Abstract
Russia is both a nation and an empire, but its evolution from one to the other took centuries, and did not cease entirely after the USSR broke up in 1991. Its historical origins are obscure, and seem to be to the west of the present-day Russia, in Kiev/Kyiv, now the capital of Ukraine. The shift eastward to Moscow (Muscovy) in the fourteenth century, when Poland took Byelorussia (hereafter, Belarus) and Ukraine, marks the special character of Russia as an eastern Slav nation. The development of St Petersburg, however, by Peter the Great (ruled 1682–1724) marked a turning towards Europe and the expansion of Russia into the Baltic (1721). This landward extension of Russia made it an empire, with many nations and ethnic groups coming under its control.
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Notes
Russia is both a European and an Asian country, and its eastern European limits are conventionally set at the Ural mountains, and the Caucasus, including Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. However, these last are not covered here, mainly for reasons of coherence relating to the constitutional and electoral dimensions of nationalism. The USSR consisted of 15 republics, but only seven (including the three Baltic republics) can be considered as European. Three of these are dealt with in this chapter. The remaining one, the Moldavian Republic (now Moldova), is a Balkan state, and has been covered in Chapter 11. The definition of Europe is as much that of geographers’ as of political scientists’ or historians’. The political scientist Richard Rose, for example, in What is Europe? (New York: HarperCollins, 1996) omits Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova and Turkey-in-Europe. But he also omits countries ‘because their position is exceptional or their size marginal’ (p. 6). Thus the Baltic states, former Yugoslavia and Albania are not included. On the other hand, James B. Minahan, One Europe, Many Nations (Westwood, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), includes Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Turks and a variety of minor ‘nations’ under the rubric of Europe. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, in The Times Guide to the Peoples of Europe (London: Tomes Books, 1994) includes various ‘Muslim- Turkic and Mongol Peoples of the Volga-Urals and Daghestan’ such as Bashkirs, Nogays, Kalmyks and Kumyks’, most of whom are in the Russian Federation. Also included are ‘Peoples of the Caucasus’ in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as in the Russian Federation. These ‘peoples’ are usually considered ethnic groups rather than nations, but the distinction falls if and when they demand autonomy or independence from Russia.
Most Sovietologists considered the Soviet Union to be a strong and stable political system, when in fact it was on the point of collapse. Many ‘experts’ followed the official line that the ‘nationality question’ had been solved through a harmonious development of federalism. There were one or two notable exceptions, such as Walker Connor, The National Question in Marxist Theory and Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984);
Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Decline of an Empire: The Soviet Socialist Republics in Revolt (New York: Newsweek Books, 1979)
and Alexander J. Motyl, Will the Non-Russians Rebel? State, Ethnicity, and Stability in the USSR (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987).
John Breuilly, in Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2nd edn, 1993), p. 350, writes: ‘However, the main point I would like to make is that one should not see the break-up of the USSR in terms of the rise of nationalist oppositions; rather one should see the rise of nationalist oppositions as a rational response to the breakdown of USSR state power, as the “politics of inheritance” based on the republics’. This is difficult to reconcile with the very strong desire to reconstitute these republics along nationalist lines, with national official languages, education systems, exclusive citizenship laws, and so on.
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© 2004 James G. Kellas
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Kellas, J.G. (2004). Russia-in-Europe, Belarus and Ukraine. In: Nationalist Politics in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597273_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597273_15
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