Russia is a schizophrenic state. The roots of that condition lie in an identity without borders and an inferiority complex about the West. Both are encapsulated in President Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia is not a nation-state, like other countries, but a borderless civilization.
What constitutes Russia in this formulation is a mystery even to Russians. In the days of the USSR, Soviet and Russian identity were fused, hence Putin describes the USSR as “Historic Russia.” And most Russians agree with him when he says the disintegration of the Soviet Union was the biggest disaster of the 20th century.
Russian imperial nationalists imagine Russia as the Tsarist Empire, Soviet Union, Commonwealth of Independent States, Eurasia, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Russian union of three eastern Slavs, and Putin’s Russian World. They all unite great, little, and white Russians (Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians respectively).
The multiple definitions have allowed alliances between the extreme left and right, as seen in hardline violent coups d’état in 1991 and 1993. After 1991, Russians moved from Soviet communism toward imperial nationalism, and not as is commonly viewed towards liberal democracy.
Russians are unsurprisingly confused about the state they live in. Even the description of June 12 as Independence Day is untrue, as the Russian Republic never declared independence from the USSR, and the date is based on the declaration of sovereignty on June 12, 1990. To add to the confusion, June 12 was renamed Russia Day in 2002.
In contrast, Ukrainians are not schizophrenic about their identity. Ukraine declared sovereignty in July 1990, independence in August 1991, and held presidential elections and a referendum on independence in December 1991. The vote produced overwhelming support of 92%, with majorities in every region, including Crimea and the Donbas.
Even before that, Ukraine had its own republic in the USSR, and its language and separate identity were recognized by the Soviet regime. It was a founding member of the UN in 1945 (the Soviet Union held three seats — the USSR, representing Russia, the Ukrainian SSR, and the Belarusian SSR).
Yet the Kremlin’s justification for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine is based on the Russian imperial nationalists’ claim that Ukrainians have been hoodwinked by nefarious Western intelligence agencies into believing they are a people separate from Russians.
Russian imperial nationalist hypocrisy is evident when denouncing Ukrainians as fascists and Nazis. Russia is, as Timothy Snyder and others have written, a schizo-fascist state where the Kremlin accuses Ukraine and the West of being extreme right while itself being akin to a fascist regime. Since the 2019 elections, Ukraine is led by Jewish-Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who lost family members during the Holocaust.
Another term for it is Ruscism, which combines Russian and fascism. Snyder writes: “Fascists calling other people ‘fascists’ is fascism taken to its illogical extreme as a cult of unreason. It is a final point where hate speech inverts reality and propaganda is pure insistence. It is the apogee of will over thought.”
The Kremlin shows this through its propaganda and financial support for fascists, Nazis, populist nationalists, and the extreme left. In the Kremlin’s dystopian world, it is the liberal West which is Nazi while fascist Russia and its fascist allies in Europe are the true Europeans.
When Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was asked how Ukraine could be a Nazi state when it is led by a Jewish president, he replied that this was not unusual. After all, Adolf Hitler was half Jewish, and the Nazis collaborated with Zionists in the 1930s, he said, repeating anti-Semitic falsehoods to make his argument.
Russia claims that extreme nationalism and Russophobia dominate Ukraine and says its so-called special military operation was launched to prevent the genocide of Russian speakers. In fact, extreme-right nationalist parties received lower electoral support in Ukrainian elections than in other countries in Europe, and surveys show Russian speakers in Ukraine never believed they were being persecuted. In 2022, the year of Russia’s full-scale invasion only 5% of Ukrainians believed there was discrimination against Russian speakers.
Drawing on Soviet anti-colonialist propaganda, the Kremlin claims it is defending the Global Majority by fighting Western imperialism.
This hypocritical falsehood obfuscates the brutality and genocide at the heart of Russian colonialism, and the fact Russia and the Soviet Union were empires. Indeed, the Russian Federation, where ethnic Russians account for just 70% of the population, is the world’s last remaining empire. The Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE (the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) declared earlier in July that the “decolonization of the Russian Federation is a necessary condition for sustainable peace” and that Russia is pursuing a “policy of genocide” in Ukraine.
Both Soviet and post-1991 Russian historiography claimed that non-Russian peoples voluntarily joined the Tsarist Empire and Russian civilization benefited them. This is untrue and, because of this, Russia has never engaged in any self-examination of the crimes committed by Russian and Soviet colonialism.
Russian imperial nationalists are furious at the way Ukrainian history has been written since 1991 to publicize and condemn crimes such as the mass murder and famine of Holodomor in 1932-3. In Russian-occupied Ukraine, monuments to the Holodomor are being removed.
In contrast, the cult of brutal Russian and Soviet leaders, such as Ivan the Terrible, Peter I, Catherine I, and Joseph Stalin, denies or excuses their crimes against humanity. Books and school billboards portray Putin as following these historical leaders into Russian history by seizing territory and building Russia as a great power. Memorial, the NGO that had documented Stalinist and Soviet crimes since the late 1980s, was banned in 2021.
Russia also faces both ways in Europe. The Kremlin claims Russia’s superior civilization is the guardian of true European values, which it says have decayed in the West because of multiculturalism, LGBT+ rights, a decline in religious faith, and an erosion of national sovereignty by globalization.
This attitude to Europe is built on long-standing inferiority complexes about the West. Never able to overtake it, Moscow instead claimed it was decadent and inferior to Russia’s civilization.
Putin and Russia’s imperial nationalists have constructed a schizophrenic state without fixed borders, built on lies, which attacks Ukraine and the West under the cover of falsehoods that are truer themselves.
The European values that it represents — military expansionism, minority hate, a brutal repression of dissent, and the demonization of opponents — are the very worst of our continent and have no place in its future.
Taras Kuzio is a professor of political science at the National University Kyiv-Mohyla Academy of Kyiv, Ukraine. His books Russian Disinformation and Western Scholarship and Fascism and Genocide. Russia’s War Against Ukrainians was recently published by Columbia University Press.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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