Russian President Vladimir Putin’s view of his country’s history is remarkably conservative. He firmly believes that Russia’s strength lies in its traditional Orthodox values.
For Putin, Russia’s isolation from the globalist agenda of the western elites allows his country to preserve its Byzantine inheritance, its old Slavonic culture and its Orthodox beliefs, untouched by the postmodern trends in Europe and North America.
According to Putin, Prof. Mark Galeotti writes while some use the term “Eurasian,” Russia is not an Asiatic country.
“It is European, but proper European. It was Russians who defended Europe time and again, sometimes from enemies without, such as the Golden Horde, at others those within, whether would-be conquerors such as Napoleon or Hitler, or forces of chaos and deviance. In other words, the line is that Russia holds to the true European values at a time when the nations to its west have abandoned them.”
Although the Russian leader is an avowed supporter of traditional Orthodox values, he was initially quite willing to be a partner with the “West.” This was under the assumption that so long as Russia backed the U.S.-led “Global War on Terror,” then the western leaders would treat Russia with more respect and not threaten its national borders.
During his first years in the presidential office, writes Russian history professor Orlando Figes, Putin moved Russia towards greater integration with the West, envisioning the country as “part of western European culture.”
Putin even said he was open for Russia to join NATO and the European Union, depending on how Western institutions—NATO in particular—would act in regions with security concerns and historical sensitivities, Figes added.
Interestingly, much of Putin’s anger regarding the situation in Ukraine is not just at the western elites but also directed at the Bolsheviks. For him, those communists had no regard for Russian history and allowed historic Russian lands to be gained by the newly independent state of Ukraine.
Some argue that Ukraine should have taken only what it had when it joined the USSR in 1922. This is an argument made also by the most famous of the Soviet dissidents and an outspoken critic of communism, the late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a major influence on Putin’s thinking.
In this context, little significance has been attached to the Soviet “gift” to Ukraine. In 1954, Crimea was handed to Ukraine as a gift by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was himself half-Ukrainian.
Russia’s Soul
The loss of Crimea was sorely felt by the Russians. A quarter of a million Russians died in the Crimean War. The region is also the symbolic home of the “Russian soul” since it is the birthplace of Russia’s Orthodox Christianity where Prince Vladimir had been baptised.Vladimir Sviatoslavich, also known as Vladimir the Great, was the Grand Prince of Kyiv and ruler of Kyivan Rus from 980 to 1015. According to the Primary Chronicle, his conversion was a result of his search for the “True Faith.”
Vladimir is still venerated as a symbol of Russia’s sacred origins as a united family of Russians—the contemporary Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians. They were all originally one nation and members of the same Slav family who shared, in great part, the same language and the same Christian Orthodox principles.
When Kyiv was at its height, Moscow was scarcely a township. The first reference to Moscow was only in 1147, when Yuri Dolgoruky, soon to be Grand Prince of Kyiv, arranged a meeting there. Back in those days, Kyiv was the very heart and soul of the Rus.
However, when the Mongols came, Kyiv was destroyed, and it would be Moscow that gradually became the major city of all the Rus.
Prior to the Mongol invasion at the start of the 13th century, Kyiv had a population of 50,000 people, more than London and not much less than Paris. But in 1236, the city was sacked with such murderous savagery that only 2,000 of its people survived. The Mongol conquest turned the Kievan Rus princes into vassals of the “Golden Horde”, and an estimated two-thirds of the towns of the Kievan Rus were obliterated.
How does this period of Kievan Rus’s history actually connect with the rest of Russian history? And is there any meaningful sense in which modern Russia can lay claim to it as the foundation of its nationhood?
Once again, Figes provides an answer:
“The lasting legacy of Kievan Rus was in religion and the cultural sphere, where Byzantium would permanently mark Russian civilisation. We should look at Kievan Rus as part of Russian ancient history—a period related to its later history in the same sense as Anglo Saxon Wessex is part of English history or Merovingian Gaul is linked to modern France—namely as a source of the country’s religion, its language, and its artistic forms.”
What especially defines both the Russians and the Ukrainians is precisely their shared Orthodox faith. In 1325, the Metropolitan (archbishop) of “Kyiv and All Rus,” Pyotr II, moved his seat from Kyiv to Moscow, making it the new spiritual capital of all the Rus. Moscow’s standing with the Church was boosted by its military defeat of a large Tartar army in 1380 at the battle of Kulikovo, near the River Don.
The victory in Kulikovo is still celebrated in Russia, and Putin has frequently referred to it as evidence that his country was already a great power—“the saviour of Europe from the Mongol threat—in the 14th century.”
Crowning the grand prince of Moscow as a Tsar was a gesture to promote Moscow as the last “true seat” of the Christian faith, the successor to Byzantium following the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks.
Opposing NATO’s Expansion
Since the mid-1990s, the Russians have bitterly opposed NATO engagement and its strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit to integrate it into the “West.”Henry Kissinger, who knew the history of the region and served as United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, believed that Ukraine should never be allowed to join NATO.
The celebrated American diplomat, George Kennan, in a 1998 interview given shortly after the U.S. Senate had approved the first round of NATO expansion in Eastern Europe, warned that this would result in a “new Cold War, probably ending in a hot one.”
“I think it is a strategic mistake. There is no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anyone else,” Kennan said.
He then predicted that NATO expansion would inevitably provoke a military crisis, after which the proponents of such expansion would “say that we always told you that is how the Russians are.”
Arguably, the Russians have been displeased by NATO’s decision to expand the Alliance to include former Warsaw Pact countries. And now, they sense that NATO has moved too close, right up to their national border and turned a former ally into a de facto member of the U.S. military alliance.
Clearly, the Russians have reached the limits of their willingness to tolerate NATO’s action, and they may actually have a historical reason for that.
