Abstract
The year 2022, with Russia’s full-scale invasion in Ukraine, has been a milestone that brought the events, in a way, widely expected and predicted, resulting in the obvious long-term trends, and yet, stunning by their dramatic acceleration. That year has also affected both academic and public discourses related to a number of issues, including, most of all, the changing perception of the huge historical, cultural, and geopolitical region - the space of Russian and then Soviet imperial domination, both current and former, both real and imagined, both directly or indirectly subject to Russian economic involvement and political dependency. After 2022, this vast, territorially pulsating region, sometimes called Northern Eurasia, acquired both new existential vulnerability and conceptual fragility.
This review paper will suggest some observations concerning the intense discussions about the cultural-historical meaning, both retrospectively and prospectively, of this Russia-affected regional space - the discussions that broke out after the start of the Ukraine war. I draw upon both published generalized opinions and regular scholarly publications related to the outlined themes. My goal here is to identify major trends in these discussions and share some comments.
A storm of debates has been trying to interpret the aggressive internal and external mobilization of Putin’s regime in several explanatory logics. It could be, first, the logic of post-Soviet developments (the evolution of the elites, the features of available resources, the misbalances of state-society relationships, etc.); or the logic of the longue-durée patterns of the Russian social and cultural history (dominant political culture, deeply-imbedded cultural mythologies, etc.); or, finally, placing the problem within a wider logic of contestation (“clashes”) between the evolving global centers of power. In all these cases, one factor should be stated as crucial and definitive: the huge continental space of Northern Eurasia, a unique geographical-spatial system that largely defined the logic of integration and disintegration, solidarities and rivalries, violence and resistance, cultural imagination, entangled identity formation, and the very nature of the state rule.
The empire that twice emerged on this geographical space – as the Romanov Empire first and then the Soviet Union (with additional claims of influence beyond the official borders, in both cases) – is now under the most passionate scrutiny because of the dominant postcolonial and decolonial agenda and the assumption that Putin’s aggression in Ukraine indicates imperial revenge. Hence the growing interest in the nature of this imperial system throughout its history.