Breadth without Depth

Russia’s shallow expansion and why its disintegration will unleash a new age of discovery.

Russia is often compared to the European colonial empires. Its expansion and imperialism are frequently juxtaposed with Western colonialism in an attempt to draw parallels and explain the nature of Russian empire-building.

Yet a closer look reveals that Russian and Western styles of expansion differ profoundly – indeed, in some respects they are almost antithetical. Western colonialism can best be described as intensive. That single adjective captures its defining logic. Russian colonialism, by contrast, has been extensive.

When Europeans conquered a territory, they did not merely subjugate its population. First and foremost, they focused on developing the area itself. They built roads, schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure. They introduced new technologies and medical practices. They took great care to establish bureaucracy, institutions, and systems of law and order. In short, they developed their colonies intensively.

But Western colonialism went even deeper than material development. Europeans were curious. They showed a genuine interest in the cultures, customs, and histories of the peoples they ruled. Wherever Europeans arrived, extensive historical, archaeological, and ethnographic research followed. Excavations were conducted, chronicles were compiled, languages were studied, and entire civilizational pasts were documented.

Take Egypt as an example. The very fact that we know as much as we do about the great civilization of ancient Egypt is due largely to British rule. In Cairo stands the Egyptian Museum – an extraordinary institution with vast collections dedicated to Egypt’s ancient history and one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions. Who built it? The British.

Or consider India. Many Indians, animated by a familiar Third Worldist ressentiment, accuse the British of having stolen their historical treasures. Yet the uncomfortable truth is that without British colonialism, much of this heritage would never have been systematically discovered, catalogued, or preserved in the first place. Without the British, Indians themselves would not know their own history in anything like the detail they do today.

Russian colonialism, however, followed an entirely different logic. It was the opposite of Western intensive development. Russian expansion was extensive. Russians expanded their empire outward, in sheer width, without any serious concern for developing the territories they conquered. Unsurprisingly, they showed little interest in the cultures, customs, or histories of the peoples they subjugated. Their method was simple: subjugate and plunder the land, kill and rape its inhabitants along the way, establish a military garrison, and move on.

This also explains why Russia was able to expand so rapidly and over such vast distances. Intensive development requires time. If you care about building institutions, infrastructure, and social order, you must stop somewhere and remain there for a while. There is no alternative – and that inevitably slows imperial advance.

Because Russians never felt burdened by the task of developing conquered territories, they never had to stop. Unencumbered by development, investment, or care, they pushed forward relentlessly. The result was the conquest of nearly all of northern Eurasia – and even, for a time, lands beyond the Bering Strait in Alaska – in a remarkably short historical span.

At the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, Muscovy-Russia set out to conquer Siberia for one reason alone: fur. The sole objective was to hunt fur-bearing animals, extract their pelts, and sell them to Europe, where fur commanded high prices at the time. The logic was purely extractive. And this pattern has not changed in the slightest. In the past, Russians enriched themselves by extracting fur from Siberia; today, they extract Siberian oil and gas, and diamonds from Yakutia. Meanwhile, these resource-rich regions remain impoverished at an almost African level – lacking proper roads, basic infrastructure, or even indoor plumbing in many places.

The same logic is visible today in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which is marked by the systematic destruction of entire towns and villages. This is how Russia advances. Settlements are carpet-bombed into oblivion, reduced to rubble, and only then entered by Russian troops. The resulting wasteland is presented not merely as a military success, but brazenly as a “liberation”.

Many Western observers have noted that Russia appears to be failing in Ukraine precisely because it captures only destroyed settlements. News reports of Russian advances are often accompanied by commentary pointing out that these “victories” are hollow: Russia takes empty, ruined towns. What, then, can it do with them? How are they to be administered? How can they be rebuilt or developed? From this line of reasoning follows a broader assumption – that Russia is achieving nothing of value in this war and will therefore eventually be forced to give up.

A striking illustration of this misunderstanding occurred last year, during celebrations marking the eightieth anniversary of the Soviet victory in the Second World War. The Russian pop singer Valeriya performed the old Soviet patriotic song Where the Motherland Begins on the ruins of a Ukrainian city – ruins created by her own countrymen, in a war she herself was glorifying through that performance.

For many in the West, this scene was genuinely shocking. How could anyone rejoice amid the destruction of a town? How could the conquest of a leveled city be celebrated as a victory? How could one sing a patriotic song against a backdrop of ruins? This is utterly alien to the Western mindset.

Yet this is precisely where the core misconception lies. Western observers instinctively project their own way of thinking onto the Russian psyche, assuming that Russians evaluate success in the same way they do. This is a grave mistake. For a Westerner, occupying a destroyed and empty landscape is not a marker of success. For Russians, however, it very much is.

Where Europeans measure success by cultivation and intensive development, Russians measure it by purely by expansion. For them, gaining territory – regardless of its condition – is a success in and of itself. Territorial enlargement alone is what brings satisfaction. Indeed, for the Russian psyche, expansion in sheer width is the primary, even the quintessential, metric of success.

This also explains why Russians would produce a patriotic music video celebrating military victory amid ruins. What matters is not what they have taken, but that they have taken it. The condition of the territory is irrelevant. Quantity matters; quality does not. Pure enlargement outweighs any notion of intensive development or long-term cultivation. This logic is unfathomable to the Western mind – but it is a central feature of the Russian psyche.

This way of thinking reminds me strongly of how history was taught in Turkey – or, more precisely, of what I absorbed and instinctively felt from the way it was taught. Whenever the greatness or success of a Turkic state was discussed, especially that of the Ottoman Empire, my attention was drawn almost automatically to the map. How large was the state at that moment? How much territory did it control?

When the reign of a particular sultan was evaluated, the focus lay almost exclusively on the battles he had won and the lands he had conquered. What mattered – both to me instinctively and as it was conveyed through the school curriculum – was the degree to which the empire’s territory expanded during his reign, or over a given century. The metric of success, the measure of greatness in my mind, and very likely in the minds of my classmates as well, was territorial extent. Size on the map equaled greatness. Turks and Russians are strikingly similar in this regard, as in many others – and here, once again, that similarity becomes apparent.

Only later did I come to realize that territorial expansion is not the true measure of greatness. Success in a given historical period is not defined by battles won or lands conquered. The real measure of greatness lies elsewhere: in scientific discovery, cultural achievement – painting, music, architecture – in great literature, philosophy, and intellectual depth. In other words, greatness is not a matter of width on a map, but of depth and substance brought to the territory one inhabits.

Seen from this perspective, the Ottoman Empire was never truly great – not even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when it reached its greatest territorial extent. By contrast, during those very centuries, the German people lived in a highly fragmented political landscape and could boast no vast empire of their own. Yet they were – and remain – great. It was Germany, and by extension Europe, that embodied true greatness, not the Ottoman Empire, even as the latter exerted immense military pressure on Europe and expanded westward toward the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire.

This difference in attitudes is visible not only when comparing modern European colonial empires with Russian imperial expansion. It can already be observed deep in the Early Middle Ages, during the period of German expansion and colonization in Eastern Europe. Whether in the tenth and eleventh centuries under the Ottonians, when Germans expanded into Slavic lands east of the Elbe, or in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries during the conquests of the Teutonic Order in the lands of the Baltic peoples, a clear and consistent pattern emerges.

Anyone who studies the history of German expansion into Central and Eastern Europe cannot fail to notice how deliberately and meticulously it was carried out. Unlike Russians, the Germans were not simply conquering land and moving on. They stopped – at every stage. They founded new towns, established bishoprics, built administrative structures, and developed infrastructure, all with the proverbial German attention to detail. Great care was taken to cultivate and organize every newly acquired territory. Nothing was left half-formed or merely provisional.

This leads to another important contrast with Russian expansion, which will become even clearer later on. The towns founded by Germans in newly colonized eastern territories did not remain peripheral outposts. On the contrary, they often became just as important as older German cities – and in some cases even surpassed them in political, economic, or cultural significance.

Take Magdeburg as an example. It rose to prominence during the German eastward expansion in the tenth century, particularly with the establishment of the archbishopric. By the standards of the time, Magdeburg was a relatively “new” German city, yet it came close to matching much older centers such as Aachen, Cologne, Worms or Speyer. Magdeburg was not only a key base for the Christianization of Slavic lands to the east; it also became a legal and institutional model for urban development through the famous Magdeburg Law, which shaped the founding of countless cities across Central and Eastern Europe.

Or consider the German crusades in northeastern Europe – first conducted by the Livonian Brothers of the Sword and later by the Teutonic Knights. These campaigns were not limited to warfare and territorial conquest. The Germans created thriving and prosperous cities in the lands they took or expanded existing settlements into major urban centers: Königsberg, Riga, Reval, Elbing, Thorn, Danzig, and others. These towns, founded or transformed in newly conquered territories, quickly became important administrative, commercial, and cultural hubs.

A very different picture emerges when we turn to Russian conquest and colonization. No territory colonized by Muscovy-Russia ever rose in status to rival Moscow. The vast Eurasian space absorbed by the Muscovite-Russian state remained precisely that: an uncultivated expanse, valued primarily for resource extraction or used as a dumping ground for prisoners and political dissidents. The towns that were founded served mostly as frontier outposts and temporary waystations. There was no sustained interest in developing or cultivating the immense territories that had been conquered.

Even the example of St. Petersburg ultimately reinforces this point rather than contradicting it. Its rise does not testify to any organic Russian tradition of intensive development. The city owed its existence and prominence almost entirely to the Europeanization project of Peter I. By arbitrarily relocating the capital closer to Europe and the sea, Peter imposed importance on St. Petersburg from above.

The development of St. Petersburg was not driven by an intrinsic impulse to cultivate newly acquired territory. It was a strategic outpost – an artificial window onto Europe – from which a Muscovy transformed into Russia could continue its expansion. The logic remained unchanged: expansion in width without depth. St. Petersburg was an exception created by force of will, not the expression of a broader civilizational pattern – and precisely for that reason, it proves the rule rather than refuting it.

The key to understanding the Russian psyche lies in the concept of prime symbols as formulated by Oswald Spengler. Spengler’s comparative morphology of cultures, developed most fully in his magnum opus The Decline of the West, offers a powerful lens through which to grasp the deeper, pre-rational structures shaping different civilizations – and it is particularly illuminating when applied to Russia.

In his morphology of cultures, Spengler assigns to each high culture a specific prime symbol. This symbol is not merely metaphorical; it expresses itself concretely across the entire life cycle of a culture. It manifests in architecture, music, science, political behavior, and in the way people of that culture experience themselves in relation to the world. The prime symbol permeates everything – from intellectual achievements to everyday instincts.

For Western culture, which Spengler called Faustian, the prime symbol is infinite space. This symbol reveals itself unmistakably in Gothic cathedrals, with their flying buttresses and soaring towers that seem to pierce the heavens and reach toward infinity. It appears in infinitesimal calculus, in contrapuntal music, and – most importantly – in the restless scientific drive of the West: the relentless pursuit of truth, however hidden, abstract, or ultimately unattainable it may be. The Faustian spirit is never satisfied with surface appearances. It seeks to probe, dissect, and penetrate ever more deeply into reality. In this sense, European civilization is defined by depth. Depth is the essence of the Western psyche.

Spengler correctly identified Russia as a cultural realm distinct from the West – and therefore governed by a different prime symbol. The Russian prime symbol is the endless plain. This image explains a wide range of Russian historical, cultural, and psychological manifestations.

The fundamental contrast is this: whereas depth is paramount for the European psyche, breadth reigns supreme in the Russian one. Where the Western soul values quality, differentiation, and inner structure, the Russian soul emphasizes quantity and extension. The European mind strives to differentiate, categorize, and systematize; the Russian mind, by contrast, is radically egalitarian in the most literal sense of the word. It is largely indifferent to distinctions – even to distinctions between opposing states of being.

The endless plain is flat, monotonous, and undifferentiated. Everything upon it appears equivalent. Nothing stands out as fundamentally distinct. And so, in the Russian psyche, everything tends toward equivalence.

The European soul is three-dimensional, with depth as its indispensable feature. The Russian soul, by contrast, is two-dimensional. A defining characteristic of the Russian psyche is precisely this lack of depth, compensated by an overwhelming emphasis on breadth. In short, the Western (Faustian) soul is driven by depth, while the Russian soul is governed by breadth.

This fundamental difference between European and Russian mindsets manifests itself in many domains. One such domain – which I have touched upon in earlier writings (here and here) – is their respective attitudes toward truth.

The European mind is obsessed with truth. It holds truth in the highest esteem and pursues it relentlessly. It abhors ambiguity and seeks clarity, coherence, and certainty. This attitude follows naturally from the pronounced sense of depth that characterizes the European psyche. Truth is something to be uncovered by digging ever deeper beneath appearances.

The Russian mind, by contrast, is largely indifferent to truth. For it, an obvious truth and a glaring falsehood are often equivalent. Ambiguity is not a problem to be resolved; it is something in which the Russian soul feels at home. The Russian mind experiences little cognitive dissonance when confronted with contradictions between truth and falsehood. This indifference flows directly from the radical egalitarianism of the Russian psyche, expressed through its prime symbol – the endless plain – where everything appears level, equivalent, and interchangeable.

This same contrast between European depth and differentiation on the one hand, and Russian breadth and numbness to distinctions on the other, also manifests itself in their respective modes of conquest and colonization. European expansion reflects the same insatiable drive to penetrate ever more deeply: to develop and cultivate conquered territories, to study their histories, to investigate their peoples, to dig layer by layer into the past in search of truth and meaning.

Russian expansion, in contrast, is driven by a restless urge to spread outward – to expand in sheer width. In the process, perfectly in line with the Russian world-feeling embodied by the prime symbol of the endless plain, every conquered territory appears dull, undifferentiated, and essentially the same. Everything beyond the immediate center of power feels interchangeable and uninteresting, valued only insofar as it yields extractable resources.

Consistent with the logic of the endless plain – flat, monotonous, and undifferentiated – the Russian psyche shows little interest in what lies beyond its immediate headquarters. It does not feel compelled to explore, to probe, or to discover. Expansion, not understanding; possession, not cultivation – this is the governing instinct.

This civilizational psyche reveals itself not only in patterns of conquest and colonization, but even in science fiction literature. The contrast between Western and Russian science fiction once again reflects their differing prime symbols – and, consequently, their differing approaches to expansion.

In Western science fiction, protagonists frequently travel to distant planets with the intention of settling them. The narrative arc typically revolves around exploration, colonization, and the establishment of new and lasting forms of life beyond Earth. The journey outward is not temporary; it is existential. The goal is to create a new home – to transplant civilization and cultivate it in alien soil.

In Russian/Soviet science fiction, however, a different pattern often emerges. Other planets are treated less as destinations for permanent settlement and more as temporary stations – almost as cosmic tourist sites. The protagonists travel outward, observe, perhaps intervene briefly, but ultimately return to Earth. The Earth remains the unquestioned center, the permanent headquarters. Everything beyond it is secondary, provisional, not meant for deep cultivation or lasting transformation.

This literary pattern mirrors historical reality with striking precision. Just as in Russian science fiction other planets serve as temporary outposts rather than future homelands, so too have Russia’s vast territories often functioned as peripheral extensions of a single center. It may sound exaggerated to some, but in a deeper sense Russia is indeed a city-state! A city-state organized around Moscow. The enormous Eurasian expanses exist primarily to serve that center.

Like the temporary planetary excursions of Soviet science fiction, the territories beyond Moscow remain conceptually “over there” – distant, undifferentiated, and interchangeable. They do not evoke a strong impulse for careful cultivation or development. Everything flows toward Moscow; everything is organized around it. The immense territories possessed by what we call Russia – more precisely, by the Moscow city-state – serve primarily as reservoirs of extraction: oil, gas, minerals, and, as the current war in Ukraine grimly demonstrates, human resources to be expended as cannon fodder.

Even today, many inhabitants of Moscow display little genuine interest in the regions beyond their metropolitan orbit – let alone in the vast lands beyond the Urals. This indifference has become the subject of countless memes and jokes. A Muscovite meets someone from Dagestan, Bashkortostan, or Tatarstan and asks where they are from. “I’m from Dagestan”, the person replies. The Muscovite responds: “Oh, interesting. And how do you like Russia?” The joke reveals more than it intends. The center does not fully register the periphery as part of itself.

All of this leads to a clear conclusion: the diverse regions currently subsumed under the name “Russia” – Siberia, Yakutia, the Urals, Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, the Caucasus, the Russian Far East, the northwest (Ingria, Novgorod, Pskov, Smolensk), and many others – can truly develop only if they gain independence. Only by seceding from what is today called “Russia” – which in reality functions as a city-state of Moscow – can these regions begin to cultivate themselves according to their own interests and priorities.

The city-state of Moscow holds together these vast territories through force and treats them primarily as reservoirs of extraction. As independent countries, these regions would finally have both the incentive and the agency to develop their own infrastructure, institutions, and economies. Only then will they acquire the chance to build proper roads, indoor plumbing and much more…

Yet the question goes far beyond infrastructure. The disintegration of Russia would also allow the peoples of these regions to rediscover themselves – to reconnect with their own histories, cultures, and traditions, which have been neglected under Muscovite-Russian rule.

In a deeper sense, such a transformation would inaugurate what might be called a new age of discovery: the discovery of northern Eurasia. For all its vastness, that immense landmass has remained, intellectually speaking, a kind of terra incognita. In line with the prime symbol of the Russian soul – the endless plain – Muscovite-Russians showed limited interest in the differentiated cultural and historical richness of the regions they absorbed. Serious archaeological and historical research was limited, if it was carried out at all. At the same time, political barriers significantly limited sustained engagement by Western scholars.

The emergence of independent states across northern Eurasia would change this dynamic fundamentally. These regions would open not only to political self-determination but also to scholarly engagement. There will be a massive influx of Western historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and other researchers into those newly independent states. Unlike Russians, Westerners will deeply engage with the societies of those newly independent post-Russian states – with their cultures, customs and histories, all of which have until now remained peripheral in global consciousness. Our hope is that, in time, these new states (at least some of them) will cultivate their own academic traditions and homegrown specialists. But the initial, transformative push will come from the West. And thanks to those Western specialists, the peoples of northern Eurasia will rediscover themselves. They will rediscover their cultures, their deeper selves. And together with them the whole world will discover northern Eurasia.

What lies ahead is truly exciting. Russia’s disintegration will not simply bring about political transformation; it will bring about intellectual renewal. It will bring about fascinating revelations – the unveiling of a vast and complex region that long remained obscure due to negligence of a single center.

These would be extraordinary times. To witness the emergence of new cultures, new states, and newly articulated identities across northern Eurasia would be nothing less than a historic turning point. It is indeed a great time to be alive.