Анджела Стент - Putin's World - Russia Against the West and with the Rest

Sergei Karaganov, another influential intellectual, argued that Russian speakers living in newly independent countries, such as Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states, would become the prime guarantors of Moscow’s political and economic influence over its neighbors, predicting that Moscow might one day feel compelled to use force to protect them, and thus its interests in the former USSR. “We must be enterprising and take them under our control, in this way establishing a powerful political enclave that will be the foundation for our political influence,” he wrote. 20Right from the start, therefore, there was a general consensus that Russia had the right to proclaim its own Monroe Doctrine in the post-Soviet space. This Monroe Doctrine would ensure that no post-Soviet state would join Western structures. The Russian Monroe Doctrine differed from the American original in that it was really an “anti-doctrine with no discernible strategic programme, encompassing disjointed responses to growing Western interest in the FSU.” 21The consensus among most of the Russian elite was that some form of reintegration with the post-Soviet space was inevitable because, without the former Soviet space, Russia could not become a great power again. The Western assumption that Russia would gradually accept the loss of empire and its new, diminished role in the global order turned out to be a product of wishful thinking.

Under the presidency of Vladimir Putin, these ideas have become more structured and elaborate. It is customary to say that, in contrast to the Cold War years, there is no ideological antagonism between Russia and the West. But this ignores the fact that Putin’s Russia has defined its role in the world as the leader of “conservative international” supporting states that espouse “traditional values” and as a protector of leaders who face challenges from “color” revolutions—popular uprisings against authoritarian governments, which Putin believes are orchestrated by the West. The image of Russia as the defender of the status quo—against what is depicted as a revisionist, decadent West trying to promote regime change against established leaders, be they in the Middle East or in the post-Soviet space—is an integral part of this new Russian Idea. Russia today argues that its values and policies are different from and superior to those of the United States. Putin has said that Western Christianity is decadent because it supports LGBTQ rights and multiculturalism. In 2013, he said:

We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan. 22

Russia is depicted as the bastion of forces that oppose revolution, chaos, and liberal ideas. A new element in Putin’s worldview has been his explicit commitment to the idea that a Russian world ( Russky mir ) exists, one that transcends Russia’s state borders, and that Russian civilization differs from Western civilization. Since the annexation of Crimea, Putin has invoked the concepts of a “divided people” and “protecting compatriots abroad.” The central argument is that, since the Soviet collapse, there is a mismatch between Russia’s state borders and its national or ethnic borders, and that this is both a historical injustice and a threat to Russia’s security. After the Soviet collapse, twenty-two million Russians found themselves outside Russia, living in other post-Soviet states. Russia, in Putin’s view, has a right to come to the defense of Russians under threat in the post-Soviet space.

Putin’s eighteen years in power have created a new Russian Idea that resembles the old Russian Idea: Russia is a unique civilization, in many ways superior to that of the West, and is both European and Eurasian. Western concepts of individualism, competition, and untrammeled free expression are alien to the more holistic, organic, communal Russian values. Russia has a right to a sphere of influence in the lands that were part of both the Russian Empire and the USSR, and Moscow has a duty to defend the interests of compatriot Russians living outside the motherland. The West represents a threat to both Russian values and interests. And its agents inside Russia are poised to do its bidding.

Throughout the Soviet era, outsiders debated the relationship between the USSR’s political system and its foreign policy. Did the Soviet Union behave internationally just as other great powers did or was there something unique about its domestic system that made it more difficult to deal with? Communist ideology committed the USSR to pursuing world revolution, but in practice, the Kremlin had to interact with other states.

In the interwar years, there were two Soviet foreign policies. One was the policy of a normal state with diplomats and government officials interacting with their foreign counterparts. Georgii Chicherin, Soviet commissar of foreign affairs from 1922 to 1930, was the scion of a distinguished tsarist diplomatic family who had defected to the Bolshevik cause. He attended international meetings—such as the Genoa conference where the USSR and Germany signed the infamous Treaty of Rapallo, which eventually enabled Weimar Germany to rearm—in full morning dress. The other foreign policy was that of a revolutionary state. Moscow created the Communist International—known as the Comintern—an organization of foreign communist parties led by the Kremlin that sought to overthrow the very governments with which the Soviet commissar of foreign affairs was dealing. Chicherin’s counterpart in the Comintern would attend international meetings in proletarian garb, plotting how to overthrow the bourgeois governments with whom Chicherin was negotiating. With the exception of the popular-front strategy from 1934 to 1939, when communists in Europe were encouraged to collaborate with socialists and other anti-fascist groups against the rise of Hitler, this schizophrenic view of the world lasted until Stalin, at the height of World War Two’s grand alliance with the US and the UK, who saw no reason to keep it going, dissolved the Comintern in 1943.

During World War Two, those in the West who dealt with Russia were divided into two camps. The first camp, of whom Franklin Roosevelt was the most prominent member, believed there was no option but to deal with the Soviet Union as one would with any great power. “I have a hunch,” Roosevelt said, “that if I give Joseph Stalin what he wants, and ask nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he will work for the good of his people.” This view—that one could make deals with Moscow—was paramount during the Yalta Conference in February 1945, when the victorious powers divided Europe in two, with the Soviet Union occupying and controlling the eastern half.

In September 2015, during a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Putin praised the Yalta Conference: “The Yalta system—helped the humanity through turbulent, at times dramatic events of the last seven decades. It saved the world from large-scale upheavals.” 23For the next half century, some Western leaders sought to make pragmatic deals with Moscow on the basis of mutual interests, the détente era from 1972 to 1980 being the most prominent example. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger believed that one could do business with the Soviet leaders and succeeded in signing a number of arms control and trade agreements. Pursuing classical balance-of-power policies, they took advantage of the hostile relations between the USSR and China to woo the Soviets. West German chancellor Willy Brandt’s new Ostpolitik was another example of striking successful deals with the Kremlin, and it eventually led to German reunification. 24