Along with the names, the statues of the revolutionary figures that once graced those public places have been swept away by world history. Now those boulevards, streets, and squares bear names of national heroes and celebrate the symbols of a new era of free market capitalism and national democracy.

Independence Square in Minsk is one example, formerly known as Lenin Square until the collapse of the Soviet Union. But, unlike most such squares and streets across Eastern Europe, Lenin’s imposing figure still gazes down at the people of Belarus from his pedestal on Independence Square.

Its neighbors denounce communism as an evil equal to fascism and enact sweeping decommunization, but in Belarus, Lenin remains proudly in front of the Supreme Soviet. For that, he has one man to thank—Alexander Lukashenko.

Few figures are more emblematic of the post-Soviet period than the longtime Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. He will forever hold a place in history as the only reactionary Communist to reverse the process of Soviet collapse, even if limited to this one small corner of Europe.

While Poland’s government was implementing shock therapy and Russia’s was selling its economy to oligarchs, Lukashenko was elected to do the exact opposite. He kept the economy largely state-run while replacing national symbols with their Soviet predecessors. His policies even provided Belarus with one of the former USSR’s highest standards of living and per capita incomes for years, giving Lukashenko success to justify his prolonged rule.

Times were good for Belarus, and times were good for Lukashenko. Those times are long gone.

Now, many of the workers whose jobs he once saved from privatization are striking and marching against him. Russian nationalists who may have once applauded his Russophilia and strongman character are joining Muscovite liberals in calling for his resignation. Events in Belarus could go many ways, but Lukashenko is between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand is the unthinkable option of ceding his personalist state apparatus to a disparate opposition. On the other, vassalage to the Russian security services under the guise of a dormant agreement he signed in an unrecognizable era. He has been left looking like an unwanted anachronism to a world that has long forgotten the world-historical moment that birthed his neo-Soviet regime.

In the post-Soviet sea of chaos that was the 1990s, Lukashenko and Belarus stood out as an anomaly. He promised stability and social security against economic reforms as were being implemented all around Belarus and succeeded. That was the Lukashenko social contract. Economic security and political stability. But the world around Lukashenko has changed dramatically over the last 25 years. The post-Soviet world he once comfortably maneuvered in is largely gone. His once reliable ally has grown sick of his geopolitical games and economic dependency.

Belarus will no longer be able to maintain its isolation, with or without Lukashenko.

Man Against the World

Illegitimate child, border guard, Komsomol leader, deputy chairman of a collective farm. These were the many lives lived by Lukashenko before his ascension to absolute power in Belarus. It is genuinely a shocking political story that a man with such a humble background became the first president of a young Belarus in 1994 with 80% of the vote in the second round, and at the age of 40 at that. It is ironic, too, that it was on the issue of anti-corruption and anti-gerontocracy that the 66-year-old, now six-term president, built his early political career.

But in late Soviet politics, those two currents were very strong, and Lukashenko was not the only Soviet or post-Soviet leader that owed his political career to widespread anti-system sentiment. Mikhail Gorbachev, the final General Secretary of the USSR, was the living embodiment of anti-gerontocracy, and along with him he brought many other young, reform-minded politicians to power in their respective republics that ruled long into the post-Soviet period.

The key word is reform-minded, though, since unlike most other Gorbachevite politicians, Lukashenko was expressly anti-reform. His is a story that begs for explanation—similar in some ways to others of the time but simultaneously quite unlike any other in Eastern Europe. Lukashenko rode a wave of anti-establishment resentment to defeat both the Soviet nomenklatura which brought the country independence and the nationalist counter-elite that sought to displace it.

Political developments in Belarus during the 1990s run completely counter to development in all similar countries surrounding it. While former communists elsewhere in Eastern Europe seamlessly transformed themselves into nationalists or social democrats and implemented the free market reforms that Western advisors recommended, Belarusians elected a man to do the opposite.

The year after he was elected, he held a referendum that replaced independent Belarus’ white-red-white flag and national coat of arms with their current unmistakably Soviet alternatives. In proper post-Soviet fashion, the independent symbols were derided by officials and state media as symbols of Nazi collaborators.

The referendum also enshrined the official status of the Russian language and confirmed the people’s support for economic integration with Russia, and importantly for Lukashenko, gave the president the right to dismiss Parliament. In another referendum the following year, the people voted 90% in favor of Lukashenko’s proposal to change official Independence Day from the day Belarus declared independence from the USSR to the day of liberation from Nazi Germany. As if that was not on the nose enough, they voted 80% in favor of banning the free sale of property.

But Lukashenko alone was not responsible for the public’s opinions and sympathies. That is in many ways woven into the very fabric of the Belarusian nation itself. Lacking a state, native nobility, universities, and many other important vectors for national development, Belarusian national identity prior to World War I was considerably less developed than its neighbors. It had historically been ruled by large multinational empires such as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or the Russian Empire, whose elites competed to impress their own religious, cultural, and political identity on the Belarusian peasantry.

Only when Lenin created a Belarusian state in the form of a Soviet Republic in the 1920s was the Belarusian nation given a native state to identify with. The Second World War changed the physical and demographic picture of Belarus permanently, as the devastation wrought by the Nazis left a quarter of the country dead—the highest proportion of any country in Europe.

After the war, Belarus achieved nothing short of an economic miracle. The country was rebuilt with the help of the entire Soviet Union, laying the foundations for an economy that survives to this day. With the country more devastated by the war than any other, and with little prewar industry compared with surrounding republics, it was a place better suited than any other for the USSR to reshape according to its will.

Beyond simple recovery, a large, high-tech industrial base was created along with numerous institutions of higher education to train subsequent generations of highly skilled workers. Throughout the Soviet period, Belarus grew faster than nearly every other republic. Even in the notoriously troubled late-Soviet years from 1970-1986, Belarus had the highest growth of national income per capita of any republic in the Soviet Union.

All things considered, the Soviet system appeared to function better there than anywhere else.

Belarus’ industrial output far exceeded Soviet standards throughout the existence of the union, and underground opposition to the regime was far less common there than elsewhere, despite the highly educated population. As has become apparent in Western political discourse in recent years, the memory of a post-war boom that produced unusually high living standards has serious staying power. In this case, it just happens to be that it was under a Soviet planned economic system and not a free market capitalist one.

Perhaps it may seem ironic for people unfamiliar with the region, but most nostalgia for the communist-era in Eastern Europe is economic more than anything. For pensioners or factory workers whose lives depended on the planned Soviet economy, capitalism—especially in the form it took—brought nothing but hardship. In Belarus, that nostalgia was clearly stronger than elsewhere, likely thanks to the particularly strong success of the Soviet economy, but similar sentiments in relation to the economic system exist across the form Eastern Bloc.

Lukashenko’s rise to power took some considerable luck, but it was in no way entirely coincidental. Belarus was always a special case, and it was thanks to many of its peculiarities that Lukashenko was able to build the regime that he did, despite the changing world around him.

As the world watches today, isolation appears to be one of the defining features of the country. But in the late 1990s and the early 2000s—the high post-Soviet period—Belarus was finding its footing in what looked to be a developing post-Soviet whole that would replace the old Soviet one, a post-Soviet world in which Lukashenko thought he and his country would play a critical role. Despite the obstacles around him, not all global developments were entirely counter to Lukashenko’s vision for Belarus.

From Soviet to Post-Soviet

The final Soviet Politburo was elected on July 14th, 1990, a little over a year before the Communist Party was dissolved. It was unique among Soviet Politburos because it was the first in which the body included the heads of each of the individual republican Communist Parties, as opposed to heads of various security services and other top party bureaucrats. It was one of Gorbachev’s failed, last-ditch attempts to save his crumbling union. But whereas Gorbachev would find himself out of a job by the end of 1991, the same could not be said for the rest of his final Politburo.

Islam Karimov—the head of the Uzbek Communist Party—was elected in 1990 as the first President of Uzbekistan. He ruled until 2016. The Kazakh Party chief Nazarbayev would similarly come to power to rule until 2019. Saparmurat Niyazov emerged to become Turkmenistan’s first President in the same year. That Politburo also supplied Tajikistan and Azerbaijan’s first Presidents, Moldova’s second, and several other ministers or sub-national leaders of Soviet successor states.

The Soviet Union was gone, but its elites hadn’t gone anywhere. Not only that, but they were actively laying the foundations for a post-Soviet political order.

In 1994, Kazakh President Nazarbayev was taking that the furthest in propagating his ideology of Eurasianism in the post-Soviet sphere and calling for a federal Eurasian Union. Just the year before, the heads of each post-Soviet state (save the Baltics) had created and signed the charter of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a weak but symbolic step towards what many thought would be formalization of Soviet ties in a post-Soviet world.

But in 1999 came perhaps the strongest expression of post-Sovietism when Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Lukashenko signed the Union State treaty, which formally united the two countries in a federal state with a common head of state, legislature, flag, anthem, constitution, army, and all the other trappings of a state. It was not just a deal between two presidents. Parliaments in both countries ratified in the agreement.

The overarching institutions of the USSR were gone entirely, but in nearly every successor state its formerly Communist elite held on. Not only did they hold on, but they continued to coordinate and cooperate politically, going so far as to create numerous institutions that would unite their countries beyond their rule. Post-Sovietism was in full-swing, and so was Lukashenko’s post-Soviet state-building process.

The issue for Lukashenko is that not every leader shared his apparent enthusiasm for another Soviet Union just as the last one had ended. While a CIS summit in 2003 may have looked indistinguishable from a Politburo meeting in 1990, leaders across the space were quickly adjusting to new political realities. Both of those projects meant gradual distancing from the former Soviet center, even if personal ties remained. That gradual distancing only accelerated over the following decades as color revolutions toppled several post-Soviet leaders who were replaced with noticeably non-Soviet alternatives, and as Russia belatedly began its own nation-building mission.

Lukashenko meanwhile stuck to his guns—a post-Soviet man unprepared for the collapse of the post-Soviet world.

House of Cards

Part of the reason Lukashenko was swept to power with such overwhelming support was the economic crisis that gripped the country following the dissolution of the USSR. The nature of the centralized and planned economic system of the Soviet Union meant that its sudden collapse was hard on every former member state. Considering Belarus’ particularly deep integration, it was especially hard for them.

Wages, GDP, exports, imports. Every single aspect of the Belarusian economy was hit by an enormous negative shock that left the entire country—including the government—financially impoverished. But rather than decreasing the country’s dependence on the Soviet center—now known as the Russian Federation—Belarus became even more dependent on it.

By 1993, 97% of the country’s energy came from Russia, mostly in the form of natural gas, which the country spent a whole quarter of its GDP on. And when the country could not actually pay for its gas, it was simply forced to indebt itself to Russia while selling its own refined oil back at discount prices. The problem for Belarus was that Lukashenko came to power on a platform of explicit integration with Russia, not the other way around. By 2001, the proportion of energy which came from Russia had increased to 99.9%. This was Lukashenko’s alternative to reform.

On the one hand, he was using politics to extract favorable energy rents from Russia, and on the other, he was using those favorable rents to prop up a state-led economy at home.

This is and always has been Lukashenko’s basic and unchanging political game with Russia. The reason the Union State was never properly implemented was not because of Russia, but because of Lukashenko. He never once actually sought to implement a single arrangement with Russia once he had extracted his rents and subsidies.

The rents he has managed to extract thanks to his close relationship with Russia take many forms. The most glaring is the discount rates of natural gas; Belarus consistently pays far less for Russian gas than any other country, along with the hundreds of millions per year in transit fees of gas sold to the EU.

But the most lucrative way Lukashenko exploits his relationship with Russia is by acting as a middleman between Russia and the European Union. Traditionally, Belarus did this by buying Russian crude oil at discount rates without export duties and then refining it and selling it along. In 2004, that amounted to over a quarter of Belarusian exports. Since Russia’s relationship with the West soured because of the annexation of Crimea, Belarus has been doing the same with lots of other Russian products, too.

The tragic truth of Belarus’ post-Soviet economic miracle is the same as its Soviet one. In both cases, the entire economy was propped up by free or cheap energy from Russia, without which the state could not afford to subsidize its planned economy any longer.

This all raises the question: why does Russia allow Lukashenko to exploit their relationship for personal economic and political gain?

Fundamentally, the rationale is political. Lukashenko has generally been a reliable pro-Russian figure who has intentionally made his country a political and economic vassal of Russia while every other post-Soviet country did the exact opposite. The case of Kazakhstan is an important comparison, since it is another noticeably post-Soviet country where the Russian-speaking formerly communist elite has remained in power and built a regime closely allied with Russia.

But the Kazakh leadership has recognized the threat Russia poses to Kazakhstan’s sovereignty from its very inception. Despite their strong ties and the Russophone character of the Kazakh elites, they have not skirted Kazakh nation-building entirely. And also unlike Belarus, their multi-vector foreign policy is genuine and has earned the country strong relationships with Western, Russian, and Chinese leaders alike.

Lukashenko’s dependence on Russia both economic and political makes him easily pliable by the Russian leadership, evidenced by past spats over oil and gas where Russia has literally cut off access to energy for the entire country. Since those spats became an obvious threat to his regime, Lukashenko has attempted to diversify and reform the economy in many ways, but it appears to be too little too late.

Brave New World

In 2020, Lukashenko has faced the strongest threat to his regime in his 26-year long rule. Yet another rigged election and a ham-fisted crackdown led to the largest protests against his rule in Belarusian history.

Visibly shaken, he begged Russia to aid him, arguing that a threat to him was a threat to the entire post-Soviet world. But for weeks, Russia did not react. Undoubtedly in the Kremlin, the question was: why should they?

In the year before Belarus was drawn into the current crisis, Lukashenko had been resisting attempts by Russia to revive the dormant Union State treaty. When he signed it with Yeltsin in 1999, it was with the assumption that Lukashenko would be the one leading that Union State. But two decades later, it is obvious that the leader would be no one but Vladimir Putin, and Lukashenko reduced to nothing more than a disposable regional autocrat.

Based on this logic, he urgently moved to develop ties with the EU and the United States, even inviting the American Secretary of State to Belarus for the first time in 25 years. While the Kremlin may have been annoyed, it is hard to imagine they could not see exactly what he was doing, because Lukashenko has had only one consistent policy throughout his reign—exploiting his relationship with Russia.

It was an inopportune time for Lukashenko to strain his relationship with Moscow, and one which may cost him and his country dearly. Once again, it was too little too late.

Russia finally answered Lukashenko’s pleas for help, but help is coming on Moscow’s terms. Russia’s plans for Belarus are nothing secret. They are simply the fulfillment of a document enthusiastically signed by the government they consider legitimate decades ago. But there is no wider post-Soviet world for him to join anymore. There is only a powerful Russian nation-state which has shown no qualms about doing what it pleases in what it considers its own backyard.

This is especially true as Lithuania and Poland have stepped up their support for Belarus’ opposition, two countries which provide a model for success far removed from any Soviet or post-Soviet world—two countries that share as much history with Belarus as Russia does.

While the opposition went to great lengths to distance itself from anti-Russian nationalism and maintained a relatively non ideological character during the election campaign, it is obvious now that a realignment is taking place. With the Polish government giving Belarus’ opposition a new base of operations in Warsaw and Lithuania recognizing it as a government-in-exile, the opposition has taken a clear side in a brewing political conflict—not between America and Russia or Europe and Russia, but between Central and Eastern Europe. A Central Europe of Western-aligned nation-states and an Eastern Europe dominated by a confident Russian Federation preserving a proud Soviet legacy.

But unlike in Ukraine where that fissure runs through the country geographically, in Belarus there is no such distinction. There is only one Belarus, and its future will be decided as a whole.

If the result of the current crisis is that Belarus is gradually absorbed by Russia—something which appears increasingly likely—it would be nothing more than a historic condemnation of Lukashenko’s leadership. For all his maneuvering throughout the years, Lukashenko appears to have led his country nowhere. He neither built state institutions strong enough to guarantee his country’s sovereignty, nor advanced Belarusian nation-building in any meaningful way.

It is a strong and noticeable difference that when Russia questions Kazakh historical sovereignty the Kazakh president commissions a multi-million dollar TV extravaganza to teach the nation about their historical exploits, while Lukashenko refuses to even speak his nation’s language.

Some weeks or months ago, Belarus’ future may have been decided in Minsk, but now Moscow has become the deciding factor. Together, the two are reasserting control with brute force, and as it stands appear to be succeeding. While the opposition may have its own allies abroad and has the revolutionary anti-regime and anti-gerontocratic sentiments of the people on its side, the examples of the Prague Spring and Hungarian Revolution of 1956 do not inspire confidence.

At a time when Putin is focused on the final arc of his time in power, the Kremlin may be looking for a massive political win to re-energize its beleaguered populace. It now stands behind Lukashenko with the full military and political force of the Russian security apparatus.

Whether it is nationalism, national security, regime stability, personal interest, or popularity that motivate the Russian government, each motivation points in one direction alone: the long-belated realization of the Union State.

Little more than a century and a half after this alleged meeting, the Mongol Empire disappeared into history.

But at its height, it was the only era in history where the entire Steppe was united under a single Khan. From Hungary to China, Mongol dominance allowed products, resources, people, and information to flow freely from east to west and back again. Centuries before the term globalization was created to describe the global spread of maritime European empires, the Mongols had built a transcontinental realm.

The Steppe today is a far cry from the open plain that was once home to enormous nomadic tribes that would frequently crash onto nearby settled civilizations. Throughout the 20th century, the Steppe became an anvil for the forces of modern development. Populations largely left out of urbanization and modern technology were forcibly settled and mobilized by foreign powers, often at a heavy human price. Industrial needs, the space race, and terrible military technologies spurred the territorialization of the Great Steppe along the hard borders of closed and paranoid states. A once open space was divided among the USSR, Mao’s China, and the Iron Curtain.

Today, it is still in flux. New independent states across Central Asia have taken up the mantle of their ancestors. The collapse of the USSR and the market liberalization of China have opened the Eurasian continent like it has not been for centuries. But these states are still forced to coexist with the power centers in Moscow and Beijing, both of whose borders cut across swathes of the Steppe itself.

From the Pontic to the Mongolian Steppe, ‘Eurasianism’ of various kinds has become the new vogue. Regimes across the steppe speak of building a new order—one that shifts the economic and political center of gravity away from America, away from the oceans, away even from Europe, taking it back home to the steppes of Eurasia.

But for the first time in centuries, China is the most important and powerful player on the Steppe, not Russia. What China will do with that power is yet to be seen, but the question of what it can do with that power is becoming clearer by the day.

Modern technology and futuristic ambitions give the Steppe a potential importance it has not had for centuries. The process of the Steppe’s territorialization will only accelerate as Central Asian states, as well as Russia, China, and other powers move quickly to control the region’s trade routes and development paths. Of these states, China alone seems poised to dominate across the entire Eurasian space, bringing new dangers to the vast and sparsely populated region under the shadow of two of the world’s most powerful countries.

The Steppe and its People

The Steppe is a vague term. It has exact uses in geography, but its historic and cultural definition is far more expansive.

Roughly, it describes the flat plain of mostly grasslands that encompasses the Pannonian Steppe in Central Europe, the Pontic Steppe mostly in southern Ukraine and Russia, the Kazakh Steppe in Central Asia, and the Mongol Steppe in East Asia. These steppes together form what is known as the Eurasian Steppe. However, the term is used more broadly to define the areas inhabited and traversed freely by the nomadic peoples of the continent.

From the perspective of great cities like Baghdad and Samarkand, those peoples were seemingly innumerable. Their lack of material records only adds to the air of mystery. Even the tribes we do know are hard to describe precisely, since they did not leave written accounts, such as the Scythians who ruled the Pontic Steppe for four centuries. The ones we know best are those like the Hungarians or the Bulgars, who invaded Europe or other regions in dramatic fashion only to settle down and assimilate to the local settled cultures over time.

Nowadays, there are few such great migrations across the Great Steppe. Its western reaches are home to the farmlands of Hungary, Ukraine, and Russia, while its central and eastern portions are largely controlled by sovereign states: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, and others. In the Steppe’s east-central region is the Chinese-ruled province of Xinjiang, home to the Uyghurs and smaller groups of Kazakhs and others.

The Steppe is not quite what it used to be. Entire populations have been frozen in space for generations, cut off from much of the world. To travel from Mongolia to Hungary by land, you need more than a few buddies and your horses—much more. In your way is the closed-off and heavily policed region of Xinjiang, followed by thousands of miles of poorly paved Russian and Kazakh provincial roads. Make it through Russia, and you will have to avoid the active warzone in eastern Ukraine. Finally, you arrive at the barbed wire fence that marks the border of the highly protectionist European Union.

Of course, a number of rail routes have been slowly built up over the decades, with expansions and new routes set to follow. But these routes serve the trade needs of states and global corporate powerhouses, not the average citizen attempting to make life work. Most of these new routes are being built to service trade between China and Europe. They are being built to go over the Steppe, not through it.

Along the Steppe, there is neither peace, nor freedom, nor development. Instead, there are vast unused or underutilized swathes of land ruled either by corrupt local elites, corrupt international elites, or corrupt communist and post-communist elites. In each case, ruling over immense but hardly occupied lands has presented countless challenges for those attempting to govern them.

Mongolia is the most sparsely populated country on the planet, with just 2 people per square kilometer. Kazakhstan is also near the bottom, with 6.7 people per square kilometer, or just under 20 million total in a land mass nearly the size of India.

After Mongol conquests, the Steppe spent centuries under the control of the Russian Empire, then of the USSR and China. For each of these powers, the question has always been how to use that vast empty space. If nomads are no more—which the Soviets made sure of—what use can humanity find in that vast expanse?

The Utopian Laboratory

Before it was called Nur-Sultan, or Astana, or even Akmola, the current capital of Kazakhstan went by a different name: Tselinograd.

That was not its first name either, but rather the result of Nikita Khrushchev’s grand Soviet scheme to modernize the Steppe and turn it into the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. It was called the Virgin Lands Campaign—hence Tselinograd, which is derivative of the Russian word for virgin. The campaign eventually brought 46 million hectares of previously wild land under cultivation. That is an area of farmland larger than either Germany or Japan.

Though the campaign was successful in some ways, it hardly turned the territory into a new breadbasket of the Soviet Union. That position remained held by Ukraine.

But the Soviets left a legacy in this region nonetheless, one which scarred generations of its inhabitants. The only reason the Virgin Lands Campaign was needed in the first place was due to persistent famine, the worst of which was borne by Ukrainians and Kazakhs along the Steppe itself. It was particularly harsh for the Kazakhs, since they had been forcibly settled into collective farms by the Soviets under Stalin, destroying their native way of life and sources of nourishment. The drive for collectivization was the result of Soviet attempts both to bring the land under cultivation and to fully integrate the Steppe territories into a Soviet whole. Even up to the eve of collectivization in 1929, Kazakhs continued to live nomadic or semi-nomadic lives with traditional tribal and clan power structures, which had even taken over their local Communist Party apparatus.

The purpose of collectivization, rather than simply economic development, was to entirely destroy Kazakh culture and reshape the people into a new Soviet mass. As the USSR acted to integrate the Steppe into its domain, it included the local populations themselves in the process. It is estimated that up to 40% of all Kazakhs perished during the famine of 1932-33, the largest proportion killed of any ethnic group in the USSR.

In true Soviet fashion, the man responsible for the famine boasted to the Central Committee of the USSR of the “enormous successes” of his five-year plan in Kazakhstan. It was a step too far even for the Soviets, who promptly had him removed from his post, though the damage had already been done. As if that was not enough, the Soviets tested almost 500 nuclear weapons on the country with no regard for the local population. For good measure, they also destroyed the entire Aral Sea by redirecting its tributaries to grow cotton to export for hard currency.

It is safe to say that the legacy of the USSR on the Steppe is one of failed utopian experiments and devastating intergenerational scars. The 20th century was without a doubt the darkest period in the Steppe’s history. A vast, open plain became an open-air prison, home to unwanted and exiled people, nuclear waste, and ecological disaster. That period was poetically described in the title of Kazakh writer Mukhamet Shayakhmetov’s memoir as “The Silent Steppe.”

On the easternmost steppes of Mongolia, millions of people found themselves divided between Soviet vassaldom and direct Chinese rule. From 1924 to 1992, a Russian-backed puppet state governed there in the form of the Mongolian People’s Republic, though nearly twice as many Mongols lived in the Chinese autonomous region of Inner Mongolia than in Mongolia proper. Mongolia sided with the Soviets after the Sino-Soviet Split, which meant that for most of the Cold War an Iron Curtain—even more closed off than its European counterpart—ran straight through the Steppe that had been traversed freely for millennia. It divided ethnic Mongols from their kin, while Kazakhs in the USSR were likewise cut off from their compatriots in Xinjiang.

The failed and lopsided development strategies pursued by Communist authorities along with the physical reality of the “forgotten” cold war between China and the USSR fractured the Steppe and its people to a previously unimaginable degree. Rather than improving horizontal communication and infrastructure along the Steppe as a road between East and West, the region was either developed as a place to extract resources to Moscow, or neglected by Beijing. Its people existed in a frozen state, subjected to the ‘world-historical’ forces of geopolitics and development at play in far-off superpowers.

But the Steppe’s long era as a backwater is fast coming to an end.

Premonitions in Xinjiang

In 2013, China announced its grand project to reshape the Eurasian continent—the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It was announced in Kazakhstan, giving it the epithet “buckle” of the “belt” that would connect Eurasia. “Belt” and “road” respectively refer to land and sea routes in this Sinocentric global development program.

It is hard to imagine longtime Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev was anything but delighted when he learned of the project, since he has been speaking about “Eurasianism” and “Eurasian integration” since the early 1990s. If you look at Kazakhstan’s 20th century, it’s not hard to see why. Even as part of the Russian Empire, foreigners were completely banned from visiting the region, something which functionally continued throughout the Soviet period. It was the most isolated part of an already isolated Soviet world.

The Steppe invites wholesale economic reconstruction in line with the 21st century realities of regional and global trade, and China’s uniquely successful blend of Leninist statecraft and state-guided capitalist development claims it can do just that. In addition to the political division of the Steppe by borders, the increasing Chinese presence is also beginning to divide it along the lines of ideology and global loyalties. While Belt and Road may have seemed like a dream come true to Central Asian states like Kazakhstan, it is nothing short of a nightmare to its Turkic cousins and countrymen across China’s border to the east.

In the past five years, China has interned as many as a million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other ethnic minorities on its western Steppe territory of Xinjiang. That has gone hand in hand with the physical destruction of everything from small mosques to entire Uyghur towns, which have disappeared off the face of the map seemingly overnight.

China’s actions on the Steppe are in pursuit of similar fundamental goals as the Soviets had, but aided by a far more powerful state, as well as the absolute  surveillance that only digital technology can provide. The Chinese authorities—like the Soviets before them—are trying to completely eliminate the traditional power structures of the Turkic Muslim population, where mosque and family play a higher role than state and party. That is a stepping stone to the full territorialization of the region and integration into a unified Chinese state.

A description of how the Soviet authorities viewed their effort bears a striking resemblance to scenes in Xinijang: “mass education and propaganda would introduce the new socialist morality and undermine Islam, as well as providing technological education.” The prerequisite logic may be identical, since the Soviets were similarly suspicious of the local nomads—whether nominally loyal Communists or not—and believed that “neither a loyal Kazakh elite nor a supportive Kazakh mass base could be created while the traditional authority structure continued to exist.”

But China has additional motivations. It is looking beyond just its portion of the Steppe at a whole Eurasian continent that it hopes to one day dominate. At least part of the logic behind China’s hardline approach in Xinjiang is that the region is a springboard into the rest of Central Asia, and it is one China wants firmly pacified and integrated. The BRI’s external success is in many ways dependent on internal dynamics. Uneven development across the country, as well as the limits of geography on Chinese supply chains, could soon hinder China’s incredible growth rates, a key pillar of the CCP’s legitimacy. The BRI offers a way of easing pressure on Chinese supply chains and developing its interior, laying down the infrastructure for future growth.

Chinese sees the “three evils” of terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism—rife in Xinjiang in the CCP’s eyes—as threats to the internal stability of the country as well as the success of the BRI. Their solution appears to follow in Soviet footsteps by eliminating the culture of the local people and reforming them into Chinese citizens in identity and culture. Kazakhstan served as a warning of what came to Xinjiang. Now, Xinjiang may be a warning to its neighbors as well.

Back across the border in Kazakhstan, locals wonder if Chinese investment—often described by their regimes as a pure positive—could be much more ominous. Roads, bridges, and pipelines may boost GDP and line the pockets of elites with money that average Kazakhs will never see. The reliance on completing BRI projects with Chinese labor ensures this. To this day, what does exist in terms of a middle class in Kazakhstan is focused in the sectors of banking and government, rather than development. Despite the dubious benefits, Kazakhstan sees geopolitical value in joining the project as a balance against Western and Russian interests. But what happens when China wants something in return?

In 2016, a wave of anti-Chinese protests swept the country due to a land bill up for consideration that opponents claimed would allow the Chinese to purchase huge swathes of Kazakh land. The protests were small, but enough to make the government shelve the plans.

Anti-Chinese sentiment is high across central Asia, both because of China’s policies in Xinjiang—which local regimes avoid criticizing—as well as Chinese investments, which are controversial among locals. This is both out of concern for the terms of Chinese loans, which Central Asian countries can’t pay, as well as the fact that primarily Chinese labor is used when building  roads, bridges, and factories from Mongolia to Croatia. Brawls have broken out frequently between locals and Chinese workers on the rare occasions when they do interact.

The Kazakh government is particularly sensitive to the issue, since along with anti-Chinese sentiment comes Kazakh nationalism—two areas the Russian-speaking and Chinese-bribe-taking Kazakh elite is particularly weak on.

People in the Russophone world are also very aware of what is happening across China’s northern border, where for years Russia has been leasing land to Chinese companies at discount rates. The uses for China are almost endless. Timber, soybeans, corn, pork, and countless other food products. All produced for the Chinese market with Chinese labor. Much of the land is leased for a period of 50 to 70 years, where under new regulations companies do not even need permits to hire foreign Chinese workers.

Officially, the Russian government says there are only about 50,000 Chinese in Russia, but unofficial estimates put the number at between 300,000 and 500,000.

Though Russia has about a tenth of the population of China, its far east is host to just 6 million Russians. That is a density of less than one person per square kilometer, less than even Mongolia. Add to that high migration, low birth rates, and general economic hardship, and the prospects for a Russian far east look grim. China probably remembers better than anyone that most of that Russian far east was only added to Russia in the last two centuries and taken during China’s “Century of Humiliation.”

The passive pressure of China’s huge population, economy, and political influence is already visibly changing its neighboring regions in a distinctly Chinese way, but if recent events are a guide of what’s to come, passivity hardly looks like it will be China’s defining feature.

By all indications, China’s ambitions under Xi Jinping are huge and highly focused on strengthening China and its place in the world. Moreover, the Communist Party’s grip on the Chinese political and economic system appears stronger than ever. The two most glaring examples of that are China’s move to fully integrate Hong Kong and the concerted effort to forcibly assimilate the indigenous Turkic peoples of Xinjiang. Both have come up against strong Western objections but enjoy support from much of the rest of the world, including states like Turkey and Pakistan.

The Belt and Road program speaks about cooperation, connectivity, and countless other buzzwords which we familiarly associate with globalization. But the underlying logic behind the BRI as a whole—as well as most of its individual projects—is one of Chinese interests at home and abroad.

Even though there is no official list of BRI projects, there is one distinct feature of every semi-official map floating around the internet: they never include the Americas.

In other words, one of the BRI’s underlying goals is to exclude America from Eurasian affairs entirely, to make China the origin and destination of all global supply chains—a great realignment of the global economy, with major geopolitical implications.

The former may be welcomed across the Steppe as long overdue, but the latter may not be.

The Middle Kingdom

Russia remains an important partner for Kazakhstan and other Steppe countries, as it does to its former satellite Mongolia. But it is a shadow of the interest and involvement it once had. Even as recently as the mid-2000s, Russia was still the most important partner for most of those countries, but not so in 2020. That political vacuum is what Beijing aims to step into.

Nobody must face the implications of China’s power more than its immediate neighbors. And few are as powerless in the face of China’s expansion than its land-rich and people-poor neighbors on the Steppe. China’s development in Xinjiang and other regions, as well as BRI projects abroad, are turning the question of territorial expansion into one of wants and needs, rather than means. China is actively laying down the infrastructure on its peripheries that opens the possibility of further expansion.

If that seems like an exaggeration, consider that recently Chinese state media outlets republished an article by a Chinese historian proposing China annex the Pamir mountain range in Tajikistan, causing a major diplomatic incident between China on one hand and Russia and Tajikistan on the other. China has already opened its first airport near the Pamir mountains in Xinjiang, and it plans to open 30 more—to “promote tourism,” despite just 20,000 Chinese citizens visiting Tajikistan last year. This conflict also comes a few months after another incident with Kazakhstan over an article published in China titled “Why Kazakhstan is eager to return to China.”

These words may not represent the daily thoughts of the highest-ranking members of the Communist Party, but they do reflect an increasingly popular mindset in China that puts the interests and needs of the Chinese state above everything else. The Steppe is rich in land as well as resources such as natural gas and uranium. And, as Steppe people have known for millennia, that land is the most geopolitically important land in Eurasia, serving as a bridge to Afghanistan, Persia, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Europe.

The Soviets territorialized their portion of the Steppe through their particular brand of nation-building and extreme social engineering. Tens of millions of people were moved permanently across the Steppe during the Soviet era: from Tatars and Germans forcibly settled in the Kazakh Steppe to the Kazakhs themselves who were detached from their way of life and forced into Soviet cities and collective farms. But somehow through all this hardship, identities and borders were shaped and solidified and survive to this day in the form of sovereign independent states.

Even when the more visionary statesmen in Central Asia speak of Eurasianism, they know all too well that it does not mean a genuine return to the openness of the Steppe their ancestors once enjoyed. It means cooperation and coexistence of strongly established states with their set borders and firm territorial integrity. It is a miracle of history that—out of the Russian Empire that Lenin described as the “prison of the peoples” and through a 20th century of unimaginable hardships—the Kazakhs, Mongols, Uzbeks, and others emerged intact with entire states in their own hands. The question now is whether this will be enough to secure their future.

To the south of the Steppe, China is expanding into the mountains, and to the north and east into Siberia’s forests. One thing is certain: it will be China and the systems it has devised that will shape the Steppe’s future and the future of those living along its vast plain. The Steppe shaped humanity’s past, but as China’s rise continues unabated, it will shape the futures of both.

The unity that the Mongols brought across the Steppe long ago will never be repeated. Instead, hard borders are solidifying that will confirm the Steppe’s territorial divides. But that is simply the price to be paid to join in the riches of 21st century globalization. Nowadays, not only is there plenty of refreshing kumis to be bought in supermarkets across the Steppe, there is plenty of everything else too. Italian coffee, Swedish furniture, American sneakers. Over the last thirty years goods, people, and ideas, have begun to move along the Steppe once again, and new empires are moving with them.

His “real lessons” are essentially a staunch defense of the USSR and its pre-war diplomacy, particularly the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Moreover, he blames the Western powers and Poland for the outbreak of the war and its eventual horrors.

But the content of the article is less relevant than what it represents about Putin’s historical project, and by extension that of the Kremlin at large. Just over a decade ago, Putin was denouncing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and attempting to reconcile with Moscow’s former imperial subjects. Why is he now talking like a late-Soviet apparatchik?

The article was published just six days before Russia’s scheduled World War II victory parade. Although postponed from the original date of May 9th due to COVID-19, it still took place even while the pandemic raged on in Russia. Victory Day—already hugely important to the Russian government and public alike—seems increasingly significant more than seven decades since the end of the war. Though the iconography may fool you into thinking these parades are some Soviet holdover, only four Victory Day parades—in 1945, 1965, 1985, and 1990—were held in the USSR. Since 1995, one has been held every year, and their importance grows with each celebration.

This post-Soviet reappraisal of history is not unique to Russia, nor is the Kremlin’s revisionism a purely Russian phenomenon. Far from it, Russia is just one player in a game of narrative creation which is pitting states against each other on current geopolitical lines. Across Central and Eastern Europe, countries have been revising and propagating their views of history with state endorsement for decades. As a new iteration of the nation-building of old unfolds, history has once again become a key tool of national political development in modern Eastern Europe.

After decades of cultural and economic stagnation under enforced Communist rule, reexamining history was not at the top of the agenda. Busy with the transition to capitalism and joining Western institutions, and keen not to antagonize the elites of either the Soviet era or the new democratic one (in many countries, they were the same people), the topic was largely left untouched.

But as the initial hardships were overcome, every single Eastern European country has experienced a radical re-imagining of the past in public discourse. Some, like Poland, began in the late ‘90s, with new institutions built to research documents relating to recent history which had been kept in inaccessible state archives. Elsewhere, like in Ukraine and Russia, it took longer for history to find state patronage, but to similar effect.

Diverging, often diametrically opposed views on history have been solidifying on Europe’s new fault lines ever since. While Russia celebrated the victory of Soviet forces in the Great Patriotic War, Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics looked back with scorn at what they see as 45 years of Communist oppression.

National histories have evolved into national ideologies. In nation-states which cherish their history dearly, the line between national and state ideology is becoming blurred. In this pan-Eastern European political development, Russia has become a central player as history pushes the political divide in Eastern Europe into a chasm, drawing in more and more countries from afar.

This war over history, coupled with the major changes to Russia’s constitution passed less than a month ago, are answering questions not just about the Russian Federation’s newfound identity and purpose, but also about its role in history. It is confirming a years-long process among the Russian ruling elite that has solidified nationalism as the country’s state ideology.

Old Stories, New Heroes

Asked in 1989 who they thought the greatest man in history was, 72% of Russians responded with Vladimir Lenin. Asked again almost 30 years later, Lenin had fallen out of favor along with the rest of the Communist Party. Another Vladimir had surpassed him, namely Putin himself.

But so, too, had another man—a man previously cast away and denounced more than half a century ago by Russia’s ruling classes and a man whose crimes defined the USSR in Western imaginations. Joseph Stalin has been reborn in the Russian imagination as the leader who saved Russia in a time of existential war. Despite being a Georgian, and responsible for the deaths of more Russians than any Russian leader in history, he has taken on new life as a Russian national hero. This rebirth is the fruit of a wider effort on the part of the Kremlin to rehabilitate the era during which Russia achieved its greatest military victories and geopolitical might.

Earlier this year, the Russian Orthodox Church consecrated a truly unique cathedral in honor of the 75th anniversary of the Soviet military’s victory in WWII. It is an elegantly geometric gold and dark green construction combining classical Orthodox iconography with WWII-era symbols of the Red Army and futuristic, wire-like patterns. Among the icons is the largest mosaic of Christ’s face in the world. More controversial were planned mosaics which would have included Stalin and Putin himself, the latter celebrating Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. While the Kremlin purportedly shelved these, the cathedral does still seem to include tributes to irregular Russian fighters, one of the few public cases of implicit acknowledgment that such forces have ties to the Russian state.

Stalin’s status as Communist leader is naturally less relevant here than his status as patriotic wartime leader. The Second World War offers a fantastic moral framework for a government to operate in. Insofar as the Russian state bears the mantle of a superpower which defeated Nazism and liberated Europe, it can occupy a unique moral high ground, historically and politically. In that conception, Russia is also a key component of the post-war international order, instead of an aggressive ideological foe. Putin emphasized both points strongly in his essay, particularly the latter.

Meanwhile, so the Russian line goes, an international coalition of neo-Nazis and neo-fascists is looking to destroy that memory and the legacy of the great Soviet victory. They do this in places like the Czech Republic and Poland by tearing down monuments to Soviet soldiers and generals. In Ukraine and the Baltics, states are rewriting history via decommunization and anti-Russian policies. Curiously, this international coalition of neo-fascists does not include Western Europe’s hugely popular far-right parties, which happen to be friendly to, and financed by, Russia.

Accusations of neo-Nazism had been leveled against the Baltic states—with their large Russian minorities and nationalist Baltic majorities—since the early 2000s. In 2014, they found their way to Ukraine in Russian state media after pro-Russian President Yanukovych was ousted by Ukrainian “fascists.” It was an incredible display of the power of historical memory, with Russians eventually rejoicing at the return of their historical province of Crimea and watching with disgust as Russian TV depicted Ukrainians as showing their true neo-Nazi colours.

Not long after, Putin began speaking more often about WWII, first referencing the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 2015 at a press conference with Angela Merkel. He presented it as the last resort of a Soviet Union which had been isolated by Western inaction into preserving peace in Europe one-on-one. It was not the first case of historical revisionism in Russia, nor was it the first time history was used as justification for actions abroad, but it was one of the first public signs of Russia’s developing national ideology.

Ideology is a problem Russia has struggled to deal with as much as any Eastern European country since the collapse of Communism. But, unlike Poland for example, Russia is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and trans-continental country whose titular ethnicity is spread across more than a dozen states. It is no easy task to build an ideology capable of uniting and guiding such a country, nor was one readily available.

Liberalism failed to do so in the 1990s, remembered by older Russians as the worst decade in recent history. Conversely, neither extreme nationalism, nor a return to Communism offered an attractive enough alternative either. The threat of either one taking hold in Russia in the ‘90s was real, as was the fusion of the two in a so-called red-brown coalition, but neither came to pass.

But as it turns out, the key does lie in the USSR, which 75% of Russians consider to be the greatest period in their country’s history. But what they remember is not the stagnant and corrupt USSR of Leonid Brezhnev, nor the collapsing USSR of Gorbachev. Specifically, Russians rally to the memory of a USSR which, led by a great and patriotic Russian people, defeated the Nazis and saved half of Europe from extermination.

Unlike the annual Victory Day parades, the syncretic mix of patriotism with Soviet characteristics is no modern invention, nor is it quite the much feared red-brown coalition come to fruition. Rather, it is a product of wartime Stalinism, resuscitated to serve the needs of Russia’s ruling elite. To rally the population behind his regime as the Nazis stormed across Russia, Stalin turned not to dogmatic Communism, but rather to the potent force of Russian patriotism.

Stalin’s USSR was not guided by traditional Communist internationalism, but by Stalin’s idea of “Socialism in One Country.” That national-communist idea emerged from Marxist theory, but it also played a major role in Russian national development. It was Stalin himself who embraced and developed Russian nationalist ideology to save the Soviet Union from complete collapse.

In public speeches during the war, Stalin spoke of the “great Russian people” frequently and referenced past Russian heroes, such as medieval Prince Alexander Nevsky and aristocratic General Mikhail Kutuzov, to inspire his troops. These Russian generals even joined Lenin on Stalin’s wall in his office during the war. Additionally, Stalin revived the once-persecuted Russian Orthodox Church in a bizarre synthesis of Communist state atheism and Orthodoxy.

The revived church was in large part controlled by the Soviet security services, and the NKVD was involved directly in church electoral procedures. Interestingly enough, though, their criteria were not adherence or sympathy to Communist ideas, but rather a candidate’s “civic or patriotic work.” Despite the Soviet persecution of the church, Stalin played a historic role not just in Russian history, but in the history of the Orthodox Church as well.

That explains the juxtaposition of Stalin—Communist leader and destroyer of Moscow’s central Orthodox Cathedral—being immortalized in the Russian military’s new cathedral. Stalin may have been a Communist, and the Orthodox Church may be Christian, but both played a crucial role in Russian national development, and now they have found a new life as pillars of Russian national state ideology.

As part of a set of comprehensive constitutional reforms Russians only just ratified, the Russian state will enshrine in law the right and obligation of the state to “protect historical truth.”

Time will tell how Russia acts on that obligation.

A New Intermarium

On a trip to Odessa last year, I stumbled across an old Polish Catholic Church. Half out of interest and half to escape from the scorching summer heat, I went inside. It was empty—few Poles remain in Ukraine after all. But it had been lavishly refurbished. Among the glowing marble and impeccably restored art, emblazoned with Polish and Ukrainian inscriptions, stood a series of placards. Like the church, the placards were bilingual and together created some kind of exhibition.

The title — “Order No. 00485.”

A reference to NKVD Order No. 00485, which led to the execution of over 100,000 mostly educated Poles in a targeted anti-Polish campaign by the Soviet security services. Stalin’s picture graces the placard titled “Architects of the Crime,” along with other top Soviet leaders.

An unambiguous message. But from whom?

The exhibition is a project of the Polish Institute for National Remembrance, Poland’s flagship institution in Eastern Europe’s burgeoning history wars. Founded in 1998 as part of Poland’s decommunization efforts to deal with study of the Communist regime, its scope quickly expanded, along with its influence.

The Institute itself is divided into three branches. The first is a judicial one to promote legal action against those who committed “crimes against the Polish nation.” A second one declassifies documents from the Communist period, disseminating these findings among the public. The Institute inherited documents—nearly 80km worth—from the secret archives of the Communist regime and maintained exclusive access to all of them. These documents were particularly sensitive and powerful since they included the names of collaborators and informants of the Communist regime.

But the flagship branch of the Institute is the third: the Public Education Office (BEP). The BEP used its vaguely defined role to immense effect from the very beginning. It published books, hosted conferences, academic clubs, helped with youth education, teachers’ training, and much, much more.

Its prominent role in Polish society grew exponentially after Poland’s 2005 elections. A wave of anti-establishment fervor followed a “lustration mania” caused by the leaking of thousands of names of alleged collaborators from the Institute’s archives, which accused many prominent public figures. It helped the nationalist Law and Justice party win a decisive victory. They then replaced the head of the Institute with a more nationalist historian and more than doubled its budget.

The Institute’s activities became even broader. It made a board game for children in which you are forced to queue for goods under Communism, and it also organized holiday camps and historical re-enactments. In a very controversial exhibition, it displayed the names and biographies of local secret police officers on public squares and major streets. When Law and Justice returned to power, reinvigorated, in 2015, it ordered the Institute to popularize history as “an element of patriotic education.” The Institute has been stepping up its activities at home and abroad ever since.

The Institute’s exhibition in Odessa is not the only one. Such exhibitions can be found in other cities in Ukraine and in various Polish cultural outposts as far as the UK and the U.S. And there is no confusion as to who the heroes and villains in these histories are.

In the newly opened Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk—made in collaboration with leading Western historians—the Polish story of the war is told in state-of-the-art detail. The very first part of the exhibition dedicates three separate rooms to the three perpetrators of the war—Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and, the Soviet Union.

While Stalin enjoys approval ratings of 70% in Russia, the rest of Eastern Europe is tearing away any legacy the Soviets left behind. For the past year, Ukraine has been going through a sweeping period of decommunization since the government made illegal all Soviet symbols and positive references to the USSR in the media. In the Czech Republic, the tearing down of a statue of Soviet General Konev has led the Russian Minister of Defence to open an international criminal case against those responsible.

To the nations of Central and Eastern Europe, Putin’s account of Soviet history is seen as not only an insult, but a threat to the national ideologies that form the bedrock of their modern statehood. Soviet liberation was a new occupation which subjugated them to decades of Russian rule, which they have only recently freed themselves from. In their histories, Russian imperialism is a major threat to the nation and has merely taken a new form in modern Russian politics, just as it did under the red star. Any political faction not explicitly focused on an ethnic Russian support base can easily gain popularity with a patriotic stance against the Kremlin.

Were this conflict limited to bilateral remarks between Russia and Eastern European countries, it may not have grown so large, and Russian leaders may not have taken to so publicly lecturing the world about WWII. But the intensification over the past year that culminated in Putin’s article is the result of Eastern European states enlisting the help of their far larger and more powerful allies.

In 2019, the European Parliament adopted a resolution which placed equal guilt for the outbreak of WWII on the Soviet Union. Russia took offense to the USSR being equated with Nazi Germany and responded in kind. As if not to be outdone by the Europeans, Washington gave its own support to its eastern allies. In a joint statement with the Foreign Ministers of Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to mark the 75th anniversary of the end of WWII, Nazi Germany was mentioned just once, in the first paragraph. The remainder of the six paragraphs dealt with Soviet rule over Eastern Europe.

For a statement commemorating the end of the Second World War, it is incredibly light on comments related to the war or the Allies’ chief enemy.

Russia’s Identity and Belonging

History has always been a contentious issue in Eastern Europe. History was used and abused to justify numerous annexations, expulsions, and genocides throughout the 20th century. But, conversely, it was with history that modern states could claim to represent entire nations, sometimes quite literally saving those nations from extermination. History allowed these states to free themselves from the clutches of the foreign empires—Russia included—that ruled over their lands for centuries and find new life as modern nation-states.

Communists viewed history differently, as a grand predetermined march in which nations played only a transient role. By the 1980s, it looked to many like the Communists had indeed stamped out ethnic and national identities and built some new “Soviet man.” Very few predicted ethnic and national tensions would unravel the world’s second greatest power as well as its satellites.

The Yugoslav Wars offered an early indicator of the power of history in contemporary Eastern Europe. Croatia’s War for Independence, for example, went beyond a drive for political independence. It served as a complete repudiation of the entire Yugoslav Communist mythos. Serbia meanwhile—then still Yugoslavia under a red star—was fighting to save patriotic Serbs from a rabble of Croatian Nazis and “Turks.”

Ignoring the clear logic of the conflicting national ideologies at work, Western journalists descended on the region to explain to those at home how ancient ethnic rivalries were tearing apart Tito’s much-admired Yugoslavia. The focus on a clash of civilizations missed out on the far more important revival of nation-states and the ideologies which formed them.

Few predicted a similar story would play out decades later between Russia and Ukraine. While the end of history was being declared in Washington, it was only entering a new cycle for half of Europe. The nation-states dreamed up by Central European thinkers in the 19th century have become a hard-fought 21st century reality.

Putin’s article—like his speech—calls on the world to create a “common reliable security system,” recalling the one founded after WWII with the USSR one of the founding members. In American eyes, with Georgia and Crimea in mind, it was Russia itself that tore up the foundations of the global security system in its cold pursuit of national interest. And accusations of cold national interest have come hand in hand with accusations of neo-Sovietism and neo-imperialism. Conversely, Russia interprets these accusations as mere justifications, similar to those used by NATO during its previous Eastern European interventions.

Putin courting the American public through a historical article is something you may expect from the Prime Minister of Bulgaria or Ukraine—not the leader of a purported great power. Decades of failed Russian diplomacy have left the country isolated from the West it was so eager to join in the 1990s, only for the country to follow its former satellites down a similar path of national development.

But is the modern Russian state any different than its Imperial or Soviet predecessors?

The Russian Empire brought entire nations, and thereby tens of millions of people in foreign lands, under its rule in a matter of decades. The USSR, in turn, shifted ancient national borders at will. Modern Russia strains its economy to sponsor breakaway ethnic Russian states in countries themselves weak and peripheral. In both strength and territorial sway, it does not possess the might of previous eras of Russian history.

Russia took longer to get here than Poland, Croatia, or the Baltics. It toyed with various technocratic and liberal solutions to its identity problem along the way, but it has arrived at the same conclusion. As much as Russian nationalists love to speak about Russia’s “Eurasian” character and celebrate the country’s distinctive characteristics, Russia is as European as it gets. Specifically, its geopolitical realities and the ideological stance taken by the Russian state mirrors nothing so much as that of its Eastern European rivals.

Common epithets like neo-Soviet, Eurasianist, and neo-imperialist rarely refer to a genuinely adopted ideology within Russia’s elite. Neo-Soviet means little when the ruling elite actually stems from the Soviet era. Nor does Eurasian refer to much beyond the country’s geopolitical position, considering Russia’s extreme centralization and the fringe status of actual “Eurasianists.” Neo-imperialist is perhaps the most accurate charge, but it oversells the reach and ambition of Russia’s nationalism. Russia may be a nation that has inherited an empire, but that does not displace the centrality of Russian nationalism in the modern state’s identity.

The idea that may come closest to describing modern Russia is the “civilizational state,” but even this falls short. Fundamentally, a civilization ends up reaching far beyond its founding people or city. Its state, culture, and language end up tying together many different regions and peoples. In that sense, Soviet rule approached something more like this model than the Russian Federation does. Nationalism is about a single people and its historical identity.

Is Russia the same as the small homogeneous nation-states of east-central Europe? Of course not. But does Russia look, sound, and act like them? Absolutely, and even more so with each passing day. Nationalism, we must not forget, tore both Yugoslavia and the USSR apart. It was the pursuit of a unified national state that drove Serbian armed forces into Croatia and Bosnia, and similarly the pursuit of national unification saw Russian troops arrive in Ukraine to liberate their Russian brethren.

Returning your nation’s long-lost historic provinces would get you immense popularity anywhere in Eastern Europe under the right political conditions, and Russia is no different. That does not mean that Putin or the Russian leadership is motivated by such a desire for national unification, but it was the path they followed in Ukraine and have stayed on since. It is the political manifestation of centuries of national myth-making that has made the nation-states of central and eastern Europe what they are today, Russia included.

In its amended constitution, the multinational Russian Federation has confirmed that those who speak the Russian language are the country’s “state-forming people.” In the same clause, the description of the Russian Federation as a “union of a multinational people” became a “union of multinational peoples.” It is a subtle but important distinction. The former implies a multitude of nationalities that form one people in a united Russian state. The newly amended phrase defines a multitude of peoples, of which Russians are at the top.

In Russian, there is an important distinction made between the adjective российский (rossiyskiy) and русский (ruskiy). The former denotes a belonging to the Russian state—hence Российская Федерация (Rossiyskaya Federatsiya)—while the latter refers to an ethnicity. That clause confirms that while it may be a Rossiyskaya Federatsiya, it is more importantly a ruskiy state. If there was ever any doubt before as to what modern Russia is, that clause has removed it.

The Kremlin’s grand project of building a history is not, ultimately, verging upon a new political syncretism. Behind the apparent contradictions of Soviet and Russian Orthodox symbols displayed side-by-side is a strikingly traditional political goal, one undertaken by states across Europe and the Western world. The Russian Federation is embracing its role in history as the first Russian nation-state.

The first domino to fall was Poland, and it has been the poster child for post-Communist success ever since. After decades of Communist rule, it became the model free market capitalist state in Eastern Europe and a fiercely committed member of NATO. With purchasing power considered, Poland is now a trillion-dollar economy.

Though Poland was—and is—the symbolic first, others have followed in its footsteps to comparable or even greater success. The Baltics, Slovakia, Czechia, and Slovenia have all seen rapid and transformational economic growth, bringing their standards of living ever closer to their Western counterparts.

Ubiquitous grey concrete block-on-block buildings have been transformed into colorful, modern apartments complete with all the latest IKEA furnishings and electrical appliances found in European households from Lisbon to Stockholm. Newly built skyscrapers housing multinational companies have made cities like Warsaw and Bratislava look more modern than many old-fashioned Western European cities. Communism, day by day, becomes a distant memory in Central Europe.

But not for everyone. For all of Eastern Europe’s capitalist success stories, there are failures, too.

The biggest is no doubt Poland’s eastern neighbor, Ukraine. The two countries share comparable population levels, history, cuisine, and similar languages. Unfortunately for the Ukrainians, what they do not share is fortunes.

Thirty years on from the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has failed on all fronts. It has failed to build an economy that can provide its people with a decent standard of living. Failed at securing itself from foreign threats. Failed to reconcile its two national groups. And above all, it has failed to develop stable political institutions.

Credit certainly goes to Europe and America for their ambition and will to welcome Poland into the Western fold, but it also goes to Poland’s post-Communist elite. While in Ukraine the new elites abused the new system and plundered what they could, the new Polish democrats steered their country down a path of growth.

For “European” Eastern Europe, the post-Communist story has been largely positive. Development, freedom, security. With many problems, to be sure, but compared with 1991, genuine progress.

But for Europe’s second largest country—one double the size of Poland—that success never came.

For 30 years, Ukraine has been treading water in no-man’s land. In one half of the country, people pull Ukraine towards Central Europe, and in the other, some have gone so far as to take up arms to rejoin Russian civilization. The world watches on with indifference.

It is not an easy place to understand, but it is an easy place to caricature. It is a country full of divisions, the most poignant of which is language. But that divide in language conceals a much deeper divide about the very identity of the country itself. Russian and Ukrainian are the two main languages spoken in Ukraine, but they are not really the issue dividing the country.

Those two languages are connected to two deeper identities. Two views of history, two visions of the future.

Not long ago, I went to Ukraine, and saw its two faces reflected in two of its most historic cities—Lviv and Odessa. It was an eye-opening experience, and one that I cherish even more now that the open world we once traversed freely disappeared in a matter of weeks. I traveled from Zagreb to Odessa through Lviv by land, crossing half a dozen countries along the way. I wanted to get to know Ukraine, but I got more than I bargained for.

Eastwards

There is something special about traveling long distances on land. Flying is so commonplace nowadays that it’s easy to lose a sense of space in the world. Everything about flying is optimized. Pristine and organized terminals. Strict rules and regulations. Invasive security, unparalleled by any other everyday situation. Point A to point B, as quickly as possible, as safely as possible. No surprises.

But stick to the Earth, and you get none of that.

My final destination was Odessa, tucked away in Ukraine’s Southwest corner. I decided from my formerly working class Zagreb neighborhood, now graced with boutique hotels and hipster cafes, that I would get there by bus. Or train. I wasn’t actually sure, because it isn’t something people do. There isn’t even a direct Zagreb-Odessa flight, let alone a train or bus connection. It would take some piecing together to get there.

It ended up taking over a week, admittedly with a few stops along the way.

My route took me through Slovakia by train, with a short hiking detour in the High Tatras, before arriving in the eastern Slovak city of Košice, which lies just 50 miles from the Ukrainian border. In other words, the eastern border of the European Union. Just 50 miles from a country that has been at war with Russia longer than the entirety of Europe was embroiled in World War II.

I would be lying if I said it was exceptionally apparent that Košice is on the edge of “Europe.” It is actually pretty impressive as far as small Eastern European cities go, but there was one telling sign—a Georgian restaurant. Georgian food is akin to the Italian food of the former Soviet Union. You can find it everywhere—but outside of the former USSR, it is a rare find. This was no accident; I was approaching real Eastern Europe.

The next day, I took the small two-cabin train to Mukachevo, a provincial Ukrainian city in Western Ukraine.

The border is the most serious one I’ve seen in Europe. Even though you know the guard towers and barbed wire fences are not meant for you, it is unsettling. The Slovak border guards look like local drunks, opening a few random bags and rummaging through them in what looks more like a performative act of security theater to make it look like they’re doing their job than like any serious work.

The Ukrainian guards are far more professional. They look like a military force. A stereotypical young blonde Ukrainian woman checks all our passports and after a short wait they let us through. Welcome to Ukraine.

Land of Red and Black

The whole border experience felt like something from another era, an experience abolished in “Europe” long ago. Most of Europe is borderless, and even when entering, Europeans only need a card that fits in their wallet. Futuristic new facial recognition cameras scan them through. But Ukraine can barely even afford to defend itself after all. It is a country at the edge of Europe fighting for its life. For some kind of life.

Ukraine is the second poorest country in Europe—second only to Moldova, itself a nation trapped in limbo by armed Russian separatists. To put it into perspective, the nominal GDP per capita in Ukraine is $3,000, three times lower than the poorest EU country, and ten times lower than Slovenia, the richest formerly communist country per capita. That means Ukraine’s GDP per capita is just 5.6% of Germany’s and 4.8% of America’s.

Arriving in Mukachevo, it’s hard to miss that. The big cities in Ukraine don’t feel as bad, with the country’s sizable upper class and streams of tourists ensuring a respectable level of development. But Mukachevo, this small town in provincial Ukraine, feels truly underdeveloped.

So close to Europe, and yet so far.

From the platform, we were dropped off at the main train station. The dirt roads made everything in and around the station feel dusty and run-down. The station itself didn’t look like it had changed much since Soviet times. The train schedule was somehow written by hand despite reaching up the wall a dozen meters.

I must admit I was relieved to board the train to Lviv. I wouldn’t call Mukachevo a culture shock—more of a social shock. Just a couple days before, I had been in Vienna, by many measures one of the most developed cities in the world. Here—just a few hours away—I was surrounded by the kind of poverty you only encounter in those provincial parts of Eastern Europe that have not yet had the economic fortune of joining the European Union.

The remarkably slow trip to Lviv is enjoyable, if for nothing else than the lovely scenery. Impressive rolling hills accompany you much of the way as you cut through the Ukrainian portion of the Carpathian Mountains. The villages feel rustic, as if untouched by the long 20th century. This region managed to escape Ukraine’s worst historical trauma—the Holodomor. It was annexed by the Soviet Union later, after the Second World War.

What really caught my attention, though, was the enormous black and red flag painted on a wall at some unnamed provincial train station. That black and red flag—in the style of the Ukrainian national flag only with red replacing the blue and black replacing the yellow—was the flag of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the country’s controversial paramilitary army during the Second World War.

This black and red flag is a common sight in Western Ukraine, though less so in other parts. In Ukraine, it is a symbol of the country’s long historical struggle for independence, which only came in 1991 after a 20th century filled with brutality and tragedy not known to Western Europe for generations.

Since 1991, regional administrations—mostly in Western Ukraine—have erected numerous monuments to UPA soldiers and their leader, the infamous Stepan Bandera. In some towns in Western Ukraine, the red and black flag even hangs from government buildings and schools on certain holidays.

For much of the country—especially to those in the diaspora—this was the Ukrainian army. The Ukrainian army which, though not perfect, fought to free Ukrainians from Stalin’s murderous and even genocidal rule over the country.

But for close to 50 years, this was not the army Ukrainians were taught fought for their freedom. No, that was the Red Army. And for much of the country, the Red Army remains the fighting force they look back on with pride. For this other half of the country, the UPA are their brutal, Nazi-collaborating enemies.

To counteract the monuments being placed in the country’s nationalist west, those in the east and south have erected their own ones to the victims of the UPA. In 2007, one such monument was opened in Simferopol—in Crimea—and the following year one in Svatove, near Luhansk. These were hardly the actions of some pro-Russian rabble either, with a 2010 opening of a monument to the victims of the UPA attended by the Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine.

Political disagreements exist in every country, of course, but this is something altogether more precarious. Ukraine spent hundreds of years under Polish, Austrian, and Russian rule, then close to 70 more under Soviet rule. For hundreds of years, external powers have been defining Ukraine, often with brutal force.

Now, for the first time in centuries, Ukrainians must decide on their own what their place in the world will be. This presumably first entails agreeing on what exactly comprises the Ukrainian state. On its western flank, Ukraine is bordered by a series of ethnically and linguistically homogeneous Central European states, flourishing as full members of the European Union and as a new anti-Russian coalition. Those in the west of the country think of this as a reflection of what Ukraine could be.

But in the east and in the north, Ukraine borders two countries, Russia and Belarus, that also draw their history back to the very capital of Ukraine itself, via the Kievan Rus’—two countries with which Ukraine has shared centuries of history. To many Ukrainians, that shared history is dear. They share language, culture, and customs, and for millions of Ukrainian citizens, they are themselves Russians. Those in the east hope that Ukraine can revive its past role as a special part of a distinct Russian civilization.

But for now both halves, Russian and Ukrainian, will have to wait to see their vision of Ukraine become a reality.

Mitteleuropa

Taking the same route I did to Lviv, you pass through six different countries that little more than 100 years ago were one empire under Habsburg rule. Even now, though you cross many borders (sometimes without realizing), the feeling of Mitteleuropa never really leaves you. Not until you step out of Lviv’s railway station, which is far more reminiscent of the Soviet Union than the Austrian Empire.

Run down, half-constructed sidewalks and poorly paved roads packed with junky old cabs greet you as far as the eye can see. That experience is short-lived, and the feeling of Mitteleuropa returns with a force some minutes after picking up the nearest taxi and entering the city’s old town.

Even by Central European standards, Lviv is magnificent. You can walk seemingly for ages without the nostalgic centuries-old buildings and endless cobblestone streets leaving you for dreary Eastern European blocs. Not only that, but the city’s landmarks carry a weight of grandeur, of real importance. Unsurprisingly, that’s because the city was once important.

Before the First World War, Lviv was the fifth largest city in the Austrian Empire. It was more than double the size of two present-day European capitals, Zagreb and Bratislava, and far larger even than Krakow. That’s particularly important, since it means Lviv was the largest and most important Polish city in the Austrian Empire. Back then, Lviv was about half Polish, though the surrounding area was Ukrainian and about a fifth of the city itself was, too.

That explains why the city is flooded with Polish tourists, coming to see Poland as it once was. Or, coming to see their ancestral home. In fact, I met a man doing exactly that during my stay. His family had lived here until 1945, and he had come to find his family’s grave. I can only assume there are many more cases like this. After the Second World War, Lviv was “depolonized,” and today barely any Poles remain.

But despite the lack of remaining Poles, their residual influence is hard to miss. An enormous monument to Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz still graces one of the city’s central squares. Old churches remain full of Polish graves and inscriptions. Polish has even left its mark on the local dialect, which retains many Polish loanwords. But despite Lviv’s Polish roots, it is, and historically has been, a bastion of Ukrainian nationalism.

In Lviv, Russian is often met with a look of frustration and potentially even hostility. Even when it doesn’t provoke quite such a strong reaction, people in Lviv almost exclusively prefer to speak Ukrainian. Most people understand Russian, but they will respond in Ukrainian.

After all, “You’re in Ukraine, speak Ukrainian.”

So I was told by a friend of mine from Lviv. Which, I must say, is a fair point. Lviv is in Ukraine, and the state language is Ukrainian. Ukrainians go through their entire education in Ukrainian, all public signs are in Ukrainian, so naturally the people speak Ukrainian. Why is it, then, that large swathes of Ukraine prefer to speak Russian?

You could say a minority, and that would be correct, but this is a minority of almost 15 million people, 30% of the country. Not only that, but in terms of daily use of the language, that number creeps even higher, with over half the country using at least some Russian in their day-to-day lives. And, most importantly, those Russian speakers are concentrated in major cities, meaning in most of the cultural and economic centers of the country, Russian remains dominant.

Of all those cities, Odessa is perhaps the greatest example. It stands in stark contrast to Lviv.

The train from Lviv to Odessa takes some 12 hours. Those hours drag on endlessly, especially when the people in the next cabin are a bit too fond of vodka, dried fish, and “singing.”

I was initially a bit concerned to find I would be sharing the cabin with a large shirtless Ukrainian man covered in  tattoos and wearing a gold chain, but quickly found out that my concerns were ill-founded. Both he and his girlfriend were amiable and more than happy to chat with their foreign cabinmates. Speaking to them in Russian, and having just come from Lviv, I was interested in hearing what they had to say about their identity and the language they use.

Like most Russian-speaking Ukrainians, they identify as Ukrainian, but have a strong attachment to Russian linguistic identity. When I asked what language Ukrainians prefer in general, he was about as helpful as most statistics available, with the main takeaway being—it’s complicated. He estimated it is about 50-50 Russian-Ukrainian overall, and 70-30 in major cities—in favor of Russian.

The reason it’s so hard to say is that all Ukrainians know Ukrainian, and most therefore identify it as their native language. But most Ukrainians also speak Russian, and many are, in fact, Russians. The Russian community in Ukraine is the largest Russian diaspora community in the world—some 8.3 million according to the 2001 census, the only one ever held in independent Ukraine. That number has gone down, though, considering the overall population of Ukraine has dropped by an estimated 6 million since 2001.

That drop is evidence of two things: an economy crippled by corruption and inequality unable to provide a respectable standard of living to its people, and the annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbass by Russia. Two separate but closely connected issues.

While I never came close to the frontlines, it is hard to miss that the country is at war, even in its most western parts, over 1,000 kilometers away. The most memorable example I found was in Lviv, in the Saints Peter and Paul Garrison Church. I entered out of sheer curiosity, not expecting anything more than the usual touristic church experience but came face to face with something striking.

A large Ukrainian flag graced with an image of Jesus Christ and the words “God and Ukraine above all!” hangs from a several-meter-tall wooden cross with the black and red flag set behind it. On one side of the cross, a large icon of the Virgin Mary and on the other Jesus Christ, with the text of a poem called “The Warrior’s Prayer” in between. And, placed carefully all around, warped pieces of metal of all shapes and sizes, unmistakably identifiable as the remnants of instruments of war deployed in the bloodlands of Eastern Ukraine, where tens of thousands have lost their lives. A shrine to the defenders of Ukraine.

Continuing along the length of the church, dozens of human-sized posters commemorate the soldiers who have lost their lives in the war. But even more prominently displayed are the innocent faces of children who have been left fatherless by the war, their mourning faces underscored by even sadder quotes about their fathers. One boy, aged six, says “I dream of building tram tracks to the cloud where my daddy lives,” while a girl, just three years old but brightly smiling in the photo, says “Daddy is in the heavens. Daddy, where are you? I want to feel your embrace, I want you back!”

At the altars, people knelt in intense prayer, verging on tears. There was no need to ask why; it was all around me.

Back to the Balkans

In Odessa, I disembarked the train along with several soldiers. Returning home, I hope. Greeting us in huge letters on top of the train station—Welcome to the Hero City of Odessa!

You could be forgiven for mistaking the heroes that sign refers to as the heroes arriving at the train station that day. In fact, hero-city in this case refers to a Soviet city awarded for its extraordinary heroism during the Great Patriotic War—as the Eastern Front is called in Russian. It used to be called the same in Ukrainian, but that was legally changed by the Ukrainian parliament in 2015 as part of sweeping decommunization laws.

Those decommunization laws were passed under previous President Petro Poroshenko, causing much consternation among large swathes of Ukraine’s population. Not only have numerous statues and monuments been torn down, but tens of thousands of streets, squares, and places have been renamed as well. Over the last five years, Ukraine has been rewriting not just its past, but its present.

But this kind of reappraisal of history as displayed in the public sphere is commonplace in Ukraine, with those decommunization laws being just the latest in a long line of historical warfare. A recent example, not long after I had left, was the extralegal tearing down of a monument to Soviet Marshal Zhukov—who led the liberation of Odessa in the Second World War—by a group of nationalists.

That monument stood right off the square where 48 Ukrainians were killed in 2014 in clashes following the Euromaidan Revolution. That revolution was the second Ukraine experienced within a decade, both times ousting pro-Russian politicians in favor of more nationalist Ukrainians. Long before the controversial decommunization laws, Odessa was the site of the controversial replacement of a Soviet monument. But in Odessa, it was not a monument to the soldiers of the UPA that went up in its place, nor to infamous Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera. Instead—in Ukraine’s third largest city—a monument to Russian Empress Catherine the Great was restored in one of the city’s main squares.

Catherine founded Odessa by imperial decree in 1794, and in the following century it became a favorite retreat for Russia’s ruling classes, and as such grew to become a culturally iconic metropolis. Great Russian writers like Pushkin and Gogol called the city home, along with dozens of others of artists, writers, and poets famous in Russia and abroad. The city was also—like Lviv—a major cultural center for Eastern European Jews, who have left a deep imprint on the city’s unique culture.

Odessa is one of those cities that holds a stronger local identity than most. It is one of the most traditionally multicultural cities I know of, historically populated not just by Russians, Jews, and Ukrainians, but also Poles, Germans, Tatars, Romanians, and many more. Even Greeks, some of whom in 1814 set the movement for Greek Independence in motion in Odessa itself. On one central street, a Polish Catholic church sits right next to a Crimean Tatar restaurant across the street from a Jewish deli.

But despite the traditional makeup of the city, nowadays it is unmistakably Ukrainian. Ukrainian  in the widest sense, not in the ethnic sense. As elsewhere, street signs, advertisements, restaurant menus, and basically everything else written publicly is all in Ukrainian. But the people—nearly all of them—speak Russian day-to-day.

The one place you may hear Ukrainian is “in the markets”, as many will say. True as it may be, “in the markets” is more a euphemism for how Russian speakers view Ukrainian in much of the country. A peasant language that serves more as a source of mockery than a means for communication. This is partly why current comedian turned President Volodimir Zelensky’s popularity in the west has remained weak. He himself a Russian speaker, his comedy sketches relentlessly mocked Ukrainian for years.

Odessa is a city of markets, though. No doubt a result of its storied history as a major port and trading hub. I’ve been told many times that if you have not visited Odessa’s famous Pryvoz market, you haven’t really been there. A bit of an exaggeration, but the markets are an important feature of Odessan culture. Another famous one is the book market—Knizhka.

Dozens of sellers offer an impressive selection of books, ranging from highly decorated anthologies of great Russian writers to boxes of second-hand books sold for cents. I asked one merchant sporting a small red and black flag if he had any Ukrainian history books in Russian. He said no: “They’re all written by Putin.” Oddly enough, though, interspersed with the book sellers are stands selling exotic foreign goods, like double-stuff Oreos and Dr. Pepper.

These sellers have switched from trading in books to high-fructose corn syrup not out of choice, but out of necessity. Ukraine’s already faltering economy was ravaged by the war in 2014, and it has never recovered. That has meant unimaginable hardship for millions of Ukrainians, no matter their proximity to the warzone. Some have turned to premium foreign goods to sustain themselves, but for others such opportunities have not presented themselves.

About 1.5 million Ukrainians have been displaced because of the war, with close to a million more finding refuge abroad, largely in Poland. For the rest, low wages, endemic corruption, and political stagnation offer little hope for the future.

This is the experience shared by Ukrainians in both Lviv and Odessa, in the west and the east, no matter their language of preference. This is the real face of Ukraine, the one its citizens are forced to face every single day. Language has its role in a fair share of conflicts in the country, but few Ukrainians have the luxury to worry about language or identity when they are struggling to get by.

Ukrainians want their country to provide for them. They want their country to be free and independent. But they know they can’t go at it alone. Russia accepted them as is, but much of Ukraine did not want to stay as is. The West wanted them to change, but much of Ukraine did not want to change. Instead, they got the worst of both worlds.

A Nation Divided, but by What?

You can see the language divide on a map. You can see it in statistics. At first glance, you can see it everywhere. But despite everything I have just written, the divide is not really in the two languages at all. Nearly everyone in the country is proficient in both languages, with much of the country seamlessly combining the two in everyday speech. The divide does not come from an inability to understand one another. It comes from two deeply entrenched and radically opposed Ukrainian identities, both looking for political life in a state shared by their most bitter rivals.

Lviv was my first real experience with Ukraine, and maybe the only place that I felt fully in Ukraine as a nation-state. But there is more to Ukraine than just a narrowly Ukrainian Central European nation-state. Odessa is just as Ukrainian as Lviv, but it is a different kind of Ukrainian that belongs to the state of Ukraine no less than the superficially more “Ukrainian” parts.

Though the two are complete opposites in many regards, they do share one unmistakable characteristic. In both cities, there is a total disconnect between the animate and the inanimate. There is the city of stone and concrete where centuries of history stand unmoved by time, and the city of the people who now call these cities home.

Lviv, for centuries a great Polish city and towards the turn of the 20th century the fifth largest city of the Austrian Empire, now stands as a bastion of modern Ukrainian nationalism at the forefront of Ukrainization. Odessa, meanwhile, once a grand project embodying the success and ambition of the Russian Empire, now finds itself on the periphery of a peripheral country which Russian culture long considered backwards peasants.

Ukraine is in a very tough spot when it comes to nation-building. In Central and Eastern Europe, it is one of a handful of countries which had little experience with modern statehood when it became independent in the 1990s. No modern statehood also means no chance for nation building within its current borders. Any nation-building in the early 20th century was largely limited to the efforts of extreme nationalists and Russified Soviets, neither of which offer a particularly appealing foundation.

But those are the foundations Ukraine is left with nonetheless, and two different Ukraines continue to build on those foundations in two opposite directions. The failure to reconcile these two groups has already been exploited by Russia once. Once more and the two faces of Ukraine may become two states of Ukraine.

As I was leaving Ukraine, a refugee from the Donbass gave me a lift to the airport. Like many, he gets by with “biznyes.” He dropped me off at Odessa’s beautiful new airport terminal where I bid him farewell, and he in turn wished me luck. He returned ten minutes later to tell me my flight was not actually at this terminal and instead at the old one which was about as run-down as the Mukachevo train station.

“Why aren’t they using the new terminal?” I asked him.

“There’s no reason,” he chuckled. “Welcome to Ukraine.”

Those were the exact words spoken by National Security Advisor John Bolton when asked whether the U.S. would support a territorial exchange between Kosovo and Serbia. He responded that it would, which was later confirmed by a State Department spokesman. This radical shift in American policy in the Balkans—and it is a radical shift indeed—will have ramifications far beyond the borders of Kosovo. By endorsing the option of a revision of borders along ethnic lines, the U.S. risks reopening the conflict it helped bring to an end with the Dayton Agreement. A border revision handled poorly risks plunging the troubled region into open conflict—this time, a conflict which would involve NATO and EU member states, creating a huge rift in a Western world already in crisis.

Unsurprisingly, Russia has been quietly fueling tensions through military, financial, and political support for nationalists on all sides. Turkey has also been painting itself as the natural and greatest ally of not just Bosnia’s Muslims, but of the Muslims of the Balkans as a whole. Even China has recently involved itself, providing enormous loans to both Montenegro and Bosnia as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. The hawks are circling.

Changing Winds

Although Bolton may be the first to state it plainly, the reality is that the West has lost interest in the Balkans. Any change to the status quo would necessitate immense political will on the part of the U.S. and the EU. But their political will is focused on more pressing issues. And so, after years of growing disinterest, the Western Balkans have been abandoned as the last remaining power vacuum in Europe. Increasingly, the region is returning to its condition as a battleground between competing powers and a land where civilizations meet and clash. For centuries the Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim worlds fought over the mountainous and sparsely populated region at the southeastern edge of Europe. This came to an end with the advent of the Cold War, when a consolidated Communist Yugoslav state found its place as a neutral buffer between the capitalist West and socialist East. The ultimate collapse of that state led to the ensuing wars in the 1990s. While they did little to stop the wars from beginning, the consensus of European powers and the United States brought the conflicts to an end.

At its height, this meant NATO military involvement in both Bosnia and Kosovo, and the brokering of a deal which ended Europe’s bloodiest war since 1945. It was thanks to U.S. pressure that Croatia abandoned its own war against Bosnia. That decision stopped the Croatian and Bosnian armies from killing the Serbian breakaway state of Republika Srpska, which was legitimized by the Dayton Agreement and continues to function to this day. The U.S. remains the most important outside player in the Balkans, maintaining a huge military base in Kosovo and recently welcoming both Montenegro and Macedonia into NATO, with Croatia and Albania having joined in previous years.

But America’s role in the Balkans has not been without its critics.

Among those critics is John Bolton himself, who wields a great deal of influence over the current administration’s foreign policy. He was highly critical of the Clinton administration’s policies towards the Balkans in the 1990s, especially of its involvement in the War in Kosovo. The U.S. effectively secured independence for Kosovo by way of a U.S.-led NATO bombing campaign against Serbia, but Bolton argued that there was no clear strategy and was skeptical of the campaign’s prospects for success. To some extent he was right. Two decades on, the conflict is still not resolved, and the U.S. is still actively involved in the conflict, which keeps both Serbia and Kosovo in political limbo.

Two conclusions from his 1999 article in The Washington Times  stand out. He writes:

“America is not doomed to having to deal with the Balkans forever. The failure of a comprehensive approach would mean only we return the matter to E.U. hands, without further U.S. political or military obligation.”

And:

“America will not care more about peace in the region than those who live there.”

Nobody can fault him for inconsistency. In line with President Trump’s America First agenda, Bolton seems to be trying to rid America of what he sees as its Balkan quagmire. Bolton undoubtedly understands that endorsing an ethnic partition of Kosovo could reopen a myriad of conflicts across the region; he just doesn’t think it’s America’s problem. Indeed, it doesn’t seem like any major player seems inclined to stop the slow-moving crisis developing in the Balkans.

Austria, Russia, and the EU have all indicated they will not stand in the way of a partition. While Germany and the UK have indicated opposition, the days for both their governments are limited. In any case, far more important than the British and German positions, is the fact that America is not only supporting the deal, but is actively pushing for it. For the first time since the end of the Yugoslav Wars, the architect of the fragile and dysfunctional Balkan order is coming around to the idea that past solutions have failed, and new “creative” ones are needed.

Bolton is absolutely correct that the U.S. does not have to deal with the Balkans forever, but to choose now as the moment to withdraw will have dramatic consequences. Can a divided, disunited, and crisis-ridden European Union really be expected to fill the void left by America in the Balkans?

While a land swap in Kosovo per se does not entail a withdrawal from Kosovo, it accepts the legitimacy of ethnic spheres of influence as against the Kosovar state and would undermine the political balance in Bosnia. This would occur at a time when tensions between Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, not to mention tensions between the three titular nationalities within Bosnia, are higher than they have been since the end of the Yugoslav Wars. Politics in all three countries is dominated by revisionist nationalist politicians who were all heavily involved in the previous wars, and most of whom are deeply unsatisfied with their conclusion.

With its enthusiastic support of an ethnic partition in Kosovo, this administration has essentially moved America’s position to that of the revisionist Balkan politicians who have long been waiting for their chance to redraw Bosnia’s borders. Since 1996, there has been no doubt that America stood by the Dayton Agreement and was committed not just to the borders it created, but also to the idea of a multi-ethnic, liberal, and democratic Bosnia. With the new administration’s willingness to redraw international borders, its hostility to international treaties (something Bolton is also famous for), and its ambivalence towards the liberal ideology that was meant to be the foundation of the Bosnian state, its position vis-à-vis Bosnia cannot be taken as a given as it once was.

Instead, the change in America’s policy in Kosovo seems to signal a wider shift toward formalizing on-the-ground territorial control, even if it falls outside of formal internationally recognized borders. This policy is echoed by the administration’s peace plan for the Middle East, as well as its recognition of Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. Could this shift be the spark that lights the proverbial Balkan powder keg?

With America’s shifted policy, the political calculus for regional leaders has now changed dramatically. These same regional leaders are overwhelmingly followers or (allegedly) ex-followers of the same nationalistic ideologies that plunged the region into several wars in the 1990s. In recent years, the same groups have reemerged with a force and could lead the region once again towards conflict.

Past is becoming present once again in the Balkans.

Open Wounds

From roughly 1919 to 1991, the seven modern day countries of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Macedonia, made up the country known as Yugoslavia. From 1945 to 1980, the country was ruled by the Communist dictator Josip Broz Tito, who kept a strong lid on ethnic and nationalist tensions through the repressive Communist state and his wildly successful foreign policy. Following his death in 1980, the state began to slowly unravel. As was characteristic of Eastern European communist regimes as they drew nearer to their collapse, the official ideology became empty. Ideas which had long been repressed began to reemerge.

In Poland and Czechoslovakia, it was forces such as liberalism and Christian democracy rallying behind the broad banner of anti-communism that would bring the socialist state to an end. But in Yugoslavia, it was the various nationalisms of the constituent republics which would tear the country apart.

Nowadays, and in most of the years since independence, Croatia is ruled by the same Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) which governed during its War of Independence. The party made its own attempt at carving out a sizable chunk of Bosnia before U.S. intervention convinced Croatian leader Franjo Tuđman to abandon the campaign and ally with the Bosniaks against the Serbs.

Meanwhile, Serbia is ruled by Aleksandar Vučić, who was a longtime member of the Serbian Radical Party—a party with the impressive achievement of being the most nationalistic of all Serb nationalist parties. It played the role of a kind of Serbian nationalist vanguard party while dictator Slobodan Milošević still maintained the Communist facade. Vučić also served as Minister of Information under the Milošević regime for several years. Until 2008, he subscribed to the idea of creating a “Greater Serbia”—the driving ideological force during the Yugoslav Wars—which meant absorption of all ethnic Serb parts of Croatia and Bosnia and in practice the ethnic cleansing of huge swathes of territory.

Only since then has he split off from his former radical party and formed a new one, the Serb Progressive party (SNS). Since coming to power in 2014, he has come to dominate the Serbian state. He has been widely accused of amounting to a weak dictator, and at the very least the most powerful Serbian leader since Milošević.

It is from that position of significant power that he has pushed for a partition of Kosovo, which is a move deeply unpopular in Serbia, especially with the still-powerful Serbian Orthodox Church. But the pursuit of such an unpopular policy could have more ominous motivations. If they are right about just how unpopular the move would be, surely Vučić would be aware, and compensate for it elsewhere.

The only thing that could come even remotely close to compensating for the loss of Kosovo would be a partition of Bosnia. Having such a conversation about Bosnia preceded by a successful partition of Kosovo, with the U.S. involved, would be an incredible diplomatic coup for Serbia.

Since the creation of the Bosnian state, the U.S. and its allies have been committed in principle to its multi-ethnic, democratic, and liberal development. In practice, it has been nowhere near successful, but failures are not easily digested in the realm of foreign policy. U.S. acceptance that it has failed in Kosovo would naturally move the conversation to Bosnia, the other unresolved Balkan conflict. It would be a total reversal of decades of policy, even if spun by the Trump administration as a diplomatic victory. If Kosovo is solved in the same way as the Greece-Macedonia dispute—bilaterally between presidents—it would give Vučić the foreign legitimacy he sorely needs to pursue the real prize and fulfill a centuries long dream of uniting (most of) the Serbs of the Balkans into a single state.

Difficult? Certainly. Impossible? Maybe not. But it’s not entirely up to Serbia. If it was, Bosnia never would have existed in the first place. But in their struggle against the fact of its existence, the Serbs in that country have been doing everything in their power to ensure it never succeeds.

The Failing Project

Far from creating a functional multi-ethnic state, the 1995 Dayton Agreement created the world’s most complicated system of government. It is barely functional, and has had little power to improve living conditions in Bosnia since the war. Bosnia remains one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in Europe, boasting the highest youth unemployment rate on the planet at 56%. It heavily relies on remittances from its sizable diaspora, which make up close to a quarter of its economy.

And when it comes to inter-ethnic relations, it only gets worse. The Dayton Agreement meant Bosnia became a collection of three subnational units. It legalized the Bosnian Serb breakaway state of Republika Srpska, which, together with the Croat and Bosniak Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the multi-ethnic Brčko District, comprise modern Bosnia. Additionally, the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina is appointed by the United Nations. This High Representative is responsible for overseeing the implementation of the Dayton Agreement, and is endowed with a broad range of powers such as dismissing public officials.

Meanwhile, Republika Srpska is run as the personal fiefdom of local strongman Milorad Dodik. With the Bosnian central government functionally irrelevant, Dodik has been free to build his own Nationalist Serb state since he came to power in 2006. And the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina finds itself under constant attack by its Croatian element, which consistently claims the Croatian population is unrepresented.

Their claims are not unreasonable. Bosnia has a rotating presidency between representatives of the three nationalities, but while only Serbs vote for the Serbian one in Srpska, Bosnians and Croats vote unrestricted in the remainder of the state. This means that in the latest election of 2018, the Croatian president won fewer votes in actual Croatian areas, instead being voted in largely by Bosniaks. In the Croatian areas, the votes were mostly in favor of one Dragan Čović, president of the Bosnian arm of Croatia’s HDZ.

Indeed, the overwhelming majority of Croats in Bosnia support the HDZ, much to the consternation of many Croats within Croatia itself. These Croats in Bosnia not only vote in Bosnian elections, but in Croatian ones as well, where they form the bulk of the HDZ’s electoral base. That Bosnian HDZ also finds itself aligned with Serb nationalist Milorad Dodik on several fronts, with the two happy to team up to express their dissatisfaction with Bosnia’s mere existence any chance they get.

Far from easing ethnic tensions for the last two decades, the mess of Bosnian politics only seems to worsen them. To be fair, a large degree of dysfunction was baked in from the start, but the continued separatist aims of Serbs and Croats were not.

The federal state has stood by powerlessly while Republika Srpska arms its “police” force with assault rifles and anti-aircraft guns. Russia’s security services play an active role in providing arms and training. Russian paramilitary groups, which were crucial in the conflict in Ukraine, are also present in Bosnia, closely connected with Serbian paramilitary groups.

On top of the dysfunction, Dodik adds an extra layer by maintaining one foot out of the country and the other in. While he builds his own state, complete with hard power and an independent foreign policy, he can also keep the rest of the country hostage when it comes to something like NATO membership.

It might be assumed that it is only the Serbs in Bosnia who align closely with Russia, owing to their historically close relationship. However, Russia has also been supportive—the only foreign country other than Croatia itself—of Croatian initiatives in Bosnia to change the electoral law in favor of Croats. While the Serbs got their own state in Bosnia, Croatia didn’t, and it has long been the dream of the HDZ to create for Croats what the Serbs had legitimized by the Dayton Agreement.

Herein lies the fundamental problem with any kind of revision—or reform—in Bosnia. While the Serbs have their own state and could simply declare independence, the state is not geographically viable without the Muslim-majority Brčko district. Croats, meanwhile, don’t have a state at all, which means borders would need to be decided, a near impossible task in a still ethnically mixed country. Even worse, the revision of borders offers encouragement and reward for ethnic cleansing, on which the current internal border in Bosnia is in large part based.

While Kosovo is relatively homogeneous and the Serb-dominated northern provinces are de facto still ruled by Serbia, Bosnia is nowhere near as straightforward. Whether a deal is reached in Kosovo or not, the change in Western policy could be enough to encourage Dodik to act in Bosnia, depending on the terms of the final agreement. Assuming independence is his aim, what has thus far stopped him from declaring independence is a fear of intervention and loss of the privileged status his state enjoys. After all, the status quo works well for Dodik and his ruling elite. As it is, the world is apathetic to Bosnia. There is no reason to invite unnecessary attention when he is already basically free to do what he pleases.

However, emboldened by Russia and Turkey and encouraged by a disinterested American administration and a divided Europe, he may feel that a push for independence would be worth the risk. His Croatian counterparts could find themselves in agreement.

But the even greater danger of conflict in Bosnia extends far beyond the Balkans, in ways many may not even realize.

Bosnia On The Brink

In many ways, Bosnia is a relic of a bygone era. Though the country is especially ethnically mixed, the whole of Central and Eastern Europe was not too different until very recently. Following the First World War, not a single new country in Eastern Europe was ethnically homogeneous. While titular nationalities generally were in the majority, millions of Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Turks, and others found themselves in a country that was not their own, not to mention stateless nationalities such as Jews, Vlachs, and Gypsies. Relics of the fallen empires of Eastern Europe, they were soon to fall prey to the nation-state.

Now, the ethnic map is incredibly homogeneous. While certain countries have small minorities still remaining, the genocides and population transfers of the Second World War and its aftermath solidified ethnic boundaries along state borders. Bosnia, by contrast, has remained divided between three nations, and that despite several wars and years of ethnic cleansing. To make matters worse for the troubled country, those three nations each tend to see themselves as belonging to different civilizations.

Croats are Catholics, and have always been Western-oriented, spending centuries ruled by Austria and Venice. Serbs are Orthodox and historically align closely with Russia. And Bosniaks are Muslim, tracing their origin to the Ottoman past of the Balkans. Now, this does not mean that conflict between the three is evidence of some grand clash of civilizations, but it does offer a potential battleground for those who are convinced of such a clash.

With Islamic extremism puzzling Western observers to no end, and corresponding anti-Islamic extremism becoming an increasingly global phenomenon, any armed conflict involving Bosnia would almost certainly transcend mere nationalism. This brings yet another problem to the fore. Even if Bosnia could somehow be peacefully partitioned between the three nations in a “Kosovo style” partition, it would effectively mean the end of Bosnia as a state and a country. A rump Bosnian state, abandoned by its Western allies, struggling with unemployment and disillusionment for its youth could easily turn Bosnia into the kind of hotbed of Islamic extremism it isn’t at the moment.

The Croatian government claims otherwise. In March, the Bosnian Security Minister accused Croatia of trying to destabilize Bosnia through staging a false flag operation, so as to make Bosnia look like a terrorist haven. Though the Croatian government has denied it, the claims appear credible. The accusation is that the Croatian security services attempted to blackmail an Islamic extremist into smuggling arms and explosives into Bosnia, placing them in a mosque, and then the cache would be “discovered.” The plot implicates not just Croatian security services, but top Croatian diplomats in Bosnia as well as a Croatian journalist from Srpska’s state television known to be close with Dodik.

If it turns out to be true, it would be in line with Croatia’s recent actions, which have been described as Croatia’s most serious challenge to Bosnia’s sovereignty since the 90s. In late 2018, the Croatian parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution urging Bosnia—a foreign country—to change its electoral law following the country’s election in 2018 where the HDZ candidate was defeated. Russia supported the Croatian government’s motion, but no other country did.

Bosnian analysts have gone as far as to call it a hybrid war, with the ultimate aim of a Croat entity in Bosnia—a goal which, if achieved, would be a further step towards the ultimate dissolution of the country. At minimum, it would require a revision of the Dayton Agreement.

With every new development in the Balkans, the outlook becomes grimmer. Open conflict is not imminent. But the region is definitely traveling down the road to conflict. Bosnia is a dysfunctional, semi-sovereign country with two hostile neighbors actively trying to undermine and tear it apart. Its most important ally is actively pushing for the same policy in Kosovo that the Croats and Serbs in Bosnia fought, killed, and ethnically cleansed for.

Bosniaks themselves have found their fair share of controversial allies. Islam and Ottoman heritage connects Bosniaks to the Muslim World—especially Turkey—like no other nation in Europe. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan kicked off his reelection campaign in 2018 with a rally in Sarajevo. Some 12,000 people came out to hear him speak, including the Bosniak leader Bakir Izetbegović, who proclaimed to the crowd “President Erdogan was sent by Allah to you.” Alignment with Turkey is one thing, but alignment with a neo-imperial and strongly Islamic authoritarian Turkish leader is something else altogether.

At campaign rallies for Turkish local elections in 2019, Erdogan showed crowds footage of the terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, as evidence of anti-Turkish sentiment in Europe. Happily using the tragedy for votes, he has framed the attack as yet another incident in the same long-standing clash of civilizations between Turkey and the West.

Just how influential more radical strains of Islam are in Bosnia is unclear, but the country has provided the second most foreign fighters per capita of any European country to terrorist organizations in Syria. Belgium is first. More worrisome is that Bosnia hosted up to several thousand foreign fighters from across the Muslim world during the Bosnian War, known as the ‘Bosnian Mujahideen.’ With Islamic extremism becoming only more widespread since then, it is not hard to imagine foreign fighters pouring into the area in any renewed conflict. Particularly with Saudi Arabia and Iran fighting several proxy wars in the Middle East, a conflict in Bosnia could become a proxy not just between Russia, Turkey, and the EU, but between competing factions in the Islamic world, as well.

Once again, the absence of Western liberal powers in Bosnia’s internal development is stark.

Adults In The Room?

Returning to the words of John Bolton, if the U.S. is to slough off the Balkans to its EU allies, what can we expect? Since Bolton wrote those words 20 years ago, the EU is no closer to a common foreign policy, so the statements of EU bureaucrats matter little compared to those of national leaders. That said, the EU’s foreign affairs chief has been supportive of a land swap in Kosovo. Angela Merkel has signaled opposition to a deal in Kosovo, but her time is limited. It’s not clear that she could, or would, stand in the way of a U.S.-brokered bilateral agreement.

Austrian Prime Minister Sebastian Kurz has also signaled support for the deal, as has Merkel’s more conservative sister party, the CSU of Bavaria. Indeed, right-wing parties on the rise in Europe have no allegiance to dreams of multi-ethnic, liberal states. If anything, they would be happy to solve problems such as Kosovo—or Bosnia—at the expense of such concepts.

If a conflict does break out, the EU would inevitably split along revisionist and status-quo lines. As it stands, the EU doesn’t even agree on Kosovo, with Slovakia, Romania, and Spain still recognizing Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia. To think that the EU would have any semblance of unity in any new conflict on its borders is laughable. Even the monolithic external threat of Russia has received a lukewarm response from Europe. Hungary and Italy openly court Russia, while Germany only goes as far as to symbolically oppose Russia, even as the two partner on globally significant energy projects.

Critically, a partition of Kosovo does not by any means mean a U.S. withdrawal from Kosovo. But by ceding the north of Kosovo to Serbia, there is a recognition that it is not in America’s sphere of influence. In fact, Serbia is the one country in the region which is not a potential NATO ally. Instead, Serbia has in recent years become one of Russia’s few strategic partners and makes a point of aspiring to mere European integration, and not “Euro-Atlantic” integration (i.e. NATO membership). Bosnia could not join NATO either without Srpska’s approval, which it would never agree to. Dodik serves as Russia’s main proxy in the Balkans, making a pro-Western turn in Srpska even less likely than in Serbia itself. If the U.S. is to formalize its de facto sphere of influence in the Balkans, Republika Srpska lies firmly outside of it.

When it comes to Russia itself, its interests are not so much in the Balkans themselves as they are in what a conflict would do to its geopolitical foes. Creating further divisions in the EU and among America’s allies is the focus of much of Russia’s foreign policy. Inciting conflict in the Balkans would go further towards achieving that aim than anything Russia has done before.

In the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, however, Russia was nowhere to be found. Still suffering from the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was in absolutely no position to project any power in the Balkans or stand up for Serbia, its traditional ally. But things have changed. Russia has regained geopolitical clout and Moscow has been taking a renewed interest in the Balkans as of late. On the eve of Montenegro’s accession to NATO, an attempted coup by pro-Russian forces was thwarted. Likewise, Russia-backed forces in Macedonia opposed the changing of the country’s name and subsequent accession to NATO.

In 2018, extreme nationalist Russian oligarch and funder of Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine, Konstantin Malofeev, purchased hundreds of millions of euros worth of Srpska government bonds. Malofeev was used as a proxy for funding military operations in Ukraine and was involved in the attempted coup in Montenegro. Russian state-owned bank Sberbank also purchased Croatian megacorp Agrokor—the largest corporation in the Balkans—in 2018, saving the entire region from recession. Employing some 60,000 people in the former Yugoslavia, it accounted for some 12-15% of Croatian GDP at its height. Relatively small amounts of money buy great amounts of leverage in this small and volatile region.

Leverage is about all Russia can get. Moscow does not offer a serious alternative to European integration in any way for the Balkans. All it can do is use the corrupt and poorly run countries to sow divisions within the EU and position itself to benefit in case any more serious conflict breaks out. But it is really the disinterest of Western countries in the first place that has allowed such foreign incursions. The Russian Ambassador to Croatia had as much to say in the wake of Sberbank’s acquisition, asking “I wonder why your Western friends and strategic partners did not come and help with the Agrokor situation?”

It’s a very pertinent question. When the EU and NATO’s most important regional ally was on the brink of financial collapse, Russia was instead allowed to step in and save the day. Just one instance in years of growing Western disinterest in the Balkans.

Forgotten Friends

In the years since the United States helped Bosnia achieve its independence and legitimacy, it has mostly dropped further involvement. The frictions of Bosnian politics are taken as a given. Tensions are allowed to rise unabated. Meanwhile, Vučić enjoys the strong support of the European Union despite his nationalist and authoritarian tendencies. And now one step further, the U.S. is giving up on the idea of a multi-ethnic Kosovo.

But no one nationality can be given special treatment without the rest of the region demanding their fair share, as well. Large swathes of Macedonia are ethnically Albanian, as parts of Serbia are majority Bosniak. This once again recalls the problem of Kosovo. An ethnic partition is basically a reward for the region’s nationalists, one that has long been denied by Washington and Brussels.

That’s what makes the position of foreign countries—particularly the United States—crucial in the maintenance of peace and stability. In many ways, they have an impossible task, as Kosovo definitely is a problem that needs to be solved. There is no reason to keep millions of people in political limbo affecting their economic and life prospects for decades. The same goes for Bosnia. But it’s the way they go about solving it that is likely to be the issue. If the U.S. mismanages its position in Kosovo, it could easily result in the overturning of the American-built Balkan order and possibly with violent consequences.

If, however, the U.S. does indeed have some grand Balkan strategy to purge the region of foreign influence and close the power vacuum at the heart of Europe and Kosovo is simply the first step, then it would be a constructive step. But there is little indication that the political will to deal with Bosnia exists, so it is far more likely that Kosovo is being handled as an independent issue.

Fundamentally, the U.S. and the EU—but especially the U.S.—bear responsibility for what happens in Bosnia. The state did not come about by accident; it is directly thanks to American diplomacy that the state survived and achieved international legitimacy. They take personal responsibility for ensuring the Dayton Agreement is followed, but that isn’t enough. With slim prospects for EU membership anytime soon, the West doesn’t appear to be offering a concrete vision to Bosnia, allowing states like Russia, Turkey, and China to step in and fill the void.

At best, Bosnia will become a black hole for foreign powers to buy an easy and cheap foothold in Europe. At worst, it could be the next stage for a bloody proxy war at the heart of Europe. Rest assured, the leaders of the region are watching the Trump administration’s actions in Kosovo with great interest. Washington has included the Balkans in its foreign policy rewrite, and this time the rules are different.

Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia—in other words the post-Soviet sphere—have each proven to be some of the most volatile flashpoints in the world, and a resurgent Russia is aggressively challenging the international order.

In the 21st century, Russia is reasserting control over post-Soviet countries using a number of economic and political tactics, so as to prevent the formation of a larger Western bloc directly on its borders. The guiding dictum of Russia seems to be: if those countries won’t be allied with Russia, they won’t be allied with anyone else, either.

The greatest misconception about the fall of the Soviet Union is that its political disintegration caused a hard break between its former member states. From this perspective, these countries simply declared independence and went their separate ways, happy to be rid of the Soviet system. While it’s true that the public largely turned against the Soviet economic system, this did not translate into a wish for wholesale dissolution of all ties between constituent states.

In fact, since then, there have been consistent attempts at reintegration by many of the former member states. Some successful, some not. These efforts reflect the holdover ties that remain from the Soviet Union and Russian Empire. While these links have brought some countries together based on their common Soviet heritage, they have also been used by an increasingly ambitious Russia to subvert and exploit those members unwilling to remain in Moscow’s sphere of influence.

Russia’s aggressive actions in Georgia and Ukraine in recent years are often portrayed as attempts to regain a lost empire. But that view makes Russia seem far more powerful than it actually is. It also seems to confuse the fantasies of certain Russian nationalists, such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky or Aleksandr Dugin, with Russia’s actual policies. Despite this disconnect, Western media outlets are all-too-happy to suck in viewers with wild theories about Dugin’s influence as part of a grand villainous mastermind narrative. What Russia is actually doing is exploiting the ties left over from the Soviet period, so that it remains the indisputable kingmaker in each country, even as the Soviet Union becomes a distant memory. Russia is not trying to annex Ukraine or Georgia as part of a new and reborn empire. As noted, it’s making sure that if those countries won’t ally with Moscow, they won’t be able to ally with anyone else.

While the fall of the Soviet Union did mark the loss of much of Russia’s former empire, the dissolution was not total.  Within the present-day Russian Federation dozens of non-Russian nations still remain firmly under Russian control. While Chechnya is the most famous example, it is surrounded by many more in the North Caucasus, as well the incredibly varied peoples of Siberia and the Middle Volga region. But for those nations that did gain their independence in 1991, the memory of the Soviet Union is slowly fading, and with it, so is Russia’s sphere of potential influence.

Three major crises have gripped Russia in the past 30 years, which have defined the country’s strategy and diplomacy towards its surrounding regions:

The first is the breakup of the Soviet Union, which marked the loss not only of much of the Russian Empire’s colonial possessions in Central Asia and the Caucasus, but also led to the separation of Belarus and Ukraine from Russia. The second is the potential breakup of the Russian Federation itself. This was avoided owing to Russia’s victory in the Chechen Wars and its installation of a loyal head of state, Ramzan Kadyrov, a Chechen warlord with strong Instagram game and the lifestyle of a successful Atlanta rapper.

And finally, the gradual disintegration of post-Soviet ties, which has been diminishing Russia’s influence in this sphere. Demographic trends in post-Soviet states show that ethnic Russian populations are shrinking, and fewer people are speaking Russian. Both trends mean lost vectors of power for Russia.

The first crisis led directly to post-Soviet conflicts in Moldova and the Caucuses. The second crisis was (for now) resolved through two brutal wars in Chechnya and internal rebalancing. But the third crisis continues to the present day and explains the two dominant and seemingly contradictory trends of political development in the post-Soviet sphere: reintegration and disintegration.

Reintegration is the Russian attempt to maintain influence in its former colonies. But reintegration also flows the other way. Some post-Soviet states are sidling up to Russia to boost economic growth. Through this strategy, Russia is aiming to build a stable and integrated economic and political sphere which it can easily dominate. Conversely, disintegration is the slow process of distancing from Russia—often sped up drastically in cases of direct conflict—and where the entire idea of the post-Soviet sphere becomes less and less relevant over time as old Soviet ties are dissolved by new strategic players, and as its former states are pushed into isolation or drawn under the influence of other powers.

Commonwealth

The first move towards reintegration happened before the collapse of the Soviet Union had even occurred, although it was also what effectively dissolved the country. In 1991, the heads of the three Slavic Soviet Republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia met in a dacha in Belarus to sign the Belavezha Accords. Though the Soviet federal government considered them illegal, they effectively brought an end to the Soviet Union by proclaiming the foundation of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Not long after, a further 8 former Soviet states joined, with Georgia joining two years later. By 1993, each former Soviet state except for the three Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) was a member of the CIS.

Since the creation of the CIS, an absurd amount of organizations have been founded between various member states. The Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan have created several economic unions over the years, eventually culminating in the Eurasian Economic Community, which has since gone defunct. Georgia, Ukraine, Armenia, and Moldova created the Organization for Democracy and Economic Development (GUAM). Even the breakaway states of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, and Nagorno-Karabakh (recently renamed the Republic of Artsakh) have created a “Commonwealth of Unrecognized States.” Perhaps the most puzzling of the bunch is the “Union State” between Russia and Belarus. Ratified by Boris Yeltsin and Aleksandr Lukashenko in 1999, the two committed their countries to federal unification. There hasn’t been much to show for that unification in the 20 years since.

Without a doubt, the most ambitious project to date is the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). It brings together Russia and its closest allies—Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan—in the most comprehensive political and economic union in the region since the Soviet Union itself. Whereas most integration projects were half-hearted attempts with ambiguous goals, subsequently amounting to nothing, this project was over 20 years in the making. It was first proposed in 1994 by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, a powerful player in his own right, but was only realized in 2015. The initially lukewarm response from other former member states has given way to rapid development.

For Russia, the Eurasian Union is an opportunity to solidify its hegemony over the post-Soviet sphere. The Eurasian Union has already managed to sign free trade agreements with both Iran and China, something Russia was unable to accomplish on its own. If Eurasian integration really does push forward, Russia will achieve stability in its border regions and more freedom to make moves on the global stage, particularly in the Middle East. This stability is a key factor for Russia, which would have preferred that all the former Soviet states align with it outright, rather than involving itself militarily on its own border. But that involvement is a price Russia is willing to pay to keep a buffer zone between itself and its adversaries, even if it is a costly one.

On the surface, the EAEU appears to be the culmination of a long trend of post-Soviet reintegration and is moving ahead at an impressive pace. But while Russia is clearly feeling the benefits of the union, the other member states are feeling increasing pressure from Russia, which has openly called into question the sovereignty of both Kazakhstan and Belarus. The tradeoff for the non-Russian members has always been between sovereignty and relative isolation on the one hand, and security and economic growth on the other. But as Russia becomes increasingly militarily involved in Ukraine and around the world with the associated economic costs, the other members are left to reconsider the future of the union.

Eurasianist Dreams

Four years since the founding of this union, it could be heading for a similar fate as other post-Soviet integration projects. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and hybrid war in Ukraine have brought several rounds of sanctions, damaging its economy. This is where the great asymmetry in both physical and economic size between Russia and the other member states becomes disastrous. While the union should be developing a strong internal market, Russia’s economic slump and China’s ever-present economic weight in Central Asia mean that the economic benefits of the union are failing to meet expectations. And while Kazakhstan and Belarus court the EU and America in hopes of economic gains, Russia’s foreign policy adventures force the other states into undesirable political positions. Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev remarked in 2011: “For objective and subjective reasons the CIS has not become the decisive integration structure of the post-Soviet space.”

Has the EAEU become that decisive integration structure he had hoped for?

The danger for the states now committed to Eurasian integration within the EAEU is that their interests are inevitably subordinated to Russia’s. While this was to some extent clear from the beginning, the other states seem reluctant on further integration while Russia is increasingly confrontational with the West. The reality is that, whatever the future of this Eurasian sphere, it is much smaller than the broader post-Soviet sphere. As such, Russia has even more influence within it.

The various conditions of the 15 post-Soviet states seem to confirm that picture. The three Baltic states are firmly entrenched in the EU and NATO, having been closely aligned with the West since their independence from the Russian Empire at the end of the First World War. Ukraine is in a hybrid war with Russia and Georgia is opposed to Moscow due to territorial disputes. Turkmenistan is a North Korea-esque dictatorship committed to its isolation, and Azerbaijan is less interested in the former Soviet Union than it is in Turkey and America. This leaves just 9 of the 15 free to join the new Eurasian sphere, and only 5 are currently part of it. The fewer members there are, the more it simply becomes the Russian sphere. “Eurasian” integration increasingly looks like absorption by Russia. This seems clear to everyone, as even Russia’s closest allies are publicly resisting further integration.

Belarus—for years Russia’s closest ally—is the most cautious. Recently, Russia and Belarus have publicly feuded over what Lukashenko has called “blackmail” by Russia to force integration of the two countries. A recent change in Russia’s energy taxation system will hit Belarus with billions of dollars in additional spending which it cannot afford. After months of negotiations, Russia suggested it would be resolved if the two countries integrated further under the terms of the Union State treaty. Seeing this as an obvious threat to Belarus’ sovereignty, Lukashenko has publicly and openly criticized Russia for trying to annex Belarus, reiterating that he will never allow the country to lose its sovereignty.

With Moscow’s other close ally, Kazakhstan, tensions flared even before the Eurasian Union had come into effect. After the crisis in Ukraine in 2014, Vladimir Putin was asked at a public event if Russia is preparing for a similar situation in Kazakhstan, due to the large population of Russians in the North and the “growth of nationalist sentiment in Kazakhstan.” He responded by saying that Kazakhstan had never had a state, and that it was Nazarbayev himself who created it from nothing. Outraged reactions from Nazarbayev and Kazakhstan notwithstanding, the implication was that Nazarbayev’s successor might not be the same ally to Russia that he was. Nazarbayev went on to say: “Kazakhstan has the right to quit the EAEU…Kazakhstan will not join an organization that is a threat to our independence. Independence is our greatest fortune.”

The EAEU came into effect January 1st, 2015. Since then, the geopolitical landscape has changed dramatically due to the crisis in Ukraine and Russia’s deteriorating relations with the West. Both Belarus and Kazakhstan have continued trading with Ukraine and Europe and have resented Russia’s unilateral actions, such as banning produce imports from the EU. Both these countries find themselves between a rock and a hard place. While they have allied closely with Russia and avoided devastating conflicts like those in Ukraine and Georgia, they value their sovereignty and are not willing to absorbed into Russia.

Ukraine was also the key to making the EAEU work, as its relative size makes it essential to counterbalance Russian influence within any post-Soviet union. With the prospect of Ukrainian membership all but dead, the EAEU is destined to be dominated by Russia. Belarus is against Russia’s confrontation with NATO more generally, owing to its position on the frontline of any conflict between the two, and it would be negatively affected even in the case of a full-scale war in Ukraine. Moreover, Russia has simply ignored decisions made by the Eurasian Commission, which in theory should be the equalizer between Russia and the smaller states, but in practice has not affected Moscow’s policies.

This is not to say the EAEU is doomed. Quite the contrary. The initiative is partially succeeding where other integrationist projects completely failed. It is legitimately creating functioning institutions which have brought economic harmonization between the member states in just a few years. While the other members object to Russia’s domination, there is little they can do about it. They are already tied to Russia by more than just the EAEU and almost entirely rely on Russia for their security. In addition, they have been under heavy Russian influence for decades, so it seems unlikely that Kazakhstan or Belarus would kill the EAEU based on objections to particular Russian policies. However, its position in the broader game of Russian geopolitics means that it may not end up being the game-changer which Russia had long desired.

Bridge To The West

One of the greatest legacies of the Soviet Union among its former member states is the lasting presence of the Russian people and their language outside of Russia. Since Russian was the official language in the Soviet Union, nearly everyone who grew up in it speaks Russian, and it continues to be widely used. In both Belarus and Kazakhstan, most people still speak Russian as their primary language. In Kazakhstan’s case, ethnic Russians make up a significant minority at one-fifth of the population. The Baltic states and Ukraine also maintain the most significant Russian minorities and a Russian-speaking population, though they have dealt with the legacy in different ways.

The Baltics are a special case, as they were only annexed by the Soviet Union during World War II, and therefore considered their membership in the Soviet Union to be illegitimate. On top of that, their Russian populations only moved in during the Soviet period, and were seen as Russian colonists. Throughout the Cold War, America, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the rest of NATO maintained that the Baltics were occupied states. The connections these three countries had to the West ensured a close relationship unlike that of any other Soviet state. All three even retained diplomatic legations in the United States throughout the Cold War. To date, they are the only three former Soviet states which are now part of NATO or the European Union. That looks unlikely to change.

But the three small republics do remain linked to their Soviet past in a very uncomfortable way. As of 2018, ethnic Russians make up about 25 percent of the populations of both Latvia and Estonia. These Russians are not even citizens of the two countries. Both countries only gave citizenship in the 1990s to people who had lived in the countries pre-1940, meaning nearly all Russians were relegated to the status of permanently resident aliens. While such a policy may seem destined to incite Russia, it doesn’t really matter for the Baltic states since they are under the protection of NATO. A Russian invasion of the Baltics coincided with the start of the Second World War, and would risk starting a Third.

This is the exact guarantee Georgia was looking for in its attempt to join NATO. Russia responded by invading the country in 2008. A similar tactic was used in Ukraine when a Western-aligned faction took power in 2014. Russia subsequently annexed Crimea and started a proxy war in Eastern Ukraine. Though these situations are far from ideal for Russia, they serve as an example for the rest of the post-Soviet sphere.

Russia will not tolerate those countries joining Western institutions like the EU or NATO, the latter of which has continued to creep eastward, ever closer to Russia’s borders. Instead, the options are membership in Russia’s Eurasian sphere or remaining under Russian influence in isolation.

Despite long-time membership in the EU and NATO, the Baltics are still vitally linked to Russia, and the potential for non-military conflict with Russia is constant. The three countries still obtain their electricity from Russia, though in 2018 the EU committed 600 million euros towards linking their power grids with Poland instead of Russia by 2025. While Russia may lament the loss of additional influence in the Baltics, the real issue is that Russia’s enclave of Kaliningrad—the most densely militarized region in the world, and home to Russia’s Baltic Fleet—is connected to the Russian power grid through the Baltics. Russia has already voiced concerns about not being informed of these changes, and has responded very creatively in the past to moves by states in their ‘near abroad’ which diminish Russian influence. Crucially, any conflict in the Baltics would certainly disrupt Kaliningrad’s power grid to a disastrous degree, which seems to be a strong deterrent to any hybrid Russian aggression on the Baltics.

There is another reason Russia is satisfied with the current stable state of the Baltics. It is Russia’s backdoor to Europe. Russian money-laundering operations exploit the ties between the formerly Soviet countries to bring billions of euros into the EU through Baltic banks. Russia also has extensive intelligence operations active in the Baltics, which are aided in no small part by long-lasting Soviet ties. A high ranking Estonian army officer and his father were both arrested on suspicion of spying for Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, in 2018. What makes this case especially interesting, though, is that the officer’s father is a former KGB agent. Such connections exist in no other NATO or EU member state, and depending on the extent of the operations, the Baltics could likely be home Russia’s most vital intelligence sources. This illustrates how deep the legacy of the Soviet Union runs and the vectors of power it gives Russia even in the countries most opposed to its influence.

Borderlands

The places where Russian influence is most welcome are not really countries at all—not recognized ones at least. In the territories of the former Soviet Union, there are now six states which have declared their independence but are not recognized by the vast majority of the world. Well known by now are the two breakaway republics in Eastern Ukraine, as well as Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh (the Republic of Artsakh), and South Ossetia in the Caucuses, and Transnistria in Eastern Bessarabia. This raises the question: why is it that in the post-Soviet sphere there are six such largely unrecognized states, while in the remainder of Europe there are none?

The phenomenon of breakaway states in post-Soviet states has its root in Soviet nationality policies. The Soviets rather arbitrarily decided the boundaries of the republics, and this—combined with internal migration during the Soviet period—meant that once the Soviet Union fell apart, millions of people found themselves in what they considered a foreign country. This would provide an explanation for the preponderance of breakaway states in the post-Soviet sphere, but it gives an incomplete picture. These breakaway regions are almost entirely dependent on Russia’s support, and in turn serve an important function.

While Russia has consolidated its allies into its new Eurasian sphere, those post-Soviet states which have pursued integration with the West have been aggressively stopped from doing so. In each case, local populations were used to great effect by Russia to trap the country in a seemingly unwinnable conflict which keeps it firmly out of Western institutions like NATO or the EU. This was done most notably in Ukraine and Georgia. But even as far back as 1990, Russian separatists in Transnistria declared independence, and have since then maintained effective sovereignty over the area, which was a factor that kept Moldova, a Romanian territory prior to Soviet invasion in World War II, from unifying with Romania.

The ease with which Russia seems to be able to weaponize its diaspora is a cause of great concern in both the Baltics and in Kazakhstan. Though the Baltics have the protection of NATO, and Kazakhstan has willingly sided with Russia in large part to avoid such a conflict, there is simply nothing to protect the remainder of the post-Soviet states from Russian interference. This is yet another reason it is difficult for those states already closely aligned with Russia to break away: they understand better than anyone that Russia would respond with force.

Whether such a union will last is debatable, but the states currently in the Eurasian Union are so culturally aligned with Russia already and the governments so supportive of the union itself, that they have essentially committed themselves to further integration, regardless of Russia’s actions. And after all, the Mongols built the largest empire in history through brute force and the mere threat of annihilation. This is not to say that Russia is militarily comparable, but it does share a similar attitude to its borderlands. As the Mongols would obliquely tell the leaders of countries who refused to submit to the Khan, “If you act against it, how then can we know what will happen? Only God knows.”

To The Future

The fall of the Soviet Union changed the face of a continent. Where a superpower once projected power across the globe, a far weaker power is attempting to preserve and maintain what influence it can. None of the member states could avoid absolute misery in the 1990s, and for many there has been little respite since. But out of the chaos, Russia is attempting to build something that will revitalize its global ambitions. It has been, rather successfully, trying to salvage and consolidate what it can from the disintegrating Soviet sphere, and that process is now reaching its apex.

Russia has made sure that those who turned their backs on it are trapped in conflicts that will keep them blocked off from Western powers for the foreseeable future. It is pushing ahead with Eurasian integration, seemingly confident its allies will not mount serious resistance. Though the objections are serious, the risks of a break with Russia are far too high.

What does seem clear is that the notion of a post-Soviet sphere is gradually losing its relevance, and the Russian-aligned Eurasian sphere is taking its place, with a buffer zone of states indefinitely frozen in conflict. But with the Baltics firmly in the West, other states looking to do the same despite their territorial disputes, and a further few content with isolation, the Russian world has become much smaller since 1991. Moscow is acting accordingly, and for those states that are not willing to join the Eurasian sphere and become beholden to Russia’s actions, it has proven more than willing to ensure they will not fall under the influence of another power.

Though there are cracks in the EAEU already, its potential cannot be underestimated. It has integrated at breakneck speed compared to the European Union, with decision-making limited to a few centralized capitals in Moscow, Minsk, Astana, and elsewhere. If the right players decide to push ahead with political integration, there are few impediments to stop them. Whatever its future may be, there is no doubt that even as all things Soviet fade further and further into the past, Russia’s primary geopolitical focus will be to consolidate its influence. The question is whether it can do so without alienating its remaining allies and undermining the very bulwark it is trying to build.

As I arrived in Astana—the capital of Kazakhstan—for the first time, I was struck by the strange position it occupies in the region. Not so much because of the foreignness of the place, but rather the coexistence of that foreignness with the modern metropolis which surrounds it. In many ways, this is not at all an experience unique to the city of Astana. Globalization has brought unprecedented wealth to parts of the world once dirt poor and irrelevant, and whose names are now synonymous with futuristic skylines and nouveau riche glamor. Kazakhstan may not quite boast the wealth of Dubai or Singapore, but it is much more than a wealthy city-state.

Since declaring independence in 1991, Kazakhstan has pushed the limits of what many thought was true or possible about building and maintaining a successful authoritarian nation-state in the 21st century. Through a mixture of abundant resources and political ambition, it has managed not only significant economic success, but also an unprecedented demographic turnaround most countries could only dream of. Kazakhstan’s size and position in Central Asia—bordering two of the world’s three superpowers, China and Russia—gives it a cultural mix that links it not only to its neighbors, but to the Turkic and Muslim world as well. This gives the country incredible potential to make its presence in the world felt and to reap the benefits. The country’s first, current, and only President, Nursultan Nazarbayev, understands this well.

The Great Steppe

I remember looking out of the window of a friend’s apartment on the 22nd floor of one of the many skyscrapers that make up Astana’s strangely futuristic skyline. We were enjoying the colorful nightly light shows that play out across the city’s many new buildings when in the distance, on the gargantuan structures built to house the national bureaucracies, a message scrolled by: «Астана — столица великой степи». Astana, the capital of the great steppe.

Bold claim. But no one can really dispute it. Astana is the only real city on the steppe, where the winter lasts six months and temperatures reach -40 °F. This makes it the second coldest capital city on the planet after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. And yet, over a million people now call Astana their home.

A million people in a city may not seem particularly impressive, especially by Asian standards, but Astana was founded just 20 years ago. Since then, it has drawn hundreds of thousands of people from all over the country, despite the miserable conditions and—as I have been told by nearly every Kazakh I’ve met—its soulless character. What draws people to Astana, though, is very real economic success. It’s a success that has gone largely unnoticed to the outside world. In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan experienced much of the same poverty and economic decline as the rest of the former Soviet Union. But since 2000, unlike most of its counterparts, it has experienced tremendous economic growth and development.

From 2000 to 2008, Kazakhstan’s economy grew at an average rate of about 10% per year. Despite being slowed down by the global financial crisis and later a fall in oil prices in 2014, it has continued growing at about 5% per year from 2008 to the present day, with a brief slowdown in 2015-16. Nowadays, the country boasts a GDP per capita in terms of purchasing power approaching $26,500. That places it above Bulgaria, Croatia, and Romania, all countries more than half a decade in the European Union, as well as its former imperial overlord, Russia. Kazakhstan also receives more foreign direct investment than all other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (an organization consisting of most former Soviet countries, including Russia). And for the first time in 2018, the United Nations ranked Kazakhstan in its list of countries scoring ‘very high’ on its Human Development Index, a composite statistic of life expectancy, education, and income per capita. While Kazakhstan is certainly no Germany, all this just goes to show that Kazakhstan is certainly doing something right.

The crown jewel of this success is without a doubt the capital city Astana. As you fly into the city, it seems to literally spring out of the ground. It appears as an oasis of skyscrapers and futuristic monuments in the middle of the vast steppe. There are no suburbs of small single-family houses surrounding the city. Rather, it abruptly ends with the latest new 20-story housing complex, and the steppe begins. The city itself is mostly planned, with enormous landmarks that grace the city’s skyline, including an enormous pyramid, the world’s largest sphere building, and an enormous steel and glass tent. All these are designed by leading Western architects, and yet are somehow unmistakably Kazakh. It isn’t just the enormous buildings that shock, though. Modern cafes, restaurants, bars, and nightclubs seem to be opening constantly and offer quality to match any Western city. To say it wasn’t always like this would be an understatement of unbelievable proportions.

Beginnings

To really grasp the full weight of the success of the modern Kazakh state, it is essential to be aware of the tragic events that gripped the country over the last 150 years. Up until the mid-19th century, Kazakhstan was ruled by the Kazakh Khanate, a distant successor to the Mongol Empire in the region. The society was still entirely nomadic, and since the 18th century had come under increased contact and friction with the Russian Empire to the north. Eventually, this resulted in the conquest of Kazakhstan and the rest of Central Asia by Russia, after which the region became essentially a contiguous Russian colony. Not only was it treated as a colony, but it also became a dumping ground for whoever was deemed unfriendly to the Russian government. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was exiled to Kazakhstan, as was Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko. But the real tragedy did not come until the birth of the Soviet Union.

In the 1930s, Joseph Stalin appointed Filipp Goloshchekin—otherwise known for presiding over the brutal murder of the Romanov family—as local dictator of Kazakhstan with the goal of carrying out mass collectivization on an entirely nomadic population. This entailed the forced settlement of millions of ethnic Kazakhs, destroying their ancient nomadic way of life. In the years 1930-1933, this policy lead to famine. Between 1.5 and 2.3 million Kazakhs starved, the consequences of which are felt to to the present. That famine killed 40% of all Kazakhs and reduced them from 60% of Kazakhstan’s population to 38%, the highest percentage of any ethnic group killed in the Soviet Union. Throughout the Soviet period, millions of people continued to be exiled and deported to Kazakhstan, considered to be worse than even Siberia. It was not only Russians sent to Kazakhstan, though, but also Tatars, Ukrainians, Koreans, Uyghurs, Germans, Poles, and dozens of other nationalities from across the vast Eurasian landmass. The result of all these policies was that by 1959, Kazakhs were just 30% of the population of their own country, while Russians made up around 43%, and various other exiled nationalities a further 27%, or 3,600,000 people.

In 1990, the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was named president. In 1991, as the Soviet Union was falling apart, he declared the country’s independence. A new constitution was adopted not long after, with an extremely strong executive branch. In the years since, various amendments to the constitution have allowed Nazarbayev (and only Nazarbayev) to remain in power indefinitely.

Back in 1991, however, none of this was certain. Nazarbayev found himself the leader of the world’s 9th largest sovereign state, rich in oil and other natural resources (the country is the world’s largest producer of uranium, all for export), and with a nationally and religiously divided population. It was no easy situation to manage. The 90s are synonymous in post-Soviet countries with economic and social collapse, and Kazakhstan was no different in that regard. But this was also when the Kazakh leadership developed a strategy which would bring Kazakhstan out of the shadow of its past and into the 21st century. This strategy is really no secret. Nazarbayev has spoken at length about his goals and ambitions for his country, and for the most part, the country has acted accordingly over the past 25 years. It is derived from Kazakhstan’s geographic and demographic position, and is described officially, albeit vaguely, by one idea: Eurasianism.

At the Heart of Eurasia

The concept of Eurasianism has a variety of meanings in different countries and contexts, but it has two main iterations: a geopolitical conception of the world, and a socio-cultural idea. The geopolitical conception is extremely influential all over the globe, viewing the Eurasian landmass as central in world geopolitics, and control over it as the key to global hegemony. Various Russian émigré writers in the early 20th century used this conception to claim that Russia is neither European, nor Asian, but rather Eurasian; they further looked to create a unique national identity which reflected Russia’s Eurasian, rather than European, character. This idea is still quite influential in Russia, though not as much as some alarmist foreign observers occasionally claim. In Kazakhstan, however, Eurasianism is promulgated as official ideology by the very leadership of the country.

In every single state of the union address given to the country since 1997, Nazarbayev has referred to Kazakhstan’s position as a crossroads between Europe, Asia, and the Islamic world. This is the single most important idea guiding not just Kazakh government policy, but the identity of the country itself. In Nazarbayev’s words, Kazakhstan is a country “in the epicenter of the world,” and Astana is the “heart of Eurasia.” This kind of rhetoric is not just government posturing, but is a view shared by most Kazakh academics and intellectuals and has been thoroughly integrated into Kazakh cultural life and education. In the words of the president himself:

“There are individuals who like to make a link between Kazakhstan and Europe; and there are those who also like to see Kazakhstan to be in close tie with the Asian Tigers; still there are others who want to consider Russia as our strategic partner, while suggesting not to ignore the Turkish model for development. Paradoxically, they are right in their own way, since they have felt the issue from different angles. In reality, Kazakhstan, as a Eurasian state that has its own history and its own future, would have a completely different path to travel down the road. Our model for development will not resemble other countries; it will include in itself the achievements from all other civilizations.” (Eurasianism in the 21st century, 2009)

Kazakhstan has integrated the concept of Eurasianism not only into its geopolitical stance, but also into its national identity. This is by no means a natural development. In other countries such as Russia and Turkey, where Eurasianism was developed as a philosophical and socio-cultural idea, it remains marginal. It has taken deliberate and enthusiastic state policy on Nazarbayev’s part to integrate Eurasianism into the country’s mainstream cultural life and thereby influence the nation-building process. One of Kazakhstan’s leading national universities bears the name of the most famous Eurasianist, Lev Gumilyov (who also spent years interned in Kazakhstan), with the full name being Lev Gumilyov Eurasian National University. Through the press and various other institutions, this conception of Eurasianism is continuously being reinforced and strengthened. Kazakhs are extremely proud not only of their place in the center of the world, but also of the coexistence of many different traditions and cultures on their territory, a key tenet of Kazakh Eurasianism.

This whole ideology is aided in no small part by the fact that knowledge of the Russian language is universal in Kazakhstan, and in cities even preferred to Kazakh. Russian was formerly recognized officially as the “language of interethnic communication”, and while it has since lost that status it remains the most widely spoken language. Practically every product sold in Kazakhstan is written in both Russian and in Kazakh, and most places such as restaurants will be marked with the Russian “ресторан” and the Kazakh “мейрамхана”. Though Kazakh is more commonly spoken in the south of the country, in Astana almost everyone will be heard speaking Russian. For the most part people are perfectly happy with this arrangement, as it connects Kazakhstan to the outside world—and for the leadership, plays into the Eurasianist conception of the country.

But what was it about the geopolitical situation of Kazakhstan in the 1990s which led Nazarbayev to believe that the state would benefit from the adoption of Eurasianism? And how has this conception of Kazakhstan as a crossroads of civilizations played into the state’s larger ambitions?

Big Brothers

As pointed out earlier, Kazakhstan shares an enormous border with China. Even more impressive though, is that it shares the largest continuous border in the world with Russia. Russia is, by far, the most important outside player in both the country’s geopolitical strategy and the internal nation-building process. By the time of the country’s independence, Kazakhs had become a slight plurality at about 40% of the population. Russians still made up about 35% of the country and were (still are) concentrated in the north of the country. Immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were very public calls by prominent intellectuals and politicians to push Russia’s claim not just on Crimea, but on northern Kazakhstan, too. Most famously, Alexander Solzhenitsyn—who himself spent years in prison in Soviet Kazakhstan—called for a new Russian state to annex the northern provinces of Kazakhstan populated by Russians. With a tiny army and an enormous country almost entirely comprised of flat steppe lands, Kazakhstan is essentially indefensible. Russia or China could easily steamroll the country with little resistance; but they won’t. At least not anytime soon.

Nazarbayev has put a great deal of effort over the last 30 years into making the country Russia’s closest friend and ally. This has not only removed his greatest geopolitical threat, but has also given his country a close alliance with one of the world’s foremost powers. This culminated in the founding of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) in 2014, the most integrated organization of post-Soviet states since the USSR’s collapse—an idea Russian President Vladimir Putin himself attributed to Nazarbayev, and the result of his decades-long attempts at integrating post-Soviet states into a new economic and political bloc. Many critics of Nazarbayev’s foreign policy have considered his friendly policies towards Russia as undermining Kazakh sovereignty. In many ways, they’re not wrong, but the state’s sovereignty is not something absolute and infinite, and it has been undermined since the very inception of the country.

It would be very easy for Kazakhstan to have ended up much like Georgia or Ukraine, with a frozen conflict leaving the country in turmoil for the indefinite future, but instead it has opted for a different route. It may have sacrificed some sovereignty for security, but the geopolitical reality doesn’t leave many other options. This seems to be a fact other countries have recognized and has not constrained Kazakhstan’s foreign policy in any significant ways. Despite its close relationship with Russia, Kazakhstan maintains excellent relations with the United States and cooperates on military, economic, and counterterrorism issues. Relations with China also remain excellent, with Kazakhstan also playing a prominent role in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The state has even gone so far as to conspicuously ignore Kazakhs being mistreated in Xinjiang as part of China’s crackdown on the region, even while many citizens are increasingly outraged by it. Recently, the Kazakh government announced that China has agreed to allow thousands of Kazakhs to leave Xinjiang and renounce their Chinese citizenship for Kazakh. All of this is known as Kazakhstan’s “multi-vector” foreign policy, balancing strategic relationships between the world’s great powers.

Each of these great powers has a great deal to gain from close relations with Kazakhstan. For Russia, it is the champion of closer cooperation between post-Soviet states and the key to Central Asia. For the U.S., it is its closest partner in Central Asia, and important economically insofar as the U.S. is one of the largest foreign investors in Kazakhstan. This has occurred despite the fact that Kazakhstan continues to receive regular condemnations for its authoritarian governance from outlets such as Freedom House and The Economist. Nazarbayev and Kazakhstan have even been praised by top U.S. officials from Dick Cheney to John Kerry to Hillary Clinton. The latter gave perhaps the most frank summary of American realpolitik toward the country: “We view Kazakhstan not only as a regional player, but also as a global leader.” For China, it is the “buckle” of its ambitious Belt and Road initiative. It will be the main land route by which Chinese goods reach Russia and Europe. Through this diplomatic balancing act, the country is making good on its promise to be a crossroads between East and West. All these positive diplomatic relations also provide great legitimacy to the regime at home, which gives it even more power and flexibility in its ambitious state-building projects.

The move of the capital city from Almaty, in the far south of the country, to Astana, was seen by many as a move to reassert Kazakh claims to the majority-Russian north. If so, it has in large part succeeded, with Kazakhs increasingly migrating to the new capital and the regions surrounding it. The largest internal and external security threat to Kazakhstan is really solving itself. Russians now only make up about 20% of the country, while Kazakhs are a healthy majority of around 65%. This is not only thanks to Russian out-migration, but also to the high birth rate in Kazakhstan, which heavily skews towards ethnic Kazakh families. In fact, while birth rates plummet across the developed world, Kazakh birthrates have steadily risen and are now higher than they ever have been in the country’s post-Soviet history, with the rate hovering around 2.7 births per woman from 2014 onward. The reasons for this trend are not absolutely clear, but likely a traditional set of social norms along with general economic success and political stability have all helped to create conditions favorable for child rearing.

Islam and Identity

There is something exotic about hearing the azan (the Islamic call to prayer) for the first time. The melodic Arabic singing echoing across the massive boulevards and empty squares is unmistakable, even hearing it the first time—a clear reminder that you have left the Western world. And yet in Astana the experience falls a bit flat. It feels more like a distant plea for you not to forget that 98% of ethnic Kazakhs identify as Muslim, even if most of them aren’t answering the calls to prayer. Instead, you can find them in the many fashionable bars and restaurants knocking back beers and vodkas and smoking their lungs out well into the night with their non-Muslim countrymen. Though not totally uncommon, you’ll probably see more women in modest Islamic dress among European Muslim populations on the streets of Paris or London than in Astana. Not exactly what most people picture when they think of a Muslim country, least of all other Muslims. When I described this to a friend of mine from Pakistan, he incredulously replied “What kind of Muslims are those?” Well, a different kind: these are Muslims of the steppe.

Owing to their historically nomadic lifestyle, Kazakhs did not build mosques and generally lacked an Islamic clergy. Islam was instead adopted along with many other native beliefs such as Tengrism and Shamanism, as well as Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. Kazakhs followed the Sufi tradition almost exclusively until the 18th century, which meant a much more mystical and less legalistic form of Islam than is widely practiced today, which accounts for the mixing of beliefs from other faiths. Part of the Russian colonial program of the 18th and 19th centuries in Kazakhstan was actually encouraging Kazakhs to be more Muslim. This was a move to ‘civilize’ the nomads who were seen as savage due to their clearly non-Muslim, traditional nomadic beliefs. The Russian administration brought in Tatar clerics loyal to the Russian Empire to set up the first Sharia courts and establish mosques, laying the foundations for organized Islam in Kazakhstan. But whatever development had started was quickly stunted by the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet rule of Central Asia.

A historic non-adherence to more formalized Islamic practices as well as 70 years of state-sponsored atheism and religious persecutions left Kazakhs about as religious as Russians or other Eastern Europeans. There is, of course, a significant highly-religious minority, mostly in rural areas, while nearly everyone identifies as a ‘cultural’ Muslim. However, a key difference between Christianity and Islam is that Islam has experienced a revival in recent years across the Muslim world, and Kazakhstan is no exception. Even if it has been far more controlled than elsewhere, in the 1990s hundreds of mosques were opened, mostly with funding from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Islam has been experiencing a steady growth in importance since. Just how much of a growth is hard to say considering the country’s history but Nazarbayev has certainly been worried enough about its influence to take many measures to control its spread.

Such measures include deporting dozens of foreign imams and creating an Agency for Religious Affairs staffed with party apparatchiks who have the power to appoint imams and Islamic teachers. These measures were adopted in the years following the attacks on 9/11, which affected Kazakh policy in no small way. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were—and to some extent still are—-seen as two of the greatest security threats to Kazakhstan and the region. This has lead to a great deal of cooperation and stronger relations with the U.S., with American planes making hundreds of approved flights over Kazakhstan during the War in Afghanistan. Counterterrorism policies seem to have done well to combat extremism, as Kazakhstan lacks any influential domestic Islamic terrorist organization and at least on paper appears to exercise a great deal of control over how Islam is taught and propagated in the country.

Kazakhstan is officially a secular and non-Islamic country according to its constitution, unlike the other Central Asian republics which give special status to Islam. Despite the fact that Kazakhstan is a member of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the country still likes to portray itself as a bridge between the Muslim and Christian worlds, rather than a fully fledged member of the Islamic one. Kazakhstan maintains positive relations with not only its direct Muslim neighbors, but with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey as well. Any crackdowns on religion in the country have been portrayed as simply a battle against ‘nontraditional’ Islam and protective of domestic ‘traditional’ Islam, even if in many cases this seems to just be a cover. Whatever the future relationship of the state with its Islamic heritage, its current strategy requires that it be balanced with strong ties to Russia and the post-Soviet world.

After Nazarbayev

It is no surprise that Nazarbayev is not very well-educated about Islam and not particularly interested in it, considering he was a Communist Party member in the Soviet Union for 30 years and would eventually come to lead the Communist Party of Kazakhstan. The same generally applies for most of his associates and his generation. This has undoubtedly aided their nation-building project and avoided sectarian tensions by propagating a more inclusive Eurasianist ideology. The alternative could have been an exclusive Kazakh nationalism closely connected to Islam, especially considering ethnic Kazakhs dominate the ranks of the civil service. However, the changing demographic map of Kazakhstan as well as generational cleavages relating to identity could challenge the foundations of the modern Kazakh state, especially once Nazarbayev is gone.

Young people may not be very religious compared to other Muslim countries, but they identify with Islam and connect it to Kazakh identity more than their elders raised in the Soviet Union. Considering Kazakhs are an ever increasing ethnic majority, a more homogeneous Kazakhstan could lead to a more assertive Kazakh national ideology, which would be in direct conflict with Nazarbayev’s Eurasianist ideology and undermine his entire geopolitical strategy for Kazakhstan. To be clear, there is rather significant opposition in Kazakhstan to this entire conception of the country, and as it stands there is no guarantee that the country will keep its course after Nazarbayev. The opposition, however, is not well-organized, not to mention essentially illegal. The Eurasianist elite which occupies the state is not directly threatened by any competing factions as far as we know.

Though succession is still not absolutely clear, Nazarbayev appears to be preparing to reduce his role in government. He will be celebrating his 79th birthday later this year. In 2010, Nazarbayev was declared ‘Leader of the Nation.’ The lifetime role will protect him and his family from any prosecution, as well as giving him a broad range of powers until he dies—even if he decides not to run for president again in 2020. This means whoever becomes president next will be a kind of half-president, sharing power with Nazarbayev. In recent years he has also delegated more powers to the parliament, which is overwhelmingly controlled by his ruling Nur Otan party. Given all this, the most likely situation for succession appears to be that Nazarbayev picks his successor for president and oversees the transition while remaining firmly in control of the direction of the country in his role as Leader of the Nation. This could happen as early as 2020.

Crossroads

Kazakhstan is not a world power, nor does it strive to achieve this impossible goal. What it can be is a significant player on the global stage, owing to its position at the center of the Eurasian landmass and as a genuine bridge between civilizations. For decades, the leadership of the country has pursued this goal enthusiastically and with great success. Rather than becoming yet another failed post-communist state, it has grown into a stable and relatively wealthy country with strong diplomatic ties not only to the world’s powers, but also other regional players. The continued success of this strategy will likely see Kazakhstan’s wealth and power grow to the point where it becomes one of the world’s important secondary powers, comparable to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, or Iran. Additionally, if Central Asia is to become a flashpoint anytime in the future, Kazakhstan is uniquely well-positioned to influence the course of the region as a whole.

But with Kazakhstan, one never knows. Kazakhs are a Turkic people and speak a Turkic language. This binds them not just to the other countries of Central Asia—Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan—but to Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Xinjiang as well. This facet of Kazakh identity is strongly linked to the Eurasianist ideology, and Nazarbayev has even stated he believes the Turkic peoples of Central Asia to be one people, only divided by the meddling Soviets. While the creation of a Turkic Union may not be in the works just yet, it seems that Eurasian integration could be a stepping stone to it if relations between the Turkic world and Russia grow more permanent, particularly in the case of Turkey. While this is entering the realm of speculation, Nazarbayev has shown a tendency to follow through on his rhetoric and being the sole regional power in Central Asia would certainly lend a hand in any such efforts.

Whatever the future may hold for Kazakhstan, the actions and policies taken by the government have been incredibly successful in forging a modern nation-state where none had existed before. Placing geopolitics at the heart of that process truly puts the country in a unique position. What this will mean for Kazakhstan in the near term seems clear: a successful development path which engages the Western, Russian, and Chinese spheres alike but refuses absorption by any one of them. What this will mean for the Eurasian world-island more broadly, only time will tell.