I
n november 2021Vladislav Surkov, Mr
Putin’s cynical, loyal ideologist, turned
his attention to the question of empire.
“The Russian state, with its severe and in
flexible interior, survived exclusively be
cause of its tireless expansion beyond its
borders. It has long lost the knowledge
[of ]—how to survive otherwise.” The only
way Russia can escape chaos, he argued, is
to export it to a neighbouring country. What he did not say was
that Mr Putin’s export of chaos, and violence, to that end has sev
ered the ties between the Slavic nations and their peoples in a way
which the collapse of the Soviet empire did not.
Mr Putin now talks of the collapse of the Soviet Union as “The
collapse of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union.”
But he has hardly restored its empire. Ukraine is not a province, or
a colony; it is a beleaguered nation in a messy, perilous process of
selfrealisation. Belarus, for its part, is a grim illustration of how
“severe and inflexible” things have to get in order to stop such as
pirations welling up. Mr Lukashenko has met a nationalist resur
gence with ever more brutal and wellorchestrated repression—a
bloody irony given that he helped start it.
When Mr Putin annexed Crimea Mr Lukashenko feared his
own fief might be next. So he decided to strengthen the Belarusian
identity which he had previously worked to suppress. It was an
opening he would regret. Social media quickly gave wellprepared
liberal nationalists access to half of the country’s population. In
2018 the centenary of theBelarusian republic saw its redand
white flag rise again.
In 2000 Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, previously apolitical, ran
against Mr Lukashenko in the presidential election in place of her
husband, who had been jailed, the redandwhite flag waving over
her rallies. When Mr Lukashenko stole that election on August 9th
it was in the same flag that protesters draped a vast statue of their
motherland. Like Ukraine, Belarus had no real history of statehood; all that Mr Lukashenko had given it since 1994 was a rough
approximation of its Soviet past, fascism with Stalinist trappings.
But the idea of something better had taken hold.
Unlike the Ukrainians, though, the protesters in Belarus had
no independencefriendly oligarchs to take their side. They had
no equivalent to the radical fringe of western Ukrainians who had
shown themselves ready to kill and ready to die on Maidan. And
they were pitted against someone who would not stay his hand, as
Mr Kuchma had, or cut and run, like Mr Yanukovych. Mr Lukash
enko doubled down on repression, his brutality honed and guided
by experts from Moscow.
For Mr Putin, the situation has become the reverse of that faced
at Viskuli 30 years ago. Then a free and independent Ukraine—
and, to a lesser extent, Belarus—were a necessary condition for
what Russia sought to become. Now such freedom would consti
tute an intolerable affront to Russia staying as it is. At the same
time, though, their struggles feed Mr Putin’s need for enemies.
Russia’s greatpower “geopolitical reality”, as sold to the people,
has become that of a besieged fortress. America is the enemyin
chief; Ukraine, and those within Belarus and Russia itself who
have aspirations like those seen in the “revolution of dignity”, are
its lackeys, all the more despicable for betraying their kin.
Russian propaganda outlets are baying for war. But that does
not mean Mr Putin plans to take fresh terri
tory. He has never laid claim to the western
part of the country. He is probably aware
that there are now enough Ukrainian patri
ots to fight Russian occupation in central
and even eastern parts of Ukraine, and that
the army he has massed on the border
would prove less good at occupation than
invasion. But he still needs conflict and
subordination. Left unmolesteda free Uk
raine reopens the existential threat of an
alternative to empire.
Ukraine’s struggles since 2014 have
been slow, frustrating and messy. Accord
ing to Evgeny Golovakha, a sociologist, this
is in part because “Ukrainians love to ex
periment.” True to that assessment, in 2019
they elected Volodymyr Zelensky, who as a
television comedian had played a history teacher accidentally ele
vated to the presidency, to tackle the role in real life. His biggest
achievement, so far, has been to consolidate protest votes against
the old elite across Ukraine, making the electoral map look more
cohesive than it has ever looked in the past. That will not necessar
ily stop him getting voted out in two years’ time. “We find it easier
to change [people in] power than to change ourselves,” says Yulia
Mostovaya, the editor of Zerkalo Nedeli, an online news outlet.
But change is afoot; it can be seen in the way that demography
increasingly trumps regional allegiance. Even in the east nearly
60% of those born since 1991 see their future as in the eu—coun
trywide, the figure is 75%. All told 90% want Ukraine to stay inde
pendent, and nearly 80% are optimistic about its future.
The same optimism is hard to find in Russia, let alone stricken
Belarus. But the same yearnings are there, especially among the
young. That is why Alexei Navalny was first poisoned and is now
jailed. As the leader of the opposition to Mr Putin he has champi
oned the idea of Russia not as an empire but as a civic nation: a
state for the people. It is why Russia has recently become much
more repressive. It is why Mr Putin cannot tolerate a true peace on
his borders.
Unlike Ukrainians and Belarusians, Russians cannot separate
themselves from Russia, so they have to change it from within.
They cannot do thatina forest retreat, or with a few phone calls.
But only through suchchange will they become truly independent
of the Soviet Union.nAccording to Russian state media, Mr Putin was not undermin
ing a revolution against a corrupt regime quite like his own; he
was protecting the Russian people and language from extermina
tion at the hands of western Ukrainian fascists. The relevance to
Russia of the issues that had led to what was being called in Uk
raine “the revolution of dignity” was thus obscured. At the same
time the brutality in Donbas, relentlessly televised, showed Rus
sians the disastrous consequences of rising up: civil war.
On March 18th Russia’s ruling elite watched Mr Putin enter the
Kremlin’s gilded Hall of St George in triumph as he hailed the re
turn of Crimea and, thereby, Russia; the annexation was support
ed by nearly 90% of the Russian population. A year later he had a
stone from Chersonesus brought to Moscow to be built into the
pedestal of a giant statue of Prince Vladimir outside the Kremlin
gates. In “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, a
tract published in both Russian, Ukrainian and English in July
2021, Mr Putin described how the inheritors of “Ancient Rus” had
been torn apart by hostile powers and treacherous elites, and how
Ukraine had been turned from being “not Russia” into an anti
Russia, an entity fundamentally incompatible with Russia’s goals.
All baloney. Mr Putin did not attack Ukraine in order to honour
or recreate an empire, whether Russian or Soviet. He attacked it to
protect his own rule; the history is windowdressing. At the same
time, following Brzezinski, for Russia to be
something other than a democracy it has to
at least be able to think of itself as an em
pire. And in Russia, empire requires Uk
raine—now more deeply opposed to union
with Russia than ever before.34 Holiday essay The Economist December 18th 2021