Russian aggression against states like Ukraine and Georgia is often explained as a response to Western actions. However, historical evidence and even Vladimir Putin’s own statements indicate that Russia’s invasions are internally motivated, stemming from deeply rooted imperialist traditions. Whether under the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the Tsars, the Soviet Union, or the Russian Federation, Russian imperialism stems from three factors: the idea of Russia as the “third Rome,” the experience of Mongol occupation, and the country’s geography.

Russia as the “Third Rome”

Having been conquered by the Mongols during the thirteenth century, Russia became formally independent of the Golden Horde under Ivan III (ruled 1462-1505), during which time the notion of Russia as the “third Rome” was conceived. This was possibly inspired by the three-headed eagle that appears in the Jewish Apocalypse of Ezra, though the phrase’s origin is difficult to pinpoint.

According to Dimitri Strémooukhoff, Byzantium’s imperial ideology included a strong religious element and “was stamped with a certain ‘messianism.’” This ideology was ascendent just as Slavs began converting to Christianity and the Byzantines were eager to “export” their religion to Slavic Europe. By the fall of Constantinople in 1492, the Russians were convinced that Christianity properly included a “Christian Empire.” The notion that Russia was the “third Rome” became central to the country’s self-image during the sixteenth century.

In The Might of the West, Lawrence R. Brown offers a comparative perspective. Brown explains that Ivan III assembled Russia much as Clovis assembled the Frankish empire, and that “each founded the great symbol of the future society built by [his] people.” Thus, Clovis’s conversion established the Catholic Church as “the rallying point and symbol of the West.” Likewise, by marrying the Byzantine heiress Sophie Palaeologus, Ivan symbolically made Moscow “the holy city of the world, the third Rome, true and only heir of the Caesars and the basileis, guardian of the past, promise of the future.”

The belief in Russia’s spiritual superiority and messianic role persisted throughout later centuries, often expressing itself in paranoia about the outside world. For instance, Russian politics in the nineteenth century already displayed some familiar pathologies. In Putinism, Walter Laqueur quotes a passage from the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, penned in 1892. Therein, Solovyov compares “the Russian people” to a man suffering from delusions:

[H]is mind is . . . afflicted . . . by false ideas approaching folie de grandeur and a hostility toward everyone and everything. Indifferent to his real advantage, . . . he imagines dangers that do not exist. . . . It seems to him that all his neighbors offend him . . . and in every way want to harm him. He accuses everyone in his family of damaging and deserting him, of crossing over to the enemy camp.

The image of Russia as sacred, immaculate, and eternally persecuted persisted into the 20^th century, occurring, for instance, in the writings of the “white” (tsarist) émigré Ivan Ilyin. For Brown, it even informed the Soviet Union’s vision of “world revolution.” was underlain by the old notion that Russia embodied the correct path through history and that outsiders ought to become Russified. Since the 1990s, the “Third Rome” trope has been prominently and explicitly invoked in Russian political discourse. 

Mongol Influence

In The Mongols and Russia, George Vernadsky maintains that the Mongol occupation of Russia deeply shaped the country’s political system. Politics in the Kievan Rus (medieval Russia) “was based on freedom,” with “the monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic” institutions keeping each other in check. Princes were not autocratic rulers, but merely “head[s] of the executive branch.” Conversely, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russia, after the period of Mongol rule, nobles had been reduced to “permanent servitors of the tsar,” who also “controlled . . . the gentry’s landed estates.” Political repression was carried out through the oprichnina, serfdom was imposed, and townspeople were subjected to “heavy taxes and, in some cases, to compulsory labor.”

According to Vernadsky, it was Mongol influence that rendered Russian politics so deeply autocratic. Certain political ideas and institutions were borrowed from the Mongol occupiers. Indeed, Russians during the sixteenth century saw their tsar as a successor to the khan of the Golden Horde as well as to the Byzantine emperor.

Geography

Arguably, geography favored Russia’s slide into autocracy from the outset. In his book Nations, Azar Gat contends that Europe has a somewhat unique history given “the near absence on this continent of hegemonic empires.” According to Gat, Europe is the only one of “the great civilizations of Eurasia” which “was never united by force from within, nor was it conquered from outside.” The Roman Empire came closest to breaking this pattern, yet it was of relatively brief duration and focused near the Mediterranean. Europe’s non-imperial past has endowed it with “a greater tradition of freedom” than one finds elsewhere. This is because the absence of empires has prevented the rise of the so-called “oriental despotism” wherein both nobles and commoners are disempowered by a central autocracy. As Montesquieu first described, Europe has been relatively free of empires because rivers, seas, and mountains render it more geographically fragmented than Asia. The exception, of course, is Europe’s wide, flat eastern extremity.

There are surely other reasons for Europe’s unusual liberalism. Still, Montesquieu and Gat’s explanation is compelling. Russia’s less fractured territory, marked by vast plains and steppes, seems to be one reason why sprawling multinational empires have been so prominent in the country’s history. First it was the Mongols’ empire, later Russia’s own.

Gat argues that Europe’s freedom-loving environment and lack of an imperial history made the nation-state especially prevalent on the continent during the modern period. By extension, the lack of these conditions can explain why the modern ideal of the nation-state came to Russia fairly late and found infertile ground when it got there.

Indeed, the ideal of national self-determination seems never quite to have caught on in Russia. In 1911, Vladimir Jabotinsky quipped that many Russians simply could not understand Taras Shevchenko, the Ukrainians’ national poet: “This Shevchenko person knew Russian extremely well, could write the same exact poems in Russian―the lingua franca―but for some stubborn reason wrote them in Ukrainian.”

The Present

Today, the Russian imperialist project lives on. In moments of candor, Russia’s leaders justify their expansionism in transparently imperialist terms. As Aris Roussinos shows, Vladimir Putin’s essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” reflects a typically imperial worldview, to which the concept of national self-determination is utterly alien.

Also significant is Putin’s 2005 statement that “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” This remark clearly bespoke a desire to see Russia’s imperialist history be continued, and the subsequent invasions of Georgia and Ukraine logically follow from it. Nor could it be argued that Putin’s Soviet nostalgia arises from some latent communist convictions. Rather, Putin shares Brown’s view of the USSR as yet another phase in Russia’s imperial history and remembers it fondly on that basis.

None of the above is meant to suggest that despotism and imperialism are Russia’s inescapable destiny. In a 1915 essay, Maxim Gorky wrote that Russians had “two souls”: the fatalistic, servile Eastern one fomented by Mongol influence and the individualistic Western one. Needless to say, he held that the latter should be more fully embraced.