Battle Over Russianness: What It Means to Be Russkii in Wartime Russia

• In Event: Non-Liberation, or "The Tradition of All the Dead Generations Weighs Like a Nightmare on the Brain of the Living"

Abstract

Famously, the English word “Russian” refers to two different concepts in the Russian language–russkii and rossiiskii. Whereas the latter points to a civic Russian identity, the former has a more complicated array of meanings. Russkii can mean the Russian ethnicity, but it can also mean the language, culture, and communal identity that makes it possible for people inside and outside the RF to call themselves Russian Ukrainian, Russian Georgian, or simply Russian (russkiie) regardless of their ethnicity or citizenship. This stretchy concept of Russianness (russkost’) has become one of the commonsense justifications for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “Russians” in Ukraine required protection; “Russians” in Ukraine wanted to re-join their homeland; Ukrainians were “Russian”–they just forgot about it, and the invasion would eventually knock them back to reality. However, behind the commonsensical concept of russkost’, there is very little common sense. Actors with the highest stakes in the invasion, Russian pro-war national-patriots, subscribe to radically different definitions of russkost’– ethnic, imperial, or Soviet-style internationalist–and regularly clash with each other over the question of who deserves to be included in it. Meanwhile, liberal media commentators, who used to default to rossiiskii as the term for Russia’s political community, have recently begun to substitute it with russkii, especially in reference to the military and the war. More emotionally charged than ever, the term russkii remains ambiguous and explosive. Critically rethinking its meaning is one of the most important tasks that Russian citizens will face in the years to come.

Author

• Alina Parker, U of Massachusetts Amherst