As the year unfolds and we approach the beginning of the fifth year of the Russo-Ukrainian War, with hundreds of thousands now killed or wounded, no end is in sight. The motivation for this struggle has been rooted in Russian history for centuries. Primarily, the current crisis derives from an amalgamation of the traditional Russian myth of Moscow being the Third Rome and the Marxist quest for world domination.
Moscow III Rome has its origins in late medieval history. After the fall of Rome to the barbarians in 476 and the fall of Constantinople, the Second Rome, to the Turks in 1453, the Muscovite state laid claim to a pseudo-ideology claiming to be the third and final Rome, endowed with the authority and right to rule over other peoples. This fallacy prevailed throughout the course of the Muscovite, and later the Russian, imperial mindset.
The Muscovites soon began using the term Tsar for their ruler, it being a Russian corruption of the Latin word, Caesar. The Tsar assumed the right to wear imperial regalia and the head of the church was designated the Patriarch of Moscow, a title that was not recognized by the five ecumenical patriarchs of the Orthodox Church. The myth has persisted in the Russian mindset for centuries.
In 1917, with the coming to power of V. I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the religious trappings of the myth were shoved aside, and the imperialist dreams were secularized, bringing forth a new and more brutal emanation in the form of communism. The drive for dominion became stronger than ever in its most forceful proponent, J. V. Stalin.
Ironically, the two most successful proponents of advancing the myth of Moscow III Rome, were not Russian themselves. The Empress Catherine II, the so-called “Great,” who ruled from 1762 to 1796, was born a German princess, Sofia of Anhalt-Zerbst. She came to Russia by marriage to the future Tsar Peter III, whom she had killed, at the age of 34, after only six months on the throne, in order for her to take over the throne herself, despite the existence of her son, who ultimately became Emperor after her death in 1796.
Catherine used her power to advance Russia’s presence in the West through the partitioning of Poland, taking the eastern portion for herself, the expulsion of the Khans from the Crimean peninsula, thereby advancing Russia’s goal of achieving a warm water port on the Black Sea.
The German Catherine’s imperial advances were far surpassed by the other non-Russian, Joseph Stalin, who was born a Georgian peasant in Tbilisi, Georgia. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin consolidated his power over his rival, Leon Trotsky, and ruled the Soviet Union, the successor state of the Russian Empire, for 29 years, until his death in 1953.
Stalin advanced the goals of Moscow III Rome to their greatest extent. After brutally consolidating his grasp of power through the purges of the 1930s, in 1939 he allied with Hitler to partition Poland once again. That union lasted for two years, until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, thereby forcing Stalin to look to the capitalist countries of the West to aid in repulsing the German advance.
Four years later, with Hitler’s impending defeat looming ahead, Stalin hosted the conference at Yalta in 1945, with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, to plan the post-war world. For Stalin, the result of Yalta was his control over Eastern and Central Europe, an arrangement that would endure until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Now we have Putin carrying the imperial baton into Ukraine, after his successful seizure of Crimea in 2014, but this time producing the first land war in Europe since the end of World War II in 1945. The present conflict may be described in many ways, but essentially, it is the modern, 21st century, version of Moscow III Rome. Imperialism does not die easily.
