"A Sixth Part of the World": The Career of a Spatial Metaphor in Russia and the Soviet Union (1837–2021)

Abstract

"A Sixth Part of the World"The Career of a Spatial Metaphor in Russia and the Soviet Union (1837–2021) Frithjof Benjamin Schenk (bio) On 23 December 2021, President Vladimir Putin of Russia held his annual large-scale press conference. It lasted almost four hours and was perfectly staged. Seated alone at an imposing desk, Putin took questions from hand-picked Russian and international journalists. Behind the president's podium, a massive map of the Russian Federation was projected onto a screen.1 The image served to remind those present, and those watching at home and around the world, that this was the political leader of a nation whose territory extends across more than 17 million square kilometers and 11 time zones. In other words, it served as a political statement, communicating pride in a literally great nation to the home audience and demanding respect for a great power from those watching abroad. The knowledge of living in the world's largest country had previously been a key performative point of reference for both the tsarist empire and the Soviet state, forming an integral component of concepts of imperial and national identity. For the few prominent voices that cursed the state's size and figured it as a burden, a greater number drew from it a sense of national pride and an imperial claim to dominion. Occasionally, pointing to the size of the national and imperial territory constituted a compensatory act that sought to distract both speaker and addressee from the fact that Russia, or the USSR, was not up there with the "big players" in other arenas of international competition, be that economic power or socioeconomic development. We continue to witness the use of this strategy today, with Putin's press conference of December 2021 providing an illustrative example. Russia is once more asserting the status of a great power, staking a [End Page 349] claim to be respected and feared on the international stage. In view of the lack of economic clout backing up the international ambitions of a country whose GDP is lower than that of Italy, Russia's government draws its claim to dominion from other resources: its status as a military and nuclear power, its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, and the sheer size of its territory.2 Taking a historical perspective covering the tsarist empire and the USSR and noting developments in the Russian Federation up to the present day, this article examines the interrelationship between discourses around the size of the national territory and conceptions of collective identity. The object of this case study is a history of the spatial metaphor of Russia/the USSR as "a sixth part of the world" from the 19th to the early 21st centuries. I argue that the idea of living in a country whose territory covers one-sixth of the earth has been a foundational element in the national and imperial self-image of Russians since the 1830s, strikingly surviving the historical cesuras of 1917 and 1991 relatively intact despite all the dramatic differences in the political forms taken by the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation and despite the fluctuations in the size of Russian/Soviet territory during the period under consideration. The image of Russia (and the Soviet Union) as a sixth of the world is part of the longue durée of the country's history over the last two centuries. Interestingly, historical research has yet to produce a close study of this spatial metaphor and of its strong identity-forging power. This article seeks to fill the gap, an endeavor that appears promising for three key reasons. First, the history of this metaphor may serve as a prism for the exploration of the relationship linking spatial discourses and imagined geographies to Russian conceptions of national or imperial identity from tsarist times to the post-Soviet era.3 Second, this history provides insights into how Soviet ideologues in the 1920s succeeded in presenting the new state as the antithesis to the [End Page 350] hated tsarist empire while simultaneously co-opting important elements of imperial self-presentation. Third, the discursive career of this image can cast new...