I have read much analysis of the reasoning behind Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, including those by professional Russia watchers & experts and agree with much of it. But I can't help noticing that many of the analysis places the invasion in the context of the last few decades and ignores the cultural and historical roots of the Russian worldview stretching back centuries. Many view Russian exceptionalism, the prime mover behind the invasion, and Russia’s attempts to reclaim the pre-eminence of its Soviet days as mirror images of American exceptionalism, very much like how the Soviet Union was a mirror to America in their competition for world leadership.
Russian exceptionalism, while still exceptionalism, is rather different from the Chinese or American versions. I would very much like to explain the cultural and historical roots of Russian exceptionalism here, which policymakers would do well to note in forming their response and action to Russia’s sense of insecurity.
New Rome
To give the background, one has to understand that when Istanbul in Turkey, or Byzantion as it was then known, was adopted by Constantine to be his new capital in 330 A.D. He declared it the New Rome and renamed it Constantinople. This became the new capital of the Roman Empire, and emperors residing in Constantinople saw themselves as inheritors of the legacy of Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor. This continued to the case after the empire split into its two halves, with the eastern half speaking Greek rather than the original Roman Latin. Even today, the title of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, the leader of the Orthodox Church residing in Istanbul, is the ‘Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch’.
With the fall of Rome in 476, the Eastern church saw leadership of Christianity transferred from Rome, the senior of the original five patriarchates in the Orthodox Christian world, to Constantinople. The Byzantines saw their imperial court as continuation of the Roman Empire and held themselves out as the beacon of civilisation as Western Europe plunged into the Dark Ages. Thus, the ancient Roman Empire continued on long after the fall of old Rome to barbarians.
After centuries of glorious rule though, the eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire, started its long decline and the Turks, originally a people from central Asia pushed out with the expansion of Mongols (that is why Turks and Mongols share the title of Khan) started to fill the geopolitical vacuum in what was then known as Asia Minor, now modern-day Turkey. Thus, the Asian Minor population changed from the 11th century as Turkish-speaking Muslims started displacing Greek-speaking Christians as Turkification under Turkish conquests created a population of Turks. (Turkification meant that most of the Turkish population today do not ethnically descend from the central Asian people who migrated there but rather from the indigenous populations who became Turks after conversion to Islam; studies show that only 5-10% of the DNA of the people in Turkey were shared with central Asians.)
By the early 15th century, Constantinople was completely surrounded by the Turks, the city being the only remnant of the ancient Roman Empire. It finally fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 and thus ending the story of the ancient Roman civilisation, 2,206 years after its founding.
The Third Rome
The fall of Constantinople sent shockwaves all across the Christian world, with the fall of the second centre of Christianity, particularly among the Orthodox who look to it as its living heart. The Russians in Moscow reacted by declaring themselves the Third Rome, seeking to take on the leadership of Christianity. Soon after that, Russian monarchs took on the title of tsar, cementing its perception as successors to the Roman civilisation. In the minds of Russians then, cut off from the rest of the world, they discounted western Europeans as still living under barbarians. Thus, the events of 1453 in Constantinople and a millennium earlier in Rome shape the thinking of Russians that they were the only civilised nation left in Europe and in the Christian world.
Unfortunately, this calcified worldview continued long after it was no longer relevant. Western Europe has advanced on and Christians under Muslim rule seek protectors closer to home. Yet, it was this very same worldview that Peter the Great, tsar 1682-1725, had to fight to open up Russia to the outside world and develop it into a modern nation. The nobility and the Russian Orthodox Church felt that Russia had nothing to learn from the west as it was the only civilised Christian nation in Europe. This worldview continues on today, rooting Russian culture in the Russian Orthodox Church. It explains why after seven decades of persecution under the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church reclaimed its pre-eminent position in Russian society within just a few years after the fall of its oppressor regime. (Interestingly, communist leaders in atheist Soviet Union were buried under Orthodox rites. No harm having some form of insurance, I guess.)
In a grudgingly implicit acknowledgement of the more advanced position of Western Europe, the old image of the West being under the Dark Ages was replaced by that of a soft decadent society under the yoke of the new barbarianism of LGBT. Today, the Third Rome sees its holy mission as to rechristianise Western Europe and underlines this with its treatment of LGBT rights and activists.
Following its ascent to the ranks of a great power in the wake of its defeat of Napoleon in 1814, Russia used its self-acclaimed leadership position of the Christian world to champion Orthodox peoples anywhere, in particular protecting Orthodox pilgrims in the Holy Land. In a geopolitical sense, this policy led it into incessant wars with Ottoman Turkey, especially in the Orthodox-populated Balkans and eventually led it into the great European war in 1914 to protect Orthodox Serbia from the western power of Austria, with a secondary objective of liberating Constantinople emerging later. Even today, the country that usually champion the Russian cause in the European Union is Greece, the only Orthodox country never to have lived under Soviet (meaning, Russian) domination.
Kyiv, cradle of Russian culture
The first Russian country was Kievan Rus, established in the 9th century with its capital in Kyiv. Unfortunately for Russians, Kyiv is now part of Ukraine not Russia. It is not unique for a country’s cultural identity to reside in another country but the precedent does not portend happy endings. The fact that Kosovo Fields, where Serbian national identity was forged in a losing battle with the invading Turks centuries ago lay in Kosovo, played no small role in the eruption of war between Serbia and Kosovo when the latter broke away from Belgrade, taking the site of the Serbian national identity with it.
Interestingly, the first leaders of the Kievan Rus were Vikings. That’s right: Vikings but not of the horned helmets marauders variety beloved by cartoonists and illustrators of children’s books. Vikings never wore horned helmets - well, their ancestors of a millennium earlier did wear horned headgear for rituals. While they were ferocious fighters, most seek land for agriculture or were traders, and integrated so well with local populations that they integrated themselves out of existence. In England, they settled as farmers; in Normandy, they became the French Normans who conquered England; in Sicily, Roger II mobilised Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims and Jews to build a very successful economy based on trade.
In Russia, they passed as traders, hauling their longboats across land between rivers as they opened up trade routes to Constantinople. Of the many theories about the etymology of the word Rus, almost all of which Scandinavian, the most widely accepted was a Norse word for men who rowed, a reference to Viking longboats. Their war-making prowess led to the foundation of the Land of the Rus, as the country was then known. The ruling elite were Varangians Norse, as testified by the Scandinavian names of all Rus signatories of the first Rus'–Byzantine Treaty, concluded in 907. The Varangians intermarried and integrated into the local Slavic population to the point that the ruling elite carried Slavic names just a century later.
The name Kievan Rus was coined only in the 19th century as a result of Russian re-imagination of its history, with Russian historians white-washing over its Viking origins, preferring the lesser supported theory that the Varangians founders of the Rus state were Slavic. At that time, Kyiv was known asked, being an integral part of Russia. Of course, Russians are not the only people who romanticised their origin story: virtually every other nation on earth does that, driven by the political and cultural agenda of the day until it becomes the accepted facts in the minds of their common people. It only becomes an issue when the romanticised past is used to deny the rights of others today.
Russia as the elder Slavic sibling
Slavs are divided into three sub groups: (1) eastern Slavs, comprising Russians, Ukrainians and Belarus; (2) western Slavs, comprising Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, Slovaks and Ruthenians, all of whom are mostly Catholics; (3) southern Slavs, comprising Bulgars and Slavs in the Balkans.
Eastern Slavs were so closely related in language, culture and history that Russians often see Ukrainians and Belarusians as extensions of themselves. Belarus in particular model itself on Russia: the premium shopping centre and the opera-ballet house in Minsk were GUM and the Bolshoi respectively, echoing their Moscow models. It is no wonder that common Russians view the division of eastern Slavs into Russians, Ukrainians and Belarus as academic and artificial.
Notwithstanding its emerging democratic movement, this is may be accepted in Belarus but Ukraine is a different matter altogether. Western Ukraine in particular, long under the rule of the Austrian Empire historically looked west. Its churches, while all holding the same doctrines and liturgical practices, owes different competing allegiances to Moscow, Constantinople and Rome. The renaming of its cities (Kiev to Kyiv, Lvov to Lyiv) is an expression of its desire to reclaim its own culture and past, stepping out of the shadow of Russia.
Western and southern Slavs languages differ substantially from Russian, and they have their own separate cultural, political and religious histories. The Catholic western Slavs in particular, viewed Russia as a threat, often being conquered by Orthodox Russia as well as Catholic Austria and Protestant Prussia, while southern Slavs tend to look to Russiafor protection while under Turkish rule. Tsarist Russia in the 19th century had much say in what happened in the Balkans, over and above the sovereignty of a weakened Turkey, all in its role as the elder brother of the Slavic people. It was not difficult to extend this role to the western Slavs, who did not ask for this protection or indeed, had often fought wars and were often subjugated by Russia themselves.
Modern day context
It is in this historical context that Russians see the West as a threat over and above geopolitical realities. The success of western Europe is seen as an existentialist threat as their mortal enemies in the West under the barbarians seek to destroy the purity of the only civilised Christian country in Europe - both directly in invasions by a powerful enemy and conceptually, as countries under barbarians shouldn’t be more advanced than a civilised Christian nation. For the West to deny Russia ascendency is to deny the fulfilment of the Christian destiny itself. Invasions by Napoleon and Hitler as well as the interventions of Western powers in the Crimean war and during the Russian Civil War did not help reassure Russians of the intentions of the West andof the need to integrate themselves into a world order of equal sovereign nations.
Russians do not see their domination of eastern Europe under the Soviet Union as imperialism as they believe orthodox & Slavic nations needed the protection of a powerful Russian state, which is pure and Christian. Whether this protection was voluntarily requested and accepted by the peoples of eastern Europe is immaterial, as the history of Russia is littered by enforced actions by tsars for the greater good of the nation. Russia was forcibly united by Ivan the Terrible; forcibly modernised by Peter the Great; and forcibly ascended to world superpower status by the Stalin, who was actually Georgian. Ordinary Russians with little history of democracy and weak, if any, democratic institutions, just would not understand eastern Europeans’ need for self-determination, with their deeper democratic roots.
With this mindset of seniority, the initial reaction of many Russians to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a feeling that this is an overreaction by benign elder brother on a recalcitrant younger sibling. Slavs do not kill Slavs and such misunderstandings should be kept within the family. Indeed, many Russians do not understand the choice of eastern Europeans of the European Union & Nato over Russia and many may even feel hurt at the rejection of Russian protection and generosity. As a result, many chose to blame the nefarious designs of an uncivilised West rather than the waywardness of their younger siblings, contributing to the siege mentality. Many Russians were initially surprised by Ukrainian resistance and do not understand why fellow Slavs, separated only by academicians, did not welcome their liberation from the evil unchristian West with open arms.
No, Putin did not deal with Ukraine in a way inconsistent with the thinking of the Russian people, even if they were not directly or explicitly complicit in his invasion and atrocities. While there is a nascent democratic movement in Russia, seeking to root its assessments on historical facts, they remain too weak to hold back the forces of the deep history of Russian exceptionalism. The historical and cultural kindling were already there and Putin’s ego and hubris, built up over two decades in absolute power, was just a spark to light the invasion.
I am originally Russian myself and must tell your analysis is very close to true, though you made some obvious factual mistakes (like calling Lithuanians as one of the Slavic nations which they were not and are not) and serious omissions of important facts from Russian history, yet their quantity does not prevail and does not distort the general picture. Grateful to you for the attempt to understand Russian mind. After reading such articles I feel more like I'd like to help the author to understand the situation even better by filling the small gaps he made, rather than argue with him. My deep appreciation to your efforts!