by Stefano Caprio

Putin is but the latest in a line of varjagi in Russian history, who tried to ‘bring civilisation’ to the lands across the border and around the world. Today, annexation is calculated not so much in square kilometres, but in sums of ‘traditional values’ such as the socialist revolution or the tsarist defence of autocracies might have been in the past.

It is now two years since 30 September 2022, when the Kremlin solemnly announced the farcical annexation of the four occupied regions in Ukraine, those of Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporižja and Kherson. Vladimir Putin intervened with a wide-ranging and confused programmatic speech, which was nothing more than a repetition of the various propaganda refrains accompanying the ‘special military operation’.

Russia's ‘new territories’ could not, moreover, arouse the same enthusiasm as the annexation of Crimea in 2014, both because the Black Sea peninsula has a very different historical and symbolic significance, and because the lands of the Donbass have never really been conquered all the way, and remain to this day the different ‘Ukrainians’, i.e. the ‘borders’ of the two faces of the Russian world, the eastern and the western.

Little more than a month after the proclamation, in fact, the Russian armies had to hastily abandon the capital Kherson in the southernmost region, without even having time to remove the banners reading ‘Russia is here forever’, and in the other capital Zaporižja they did not even manage to enter. Yet the rhetoric of annexation remains total and unappealable, despite the constant changes on the war front in these regions.

In the meantime, the inhabitants of the occupied territories are divided into different categories: in addition to the relokanty fugitives, there are the žduny, ‘those waiting’ for liberation from the occupiers, called kolonizatory in a derogatory sense, or varjagi, like the ancient Scandinavians who came down to form Kievan Rus' at the beginning of the millennial history.

This reference to the variagos (also called Normans or Vikings, depending on the context) is one of the most explanatory of the origin of the theories of the ‘Russian world’, because it puts the ideal of annexation or conquest at the very beginning of collective identity: the Russian people do not really have ‘their own territory’, but recognise themselves in the continuous search for and unification of ‘new territories’.

The Varangians are as much foreigners as Asians, Caucasians, Europeans or Turanians, who in various epochs have recomposed and expanded ‘Russian-ness’, understood as the sum and not the specificity of an eastern branch of the Slavs.

In the narratives of the ancient annalists illustrating the ‘call of the variegated’, the groups of Russians who came to the North Seas in the 9th century were referred to by the Scandinavians as the Gardariki as a whole, the land of the gard or countries, the inhabited centres of a society to be invented.

Putin himself made a statement that recapitulated this ancient and new history when he spoke a few years ago on a television programme, where some young people answered questions on history, geography and other subjects with great preparation.

When asked ‘where do Russia's borders end’, one of them had listed the extreme ends of the federal map in all coordinates, but Putin interrupted him, saying between the serious and the facetious that ‘Russia's borders end nowhere’.

This is indeed the founding motive of sobornost, the ‘universal communion’ that feeds the many variants of Russian sociality: to go beyond, not to be enclosed in any dimension, that attitude that in Russian is called bezpredelnost, the ‘absence of limits’ that can be understood as adventurism or even incontinence, the inability to respect any rules, even international agreements on state borders.

Putin is only the latest heir of the many varjagi in Russian history, who tried to ‘bring civilisation’ to the lands across the border and the world. Today, annexation is calculated not so much in square kilometres, but in sums of ‘traditional values’, such as the socialist revolution or the tsarist defence of autocracies, the ‘third international’ or the ‘third Rome’ of Ivan the Terrible, up to the current ‘orthodox sovereignism’.

It is not the other states that must annex Russia, it is Russia that ‘annexes’ the lands and peoples in search of the new and final civilisation. This is why the banners of ‘Russia forever’ remain even in defeats and retreats, as at Kherson and in so many other situations in the past; Russia has in fact never won a war of occupation and annexation, but rather has demonstrated the ability to expel the enemy from itself, from the Tartars, the Teutonic Knights and the Swedes to Napoleon and Hitler, to establish itself in Paris and Berlin as the ‘new capitals’ of Russia itself.

Annexation, after all, is a defining concept, as opposed to mere ‘occupation’, such as that of the Ukrainians in the Kursk region, which one has no intention of annexing, despite the fact that one could use speculative arguments, as many Kuriane, the inhabitants of the area, speak the Ukrainian language more readily than the Russian.

When in conflicts a nation occupies a territory, annexation is the result of a complex process of justifications and international agreements, as when China annexed Tibet in 1951 through a formal agreement with the local government, or Israel took East Jerusalem through a national law. Ukraine now considers Crimea and Donbass as ‘temporarily occupied’ regions, and so they will probably remain for decades or centuries, while Russia exalts itself with the cries Krym Naš!, ‘Crimea is ours!’ and also, albeit with less enthusiasm, Donbass Naš!.

In both Sevastopol and Donetsk, the annexation was enshrined in a ‘people's referendum’, without bothering to give it even the illusion of legitimacy; back in 2014, when an open military conflict was not yet underway, the polling stations were manned by the Russian army.

The concept of ‘sovereignty’ is very aleatory in these territories, responding only to impositions of force that produce fake consensuses, 95 per cent in Crimea and even 99 per cent in Lugansk and Donetsk, 93 per cent in Zaporižja and ‘only’ 87 per cent in Kherson. Autocracies in general like ‘referendums’, and not so much to confer a semblance of democracy, but rather to exalt the consensus of the entire population and demoralise the naysayers, convincing them that they cannot do anything about it, while at the same time discouraging ‘palace revolts’ by those in the power elites who wish to oppose the ruling regime.

In authoritarian countries, referendums are occasions to carry out further ‘rounds’, boasting of a landslide victory. As the Swiss Centre for Research on Direct Democracy has calculated, out of 876 plebiscites conducted between 1945 and 2005, dictators received an average of 70% support, with a turnout of 77.3%. Achieving these results requires effective propaganda and fierce censorship, as well as various forms of electoral manipulation and fraud.

Now Russia's ‘new territories’ are the object of special attention, especially since Putin and Patriarch Kirill do not like the term ‘new’, preferring to call them Russia's ‘historical territories’, knowing full well that these are areas that have been disputed for centuries where groups of Cossacks gathered in search of ‘free territories’, not subject to any authority.

Russia, on the other hand, does not want to bind itself too closely to the territories, preferring the extension of ‘spheres of influence’ that transcend all borders, as was the case under the Soviet regime, in which the fifteen official republics stood alongside the many ‘sister’ states, now downgraded to the distinction between ‘friendly’ and ‘unfriendly’.

One discriminating factor is certainly the proportion of ‘Russian-speaking’ citizens in the various countries, which is most evident in neighbours such as Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Armenia in the Caucasus and in the countries of Central Asia, where one can speak Russian freely with those over fifty, and with some difficulty with young people.

In the Ukraine everyone speaks Russian freely, regardless of the region, even if since the beginning of the conflict they prefer not to use it, and in any case for Moscow the ‘Russophonie’ justifies any kind of interference and invasion, because whoever speaks Russian is by definition an exponent of the ‘Russian world’, even if he is in Kenya, India or Venezuela, and his ‘re-annexation’ to Russia is nothing but a restoration of historical justice.

The new or ‘historic’ annexed territories today are the showcase of the Putin project, and are financed at least three times more than all the other hundred regions of the Russian Federation, to the great appreciation of various profiteers and corruptors. The same thing happened with the Baltics in Soviet times, with Chechnya in the first Putin phase, not to mention Crimea in the last decade.

For now, the inhabitants of the Donbass are particularly needed to support the official ideology, as ‘heroes and victims of Kievlian Ukrao-Nazism’, but they will have to watch out for future developments.

It is not known how long Russia will remain ‘annexed’ to these lands, but already in the deserted city of Mariupol, in addition to the military, 50,000 people have moved in from Russia and Central Asia to create a ‘new world’ on the shores of the Black Sea. Russia is a concept in perpetual evolution, created and destroyed according to epochs and regimes, looking forward to an ever more unpredictable eternal kingdom.

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