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Putin and the End of Russian “Empire Fatigue”

In retrospect, 1991 offered the first real chance in modern Russian history to break the infernal cycle of imperialist expansion and colonial subjugation of neighboring peoples. It was not a war that caused the breakup of the empire. The empire collapsed because of its internal tensions: its inefficiently planned economy, its lack of freedom, its corruption, and its bureaucratic overload. “Many Russians were weary of supporting and subsidizing the economies of poorer regions of the USSR, such as Central Asia, and argued that economic reforms and modernization in Russia had a better chance if Russian statehood was dissociated from its colonial past.”^[1] For the young, liberal reformers the loss of empire was a real liberation, it was like the loss of a historical ballast. They knew, intuitively, that Russia could only proceed further on the road toward a liberal, Western-style democracy if it were able to shake off its centuries-old legacy of imperial conquest and oppression. According to Igor Yakovenko, “the collapse of the USSR was the luckiest event in the past half-century.”^[2] Why? Because, as Brzezinski rightly remarked, “Russia can be either an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both.”^[3] Democracy and empire mutually exclude each other.^[4] According to Charles Tilly, “segments of empire can in principle achieve some democracy but whole empires remain undemocratic by definition; at an imperial scale their segmentation and reliance on indirect rule bar equal citizenship, binding consultation, and protection.”^[5] Zbigniew Brzezinski, therefore, was right when he wrote: “In not being an empire, Russia stands a chance of becoming, like France or Britain or earlier post-Ottoman Turkey, a normal state.”^[6]

Empire Fatigue: A Chance of Becoming a

“Normal State”?

The demise of the Russian empire was an atypical event. Apart from an independence movement in the Baltic republics that had started earlier, it found its basis not so much in the periphery—in the nationalism of the colonized nationalities—as in the nationalism of the colonizing center: Russia. This was one of the contradictory outcomes of the Soviet Union, in which ethnic Russians were in control of the party, the army, the KGB, and the heavy industry, but, at the same time, the Russian national identity was suppressed in favor of an invented, mostly artificial “Soviet” citizenship. Indeed, “a strong Russian nationalist movement . . . was in fact the most potent mobilizing force against the Soviet state. It was the merger of the struggle for democracy, and the recovery of Russian national identity under Yeltsin’s leadership in 1989–91, that created the conditions for the demise of Soviet communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union.”^[7]

There existed in the center even a certain resentment against the other nationalities, some of which had a higher standard of living.^[8] Others, poorer ones, got subsidies from Moscow to balance their budgets. In the end all profited from the center by buying their energy at cheap, subsidized prices. The subsidies were significant. In 1991, for instance, seven Soviet republics received substantial subsidies from the Union Budget, which, in the cases of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan amounted to almost one half of their state budgets (46.6 percent and 42.9 percent, respectively).^[9] It was, therefore, no surprise that in the eyes of the average Russian the empire was no longer considered to be advantageous, but, on the contrary, a heavy burden that only cost them money.^[10] Russian nationalism, instead of being a motor of Russian expansionism, had become the motor of the Soviet Union’s disintegration in a process of empire fatigue. This empire fatigue could have been the starting point for a revival of the Russian nation on a fundamentally new basis—that of a democratic Russia that had freed itself from its imperialist drive. Severing the old colonial ties can be advantageous for both the colonial power and the former colonized peoples. Adam Smith had already written during the American Revolution: