Paul Richardson on why the warm-water myth and expansionist urges are no guide to Russia today
The Quick Read Summary
The Myth of Russian Expansionism
- Russian Perspective on War: The Ukraine invasion is framed as a “special operation,” with dissent suppressed through severe penalties.
- Putin Unveiled: The invasion revealed Putin’s revanchist ambitions, not just territorial expansionism, challenging the historical myths of Russia’s perpetual land grab.
- Revanchism, Not Expansionism: Putin’s actions reflect a drive to reclaim perceived lost power and status post-USSR, fuelled by ethnonationalism rather than practical geopolitical needs.
The article challenges the Western lens of Russia as an expansionist power, presenting a more nuanced view of Putin’s motives as rooted in personal and national identity crises.
In Russia, there is no war. It is instead referred to merely as a ‘special operation’, with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov stating with a straight face in the weeks after the invasion that Russia had not even attacked Ukraine.
Reporting the truth about the war – beyond the lies of state propaganda – became punishable in Russia by up to 15 years in prison. Even so, many Russians still came out on the streets to protest the invasion, only to be arrested. The repression exposed a darkness that had been stirring in the Kremlin for a while.
As the dissident Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin explained: ‘On 24 February, the armour of the “enlightened autocrat” that had housed Vladimir Putin for the previous 20 years cracked and fell to pieces. The world saw a monster – crazed in its desires and ruthless in its decisions.’
While the invasion of Ukraine unmasked the true face of Putinism, it also seemed to confirm a long- standing story about Russia as a perpetually land-grabbing power. In this myth of Russian expansionism, the invasion of Ukraine was merely the latest instalment of an inexorable extension of territory set in motion by Ivan the Terrible, which took Russia from tsardom to empire, and from Muscovy and the Baltic to Alaska and the Pacific.
More than 100 years ago, in the final years of the Russian empire, Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan – the US’s foremost naval strategist of the day – captured this perspective on an expansionist Russia. In 1905, he argued that warm-water ports, which didn’t freeze in winter and would allow vessels year-round access, were an ‘evident need’ for imperial Russia.
Peter the Great’s testament has often been cited to explain Russia’s behaviour over the last 200 years. Unfortunately for those who place their faith in it, the document is a notorious fake. It first appeared in 1812 in a work of anti-Russian propaganda, produced on the orders of Napoleon, who was justifying his ill-fated invasion of Russia. In 1836, a version of the will was published in full in French, and it later became widely circulated in England and France during the Crimean War against Russia. Napoleon III even ordered copies of the document to be posted on buildings throughout France.
The story was again revived when the will was reprinted in English during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, and it reappeared in Germany during the First and Second World Wars. Inevitably, it was to reappear just a few years later in the USA during the Cold War, even while the Soviet government made concerted efforts to emphasise that it was a fake.
Despite its widespread resonance, the will was likely fabricated almost a century after Peter I’s death by a Polish general, Michał Sokolnicki (1760– 1816), who, after being imprisoned by Catherine the Great, emigrated to France and joined the French Revolutionary Army.
As one scholarly account of this fake concludes, at each moment of renewed tension between the East and West, the ‘forged Will turns up again like the proverbial bad penny’. Its sticking power seems to stem from the fact that the fabricated will fits seamlessly into an explanation of Russia’s threatening past, present and future.
It’s a perspective that has long held sway in Washington, London and Paris, and neatly corresponds with a concern over Russian power one day being extended to complement sea as well as land.
In the early 20th century, the British imperialist, politician and geographer Sir Halford Mackinder (1861–1947) was deeply troubled by the threat of a rising Eurasian power challenging the supremacy of the British Empire and its sea power. He considered that whoever controlled Eurasia – or the ‘heartland’, as he termed it – would pose a grave threat. In a famous lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in London in 1904 – just months before the inauguration of the Trans-Siberian railway – Mackinder outlined how Russia’s railways were beginning to open up the resources of Eurasia for exploitation.
For Mackinder, this was of the same order of significance as when Britain’s merchant ships and Royal Navy had come to dominate the seas in favour of the British Empire.
In this perspective, ice-free warm-water ports were deemed of particular importance for projecting Russia’s geopolitical power beyond the Eurasian heartland. It was an idea that became so entrenched in Western thinking on Russia that several decades later, during the closing days of the Second World War, the Western Allies used it to justify the annexation of the city of Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad) World War, the Western Allies used it to justify the annexation of the city of Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad) to the Soviet Union.
However, by this point in the war, the Soviet Union already had possession of a series of accessible Baltic ports – from Riga to Baltiysk – while Königsberg was distant from the open water, only suitable for medium-sized vessels, and accessible by a canal that in winter had to be kept open by icebreakers.
The myth of warm-water ports was so captivating that it created its own logic for the Western Allies and came to shape the post-war borders of Eastern Europe. Subsequent decades seemed to only further prove Moscow’s longing to secure its interests in distant ports – from Cuba to Vietnam. Even the Soviet invasion of landlocked Afghanistan in 1979 was interpreted by some, including analysts at the CIA, as merely a step towards the Indian Ocean.
Yet for a permanent naval base or commercial port on the Indian Ocean to be contiguous with the Soviet homeland would have involved a potential war of conquest, annexation and resettlement of such magnitude and scale that acquiring the port itself would have been a distant secondary matter.
Another awkward detail facing the warm-water theory is that Russia has, on several occasions, given up its naval bases. At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union leased from Finland a base at Porkkala, just outside Helsinki. This was returned shortly after Stalin’s death, well before the lease had expired. In the Far East, Stalin also restored the warm-water port of Port Arthur (Dalian) to China in 1950 without making any demands for compensation.
More recently, in 2002, Putin himself gave up Russia’s right to extend its lease on Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, despite significant investment in expanding the base during Soviet times. By the early 2000s, it appeared that the economic, military and political costs of maintaining this base were simply not worth the investment.
However, this habit of periodically relinquishing access to the sea – perhaps the most famous example being the sale by the Russian Empire of Alaska to the USA in 1867 for US$7.2 million – is rarely noted in the analysis of Russian expansionism.
It’s also often forgotten that Russia has had within its territory the potential for a port with ice-free access to the open ocean for centuries. Located on the Arctic Sea, the city of Murmansk, and a short stretch of the Murman Coast, is kept ice-free year-round by the Gulf Stream. It’s a port more open to the oceans of the world than Sevastopol in Crimea, and closer to the major population and production centres of Russia than the Pacific.
Aside from Murmansk, the technological innovation of ice-breaking ships with reinforced hulls, from the late 19th century onwards, also allowed more of Russia’s ports in the Baltic and Pacific to remain open throughout the year, again negating any need to find a supposedly warm-water port. Although reducing Russia’s behaviour to a single myth of incorporating warm-water ports that it supposedly lacks has proved to be an appealing and alluring way to explain Russia’s geopolitics, it ends up ignoring both geography and history.
The danger of solely focusing on expansionist myths and the drive to control warm-water ports as a way of explaining Russia’s actions is that it occludes a very real threat – the ethnonationalism-fuelled hatred that lies behind Putin’s revanchism. Revanchism is distinct from expansionism and refers to a concept derived from the French word for revenge. It’s a term related to the reclamation of lost territories in order ‘to recover past position, power and status’.
The 1990s were certainly a period in which a sense of loss characterised the experience of many Russians. In 1991, the Soviet Union fragmented into 15 independent states – the largest of which became the Russian Federation.
For Russia, this coincided with economic collapse, a decline in geopolitical power and status, and confusion over the identity of a new Russia in a new world. According to official statistics, Russian GDP per capita fell about 39 per cent in real terms between 1991 and when the economy started to recover in 1998.
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It was a decade defined by tumult and turmoil with devastating social and economic outcomes for most Russians.
These changes shocked and bewildered many Russians as the country was reduced to its smallest territorial extent since the time of Peter the Great. While it retained areas such as Tuva (a republic in southern Siberia with a majority population of ethnic Tuvans) and Chechnya (a republic in the North Caucasus), it lost parts of Ukraine and North Kazakhstan, both with large populations of ethnic Russians.
As one Russian commentator explained, this was like picturing the USA with Texas, Hawaii and Alaska, but without Alabama and West Virginia.
With the spectre of territorial fragmentation, the abandonment of Communist ideology, and the end of one-party rule, Russia urgently needed to find a new identity that could unite the vast territories and diverse peoples that made up the Russian Federation. It also meant that certain territories suddenly assumed critical significance in debates over national identity.
For some, holding on to these territories became a symbol of the integrity of the new state, the authority of the leadership, and the marker of a new national identity.
It was an agenda endorsed by Putin, who burnished his image as a ‘territorial tough’ by orchestrating the Second Chechen War, which devastated Chechnya and its capital, Grozny. Beyond Russia’s borders, the Russian military clashed with Georgian forces to support ethnic Russian separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which culminated in a brief but bloody war in August 2008.
Today, Russia’s so-called ‘special operation’ in Ukraine has been framed in Moscow as bringing back supposedly lost territory and people into the Russian world. It’s a revanchist claim that is meant to be a surrogate for restoring Russia’s past position, power and standing in the world.
However, the failures of the Russian military, its reliance on North Korea and Iran for weapons, its weakened economic and political ties with the West, and increasing dependence on China, point to precisely the opposite, and with it the folly of Putin’s revanchism.
More than two decades since he came to power, Putin’s obsession with Russia as a victim of Western aggression, the promotion of a cult of Soviet victory in the Second World War, the reinstatement of a Russian sphere of influence, and the undermining of Western liberal values have all become the defining features of his presidency. The primary aim of foreign policy is no longer that of furthering Russian national interests – whatever they may be – but instead the singular goal of Putin’s self-preservation and the continued access to power and stolen wealth that protects him from prosecution or worse.
In an increasingly authoritarian system of his own making, isolated from reality, and dismissive of advice, power ultimately overcame Putin.
He became lost in a myth of Russian greatness, for if there was a shred of pragmatism left in him, then he would have known that there never was a victory for Russia in its invasion of Ukraine.
By staking the house, it may come down with him.
