Per the 2022 National Defense Strategy, Russia represents an “acute threat” to the United States and its interests.1 Despite the best efforts of successive post–Cold War U.S. presidents to adjust policy towards Moscow in a more aspirational direction, Russia remains an intractable opponent of the United States, motivated by objectives which can appear frustratingly opaque to outside observers.
When viewed from the West, Russia’s behavior presents a challenging question: what motivates Russia to take such a self-destructive path that brings it into direct confrontation with the United States and many of its neighbors, at such a great cost to itself? Is the Russian state of President Vladimir Putin evolving into an ideological one, whose self-imposed imperatives can seem idiosyncratic or confusing to observers? Although the Russian constitution forbids the official endorsement of a particular ideology by the state, Putin’s December 2023 quip that Russia benefits from an ideological foundation that Ukraine lacks reflects that he nonetheless values the idea of an ideologically-grounded Russia.2
Putin and others in Russia’s leadership class have increasingly articulated the concept that Russia is a “civilization-state.” According to them, Russia’s statehood is synonymous with its status as a civilizational pole, which has led the Kremlin to view its relationship with the West and its other neighbors as an immutable, primordial contest between civilizations. It is likely that the adoption of civilizational rhetoric (and ideas adjacent to it) as a nebulous strategic philosophy by the Kremlin represents genuine conviction, rather than a cynical ploy to justify the existing political regime. Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the most dramatic consequence of this emergent ideology and demonstrates the degree to which the Kremlin is willing to gradually subordinate all other priorities to what it sees as the defense of Russian civilization. With this civilizational course in place, the United States and Russia will struggle to manage their competition, as Russia’s leadership views this contest in self-identified existential terms.
Present-day Russian civilizational rhetoric is in many ways a post-2012 innovation of a political system crafted by Putin, but it is also an amalgam of much older intellectual traditions that shape Russian state policy and drive friction with the United States and the “collective West.” Imported into Russian statecraft by Putin, the concept of Russia as a civilization-state has already had noteworthy consequences. Unless the Kremlin decides to jettison its increasingly entrenched identification of Russia as a civilization-state, its pursuit of the objectives that flow from this concept will drive the Russian state to dedicate as much bandwidth and as many resources as possible to enforce an acceptable degree of unity on what it sees as its civilizational space.
The Kremlin’s Civilization Ideology Progenitors
Putin is far from the first in Russian history to discuss the idea of Russia as a civilization-state, but he is the first leader in the country’s history to directly identify the concept with Russian statehood and its raison d’etre. The identification of Russia as a civilization-state draws on a variety of Russian intellectual traditions over the last two centuries, including the Pan-Slavic movement of the Russian Empire.
One of the earliest Russian Pan-Slavist theoreticians cited by Putin is Nikolai Danilevsky, whose 1869 work Russia and Europe was an important expression of the extreme current of Russian nationalism which emerged in the wake of the Polish January 1863 Uprising.3 To Putin, Danilevsky’s writings justify his rejection of the universality of Western political and cultural ideals and the existence of a separate Russian civilization. At the 2022 Valdai Discussion Club meeting, Putin declared that “no civilization can pride itself in representing the highest point of development,” citing Danilevsky.4 This was a reiteration of the same point he made in a public address to the 2018 World Russian People’s Council meeting.5 Putin’s citation of Danilevsky is remarkable, as Danilevsky himself was an inspiration for the subsequent “Eurasianist” tradition. The writings of the linguist and White Russian émigré Nikolai Trubetskoi advanced this tradition and were influential in the post-October Revolution Eurasianist émigré community. In his work Europe and Mankind, Trubetskoi rejected purported “Romano German” assumptions of the universality of their own civilizational mores, repackaging Danilevsky’s Germano Roman formulation without direct mention or citation of Danilevsky. These themes of Russia’s separateness as a civilizational and cultural space ground Putin’s ideological project.6
Founded with the stated purpose of furthering the “spiritual and moral education” of the Russian population with slick, high–production–quality video lectures and series, the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education’s Znanie (Knowledge) Society provides clues as to how the Kremlin projects civilizational ideology on the Russian population. In a course titled “DNA of Russia: Civilization-state,” the concept of Russia’s civilizational separateness is traced through different Russian intellectual traditions.7 Russia’s historical eastward expansion to the Pacific is justified by famed Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev’s predictions that Russian population growth would necessitate the acquisition of new lands. Soviet-era Eurasianist Lev Gumilev’s theory of passionarnost’ (“passionarity”) is also presented in the video. The concept is defined in the lesson as the “biochemical energy” of a particular ethnos which “generates an irresistible internal desire to change life,” although this term can also be understood as a “capacity for suffering.”8 This concept was cited by Putin himself in his 2012 Federal Assembly address, and Putin has said at different occasions that he “believes in passionarity” and that the West lacks the quality of passionarity.9
The Znanie course describes how Gumilev ascribed a high level of passionarity to Russia which fueled great national feats such as freeing Western Europe from Napoleon’s armies. While the work of Danilevsky is presented by the course as the original conceptualization of the world in civilizational terms, the non-Russian civilization-based historical theories of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee are described as lending credence to the idea of Russian civilizational distinctiveness. By also detailing Aleksei Khomyakov’s theory of sobornost’, roughly translated as the collective spiritual culture of the Russian people, the course describes a version of Russia which is civilizationally distinct from Europe. It even proclaims that Russia’s “typical management model” is that of an empire, which it glowingly defines as a “large, multinational entity led from a single center.”10
While these ideas may strike Western observers as strange or harmless, these threads have been woven together to influence Russian policy. These real-world impacts have followed years of ideological formation and dissemination across the Russian state.
Development of Civilizational Concept in Putin’s Russia
While the conceptualization of Russia as a civilization-state has been bandied about in Russian politics since at least the start of Putin’s first term, its practical adaptation by the Kremlin as an ideology of the Russian state began in earnest after Putin’s first term in office. According to a 2009 essay by Wilson Center Global Fellow Igor Zevelev, Moscow had begun to express “two possible approaches to Russia’s civilizational affiliation.”One, according to Zevelev, was posed by President Dmitri Medvedev in a June 2008 speech where he suggested that “the end of the Cold War [raised the possibility of] cooperation between Russia, the European Union and North America as three branches of European civilization.” The other described by Zevelev was a slightly different version of Russia’s civilizational conception advanced by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, which held that a new manner of interstate competition was emerging around the fault lines of civilizational differences, namely those pertaining to differing models of values and development. Zevelev also noted that there had been years of churning deliberation in the State Duma about Russia’s civilizational identity, with Duma factions introducing legislation and party platforms which aimed, unsuccessfully, to reorient Russian self-conceptualization of its civilizational nature in a more ethno-nationalist direction.11
Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 after swapping positions with Medvedev marked a new turn in the use of civilizational rhetoric to describe Russia’s place in the world. In connection with his 2012 election campaign, Putin penned a series of articles which laid out his idea of Russian statehood that emphasized Russia’s “civilizational model” and “civilizational identity.”12 In an article titled “Russia: the Ethnicity Issue” in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Putin rejects a Russian ethnonationalist conception of the state, instead labeling Russia a “multiethnic civilization with Russian culture at its core.” While this vision disputes the claim that the Russian state should exist to serve ethnic Russians, Putin describes Russians as a “state-forming” (gosudarstvoobrazuyuschiy) people at the center of the Russian civilizational project.13 Shortly after reassuming the presidency, Putin delivered speeches at the inaugural meeting of the Council for Interethnic Relations in 2012 and at the 2013 meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, where he repeated a similar conception of Russia as a distinct civilization built around a core Russian cultural identity.14 On Putin’s suggestion, the Russian language was enshrined in Russia’s constitution as the “language of the state-forming people” along with a raft of other cultural and political amendments in 2020.15
Russia’s Foreign Policy Concepts define the strategic priorities of Russian foreign policy and have been an important instrument in the institutionalization of civilizational self-perceptions in Russian state policy. The 2008 Russian Foreign Policy Concept, as approved by Medvedev, claimed that “global competition” was acquiring a “civilizational dimension” for the “first time in…contemporary history” and called for dialogue among civilizations.16 The document also declared that Moscow “attaches great importance to improving the manageability of the world development and establishing a self-regulating international system” through the collective leadership of the “leading states,” which the document argues should be “representative in geographical and civilizational terms” under the auspices of the United Nations. These themes were reiterated in Russia’s succeeding 2013 Foreign Policy Concept, indicating a persistent belief that civilizational interaction was an important consideration in world affairs.17 In an article published in connection with the approval of the 2013 concept, Sergei Lavrov described the importance of “civilization identity in modern conditions” as well as the formation of civilizational blocs as major recent developments, raising the risk that “civilizational frictions” could lead to outright confrontation.18
In March 2023, Putin approved an updated Russian Foreign Policy Concept which, for the first time, officially characterized Russia as a “civilization-state.” In its general provisions, the concept declares that Russia’s “thousand years of independent statehood,” historical links with both European and Eurasian cultures, and its “ability to ensure harmonious coexistence” among many distinct cultures in northern Eurasia bestows a “special position” upon Russia as a civilization-state. The document accuses the United States of seeking to undermine Russia’s civilizational status and defines the preservation of Russia’s status as a civilization-state as a core foreign policy objective. Viewing the post-Soviet “near-abroad” as crucial to Russia’s status as a civilizational pole, the 2023 Foreign Policy Concept calls for Russia to collaborate with Commonwealth of Independent States members as states joined to Russia by “centuries-old traditions of joint statehood,” deep interdependence, and commonality in cultures and language.19
Since approving the 2023 Foreign Policy Concept, Putin has continued to publicly invoke the characterization of Russia as a civilization-state. In an April 2023 address to a meeting of the Council of Legislators of the Russian Federation (a shared body of the two chambers of the Russian Federal Assembly), Putin described patriotic ideals as being of the highest importance in a civilization-state like Russia.20 At the October 2023 Valdai Discussion Club meeting, Putin described Russia’s 2023 Foreign Policy Concept as “distinctly and succinctly” characterizing how Moscow views “not only our own development, but also the principles of world order we hope for in victory.”21 Putin has also taken his civilization-state concept in more esoteric directions. In November 2023, Putin proclaimed that the uniqueness of Russian civilization has “scientific grounds” in the field of paleogenomics, the study of ancient genomes. According to Putin, such paleogenomic research confirmed Russia’s status as a civilizationally distinct entity, which he promised to fund extensively during a meeting with young scientists.22
Putin’s Civilization-State in Practice
The concept of Russia as a civilization-state has taken on a variety of real-life manifestations, some of which include the most destructive elements of Russian state policy. In practice, a civilizational identification of Russia is articulated by the Kremlin as a fundamental driver of competition with the West and as partly justifying Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Traces of the concept can also be found in Russia’s relationship with its other post-Soviet neighbors. Russia’s civilizational identity under Putin gives reason for Russia to aggressively corral those states which exist in its civilizational space by any means necessary.
In its most aggressive application yet, Putin’s civilization-state concept provided the rhetorical justification for Russia’s Ukraine invasion in his July 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”The essay, which preceded the buildup of manpower and materiel on the Russo-Ukrainian border that would eventually facilitate the February 2022 invasion, evokes familiar civilizational themes while only briefly mentioning the concept directly. The essay opens with a denunciation of the “wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine,” countries which, per Putin’s assessment, exist in “essentially the same historical and spiritual space.” The essay’s interpretation of the broad history of Russia and Ukraine decries what Putin describes as artificial or externally driven attempts to separate Ukraine from Russia in different historical episodes, such as during the Catholicization of former Rus’ lands controlled by Lithuania after the 1596 Union of Brest or attempts at forming a Ukrainian state in the wake of the First World War.23
In particular, Putin criticized how the Soviet Union created a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as a co-equal founder of the Union and how the Bolshevik government pursued a policy of korenizatsiya (indigenization), which Putin described as foundational to Ukraine’s present–day separate statehood and culture. To Putin, policies of “Ukrainization…imposed on those who did not see themselves as Ukrainians” essentially subverted the unity of “the large Russian nation, a triune people comprising [Great Russians], [Little Russians] and Belorussians.” This conception of Russia as a “triune nation,” which bears resemblance to broader concepts of Russia’s status as the center of a distinct Russian civilization, undergirds Putin’s assessment that “true sovereignty [for] Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia” based on “spiritual, human and civilizational ties formed [over] centuries.”24 As such, a civilizational conception of Russia is important in understanding the Kremlin’s rationale for its war of choice in Ukraine.
In a November 2023 address to the World Russian People’s Council, Putin described the scope of the “Russian world” while also assigning a deep responsibility for Russia’s civilizational development to the state-forming ethnic Russian core of Russian civilization. He identified the scope of Russia’s civilization-state as encompassing the historical territories of the Kievan Rus’, Muscovy, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the present-day Russian Federation, as well as those who “feel a spiritual affinity with our motherland, who consider themselves a carrier of the Russian language, history, and culture,” regardless of their national or religious affiliation.25 This was not the first such address by Putin to the council, and the emergence of Putin’s civilization-state image can be traced through his previous addresses to the council. In his first appearance in December 2001, Putin described the September 11 terror attacks in the United States as having shaken the planet and appealed for the world to join efforts to defeat terrorism and efforts to divide civilizations. He also said that Russia had been able to “localize” the spread of religious and cultural hate by relying on Russia’s “unity and historical kinship” forged through a “thousand-year experience of mutual understanding and life in multiethnic and multireligious Russia.”26 In his next in-person address to the council in 2018, Putin cited Danilevsky and decried unspecified attempts to destroy independent “cultural-historical spaces which have developed over centuries.”27 The vision of civilizational cooperation expressed by Putin in 2001 had given way to a worldview of civilizational competition.
In more peaceful applications of a civilizational framework, the Russian-dominated multilateral organizations in post-Soviet Eurasia hew closely to a civilization-state conception of Russia, despite their dysfunction in practice. Russia’s 2023 Foreign Policy Concept does not attempt to hide the character of these regional bodies. The document calls for deepening the role of Russian-led multilateral regional organizations like the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and Union State while also blocking the introduction and reinforcement of the infrastructure of so-called “unfriendly states.”28 Having previously described the EAEU as a means to bring member states into a “greater Eurasia” and to transform the post-Soviet space into an “independent center of global development” distinct from both European and Asian structures, Putin sees the EAEU as more than a simple geoeconomic project.29 Additionally, Putin’s November 2023 declaration that the CSTO’s functions in the sphere of military-technical cooperation serve to facilitate the “unity of states and peoples” fits cleanly within Russian civilizational formulations.30 Along with a conception of the Union State as a “locomotive of integrative processes in the Eurasian space,” the Kremlin has indicated that it at least sees the set of Russian-dominated multilateral organizations in the post-Soviet space as flowing from a civilizational concept of Russia’s place in its local neighborhood.31
In practice, the civilizational conception of Russian identity is described by Putin and other influential figures as a structural factor pushing Russia towards a confrontation with the West that is the result of innate differences between the two. Putin himself increasingly characterizes Russia’s sharpening standoff with the West as a clash of values and cultural models, rejecting the universality of Western culture and its mores.32 Comparable convictions of civilizational confrontation with the West can also be seen in the analysis of other Kremlin and Kremlin-adjacent figures such as presidential aide and former Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and well-connected political scientist Sergei Karaganov.33 Both express similar beliefs about the nature of the U.S.-Russian rivalry.
Some argue that the Kremlin’s newfound characterization of Russia as a “civilization-state” is part of a broader effort in Russia’s post-2012 “conservative turn” to generate the ideological structure needed to justify Putin’s state policy and costly foreign adventures.34 However, the search for a coherent ideology that could be used to justify the activity of the Russian state pre-dates the Putin era. In 1996, then-President Boris Yeltsin ordered the creation of a special committee to identify or develop a new national idea for post-Soviet Russia by the start of the coming millennium to fill what he saw as a problematic void. However, the committee was unsuccessful and faded from existence.35
Whether or not their worldview was consciously or unconsciously adopted, Putin and the wider leadership of the Russian state genuinely believe Russia possesses a special civilizational essence that puts it on a collision course with the United States and its Western partners. The choice to intensify confrontation between Russia and the West by launching a brazen and costly invasion of Ukraine makes little sense when viewed through a less ideological lens of what Russian security and cultural interests are. However, when viewed through the lens of maintaining the civilizational integrity of Russia, this costly endeavor seems more like the kind of life-or-death crisis that would demand that Russia launch such a risky and expensive war of choice.36
How Should the United States Respond?
As the Kremlin’s civilizational framing of Russian statehood represents an enduring ideological foundation, the United States should be prepared to contend with a Russia that is willing to take immense risks in pursuit of abstract goals. As such, it should expect that Russia will remain an “acute threat” so long as it retains the capability to act on its self-perceived civilizational imperatives. The Kremlin’s present-day conception of Russia as a civilization-state precludes any form of meaningful cooperation with the West. With an emphasis on the fundamental distinctiveness of Russian civilization and a rejection of cultural cross-pollination, Putin has guided Russia towards a state of constant friction with the West. If the Kremlin maintains its reliance on a civilizational concept of the world, continuous confrontation with the West will be a given in Russian strategy.37
In addition, Russia’s civilization-state basis for confrontation with the West could facilitate an ideological convergence of U.S. adversaries in Eurasia, particularly China with its Global Civilization Initiative (GCI). While still amorphously defined, the GCI was billed by Chinese President Xi Jinping as advancing the principle that separate civilizations are entitled to differing models of development while rejecting the practice of “imposing [one’s] own values or models on others” by unnamed other states.38 In a joint statement signed in connection with Putin and Xi’s March 2023 summit, the two leaders called on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance to respect the “civilizational, cultural and historical backgrounds” of other states and the wider world community to respect the “civilizational diversity” between countries. While the idea of Chinese civilizational identity advanced by Xi is not a mirror image of Putin’s and contains its own idiosyncratic blend of Chinese imperial memory, Han nationalism, and Marxist ideology, the very fact that both leaders argue that their states are charting distinct civilizational paths from that of the West facilitates their convergence.39 Thus, Russia and China may try to present themselves as the champions of “alternative” modes of governance to autocratic governments who bristle at U.S. insistence on liberal governance modes.
When viewed through a civilization-centric lens, the drift of states and peoples considered part of Russia’s core civilization towards other civilizations, namely the West, is an existential threat to Russia itself. If the Kremlin continues to develop its civilization-state concept as a foundational tenet, it is all but guaranteed that attempts by the other two members of the “triune” Russian nation to turn their ambitions away from Moscow will be met with stiff resistance, including the use of military force. Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and incursions into eastern Ukraine as well as its subsequent full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 are simply the most recent and most violent examples of this.
Russia’s pledge of political, military, and financial support to Alexander Lukashenko’s regime in 2020 as he faced down a massive protest movement following his falsification of the country’s August 2020 election forestalled the replacement of an autocratic partner with a democratic alternative which Moscow feared would turn away from Russia.40 Moscow’s support for Lukashenko also helped put an end to Belarus’ “multi-vector” foreign policy experiment in balancing Minsk’s relations with Russia and the West.41 This in turn facilitated the Kremlin’s use of Belarus as a springboard for the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In Central Asia and the Caucasus, Putin’s Russia has also sought to prevent the collapse of partner regimes who begrudgingly participate in Russia’s civilizational project, as seen in the Russian-led CSTO intervention into Kazakhstan in 2022 to rescue President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s embattled government. While the CSTO has been buffeted by conflicts both involving and between member states in the post-February 2022 period, Russia will continue to employ it as a regime-security tool for friendly governments in Russia’s civilizational space beyond the end of the Ukraine war.42
Even as the war in Ukraine inflicts heavy losses of materiel and manpower on Russia’s armed forces and state finances, Moscow is digging in for a long-term confrontation. Moscow’s 2024-2026 budget, which was characterized by Finance Minister Anton Siluanov as a “Victory Budget,” directs 39 percent of its expenditures to waging the war in Ukraine, by one estimate.43 Russia’s military industry has been kicked into overdrive to meet the demands of the war, and European governments have begun to sound the alarm of a looming risk to the continent’s broader security posed by an emboldened, increasingly aggressive Russia.44 While Russia’s efforts to build up its arsenal and war chest are important enablers of its competition with the West over the long-term, the Kremlin also seeks to spiritually and culturally reinforce the Russian people for this confrontation. Russia’s 2021 national security strategy calls for “strengthening traditional Russian spiritual-moral values [and] preserving the cultural-historical heritage of the Russian people,” as such values are identified by the document as the foundation of Russian statehood. To protect these declared traditional values, the 2021 strategy tasks the Russian state with providing “support for public projects aimed at patriotic education” and “strengthening the cultural sovereignty of the Russian Federation and the preservation of its unified cultural space.”45
Depending on how Russia’s population receives the Kremlin’s concept of Russia’s civilization-state status, it could be difficult to rebuild a “normal” relationship with Moscow in the foreseeable future. Even after Putin’s death or exit, or a complete Russian withdrawal from its occupation of neighboring territories, a Russian population mobilized to confront the West could guide successive governments in a similar direction. With an eye towards evangelizing its civilization-state concept among the youngest generations of Russians, the Kremlin plans to introduce a mandatory “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood” course as a graduation requirement for all Russian university students. Syllabi of the course include modules on the Russian civilization-state and the values of Russian civilization as prominent concepts of Russian history.46
While it is yet to be seen if younger Russians will widely adopt the Kremlin’s preferred civilizational image of Russia, there is some indication that Russia’s population would be receptive, or at least willing, to sever relationships with the West on civilizational grounds. Public polling conducted by the state-owned VTsIOM in August 2022 recorded that 33 percent of respondents described Western “civilization, democracy, and…culture” as “not fit for us,” while 26 percent called it “destructive [and] disastrous” for Russia. This was compared to the 30 percent who said there were useful things to be taken from Western culture and civilization and the two percent who described drawing from Western culture and civilization as “necessary [and] life-saving” for Russia. It appears that the Kremlin still has plenty of ground to cover to justify a full break with the West on civilizational grounds to Russia’s youngest generation, as respondents in the 18-24 age bracket were the only group with an outright majority share of respondents who saw Western civilization as helpful to draw upon, although a substantial subset still saw it as destructive or minimally useful.47 The long-term viability of the concept of the Russian civilization-state as a guiding principle for Russian state policy is dependent on how much younger Russians share that understanding with the Kremlin. The Kremlin recognizes the importance of winning over younger generations to lock in future support for a civilizational state policy—initiatives like Znanie can be seen as the kind of “patriotic education” project envisioned by the 2021 National Security Strategy.
Overcoming the unique nature of this challenge will require the United States to recognize that Moscow will be willing to take significant risks in pursuit of its self-imposed objectives. There are many competing missions that distract from Russia, requiring U.S. leaders to marshal finite materiel and financial resources in managing the host of challenges present in the wider world. These include the clear risk of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, cascading crises in the Middle East region following the October 7, 2023 attacks in Israel, and the enduring risk posed by transnational terrorism. If Russia’s leadership sees one of its most fundamental duties as reasserting Moscow’s political dominance within an amorphous Russian civilizational space in northern Eurasia, then the United States can reasonably expect sustained friction with Moscow. The Russian state will do all in its power to stave off the “loss” of elements of its civilizational whole, even if that drift is occurring because of political decisions made by the states in question rather than at the behest of a conniving “collective West.”
U.S. strategy should emphasize resourcing efforts to contain the Russia challenge for the long term. Whether or not Russia is defeated in Ukraine, Putin and his state will mobilize to pull errant elements of the Russian world back from their drift towards other civilizations, whether in Russia, the Caucasus, or Central Asia. With this in mind, the United States should understand this is a generational challenge that will periodically require the United States to actively manage Russia’s sustained attempts to exert control over its perceived civilizational expanse.
If widely accepted by the Russian population, the Kremlin’s civilization-state concept could serve a national-ideological role for the immediate and medium-term future, reinforcing the state’s legitimacy and giving it the domestic freedom as well as the conceptual framework to persistently take destabilizing risks abroad. U.S. strategy should be built from an understanding that Russia’s current leadership believes U.S. policy seeks to subvert Russia’s civilizational status, which Moscow will dedicate tremendous resources to counter. Given the degree to which Putin has organized Russian state priorities around the invasion of Ukraine, the main thrust of his attempt to maintain what he sees as the unity of Russia’s civilizational space, U.S. leaders should assume that he will seek to select a successor who is similarly motivated to continue the ideological project. Even if Putin were to die in office, Russia’s leadership class may be so invested in his civilizational project that a future successor would come into office with a similar ideological bend.
In short, U.S. policymakers should assume that Russia will not be dissuaded from its present civilization-unifying war on Ukraine’s statehood and that it will attempt to further consolidate this space regardless of whether it achieves victory in Ukraine. While it is tempting to hope for some deus ex machina that will free the United States and others from contending with a civilization-state Russia whose behavior is erratic and destructive in unpredictable ways, this is no substitute for strategy. The United States should, at a minimum, continue to lead efforts (such as those through the Ukraine Contact Group) to make Ukraine difficult or impossible to conquer over the short- to medium-term future to forestall further consolidation of Russia’s civilizational space. The White House should also commission a top-level review of U.S. force posture in Europe and in other theaters to determine the maximum force deployment possible that can be stationed in Europe for the foreseeable future to block Russian efforts to push to the limits of its perceived civilizational space and beyond. Finally, the U.S. Department of State and defense establishment should prioritize the recruitment of a new generation of fluent Russian speakers who can ascertain the future course of Russian civilizational ideology from the writings and musings of Russian leaders.
As Russia leans into its civilizational identity in the future, it will rely on confrontational and aggressive methods to preserve the integrity of that civilization. The United States should be prepared to meet this rising challenge.
The views expressed in this article are those of this author alone.
Image: The Moscow Kremlin Towers of South Wall, August 7, 2016, from Dmitry Ivanov. Retrieved from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moscow_Kremlin_Towers_of_south_wall.jpg.
[1] U.S. Department of Defense, 2022 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: 2022), https://media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY-NPR-MDR.PDF.
[2] Russian State Duma, “Новый текст Конституции РФ с поправками 2020,” Russian State Duma, July 3, 2020, http://duma.gov.ru/news/48953/; “Путин заявил, что у Украины нет будущего,” RBK, December 10, 2023, https://www.rbc.ru/politics/10/12/2023/65759d6a9a794771fd6dec67.
[3] Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multi-Ethnic History (London: Routledge, 2001), 241.
[4] “Заседание Международного дискуссионного клуба «Валдай»,” Kremlin.ru, November 3, 2022, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/69695.
[5] “Заседание Всемирного русского народного собора,” Kremlin.ru, November 7, 2018, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59013.
[6] Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow: Russia’s New Nationalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 49–50.
[7] “Указ Президента Российской Федерации От 11.12.2015 r. № 617,” Kremlin.ru, December 11, 2015, http://www.kremlin.ru/acts/bank/40274; “ДНК России. Государство-цивилизация – Российское Общество «Знание»,” Russian Society “Knowledge”, July 19, 2023, https://znanierussia.ru/library/video/dnk-rossii-gosudarstvo-civilizaciya-3416.
[8] Charles Clover, “Lev Gumilev: passion, Putin and power,” Financial Times, March 11, 2016, https://www.ft.com/content/ede1e5c6-e0c5-11e5-8d9b-e88a2a889797.
[9] “Address to the Federal Assembly,” Kremlin.ru, December 12, 2012, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/17118; Kira Latukhina, “Путин заявил о бесконечном генетическом коде России,” Rossiiskaya Gazeta, February 2, 2021, https://rg.ru/2021/02/14/putin-zaiavil-o-beskonechnom-geneticheskom-kode-rossii.html; “Путин заявил, что на Западе ‘нет пассионарности, это затухающие нации,’” TASS, June 13, 2023, https://tass.ru/politika/17998985.
[10] “ДНК России. Государство-цивилизация – Российское Общество «Знание»,” Russian Society “Knowledge”.
[11] Igor Zevelev, “Russia’s Future: Nation or Civilization?,” Russia in Global Affairs 4 (October/December 2009), https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/russias-future-nation-or-civilization/.
[12] Fabian Linde, “The Civilizational Turn in Russian Political Discourse: From Pan-Europeanism to Civilizational Distinctiveness,” The Russian Review 75, no. 4 (2016): 606, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43919639.
[13] Vladimir Putin, “Владимир Путин. Россия: национальный вопрос,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta, January 23, 2012, https://www.ng.ru/politics/2012-01-23/1_national.html.
[14] Linde, “The Civilizational Turn in Russian Political Discourse,” 606-607.
[15] “Русский язык может быть обозначен в Конституции как язык государствообразующего народа,” TASS, February 26, 2020, https://tass.ru/politika/7844175.
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[30] “Путин заявил, что сотрудничество в ОДКБ способствует сплочению государств,” TASS, November 23, 2023, https://tass.ru/politika/19364187.
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[33] “West determined to dismember Russia, eliminate its peoples — Security Council’s secretary,” TASS, November 30, 2023, https://tass.com/politics/1714391; “Why Russia Believes It Cannot Lose the War in Ukraine,” The New York Times, July 19, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/19/opinion/russia-ukraine-karaganov-interview.html.
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[35] Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2013), 45–46.
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[39] Chris Buckley, Vivian Wang, and Joy Dong, “One Nation Under Xi: How China’s Leader Is Remaking Its Identity,” New York Times, October 11, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/11/world/asia/xi-jinping-china-nationhood.html; Charlie Campbell, “How Beijing Is Redefining What It Means to Be Chinese, from Xinjiang to Inner Mongolia,” Time, July 12, 2021, https://time.com/6078961/china-ccp-anniversary-identity/; “Xi stresses building modern Chinese civilization,” State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, June 3, 2023, http://english.scio.gov.cn/m/topnews/2023-06/03/content_86200152.htm.
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[41] Wesley Culp, “Belarus is risking its independence for a Russia-centric foreign policy,” The Hill, January 29, 2022, https://thehill.com/opinion/international/591830-belarus-is-risking-its-independence-for-a-russia-centric-foreign-policy/.
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[43] Milana Gadzhieva and Alexei Lazurenko, “Мы охарактеризовали финансовый план на трехлетку бюджетом победы,” Izvestiya, December 14, 2023, https://iz.ru/1619599/milana-gadzhieva-aleksei-lazurenko/my-okharakterizovali-finansovyi-plan-na-trekhletku-biudzhetom-pobedy; Alexander Gabuev, “In Russia, All Policy roads Lead to the War,” Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2023, https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-war-ukraine-economy-policy-7428ef7b.
[44] Andrew Roth, “‘A lot higher than we expected’: Russian arms production worries Europe’s war planners,” The Guardian, February 15, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/15/rate-of-russian-military-production-worries-european-war-planners; Sergey Goryashko and Pierre Emmanuel Ngendakumana, “Russia gearing up for decade-long duel with West, Estonia warns,” Politico Europe, February 13, 2024, https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-prepares-for-decade-long-confrontation-with-west-estonia-warns/; Richard Milne and Marton Dunai, “Russia could attack a Nato country within 3 to 5 years, Denmark warns,” Financial Times, February 9, 2024, https://www.ft.com/content/b3101099-9516-4b0b-92c6-179997d7e4cf.
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