Russia at a Civilizational Crossroads: The Rise of the Middle Turkic Order and the Crisis of Imperial Identity

07.03.2025

By Valikhan Tuleshov

In recent years, Russia's growing pressure on Armenia and Azerbaijan has revealed more than just geopolitical ambition. It is a confrontation not merely with two sovereign states, but with a deeper, emerging force: the Middle Turkic civilization — a distinct civilizational cluster in Eurasia that is beginning to assert its subjectivity, coherence, and independence from imperial legacies.

By manipulating conflicts and maintaining control through provocation and dependency, Moscow is not just clinging to influence — it is resisting a tectonic civilizational shift. What we are witnessing is Russia’s refusal to acknowledge the awakening of agency among peoples it once considered subordinate. Today, both Azerbaijan and even Armenia — the latter, perhaps more intuitively — are moving toward a more rational and pluralistic diplomacy. This reflects a new model of regional behavior: that of “smarter neighbors” who reject the vertical norms of fear, domination, and dependency.

This civilizational awakening is about more than geopolitics — it represents a transformation in the very grammar of international relations in the region. Where the old order relied on hierarchy and coercion, the emerging Middle Civilization emphasizes networks over pyramids, language over force, and honor over fear. In resisting this, Moscow is not merely losing influence — it is entering into a direct conflict with the historical vector of the region.

At the heart of Russia’s challenge is an unresolved civilizational identity crisis. Unlike other former empires — the United States, which forged a unifying national myth around the “American dream,” or the European Union, which pursued integration, or even China, which reconfigured its past through cultural revival — Russia has failed to synthesize the diverse historical, ethnic, religious, and cultural identities it absorbed over centuries of imperial expansion.

Instead of forming a coherent post-imperial model, Russia harbors fragmented identities: Tatar, Caucasian, Siberian, Orthodox, Soviet, Eurasian, Western, Slavocentric, and Turkic, among others. None has achieved dominance, yet none relinquishes its claim. The result is what might be called a structural schizophrenia of civilizational consciousness — Russia is not a subject of identity but a battlefield of conflicting meanings.

This internal dissonance has rendered Russia increasingly incapable of projecting a sustainable civilizational vision. Without internal harmony, no future can be meaningfully designed. Russia today is not a project — it is a resonator of unarticulated cultural codes. And unless it evolves into a meaningful node within the Middle Turkic civilization — as a cultural mediator between East and West, the Islamic South and the Arctic North — it risks becoming not merely unstable, but existentially hollow.

What threatens is not a classic imperial collapse through conquest or rebellion, but something deeper: the erosion of meaning. In place of a unifying idea, only a geographic shell may remain, populated by unresolved conflicts of memory, identity, and interest. Fragmentation may follow — not just politically, but civilizationally, as Russia ceases to function as a coherent historical subject.

This crisis places Russia not simply at a geopolitical crossroads, but at the edge of civilizational dissolution. Its severed ties with Europe and its inability to fully integrate with Asia (in the Chinese sense) have left it suspended in a civilizational vacuum. This vacuum will not remain empty. It will either be filled by external actors — like China or the expanding Turkic world — or by internal centrifugal forces that will disaggregate Russia further and redefine its identity landscape from within.

In understanding these transformations across the post-Soviet space, we must also recognize the philosophical implications. The frameworks of modernism and postmodernism no longer provide sufficient answers. What emerges instead is a new paradigm — Texturalism — a theory of civilizational plurality, irreducibility, and coherence rooted in lived, dynamic cultures rather than abstract models of power.

Texturalism does not seek to replace previous paradigms but offers a different foundation: one that resonates in an age where civilizations are not constructed from monoliths, but from meaningful, interwoven textures.