Novorossiya!
In April, in a four-hour call-in show televised across Russia, Vladimir Putin assigned the name New Russia—Novorossiya—to the lands in Southeastern Ukraine he claimed were and are historically part of Russia. The term Novorossiya had been used only once before in history, during the three decades from the late 18th to the early 19th centuries, to describe the territories north of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov that Catherine the Great had wrested from the Ottoman Turks. What’s more, Putin said, the lands of his Novorossiya—Kharkov, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolaev, and Odessa—had never been part of Ukraine. The contention is nonsensical. There had never been an officially designated piece of territory called Ukraine before the Leninist regime in Moscow created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The USSR came into being in 1922 with four constituent sub-states, the Ukrainian SSR being one of them.
So Putin’s “New Russia” is, to put it mildly, historically dubious, a work of convenient fiction—and a cover for his assault on Ukraine, featuring the annexation of Crimea and the proxy war in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Yet Putin has done the world a favor by bringing the word Novorossiya back into circulation. Novorossiya is the perfect word to describe the messianic, autocratic, and increasingly dangerous regime Putin has been engineering over the past three years, following his return to the presidency of Russia after a four-year gap in which his aide Dmitry Medvedev warmed the chair.
The annexation of Crimea and Russia’s military proxy intervention in Ukraine should be considered an epiphenomenon of Russian politics. Putin has been changing his regime from a “softer,” largely nonideological, corrupt “electoral authoritarianism” to a highly personalistic, far more repressive, and ideologically inspired dictatorship. The annexation of Crimea was a portent of “a new Russian revolution from above,” according to the popular website Gazeta.ru.
“The huge iceberg Russia, frozen by the Putin regime, cracked after the events in Crimea; it has split from the European world, and sailed off into the unknown,” wrote the Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin in a recent essay in the New York Review of Books. “No one knows what will happen to the country now, into which seas or swamps it will drift.” The website Slon.ru declared: “Russia is no longer Europe…but another, peculiar civilization.”
Alexander Dugin, one of the organizers of Russia’s National Bolshevik Party, and perhaps Russia’s most prominent advocate of what might be called national-imperial totalitarian socialism, was thrilled by the annexation of Crimea; he sees it as the onset of a “real evolution,” the “end of liberalism and the beginning of patriotism,” and as “Putin’s challenge to the unipolar world, dominated by all the components of the world [that are] evil.”
Why did Putin open this Pandora’s box?