Foreign Affairs - 03.2020 - 04.2020

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