The utopia of uniting "minor peoples" with the Russian "father"
In a divided and conflict-ridden world, universal unity is Moscow's new religion. It relies on destabilisation, propaganda, and the financing of "friendly" elites and oligarchs loyal to Moscow, along with the Churches as tools of power. After Ukraine, Kazakhstan is the country most at risk, with the longest land border and the largest Russian diaspora. The US, the EU, and international partners will have to strengthen economic and diplomatic relations with the territories targeted by Moscow.
As in it has done in previous years, Russia marked its main national holiday, the Day of People's Unity (День народного единства, Den' narodnogo Yedinstva), on 4 November, as a solemn occasion to celebrate the state ideology that proclaims Russia's superiority over all other peoples of the Russian Federation, and by symbolic extension, over those of the rest of the world.
This date commemorates the event so longed for even today by Vladimir Putin's Russia: the victory over the invading Poles and the entire West in 1612, after the Twenty Years of Troubles that had completely erased the dream of the "Third Rome" of the first Tsar, Ivan the Terrible.
The similarities lie not only in the exaltation of wartime patriotism, enshrined in the bronze statues of Kuzma Minin and Dmitry Pozharsky in front of the Red Gates (Красные Ворота, Krasnye Vorota), the main entrance to the Kremlin, with the two anti-Polish resistance leaders pointing to the West, where Russia's enemies fell back humiliated and defeated.
The Troubles were also the failure of the policies of Tsar Ivan's successor, his faithful assistant Boris Godunov, who had attempted to reform the country by transitioning from imperial autocracy to feudal oligarchy, even inventing the institution of the Moscow Patriarchate to give the Orthodox Church an institutional role.
The economic crisis, popular uprisings, and a series of natural disasters led Tsar Boris to an untimely death, paving the way for conflicts between the great boyar families and the traitors who led the Poles to Moscow.
The Romanov dynasty, inaugurated in 1613 by the reigning father and son pair, Patriarch Filaret and Tsar Mikhail, brought order back to Russia after the victory over the invaders.
All this still inspires the Russia of Tsar Putin and Patriarch Kirill today, in the war against the West and the subjugation of the empire's internal diversity.
As State Duma Deputy Pavel Krasheninnikov put it, the Day of People's Unity commemorates “Russia's spiritual rebirth after the tragedy of the Time of Troubles,” and the overcoming of destruction and fragmentation that was possible thanks to “the fidelity of following generations to the traditional values of the family, the only form of regulation of common life capable of uniting in a single homeland, history and culture.”
The very relationship between the patriarch-father and the tsar-son, which continued in various forms throughout the 17th century, shows this sense of "family as the founder of the state" as a definition of power relations at various levels of society, as indeed occurred in all European kingdoms and principalities to varying degrees.
Family in this sense means "succession and submission," as in the Soviet dictatorship of Lenin's successor and “Father of the Peoples”, Joseph Stalin, in some ways the true reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible.
On 4 November, Putin also resumed his Stalinist "paternal" role, signing the decree establishing two new holidays, the “Day of the Indigenous Small-Numbered Peoples” of the Russian Federation and the “Day of the Languages of the Peoples of Russia”. These will be celebrated on 30 April and 8 September respectively, and are intended to "preserve the traditions, ways of life, and cultural values of the small-numbered peoples" as well as their linguistic heritage, the latter on the birthday of the Dagestani poet Rasul Gamzatov, uniting the various languages with Russian.
The significance of these new holidays, which are meant to respond to the revival in nationalist sentiments among smaller nations , is precisely to reaffirm the role of the Russian "father-people" who imposes the "mother tongue" on all "minor children" in the great family of the Universal Union.
This very concept has sparked the conflict with Ukraine, which Russians consider the first of the "minor peoples," the main blood brother along with Belarus, downgrading all other former Soviet and federal peoples to half-siblings or adopted children.
As with Ukraine, Putin has repeatedly reiterated that Kazakhstan, the largest of the "minor peoples," "has never had its own statehood." Tensions are running even deeper with Armenia, a land with an ancient and always controversial statehood, later incorporated into the greater Russian family following the genocide perpetrated by modern Turkey in the early 20th century.
Russia seeks to keep the Armenians subjugated thanks to the support of the Apostolic Church, the main pro-Russian force in the country, in conflict with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who wants to build an independent and pro-Western “new Armenia”.
For these reasons, Russia also includes the countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia as targets of its global war, as well as other parts of Eastern Europe, from the Baltics to Moldova and the Black Sea.
The war is raging in all directions, even militarily, like in Georgia in 2008-2009. This has now led to Tbilisi's complete submission to Moscow, stifling any protest thanks to the oligarchic dictatorship of the Georgian Dream, the party founded by the pro-Putin billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili.
Hybrid warfare is being turbocharged through disinformation (дезинформация, dezinformatsiya), provocations, and sabotage, and actions designed to increase tensions and spark conflicts within societies, not only in neighbouring countries but also around the world.
Destabilisation, propaganda, financing of elites and "friendly" oligarchs loyal to Moscow, and, last but not least, the use of religion and Churches as tools of power, as is evident in Ukraine, Armenia, Moldova, and Romania, and now even in Africa and several Asian countries, all territories entrusted to the one true Orthodox Church of Moscow.
Kazakhstan is the country most at risk, with the longest land border with Russia and the largest Russian diaspora after Ukraine. Furthermore, the Kazakh army is not even remotely comparable to Ukraine’s in terms of military preparedness, and thousands of kilometres of border are effectively undefended.
As long as Russia is engaged in Ukraine, it is not ready to open a new front, but pressures for informational and economic influence are very active towards Astana, which is trying to tailor its policies, by balancing North, East, West, and South.
The United States can play an important role in the Central Asian region, as evidenced by the recent meeting with the leaders of the Central Asian countries in the "5+1" format in Washington, where rare earths, particularly sought-after these days, are under discussion as an alternative to China’s. However, Russian influence in the region remains hard to restrict.
Even in Armenia, following the US agreement with Azerbaijan in August, Moscow continues to seek to reestablish its historic role, raising considerable tensions with Baku as well, which in turn is seeking to carve out an independent role in the regional balance of power.
Russia is losing control over the entire post-Soviet space, but the window of opportunity for the countries once part of it to transition to truly democratic systems will not remain open for long, as the Russians are still capable of undermining their stability even without military invasions, as will be the case in future for Ukraine itself.
The United States, the European Union, and other international partners must boost economic and diplomatic relations with these countries to prevent the flag of the Muscovite empire from being raised again, as happened recently at the devastated Pokrovsk city hall, Russia’s latest conquest on the Ukrainian front.
Thirty-five years have passed since the end of the Cold War, and after nearly four years of heated war in Ukraine, a new global balance of power seems to be emerging, with US and Russian nuclear exercises reminiscent of the times of Brezhnev and Nixon, when the world hung in the balance of power between empires always ready for full-blown war.
As Russian cultural expert Yevgeny Dobrenko put it, "with the end of communism, the end of the West also began," struggling with the bi-populism of sovereignist and anti-sovereignist radicalisms well represented by Donald Trump and the new mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani.
On the one hand, in the East, we have a dying Russia dreaming of its return to the centre of world politics with suicidal military operations, which, in reality, is increasingly surrendering to the feudal subjugation of the Chinese economic empire. On the other, the West is unable to find a shared form of effective response, beyond endless sanctions that are increasingly contradictory and easy to circumvent.
Russia is incapable of defeating the West, but seeks to undermine it from within, renewing its utopias, which have morphed from communism to the "universal Christianity" of Russian Orthodoxy, which Putin, in recent celebrations, has defined as "closely related ideologies, proclaiming freedom and brotherhood, equality and justice."
Patriarch Kirill proclaimed that "we are the only Russian people capable of uniting other cultures without conflict, which no other country is capable of doing, because in the soul of the Russian man, a sense of humility predominates, the foundation of true union with others."
This is Russia's new religion, the utopia of the universal unity of peoples, in an increasingly divided and conflict-ridden world, seeking new revelations for a future yet to be discovered.
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16/09/2023 09:00
