Vladimir Putin's last Russian imperial war

Russian imperialism has basically moved along five historical axes—due west, southwest, south, east, and southeast. The two western axes led to the Baltic Sea and into and through Ukraine. The eastern ones expanded the Russian Empire down into the Caucasus and Trans-Caucasus, towards and through Siberia, and through Central Asia towards China and the Pacific Ocean.

The western axes differed from the eastward ones in that they were both towards Europe, populated and, according to Russian concepts (European ones, too), “civilized.” (Other than the Crimean Tatars, whom they—and most researchers—considered “tribal.”) Although Russia used significant violence in its interactions in eastern Europe (especially in putting down rebellions), it was mostly directed against other armed forces. Rarely did it rise to the level of campaigns of dispersal, despoliation, or elimination. That, they reserved for the westward axes.

Although, especially in the early centuries of Russian imperialism (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) they took on the remnants of the Mongol horde and its successors, by the eighteenth century there were fewer of those to be encountered as Russian explorers and conquerors moved further and further into Siberia and Central Asia.

But there were “tribes”—Kazakhs, Kirghiz, Chukchi, and others—who could be dealt with by either “steppe politics”—looking for local satraps, playing off one chief against another—or by violent conquest.

Russian drives southward through the Caucasus on their way to wars with the Ottoman and Persian empires led to conflict with the “tribal” peoples living in the mountains. A century of warfare in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused the virtual extermination of the Circassian people.

Note that this kind of violence was almost never used in Europe. As bad as were, say, the repression of Polish rebellions or Cossack uprisings or peasant revolts, it wasn’t an attempt at the total suppression of native peoples.

Which is what makes Vladimir Putin’s attempt to cancel Ukrainian national self-identity so different from the historical patterns of Russian imperialism. He has shown much less restraint than previous Russian (and Soviet) rulers. Besides the fact that he has made it personal (almost existential for himself), he has countenanced indiscriminate measures that target some of the very people whose defense was one of his claimed justifications for invading (bombing Kharkiv, for example, has killed countless Russian-speaking Ukrainians). He has permitted if not ordered atrocities, crimes of war and against humanity, open outrages without much attempt to disguise his actions.

This is not exactly like the genocide of the Circassians, perhaps, but it is far worse than anything the Russian Empire previously practiced against Europe. The closest analogy is maybe to the Holodomyr, Stalin’s enforced famine against Ukraine in the 1930s, along with the ethnic cleansing of Germans from eastern Prussia after World War Two.

My point is, Russian imperialism was not uniform as to either place or time. Putin is behaving very differently than most previous Russian actions against Europe. His reasons for trying to eliminate Ukraine are different from the causes of genocide in the Caucasus or Siberia, but the pattern of indiscriminate violence is far more similar to those than, say, Peter the Great fighting a war against Sweden to acquire his “window on the west.”

The significance of this distinction is that arguments that Russia is somehow uniquely or especially “imperialistic” conflate hundreds of years and vast distances into a single theme and ignore the historical reasons for each campaign and the details that distinguish them. Russia historically fought against European kingdoms (and against Cossack, peasant, or nationalist rebellions), while they used much harsher measures against eastern “tribes.” Putin’s war in Ukraine is more of the latter than the former. It makes a difference as to how we look at things.

Ukraine is Russia’s last imperial war. Categorizing it is a task for historians. This is how I see it.