A Country That No Longer Exists Editor’s Introduction

Russia’s bloody war in Ukraine has drastically sharpened the question of the bitter confrontation between Russia and the West. Driven by a complex interplay of ideological, political, and economic factors, this confrontation points to Russia’s ambition to regain the superpower status that its predecessor state—the Soviet Union—maintained for more than half of the last century. Furthermore, some experts argue that the current Russia–Ukraine military confrontation has its roots in the disintegration of the Soviet Union and that the concept of “the Russian world,” currently widely used to justify a geopolitical strategy based on the idea of Russian exceptionality, grew out of the humiliation Russia experienced in the wake of this disintegration. This idea is also echoed in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s series of reflective remarks on the topic. During his 2005 state-of-the-nation address, Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union “a major geopolitical catastrophe of the century” and “a genuine drama” for the Russian nation. More recently, in late September 2021, he evoked this idea again, claiming that the dissolution of the Soviet state is to blame for “what is happening now between Russia and Ukraine” and “what is happening on the borders of some other CIS countries.” It is not my goal here to examine the explanatory power of these and similar statements in relation to the ongoing Russo–Ukrainian war. Yet there should be no doubt that the Soviet era left a deep imprint on the self-conception of each of the former Soviet republics and their current, often difficult relationships. Even today, more than three decades after its official dissolution, the Soviet Union continues to cast a shadow on Russia and the world. This forces us to reflect upon the phenomenon of the Soviet Union, its origin and its development, making it an acute research topic worthy of serious philosophical discussion. The successor state to the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, was officially established on December 30, 1922, following a civil war that raged in Russia from 1917 to 1921. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the USSR)—as it was officially called—appeared as the first nation in the world based on