The Return of the Russia Question

What is Russia? Today’s Russians can’t even be sure where their country’s borders lie. Newly issued maps of Russia include regions of Ukraine that are not even controlled by the Kremlin’s army, and Kremlin propagandists flood the airwaves with pronouncements of territories to be seized from various countries.

There’s also no definite answer to the question “What kind of Russia are we fighting for?” It’s asked by demoralized Russian conscripts in the trenches, millions of Russians looking in vain for guidance, and Kremlin propagandists visibly struggling to explain the war to their television audiences. If Russians thought that yesterday’s state-of-the-nation speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin would finally bring some clarity on the eve of the war’s first anniversary, they were disappointed. In his 105-minute address—eagerly awaited by his most ardent loyalists, who had expected him to explain his war goals and announce a major escalation—Putin rattled off his usual litany of rants about the West’s supposed perfidies, including his bizarre obsession with sexuality and gender. (This time, it was about gender-neutral pronouns for God.)

But Russians’ confusion extends far beyond their national borders and the goals of the war. The problem is a much more existential one: Russia simply doesn’t know what it is and why it exists at all.

This, therefore, is the modern Russia question. Is it an empire to be restored, as Putin seems to think? Is its destiny to be an oligarchic autocracy, a kind of modern version of tsarist rule? Is it a post-Soviet society inching toward better infrastructure and perhaps even democracy? A former empire struggling to come to terms with a post-imperial future? Or something else entirely? This question will be all the more urgent when the war ends, Putin’s malevolent pall over Russia is lifted, and Russians try to figure out a common future within their own borders. Whatever the answer is, it will have to be more inspiring than “a large country that no longer invades its former colonies”—even if that definition would be just fine for all of Russia’s neighbors. As the layers of Russian imperial and post-imperial identity are peeled away like those of an onion, will there be anything left to form a Russian national idea, something the country has conspicuously lacked since it emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union in 1991?

Putin’s answer to the Russia question has been clear for all. His national idea is openly imperialist: By invading Ukraine, he wants to restore Kremlin control over a former tsarist and Soviet colony by taking its lands, erasing its national identity, and turning its inhabitants into Russians by merciless repression and reeducation. Ukrainians and their supporters have a keen interest in making sure Putin’s idea of Russia’s future doesn’t become reality.

For Europe and much of the world, an acceptable postwar Russia is one that doesn’t invade its neighbors. But what else? For 30 years Russia has tried, and failed repeatedly, to come up with anything resembling a national idea. There’s no contemporary Russian version of the “American dream,” no “liberté, egalité, fraternité,” no “workers of the world, unite.” Nor is there a quieter civic or constitutional patriotism that might allow Russians to take pride in their rights and the way their society is run.

For the first time after the tumultuous Soviet collapse, something resembling a Russian national idea emerged when Putin, during his first presidential term, proclaimed an era of stability. An unspoken social contract emerged between the ruler and the ruled: As long as they stayed out of politics and didn’t threaten the regime and its kleptocratic friends, Russians would enjoy an economic stability and prosperity their forefathers had never known. That stability was predicated on citizens not challenging the emerging “managed democracy,” which observed the bare minimum of political rituals like regular elections but was tightly orchestrated to preserve Putin’s and his cronies’ power.

But when Russians protested in previously unseen numbers in late 2011 and early 2012 following elections so fake that they were openly exposed as a sham, Putin cracked down on protests before shifting to another national idea: Russia would henceforth be a bulwark of so-called traditional values against an ungodly, decadent West. Since then, this has been Putin’s consistent idée fixe, outlined yet again in yesterday’s state-of-the-nation speech. But unlike the old social contract promising “stability,” the idea of a Russian identity built around traditional values has no basis in reality. Neither the traditional family nor the church—the two lodestars of the Kremlin’s current propaganda—are particularly important to Russians. Of the 72 percent of Russians who identified as Russian Orthodox in a 2014 Pew survey, for example, less than 10 percent made it to church once a month. A national identity based on Russia as a bastion of conservative values stands on very shaky ground.

When Putin announced his partial mobilization in September 2022, the last vestiges of the old social contract based on stability and relative prosperity in exchange for nonparticipation went out the window. Now Putin’s only vision of the future for Russians is a blood oath: Fight in the war and share the responsibility for my crimes or be publicly ostracized and possibly jailed. The only escape has been to leave one’s life behind and emigrate, as hundreds of thousands have chosen to do, including my wife and I. Putin still has the option of closing that avenue for those we left behind by shutting the country’s borders.

One year into this war, it is now clear that even if Putin tries to secure some kind of propaganda victory in Ukraine, Russia has already suffered a crushing defeat. Like Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein after his defeat in the First Gulf War, Putin and his regime may survive for a few years or more. But his version of Russia’s future is finished. A new vision of Russia—shorn of its imperialist ambitions without spiraling into dark revanchist fantasies—is needed to prevent another tragedy in the future.

But what might such a Russia look like? As one peels away the defunct layers of Russia’s imperial identity, sooner or later the question of imperialism within Russia’s own borders will come up. Today’s Russia, after all, is a vast multiethnic state, the result of centuries of imperial conquest, subjugation, colonization, resettlement, and genocide. Some have even suggested Russia be decolonized, breaking it up along ethnic boundaries to liberate its captive minorities.

Navalny’s proposals are perhaps the most clear-eyed and concrete vision for the country coming from a prominent Russian so far.

These ideas are wildly impractical. With a few exceptions such as Tuva and Ingushetia, most of Russia’s national republics are far from ethnically homogenous. In fact, most are dominated by a solid majority of ethnic Russians, the consequence of centuries of colonization.

Only a few of these republics, like Tatarstan, have a historical record of statehood or forays toward full independence. For others, a non-Russian ethnic identity is more complicated: Dagestan, for example, contains myriad ethnicities speaking dozens of languages, the result of administrative borders arbitrarily drawn long ago. Separating these regions from some kind of historical Russia—presumably, something along the lines of the 16th-century Grand Duchy of Moscow before the great imperial conquests of non-Russian peoples all way to the Pacific Ocean—can only result in calamity. It would be much like the Partition of India, including forced population exchanges and border conflicts. With local elites fully integrated into the Kremlin’s system of governance, there is little indication that any such push for separation is at hand.

Just as a partition of Russia is a bad idea, so is the radical nationalist vision of Russia as belonging to ethnic Russians. The country’s non-Russian population is simply too large, and it would take too much repression and violence to deprive them of their rights. More sensible proposals for internal decolonization include granting Russia’s regions significantly more political and economic autonomy than they have now, with real representation at the national level. (Right now, despite what it says on paper, political and economic control in Russia is extremely centralized.) As Russian political scientist Grigory Golosov argues, devolution of authority would be more likely to result from a general democratization, not the other way around.

Some Russians are beginning to lay out a vision for what this democratization might look like. This week, imprisoned opposition activist Alexey Navalny outlined a 15-point plan that starts with the obvious: recognizing Putin’s criminal invasion as unwinnable, pulling out of Ukraine (including Crimea), paying reparations to Ukraine, and cooperating with international institutions to punish Russian war criminals. Next, Navalny explicitly called out Russian imperialism as the culprit: Russia, he writes, is a “vast country with a shrinking population” that does not need even more territory. Russia’s political future, Navalny said, is as a federal, parliamentary republic with authority devolved to the regions. To that end, Navalny called for a constitutional assembly. Russia’s ultimate path, in his view, is to join the family of European nations.

Navalny’s proposals, perhaps the most clear-eyed and concrete coming from a prominent Russian so far, seem like an incredibly far-off prospect today. But they are not inherently impracticable. Only one generation ago, in the twilight years of the Soviet Union, Russian society came out of more than seven decades of near-total repression to hold its first semi-free elections in 1989 and thwart a violent coup attempt by Communist Party hard-liners in 1991. The Soviet Union’s first legal opposition was dominated by Russians, but it was explicitly post-imperialist. In Moscow, more than one hundred thousand demonstrators expressed solidarity with the Baltic States’ independence. Russia’s democrats ultimately failed; many of them opposed, but could not prevent, two horrific wars to crush the seeds of independence in Chechnya. Most of these democrats were later co-opted by the Kremlin, assassinated, or pushed into political obscurity. Today’s generation of democrats is facing not a decrepit Soviet bureaucracy but an overwhelming force of repression. But as soon as Putin starts to falter—and with Russians willing to sacrifice their freedom and even lives for their ideals—it’s not unrealistic to imagine a scenario where democracy finally wins.