Putin's talk of soldiers' feet puts the lie to Russian nationalist myths

The Hill

11 hours ago

Vladimir Putin recently admitted that Russia is an artificial construct created by violence. This is a bombshell, putting to the lie Russian propaganda's longstanding claim that some spiritual entity called Russia has existed since time immemorial.
In fact, Putin reduced Russia to its soldiers' feet — hardly an elevated comparison.
In his address to the plenary session of the Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 20, Putin made the following astounding, and deeply subversive, claim: 'wherever the foot of a Russian soldier steps is ours.' Whereas we apply the word 'Russian' to both the ethnic designation (russkii) and the political designation (rossiiskii), Russians distinguish between the two. Significantly, Putin specifically referred to the ethnically Russian russkii soldier.
In effect if not in intent, Putin reduced Russia (the political entity) to the lands conquered by ethnically russkii soldiers, thereby giving the lie to the claim that Russia is a 'federation' of happily coexisting nations, the largest of which happens to be russkii. This is an admission both of Russia's being (and always having been) an empire, and of the subordinate status of its non-Russian nations, brought into the imperial fold by soldiers — that is, by violence.
Ukrainians, Poles, Finns and scores of other nations know this quite well, and it shouldn't surprise us that they are allergic to the presence of the feet of Mother Russia's children on their lands. Who can blame them for wanting to put as many yards as possible between them and those imperialist Russian feet?
None of this is new or surprising to such leading Sovietologists as Paul Goble, who have spent decades reminding policymakers that the non-Russians of the former Soviet Union are strategically important to the West, because they are the only thing standing between Russia as an expanding empire and the rest of the world. These states possess the wherewithal to maintain Russia as a more or less stable object of containment.
But such ruminations presuppose that Russia exists, whereas Putin, its putative head, unwittingly subverted and reduced it to an artifice of history. The logic is simple.
If Russia is a function of soldiers' feet and where they happen to land, then it's neither imagined by lofty-minded intellectuals determined to reach out to the oppressed masses nor primordially present as a self-identifying agent of history since the dawn of time. And Russia is certainly not the Third Rome or God's gift to humanity. Rather, it's just a bunch of real estate cobbled together by its soldiers' feet. But if so, then the Russia that exists today or that existed in the past is an arbitrary collection of dirt.
Because Muscovite rulers sent the feet in one direction and not another, the resultant 'our' territory is merely the product of the serendipitous whims of autocrats. Had its rulers not embarked on expansion and let the feet stay at home, Russia might have been as tiny as the Kremlin.
This matters because Russian political culture insists, and has insisted, that Russia is a quasi-mystical entity enjoined by the divine to save the world. That culture also insists that Russia was already present in the guise of the state known as Kyivan Rus some 1,000 years ago. Regardless of whether that state was or was not Ukrainian or proto-Ukrainian, it obviously follows from Putin's own claims that it definitely wasn't Russian. How could it be, since russkii soldiers and their land-grabbing feet did not exist in the city called Kyiv a millennium ago? They may have existed in the town called Moskva in the marshy wooded areas north of Kyiv, but that's hardly a grand and glorious way to initiate a divinely ordained state.
So where does Putin's demolition of Russia leave Russians and their feet? Pretty much nowhere. Russia is just a bunch of stuff randomly acquired over the years, Russians are reduced to an accidental agglomeration of folks — akin to the commuters at Grand Central Station during rush hour. Their soldiers' feet are transformed into mere physical appendages without any rooting in a nation or state.
This bodes ill for Putin. If Russia doesn't really exist as a nation, then he becomes little more than a puppet at the mercy of historical forces — and his imperial ambitions are doomed to fail. After all, if he can only ultimately rely on feet, he won't get very far.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as 'Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires' and 'Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.'