THE EVOLUTION OF RUSSIA’S GREAT POWER DISCOURSE: A CONCEPTUAL HISTORY OF VELIKAYA DERZHAVA By Anatoly Reshetnikov Submitted to Central European University Department of International Relations Word count: 88,828 In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science Supervisor: Dr Alexander Astrov Budapest, Hungary 2018 COPYRIGHT NOTICE I hereby declare that this thesis contains no materials accepted for any other degrees in any other institutions. The thesis contains no materials previously written and/or published by another person, except where appropriate acknowledgement is made in the form of bibliographical reference. Anatoly Reshetnikov Budapest, 25 September 2018 i ABSTRACT Today, Russia is yet again talking about being a great power. Such rhetoric emerges in almost every programmatic text written by Russian politicians, as well as in every forecast and policy analysis prepared by Russian state-affiliated think-tanks. Most western observers perceive this as a question of foreign policy and treat Russia’s claims with suspicion. At a closer look, however, it becomes evident that, instead of having an exclusive connection to foreign policy, Russia’s great power discourse is self-centered, defensive, ideological, and relates equally, if not more, to the causes of Russian domestic consolidation and catch up development. In this study, I argue that the origins of this inherent ambivalence and specific functions of Russia’s great power discourse should be sought in the conceptual evolution of velikaya derzhava, a Russian political concept that is usually translated as ‘great power’. In its current shape, velikaya derzhava is a product of both the evolution of local political culture, and Russia’s discursive encounters with external political environment, the most consequential of which was Russia’s lengthy and troubled integration into the European society of states in the XVIII and the XIX centuries. While before the XIX century, Russian and European ideas about political greatness and power could be said to develop on collinear tracks, sometimes converging, but sometimes drifting apart from each other, in the XIX century, there emerged an important diversion between the two. In Europe, different genealogically related versions of political glorification were synthesised into the story of progress, which was universalist, but not essentialist. While it postulated the existence of the family of mankind developing in one common direction, the position of each individual polity on that axis was to be established based on rigorous civilizational analysis and comparison. In Russia, that synthesis proceeded differently. Instead of fully rejecting the progressive paradigm, or, on the contrary, adopting it in its entirety and accepting the role of a learner, Russia seems to have internalised the Western discursive framework, but did not find a way to relate to it unproblematically. Viewed as an ambivalently positioned latecomer from within the progressivist ii paradigm, Russia never came to terms with that role, refused to leave the club altogether, but was also unable to greatly improve its relative position vis-à-vis the core (if measured by the core’s standards). Consequently, it ended up oscillating between the two poles: (1) the forceful assertions of its own greatness (retrieved in different genealogical variations from its cultural image bank), and (2) the acute realisations of its underdevelopment, which was supposed to be mitigated through an emergency modernization program that Russia was believed to be capable of, empowered by the ideology of being a velikaya derzhava. This created an uneasy tension in Russia’s self-image, as well as in its interactions with the outside world. That failed synthesis continues to shape Russia’s great power discourse until today. iii TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION NOTE Unless specified otherwise, all translations of the Russian sources are mine. The sources originally written in French were either read in Russian translations provided by the publishers and then translated by me into English or translated by me directly from French. The sources originally written in Church Slavonic were read in translation into modern Russian provided by the publisher, but the original text was also scrutinized for sematic nuances that could have been lost in translation. In transliterating Cyrillic letters, I used the ‘Passport (1997)’ standard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian) with the exception of some last names, whose spelling variant has become widespread. I also opted for transliterating the common ending of Russian first and last names “ий” by using “y” in English. iv To Y.I. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study would not have seen the light without intellectual, emotional, financial and administrative support of many people and institutions. It is impossible to adequately acknowledge them all in this brief section. I am also sure that some support came in without me fully appreciating and/or noticing that. Therefore, thank you all, and, please, forgive me if your name is not mentioned here. I specifically thank Alex Astrov, my long-standing and loyal supervisor for intellectual inspiration, for believing in me, and for helping in every way possible to make it through. Even though you do not believe in ownership, when it comes to ideas, I still feel indebted to you up to my chin. I thank Xymena Kurowska for helping me socialise into the academic profession and for distracting me in all possible ways from my thesis writing by agreeing to collaborate on new exiting projects and publications. The same goes for Ben Tallis, who I still owe a few texts. I promise, I am getting there. I thank Iver Neumann for not discouraging a young student’s naïve attempts to chip into the academic debate on Russian international politics on par with established giants like himself. And thank you for the dinners with your students in London, Iver – they were great. I thank Jan Hennings and Matteo Fumagalli for serving as members of my supervisory panel at CEU and helping position myself among and between the disciplines. I thank Einar Wigen for the most detailed feedback I have ever received and for finally pointing at the obvious, but still ingenuous thing – that international relations are inter-lingual relations before anything else. I thank Pete Duncan for the most thorough examination of my early chapters and for welcoming me in London. I thank Jens Bartelson for working with me in Lund and always being professional and intellectually stimulating. I thank Erik Ringmar for conversations about nomads and many useful hints. I thank Viacheslav Morozov for ideas and fullhearted support. I thank Stefano Guzzini, without whom I would have never made it to Sweden. I thank Kristina Stoeckl for her unparalleled expertise on Russia’s religious discourse. I thank Stephanie Ortmann for wonderful vi conversations in Saint Petersburg. I thank Evgeny Roschin and Iain Ferguson for organising the BISA workshop in October 2017 – still the best workshop I have ever attended. I also thank all the members and audience of multiple panels at the ISA, CEEISA, EISA, and GNC conferences, where the early drafts of this research were presented. Of course, I thank my colleagues and friends at CEU, Alex Akbik, Andreea Nicutar, Aron Tabor, Sasikumar Shanmuga Sundaram, Bastian Becker, Jelena Belic, Georgiana Turculet, Ewa Maczynska and many others for being in this together with me and for sharing the ups and downs of this profession. I thank my Saint Petersburg gang for making every summer holiday during these six years fun and memorable. Thank you, Lena, Oleg, Tyoma, Vova, Olya, Nastya, Andrey, and all the others. Thank you, Csaba and Nastya, for making Budapest feel like home. A very big thanks and respect goes to Alexandra Elbakyan and Libgen people, who are struggling for a great cause of making knowledge free and accessible for everyone. Without your platforms, many academic works would have been impossibly expensive and miserably weak. Thank you, Lori and Andrew for proofreading the text. Last but not least, my deepest gratitude and love goes to my partner Yulia, who shared every bit of this journey. Thank you for your love, talent, integrity, inquisitive drive, and for setting high standards, intellectual, aesthetical and moral. You keep me going like no one else. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 – Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 1.1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Russia’s ambiguous greatness ......................................................................................................... 4 1.2.1 Registering Russia’s attachment to greatness ........................................................................ 6 1.2.2 Psychological explanations ...................................................................................................... 7 1.2.3 Materialist and international systemic explanations ............................................................. 9 1.2.4 Towards a conceptual history of Russian political notions .............................................. 11 1.3 Contexts of greatness ..................................................................................................................... 14 1.3.1 Political