Conclusion

These examples show just how flexible Moscow can be tactically in its use of Muslims, at home and abroad and they do not even get into the long issue of Russian ties to Turkey’s Kurds that are a story in themselves and date back over a century.[i]  But the continuation of these gambits and tactics in service of a broader strategy to advance Russian interests, even in a maelstrom like Syria shows the continuity of the cooptation tactic when applied to Islamic peoples through Tsarist, Soviet, and now Putinist Russia.  These gambits reflect not just an essential tactical continuity and flexibility but also the continuing imperial mindset of divide and rule.  Many analysts suggested that in the wake of the Soviet collapse that Russia was no longer an empire or that it is now suffering “phantom pains” over the supposed loss of an empire.  Perhaps that is the case, but from its continuing behavior and overt embrace of the imperial legacy Putin’s Russia appears not to have gotten that message or if it did it intends to keep disregarding it even if that means war as is now the case.  Thus Moscow continues to seek to govern and be seen  by others as not just a great power but as an empire.  And empire, as revealed, inter alia, in the persistence of imperial tactics of elite cooptation, ultimately means war. Already in 2004 Rieber wrote a fitting epitaph underscoring the essential link between empire and war as revealed here.

If imperial boundaries have no intrinsic limitations and are solely established by force, then they are bound to be heavily and persistently contested.  The universal claims of empires, whatever the practical constraints may be in carrying them out, cannot by their very nature be accepted as legitimate either by the people they conquer or their rivals for the contested space.  There can be no community of empires as there is a community of nation states.  All empires share a common problem of legitimizing boundaries.  As perceived through the prism of the community of nations imperial frontiers appear problematic because they are sustained by force, even though they might have been recognized from time to time by solemn treaties.[ii]

 Moscow’s ingrained resort to this tactic in all of its guises and its overall imperil strategy in Eurasia are not harbingers, then, of a newly stabilized and legitimate Russian empire based on elite integration as was true previously.  Rather it is a call to arms and a landmine under the continuity of the very Russian state it seeks to preserve and extend.