RUSSIA.

The Russian Federation, or Russia, formally emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union in December 1991, as a result of the Belaya Vezha agreement between the leaders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Many Soviet citizens and foreigners, however, viewed the Soviet Union itself as an extended Russia (Soviet Russia was a commonly used synonym). The Russian Federation inherited from the Soviet Union more than 75 percent of its territory and the distinction of being the largest nation in the world, 50 percent of its population, its nuclear weapons and foreign debt, and the longstanding ambivalence about the extent of its belonging to Europe. Russia was recognized by the international community as the USSR's main successor state, inheriting its seats in the United Nations Security Council and other international institutions, including the Conference on (since 1994, Organization for) Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Additionally, it was invited to join most major international institutions, including the Group of Seven, whose membership had been sought by the Soviet Union. Yet it was predictably frustrated in its hopes of the early 1990s to achieve a deep integration with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU), which would have obliterated the entire history of Soviet conflict with the West. Instead, Russia found itself repeatedly at odds with NATO over the latter's eastward expansion and attack on Yugoslavia. It has had a more difficult record of relationships with multinational institutions, such as the OSCE, than with individual Western European nations, especially Germany, with whom it has built a robust economic and geostrategic partnership, as well as Italy and France. Russians' sense that the pro-Western ("Atlanticist") policies of their first post-Soviet leadership contributed to the incorporation of most of their former allies, satellites, or dependencies in Eastern Europe into the EU and NATO, while Russia itself was taken advantage of and left out in the cold, is widely shared across Russian society and has a deep impact on Russia's relations with the West.

IMPERIAL LEGACIES, MULTIETHNICITY, AND THE AMBIGUITIES OF IDENTITY

The prevalent post–Cold War view of historical Russia as an empire that dominated its non-Russian subjects against their will tells an important part of a much more complex story. Unlike countries of Western Europe with their well-defined geographic and ethnic boundaries, Russia's neighborhood—the East European plain and the southern steppe—historically consisted of underpopulated and unsecured frontiers shifting together with unformed and fluid national identities. Russia's political culture, with its preeminent concern with security, was shaped by recurrent threats of invasions from the east, the west, and the south. The vulnerability of Russia's agricultural and urban civilization, built against formidable odds on an infertile land and in a hostile climate, left its rulers continuously preoccupied with acquiring stable and defensible borders and securing access to naval trade routes of European commerce. This implied the need to establish and fortify Russia's presence in the Baltic, Black, and Caspian Seas and in the Caucasus Mountains. The resulting empire both oppressed its subjects, like any other, and generated a measure of stability and protection for some of the ethnicities whose alternative option was often to be controlled by a rival power, such as Poland (in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), Sweden (early eighteenth century), Turkey or Iran (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries), or Germany or the British Empire (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries).

The multiethnic composition of the Russian Empire, together with spontaneous as well as government-engineered migration and intermixing of ethnicities, resulted in a long-standing uncertainty about the geographic and ethnic boundaries of Russia proper, and hence about the definition of Russian national identity. The internationally recognized borders of the Russian Federation of the early twenty-first century reflect Soviet-era administrative mapping, which was not planned with future sovereign states in mind and often cut across even clearly recognized ethnic and historical boundaries. Early-twenty-first-century Russia remains multiethnic and multiconfessional, albeit much less so than the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire had been. Ethnic Russians (russkie, in the narrow sense of this word) comprise 80 percent of its population. Most of them are nominally adhering to the Russian Orthodox Church, primarily as represented by its Moscow patriarchate. After seven decades of state-imposed atheism, the levels of actual observance or commitment to Orthodoxy remain fairly low, and official clergy are often seen as compromised by their excessive deference to Soviet and post-Soviet secular authorities; minor, autonomous branches of Russian Orthodoxy, including Old Believers and local parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, continue to exist alongside the Moscow patriarchate, while the active presence of both historically established Western Christian denominations and churches as well as new charismatic movements and cults is often seen as dangerously subversive proselytizing. Meanwhile, more than twenty million ethnic Russians—between 15 and 20 percent of their total number—remain outside the Russian Federation's borders as a result of the Soviet collapse; their levels of ethnic and religious identification are often higher than among Russians living in the Russian Federation.

Ethnically non-Russian minorities and non-Orthodox confessions represent a much smaller share of the population than in the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire but have continued to play pivotal roles in the debate on Russian identity. Russia remains one of the most multiethnic nations in the world, with 140 nationalities listed in the 2002 population census. It is generally recognized, even among the groups usually defined as nationalist, that a purely ethnic definition of Russianness and ethnonationalism of an Eastern European type would be an undesirable break with the tradition of an inclusive and open national identity, however "imagined" this tradition may seem to outsiders. Hence the status accorded to principal minority groups. Alongside Christianity, Islam (with fifteen to twenty million faithful, according to various estimates), Buddhism, and Judaism (several hundred thousand each) are recognized as "traditional religions" by the 1997 law, although the rights of these and other minorities are not infrequently violated in practice, especially at local levels. Minorities are often included in the definition of russkie in the broader sense (as a "super-ethnos," to use a popular Russian term), as indicated, for example, by a recent debate on the specifically Russian (russkii) Islam. The term rossiyane implies "civic" allegiance to the common Russian state-hood; it was widely used in the Yeltsin-era official parlance, but has become unpopular by association and is rarely employed.

FROM RUS TO THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

Most international scholarship, as well as Russia's own historical tradition, trace the origins of the Russian nation to the state of Rus, an association of Slavic, Scandinavian, and Finnish tribes, with historical capitals in Novgorod (862–882), Kiev (882–1169), and Vladimir (1169–1320s). It is considered the common ancestor of Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians. (This view has been disputed, however, by Ukrainian nationalist scholars and their co-thinkers in the West claiming the Kievan Rus to be a Ukrainian state par excellence). The Rus, whose princes adopted Christianity in its Byzantine version in 988 and participated in European power plays and family relationships with French and German royal dynasties, was weakened by internal feuding and lost its independence to the devastating Mongol invasion of 1237 to 1240. This period, known in Russia as the Mongol-Tatar Yoke and involving struggle as well as cooperation and some degree of cultural rapprochement with the occupiers, was later blamed by Europeanized Russians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for Russia's loss of its original Europeanness and its cultural, as well as geopolitical, estrangement from the West. Other thinkers, primarily of the Eurasianist school, saw the Mongol and Tatar influences, with the resulting internal diversity of Russia and its "otherness" vis-à-vis Europe as a source of Russia's unique civilizational characteristics of inclusiveness and breadth, in contrast to European nation-states, and as the basis for its special calling, to serve as a bridge between the East and the West. In another variation on this theme, many educated Russians believed that Russia's resistance had saved the rest of Europe from subjugation by exhausting the nomadic drive of the Mongols and thus fulfilled a historic mission that was duly appreciated by the West. This belief was epitomized in 1918 in Alexander Blok's classical work The Scythians, reflecting widespread disillusionment and a sense of betrayal that, some argue, contributed to the failure of Russia's pro-Western democratic revolution of February 1917 and paved the way for the Bolshevik coup.

In a more radical response, democratic and revolutionary thought in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia often took the shape of reaction against the perceived foreignness of the post-eighteenth-century ruling class with its military-bureaucratic establishment (e.g., Pavel Pestel, early Slavophiles, Mikhail Bakunin, and the Pan-Slavs). Other radical democrats, including Alexander Herzen and some of the early Marxists, as well as authoritarian revolutionaries such as Vladimir Lenin, held more ambiguous and complex views of Europe, recognizing the need to borrow its technological and cultural achievements in order to catch up with it on the path of modernization, but few among the generally antitsarist educated class, the intelligentsia, fully accepted western Europe as an unquestioned cultural or socioeconomic model (the major exceptions in the early twentieth century included the historian Pavel Milyukov, the founder and leader of Russia's liberal Constitutional Democratic Party, and Georgy Plekhanov, the founding father of Russian Marxism, who oscillated between democratic and authoritarian tendencies). Significantly, one of the ideological discussions of the early twentieth century that later contributed to the demise of Leon Trotsky as a potential successor to Lenin and the leader of the Russian Revolution was over the project of the "United States of Europe"—the ideological blueprint of the future European Union: Trotsky argued that the Bolsheviks should support the idea and that revolutionary Russia itself might become part of united Europe, whereas Lenin and Joseph Stalin dismissed the idea as unrealistic in view of the profound power inequalities and resulting divergences of interests within Europe, and argued that a Bolshevik Russia should play on these divisions rather than pursuing a remote pan-European utopia.

FROM IMPERIAL TO SOVIET RUSSIA

By 1914, after a suppressed democratic revolution of 1905 to 1907 and a program of reforms promoting capitalism in the countryside through the forced dissolution of peasant communes, Russia's economy was on the path of fast yet fragile growth. It was highly dependent on Western investment, loans, and technologies, and riven by social and cultural tensions—between the cities and the countryside, the rich and the poor, and the ethnically Russian and German elites and oppressed national minorities, such as Poles and Jews. Its high culture and the arts, combining deep Europeanization with commitment to their peasant roots, reached a historical peak of creativity known as the "Silver Age" and were among the driving forces of European modernism. Yet in politics, Russia's technological dependency on German industries and financial dependency primarily on French money led to its geopolitical oscillation between the German and the Franco-British military blocs. It joined the latter, the Entente Cordiale, but was the odd man out in this alliance because of Tsar Nicholas II's erratic diplomacy and autocratic policies at home. It was forced into World War I by Kaiser William II's resolve to push Russia out of the Balkans and its own loss of international prestige, which was eroding the domestic authority of tsarism. The allies tried to boost Russia's morale by a secret treaty providing for the acquisition of the Straits—a coveted slice in the future partition of Turkey. But the failure of political and military leadership, attempts at separate negotiations with Germany, and the resulting demoralization of the army and society at large led both Russia's liberal elite and Western allies to conclude that Nicholas II and his tiny ultraconservative entourage had become the main obstacle to the war effort.

The tsar was deposed with ease after several days of popular revolt in Petrograd. The new Provisional Government was a coalition led by pro-Western liberals committed to pursuing victory under the slogan of "revolutionary defense." But the revolution quickly went out of control, with the rise of the Petrograd Soviet increasingly challenging the Provisional Government, which itself became dominated by socialist parties and was frequently reshuffled from the inside. The failure of a renewed war effort and military retreat, the grass-roots pressure for a radical agrarian reform blocked by the liberals in the Provisional Government, and, finally, the agitation of Lenin and his supporters for separate peace with Germany and their confrontation with the Provisional Government in July 1917 debilitated the government, discredited the principle of democratic coalition that lay behind it, and accelerated the search for a new, iron-willed leadership in all parts of the spectrum.

In November 1917 this role was unilaterally assumed by Lenin and his supporters in the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, who seized power in Petrograd with the help of military deserters and marines, and then tried to legitimize their one-party rule as revolution by the soviets. In the course of their struggle with other socialist parties and unions opposed to this scenario, the Bolsheviks managed to split their leading rival, the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party, and persuade the splinter Left SR Party to join them in a coalition, accepting for the time being its platform of the socialization (rather than nationalization) of the land. Although the Bolsheviks came to power promising to speed up the convocation of the democratically elected Constituent Assembly, after they lost this election to the SR majority, Lenin changed his mind and eventually dissolved the assembly by force. The assembly was in session for only one day, proclaiming the Russian Democratic Federal Republic, which never materialized. After its dispersal, the Congress of Soviets dominated by the Bolsheviks proclaimed the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic, with a constitution disenfranchising the "exploitative classes," including, in practice, a large fraction of the peasant population of the country.

Meanwhile, as Germany gained decisive advantage on the battlefield, and the Russian army virtually disintegrated, Lenin secured support or acquiescence of his party, against the will of most of its other leaders and many in the rank and file, to an ignominious separate peace with Germany, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918), leading to huge territorial losses and vast German control over the Russian economy. The Left SRs quit the government in disagreement and soon were provoked by Lenin's security forces into a rebellion in which they were crushed and eliminated from the stage. The one-party rule was effectively established and then cemented over the two years of resistance both to the White Guard, fighting in effect for the restoration of the monarchy, and to the military intervention of Western powers along Russia's coastal perimeter. While the bulk of the population in the overwhelmingly peasant Russia was not supportive of the Bolshevik policies, Russians often acquiesced to them as to the lesser evil. By 1922, all political parties, left and right, except for the Communists, had been eliminated by repression and expulsions from the country.

RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET UNION: AMBIGUOUS COEXISTENCE AND THE PARTING OF WAYS

In 1922, with the signing of the Union Treaty, the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic (RSFSR) formally became one of the four founding states of the Soviet Union, together with Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Transcaucasian Federation. Over the next seventy years, the Soviet Union expanded to fifteen republics, some of them, such as the Baltic states and Moldova, annexed or taken over from previously sovereign entities, and others, such as Kazakhstan, carved out of the RSFSR's territory. Soviet official ideology oscillated between internationalist emphasis on "the friendship of the peoples" and "Soviet patriotism" (the prevalent rhetoric of the more liberal periods, such as the 1920s and 1960s) and calculated appeals to Russian national pride at the threatening junctures of World War II and the Cold War. There is no consensus on Russia's actual role in the Soviet Union: while nationalists in countries such as the Baltic states and Georgia see Russia as the prime oppressor under the guise of the Soviet Union, many Russian nationalists since the 1980s have argued that Russia was used by the communist regime as a donor for other republics that benefited from its economic might, natural resources, and human capital in the course of their modernization. Also, unlike other republics, the RSFSR before 1990 did not possess a fully developed administrative apparatus distinct from the institutions of the government of the Soviet Union, which became another source of nationalists' complaints. The unaccountable Soviet leadership, in spite of its large share of ethnic Russians, was widely seen as denationalized and having lost touch with the true interests of Russians as a people. Russian dissidents from the 1960s to the 1980s consistently took the side of national minorities and their organizations in the republics of the Soviet Union, providing international visibility to Ukrainian, Baltic, Georgian, and other human rights and opposition advocates.

Accordingly, Russian politicians, brought onto the public stage by Mikhail Gorbachev's democratization and glasnost, did not see Russia as having a major stake in the Soviet Union's common future and by and large did not see any potential dangers to Russia in the Soviet Union's demise until the latter became irreversible. Thus, most Russian democrats and, indeed, some nationalists encouraged the "parade of sovereignties" across the Soviet Union and even took an early lead in the process. Russia's famous nationalist writer Valentin Rasputin envisioned Russia's potential secession from the Soviet Union well before other republics began their drive for independence. On 12 June 1990 the RSFSR's Congress of People's Deputies, chaired by Boris Yeltsin, proclaimed Russia's sovereignty, becoming the first Soviet republic after the Baltic states to do so; the Russian parliament opposed the hardliners' attempts to suppress secessionist movements elsewhere, offering recognition to the Baltic states without any conditions with regard to Russia's strategic interests or the Russian population remaining in the area. In September 1990 Nobel Prize–winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn called for Russia's total disengagement from eleven republics, in the hope of potentially salvaging the union with Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, but Russian democrats dismissed his proposal as overly conservative. The botched coup attempt of August 1991 under the slogan of preserving the Soviet Union (nowadays widely seen as an episode in the power struggle within the Soviet establishment) did not elicit any support in Russia: to the contrary, whatever public action in Russia did occur was directed against the coup and in support of Russia's Supreme Soviet, or the "White House" (so nicknamed because of the color of its headquarters). After the coup, the Russian parliament further contributed to the Soviet Union's demise by supporting Yeltsin in his takeover of the Soviet Union's assets and institutions on Russian territory and approving the program of unilateral price decontrol that implied the abandoning of attempts to preserve a Soviet Union–wide economic community. The parliament also pursued the principled policy of noninterference in the centrifugal developments within Russia itself, and blocked the executive's attempt to suppress the revolution in its constituent republic of Chechnya in November 1991.

RUSSIA'S POST-SOVIET EXPERIENCE

The central role in the Soviet Union's demise and Russia's disengagement from other republics belonged to Yeltsin and his narrow circle of associates, whose overarching goal was to get rid of Gorbachev's supremacy. Yeltsin managed both to ride the wave of a vague protest movement and to secure support of key groups in the Soviet establishment displeased by Gorbachev and threatened by grassroots democratization. He had no ideological commitments and at various points used radical Russian nationalists, liberal intellectuals, and anti-Russian nationalists in the republics to strengthen his position against Gorbachev.

His biggest success, however, came from his opportunistic alliance with Russia's mass-based democratic organization, the Democratic Russia movement (DemRossiya), which mobilized street support for his policies at all the critical points, most importantly in August 1991. The movement had approximately three hundred thousand active supporters and won solid majorities in the councils of major industrial cities. Its social base consisted of the educated and westernized "middle class" largely unprepared for the transformative role in society that it could potentially assume: it was characterized by utopian naiveté, lack of a systemic vision of the problems of the country and the world, excessive idealizing of the West caused by decades of isolation behind the Iron Curtain, poor understanding of contradictions among social strata and conflicting geopolitical interests, and the inadequacy of its political leadership. Economically, it was entirely dependent on guaranteed government employment and unprepared for an abrupt abrogation of these guarantees and the collapse of real incomes caused by price liberalization and hyperinflation in 1992. This so-called shock therapy (even though this label is disputed by neoliberal economists) caused a fundamental and permanent change to the structure of Soviet society by dealing a blow to this "middle class" from which it never recovered as a stratum. Accordingly, DemRossiya quickly lost most of its volunteer activists to the struggle for economic survival, and the younger crop of actual and potential supporters to "brain drain" abroad, while its leadership split over the assessment of reforms. Since DemRossiya's split in 1992, the democratic movement in Russia never recouped its losses, and its previous mistakes left a bitter disenchantment with the very ideas of democracy and collective action. Yabloko, the only democratic party that managed to build some grassroots support and maintain a presence in the parliament from 1993 to 2003—only because of its relatively consistent critique of Yeltsin's policies and of the past democratic experience—still never reached DemRossiya's size and stature. And even it was eventually eliminated from the Duma by a combination of voter apathy and insecurity, concentration of financial and media resources in the hands of the Kremlin, and growing popular mistrust of "Western-inspired" solutions.

These internal developments, coupled with Russia's frustrated attempts at a high-speed integration with major European and Euro-Atlantic institutions, eventually led Russia's authoritarian and inward-looking legacies to reassert themselves. This trend was, however, denied by many observers as long as the policies of Russia's successive leaders offered domestic and foreign players exceptional opportunities for economic or geostrategic gain. Yeltsin used force to disband the democratically elected parliament that had brought him to power, changed the constitution of the country in a referendum whose legitimacy and outcome were questioned by many, and, in spite of his poor health, ruled Russia at his whim, hiring and firing several prime ministers and eventually passing the baton to his chosen successor who had never run for a public office before being elected president. The new constitution established a super-presidential system viewed at the time as instrumentally useful to liberal reformers but increasingly deplored by them ever since. Two military invasions in the rebellious constituent republic of Chechnya, in 1994 and 1999, cost thousands of Chechen and Russian lives and left deep scars on the tissue of both societies. Economic reforms pursued in the early 1990s with varying degrees of intensity failed in their declared purpose of creating a private economy based on medium and small businesses, as the domestic market for industrial production remained limited by mass poverty, while Soviet-era or potential foreign markets were lost to geopolitical retrenchment. In the 1990s Russia's manufacturing and high-technology industries largely collapsed, except for the weapon production; its gross domestic product (GDP) shrank twofold; corruption flourished, while budgetary funding and government resources were channeled away from the public sector and the sphere of production into private hands and financial activities. The social costs of these policies for Russia's population were as high as the cost of a major war, if not higher: from 1992 to 2003, the number of Russians shrank by over 4 million people to 143 million total (in spite of the influx of 5.5 million labor migrants from other post-Soviet states), and male longevity declined from sixty-five to about fifty-eight years, because of the collapse of affordable health care, increasing cardiovascular diseases caused by stress, and rising violence.

By 1998, the government, led by "young reformers," gambled on attracting foreign capital by offering up to 100 percent yearly returns on government promissory notes (GKOs), which led to financial bankruptcy, debt default, and the devaluation of the ruble. The latter, coupled with rising commodity prices, helped Russia to several years of economic growth, at approximately 6 percent of GDP, enabling it to reestablish its solvency and accumulate large foreign reserves, which have been used to form the Stabilization Fund. The downside of this process was the exacerbation of Russia's reliance on commodity export at the expense of all other economic activities. Although President Vladimir Putin and Russia's elite have been boastful of the nation's role as a major energy power, failed attempts to translate this into geopolitical gains as, for example, in relations with Ukraine and Western powers, showed its limited utility in the absence of other resources. And given the concentration of economic assets in the hands of the government and corporate bureaucracies tied to the commodity sector, poverty and inequality have stayed high, and Russia's overall health and demographic outlook is increasingly bleak: according to one of the estimates done by the United Nations Population Division, if the current trend is not reversed, Russia may be expected to lose twenty-one million people between 2000 and 2025.

The structural constraints on the development of a truly autonomous capitalist class and the reassertion of authoritarian rule eventually led to the elimination of the few independent business empires built in the 1990s by the so-called oligarchs, at a relatively low political cost to the Kremlin. Three leading business tycoons who had played major political roles in the 1990s and then supported, to various extents, democratic opposition to Putin, have been stripped of their assets and either forced out of the country or, in the exceptional case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man and owner of the YUKOS oil empire, sentenced to labor camp.

Russia's economic recovery achieved since the late 1990s, however partial and one-sided, and the relative stabilization of its geopolitical standing, may eventually pave the way for the ascendancy of a more democratically minded group of leaders within the ruling stratum. An alternative scenario—continuing humiliation and retreat in the post-Soviet space, with or without an economic downturn—is likely to result in more authoritarianism, further alienation of Russia's educated youth from the West, increasing support for homegrown and foreign-born Islamic radicals in the impoverished North Caucasus, and prolonged turmoil in this region, with unpredictable consequences for the international community.

See alsoRussian Civil War; Russian Revolutions of 1917; Soviet Union.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arbatov, Alexei G., K. Kaiser, and R. Legvold, eds. Russia and the West: The 21st Century Security Environment. Armonk, N.Y., 1999.

Cohen, Stephen F. "Was the Soviet Union Reformable?" Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (2004): 459–488.

Hough, Jerry F. Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991. Washington, D.C., 1997.

Kingston-Mann, Esther. In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics, and Problems of Russian Development. Princeton, N.J., 1999.

Kotz, David M., and Fred Weir. Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System. London, 1997.

Lieven, Anatol. Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power. New Haven, Conn., 1998.

Poe, Marshall T. The Russian Moment in World History. Princeton, N.J., 2003.

Reddaway, Peter, and Dmitri Glinski. The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy. Washington, D.C., 2001.

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V., and Mark D. Steinberg. A History of Russia. 7th ed. New York, 2005.

Rieber, Alfred. "Struggle for the Borderlands." In The Legacy of History in Russia and Post-Soviet States, edited by S. Frederick Starr, 61–90. Armonk, N.Y., 1994.

D. Glinski