Opinion C Raja Mohan writes: India’s approach to Russia must take stock of Moscow’s imperialist history

India is among the few places in the world where the Soviet legacy endures with some strength. In Delhi, Vladimir Putin’s Russia continues to be valued as the heir to the Soviet Union and as a special strategic partner. Putin’s aggression against Ukraine and his brutal bombing of its civilian population, which Moscow claims is an integral part of Russia, has hardly made a dent in the way the Indian political classes think about the crisis.

Although it has been reluctant to directly criticise Russian aggression, official Delhi is not blind to the fact that Putin’s “special military operation” has gone horribly wrong. Delhi will inevitably find ways to adjust to the tectonic shifts in the world order triggered by Putin’s misadventure. But the Indian political and strategic communities must come to terms with the many complex factors that have contributed to Putin’s egregious errors in Ukraine.

On the left and centre of the Indian political spectrum, the Soviet Union has been viewed purely through the ideological lens of progressive politics — nationalist, internationalist, communist and anti-imperialist. That lens, however, is detached from the history of Russia and the continuing struggles for its political soul. Within the strategic community, the conviction that Russia is India’s “best friend forever” leaves little room for a nuanced view of Russia’s domestic and international politics.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, speaks to Prime Minister Narendra Modi during their talks on the sidelines of the SCO summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. (AP, file)

Five factors might help lend greater depth to Delhi’s Russian discourse.

One is the religious and messianic impulses in Russian history and the deep-rooted pan-Slavism that have so neatly dovetailed with the post-Soviet image of Russia as the vanguard of global revolution. Russian internationalism is rooted in its traditional self-perception as the “Third Rome” and the successor to the Roman and Byzantine empires. Moscow is the heart of Orthodox Christianity — which is at once mystical and millenarian. It sees itself defending “The Holy Rus” against Mongols, Turks, Polish Catholics, Swedish Lutherans, the Jews, Napoleon, Hitler and the West.

The Bolshevik Revolution, which initially sought to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church, eventually leveraged it in the deification of the Soviet state and lent a religious colour to the claim of Russian exceptionalism. Putin has taken the alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church to a higher level. For the Russian nationalists today, the effort to take back Ukraine is a “holy war”.

Second, the Indian debate that has long viewed Russia as anti-imperialist is reluctant to engage with Moscow’s own imperial history. If Moscow’s European peers captured overseas colonies, Russia’s expansion was overland. The replacement of Czarist Russia by the Soviet Union did not end Moscow’s imperial habits.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) claimed a special role in directing revolutions in other countries. After the Second World War, Soviet Russia insisted that fellow communist states had only “limited sovereignty” and Moscow had the right to intervene to keep them on the straight and narrow path of socialism and prevent their destabilisation. The military invasions in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1979) were motivated by this impulse.

In claiming that Ukraine has no sovereignty of its own, Putin is merely following that imperial tradition as well as the conviction that Ukraine, Belarus and Russian-speaking people everywhere are part of the “Russkiy Mir” or the “Russian world”.

Among the few outside the West who saw through the imperial dimension of the Soviet Union was China’s Mao Zedong. After he broke from the Russian communists, Mao began to characterise Russia as an “imperial power”. Mao had not forgotten the persistent tension between the Chinese and Russian empires. Pro-China communists in India duly followed by attacking Russia as “social imperialist”.

The third missing element in the Indian debate on Ukraine is the nature of the relations between Russian nationalism and other ethnic minorities. The founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin warned against the dangers of “great Russian chauvinism”. He insisted on structuring a federal polity with the right of various nationalities to secede. Stalin, however, turned Russian federalism into a hollow shell and erased the difference between the “Soviet Union” and “Soviet Russia”.

In a speech earlier this year, Putin denounced Lenin for giving a separate identity to Ukraine. “Modern Ukraine”, Putin said, “can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine’.”

Fourth is the enduring autocratic impulse in Moscow that is rooted in the stalled democratic revolution. Traditionally, the Russian fear of disorder has left the population to put great faith in strong leaders. The Russians believed that the “Czar” was a just ruler who would save them from the oppressive feudals and corrupt local officials. The frequent but unsuccessful efforts at political liberalisation have left a fertile ground in Russia for centralising power under leaders like Putin and increasing the chances of grave miscalculation.

Fifth is the idea that Russia has no borders. In a talk with geography students a few years ago, Putin asked a rhetorical question: “Where do Russia’s borders end?” He answered, half facetiously, that “they don’t end anywhere”. But more seriously the lack of defensible borders for the vast territory it holds has been a persistent concern for Russia over the centuries.

The idea of securing Russia through a “sphere of influence” in the “near abroad” comes naturally for leaders in Moscow. But most of Russia’s neighbours, unsurprisingly, do not want to be part of it. The resentments against Moscow’s domination are deep-rooted on Russia’s periphery, especially in Central Europe. The closer you are to Russian borders, the greater your need for external balancing against Moscow.

Although the ideas of “territorial sovereignty” and “strategic autonomy” come naturally to Delhi’s discourse, the Indian foreign policy community has had little sensitivity to the demands for freedom from Russian domination in Central Europe. That in turn can be explained by the fact that independent India tended to view east and central Europe through the eyes of Moscow.

As the tragic Russian war against Ukraine enters the 11th month and there is an exploration of the terms of a potential peace process, reconciling Russian security concerns with those of Ukraine and its Central European neighbours will be hard. The concerns and convictions on both sides are strongly held and so antithetical.

India’s interests in Russia are many and will endure even as its stakes grow in Central Europe that is gaining greater strategic weight and the political agency to shape the future of Eurasia. To understand how the war in Ukraine might play out and its longer-term consequences for India, Delhi’s discourse must pay greater attention to the turbulent history of Russia and its troubled relations with its Central European neighbours.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, Delhi and a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express