Authors

Discussion

The cultural myths formulated within the circles of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences, in the service of imperial policy, have long obscured the early history of the East Slavic peoples—today’s Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians—and continue to impede the construction of coherent national identities among them.

These myths, deeply rooted not only in Russian collective consciousness but also echoed internationally, perpetuate the notion of a unified cultural community of “Rus” that allegedly existed until the late thirteenth century, while assigning Russians a dominant role within it. This conceptual conflation of Rus and Russia distorts both historical understanding and contemporary reflection on the complex nation-building processes in Central and Eastern Europe.

The problem is compounded by successive attempts of the Russian state (whether under tsars, Soviet leaders, or President Putin) to engineer a Russian nation “from above.” Drawing inconsistently on Western European concepts of nationhood, combining elements of the German Kulturnation and the French political nation, these projects, when applied to the multicultural and socially stratified reality of the Russian Empire, have resulted in the flourishing of cultural imperialism rather than the emergence of a genuine civic identity.

Today, Russian propaganda that diminishes the achievements of other nations conceals a fundamental weakness: the persistent absence of a coherent Russian national identity. Neither the imperial “Rossiychik” project of Catherine II nor the Soviet attempt to forge a supranational “Soviet people” succeeded in producing an authentic sense of belonging. Contemporary “Russianness” remains an artificial construct imposed from above, exemplified by the constitutional fiction of a “multinational nation” (mnogonatsionalny narod). The paradox of this concept becomes evident in Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, where members of non-Russian ethnic groups—such as Kalmyks and Buryats—fight in a “special military operation” officially justified as defending the sovereignty and dignity of “Russians wherever they live.” In this light, Russia’s aggression appears as a violent and tragic attempt to resolve its own crisis of identity and historical inferiority complex toward its imagined “elder brother.”