Metaphor, Nationalism and Imperialism – Theoretical Approach

Given Putin’s strong affinity for the ‘time bomb’ analogy and his consistent use of it since his early days in politics, I posit that he purposefully employed this metaphor. His intention was twofold: first, to resonate with those who felt a shared sense of victimization during Russia’s tumultuous 1990s (Michlin-Schapir Reference Michlin-Schapir2021, 3, 74–78), and second, to sincerely convey his belief that Russia’s borders were unjust. Equally significant was his endeavor to comprehend the pivotal moment in Putin’s trajectory – the collapse of the Soviet Union – and, within this context, to promote his own interpretation of history. These assumptions are rooted in theoretical examinations of metaphor.

Metaphor is an essential element in the representation of the cultural world (Ricoeur Reference Ricoeur2010). In addition to its persuasive power, it is a prerequisite for moving from the language of chronicles to a narrative text, which has a much greater power to describe the reality around us (White Reference White1973). Most importantly, it carries with it certain values and allows a glimpse into the consciousness of the one who uses it. Provided, of course, that the person using the metaphor does so deliberately.

However, metaphor is not just a matter of language. Research by cognitive scientists shows that its use is one way in which the human brain processes new information. By placing it in familiar contexts, it enables us to understand reality (George Lakoff Reference Lakoff and Ortony1993). Metaphor is both an epistemological category – through which we try to put the reality around us into words – and a category that can be analysed.

Therefore, I applied the analytical method developed by Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), which focuses on tracing the transformation of political and social concepts over time. The aim of Begriffsgeschichte is to reveal how changes in meaning both reflect and influence broader societal shifts, particularly during periods of political crisis or upheaval (Koselleck Reference Koselleck2002, Reference Koselleck2004). Using this framework, I analyze the metaphor of the ‘time bomb,’ arguing that it appeared as a reaction to the collapse of the Soviet Union and at the same time served as an interpretive tool to comprehend its aftermath and implications in political discourse.

In 1991, to borrow Roman Szporluk’s phrase, the ‘nation-builders’ defeated the ‘empire-builders’ (Szporluk Reference Szporluk2000, 183–228). The Russian nation took self-determination against the USSR and had to reinvent itself. Any self-determination inevitably raises the question of borders and is an indelible part of the nation-building process. Russia was no exception.

With the inevitable generalisation, three types of nationalism can be distinguished that were popular in Russia at different times and were supported or challenged by the authorities: civic nationalism, imperial/state nationalism (so-called impertsy), for which the point of reference is the power of the state and its territorial extent, and ethno-nationalism (Kolstø Reference Kolstø, Kolstø and Blakkisrud2016a; Szporluk Reference Szporluk2000; Laruelle Reference Laruelle2009; Blakkisrud Reference Blakkisrud2023; Teper Reference Teper2015). The latter one is understood as the desire to shape state borders so that they correspond to the territory inhabited by a single ethnic group, in this case Russians (russkiych), and coincide with what the proponents of ethnonationalism consider to be the historical territory of a given nation (Smith Reference Smith2010, 132; Connor Reference Connor1994, 68–86).

Proponents of each version had their own preferred version of the borders of the Russian Federation. Civic nationalism was most strongly promoted during Yeltsin’s presidency. According to official rhetoric, ethnicity was not the basis on which the Russian nation was to be built, although – as Paul J. Goode argues – Yeltsin often played with the concept of ethnicity – russkiy (Goode Reference Goode2019, 12). Yet, the nation was to be ‘rossiyskiy’, not ‘ruskiy’. Identification with the state and Russian culture, including the use of the Russian language, was crucial (Kolstø Reference Kolstø, Kolstø and Blakkisrud2016a, 3; Smith Reference Smith2002, 158–172). The intention was to reconcile the new realities with the legacy of the USSR and the pre-1917 Russian Empire. This approach, however, carried with it the potential for imperial thinking inherent in nationalists described as ‘impertsy’. Indeed, since identification with the state capable of governing its territories was to be crucial for the ‘rossiysky’ nation, some may have wondered which state was being referred to: the present one or the one before 1917? There was also no shortage of those who identified with the USSR as a Russian state.

At the same time, in the 1990s, voices were raised about Russians being the most divided nation in the world, which translated into calls for the revision of borders in the post-Soviet space. Such statements showed that there were already proponents of ethno-nationalism in parts of the Russian elite and society. The Russian state should speak on behalf of ethnically identified Russians (russkiye) and territorially encompass areas where an overwhelming proportion of ethnic Russians lived. While this current was not particularly strong during the Yeltsin period, it gained popularity during Medvedev’s presidency (2008–2012) and Putin’s third term (2012–2018). Aware of its strength, the Kremlin initially tried to enter into a dialogue with representatives of ethnonationalism in order to control it. The breakthrough came with the annexation of Crimea, which, as researchers point out, allowed ethno-nationalist themes to dominate Putin’s official rhetoric (Blakkisrud Reference Blakkisrud2023, Teper Reference Teper2015). The paradox of the seizure of Ukrainian territory was that the Russian president’s move satisfied not only the supporters of ethno-nationalism, but also the impertsy, who put state power above the ethnic question. After all, according to their understanding, Russia was returning a territory that had once belonged to it in history (Kolstø Reference Kolstø2016b). At the same time, experts saw ethnonationalism as a political strategy chosen by the Kremlin because of the political capital it generated (Laruelle Reference Laruelle2017). What has not been asked, however, is what Putin’s personal opinion is of the above ideas and whether ethnonationalism is not what he is personally closest to.

Scholars of the subject have struggled to reconcile a seemingly irreconcilable conundrum in the case of Russian history: the notion of ethno-nationalism, understood as a movement to create a state that is as ethnically and culturally homogeneous as possible, with the notion of an empire whose power extends over a territory populated by people of diverse origins and seeks to ensure the loyalty of the centre. While these two phenomena have often been at odds with each other, as in the last years of Tsar Nicholas II’s reign or during the collapse of the USSR, there are periods when their relationship has been less clear (Brandenberger Reference Brandenberger2002; Głębocki, Reference Głębocki2000; Mitrokhin, Reference Mitrokhin2003).

Lilia Shevtsova has argued that imperial rhetoric serve only as a way to hide ethno-nationalism (Shevtsova Reference Shevtsova2007, 283). Pal Kolstø believes that the two phenomena coexist and that, depending on the current policy, one of them is exploited and strengthened, but he seems to perceive them as conflicting and exclusive (Kolstø Reference Kolstø, Kolstø and Blakkisrud2016c, 27). Oxana Shevel has argued that this ambiguity – during the Putin era – has become a deliberate policy because this ‘flexibility serves a functional purpose, as it gives Russian policymakers a lot of room to manoeuvre’ (Shevel Reference Shevel2011, 200). She has also rightly noted that Russia should be qualified as a mono-ethnic state, given that ethnic Russians make up 80% of the population (Shevel Reference Shevel2011, 186). This mere statistic puts additional pressure on Russian politicians to deal with ethno-nationalism.

In explaining the “time bomb” metaphor, I would like to unpack its content with regard to two questions: what is a desired territory of Russia and what are the criteria by which the proponents of the “time bomb” metaphor imagine this territory. My aim is to show that ethno-nationalism and imperialism are complementary in this particular respect.

Final Countdown

For almost 67 years between the creation of the USSR (1922) and the First Congress of People’s Deputies of the USSR (1989), no Communist Party leader imagined that in the near future an international passport (zagranpasport) would be required to travel from Moscow to Vilnius, Sevastopol or Kyiv. The officially proclaimed federalism of the USSR was so irrelevant that when the Supreme Soviet of the USSR decided in 1954 – in full accordance with Soviet legislation – to transfer Crimea from the RFSSR to the UkrSSR, the whole thing went ahead without any controversy or protest. There could be no controversy, of course, because there was a widespread belief that destiny had united the two peoples, Ukrainian and Russian, forever (Kramer Reference Kramer2014).

On the other side of the Iron Curtain, too, few people entertained the possibility of a relatively bloodless break-up of the USSR along the borders of the national republics. George Kennan, while sympathetic to the idea of an independent Ukraine, noted pragmatically a few years after the end of the Second World War that the country was as economically integrated with Russia as Pennsylvania was with the rest of the United States (Kennan Reference Kennan1951). In other words, Kyiv’s separation from Moscow was unthinkable and would have been economically fatal at best. In passing, he also suggested that the Dnieper was the cradle of Russian statehood, just as the beginnings of the USA were inextricably linked with Pennsylvania, where the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed.

Gorbachev “let the genie out of the bottle,” creating an atmosphere where the “time bomb” metaphor could emerge. His reforms, particularly perestroika, expanded public debate within the USSR, allowing previously unthinkable critiques, such as public remembrance of communist crimes and criticism of figures like Lenin and Stalin (Smith Reference Smith1998). Perestroika also exposed Russian nationalism within society and the Communist Party (Mitrokhin Reference Mitrokhin2003; Shnirelman Reference Shnirelman2012; Yakovlev Reference Yakovlev1972), with some voices challenging the USSR’s borders and Lenin’s disregard for Russian national interests.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was the most vocal in expressing his dissatisfaction with the territorial shape of the new Russia. The Nobel laureate reiterated the theses he had written years earlier in his most important work, ‘The Gulag Archipelago’, which concerned the most important part of the Russian Empire – Ukraine:

But while few in the USSR were familiar with Solzhenitsyn’s work when ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ was published in 1973–1975, this changed when the first edition of the three-volume work was published in the USSR in 1989. The moment when the USSR began to totter provided Solzhenitsyn with the perfect opportunity to recall the damage he believed Lenin had done to Russia. In August 1991, a few days after GKChP’s failed coup to prevent the collapse of the communist state, the writer sent a letter to Boris Yeltsin, the president of the Russian SFSR. After expressing his gratitude for the fact that he and his supporters had managed to stop the putschists, he moved on to the most important issue – the borders of the new Russia:

Solzhenitsyn’s message to Yeltsin may have been a response to his words on 17 August 1991: “If the redrawing of borders begins, there will be no end to it, there will be enmity and blood” (Sokolov Reference Sokolov1992a).

Revisionist views were not only expressed privately by the author of ‘The Gulag Archipelago’. In a pamphlet published in 1990, ‘How to Rebuild Russia’, he stated that the Ukrainian language was “polluted”, “alien to the nation” and “saturated” with Polish and German words. He went on to suggest that the territory of present-day Ukraine, which consists of territories that never belonged to it, such as Crimea, Donbass and the south-eastern region (’Novorossiya’), was also ‘tainted’.

He argued that a referendum should be held in each of Ukraine’s separate oblasts, in which the population would have a say on nationality. The logic of the Russian writer’s thinking was reminiscent of that of the First World War: he believed that the borders of a country should end where a particular ethnic group was in the majority (Solzhenitsyn Reference Solzhenitsyn1990). Of course, this was selective: the Russian writer said nothing about those regions of the future Russian Federation where Russians were a minority, such as Karachay-Cherkessia, Chechnya, Dagestan or Ingushetia.

Central to Solzhenitsyn’s view was his attribution of historical injustice to one figure: Lenin. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, Lenin envisioned the USSR as a federal state, constitutionally granting each republic the “right to leave the Union freely” (Konstitusiia SSSR, 1924), aiming to counter Great Russian chauvinism. He warned that, without vigilance, this right could become “a mere scrap of paper,” defenseless against Great Russian nationalism, which he saw as a remnant of tsarist bureaucracy (Lenin Reference Lenin1970, 357). Lenin believed the republics would remain united with Moscow as long as the center avoided chauvinism, facilitating his ultimate vision: the erasure of national differences and the creation of a unified, supranational identity, as proposed by Marx and Lenin (Smith Reference Smith1999; Szporluk Reference Szporluk2006; Martin Reference Martin2001; Hirsch Reference Hirsch2005). Solzhenitsyn, in turn, by criticising the first leader of the Bolshevik Party, sought to weaken the still strong bond between Russians and the Communist Party. At the same time, he created the half-truth that the Russians were merely victims of a collapsing empire. He failed to see that at the same time they were the most important and largest group of beneficiaries of the empire.

Moscow-born Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s adviser on international affairs, who was regarded as a party liberal, was one such beneficiary. As the spectre of disintegration loomed over the USSR, ideas about unjust borders began to emerge among the CPSU General Secretary’s closest associates. His views on this issue linked him with Solzhenitsyn. Although they came from different political worlds, both saw the borders of the future Russia in a similar way. The only difference was that Chernyaev did not dare to name Lenin as the culprit. The cult was still binding on party members: it was in his writings, after all, that Gorbachev sought inspiration for his actions (Taubman Reference Taubman2017, 217).

In early 1991, Chernyaev commented in his diaries on the possibility of the break-up of the USSR as follows: ‘Let Russia leave the USSR and the rest ‘as they wish’…. The fact that if Ukraine also leaves, we will cease to be a ‘great power’ for a while. Well, we will survive! And we will regain this ‘name’ through the revival of Russia’ (Chernayev Reference Chernayev2008, 838). A true communist could not use the badly connotated word “empire”. Nevertheless, it was clear from the above entry that Russia was the most important component of the “great power”. A superpower that could not do without Ukraine.

He justified the injustice of the new borders in two ways: the aforementioned loss of superpower status, and the separation of lands that Chernyaev believed were indigenous to Russia. These included: Crimea, Odessa and Donbass, an area reminiscent of the former governorates of Novorossiya and Taurida. Neither of these terms, of course, was used by Chernyaev. Of the territories mentioned, the peninsula was the most important: ‘Crimea … It cannot be returned, it is a disgrace to Russia’s national consciousness. And it is the only ‘ideological’ pillar of Russian policy,’ he wrote in November 1991 (Chernayev Reference Chernayev2008, 1025). These were not just Chernyaev’s views. In his memoirs, another of Gorbachev’s advisers, Georgy Shakhnazarov, described a discussion among the Gorbachev leadership about the possible consequences of a new, reformed state structure in place of the USSR. The key issue was borders:

“One of the most important new demands of the [Union State] agreement is that as long as the republics remain in the Union, the question of borders will not be discussed; if the republics leave the Union, the question should be discussed anew. Are the interlocutors prepared to return Crimea to Ukraine if it leaves the Union? Absolutely not,” was the group’s answer.” (Shakhnazarov Reference Shakhnazarov2001, 463)

It was believed that not only was part of Ukraine really Russia, but that it would be inconceivable for a Russian republic to seek sovereignty. For, as at least some of Gorbachev’s associates believed, the RSFSR was not Russia. Therefore, as can be deduced from the words of Vadim Medvedev, a member of the Politburo, it was clear that Gorbachev and his colleagues tolerated and accepted the existence of the ‘Russian factor’ in the form of the drive to create a Russian section within the CPSU, because it was inconceivable to them that it would lead to the disintegration of the union state. At the same time, the existence of these currents was used instrumentally by Gorbachev in his relations with, for example, Baltic politicians (Bergmane Reference Bergmane2023; Medvedev Reference Medvedev1994, 137–138).

But both the RSFSR and Crimea – the pillar of Russian identity, as Chernyaev defined it – were about to go separate ways. When Ukrainians voted for independence in a referendum on 1 December 1991, Gorbachev’s team had to respond somehow. The proclamation prepared by Shakhnazarov for the occasion was ‘demonstratively’ torn up by his boss. The reason was the words it contained: “historic choice”, “great role of Ukraine”, “congratulations on victory”, “independent, sovereign” (Chernayev Reference Chernayev2008, 1030). According to Chernyaev, Ukraine’s future looked in black colours. “Ukraine is behaving like a political minor,” Shakhnazarov concluded, making an allusion to Denis Fonwizin’s 18th century drama ‘The Minor’ (Shakhnazarov Reference Shakhnazarov2001, 463).

Borders were also discussed at the Congress of People’s Deputies of the RFSSR. They were triggered by the GKChP’s coup of August 1991, which proved to be the nail in the coffin of any idea of a single union state headed by Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. Fear was palpable in almost all the statements made by the delegates at the time.

This was particularly evident in the appeal made by the Congress of People’s Deputies of the RFSSR to the citizens of the three countries in connection with the forthcoming referendum on independence in Ukraine: ‘To separate, as hostile brothers do, destroying their parents’ house in order to become independent?’ – they asked rhetorically (V Syezd Reference Syezd1992, 284). Hovering over everything was not so much the question of unjust borders, but the feeling of losing a homeland of three nations. Vladimir Serdyukov of the ‘Rossiya’ faction, which included conservative communists and nationalists, pointed out in a discussion devoted to the preparation of a document on national minorities that the word ‘exile’ was inappropriate in relation to the inhabitants of Crimea, Donbass and Kharkiv. This is because it would be an acknowledgement that they are outside their homeland (V Syezd Reference Syezd1992, 239). He believed that the upcoming independence referendum in Ukraine could lead to a tragedy in the form of Kiyv’s separation from Moscow (V Syezd Reference Syezd1992, 240). A group of deputies led by Mikhail Astafyev tried to raise the Crimean issue during the debates, but it was ignored. This was because the belief at the time was that the union state, with Ukraine as part of it, would survive (Gretskiy Reference Gretskiy and Schäffer2022, 28).

The atmosphere changed dramatically after a majority of Ukrainians voted in a referendum on 1 December 1991 in favour of Ukraine’s declaration of independence. Hopes for the establishment of a common state organisation were dashed and, at the same time, representatives of the majority of the Russian political elite openly questioned the territorial integrity of Ukraine. The prelude to what was to take place at the next Congress of People’s Deputies was a letter from Russian admirals to Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk. In it, they wrote that Crimea was ‘the historical territory of Russia and the Russian people’ that was outside the borders of their homeland due to ‘administrative Anschluss’ (Gretskiy Reference Gretskiy and Schäffer2022, 33).

The proceedings of the Sixth Congress of People’s Deputies of the RFSSR were dominated by the growing conflict between the Supreme Council and the regional councils on the one hand, and President Yeltsin, the government and the administration on the other. The opposition, demanded a halt to economic reforms, epitomised by then acting prime minister Yegor Gaidar (Shevtsova Reference Shevtsova1997, 31–54). The Ukrainian issue became an additional weapon in the hands of the then president’s opponents. In this way, efforts were made to create an image of Yeltsin as a politician embezzling Russian national interests.

The loudest call for a revision of the borders came from representatives of the right-wing faction “Rossiya”. The faction was part of the “Rossiyskoye Jedinstvo” coalition (310 deputies) and had 74 deputies. One of its leaders, Sergei Baburin, circulated a text on 10 April 1992 containing a legal assessment of the decision to include Crimea within the borders of the UkrSSR. This was a continuation of a discussion that had begun three months earlier. On 20 January, at a meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation, its Chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov distributed the text prepared by the Committee on International Relations of the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation. The whole exercise was initiated by Yevgeny Kozhokin, then a lecturer at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). All this took place with the support of the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation, which adopted a resolution on the issue with 166 votes in favour, 13 against and 8 abstentions (Sokolov Reference Sokolov1992b; VI Syezd Reference Syezd1992, 24). The authors of the prepared expert report unequivocally ruled that the decision to hand over Crimea in 1954 was illegal, as the Supreme Council of the RFSSR had not spoken before it was taken. On 21 May 1992, the Russian parliament ruled that the 1954 decision on Crimea had no legal force.

Despite these claims, hopes for the creation of a potential union state remained strong. This was alluded to by Astafyev, one of the leaders of the ‘Democratic Russia’ movement, who believed that another series of discussions on common statehood should be launched. In return, regions such as Gagauzia, the left bank of the Dniester, Crimea and South Ossetia should become part of Russia if they so wished (VI Syezd Reference Syezd1992, 289).

The parliamentary debates did not lead to any significant action on the part of the government and President Yeltsin’s administration. This was due to different assessments of the situation. The militant mood of the revisionists was cooled by the then foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev. He warned that the use of force (’the Yugoslav variant’) had no prospects and would lead to disaster. He saw the problem within Russia itself, not beyond its borders:

Therefore, he said, referring to President Yeltsin’s position, ‘the issue of Crimea, as it has been taken up, is out of place and leads to the destabilisation of the situation. In August 1992, during his visit to the peninsula at Mukhalatka and his meeting with President Kravchuk, the Russian leader declared that Crimea was an internal Ukrainian affair. Judging from his talks with US President George W.H. Bush at Camp David in February 1992, Yeltsin had always hoped that the Commonwealth of Independent States would manage to become a functioning organisation integrating the post-Soviet space in the future. Ukraine was to be part of it, driven by the fact that it had ‘11 million ethnic Russians’ within its borders, as Yeltsin did not fail to mention to Bush (Memorandum 1992). He was thus faithfully summarising the results of the last Soviet census of 1989.

The attitude of the Russian president was crucial. He too wanted to keep Ukraine close to Russia, but by different means from politicians like Baburin. But that did not stop him from pandering to the nationalist wing of Russian politics and society. On 27 August 1991, a few days after GKChP’s coup, the spokesman for the president of the RSFSR, Pavel Voshchanov, made a highly controversial statement:

The statement was issued with the president’s approval. At a press conference, Voshchanov clarified that he was referring to the borders with Ukraine and Kazakhstan. This is where, in his opinion, there are indigenous Russian territories. The guilty parties, Voshchanov suggested, were the Communist authorities, who had arbitrarily altered the territories of the various republics. These words provoked violent protests in Kyiv and Alma-Ata. Vice-President Rutskoy, while admitting that “as a citizen” he was “outraged by Ukraine’s desire for separation”, had to save the situation with a personal visit to both capitals and the signing of relevant documents confirming Russia’s respect for existing borders (Sokolov Reference Sokolov1991).

Yeltsin criticised his subordinate, but not for the statement itself. It was because Voshchanov had named two countries to which Russia might have territorial claims (Voshchanov Reference Voshchanov2019, chap. 13). The whole action was a veiled threat to draw all the republics – except the Baltic ones – led by Kazakhstan and Ukraine into a federal union with Russia. It achieved the opposite of what was intended: the leaders of the republics saw the section of Russian democrats at the helm of power as a revelation of Russian nationalism demanding a revision of the borders. The difference was qualitative. Previously, such statements had been allowed by politicians outside the presidential administration such as the liberal mayors of St Petersburg and Moscow, Anatoly Sobchak and Gavrill Popov. Both criticised the agreement signed by Yeltsin in November 1990 between the RSFSR and the UkrSSR, which recognised the territorial integrity of both countries (Tolz Reference Tolz2002, 238). In addition, Sobchak, after the independence referendum in Ukraine and in relation to the unclear situation around the status of the Black Sea fleet, demanded that Kyiv ‘return Crimea to Russia’ and called those in power in Ukraine ‘partocrats and nationalists’ (Izvestiia 1992a).

However, no one in the ongoing discussion used the ‘time bomb’ metaphor. The closest anyone came to making sense of the phrase was Nikolai Pavlov of the ‘Rossiya’ faction. He explained that Trotsky, together with Lenin, after arriving in Russia and winning the civil war, ‘cut Russia’s borders to pieces’ (VI Syezd Reference Syezd1992, 184). He further elaborated on his thought:

Pavlov ended his speech with a threat: either the government and the president rescind the decisions taken at the Belovezhskaya Pushcha and begin talks on common statehood, or they will be recognised as the successors of the Bolsheviks and ‘swept away by 150 million Russians’. All because the Russians will not accept the ‘Marxist-Leninist borders’ and will fight for their ‘reunification’ (VI Syezd Reference Syezd1992, 185). A member of the ‘Rossiya’ faction, Aleksandr Surkov, used similar language, speaking of the ‘Stalinist gift’ of the northern border to Kazakhstan (VI Syezd Reference Syezd1992, 208). The logic was simple: having given the gift, Russia could always take it back. Pyotr Ryabukhin of the “Smiena – Novaya Politika” faction, who also disagreed with the Belavezha decisions, asked rhetorically: ‘If the 1922 agreement on the creation of the USSR was annulled, were not the 1922 borders also annulled?’ (VI Syezd Reference Syezd1992, 163)

In the period 1989–1992, representatives of various political milieus, from communists to conservatives, nationalists to democrats, believed that Russia’s borders – those inherited from the RFSSR – were a historical injustice. The consensus on this particular issue united such ideologically distant figures as Yeltsin, Solzhenitsyn, Baburin, Sobchak and Chernyaev. They all drew Russia’s imaginary borders according to national criteria. It was in line with all Russian policy towards the diaspora, which was driven by an ethnic understanding of the nation (Goode Reference Goode2019, 1). It is important to note, however, that they also proposed different ways of solving this problem, which they argued had been created by Lenin or, less often, Stalin. When Russia had to reinvent itself for the third time in the twentieth century, its political elites demanded a revision of the borders, justifying it on allegedly legal, moral-historical and ethno-nationalist grounds. This also served the ongoing struggle against the still strong sympathies for the Communist Party.

But this revision did not take place in the 1990s. Verbal demands collided with reality. On 20 July 1993, the UN Security Council declared that the decree of the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation of 9 July 1993, which undermined the territorial integrity of Ukraine, was incompatible with the UN Charter and international obligations. The Russian representative to the UN reported that the position of the Supreme Council did not reflect the opinion of the Russian President, adding another element to the simmering conflict between Yeltsin and the Moscow parliament (Complaint 1993).

Very few people commented on the issue of borders, arguing that it was not in Russia’s interest to redraw them. One of the loudest voices came from a Russian political scientist, Dmitriy Furman. Against the backdrop of the collapse of the USSR and the conflicts in Abkhazia, Ossetia, Transnistria and the debate over Crimea, he described those calling for the redrawing of borders as the enemies of Russian democracy. Looking at the current situation, he saw Russia as being forced “by the logic of events” to repeat “the fate of Germany after Versailles or Serbia today” (Furman Reference Furman2001, 57). Acknowledging that the rights of Russians in the newly established states were sometimes violated and that some territorial claims had at least some basis for discussion, he argued against the use of force. Instead, he advocated ‘creating an atmosphere within the Commonwealth of Independent States where borders don’t mean so much’ (Furman Reference Furman2001, 63). A confused Russia, mired in its own problems and in need of economic support from Western countries, could not afford to support the above ideas by force. All the more so as Ukraine still possessed nuclear weapons and an army of some eight hundred thousand men. What remained were political solutions and the hope that the Commonwealth of Independent States, established in Belavezha, would become a tool to draw Kyiv into a relationship with Moscow by other, mainly economic means.

Ukraine was also hostage to an internal political process in Russia. Initially, in 1990, Yeltsin supported the quest for sovereignty for the republics of the USSR, seeing it as a convenient political tool against Gorbachev. While hoping to eliminate his main opponent, he also believed that the ties between Moscow and Kyiv would be so strong that their separate existence would be unthinkable. Political as well as economic pressure would ensure that sovereignty did not become independence (Gretskiy Reference Gretskiy and Schäffer2022, 30, 38). Hovering over all this was the conviction that the Ukrainian question was really an internal Russian issue. In other words, while Ukraine’s subjectivity was denied, its existence was de facto accepted.

“Time Bomb”

It was in this context that the ‘time bomb’ metaphor emerged. It was probably first used in 1991 by Gleb Rahr, a member of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS), an anti-communist journalist for Radio Svoboda, and long-time chairman of the Brotherhood of St. Prince Vladimir, which was active in charity work in Western Germany and supported the Orthodox Church there (Nikolayev Reference Nikolayev2006; Tolstoy Reference Tolstoy2012a, Reference Tolstoy2012b, Reference Tolstoy2012c; Rahr Reference Rahr2011). Less than a year later, the same phrase was uttered by Putin and Dmitry Rogozin, a journalism graduate of Moscow State University who was not yet 30.

Each represented a different political formation. Rahr was a national conservative who rejected the USSR altogether, bringing his views close to those of Solzhenitsyn. He came from a family in which at least one member had collaborated with the Third Reich during the Second World War (Andreeva Reference Andreeva1990, 308). He considered the ‘Fundamentals of the Struggle for a National Russia’ by Ivan Ilyin, a Russian émigré philosopher with fascist sympathies, to be a ‘general guide’ and a very persuasive read (Rahr, 117). If Putin, then an obscure KGB lieutenant-colonel, had any views, they were seen as liberal. All because of his boss, the mayor of St Petersburg, Sobchak. Rogozin, on the other hand, who was taking his first steps in politics, held the position of deputy leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party (People’s Freedom Party). Its name, however, should not mislead us: its leader, Mikhail Astafyev, initially associated with the democrats represented by Yuri Afanasyev or Galina Starovoytova, held revisionist views on the outcome of the collapse of the USSR. He questioned the provisions of the Belovezhskaya Agreement and was a member of the Social Committee of ‘Russian Sevastopol’ in 1993. He called for the convening of a constituent assembly to which all the republics of the former Soviet Union would elect their representatives (Krotov and Maiorov Reference Krotov and Maiorov1993). Rogozin thought exactly the same.

Putin, Rahr and Rogozin, despite significant career differences, were united by a sense that Russia’s borders were ‘unjust’, as Putin put it at the Bergedorfer Gesprächskreis in St Petersburg in 1994. These words from the current Russian president, Vladimir Putin, were recalled in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine by Wolfgang Ischinger, a German diplomat who served as Director for Political Affairs in the German Foreign Ministry from 1993 to 1998 and later chaired the Munich Security Conference, one of Europe’s largest gatherings of world leaders (Ischinger Reference Ischinger2022).

From the above, it is most likely that it was Gleb Rahr who first used the metaphor of ‘time bomb’ to describe the federative structure of the USSR, which played a major role in its collapse. In 1991, he presented four programmes on Radio Svoboda as part of the ‘Partner Germany’ series (Archive Svoboda 2002), the titles of which featured the phrase “time bomb”: “A time bomb planted in the relations between nations by the 1918 Constitution and the 1922 union agreement” (Mina zamedlennogo deistviia, polozhennaia pod mezhnatsionalnye otnosheniia konstitutsiei 1918 goda i soiuznym dogovorom 1922 goda). Unfortunately, the recordings do not seem to have survived in the radio archive, as I learned from correspondence with the Radio Svoboda archive. Therefore, the reconstruction of Rahr’s views on this issue is subject to some risk of error.

He was certainly a staunch anti-communist – his membership of the NTS was evidence of this. He did not take the return of the monarchy seriously (Rahr Reference Rahr1991), while what linked him to the idea of the ‘whites’ of the revolutionary and civil war period was a vision of national policy. In his memoirs, published in 2011, he explicitly stated that ‘Ukrainians – are Russians (russkiye). Just like the Bavarians are Germans’ (Rahr Reference Rahr2011, 109). In other words: he believed that Russians and Ukrainians were one nation. He referred to those Ukrainians who demanded an independent state in his memoirs as ‘separatists’ (Rahr Reference Rahr2011, 109, 251, 254). At the same time, he emphasised the unity of the Orthodox Church in Russia and Ukraine in an émigré publication on the Orthodox Church (Rahr Reference Rahr1954).

In his view, Russians were victims of the USSR. He rejected any responsibility of the ‘new Russia’ for ‘the actions of the Soviet power and the Bolshevik regime’ (Rahr Reference Rahr2011, 594). The damage inflicted on Russians by the Communist authorities was not only the thousands of victims and the shattered Orthodox Church, but above all the territorial shape of the Russian Federation. He believed that Khrushchev had given Crimea to Ukraine ‘in defiance of international law, in defiance of the right of the inhabitants to decide the fate of their homeland, in defiance of the will of the Russian people’ (Rahr Reference Rahr2011, 428).

The historical anti-hero was Lenin. It was he who, in Rahr’s view, perpetrated violence against Russia by ‘forcing’ it into its present borders. Russia became a victim of “anti-Russian (antirusskogo) and anti-Russian (antirossiiskogo) imperialism”. This sentence is a clear indication of how ethno-national and imperial were intertwined in Rahr’s thinking. He justified this on the grounds that there were ‘millions of Russians’ outside the borders of the Russian Federation (Rahr Reference Rahr2011, 593). Rahr suggested that since Russia recognised the Soviet right to secede from other state entities, it should also recognise the right to join or ‘reunite’ with Russia (Rahr Reference Rahr2011, 597). Behind this was probably an allusion primarily to the Slavic nucleus: Belarus and Ukraine. He explicitly called Kazakhstan an ‘artificial Leninist-Stalinist creation’ (Rahr Reference Rahr2011, 598).

He rejected any claim that Russia had started ‘from scratch’ in 1991, understood as a postulate to deny the past and build a new statehood on a vision of the future. For Rahr, Russia was a country with more than a thousand years of history. The problem was the period between 1917 and 1991. The USSR, the journalist seemed to suggest, was not a state of Russians, because Russians were oppressed. The Soviet Union also lacked what was intrinsic to Russia: it should be Orthodox “in spirit, not in letter”. He therefore demanded the restoration of statehood – in the sense of legal obligations and symbolically – that of 24 October 1917. If this were to happen, it would be necessary to revise all international treaties, including those signed by the ‘illegal owners of Russia’. He was alluding to the possibility of revising the commitments made between the republics of the USSR (Rahr Reference Rahr2011, 594).

He believed that Russian national chauvinism was much rarer than Estonian or Kazakh chauvinism. In Rahr’s view, the Russians were characterised above all by national indifference and acquiescence, and by the acceptance of any insult directed in their direction. He stated ironically that “‘chauvinism’ of ours is expressed only in the fact that they cannot in any way teach or force us to see the Belarusians or Ukrainians as foreigners who were, are and always will be our own” (Rahr Reference Rahr2011, 598).

It is therefore highly likely that his broadcasts on Radio Svoboda, which included the metaphor later used by Putin, had a very similar interpretation. Lenin’s geopolitical shadow loomed over the Russian Federation. In order to get rid of it and restore historical justice, Rahr argued, it was necessary to strive for the revision of territories and the restoration of pre-1917 statehood. Like Solzhenitsyn, however, he did not envisage using force to solve this historical problem. If he could turn back time, Rahr would prefer to go back to 30 August 1911. To prevent the death of Peter Stoylpin, who was held in high esteem by NTS members. All the more so as his grandson Dmitri was himself a member of the organisation. The above views did not prevent Rahr from calling himself a ‘liberal’ (Rahr Reference Rahr2011, 595).

In August 1991, Gleb Rahr flew to Moscow for the First Congress of Compatriots (Kongress Sootiechiestviennikov) – a project animated by Yeltsin’s circle to integrate representatives of the emigration with the country. At that time, among other things, he met Patriarch Alexei in person (TASS 2012). The following year, the Congress was held in St Petersburg, with Deputy Mayor Putin speaking at the opening (Artsishevskii et al. Reference Artsishevskii, Tolstoy and Evgeniy1993, 30–31).

Rahr’s views on the question of Russia’s borders after 1991 did not differ from those of Solzhenitsyn or Chernyaev. What was unusual, however, was that his son Alexander managed to make contact with Yeltsin’s entourage in 1990, even before the collapse of the USSR. Immediately after GKChP’s coup, while staying in a dacha with the Russian president, he proposed the idea of a ‘Russian Club’. Its purpose would be to integrate exiled Russians into the country. The idea met with a positive response from Sergei Stankevich, one of Yeltsin’s advisers (Rahr Reference Rahr2011, 515; Ostapchuk Reference Ostapchuk1992). The founding meeting of the ‘International Russian Club’ took place on 21–24 January 1992 in Moscow. Stankevich was appointed chairman. In addition to the cooperation of Russian specialists living abroad with the government and attracting people with money, the aim of the club was to deal with the creation of ‘Russian homes’ abroad, promoting the new Russian state (Izvestiia 1992b). At the congress, Gleb Rahr spoke of the ‘Leninist vivisection’ that left tens of millions of Russians outside the country (Shkarenkov Reference Shkarenkov1991; Rahr Reference Rahr2011, 593).

His son Aleksandr worked for Radio Svoboda from 1982 to 1994. He is now a political scientist, a lobbyist with links to Gazprom and the author of books published in German such as “Vladimir Putin. The German in the Kremlin" and “Vladimir Putin. Russia’s President – Germany’s Partner”. He participated in the above-mentioned Bergedorfer Gesprächskreis in St. Petersburg in 1994 and worked as an analyst for the US think-tank Rand Corporation and the German Körber-Stiftung as director of the Russian and CIS programme. He was involved in bringing the Russian imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky to Germany. He supported the annexation of Crimea and Russia’s actions in the Donbass in 2014 and believes that Ukraine should not be an independent state (Banse, Flade, Müller Reference Banse, Flade and Müller2014).

In 2001, Gleb Rahr was granted Russian citizenship. According to his son Aleksandr’s version of events, it all happened quite spontaneously. Over dinner with the Russian president Putin, Aleksandr told him his father’s story and, impressed, the president is said to have decided to grant Gleb a Russian passport (Banse, Flade, Müller Reference Banse, Flade and Müller2014). He also received many honours from the Orthodox Church being one of the greatest supporters of the unification of the national church structures with the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia through the convening of the All-Russian Orthodox Church Council (Rahr Reference Rahr1991). He died in 2006 in Berlin.

Dmitry Rogozin, then deputy leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party (People’s Freedom Party), understood the ‘time bomb’ metaphor much like Rahr. The article he published in the Obozrevatel’ journal in 1992 was an attempt to revise the Belavezha agreement from the point of view of law and historical justice. The text was written not from the perspective of a communist, but of a Russian nationalist. Thus, Rogozin was criticising the limits that Russia found itself in after the collapse of the USSR, rather than the collapse of the communist system itself. In doing so, he used a metaphor that would later recur in Putin’s speeches.

‘A time bomb, the Leninist principle of the right of every nation to self-determination until separation – in the end triumphed and divided the country into hostile pseudo-states’ (Rogozin Reference Rogozin1992) – this is how Rogozin summarised the aftermath of the events of late 1991. He then set out legal arguments to demonstrate the illegality of the decision taken by Kravchuk, Yeltsin and Shushkevich. He pointed out that the 1922 law on the creation of the USSR could not be considered null and void because it lost its force when the new USSR constitution was adopted in 1924. In other words, the three aforementioned leaders had broken the existing law.

Also of interest was his criticism of the USSR’s State Committee on the State of Emergency. He blamed Yanayev and his colleagues for the fact that their actions had led to a rise in independence tendencies in the existing republics of the USSR. So much so, Rogozin wrote, that a ‘second group of liberal communists’ began to support them. From a historical perspective, he said, it was all the fault of Trotsky and Lenin, who ‘hated their fatherland, mocked its history and religion, and deeply despised the national sentiments of the Russian people’ (Rogozin Reference Rogozin1992). The remedy for all these mistakes was the creation of a new Russia as a common state within the borders of the USSR, but without the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. He presented a grim vision that its absence, with ‘artificial, arbitrary, Leninist-drawn borders’, would lead to bloodshed. Outside Russia’s borders, the author argued, 25 million Russians would be persecuted.

He developed some of these ideas in a dissertation he defended six years later for a doctorate in philosophy on Russian national security issues. He paid particular attention to Ukraine. He speculated that there might be territorial disputes between Kyiv and Moscow in the future. They would involve the Crimea, ‘returned to Ukraine by Khrushchev’, and ‘the oblasts of Kharkiv, Odessa, Kherson and Nikolaev, conquered by Russia in the 18th century after the Third Russo-Turkish War and returned to Ukraine with the creation of the USSR’ (Rogozin Reference Rogozin1998, 158). He also did not rule out a conflict with Kazakhstan over its northern lands “historically belonging to Russia” (Rogozin Reference Rogozin1998, 158).

For many Russians thinking in these terms, the moment of liberation in 1991 became both a moment of humiliation and the beginning of the formation of resentment. On this basis, the Russian political elites began to reinvent the Russian nation. The arithmetic made it easy for them: for the first time since the 15th century, if we bend history slightly and acknowledge that nations similar to those of the 20th and 21st centuries already existed then, Russians became the dominant majority in Russia. The Russian Federation is currently inhabited by around 80% ethnic Russians. In the USSR in 1989 it was 50%. In the Russian Empire in 1897 45%.

The relatively bloodless disintegration of the USSR that led to this was, paradoxically, due to Lenin and a triumph of the idea of the right of nations to self-determination as enshrined in the UN Charter. Everything took place against the original intentions of the Bolshevik leader. By ensuring that each republic had clearly – with some exceptions (Russian-Estonian relations referred to the disputed Pechora-Petserimaa region, while in Ukrainian-Russian relations the issue was the demarcation of the waters of the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait) – demarcated administrative boundaries, potential conflicts over where Russian territory began and where Latvian territory ended, for example, were prevented. If these borders had not existed, it is easy to imagine – just look at the Azerbaijani pogrom against the Armenian population in Sumgait in 1988 or the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict – that discussions on this issue could have ended in thousands of deaths. It would have been decided by force.

Russian politicians and intellectuals who criticised the borders of the new Russia took a different view. The most famous of these was Solzhenitsyn, who was awarded a state prize by Putin in 2007. He was one of the few to criticise the ‘Leninist borders’ for their artificiality, even before the dissolution of the USSR along national borders became a reality. Putin’s boss in St Petersburg, Sobchak, believed the same. The right to self-determination of peoples in the USSR had, in his view, been “taken to the point of absurdity”. The territorial changes of the republics between 1917 and 1991, on the other hand, resulted in “a completely distorted map of the national-state structure” (Sobchak Reference Sobchak1995, 112).

Lenin and the state he created, in Putin’s view, had wronged the Russians. Not only through massive repression, impoverishment and economic underdevelopment in relation to the rest of the world. But above all by drawing artificial borders and leaving millions of Russians outside the Russian Federation. ‘As for the problems of dual citizenship and the problems of the Russian-speaking population in the former Soviet republics, I would just like to say that these groups did not invade the republics of the former Soviet Union, as is claimed here, but were invaded by the then Soviet power. In this respect, the Russians are the same victims of the Soviet power’ (Bergerdorfer 1994, 38) – Putin said in St Petersburg in 1994 to participants in the Bergerdorfer Gesprächkreis. It seems that the future Russian president presented the perspective of those who had left Soviet Russia after the revolution. Rahr belonged to such people. In 1941, his family – fearing for their own safety – left the territory of Latvia, which had been annexed by the USSR a few months earlier.

None of them wanted a post-factum restoration of the USSR as they knew it. Its ideology had worn out, and the system was incapable of meeting the most basic needs of its citizens. This was also true of Gorbachev’s team. Once the collapse itself had taken place, however, the result proved unjust in one key respect. Russia’s political elites convinced a nation that had to reinvent itself for the third time in the twentieth century that it was entering a new era of injustice. This is because the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century did not bring about the best – in the opinion of Putin, Chernyaev, Sobchak, Yeltsin, Baburin, Rogozin, Rahr – arrangement of borders from the point of view of Russia’s national interests. ‘Please do not forget that Russia, in the interests of general security and peace in Europe, voluntarily ceded vast territories to the former republics of the Soviet Union, including territories that historically had always belonged to Russia. I am not only referring to Crimea or northern Kazakhstan, but also, for example, Kaliningrad [sic – typo? B.G.]’ (Bergerdorfer 1994, 38), Putin said in 1994 in the presence of Volker Rühe, Germany’s Defence Minister 1992–1996, and Andreas Meyer-Landrut, State Secretary in German President von Weizsacker’s cabinet.

Complementary Nature of Ethno-nationalism and Imperialism

It is likely that the ‘time bomb’ metaphor, along with Putin’s admiration for Stolypin (Hill, Clifford Reference Hill and Gaddy2012), reached Russia from Germany, just as Lenin did in 1917. But more importantly, there was a particular intellectual climate associated with the collapse of empire and the emergence of new states in which the metaphor emerged. Those who used the phrase wanted to analyse reality and understand what had happened. The metaphor also revealed much about their worldview. At the same time, it contained a criticism of those who had planted this ‘bomb’ and a call for action to deal with the consequences of its explosion, i.e. to revise borders. The historical roots of this belief went back to the white emigrants and the NTS, some of whose representatives had collaborated with the Third Reich during the Second World War in the name of anti-Bolshevism. The second source was within the CPSU itself, exemplified by the views of Chernyaev or Shakhnazarov (Mitrokhin Reference Mitrokhin2003, 77–136). Some of the views were reminiscent of those expressed by Russian nationalists or proponents of the ‘Little Russia’ movement such as Vasiliy Shulgin (Korolov Reference Korolov2020).

As Vadim Medvedev wrote, the realities of perestroika led to “an amazing thing happening – the transformation of many people who were very distant from Russian problems, who had never even noticed them before, into ardent patriots and defenders of the Russian people, promoters of the national aspirations of Russians” (Medvedev Reference Medvedev1994, 137). Putin, a KGB functionary, was one of those.

As early as the early 1990s, he expressed a conviction that the Russian nation, having just achieved self-determination, had at the same time become a nation wronged by history and Lenin. The spontaneous and emotional expression of this idea behind the metaphor of the ‘time bomb’ in 1992, and its recurrence in later speeches, most notably in his article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” (Prezident Rossii Reference Rossii2021b)”, suggests that he may have internalized these views. It is notable that he has adhered to the ideas embodied by the “time bomb” metaphor consistently over the past thirty years. This, in turn, would explain such an easy adaptation of ethnonationalism in Putin’s rhetoric, which was already noticeable during the campaign period before the 2012 presidential elections (Blakkisrud Reference Blakkisrud2023, 72; Goode Reference Goode2019, 14; Teper Reference Teper2015).

I contend that this metaphor encapsulates a fundamental historical meta-assumption that facilitated the conceptualization of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. By framing the narrative through this rhetorical lens, the metaphor served as a critical discursive mechanism that normalized and rationalized the subsequent military intervention. The consistent use of this metaphor by Putin over a period of at least three decades, despite shifting circumstances that could have warranted a recalibration of his rhetoric, underscores its significance in shaping his worldview and strategic calculus. The “time bomb” metaphor is geographically limited. If we reconstruct the territorial scope of the associated claims, it becomes evident that they focus solely on Ukraine, Belarus, and northern Kazakhstan – regions where, according to the Kremlin, ethnic Russians reside. In contrast, territories such as Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan are excluded, as the Russian political elite do not recognize their populations as ethnically Russian. However, if ethno-nationalism is indeed a primary consideration, one must question why so few within the Russian political elite have expressed any willingness to relinquish regions within the Russian Federation where ethnic Russians are a minority. This seemingly contradictory stance invites further analysis: how can this dynamic be reconciled within the broader ideological and strategic framework?

After 1991, Russia had to come to terms with its imperial legacy, which included both current territory (ethnofederalism) and imagined historical territory. Throughout history, no mono-ethnic state inheriting post-imperial territories has endeavored to discard certain territories, where its ethnic group constitutes a minority, under the pretext of ethno-nationalism. And secondly, the imperial mindset – understood in terms of borders as a reference to either the USSR or Imperial Russia – still plays a significant role and is being exploited as a political tool by the current regime. It is one of the key reasons why the Putinist regime rhetorically sustains this ambiguity (Shevel Reference Shevel2011, 200).

How is then the relation between imperialism and nationalism in Russia? When we examine Peter the Great as the architect of the Russian Empire, we must recognize that the Tsar’s endeavors were motivated by imperial doctrine and a sense of universal monarchic pride, drawing extensively from ancient Rome (Wortman Reference Wortman2006, 21–39). Even if we concede the existence of nascent nationalism during this era (Cracraft Reference Cracraft1986), it’s essential to acknowledge that the Russian nation served as a vehicle for imperial ideology. However, in the contemporary context, Russia is now predominantly inhabited by ethnic Russians. Consequently, imperialism has been employed as an instrument in the name of the Russian nation, guided by the principles of ethno-nationalism, particularly concerning territories with significant ethnic Russian populations that were formerly part of the USSR or the Russian Empire. This is also the logic by which the “time bomb” metaphor is used, and by acknowledging this we can better understand Rahr’s words that Russia has become a victim of “anti-Russian (antirusskogo) and anti-Russian (antirossiiskogo) imperialism” (Rahr Reference Rahr2011, 593). It is in the name of russkiy not rossijskiy mir that the Kremlin is waging the current war against Ukraine.

This doesn’t, however, offer an answer to the question of how the two attitudes – ethnonationalism and imperialism – can be axiologically reconciled. The reconciliation of these two elements may explain the phenomenon of post-Soviet cynicism. This attitude, as Mark Lipovetsky shows, makes it possible to reconcile private actions and personal convictions, which are very often at odds with generally accepted social norms, political situation or with what the law states. What facilitates this phenomenon is the widespread theatralisation and performativity of social life made possible by contemporary media. For example, the Kremlin officially fights corruption, but at the same time it tolerates and uses corruption as a political tool. Lipovetsky’s concept would therefore explain why the Kremlin in its rhetoric more often reaches for slogans “Russia – is a separate civilisation”, showing universalist – and therefore contradictory to ethnonationalism – ambitions; while in reality it is guided by ethnonationalism in its policies towards particularly Ukraine (Lipovetsky Reference Lipovetsky2018; see also: Yurchak Reference Yurchak2006; Pomerantsev Reference Pomerantsev2015).

And finally, if Lenin is responsible for planting a time bomb, why hasn’t Putin ordered his body removed from the mausoleum in the heart of Moscow? The explanation is simple: since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, public approval of Lenin as an important historical figure has hovered around 30–40% (Levada 2021). Consequently, coupled with the lack of consensus among the Russian elite on Lenin and the October Revolution, the Kremlin refrains from fomenting discord among the population (Malinova Reference Malinova2017).

Serhii Plokhy has noted that the effective resistance of present-day Ukraine against Russia has led Russian elites to reconsider the concept of the Russian nation. They are now faced with the necessity to depart from not only the imperial legacy of the tsarist era but also from the outdated notion of a Russian nation encompassing Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians (Plokhy Reference Plokhy2023, 293). Ethnonationalism appears to be among the potential and most important options under consideration in this context. However, a further shift by the Kremlin towards ethnonationalism could lead not only to potential territorial claims over Kazakhstan or the possible annexation of Belarus, but also to possible national tensions within Russia itself, which we do not see today. The catalyst could be for instance a weakening of central power. It would make the Chechens or Tatars start to ask the question about the sense of further subordination to Moscow. At the same time – in the event of a possible change of power in Russia – Putin’s successors will face the problem of the internalisation of Kremlin’s views by a significant part of Russian society (McGlynn Reference McGlynn2023; Levinson Reference Levinson2023; Hebel Reference Hebel2023). This, in turn, will raise the potential political costs of radical systemic change and in the sphere of values. And last but not least, it will be a huge obstacle to the normalisation of relations with Ukraine and the acceptance of the Ukrainian people as a separate entity from the Russian people.