Over centuries, Russia struggled to define its place between Europe (or the West) and Asia. After the failed post-Cold War experience of trying to integrate with the West, it seems to have found a balance reflecting its historical legacy, geography, and the realities of the changing world.

Russia’s huge territory, spanning more than 17 million square kilometers, is perhaps the nation’s most distinctive feature. The vast expanses are believed to have influenced Russians’ political and strategic thinking and mentality in general. However, it is not simply the sheer size of the country that matters: Russia’s presence in two parts of the world—Europe and Asia—is undoubtedly a crucial factor that has determined the country’s position in world affairs and its self-image.

Russia’s vast geography as a Eurasian power has shaped its political and strategic thinking for centuries.

The European-Asian dichotomy became relevant even before Russia began to expand eastward with its explorers and warriors crossing the Urals mountains in the 16th century, which were seen as Europe’s eastern geographical border. At that time, for Europeans, Europe and Asia were not just geographical areas: “Europe” was synonymous with culture, civilization, and progress, while  “Asia”, however artificial this concept might be, served as the defining Other for the Europeans. According to Peter Bugge, a Danish researcher of Eastern Europe,

The term “Asiatic” was mobilized with pronounced negative connotations from around 1500 in connection with Muscovite Russia, which, by the Poles, was described as barbarian and Asiatic and a threat to Christian Europe.

In the 19^th century, French historians depicted Russians as “brutish Asiatics and a mortal threat to civilized Europe.” During World War II, Nazi propaganda used the “Asiatic” argument to justify the extermination of Russians, portraying them as being innately barbaric. Ironically, the same “Asiatic” rhetoric was echoed by Russia’s allies at the time with the former US President Hoover referring to Russians in a memo as “Asiatics” who “would never honor any treaties signed.”

The rhetoric changed, however, whenever Europe faced threats from within its western part: be that the revolutionary movements of 1848 that challenged the international order, or the First World War in which Germans were labeled “Huns”, representing an unruly and chaotic threat from beyond the civilized world.

In fact, Russia is not the only country to have been excluded from the Western perspective of Europe. Turkey comes to mind as a prime example, but it is also worth mentioning the phrase “Africa begins at the Pyrenees”, ascribed to Dominique Dufour de Pradt, the French ambassador in Spain in the early 19^th century. What is significant is the perception of Europe as a dynamic entity with fluctuating boundaries, which can be expanded if certain criteria set by Europe are met — this perception predates the formal criteria for membership in the European Union by centuries.

That said, perceiving Europe as the synonym for progress was something natural for Russia as well. Its first large-scale attempt at modernization in the early 18^th century (Peter the Great’s reforms) was aimed at making Russia a great European power, even though by that time the country already bordered China its easternmost point was across the strait from Alaska.

Russia’s first massive encounter with Asia – the Mongol invasion of the 13^th century – was a traumatic experience that remained strongly embedded in the historical memory. Russia’s Asian possessions were seen as a resource base and a military frontier through much of the centuries to follow, with the country’s demographic, cultural, and industrial core remaining firmly in the European part.

Russia’s Asian territories served as a resource base and military frontier, while its cultural, demographic, and industrial core remained European.

For the Russian intellectual class, the question “Are we European enough – and should we be?”  shaped much of the political and philosophical discourse of the 19^th century, giving rise to two schools of thought, the Eurocentric Westerners and the nationalist Slavophiles. Meanwhile Russia as a state continued to be an important element in the balance of power in Europe and reinforced its position in Asia through its unique geographical location. Debates on Russia’s European or Asian identity continue in the country and beyond up to this day, but a completely new answer was given in 1917.

Finding a global identity  

Russian Marxism, which gave rise to the political practice of Bolshevism, is widely seen as a homegrown school of thought. Indeed, the Russian context greatly influenced the political teaching imported from the West, but it should be remembered that Russia’s first Marxists adopted a political doctrine that they believed to be the most progressive, capable of taking the country from backwardness to modernity.

In this sense, they were absolute Westerners. For Vladimir Lenin and his followers, Communism as a political theory represented the great equalizer, allowing developing countries, including Russia, to pursue shared goals with more developed nations. But, contrary to Lenin’s expectations, a socialist revolution never took place in the core of the capitalist system, in Western Europe and North America. Still, the events in Russia resulted in a major shift in global politics.

The Cold War, with its bipolar competition, saw the emergence of the “two worlds”: centered around, respectively, the United States and the Soviet Union. The developing countries, or “the Third World”, had at least two options to follow, with their pros and cons. The Soviet experiment led Russia to impressive breakthroughs in education, science, technology, and industry, creating a viable alternative path for development that was not tied to colonialism or neo-colonial practices. Russia’s role was now not European or Asian, but global.

The Soviet Union positioned Russia as a global power, offering an alternative development path free from colonial practices.

Following the collapse of the USSR, Russian elites expected swift integration with the West. For a new Russia grappling with internal challenges, engagement with developing nations was not a priority. However, integration with the West never materialized. While Moscow believed the Cold War to be over thanks to shared efforts and goodwill between the two former rivals, the West viewed itself as the sole victor and was unwilling to treat the loser as an equal partner.

It was not until the late 2000s that Russia began re-establishing ties with Asian, African, and Latin American countries, which had once been important partners during the Soviet era. Importantly, many of the former Third World were gaining more and more agency on the international stage, becoming new centers of power.

Pivot to the East

Despite bitter misunderstandings, Russia’s economic and political ties with Europe (now embodied by the European Union) remained strong throughout the first decade of the 21^st century. However, as the center of the world economy began to gravitate toward Asia, it became clear that the nation’s relations with the Asian countries needed to be reinvigorated. The groundwork had begun to be done during Vladimir Putin’s first presidential term with the 2001 Russia-China friendship pact serving as the seminal document outlining the two countries’ strategic partnership.

In 2011-12, the Russian leadership and scholars began to talk about a “pivot to the East”, meaning more focus on relations with Russia’s Asian partners. Originally, the “pivot to the East” was centered on China, aimed at “catching the Chinese wind in the sails of our economy,” as Russian President Vladimir Putin put it in his 2012 article “Russia and the Changing World.” In 2012, the Valdai Club released a report titled “Toward the Great Ocean or the New Globalization of Russia,” arguing for a more active role for Russia in Asia:

Russia […] is being held back by the backwardness of its infrastructure, an underdeveloped economy, and the demographic situation, but even more so by its obsolete Euro-centric foreign trade and economic mentality.

The report was one of the first attempts to summarize Russia’s position in Asia and to explore what opportunities it could gain by focusing more on the eastern direction. But, despite this intellectual effort and the government initiatives, the pivot to the East was initially perceived as merely an option, not a necessity. “There is a widespread belief that Russia’s only option, in light of its weakness in the Far East of the country, lies in closer ties with the West”, the report read.

Russia’s pivot to the East marked a strategic shift, redefining itself as the center of the Eurasian supercontinent, moving beyond the Europe-Asia dichotomy.

This belief was shaken in 2014 when the deterioration of relations with the West appeared to have reached a peak. And the war with the West in all but name, which started in 2022, finally destroyed it. By that time, a shift in the mindset of the Russian elites had begun to take place. According to Bruno Maçães, former Secretary of State for European Affairs in Portugal,

Traditionally, Russian elites tended to see their task as that of bringing about a gradual but complete integration with a more advanced Europe. That vision is now being replaced by a new self-image: as the center and core of the Eurasian supercontinent.

Indeed, Russia began to see itself as part of Eurasia, with Western Europe only a part of the vast interconnected continent. This may indicate a departure from the centuries-long Europe/Asia dichotomy, which today deals less and less with the issue of progress and development.

The World Majority

The division of the world into the Global North and the Global South replaced the Cold War-era notions of the “First”, “Second”, and “Third” worlds. The “Second World” ceased to exist. Some of its countries – the former Eastern European allies of the USSR and some former Soviet republics – politically and militarily aligned themselves with the West and also became some of the driving forces within the western bloc against more engagement with Russia.

Two events further set the stage for a potential confrontation between Russia and the West. The 2008 NATO Bucharest summit declaration stated that two former Soviet republics, Ukraine and Georgia, “will become members of NATO.” The 2013 political crisis in Ukraine demonstrated that the European Union would at any cost promote its agenda in a politically divided country, which is strategically important for Russia. The two main western institutions were now seen as completely unwilling to accommodate Russia’s interests. As a result, a conflict was inevitable.

The hot stage of the conflict in Ukraine, which began in 2022, led to an unprecedented rupture of ties between Russia and the West, most notably the European Union. Measures aimed at crippling Russia’s economy included, apart from the barrage of sanctions, halting the imports of Russian energy resources despite causing significant damage to Europe’s own industry. But it was not only about the economy: a special set of measures – from limiting access to western goods and services, including payment systems, to blanket travel bans to certain EU countries – targeted the general population in a bid to foster anti-government resentment. In reality, it only fueled anti-Western sentiment, even in those quarters of society, where it had not existed before.

Western sanctions have deepened Russia’s ties with the Global South, forming the ‘World Majority.

The West expected the rest of the world to jump on the bandwagon. However, an overwhelming majority of the world’s countries representing the majority of the world’s population refused to sever trade and political ties with Russia, not to mention joining the western effort to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Moscow over the conflict in Ukraine.

This is how the term “World Majority”, actively used in the Russian foreign policy discourse today, came into existence. And Russia began to increasingly identify itself with the World Majority where Asia plays a crucial role, which is in a sense ends its centuries-long soul-searching and trying to fit into the framework of the western civilization.

Interestingly, western analysts continue to maintain their belief that alignment with the US-led West is the only viable option for non-Western countries if they want to pursue a path of development and security. Discussing a post-conflict Ukraine, Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote about the prospect of Russia having “a post-Putin leadership interested in reintegrating the country into the West.”

The comment by the eminent scholar misses two important points. First, what passed for integration with the West in the pre-Putin times is widely seen as a disaster in Russia, both by the country’s elites and the general population. Second, Russia’s engagement with the World Majority has no alternative due to objective reasons and is not dependent on leadership. Nevertheless, Russia has never closed the door to engagement with the West based on mutual respect and recognition of each other’s interests. It remains to be seen whether the West is prepared for this type of interaction.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. They do not represent the views, beliefs, or policies of the Stratheia.