacing its failed predecessor. The mystery is why knowledge of Russia’s abusive marriage to empire hasn’t yet penetrated the left and right halves of western useful idiots in Whataboutistan.

Russia and the Russian people have had a rocky five century marriage with empire. After its tsars copied the Mongol Golden Horde’s tribute-collection business model, from the 16th to the 19th century Russia was the world’s fastest growing empire. As America expanded westward through genocidal conquest, Russia expanded eastward, reaching the Pacific much sooner, in 1647 with the founding of Okhotsk.

Imported military and shipbuilding technology imported to Russia enabled the extraction of commodity exports — at first furs and timber and later grain, oil, palladium and diamonds.

The genocide apologists lost in the we-did-it-too province of the fact-free empire of Whataboutistan excuse Russia’s neo-colonial war in Ukraine for several reasons:

• They view Russia as inheriting the USSR’s anti-colonial propaganda veneer.
• The West did it first and is therefore worse.

They ignore fundamental differences between North American and Russia’s Eurasian empire builders:

• The North American empire builders were at the core of the Dutch and English-built global trading networks.
• They were technology and institution exporters. Ask the 19th century Japanese who assiduously copied the German military and civil service and the Ottomans who copied the French in the 18th century and the Germans in the 19th.
• Russia remained a technology and capital importer and commodity exporter permanently on the periphery of what historian Immanuel Wallerstein called “the modern world system” — the western-built global trading networks, financial markets and institutions.
• Russia had no counterpart to New York’s Wall Street and London’s City. In its war with Japan in 1904–05 Russia tried, and failed, to raise money for its war effort from Wall St bankers. Meanwhile its Japanese opponent that had more thoroughly adopted western institutions and was a better credit risk, succeeded.(1)
• Geography 1, America: Maritime empires beat land-based empires, especially when protected by two oceans. Indirect rule through voluntary alliance beats direct rule. The North American empire had two oceans, the world’s most extensive and best inland river and lake system for low commodity shipment costs.
• Geography 2, Russia: With no natural borders in a Eurasian invasion corridor, Catherine said “in order to defend my borders I must expand them.” Except for the Dnieper that flowed into the Black Sea, Tsarist Russia’s rivers were commercially useless, flowing northward into the Arctic or the Volga into the landlocked Caspian.
• Geography 3, Russia: Much further north agriculturally poorer than its American rival, Russia never overwhelmed its subjugated indigenous peoples with demography and opportunistic assimilation, as the US and Canada did.
• Result: Russia’s 100+ indigenous nationalities have one foot in Russkiy Mir (Russian World) while preserving separate languages and cultures and assimilating far less than America’s immigrant ethnic and indigenous populations; more like Bolivia’s and Paraguay’s than Arizona’s.

The geopolitical outcome of all this: Russia can disrupt, but not shape a global alliance network based on a global trading order.

Tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet Russification

The roots of the problem start with eliminationist Russification, which began in earnest with Peter the Great and continued under Catherine:

“”Little Russia, Livonia, and Finland are provinces governed by confirmed privileges, and it would be improper to violate them by abolishing all at once. To call them foreign and deal with them on that basis is more than erroneous-it would be sheer stupidity. These provinces, as well as Smolensk, should be Russified as gently as possible so that they cease looking to the forest like wolves. When the Hetmans are gone from Little Russia, every effort should be made to eradicate from memory the period and the hetmans, let alone promote anyone to that office.”

Russification resting on mythologized history was a constant under Tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet regimes:

• Alexanders II and III: banning baptisms and all media in the Ukrainian language. It was legal to speak banned Ukrainian on the Warsaw to Moscow train before the Polish-Ukrainian border. But then speak Russian and wait until it crosses the Ukrainian border back into Russia before switching back to Ukrainian.
• Nicholases I and II: Repression of the national awakening poet Taras Shevchenko and absorption of Ukraine’s Uniate Church into the Russian Orthodox Church. ”writers should be most careful when handling the question of Little Russian ethnicity and language, lest love for Little Russia outweigh affection for the fatherland-the Empire.”
• Stalin: blame the Holodomor famine on Ukrainian nationalists and Polish saboteurs. “”In the 1930s, the Russification of the Ukrainians proceeded at a rate that imperial proponents of a big Russian nation could only have dreamed of.” — Ukrainian historian Sergiy Plokhy
• Brezhnev: banning university theses in Ukrainian.
• And Putin’s “Ukraine is not a real country George”

The blame NATO and American provocations of Russian useful idiots left and right conflate “Russian speakers” with Russian national identity. They naively accept this Russian ethno-nationalist mythology.

In another article one of my useful idiot interlocutors (Scott Dunn) pitches his deescalation therapy skill set as a geopolitical game changer. He thinks that Russia can’t lose because it has 1000 years’ experience of war. This ahistorical nonsense accepts Putin’s and Dugin’s idiocy that the Viking Vladimir (Voldemar) convert to Christianity in 988 intended to found Russia. This naively swallows the myth that the four oblasts Putin annexed were always Russian, ignoring that when Kyiv was conquered by the Mongols in 1240 Moscow was a forest.

When the Cossack Hetmanate accepted aid from the Russian Tsar in their revolt against Polish landowners, they entered what they thought was a contingent contract in which they had rights, as they’d had in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Russian Tsars had other ideas, having no concept of contractual governance. You can learn more about this story in class 9 of Tim Snyder’s The Making of Modern Ukraine course. Go to Yale for free, no tuition.

The Lost in Whataboutistan ignore this history of Ukrainian bottom-up contractual governance vs top-down Russian-Mongol enserfed tribute collection governance. As we’ll see next, in justifying Russia’s “protection” of Ukraine’s Russian speakers, they also swallow whole the Russian ethno-nationalist nonsense that language and national identity are the same thing. In doing so, Whataboutistan’s Russian useful idiots accept the Great Russian chauvinist thesis that Russia alone decides the national identity of those outside its borders that speak Russian and, therefore, decides Russia’s ever-elastic borders. Whataboutistan’s useful idiots provide the anti-colonial, anti-interventionist veneer to this imperial ethno-nationalist mythology that’s integral to Russia’s genocidal erasure of Ukraine project.