All hegemons eventually fail. Throughout recorded history, no civilisation of significance has escaped that fate. It can be considered a maxim of global geopolitics. While the Roman Catholic Church is unique in having a traceable institutional lineage for nearly two millennia, its period as a territorial power came and went. China is a complex case, with a discrete, continuous culture and multiple expansion phases, but it recently endured a hundred years at the bottom of the pile – from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th.
Certainly in the West, the rule holds. The maritime empires of Spain, France and Great Britain expanded and then retreated to their home territories. The territorial empires of Rome, the Ottomans, the Habsburgs (and dozens of others) arguably fared worse, either disappearing entirely or returning to much diminished, even unrecognisable bases. Paul Kennedy and a handful of academic historians have taken up the whys and wherefores of imperial expansion and contraction. Scores of other historians and journalists have narrated the rise and fall of individual empires. School libraries are full of their works.
Applying the maxim in real time to today’s leading hegemons – the US, China, and Russia – is an intriguing test of the proposition. For some, however, it may be shocking to even question the Great Power status quo. The presentist bias of many observers and almost all politicians is overwhelming. History was history, of course, but ‘now is different’, they say. It borders on a psychological pathology. Americans will point to their ‘exceptionalism’. The Chinese can respond that the petty rhythms of Western hegemons do not apply to the Middle Kingdom. Whether as the Third Rome or as the bearer of a unique Eurasianist culture, Russia has a healthy sense of its self-importance and its historical role.
Despite those assertions, the US, China, and Russia do not exist outside of history. Check back in a century and all three will be elsewhere on the hegemonic trajectory. Russia peaked somewhere from a century ago (on the eve of the First World War) to the 1970s or so, depending on how one measures Great Power vitality. While many will disagree with that timing, no one can deny that a major diminution occurred around 1990-91, with the end of the Soviet Union.
So where does Russia go from here? Does it continue retreating to some historical boundary such as its core territory before it ‘broke out’ in the 15th and 16th centuries? Does it remain the planet’s largest country, but as a weaker, fragmented entity? Something in between? Does it break the mould and rebound, as its leadership has committed to doing?
All are fair questions and, it turns out, none of them original. As the Soviet Union faded in the 1970s and 1980s, and collapsed in the 1990s, scores of scholars, politicians, and journalists in Russia and the West opined on what happened, why, and wherefore. With its recent invasion of Ukraine, Russia is actively testing its hegemonic prerogative. That action makes it a good time to review the prior period of introspection and consider its implications for today’s Russia.
I also have a personal reason for doing so. I spent the first half of the 1990s in newly opened Russian archives, working on my dissertation about the early Soviet bureaucracy. In retrospect, I completely, utterly, and embarrassingly failed the Chabris-Simons test, missing world-significant events going on just outside the archives while I had my nose deep in musty folios. Within a few years, I had moved on to a different career, so it has been revelatory for me three decades later to review the ‘post-mortem’ literature (for lack of a better term) with a relatively clear head, no academic obligations, and the knowledge of how Russia has evolved over the past 30 years.
The accounts of the Soviet Union’s demise are striking in one particular respect. Commentators who would otherwise not associate with one another or even agree on how to spell samovar were nearly unanimous in the view that the Soviet state had become ‘overstretched’. A multitude of stress-suggesting words and phrases appear again and again in every possible context. There was the obvious economic burden of military spending to keep up with the United States. The East European satellite states had to be subsidised. Third World ventures such as Cuba and Afghanistan (to name just two) came out of the general coffers. They did not pay for themselves.
The other form of overreach was within the Soviet Union itself: the high ‘cost’ of Russia expanding beyond the Slavic heartland, starting in the 15th-16th centuries, to what were and still are today far-flung, often non-Russian, and sparsely populated lands. The Russians were very good at the expansion process and ended up with the largest country in the world, by a lot. Paul Werth’s recent account– How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History – tells the tale well and concisely. In Russia’s case, building this empire was partially a matter of military necessity – a form of defence against other powers in the absence of natural barriers – but it was nevertheless a costly strategy. Almost all the commentators note that, in practice, Russia’s imperial legacy to the Soviet Union, and then the latter’s management of its sprawling, ethno-federal empire became an enormous burden.
In this context, it is helpful to review the unusual nature of Soviet nationalities policy. Like a lot of early Soviet administration, it was remarkably convoluted. Recall that by the time Lenin was done revising Marxism, there was not much left that Marx would have recognised. For instance, according to Marx, advanced industrial workers would know that the important identity was class, not nationality or ethnicity. They would organise themselves accordingly. Well, in mostly rural and multi-ethnic Russia in 1917, it didn’t work out that way. Empires were failing left and right, with nation-states, not a global workers movement, gaining the upper hand. So Lenin and Stalin, his early nationalities commissar, came up with a solution in the years immediately following the Bolshevik takeover to square the circle: they supported newly formed, ethnically based entities that fit within the overarching framework of a socialist state. It was, as the slogan proclaimed, ‘national in form; socialist in content’.
That’s how the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922 came about, with a constitution in 1924 that voluntarily joined together nominally independent republics. It was a compromise with the nationalistic aspirations of ethnic groups suddenly freed from the ‘prison of nations’, Lenin’s famous characterisation of Tsarist Russia. The system featured the promotion of local ethnic languages, culture, cadres, but most importantly ethnic territories had their own administrative structures, educational institutions, and media platforms. Originally, there were four constituent republics. By 1936, further map-making resulted in 11 union republics. Lands taken in the Second World War brought the total to 15 after 1956. The largest, then the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and now the Russian Federation, had and still has numerous ethnic sub-divisions and administrative entities.
And therein lies the rub: the republics that constituted the Soviet Union in 1922 and thereafter had the right to secede. Of course, that was a dead-letter provision at the time, but it came to life 70 years later when inanition had mortally weakened the central state. The Soviet Union fractured precisely along those 15 republic lines. That was not a random outcome. It is instead the great irony of Soviet nationalities policy. Lenin’s solving of a nationalities-vs-empire problem in the early years of the Soviet Union became the source of a renewed nationalities-vs-empire problem at the end of the Soviet Union. In contrast, the lesser ethnic-administrative units within the huge RSFSR did not have the paper right or the practical ability to become independent, and they remained within the post-Soviet Russian Federation. Chechnya was the attempted exception that proved the rule.
Moreover, while all the Soviet republics were nationalities-based, there was one important exception: the RSFSR itself. It was quasi-Russian, quasi-Soviet, leaving Russians as the dominant ethnic group in the Soviet Union, but with a confused identity. Were they Soviet? Were they Russian? Were the two identities supposed to be the same?
The shortcomings of managing nationalities in this manner became increasingly obvious inside and outside the Soviet Union. In the late 1970s, French historian Hélène Carrère d’Encausse wrote that ‘of all the problems facing Moscow, the most urgent and the most stubborn is the one raised by the national minorities. And like the Empire that it succeeded, the Soviet State seems incapable of extricating itself from the nationality impasse’.
In 1990, an enraged Alexander Solzhenitsyn fumed about what the Soviet Union had done to Russia. He called for the union’s breakup, with the non-Slavic republics going their own way. He focused on the revitalisation of the medieval notion of Rus’, which he defined as big Russia (Russia), little Russia (Ukraine), white Russia (Belarus’), and a heavily Russianised sliver of Kazakhstan. And even then, there would still be ‘a hundred’ other peoples within the resulting borders. But he argued that Russia has no strength left for empire and, pointing to the case of Japan, that it didn’t need to be large to prosper. Freeing itself of the 12 non-Russian republics would not weaken Russia; it would strengthen it. Did Russia suffer, he asked, for not having to deal with Poland and Finland as a result of the First World War? No, not at all. And it could do without the rest. As for the non-Slavic ethnic groups within Russia, it was not practical for them to break away without an external border. But those that were on the border should be free to go.
The challenge of empire was visible to all, not just the pundits and the prophets. Journalist David Remnick reported a student at Moscow State University in 1990 saying that ‘the Soviet Union is a great empire, and we are now watching its disintegration… Assuming that by my early thirties I have not been killed in a civil war, I think what will be left will be Russia – the original core territory. And that is what happened to the Roman Empire, isn’t it? It shrank. I just hope that it all happens without haste, and peacefully’.
As became evident in the 1990s, it was the bearers of empire themselves, the Russians, who bore the brunt of the empire’s collapse. The Ukrainian-American academic Roman Szporluk was arguably a highly biased observer, but his assessment, written originally in 1997, still resounds:
Another major factor in the fall of both the Russia and Soviet empires was their overextension. They established their hegemony over nations and territories that refused to recognize Russia and/or the USSR as a superior civilization, a higher form of economy and government – qualities an empire must possess if its rule is not to be based on coercion alone. To maintain hegemony over them in the absence of such recognition required a disproportionate reliance on coercion, and this made Russian rule in ‘Europe’ a heavy burden on the Russian people, which in turn further contributed to the alienation of the Russians from ‘their’ state… Having been called – and coerced – by their rulers, both tsarist and communist, to serve ‘the great cause’ of the empire, the Russians found it very difficult to establish for themselves a political identity distinct from and independent of empire.
Such quotes are from random accounts within an arm’s reach of my desk. Yes, other observers focused on ideological shortcomings of the Soviet Union, and celebrated the victory of the classical liberal ideal. Some noted the personalities of the key players such as Gorbachev and Yeltsin as decisive factors. Those insights are not to be dismissed, but the far greater overlap in analysis is on the mundane matters of empire, of ethnic relations, demography, geography, budgets, subsidies, administration, operating costs, and standards of living. External and internal imperial overreach is surely not the only cause for the Soviet Union’s failure, but it is among the most commonly encountered. And within the longue-durée context of rising and falling hegemons, it is simply an obvious one.
What is equally striking is that, three decades later, the Russian Federation faces similar challenges. While the extent of ethnic complexity may not be as great as that facing the Tsarist empire circa 1914, or the specific ethno-federalism that bedevilled the Soviet Union circa 1990-91, the Russian state today remains a vast, economically challenged, multi-ethnic enterprise. Yes, there was a clear step-change down in imperial overreach with the end of the Soviet Union. Yes, after the brutal 1990s, Russia started growing again and achieved some degree of political stability.
Still, the Russian Federation is overstretched. Moscow continues to subsidise non-energy-producing regions. Consistent with an over-reliance on hydrocarbon extraction, Russia has had limited success diversifying its economy. Not surprisingly, living standards and development are highly uneven by geography. And the state now faces all-encompassing military expenditures. Does that sound familiar? None of these challenges are secret. They are actively discussed in the Russian media and addressed directly by the political elite.
Most critically, Russia continues to experience a demographic decline. Russia’s current population of around 143 million (sources disagree) is struggling due to a prolonged low fertility rate, net emigration, and most recently, the war. The UN is forecasting further decline to 136 million by mid century. The extraordinarily low population density outside of European Russia – approximately 25 million people across a territory of 11.3 million square kilometres (the Siberian and Far Eastern Federal Districts), or 2.2 persons per kilometre – highlights the challenge of maintaining such a large territory. Those two eastern territories represent roughly two thirds of Russia’s landmass, but less than one fifth of its population. And even those figures are misleading. Essentially, all of the Siberian and Far Eastern population is in a few cities and along the southern tier of the region. The rest of the vast area is, for all intents and purposes, empty. Yes, the entire global north is facing demographic challenges. Yes, Alaska and Canada’s northern territories have even lower population densities, but in Russia’s case, the demographic decline is central to the country’s hegemonic trajectory.
Russia’s leadership is well aware of the demographic challenge. Among his earliest public pronouncements on the topic, in 2000, Putin declared that ‘year by year, we, the citizens of Russia, are getting fewer and fewer… We face the threat of becoming a senile nation’. A few years later, he cited Russia’s demography as ‘the most acute problem facing our country today’.
Although approximately 80 per cent of the population in the Russian Federation identifies as ethnically Russian, the severity of the demographic decline is greater for Russians in outlying regions due to lower fertility rates and out-migration. While the conflation of Russian and Soviet identity is no longer an issue three decades after the end of the Soviet Union, it is relevant in a new form: is Russia the land of the ethnic russkie (the ethnic group) or the land of the rossiiskie, those subject to Russian government control (a much larger territorial range)? A lot depends on how that question is answered.
In this context, it’s worth noting that Russia remains organised along administrative lines that invite comparison to the fractures along which the Soviet Union broke apart in 1990 and 1991. Those lines are ample. Russia is currently divided into no less than 83 distinct territorial entities, called ‘subjects’ (sub’ekty) in Russian. It has 46 oblasti (regions), 9 generally large and remote krai (territories), and 21 ‘republics’ based on a stated ethnicity, plus one ethnically-based autonomous region. There are also four autonomous okrugi (districts), and the two ‘federal’ cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. This list does not include six administrative entities carved out of Ukraine in the past decade. For matters of central administration, the country is also divided into eight massive Federal districts (okrugi). Did I mention convoluted?
Most of the ‘non-ethnic’ (i.e. ethnic Russian) regions are in the west of the country, surrounding Moscow, in what might be considered the Russian heartland. In contrast, most of the ‘ethnic’ republics (i.e. not ethnic Russian) are in the Caucasus, in Siberia, the Far East and Far North, or on the fringes of Russia’s historical territories. Others are along the middle and lower reaches of the Volga River (and its tributaries), what was the eastern edge of the emerging Russian state centuries ago.
What do these lines in the sand (taiga, steppe) mean? Perhaps nothing. In the tumultuous 1990s, numerous ethnic and regional groups within the Russian Federation sought to have greater autonomy. Their efforts came to nought. Compared to then, power is now far more centralised in Moscow. The ethnic republics are not necessarily dominated by, or even have a majority population of, their titular ethnos. And since the 1990s, the number and boundaries of the Federal subjects have been periodically revised to minimise the administrative basis of non-Russian ethnic groups.
More importantly, the ethnic republics within the Russian Federation do not have the same constitutional rights that the union republics had in the Soviet period. That calls into question the ‘federation’ title. And after three more decades of attempted modernisation, intermarriage, and cultural and linguistic homogenisation around Russia and Russian ethnicity, the potency of a non-Russian ethnic identity can be easily disputed. So there may be nothing to see here. My contention is simply that, should Russia continue along the downstroke of the hegemonic trajectory, its current administrative borders may serve the same function as the USSR’s internal republic borders did 35 years ago – the path of least resistance.
Or not. Historians have noted how Russia’s centuries-long expansion saw ebbs and flows, particularly on its Western border with the Swedes, Poles, and Lithuanians. The 1990s setback might be one of those ebbs before the next flow. ‘Great Man’ Putin might still triumph over the Rise and Fall model by bringing Russia back to its prior borders and addressing Russia’s chronic overstretch. Rather than rise and fall, it might be an instance of rise and fall and rise and….
There are several upcoming opportunities to test that hypothesis. Belarus is one of them. Of all the former Soviet republics, it has remained the closest to Russia, essentially as a satellite state. After Lukashenko is gone, will it be reabsorbed into the Russian Federation, remain a buffer state, or will it lurch chaotically westward? The exclave of Kaliningrad offers another test. As currently constituted, it makes little sense as part of Russia. It makes even less sense as part of any other country or on its own. So how it ends up will give a strong indication of the pace and direction of Russia’s movement along the hegemonic trajectory.
The results vis-à-vis Ukraine are already in. Russia may end up keeping the territory it has occupied since 2014 and 2022, but it will be a Pyrrhic victory at best. The Russian tricolour flying over Luhansk and Donetsk, both reduced to apocalyptic wastelands, is a sign of hegemonic weakness, not strength. Crimea, like Kaliningrad, looks great on a map as an imperial outpost, but as a non-contiguous, hard-to-manage, and hard-to-defend territory, it is the very definition of overreach. The expense involved in seizing and maintaining it seems well out of proportion with any benefits Russia might derive from being able to call ‘Крым-Наш!’ (‘Crimea is ours!’)
Russia spent centuries expanding across the Eurasian plain to defend itself and compete with other hegemons. Then, at the end of the 20th century, the pendulum began swinging back. Russia’s most recent efforts appear designed to reverse course yet again. All of this movement raises the question: what might be Russia’s ideal borders to achieve some sort of economic, demographic, ethnic, and geopolitical equilibrium? Where fiscal transfers are less onerous? Where defence costs are more manageable given a smaller perimeter? Where the population has the means and incentive to become stable if not actually grow? Where the economy can diversify away from an excessive reliance on hydrocarbons? In short, where might Russia begin and end such that it would no longer need to engage in a constant struggle with its neighbours and its own population?
There is, of course, no such thing as a permanent geopolitical equilibrium, and geography is only one of many factors determining economic prosperity and a flourishing society. So what follows is at best a thought exercise. But as counter-factual as it might sound, the question is indirectly implied in many of the works about the late Soviet Union, and directly implied in those focusing on Russia’s current imperial overreach.
Solzhenitsyn was never one to shy away from a strongly stated view of his ideal, Russia-focused entity. His 1990 statement imagines a more concentrated Russian state, though he does not draw detailed borders. Solzhenitsyn discussed strengthening the area around 40 Russian cities in the provinces, with significant regional autonomy for each. His contemporary Vadim Tsymburskiy authored The Island of Russia (1993) which made a similar argument in favour of shedding imperial burdens and reorienting the country toward inner cultural consolidation. In 1996, the demographer Vladimir Kabuzan outlined his vision of a Russkii – as opposed to Rossiiskii – nation state, built around territories where Russians and Russian-speakers constituted the majority of the population and lived in compact settlements. This reimagining of the Russian state would have involved many of the ethnic Russians who found themselves separated from the Russian Federation after 1991. Yet it still raises the question of those territories within the Russian Federation not compactly settled or not dominated (at the time) by Russian-speakers.
Coming from a very different quarter, Zbigniew Brzezinski considered the specific possibility of a tripartite Russian confederation, consisting of Russia, Siberia, and the Far East. This structure suited a Western agenda to limit Russian power, but it may also end up constituting an historical inevitability in one form or another. An economic advisor to Putin, Andrey Illarionov, supposedly summed up the challenge in 2002 by noting that Russia ‘occupies 11.5 per cent of the world’s territory, it has 2.32 per cent of the global population total, and its share of world gross domestic product is 1.79 per cent in terms of purchasing power parity and 1.1 per cent at market exchange rates. The unavoidable conclusion here is a cruel one. Human history has no precedent of a gap this wide between “territorial power” and economic “insignificance” holding for any extended length of time.’
At about the same time, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy took up the economic cost of supporting Siberia and the Far North and concluded that Russia would do best to concentrate its resources in European Russia: ‘For reasons of economic efficiency, Russia needs to “shrink distance and grow warmer” by having people move back to the western and southern regions of the Russian Federation and away from Siberia.’ The authors did not suggest abandoning the vast territories to the east, just not spending undue amounts trying to develop and support them.
More recently, under Putin, there has been less support, if any, within Russia for pulling back from remote territories. In fact, public statements challenging the borders of the Russian Federation were made a criminal act in December 2013. But having that law on the books will not stop much larger historical processes at work. Russia has already retreated from its peak size before the First World War to roughly the same territory that it occupied in the middle of the 17th century. What is the next step?
A close look at the current Russian Federation administrative map becomes suggestive in this context. I have in mind not the jigsaw puzzle of 83 subjects, but the eight large districts created by Putin’s administration in 2000 to centralise Moscow’s command of the unwieldy number and nature of the Federal subjects. Like the maps that Sykes and Picot drew through the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, and like those approved by Lenin and Stalin at about the same time, these arbitrary divisions may end up taking on a life of their own a decade or a century or two from now.
Five of the districts – leaving out the troublesome North Caucasus and the remote Siberian and Far Eastern districts – might constitute a more manageable and a potentially more successful Russia. This version would have 5.5 million square kilometres and a population of roughly 112 million, or a population density of just over 20 people per square kilometre. This Russia would look like an expanded version of ‘break-out Russia’ circa the 16th century, but would include the Urals, the energy rich-part of Western Siberia, and other periphery areas. It would still encompass numerous non-Russian ethnic administrative entities and enclaves; the checkerboard nature of the Eurasian plain makes that unavoidable. I leave it to others to figure out the exact geography, economics, demographics, and political economy of this blackboard equilibrium. But if it worked, it would be because it was an extension of historical Russia, not an overextension.
To be clear, this is not to suggest that equilibrium Russia would emerge in an equilibrium manner. Existing and emerging polities have filled the territorial vacuum left by earlier retreating hegemons, but that would certainly be a chaotic process. Similarly, the emergence of a core Russian state would leave millions of ethnic Russians in the ‘near abroad’, just as the break up of the Soviet Union did. That has been a source of instability in the Baltic states, the North Caucasus, and, of course, most visibly, in Ukraine. More generally, massive population and land transfers associated with declining empires rarely occur smoothly or peacefully.
Getting the right geopolitical and economic balance is not just a map issue. It is also a philosophical one. Even before the pointed debates of the 1990s, Russians have been trying to determine the country’s right place vis-à-vis ‘the West’ for centuries, starting with Peter the Great in the early 18th century and then more or less continuously since the Slavophiles and Westerners in the 1830s and 1840s. The early 20th century brought the distinctive Eurasianist school of thought to the fray. Russia seems fated to be forever searching for its proper place in a dynamic world.
Even while Russia was on the upstroke, (the Ukrainian-born) Nikolai Gogol famously asked, ‘Русь, куда ж несёшься ты?’ (‘Rus, where are you heading?’) Less than a century later, Vladimir Lenin had a perhaps prophetic answer. Already sidelined by illness, in early 1923, Lenin entitled an article ‘Лучше меньше, да лучше’ (‘Better fewer, but better.’) In it, he argued in favour of quality over quantity, specifically in regard to an emerging state bureaucracy. The phrase became famous during the Soviet period, being interpreted by each generation of Soviet leaders for their own purpose. It might just as well serve for the size of a future Russian state.
In the meantime, if Putin cannot reverse history, can he at least ‘flatten the curve’ of hegemonic decline? Can he and his successors run it down slowly like the Dutch rather than headlong like the Spanish? He is certainly trying. Policies adopted by the regime over the past decade are explicitly designed to reduce Russia’s reliance on imported goods, and its dependence on foreign economic and technology networks. They include a broad-based effort at import substitution, creation of a ‘sovereign’ internet, native payment systems and a separate financial infrastructure, etc. On the demographic front, there is the maternal capital programme – MatKapital – started in 2007 and designed to encourage family formation. On the cultural front, there is Presidential Decree No. 809, ‘On Approval of the Fundamentals of State Policy for the Preservation and Strengthening of Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values’ signed 9 November 2022. The name says it all.
According to Presidential Decree No. 309 from May of 2024, ‘On the National Development Goals of the Russian Federation’, many of these efforts are supposed to bear fruit by 2030, within a foreseeable measurement period. By that time, the government aims to increase life expectancy to 78 years, raise the total fertility rate to 1.6 (still well below replacement rate), and reduce poverty below seven per cent. Other goals that the Russian government has set include delivering 1,000 domestically produced aircraft, becoming a top-25 leader in industrial robotics, making the Northern Sea Route a major international trade corridor, providing 97 per cent broadband coverage, and facilitating 140 million domestic annual trips through development of new domestic resorts.
In the very near-term, Putin may have some flexibility in achieving these targets. With his man in the White House, and by enjoying the status of a protected vassal of China, Russia buys time, as does a stable price of oil. But whether Russia’s latest ‘Five-Year Plan’, even if achieved, will be sufficient to slow, halt, or reverse Russia’s longer-term trajectory is the greater question.