Authors

Discussion

This paper places contemporary Russia's uses of history in its relations with its neighbours within a broader move – both within official and societal discourse – towards civilisational justifications for Russian dominance over the Eurasian space. Emerging from Russia’s longer-term ambiguous ties to Western modernity and its ‘own Orient’, I argue that specific interpretations of historic events and processes – including elements as diverse as the Treaty of Pereieslav, the conquest of the Caucasus, industrialisation in Ukraine, nation-making in Central Asia, and the Great Patriotic War – superseded normative arguments sourced from the Liberal International Order (LIO) as justifications for a hierarchical regional worldview. The Putin regime had, with its coming to power, combined both liberal and civilisational arguments, sourced from liberal, pragmatic and nationalist currents prevalent in the indeterminate 1990s, in these justifications. While liberal arguments remained dominant – albeit in increasingly feigned form – until Russia’s takeover of Crimea in 2014, the definitive rupture with the LIO represented by that particular event saw an increased reliance on ‘red-brown’ approaches to Russian and Soviet historiography. The paper concludes by exploring how the West and Russia’s neighbours should approach the challenge posed by the Kremlin’s hierarchical claims in light of its uses and abuses of history.