It is almost misleading to call Russia a “culturally united” country. Consider the fact that there are still Turkic tribes of nomads in Siberia herding reindeer and all the marvels of the 21st century in Moscow.

Sure the majority of people within what was the Russian Empire and modern day Russia can speak Russian, a lot of the time, that is as far as Russian culture may go. Vladivostok would be the best example of this; it being a fairly metropolitan and European appearing city, but you go some kilometres north and you have people living in yurts and wearing furs. Russia itself is a patchwork of vastly different peoples from Germans to Gokturks, religions from Animism to Islam, and languages from Finno-Ugric to Hebrew.

I believe the best way to understand Russian “cultural unity” is to view it the same way we view the process of cultural assimilation in the Roman Empire. So many of the things we think of as Russian are far from it. The Russians did not assimilate others to the their culture as in the process of Sinicization in imperial China, but added the newly conquered peoples culture to their own. You could see a Russian man dancing the hopak while eating pelmeni, but when you break it down the clothes he wears are influenced from years of Mongol control, the dance he dances likely being of Turkic origin, and the food he eats coming from China. When a people were conquered by the Empire nothing much would change for them other than the fact that they now had to speak Russian occasionally.

Russia’s strength was not assimilation but absorption.

The thing that made Russia stay together, aside from brutal militaristic force, was its ability to adapt foreign peoples and cultures into their own and to convince these peoples they were better off as Russians. A man in Kamchatka will likely have more in common with a man from Nunavut than he will with a man in Moscow. In everything from language to the clothes they wear, but what makes him culturally united and connected to the man in Moscow is the fact that he says he is Russian.

In addition to the (incredibly lightly) mentioned military force, population movement, and settling of ethnic Russians, far from being woke, Russia found its unity in its diversity.