In many ways, the unlikely pairing of two strands of Russian history, centuries apart, is driving Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. The Russian president has engaged his country’s imperial legacy in an attempt to overcome the trauma encountered by Russia in the 1990s. At the close of the Cold War, the country was adrift, with a spiraling economy, rampant crime and a loss of identity. Putin has worked to address all three, with territorial expansion key to rebuilding a national identity — one built around restoring the country’s imperial glory and supposed sense of unity.
In the 10th and 11th centuries, Kieven Rus’— what we today know as Ukraine — became a great European power and the center of Eastern Slavic culture. But the Mongol invasions of the late 13th century caused the already politically fragmented kingdom to fall apart. The territories unincorporated by the Mongol armies fell to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Enter the principality of Muscovy (a precursor to “Moscow”). Once subservient to the Mongol Empire — just like Kievan-Rus’ — Muscovy shifted its fate in 1480 when its grand prince, Ivan the Great, refused to pay tribute to his Mongol overlords and successfully proclaimed his territory’s independence. Muscovy then annexed fragments of Kievan-Rus’.
In the centuries that followed, Muscovy transformed into Russia. It accumulated territory in the east from Indigenous people, in the south from the Ottoman Empire and in the west after it partitioned Poland (1772-1795) and later proclaimed victory in the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815). By the turn of the 20th century, few could miss Imperial Russia’s territorial command over the globe.
But in 1917, the Russian Revolution fractured Imperial Russia. The empire fell apart as a newly born provisional government dealt with an unsatisfied population at home and World War I on its borders. After Russia relinquished the former imperial territories on its Western border, Ukraine firmly established its independence with the cultural heritage of Kievan Rus’ at the heart of its nation. But by 1922, Ukraine found itself reabsorbed into a collection of republics — formally supervised but supposedly not controlled by Russia — under the singular title of “the Soviet Union.”
That’s where Ukraine would remain for a half-century. The winds began to change only when a failed 1991 coup d’etat led by communist hard-liners opposed to the liberal restructuring instituted by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev triggered a vacuum in Soviet authority. Several Soviet republics, including Ukraine soon proclaimed their independence from Moscow. The Soviet Union officially collapsed on Dec. 25, 1991.
Russia lost 23.8 percent of the territory it once claimed as its own and became a territorial shell of its former self. Once an empire that dominated both Europe and Asia in the 18th and 19th centuries and served as a powerful counterbalance to the United States throughout the Cold War of the 20th century, the nation no longer seemed to hold a powerful sway on the world stage.
This reality created a crisis of identity for Russians: Would their nation be special any longer?
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