The "Russian world" () is a concept and a political doctrine usually defined as the sphere of cultural and political influence of Russia. This concept is sometimes also phrased as Pax Russica, in parallel to the Pax Romana, and as counterweight to Pax Americana and Pax Britannica before that.
History
1990s
Major authors behind the resurrection of the concept in post-Soviet Russia include , Yefim Ostrovsky, Valery Tishkov, Vitaly Skrinnik, Tatyana Poloskova and Natalya Narochnitskaya. Since Russia emerged from the Soviet Union as still a significantly multiethnic and multicultural country, for the "Russian idea" to be unifying, it could not be ethnocentric, as it was in the doctrine Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality of the 18th century Russian Empire.
In 2000, Shchedrovitsky presented the main ideas of the "Russian world" concept in the article "Russian World and Transnational Russian Characteristics", among the central ones of which was the Russian language. Andis Kudors of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, analyzing Shchedrovitsky's article, concludes that it follows the ideas first laid out by the 18th century philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder about the influence of language on thinking (which has become known as the principle of linguistic relativity): the ones who speak Russian come to think Russian, and eventually to act Russian.
Putin era
Russia's president Vladimir Putin visited the Arkaim site of the Sintashta culture in 2005, meeting in person with the chief archaeologist Gennady Zdanovich. The visit received much attention from Russian media. They presented Arkaim as the "homeland of the majority of contemporary people in Asia, and, partly, Europe". Nationalists called Arkaim the "city of Russian glory" and the "most ancient Slavic-Aryan town". Zdanovich reportedly presented Arkaim to the president as a possible "national idea of Russia", a new idea of civilisation which Victor Schnirelmann calls the "Russian idea".
Eventually, the idea of the "Russian world" was adopted by the Russian administration, and Vladimir Putin decreed the establishment of the government-sponsored Russkiy Mir Foundation in 2007. A number of observers consider the promotion of the "Russian world" concept an element of the revanchist idea of the restoration of Russia or its influence back to the borders of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire.
Other observers described the concept as an instrument for projecting Russian soft power. In Ukraine, the promotion of the "Russian world" became as early as 2018 strongly associated with the Russo-Ukrainian War. According to assistant editor Pavel Tikhomirov of , the "Russian world" for politicized Ukrainians, whose number constantly increases, nowadays is "simply 'neo-Sovietism' masked by new names". He reconciled that with the conflation of the "Russian world" and the Soviet Union within Russian society itself. The Financial Times described "Russian world" as "Putin’s creation that fuses respect for Russia’s Tsarist, Orthodox past with reverence for the Soviet defeat of fascism in the Second World War. This is epitomised in the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, 40 miles west of Moscow, opened in 2020."
Russian Orthodox Church
On 3 November 2009, at the Third Russian World Assembly, newly-enthroned Patriarch Kirill of Moscow defined the "Russian world" as "the common civilisational space founded on three pillars: Eastern Orthodoxy, Russian culture and especially the language and the common historical memory and connected with its common vision on the further social development".
Russkiy Mir is an ideology promoted by many in the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow also shares this ideology; for the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russkiy Mir is also "a spiritual concept, a reminder that through the baptism of Rus', God consecrated these people to the task of building a Holy Rus."