Why Does Russia Act This Way?

Why Does Russia Act This Way?

By Keith Alan Hanson

Posted March 3, 2022

Why does Russia act this way? 

The answer can be found in a look at more than 500 years of Russia’s imperial expansion through the brutal use of military force. 

Russia has always been a bad neighbor.

Since the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the mid to late 1500s, Russia has been bullying, invading, starving, and absorbing neighboring peoples across Asia and Eastern Europe. 

Russia traces its origins at least as far back as 1480 when what would become the Grand Duchy of Moscow overthrew its overlords, the Tatar Golden Horde, to become an independent nation state.  The Grand Duchy of Muscovy thereafter set out on a five-century acquisition binge, conquering and assimilating almost all its immediate neighbors.  To start, Russia methodically conquered the Novgorod Republic in 1478, the Grand Duchy of Tver in 1485, the Pskov Republic in 1510, the Appanage of Volokolamsk in 1513, the principalities of Ryazan in 1521 and Novogorod-Seversky in 1522.

At that early date the borders of Russia looked a lot like European-Russia before the recent invasion of Ukraine: a northern border on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, a western border near the eastern boundaries of modern-day Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Belarus, and a southern border near the northern boundary of modern-day Ukraine.

With the rise of the Romanov czars (or tsars) in 1613, Russia began a series of aggressive campaigns to expand its borders in all directions.  Seizing modern day Belarus, briefly occupying what is today (still) northeastern Ukraine, driving westward the borders of Poland and Lithuania, and launching a series of campaigns into sparsely populated Siberia, Russia’s land holdings grew steadily for hundreds of years, until either natural barriers (like the Pacific Ocean, Black Sea and Himalayan Mountains) or the presence of powerful neighbors (like the Ottoman Empire in Turkey and the Middle East, various Chinese regimes in Eastern Asia, and the rising industrial states of Central Europe) checked the Russian march outward from its Moscow center.  The Siberian project continued for nearly two centuries until Russia reached the Pacific and began to seize central Asian nations stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Himalayan Mountains and the border of present-day China.  In 1799 Russia laid claim to Alaska.  Russia maintained a colonial outpost in Northern California from 1812 until 1841 and established one or more forts in the Hawaiian Islands at about the same time.

While the British-American colonies assembled themselves into the fledgling United States of America and began their expansion westward across North America in the late 1700s, Catherine the Great, Czarina of Russia, was already leading her country to incrementally devour the northern tier of the Ottoman empire, seizing territory in the Caucasus, Crimea, southwestern Ukraine (as it is known today), and along the shores of the Sea of Azov.  Catherine led Russia to repeatedly dismember Poland in the later decades of the 18th century and incrementally expanded its influence, control and sometimes borders into Lithuania, Galicia and Mazovia in Eastern Europe.

Russia didn’t fully stop its expansive ways when it reached the Pacific and met its match in military power in Central Europe.  It went on to lay claim to all of modern-day Alaska in 1799, only to sell that claim to the newly powerful United States of America in 1867. Notably as Russian expansion in Europe ended with encounters with the advanced military and industrial states of Central and Western Europe at the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, a new theme began to emerge in the imperial Russian national playbook: creation and maintenance of “buffer states.”

In 1809, Russian military force obliged Sweden to establish and cede to imperial Russia, as a separate puppet nation, the Grand Duchy of Finland.  This would become a standard gambit in the Russian international playbook.  Forcibly dominated Finland, like partitioned Poland and eviscerated Lithuania, became a buffer state on Russia’s western flank.

The Finnish experience of the last century is also particularly instructive.  Although Finland freed itself from Russian control during the Russian Civil War of 1917-22, Russia invaded that country in December of 1939 in an initially unsuccessful attempt to reverse that reality.  But by March of 1940 renewed Russian assaults reminiscent of those unleashed on Ukraine of late drove the Finnish government to accede to the territorial demands of the Soviet government.  In the post-World War II era, Finland became a model for what Vladimir Putin may have in mind for Ukraine: a nation coerced into a state of neutrality, effective disarmament and limited sovereignty by the huge Red Army parked on its doorstep.  That Finnish reality continued from the end of World War II in 1945 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Ultimately, in the years following World War II, Russia assembled its ultimate buffer: the seven non-Soviet nations of the Warsaw Pact.  These countries, denied free elections, denied control of their foreign policy, denied free access to their neighbors in the West, and conscripted to potentially defend Russia from the imagined threat of a NATO invasion, provided Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, and a host of forgettable grey Soviet dictators with the buffer state barrier Russian imperialist leaders had sought to establish for centuries.  But when the Soviet system collapsed upon itself in 1989 and the years immediately following, the desire for self-determination, freedom and democracy quickly drove many of these nations to join both the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to assure their security going forward. 

These were the nations that knew best how unwise it would be to stand alone and depend on transitory assurances of restraint from any Russian government, be it the Soviet government or that of its successor state, the Russian Federation, whether that Russian state is led by Joseph Stalin or Vlad Putin.  Importantly these are the nations that moved most quickly to provide concrete support to Ukraine’s resistance to Putin’s latest Russian invasion.

Russia is not alone, of course, in having an imperialist past.  Great Britain, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, the Ottomans, Persia, China and many other nations and peoples have assembled (and often lost) empires as well during or before the last half-millennium.  The sometimes-brutal American expansion across North America and the acquisition of territories in the Pacific and Caribbean as a result of the Spanish American War of 1898 is well known to most Americans.  At one point just before the First World War the British Empire had a population of 412 million people, 23 percent of the world population at the time.  The population of the United Kingdom itself at the time was about 42 million. In geographic terms, the British Empire covered 24 percent of the world’s total land area by 1920.

But unlike Russia, all the current nations that have a colonial past (save Communist China) have renounced such behavior and changed with the times.

Not so Putin’s Russia.

What matters about this little history lesson are the implications of this story for the people of Europe and Asia today.  The pattern of Russian behavior repeated dozens of times over the course of the last five centuries tells us much about the steps that Putin can be expected to take if he succeeds in his effort to subjugate Ukraine.  Russian monarchs and Soviet dictators have never been satisfied with just one more possession, one more satellite.  They have never been satisfied to compete economically or socially or intellectually in a peaceful world.  They have never been satisfied with the status quo.  In Russian history, all the way up to the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Georgia in 2008, the Crimea and Donbas in 2014, there has always been one more neighbor to acquire or dominate, one more military move to expand the Kremlin’s influence and control.

This is why the free world should pay attention to the way in which Russia successfully spread its borders across 11 time zones and forcefully dominated (at times) all of its immediate neighbors.  This is why it matters when Vladimir Putin does what Russian leaders have always done, acting in the way Russian czars and dictators have always acted, for close to 500 years.

In its most recent iteration, Russian imperialism has taken on a particularly cruel level of brutality: area bombardment of residential neighborhoods, depriving civilians of the ability to flee conflict zones, the use of cluster bombs and (apparently) the indiscriminate use of area-destruction technology in civilian communities.  This is not simply the expansive Russia of Catherine the Great. It is the Russia of Ivan the Terrible and Joseph Stalin at their worst.

In an episode reminiscent of Nikita Khrushchev haranguing Western diplomats in Warsaw in 1956 (“Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!”), in recent days Russia warned Finland (as well as Sweden, Poland, the three Baltic States and by implication all the former members of the Warsaw Pact) that Russia expects all of them to fall in line with his revanchist world vision or face unspecified serious consequences.

Last week Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said that there would be “serious military-political repercussions” if either Sweden or Finland joined NATO. Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, appearing with Sweden’s military commander Micael Byden replied, “I want to be extremely clear.  It is Sweden that itself and independently decides on our security line.”

In Ukraine today, we see one version of what Putin might mean when he talks of the consequences of resistance.

Vladimir Putin is trapped in time.  Rather than making himself a transformational leader who could lead the Russian people into a prosperous democratic age, he has apparently chosen to imagine himself in the role of Catherine the Great.  In so doing, he has instead become a modern-day Ivan the Terrible.

March 3, 2022