Russian Territorial Anxiety in Context
Charles W. King
The 1240's were a landmark decade in Russian history. Victories at the Battle of the Neva and the Battle of the Ice turned back invasions by the Swedish and the Teutonic Knights. The year 1240 ended with more than a dozen cities of the Kievan Rus being sacked by invading Mongols, including the capitol, Kiev. This marked the beginning of hundreds of years of tribute and vassalage to the Mongols.
After Ivan III “threw off the tartar yoke” in 1480 the territorial incursions did not cease. The Ottomans burned parts of Moscow in 1571. The 1600’s were a time of internal conflict between the Rus princes and continued invasions from the north, west, and east. It was not until the 1700’s under Peter the Great that a single Russian state formed, and Catherine the Great that Russia began to exercise control over its neighbors instead of the other way around. This stability did not last long. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 he had yet to be defeated by any European power. In the 1850's Russia lost the Crimean War to an alliance of the British, French, and Ottomans, ceding territory and right to base naval forces in the Black Sea.
The twentieth century treated the Russian state no better. The tumult of the First World War precipitated two revolutions. Foreign powers intervened in the civil war that followed in the favor of the anti-Bolshevik White Army. Hitler’s Germany invaded in June 1941. Neither the end of the Second World War nor shared ideology would put a stop to the territorial incursions; the U.S.S.R. and the P.R.C. fought an undeclared border war in 1969.
Russian history begins with the loss of its cultural and economic capitol, hundreds of years of foreign domination, and after establishing control over its own sovereignty the encroachments never stopped. It is unsurprising that to this day the Russian state and people exhibit an anxiety bordering on paranoia for their territorial integrity. Combine this with the fact that when the Russian state has successfully turned back invaders it has been by trading territory for time and the territorial ambitions of the Russian Tsars, Soviet leaders, and Vladimir Putin are comprehensible, although not condonable. Even when Russia exerted control over its near abroad, the region was always a source of tension and concern in ways that other great powers did not experience.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia’s neighbors are increasingly looking west. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and Romania are members of NATO and the European Union. Finland and Sweden are EU members and cooperate extensively with NATO on defense. Ukraine and Georgia have both looked to the EU and the US in recent years for trade and security. From the Russian perspective this expansion fits with hundreds of years of precedent of dangerous encroachment on Russian territory and security and must confronted. That this is not necessarily the intent of the EU, US, or NATO is irrelevant. A sphere of influence is historically important to the Russian state. What may appear to Western observers like unchecked aggression or exploitative meddling is to Russian policy-makers the crucial reinforcement of necessary regional order and defensive credibility. By recognizing this, the US and its European allies can better formulate strategies to deal with unacceptable acts of aggression as well as more insidious actions on the part of the Russian state.
Further Reading
Jane Burbank, and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Lorenz M. Luthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 2008).