Thirty Years from the End of the USSR

The article contains a brief retrospective assessment of the reasons given by various scholars and observers for the breakdown of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership and it situates that crisis in the larger context of history and the imperial legacy of the Russian state. It particularly looks at the issue of nationality as an ethnic, cultural and linguistic concept vis-a-vis the universalistic notion of empire as a community of destiny among diverse people. The author compares the Soviet Union’s structure as a ‘non classical’ empire to those of other European states and especially to Germany’s which has also evolved from being a loose Central and East European ‘Reich’ inspired by the Roman and Carolingian heritage – to becoming a federal nation surrounded by smaller countries that share with it ancient civilisational and political legacy. Whereas Germany is gradually asserting leadership among many of its former dependencies and in the post-Brexit European Union as a whole, Russia is led by geographical and strategic compulsions to rebuild a Eurasian confederal association with erstwhile Soviet Republics and possessions of the Tsarist Empire, in conformity with its location between the ‘West’, the Islamosphere and the Chinese world. Will Russia be able to create a synthesis between the Slav Orthodox Oikoumene envisioned by Nikolay Danilevsky and the Eurasian syncretistic model promoted by Lev Gumilyov?