I also wanted to call attention to this post by Andrew Michta at RealClearDefense:
Russia is not and has never been a nation state in the sense of the consolidated societal and institutional framing that has undergirded the foundations of Western democracies. Since the 15th century when the Duchy of Muscovy began to shed the Mongol Yoke – for two centuries Moscow was a vasal state of the Tatar Golden Horde – Russia expanded and formed its civilization as a multinational empire. For centuries, Russia extended its reach across the Eurasian mainland and into Europe, defeating Poland and Sweden and colonizing Central Asia and the Far East. This rapid imperial expansion fueled top-down governance that rested on state-sanctioned violence and absolutism buttressed by ideology – tsarist at first, subsequently communist, and now a mixture of orthodoxy and professed “Eurasianism,” but always resting on the primacy of centralized, top-down governance. As the empire grew, the people shrank. Expansion became the sine qua non of the Russian state’s existence and the foundation of the ruler’s power. The might of the empire and the perennial homage paid to the leader – whether the tsar, the general secretary or now the president – was justified by the glory of the motherland and the Great Russian People (velikiy russkiy narod). Simply put, Russia cannot exist without its expansionist drive, for only continued expansion can generate the requisite centripetal forces to hold together the patchwork of nations imprisoned within the bonds of empire.
I think that Dr. Michta does a real service in trying to educate Americans on the history of Russian imperialism. In general Americans are indifferent to history which I think weakens our foreign policy. Russia’s eastward expansion in the 19th century is reminiscent of American westward expansion in during roughly the same period.
I do have a question for Dr. Michta. Is it actually true that Russia has incessantly tried to expand westward into Europe? Or is it the other way around, that European countries including Poland (in the form of the Polish-Lithuanian Empire) invaded Russia in the 17th century and was ultimately ejected from conquered territories in the 18th century? Germany invaded Russia during World War I and then, again, during World War II, killing millions of Russians.
France and Britain invaded Russia and then the Soviet Union in the 19th and 20th centuries.
I genuinely want to know. I’m trying to distinguish between Russian imperialism and Polish irredentism. There are contemporary political currents in Poland that articulate territorial claims grounded in historical memory, and they deserve to be taken seriously. The question, however, is whether such currents—contested, constrained, and non-hegemonic—are meaningfully comparable to Russia’s long-standing pattern of state-driven imperial expansion. Are we observing symmetrical national impulses, or fundamentally different political structures producing superficially similar rhetoric?
