Foreign Affairs - 03.2020 - 04.2020

(Frankie) #1
The Wily Country

March/April 2020 161

ILLUSTRATION


BY
BRIAN CRONIN


empire had been robustly
multiethnic. Not all o’ its
leaders were ethnic Rus-
sians, whereas ethnic
Russians ¥gured promi-
nently among the victims
o’ Soviet rule.
The Russian Federation
that crawled out from the
Soviet Union was by no
means homogeneous.
Today’s Russia is a patch-
work o‘ languages, reli-
gions, and peoples, and
because o’ shifting borders
(and Soviet population
moves), many who con-
sider themselves Russian
live outside Russia’s
borders—especially in
Ukraine. Yet the realign-
ment o‘ borders in 1991
also yielded the most
coherently Russian state in
Russian history. In particular, the
top-down project o’ mapping a Russian
identity onto an internationalist Soviet
identity died with the Soviet Union, and
for the ¥rst time since 1917, it was
possible to contemplate an explicitly
Russian polity in Russia, under a single
Russian “ag, even though the Russian
language continues to have two dierent
terms for a¾liation with the Russian
Federation: russkii (ethnic Russian) and
rossiiskii (adhering to the Russian state).
For Russians, acquiring a country
was the pivotal consequence o’ the 1991
revolution. Boris Yeltsin’s presidency
“owed directly from his challenge to
the scrupulously communist and
internationalist Mikhail Gorbachev, a
widely disliked ¥gure in post-Soviet
Russia. Putin’s popularity stems not just

wily.” In o¾ce, Putin has burnished
the reputations o’ the Soviet leader and
the Soviet dissident and has embraced
the iconography o’ the Soviet Union and
that o’ the Russian Orthodox Church.
As the wiliest o’ them all, Putin is no
stranger to such contradictions.
However, by reaching back to wiliness
and an attitude that is so indigenously
Soviet, Yaa understates the distinctive-
ness o’ post-Soviet Russia. The Soviet
Union fell apart not only because the
Georgians, the Lithuanians, the Ukrai-
nians, and other non-Russians rose up
against it but also because the Russians
themselves did. The aspirations o’
independence-minded Russians in 1991
were similar to those o’ the Soviet
Union’s other separatist populations. They
wanted a country o’ their own. The Soviet
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