The break-up of the Soviet Union into fifteen independent states at the end of 1991 occurred at a time when, in Western Europe, politicians and the public were increasingly embracing the concept of open borders. In fact, the Soviet collapse and the end of the Cold War may have contributed in no small way to the atmosphere in which high security at national boundaries was no longer deemed essential in the West in the 1990s. But there was little awareness of such sentiments in the lands of the former Soviet Union. The only international borders known to their citizens were ones which required special permission to cross. On the USSR’s eastern and southern frontiers, and beyond the handful of satellite states to the west, the international borders were even harder than those within the Soviet bloc, presenting an ideological as well as physical boundary between the communist and capitalist worlds. Indeed, the hoops which even the most senior officials in the Soviet republics had to go through in order to engage in international travel have been identified as one of the reasons many of them came to support the USSR’s dissolution. The significance of external borders for the new states was reinforced by the identification of territory with nationhood.
For many Russians, the disappearance of the Soviet Union was akin to the loss of Empire and the status of a great power. More specifically, it also meant the ‘loss’ of millions of Russians who were now living in a ‘foreign’ country. For the Russian Federation, the questions of identity, citizenship, physical and demographic borders remained disputed
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and fluid. For those successor states that shared a border with Russia, this meant contending with an inconsistent and unpredictable neighbor whose border regime and cross-border attitudes could and did fluctuate
Thus from the break up of the Soviet Union there were two competing conceptions of borders in the post-Soviet space, which led to contradictory pressures: on the one hand to keep borders open for the continuation of established patterns of trade, shared services and social interaction; on the other hand established notions of sovereignty and nationhood, increasingly reinforced by perceived security needs and a more competitive economic environment, demanded a more securitized concept of borders with manned crossings, requiring at the minimum the production of documentation in order to cross.
This was an entirely new situation which created unforeseen problems at both the local and national levels. Some of the most detailed research on this topic concerns the Fergana Valley, where the jumbled up borders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan now divide up ethnic communities, close relatives, and marketplaces that in Soviet times, and still for most of the 1990s, were the scenes of lively exchange between the republics. The growing securitization of these borders has led to much longer journeys within each state (in order to avoid crossing borders), has disrupted trade and social relations, has created cases of deceased Tajiks, Uzbeks, or Kyrgyz not being able to be mourned by their relatives or buried alongside their ancestors, and in some instances has sparked violent conflicts with a strong ethnic element. While these borders do not concern Russia, and the Fergana Valley is perhaps an extreme case, some of these tensions have been seen along the world’s largest continuous state border – that between Russia and Kazakhstan - as well as on Russia’s western and southwestern borders.
Most of the countries that emerged from the rubble of the Soviet Union initially agreed to keep their borders with each other open for economic exchange and the movement of people. But this agreement came under pressure as early as 1992, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin began to complain that the Central Asian states were too liberal in issuing visas to foreigners who could then cross the open border into Russia, that all kinds of firearms were entering Russia across the borders, and that a large number of cultural artefacts were disappearing from Russia because of lax border policies in the neighbouring states. These complaints justified introducing border controls, and not much later the argument that drug dealers and terrorists were also able to profit from uncontrolled borders led to further security measures at the border.
Therefore, despite the early hopes that the Confederation of Independent States and other institutions would provide some institutional cohesion that would provide a measure of continuity, it did not take long before it became clear that the fifteen successor states were now independent of each other, and would conduct relations with each other in the same way as with other states. Two pressures, however, continued to influence moves towards the greater integration of these countries. The first was the economic interdependence that had been a key feature of Soviet planning. Although economic ties were severely disrupted by the total economic collapse of all of the former Soviet economies in the early 1990s, and the more or less successful efforts of the successor states to reorientate their economies towards Europe (and later China), economic interdependence was still a strong factor in many cases. The second pressure arose from the continued presence of large numbers of ethnic Russians or Russian speakers in neighbouring countries – especially in Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. While many Russians left these
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countries and moved to Russia in the 1990s, millions stayed behind. Russia has consistently asserted its right and duty to defend the interests of these Russians. While this rarely moved beyond the level of rhetoric in the 1990s, it nevertheless remained as a real concern for many Russians.
While the second of these pressures applied only to Russia, for some neighbours, primarily Belarus and Kazakhstan (and non-neigbouring Armenia) it was economic concerns that reinforced reintegration efforts. After a number of false starts, in the early 2010s it appeared that real progress was being made on the basis of a solid institutional background with the formation of the Eurasian Customs Union, with the intention that it progress into a broader Eurasian Economic Union. Although only Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan have joined the ECU, extending and deepening this Union has been a core part of Russian foreign policy for the past few years (more on this in the section ‘Russian policy towards the ‘near abroad’ countries’ below).
But this development had important implications for countries which may have hoped not to be forced into making a choice between economic links with the ECU and those with the EU – primarily Ukraine. The EU has, for many years, been openly trying to win former Soviet countries over to ‘European values’ through its neighbourhood programmes, while at the same time Russia has made no secret of its efforts to increase its influence abroad through ‘soft power’. As long as these policies appeared to represent peaceful forms of competition between Russia and the West, few foresaw the dangers they presented. But developments in Ukraine at the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014 confirmed, once again, von Clausewitz’ dictum that ‘War is the continuation of Politics by other means’.
The problem, given Ukraine’s geographical location between Russia and the EU, was that underlying this contest for the hearts, minds, and economic resources and markets of Ukraine, was an understanding that this was a zero sum game. Ukraine was, effectivelty, presented with a choice between the ECU and the EU’s Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement. While it is easy to dismiss such zero sum thinking as Russian or, indeed, Soviet, the EU also has some responsibility in this area. Exacerbating the difficulty was an understanding of nations and borders which prioritized ethnicity, a legacy of the Soviet system which is discussed below. The ambiguity elsewhere over the nature of post-Soviet borders – open for trade and continuing links, but closed for security reasons – was experienced in regard to Ukraine, where the situation was exacerbated by the highest concentration of Russian speakers outside Russia and a particular situation with regard to the status of Crimea, which was resolved diplomatically in the early 1990s but has been contentious emotionally for Russians since. The rhetoric that accompanied the annexation of Crimea included several important elements that underpinned Vladimir Putin’s new border order: a) the legitimacy of the break-up of the USSR was challenged; b) Russia’s
‘outer border’ was no longer the former external borders of the Soviet Union, as had been the case in the 1990s, but rather the borders of the extent of the Russian people; c) nationalism is now a central element, or perhaps the central element, of Russian political discourse; d) the principle of territorial integrity is, in Russia’s case, conditional. This last shift was already evident in 2008 when Russia recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in the course of which Putin argued that Georgia had, through its own actions, surrendered its right to territorial integrity. But this did appear exceptional at that time and the current rhetoric, involving accusations of fascism and violation of
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minority rights by the post-Maidan Ukrainian government, extends the notion significantly.
All of Russia’s neighbours have had to take account of this new way of thinking. Even traditional close allies like China and Kazakhstan have reacted nervously to the turn. For many people in the countries covered by this study, as reflected in some of the questionnaire responses given below, recent events are merely a confirmation of what they have always known – that Russia has always had imperialist ambitions and is bent on restoring control over the former territory of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire.
For some others, this turn is associated only with Putin himself, and it is the current regime that is the problem. For still others, the current downward spiral in Russia-West relations is a temporary aberration, and there are stronger hopes that things can return to normal. That at least seems unlikely, if ‘normal’ is considered the way things were before.
The Ukrainian crisis is a global, international crisis. But, like an earthquake, the strongest vibrations are felt nearest to the original core. Many of Russia’s neighbours, dependent economically and threatened militarily, and with significant Russian populations, are being forced to make difficult decisions and think carefully about their relations with Russia. The past, present and future of these relations are discussed in the remainder of this report.