Rahr thus called for “the restoration of our common home—Russia, as it was conceived by St. Vladimir, as it had emerged through the efforts of Piotr Stolypin by 1914, as we want to leave it to our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.” It followed that not all the post-Soviet states had an equal claim to sovereignty: while the independence of Finland and Poland would need to be “accepted as irreversible and natural,” this was not the case for Ukraine and Belarus, which were supposed to become part of one “fraternal family, by mutual agreement, of course.” Either a particular republic grants the Russian part of the population exactly the same rights as its so-called “indigenous” nationality, in which case Russia may refuse to revise the borders and will consider this republic as an equal brother, or the republic insists on unjustified privileges of the “indigenous” nation and treats Russians and Russian citizens as disenfranchised foreigners, in which case Russia will be obliged to be guided by other criteria in its relations with this republic, up to and including raising the question of transferring territories predominantly inhabited by Russians to the Russian Federation. To Rahr, as to other Russian nationalists, it was an intolerable state of affairs that Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians—to him, part of one Russian nation—were no longer part of the same state, while the emergence of new nation-states from the Baltics to Kazakhstan had left millions of ethnic Russian minorities outside the borders of the Russian state.
Author: January 21, 2026
Published at: 2026-01-21 00:00:00
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