Where Europe and Russia Meet — A Story in Eight Maps

  

Where Europe and Russia Meet — A Story in Eight Maps

 

 

In the 13^th and 14^th centuries, when Moscow was just taking control of its immediate environs, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania brought much of the old Kievan Rus under its control.  Lithuanian rule was light-handed, leaving local populations to carry on while paying tribute.  Later, Lithuania and Poland would form a dual realm.  In the process, this region became part of the larger European historical and cultural experience.  Meanwhile, Moscow would remain under Mongol rule until the 16^th century—a fact that shaped much of the flavour of Moscow’s way of conquering and ruling, hiving them off from the European conversation.

 

 

 

 

After 400 years of expansion, mostly east into Siberia, this is how far Muscovy/Russia was able to move westward.  The eastern frontiers of the Swedish and Polish-Lithuanian empires marked the cultural boundary between a European world that had evolved together through the Middle Ages of castles, knights, and feudalism; through the Renaissance and Reformation of revived classicism, new ideas, and the Roman-Protestant split; through the Age of Discovery and Reason with new ideas about the world and the cosmos; and was in 1700 entering on their new common experience, the Enlightenment, laying the foundations of modern science, developing new technologies, and exploring new political ideas.  Meanwhile, when Peter the Great became the Tsar, he saw how his own empire was a world apart, being left behind, especially technologically.  He had to force the acceptance of western ways among his nobility, but Russia would never completely catch up.  Indeed, in matters of statecraft, Russia would remain stubbornly stuck in a mindset of autocracy.  Even the absolutist monarchs of Europe did not operate as autocrats.  Rather, while wielding power, they still governed within the framework of larger legal structures built on Medieval and Roman foundations.

 

 

 

 

Russia would first manage to break into the west with its defeat of Sweden in the Great Northern War (1700-1721) by taking what are now Estonia and the northern half of Latvia.  In 1772-1795 Russia, under Catherine the Great, would interfere in the internal politics of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, making decisive leadership in the face of Russian aggression impossible.  Catherine would see to it that her former lover came to the Polish throne, and collude with Prussia and Austria to dismember what had been the largest land empire in Europe (west of Russia) for 500 years.  A program of Russification followed in the new lands.  This is the template for what Russia is doing today: destabilizing its rivals internally, putting leaders friendly to Russia in place, and conspiring with other hostile powers to grab territory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Russia’s intrusion into the European cultural-historical space was cemented at the Congress of Vienna.  The Russian narrative of peoples not being peoples and Russians being the only people in their own right within the empire intensified.  Even Lithuanians and Poles, who had only a few decades earlier been masters of a venerable empire older than Spain or the Ottoman Empire, were dismissed as barely significant.  Local peoples were deported east, and Russians moved in—a method of control not practiced in Europe, but still in use today as Moscow continues forced Russification.

 

 

 

 

Centuries of cultural and social evolution are not quickly erased.  By conquering most of the former Polish-Lithuanian lands, Russia also took control of the largest Jewish population in Europe and the world.  Muscovy/Russia had always been intolerant of Jews.  By contrast, Poland-Lithuania had invited Jews displaced from other parts of Europe to settle in their extensive domain.  Jewish men often took on the role of estate managers for the Polish nobility.  Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, became the leading centre of Jewish intellectual life in Europe.  Over the course of the 19^th century, the bifurcation between Europe and Russia was brought into stark relief in these territories.  While in most of Europe the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution were leading to the elimination of special laws restricting Jews, the new Russian masters were hoping to keep the Jewish population contained and controlled.  Thus, the “Pale of Settlement” was established—former Polish-Lithuanian territory to which Jews were to be confined.  This map shows the extent of the “Pale of Settlement” with the percentages of Jews as a proportion of the population.  After barely 100 years of controlling this region, the Russian government embarked on a campaign of pogroms to “encourage” the Jews to leave.  Many fled west, especially to the new United States of America.

 

 

 

Just over a century after Russia succeeded in pushing into Europe, World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and the Treaty of Versailles freed many of the peoples of what we might call, “the eastern march of Europe” from Russian control, notably Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.  In the time between 1918 and 1923, the Ukrainian people also attempted to achieve independence, but after a hard-fought war against the Bolsheviks, they were pulled back into Moscow’s shadow.  Nevertheless, an insurgency would continue in Ukraine into the 1950’s.  It should not surprise us that in the 1990’s, many Ukrainians were ready to be free of Moscow.

 

 

 

 

 

Following World War II, in a latter-day echo of the partition of Poland-Lithuania, Muscovy/Russia in its Soviet Union avatar, managed to push the line of Russian control into the centre of Europe, asserting autocratic (Stalin) control over numerous peoples previously untouched by Moscow’s heavy hand.  But Europeans never felt at home in the system and culture of governance imposed on them from the east.

 

 

 

 

While political scientists of the realist school regard the “expansion” of the European Union and especially NATO into the former Warsaw Pact region as a geopolitical mistake, from the perspective of historical process, what is actually happening is, that the European cultural-historical zone is reintegrating its eastern march into its continental structures.  This process will not be complete until Ukraine and Belarus—the former lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—are returned to their true cultural, political, and economic home.  Russian imperialists may take offence, but if we hold self-determination to be a real value for peoples and nations, then Moscow has no right to decide for others with whom they will align themselves.  The people of these countries know themselves to be European and know that Russia, for all its overlay of European culture, to be something alien: autocratic and anti-cosmopolitan.  If Russia wants a “Russian world”, let them keep it to themselves.