The Velvet Glove: Russia's Soft Power Play

What is soft power — and when does it stop being soft?

From the Baltics to the Caucasus and Eastern Europe, Russia’s strategy has often relied on cultural integration before political leverage. This episode examines how modern soft power tools — Russification policies, identity shaping, and strategic citizenship — become instruments of long-term geopolitical control.

In The Velvet Glove: Russia’s Soft Power Play, Irada Hasan explores how influence is built through language policy, education systems, passport distribution, media narratives, and “peacekeeping” missions.

 A deep dive into how influence is engineered — and why soft power often precedes hard outcomes. 

Transcript

Speaker 0:03

You're listening to the Global Front with Irada Hassan. When we talk about Russian influence, we usually start with the Soviet Union. With communism, with ideology, with fear and control. That's understandable. But the truth is the story begins much earlier, long before tanks, before propaganda posters, and even before the Cold War. Because Russia's most effective weapon did not arrive with soldiers. It arrived quietly. Through language, through education, through belief. Welcome to the Global Front. This is where we look at how power actually works, not in theory, but in real lives. And today I want us to look at how Russian influence was built step by step together. So let me take you back. Before Russia became an empire, it was something much smaller, just a landlocked Slavic principality centered around Moscow. No oceans to protect it, no mountain ranges to shield it. For centuries Moscow lived exposed on open plains, attacked from every direction, Mongol armies from the east, Polish Lithuanian forces from the west, and Scandinavian powers from the north. And slowly something settled into the Russian political mindset. Fear and insecurity. The belief that survival meant expansion. So Moscow did not simply grow, it pushed outward aggressively. And their goal was not to coexist, it was to dominate. By the 16th century, under Ivan the Terrible, Russian armies captured Kazan and Astrakhan along the Volga. That moment matters because it brought large Turkic Muslim populations under Russian rule for the first time. From there, expansion accelerated, east into Siberia, south toward the Caucasus, west toward Ukraine and Poland, and north into the Baltics and Finland. This did not happen overnight. It unfolded over centuries. Village by village, region by region, Russia did not just expand, it dismantled societies. So basically what they were doing was eliminating local leadership, destroying religious centers of that area, and displacing the local communities. So imagine suddenly one state ruled dozens of peoples. Turkic Muslims in current day Central Asia and Azerbaijan, Tatars along the Volga, Chechens and Dagistanis in the Caucasus, Catholics in Poland, Lutherans in the Baltics, Ukrainians with their own language and history, and Finns in the north. Different faiths, different alphabets, different memories. Moscow did not see this diversity as richness, it saw it as danger. So naturally people resisted suppression everywhere, sometimes openly through uprisings, sometimes quietly, parents teaching forbidden languages at home, communities protecting mosques and churches on the ground. So Russia could seize land, but it could not erase identity, and that frightened Moscow. Because as long as people remembered who they were, empire could never be complete as they saw it. So repression had to evolve. Force alone was not enough. So control had to move deeper into classrooms, into churches, and into alphabets. By the 17th century, Russia was already expanding fast, but it had no system for managing difference. Because despite all improvements, education was still limited, and the Orthodox Church would still dominate knowledge. In addition to that, anyone who would try to go against the regime or to go against the new regulations would be punished instantly and in the most brutal way. And then came Peter the Great. Peter grew up surrounded by violence. He witnessed executions inside Moscow itself. He saw his relatives being killed in palace struggles. For Peter, power was never a birthright. By the time he ruled alone, Peter had learned a brutal lesson. Power in Russia was built through fear. What he decided to do was to travel across Europe, studying armies, universities, shipyards, bureaucracies, but his real intention was not to learn a culture. His real intention was to learn control. And Peter understood something deeply cynical. Territory can be taken by force, but identity must be dismantled slowly. So what he did was he weaponized culture. Language became administration, education became surveillance, and belief became regulated. So in 1710, Peter introduced what was called the civil Cyrillic script. This wasn't just a new alphabet, it was a political intervention. Until then, written language belonged largely to the Orthodox Church. Religious texts were printed in Church Slavonic using a sacred script. The church controlled education, books, and knowledge. So Peter broke that. He created a separate, simplified alphabet for state use for laws, schools, administration, and science. From that moment on two systems existed. The church kept its old script, the state took over everything else. It was the formal separation of church and state through language. And this system wasn't limited to Moscow. It was imposed across empire on newly concurred territories, on Turkic communities, on Ukrainian, Baltic, Caucasian, and Central Asian populations. Everywhere Russian administration followed, this alphabet followed. Everywhere schools were opened, the system was enforced. Printing presses moved under government control. Textbooks were rewritten, history was edited, secular schools replaced religious ones. Children stopped learning who they were. They started learning who they were allowed to become. Education no longer served people, it served empire. Knowledge stopped being neutral. It became political. And obviously these new changes were not welcomed, and resistance followed. In Poland, uprisings erupted in 1830 and again in 1863. Students, priests, farmers, they demanded the right to speak Polish and practice Catholicism freely. Both revolts were crushed, thousands executed or deported, schools closed, clergy exiled, and land was confiscated. Entire villages were punished collectively. One more good example is Ukraine. In Ukraine, books were banned, theaters were shut, even folk singing became suspicious. In Finland, autonomy was stripped away. The army was dissolved and newspapers were censored. In Estonia and Latvia, local schools were replaced with Russian ones. Different nations same punishment. Language was controlled. Education redesigned, identity criminalized. Still people resisted quietly and at enormous cost. In Muslim regions, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Volga, the policy of forced conversion failed because Islam endured. So Russia shifted tactics here. Instead of religion, it suffocated culture. Government jobs required Russian, universities taught in Russian, administration operated in Russian language. And of course, people were not ready to accept the new reality. And as the result, armed revolts broke out across all these regions, and what happened again was the same scenario. Religious leaders were arrested, the protesters were executed publicly, mosques were constantly monitored, and people were simply afraid of their lives and the lives of their children. By the nineteenth century, repression was shaped into the system through figures like Nikolai Elminsky. Nikolai Elminsky was a Russian Orthodox missionary and linguist who helped turn education into a tool of empire, and who is responsible for the linguistic and cultural genocides in this region. Ilminsky designed an assimilation model. Children were taught briefly in their native language, written in Cyrillic, then Russian replaced everything. Identity wasn't erased overnight, it was dismantled classroom by classroom. Religion opened the door, language became the lever, education became identity management, and assimilation was staged and calculated in a very cruel and scrupulous manner. At the same time, with the help of Ilminsky, Moscow fractured Turkic unity by creating separate alphabets and school systems, turning one linguistic civilization into twenty-seven artificial written languages, not by accident, of course, but by policy. Now people who once understood each other easily were divided by scripts. And then came demographic engineering. Populations were physically reshaped. Russian settlers moved into strategic regions. Cossacks secured Caucasus borders, so unity weakened. Dependence on Moscow deepened, while Christian communities, including Armenians, were deliberately relocated into Karabak, Zangazor, and Nakchevan as part of a wider demographic strategy. Borders rewritten over people's lives. This wasn't administration, it was colonial restructuring. When the Empire collapsed, the Soviet Union replaced it. The ideology changed, but the violence did not. Mass deportations, forced collectivization, labor camps, religious persecution. Entire ethnic groups were relocated overnight. Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Engush, Volga Germans. Millions were imprisoned, and millions died. Churches and mosques turned into warehouses. Children were taught to report parents. Neighbors learned not to trust each other. Russian became the language of survival, not success, but survival. Soft power became institutional, and fear became routine. Now, if we take a look at what's going on in the post-Soviet republics today, you will be very surprised. In several post-Soviet states, Russian still remains deeply embedded. In Belarus, over 70% of the population uses Russian as their primary language of communication. In Kazakhstan, around 80% speak Russian fluently. Latvia and Estonia, roughly one-third of residents are Russian speakers. In Ukraine before 2014, nearly 30% identified Russian as their native language. Language-shaped education systems, media consumption, political discourse, Russian television remained dominant in many households across the former Soviet space long after independence. I was born after the Soviet Union collapsed, but Russian was my first language. My parents inherited it from the system, and I inherited it from them. That is not coincidence. That is colonial legacy. Russia continues influencing independent states through Russian-speaking populations, Russian language schools, cultural centers, and media networks. It tracks them, funds them, monitors them, and it passed laws allowing military intervention wherever Russians are claimed to be under threat. But here's the danger. That ambiguity is intentional. We saw this in Ukraine. Years of media narratives framed Russian speakers as victims. Cultural ties were weaponized. Then came invasion. Cities destroyed, families displaced, children growing up under air raids. Language became pretext. Identity became justification. And if we take a look in the Caucasus, the same design repeats. Artificial borders, mixed populations, Russian peacekeepers, constant territorial problems that are used as a lever of influence. Think of Abkhazia, South Asetia, Transnistria, Donbass, Crimea. Karabakh was solved and the territories were claimed back by the true owner. But what about the others? Not accidents, but mechanisms. Instability kept alive just enough to control futures. Nations held hostage by unresolved borders. Soft power did not retreat. It adapted. Even decades after 1991, around 40% of Armenian's trade turnover has been connected to Russia. Armenian's natural gas system is operated by Gazprom. Approximately 3,000 Russian troops were stationed at the Gumri base. Belarus conducts more than half of its trade with Russia. Although China is Turkmenistan's largest gas buyer, Russia has strategically re-entered the Turkmen gas market, ensuring that even Ashkabat's export diversification does not fully escape Moscow's energy orbit. Energy is leverage. Pipelines are influence. Dependency does not need soldiers. But the post-Soviet space is not uniform. Each country navigated Moscow differently. Belarus remained deeply aligned. Kazakhstan balances carefully. Ukraine eventually pivoted west and paid a price. Georgia experienced war in 2008, and Azerbaijan charted its own course. This brings us back to influence. Power today is not always loud. It can be cultural, economic, linguistic, institutional. You don't need to occupy a country if its energy grid runs through you. You don't need to censor if its media ecosystem speaks your language. You don't need troops if economic dependency ensures alignment. This is not brute force. This is something else. It is pressure without constant visibility. It is leverage without declaration. Soft on the outside, firm underneath, invisible. The question now is not who controls the region. The question is whether the region can move beyond being controlled. Can former Soviet republics transform structural dependency into strategic autonomy? Can economic connectivity replace geopolitical confrontation? Can peace agreements survive historical grievances? History suggests it will not be simple. But history also shows something else. Influence evolves, and so do nations. This is the end for today. What should we talk about next? Share your ideas and tell us what you think in the comments. Your voice matters here. Until next time, stay curious and stay informed. I'm Mirada Hassan and this is the Global Front.