"The Great Russians, [founder of the Zalesskaya Rus civic initiative Ilya Lazarenko] argues, were the first victims of Muscovite imperialism; and thus it is important to recognize that “Moscow is hardly [a] symbol of ‘Russianness’ but rather of a Babylonian mixing” that was inevitably the result of the messianic ideas which arose around that city rather than out of the minds of Great Russians as such."