What was “New Russia,” and why did President Putin revive this concept?
Several years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, populist Russian politicians discovered that claiming the Crimea as a Russian territory was an easy way to score points with a nationalistic audience.
They also spoke ominously about the need to protect Russians and Russian-speakers living in the other former Soviet republics, especially in the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Central Asia. Putin's administration inherited this populist rhetoric, but also framed it with explicit references to the empire of the tsars—and acted on it.President Putin first reintroduced the tsarist concept of New Russia (Novorossiia) into modern Russian political discourse during his televised question-and-answer session on April 17, 2014. This town hall-style show was broadcast nationally more than a month after the Crimea's annexation, just as the first signs of “separatist insurgency" appeared in the Donbas. The timing was significant, as the Russian leader was trying to link the territory already seized to the regions where trouble was about to begin. He announced that the six provinces comprising all of southeastern Ukraine were “New Russia," which “had not been part of Ukraine in tsarist times" before the Soviet government transferred these lands to Ukraine in the 1920s, “God knows why."2
Putin's sweeping statement ignored the fact that the Russian Empire did not have an administrative unit named “Ukraine”; what is now the Ukrainian heartland was officially known as “Little Russia." In other words, if an imperial province was called “New Russia," it does not follow that it had been populated by Russians or that the Russian state today should have any special relation to it. In fact, there existed two “New Russias," but with different borders: one in 1764-1802 and another in 1822-1874, but neither included the major city of Kharkiv, which Putin included on his list.
Created on the southern steppes recently reclaimed from the Ottomans, these provinces were sparsely populated at first. The tsarist government invited Italian, Greek, Bulgarian, Mennonite, and other foreign settlers to come there, but by the time of the 1897 census, Ukrainian peasants constituted a majority in every province that had been parceled out from the former New Russia, even in Taurida province, which at the time included the Crimea. “New Russia" was thus not really “Russian" from the get-go.The pro-Russian militants in the Donbas took their cue from the Kremlin. They created a New Russia political party, an army of New Russia, and an official flag of New Russia; all this happened even before the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic formally established the union state of New Russia, into which they hoped to bring six more Ukrainian provinces. The changing terminology reveals an important ideological shift among local separatists and Russian volunteers in the Donbas. At first they operated within the old Soviet paradigm by creating the two “people's republics" and proclaiming the Union of People's Republics. But that sounded too much like a restoration of the Soviet Union. Putin offered them a different solution: thinking in terms of the Russian Empire.
It was also an important ideological transition for Putin's Russia. The protection of ethnic Russians had exhausted its potential as a political tool with the absorption of the Crimea. Ukraine's Russian-speaking population proved an elusive constituency lacking a common political identity. Kyiv residents remain mostly Russophone, for example, but they vote overwhelmingly for proUkrainian parties. Soldiers and volunteers on the Ukrainian side speak mostly Russian, just as their opponents do. A political project harking back to the Russian Empire thus appeared as the next logical step for the Putin administration. But the resurrection of the imperial past also meant delegitimizing Ukrainian nationhood and increasing the likelihood of war.