The Long Brief: Holiday From History [Part 3]
Great powers didn’t retire. They modernized—and they learned our gaps.
February Long Briefs continue our four-part serialization of Holiday From History. This week covers the great-power chapter of the story—then pivots into the first two “new weapons” shaping the battlefield now.
Full book: Holiday From History on Amazon
Shalom, friends.
This installment is about capability, will, and method: how revisionist powers test borders, how nuclear extortion becomes a regime survival strategy, and how the U.S. signal has drifted from clarity to churn.
Then the lens tightens: terror is not random violence—it’s staged pressure—and demography is not a statistic—it’s leverage.
Holiday From History:
The West’s Delusion of Peace and the Return of War
Part Three: Great Powers Unmasked
Chapter 12: Russia’s Return
The West imagined a “normal” post-imperial Russia in the 1990s and booked a peace dividend on that premise. It was a pleasant delusion. From Chechnya to Crimea, cyberattacks to gas blackmail, Moscow behaved like what it is: a wounded empire biding time. Ukraine ripped off the facade.
The red flag came down in 1991; the center–periphery logic stayed. Tsarist and Soviet habits—rule from the core over diverse borderlands—didn’t evaporate with a change of colors. National questions were frozen, not solved. As the West toasted an “end of history,” Russia grappled with imperial aftershocks—often with artillery.
In 1991 Chechens declared independence. Yeltsin answered with tanks in 1994. Grozny was turned into kindling; tens of thousands died. Russia withdrew in humiliation in 1996—briefly. In 1999, amid apartment bombings and a militant incursion into Dagestan, Vladimir Putin returned to war. His promise to “wipe out terrorists in the outhouse” translated into massed firepower and a flattened capital. “Chechenization” installed the Kadyrov clan to terrorize on Moscow’s behalf. The message was unmistakable: no piece of the federation would leave. Call it counterterrorism if you like. It was imperial reconquest.
Beyond formal borders, the toolkit matured. In the 1990s Moscow helped carve out Transnistria in Moldova, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia—then parked “peacekeepers” who never left. When Georgia turned West under Saakashvili, Russia tested its doctrine. In August 2008, after skirmishes in South Ossetia, Russian armor smashed across the border, bombed near Tbilisi, and pushed to Gori. Thousands of Georgians fled. Moscow then “recognized” Abkhazia and South Ossetia, installed bases, and paid in rubles. It was the first post-1991 overt border change by force in the former USSR. Western response: statements and a pause in NATO outreach. The Kremlin learned that revanchism, carefully dosed, carried a low price—especially outside NATO’s walls.
In 2015 Russia projected power beyond its near abroad for the first time since Afghanistan. Under the banner of fighting ISIS, it built Khmeimim airbase, expanded Tartus, and bombed Assad’s rebels—including Western-backed factions. It saved a client, gained a Med foothold, blooded its forces, and showcased new kit. The cost to Syrians was obscene: hospitals, markets, and apartment blocks hit as a matter of method; Aleppo starved and shelled into submission. The global headline was different: Russia was “back,” acting decisively while Washington hesitated. A regional balance shifted because Moscow moved and the West blinked.
Thread these together and see what the obvious. Chechnya reconquered a province. Georgia amputated a neighbor. Syria reasserted great-power reach. The justifications—counterterrorism, protecting “citizens,” stopping “genocide”—were pretexts. The motive was consistent: preserve a sphere, punish apostasy, gain leverage. The West compartmentalized each as a local issue. The Kremlin saw them as steps in one campaign.
Russia’s neo-imperial drive isn’t only about tanks and pipelines. It’s a story Moscow tells itself—about a civilization, a church, and a mission. Two ideas matter most: Russkiy mir (the “Russian World”) and Moscow as the “Third Rome.” Together they turn expansion into destiny.
Russkiy mir—the Russian World. After 1991, some 25 million ethnic Russians woke up outside Russia. The Kremlin decided they were still its responsibility. In 1999, a “compatriots abroad” law declared a duty to protect Russian speakers and former Soviet citizens wherever they lived. In 2007, the Russkiy Mir Foundation launched to fund language centers, schools, and networks from Riga to Almaty. On the surface, this looked like soft power. Subtext: build a constituency that sees Moscow as patron and arbiter.
By the 2010s, Russkiy mir hardened into a claim: wherever Russian language and Orthodoxy reach, Russia has a special right to “protect.” That is why “compatriots” in Estonia, Crimea, or Donbas are framed not as citizens of those states but as members of a civilizational community under Moscow’s care. The term rossiyskiy (civic, multiethnic) serves at home; russkiy (ethno-cultural) serves abroad. The regime toggles between them as needed—one nation for minorities inside, an ethnic crusade outside.
The religious counterpart completes the picture. Since the 16th century, Russian clerics have preached: “Two Romes have fallen; the third stands; there will be no fourth.” Moscow, heir to Byzantium, is the last bastion of true Orthodoxy—charged to protect the faith and the peoples of Holy Rus. Patriarch Kirill has revived this openly, in lockstep with the state. Church and Kremlin trade favors: power and money for pulpits and legitimacy. The myth turns Kyiv from a neighbor into a cradle; Crimea from a peninsula into a baptismal font. If Kyiv is the mother of Rus and Chersonesus the site of Prince Vladimir’s baptism, then “reunifying” these places reads as redemption, not conquest.
The most effective tool this ideology has used has been passportization. Moscow mass-issued Russian passports in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the 2000s, then claimed a duty to defend its “citizens” in 2008. It did the same in Donbas after 2014, accelerating in 2019 by decree; by 2022 hundreds of thousands had Russian papers. Crimea’s residents were handed passports wholesale. Diaspora policy, funded through ministries and church networks, stitched an extraterritorial Russian constituency across the post-Soviet space. Media and schools did the rest.
At home, state television and the security services weave a continuous story: baptism at Kyiv, empire, the Great Patriotic War, and today’s struggle against a decadent West and its “color revolutions.” Patriarch Kirill blesses the war as moral resistance—at one point even casting it as a stand against “gay parades.” The fusion is seamless: Orthodoxy becomes raison d’état; patriotism becomes liturgy.
Through this lens, Crimea in 2014 was not theft; it was the “gathering of Russian lands.” Donbas was not subversion; it was protection of compatriots. The 2022 invasion was pitched as the reunification of Holy Rus and defense of Orthodoxy against a NATO-run “Nazi” regime. To Western ears, this sounds deranged. To audiences primed by grievance and catechism, it sounds like duty.
Strip the vestments and you see imperialism. Leave them on and you see a mission. That’s the point. The Kremlin’s ideology turns neighbors into wards and conquest into sacrament—so that when Moscow redraws borders, it does so with a crucifix in one hand and a passport in the other.
