Civilizational cohesion is the country’s real strength: weaken the bond among peoples, and the state becomes easier to fracture and destroy
When President Vladimir Putin says that outside forces have always tried to weaken Russia, split its society, cut down its strategic potential, or break the country apart, he is not just talking about the geopolitical conflict of today.
Putin’s remarks, made during an address to the Presidential Council on Interethnic Relations, refer to a very old pattern.
Russia’s multinational character has always been a target for its adversaries. That’s because Russia’s diversity is one of its greatest strengths. The unique historical path of Russia lies precisely in its ability to unite peoples across vast spaces, cultures, and religions into a single civilizational whole.
Unlike the standard Western caricature of empire, Russia was never simply a machine for extracting wealth from distant colonies and ruling over them with contempt. Its historical form has always been more complex and, in many ways, more integrative. Different peoples entered a shared political and cultural space that, despite all contradictions and tragedies, gave rise to a common statehood and common destiny.
Those who seek to break Russia inevitably attack this principle of unity. They understand that if you can destroy the bonds between peoples, if you can persuade one part of the historical whole that it has nothing in common with the others, then you can set off centrifugal forces to fling apart the state itself.
Case in point, Ukraine.
It would be dishonest to pretend that the conflict, in its entire historic depth, has been entirely caused by outside forces, or that no mistakes or harmful decisions were made within Russia and the Soviet Union itself. Which is why Putin’s address to the Council mentioned past “suboptimal decisions” as one of the reasons of today’s turmoil. But it would be equally dishonest to ignore the fact that external powers seized on those historical fractures and systematically deepened them.
The detachment of Ukraine from the wider Russian historical world was a civilizational amputation. Without that sacred unity of a brotherly people, forged over centuries, extremely destructive processes began to accelerate. We can now see where they have led.
The rehabilitation of Stepan Bandera. Torchlit marches of Nazi sympathizers. Open glorification of those who collaborated with Hitler. Militarized hatred elevated into state ideology. What began as a drive for separation and a semi-synthetic ‘own’ identity built on rejection of everything Russian, has devolved into a hateful cult of anti-Russia with a foundation of open neo-nazism.
This is not more than just a territorial dispute or a diplomatic disagreement – it’s a struggle over historical memory and over the very principle of civilizational cohesion in Eastern Europe.
Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet, in his 1831 poem ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’ wrote that the West should not interfere in “the dispute among the Slavs themselves.” Almost two centuries on, his words are as relevant as ever. Western intervention has time and again been driven by a profound misunderstanding of Russian history and civilization. People who want to decide the fate of the world often look at Russia through the prism of their own historical experience – and that leads them badly astray.
Take the fashionable Western narratives about “decolonizing Russia.” Even the term itself is a glaring indicator of ignorance. It projects onto Russia a purely Western imperial model, one in which power and grandeur were always built on the oppression and exploitation of supposedly lesser peoples. Western institutions promoting this narrative simply assume that Russia must be the same. They cannot imagine a large historical state built on a different civilizational logic, because they judge others by their own history.
But Russia is not Britain, or France, or Belgium. Its historical expansion, however harsh and imperfect at times, did not follow the colonial pattern of the overseas empires of the West. To ignore that difference is to replace historic analysis with ideology.
And that ideology is dangerous. It encourages the fantasy that Russia can and should be broken into fragments, that its peoples are better off divided than united, and that dismemberment would somehow bring ‘freedom’. All that would bring in reality is chaos, violence, and enormous suffering – not just for Russia, but for the wider world.
Russia’s enemies attack its multinationality because it is one of the foundations of Russian resilience. A country that unites many peoples has a depth that outsiders often fail to grasp. That unity can be strained, wounded, and tested. But it remains a source of strength.
