Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has coined a new historic phrase. Speaking at a televised awards ceremony held by the Russian Geographical Society, he asked the youngest laureate, nine-year-old Miroslav Oskirko, who knows by heart the location on the map, flags, and capitals of all countries, where Russia’s borders ended. When the boy said that it ended at the Bering Strait with the US, Putin noted philosophically: “Russia’s borders don’t end anywhere.” But he hastened to add before the world could get scared: “That’s a joke.”
Yet this joke reminds me of another one, which Stalin allegedly said to Viacheslav Malyshev, People’s Commissar for the Tank Industry. Malyshev was once summoned to Stalin in 1942. The people’s commissar sat in the waiting room all day long, but Stalin did not receive him. The next day Malyshev came to the Kremlin early in the morning, but the Leader did not receive him again. On a third day, the people’s commissar sat again, full of anxiety, in the waiting room. As evening was approaching, Stalin walked out of his office room, looked surprisingly at the visitor, and said with a pronounced Caucasian accent: “Malishev? We haven’t shot you yet?” And he left.
Malyshev was taken to the hotel and told to go back to the Urals. He worked there until the end of the war, successfully increasing the output of tanks. Then a long-awaited Victory comes! After Germany’s surrender, Stalin holds a banquet in honor of the people’s commissars and designers of armaments. The Leader approaches Malyshev and says in an intimate voice: “Comrade Malishev, do you remember ’42? It was awfully hard, but still we knew how to joke!” Putin jokes the way Stalin did.
“Well, Putin was, of course, formally right, talking to the boy. In principle, the border of any state has neither the beginning nor the end. If a country is landlocked, its borders are a closed line without the beginning or the end. But if a part of the country’s territory has access to the sea, one point of the convergence of the land and maritime boundaries can be in principle considered the beginning of the state’s border and another point the end of it if you look, for example, from west to east. This is what Oskirko must have done. But if you draw the boundary of 12-mile territorial waters along the coast from the extreme points of the land boundaries, the state’s border will again form a closed line without the beginning or the end. This view about borders is possible, and Putin has every right to look at them this way.
But something prompts me that when the Russian president said that the Russian border did not end anywhere, he meant not so much the closed nature of the border of Russia or any other country as the possibility of its, pardon the tautology, boundless expansion. In spite of saying that it was a joke, he must have scared many, especially in the neighboring countries. Great ancient conquerors also dreamed that the borders of their empires should coincide with those of the oecumene – what they thought was the populated part of Earth. Both Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan hoped they would manage to conquer all the inhabited lands of Europe, Asia, and Africa, and “reach the ultimate sea.”
Of course, neither of the conquerors had the faintest idea of a rather densely populated America, a less inhabited Australia, the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, and a number of other countries in Europe and Asia. Still, they were going to conquer all the countries and peoples they knew. But, as is known, neither Alexander nor Genghis Khan managed to fully implement their aggressive plans and reach the mythical “ultimate sea.” And soon after the death or their founders, Alexander’s and Mongolian empires broke up into a lot of big and small states.
The subsequent empire builders never made a bold push for the oecumene – their plans were only confined to certain areas of Europe and Asia in the case of continental empires or to the not so large territories of European parent states to which they added vast overseas possessions in the case of colonial empires. Incidentally, the Russian Empire combined the features of a continental and a colonial empire. On the one hand, all of its territory was one solid continental area. On the other hand, many Russian territories in Asia were typical colonial possessions which did not differ from, say, the British colonial possessions in India. But the destiny of all empires was the same: they ceased to exist and broke up in a few decades or centuries.
Obviously, Putin is neither Alexander the Great nor Genghis Khan. His resources are scarcer, and he has no talent of a general. And it would be wrong to say that, under him, the Russian state is seeking military expansion only. It is the 21st century now, and at least some social needs of people must be met – it’s not the Mongolian empire, after all. After World War Two, the Soviet leadership daydreamed to reach the Iberian Peninsula and the English Channel very fast and let its soldiers wash their boots in the Atlantic. I don’t think Putin can even dream of such large-scale misadventures for lack of resources. Instead, he considers the entire post-Soviet space either as a “sphere of Russian interests,” if we use a term from the secret protocol to the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or as a “sphere of joint prosperity of the Great Eurasian space,” if we paraphrase a term from the WW2-time Japanese expansionist program.
And it is perhaps no accident that Putin said the phrase about Russia’s never-ending border, talking to a boy with Ukrainian first and last names. For the president of the world’s second strongest nuclear power still thinks in the categories of World War Two. Putin would certainly like to extend Russia’s borders to those of the former USSR, “to the devil knows what limits,” to quote a classic Kyivites know only too well. But Putin won’t succeed. The proof of this is the destiny of all empires – they die but never resurrect.
Boris Sokolov is a Moscow-based professor
