The Diaspora Begins at Home

The term "global Russian" is contused and problematic, both within the snobshchestvo and without. From a political or sociological point of view, the idea of the global Russian is marginal at best.  At issue is a very small group of people who consider themselves an elite, representing an idea far more than an actual empirical trend. The idea itself has a great deal of value for understanding not just contemporary Russia, but also the vexed relationship between diaspora and transnationalism.  On the face of it, the global Russians are transnational through and through.  If they emigrate, they may just as easily come back.  If they leave the country, they might simply be following jobs and opportunities, and returning to Russia could very well be their next step.  More important, one does not have to leave Russia in order to be a global Russian.  

Yet the global Russians make a valuable contribution to our understanding of post-Soviet diaspora, thanks in part to the issues of loss discussed above.  Traditionally, diaspora is about leaving the homeland for another country, and succeeding, failing, or not even trying to assimilate. What country are the global Russians leaving behind?  The Soviet Union was a multi-national empire that technically lacked a titular nationality: "Soviet" was not an option for Line Five of the internal identity documents. But whatever one's attitude towards Soviet ideology and aspirations, despite the self-hatred encoded in the stereotype of the sovok, the identity that did, in fact, cover everyone, regardless of "nationality" (ethnicity), the identity that, for good or ill, posited a common culture, a common background, and even a common lingua franca (Russian) was Soviet. Everyone in Russia (and the other republics) has been exiled from that homeland.  The elitism and cosmopolitanism of the global Russian is antithetical to the now defunct Soviet ideology, but this is a difference of content rather than form.  In their aspirations toward internationalism and their focus on Russian culture as a default common ground, the global Russians are recapitulating some of the most appealing aspects of Soviet structures and Soviet discourse.  This is a profoundly compensatory gesture, an attempt to define a community in the absence of a vanished home. That home is no address or street--that home is the Soviet Union.  

Thus the transnational character of the  Global Russians is, like their name, deceptive, since the global Russians are a Soviet diaspora in a world that has rendered a return to the Soviet home impossible.  The global Russians allow for a redefinition of the Russian community itself: trans-ethnic (like Soviet identity) and deterritorialized (exiled from its form Soviet home).  The global Russians posit a "Russian" diaspora that is capacious enough to include the Russian Federation itself.  Just as millions of Soviet citizens "left" their native country in 1991 without taking a step, now Russians can belong to a diaspora while living comfortably in the suburbs of Moscow.

The "Global Russian" was not the only framework available for rethinking Russian identity beyond the country's borders; it wasn't even the newest.  With origins dating back to the 1980s, an idea called "the Russian World" was quickly being coopted from its originally liberal roots for the purposes of a nationalist/imperial agenda under Putin.  Since Russia's first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, the phrase has become irredeemably expansionist, yet in the beginning, it was in many ways the prototype of the short-lived "Global Russian" movement.

During the perestroika years, a group of forward-looking Soviet intellectuals centered around the philosopher Mikhail Gefter was already anticipating the need for a new, unifying identity that could function in a world where the "Soviet" was no longer viable.

Gefter's group effected a partial deterritorialization of group identity, positing that people might feel a sense of belonging to various "worlds" that could not be defined solely by geography, even if such a world originated in a specific, identifiable country or state. Since these worlds could overlap and coexist without sparking territorial disputes, their close cooperation could serve as a model for avoiding military conflict (Nemtzev).  Unsurprisingly, there was one such world to which Gefter's circle paid especially close attention: the Russian World.

What looked initially like an abstract, philosophical exercise gained a sense of urgency after the Soviet collapse. As I have already discussed in Plots against Russia, a broad range of elites and cranks spent the 1990s obsessed with the development of a new "Russian Idea" that could united a fractured and fractious nation.

Initially, the framework of the Russian World was not all that different from the Global Russians that eventually followed. Each would offer a vision of Russianness that tried to move beyond nationalism and imperialism whose aspirations towards inclusiveness were complicated by a questionable terminology. Each used the word for "Russian" (russkii)  in a manner divorced from the word's ethnic definition.  "Russian" was instead a matter of language and culture, not ancestry.  For Gefter's circle, speakers of Russian had a world view that was structured by the Russian language, steering them towards common ways of thinking that were not necessarily shared by non-Russian speakers.  There are, of course, numerous flaws with this notion, from its resemblance to the discredited Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to an unrecognized cultural imperialism that makes no allowances for the intersecting cultural identities of non-Russian Russian speakers in the former Soviet Union.

This, however, was in the 1990s, and this relatively benign formulation of the Russian World would not survive the Putin Era.  Putin brought up the concept early in his presidency, in a 2001 speech, but, as with most questions of politics and ideology, it would take years for the Russian World to take on a more oppressive overtone.  In this speech, Putin defined the Russian World as an extraterritorial phenomenon, less about borders than about all the people “who speak, think and – what is perhaps most important – feel in Russian," whether they lived within the boarders of the Russian Federation or beyond (Suslov 2020). Over time, the Russian World proved to be a useful vehicle for the state's soft power initiatives, resulting in a transformation of the imaginary geography that formed the idea.  The early version of the Russian World looked a bit more like a distributed network, but now it was rested on the relationship between the center of power (the Russian Federation, and less, generally, Moscow) and the various Russian-speaking  communities around the world.

It’s the Russians’ world, we’re just living in it

Nor did the foreign policy implications of the "Russian World" go unnoticed, as Russia's relations with some of its fellow former Soviet nations soured after the color revolutions in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine 2004-2005 (Budraitskis). In 2007, Putin issued a decree establishing the "Russkiy Mir Foundation" (Russian World Foundation), which would work with the Russian Orthodox Church to promote traditional "Russian values" beyond the country's borders (more on this in the next chapter).  Now the Russian World would be thoroughly instrumentalized for Russian foreign and cultural policy, not to mention national security.

There has been a great deal of valuable scholarship on the Russian World concept as soft power and as the ideological buttress for renewed imperialism.  For our purposes, though, what is particularly remarkable is the stark stylistic and institutional contrast between the "Russian World" and its younger, now almost-forgotten sibling, the "Global Russians."  One was born in the realm of pixels and memes in the blogosphere, while the other was adopted as a state-sponsored initiative and literally turned into a foundation.  One emphasized cosmopolitanism by sidestepping the Russian language itself in its naming convention, while the other would insist on an awkward transcription of its Russian name in Latin script ("Russkiy mir").  When combined with the question of "russkii" and "Rossianin," as well as the gone-but-never-forgotten "Soviet," the range of designations and circumlocutions suggests less an identity crisis than a crisis of naming.  These are the unidentified, and possibly Russian, objects.