Russianness in the Post-Soviet Block

This year, I decided to study the Russian Language. I have always been, at the very least, marginally interested in Russian society and Russian culture, I find the language to be beautiful sounding, and I found its features to be sufficiently complex (and interesting). But one of the reasons I decided to study Russian was because of how polarizing the language is in large parts of the Earth today. The Russian Language is polarizing in North America because of the aftereffects of the Cold War, and because of recent allegations of Russian collusion in North American elections; the Russian Language is polarizing in Western Europe because of the influence of Russian oil and of Russian oligarchs in places like London or Berlin, and the Russian Language is polarizing in Eastern Europe because of the lasting legacy of Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe, and most recently because of the annexation of the Crimean Penninsula in 2014.

The history of Crimea is long and complex. The Penninsula has exchanged hands between Greeks, Italians, Tartars (Turkic nomads), and Slavs (of Russian and of Ukrainian stock) countless times throughout history. The Russian empire incorporated Crimea after a war with the Turkish Ottoman Empire, after which the demographics of the peninsula would shift to Russian after decades of resettlement. The Russian Black Sea fleet was based out of Crimea, and Crimea became a place as Russian as any other part of Russia. Then, things changed, when under Soviet control the Crimean Penninsula was given to the Ukrainian SSR as a gift to celebrate 400 years of Ukrainian incorporation within Russia; this move was intended to be purely ceremonial and no one foresaw that in a few short decades the Soviet Union would collapse and Crimea would join a freshly independent Ukraine.

Despite joining Ukraine, Crimea and the rest of Eastern Ukraine remains predominately Russian. Russian is spoken as the native language of the vast majority of Crimeans and Eastern Ukrainians, therefore many of them choose to identify with the nationality tied to their language rather than the nationality tied to their nation. This is what essentially gave Vladimir Putin the confidence to annex the Crimean Penninsula, and to start a civil war between East and West within Ukraine, because he knew that the Crimean people wouldn't resist Russian expansion into their country.

Anecdotally speaking, I have more evidence to back this up. Yulia Belopolsky, my Russian professor, is from Crimea and affectionally reflects upon the annexation of Crimea as the time when Crimea "returned to Russia." Additionally, my Russian history Professor last year reflected on his friends' experience in 2014 when they were visiting Kazakhstan and heard people marching through the streets yelling, "Crimea is ours!" as the news spread that Russia had annexed Crimea. This offers some interesting insight as to how the post-soviet block views itself in relation to Russia. A lot of people, it would seem, in post-soviet countries across Eurasia still feel a close affinity to Russian culture and to the Russian language. People still identify with their former Russianness despite having been politically isolated from Russia for decades now, demonstrating the lasting impact language has on how one views themselves. Nationality has a very close relationship with language, and one is likely to identify with the people who are like them and share their language before they group themselves with another group of people with whom they might share a nation but not a language.