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

Arrayed against the proponents of pragmatic cooperation with Russia were those who viewed the USSR and its leaders through a much darker lens and were convinced that the communist ideology made it impossible to deal with the Kremlin as if it were just another great power. George F. Kennan, father of the theory of containment, expressed these sentiments in his seminal Mr. X article in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1947. Soviet behavior, he argued, was a product of the traditional suspicious tsarist view of the world reinforced by the Soviet adaptation of Marxism-Leninism implacably opposed to the capitalist West. The USSR was inherently expansionist, and the only way to counter it was to pursue a “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russia’s expansive tendencies.” 25But Kennan was also convinced that, contained, the Soviet Union would eventually collapse from its own internal rot.

Of course, during the Cold War numerous countries outside the Western alliance were willing to do business with the USSR irrespective of its domestic system. Many developing countries viewed Moscow through an anti-colonialist lens, believing the Kremlin would support their interests against the West, until some began to experience Soviet heavy-handedness and the competition for influence between China and the USSR. African delegates at international conferences would complain about Soviet officials trying to persuade them over lunch to support their cause, followed by Chinese officials insisting over dinner that theirs was the correct path forward. China itself felt subordinated to the USSR and emerged as an ideological rival as well as a claimant on the Soviet Far East. After Stalin died, Mao Tse-tung believed that he should lead the international communist movement, and he looked down on the uncouth (in his view) Nikita Khrushchev, who refused to cede that role to him. Between the initial Sino-Soviet split in 1958 and Gorbachev’s ascent to power in 1985, Beijing was arguably seen to be as great a threat to Moscow as was Washington.

When the USSR collapsed and Boris Yeltsin wrested the Kremlin from Gorbachev to become the first president of the Russian Federation, the Chinese were horrified, and the West was cautiously optimistic although wary of Yeltsin’s unpredictability. When Bill Clinton came into office, he and his closest aides were convinced of the crucial link between a country’s domestic political system and its foreign policy. The liberal internationalist ideas in which they believed, as already noted, held that democracies do not go to war with each other and that it was imperative for the United States to do all it could to help Russia become a democracy.

When Vladimir Putin took over from Yeltsin, he was determined to restore Russia’s greatness, and he understood the connection between domestic and foreign policies differently from those in power during the brief Yeltsin interlude. Foreign policy was increasingly driven by domestic considerations. During his first term, from 2000 to 2004, Putin appeared to seek greater integration into the global economy and introduced a number of modernizing reforms. This was also a time of cooperation with the West—the post-9/11 partnership with the United States in Afghanistan and a rapprochement with Germany—until events in Russia’s neighborhood and beyond caused a domestic crackdown. Putin had initially favored closer ties to the West. But when he realized that the West expected Russia to become more democratic and to encourage the development of competing political parties, he began to view closer ties with the West with suspicion because of their implications for his hold on power. The George W. Bush administration’s Freedom Agenda involved regime change—be it in Iraq, Georgia, or Ukraine. At least that is how Putin saw it. And that represented a direct challenge to Russian interests.

During Putin’s second presidential term, domestic freedoms were curtailed in the name of security. Putin had blamed the West for a 2004 terrorist attack in Beslan in the North Caucasus, when hundreds of children were killed. “Some would like to cut a juicy piece of our pie. Others help them.” 26After the shock of the color revolutions that deposed rulers in Ukraine and Georgia, Putin appointed Vladislav Surkov, his half-Chechen “grey cardinal” to direct the transition to what has become known as “managed democracy.” A former public relations man, Surkov describes himself as the author of the current “Russian system.” The system which he calls “sovereign democracy” combines “democratic rhetoric and undemocratic intent.” 27Surkov stresses sovereignty over democracy, meaning that no outside power should interfere in Russia’s domestic affairs. He created a pro-Putin youth group, Nashi (Ours), to battle liberal youth and created a series of patriotic summer camps that resemble the Soviet-era Young Pioneer and Young Communist conclaves. Independent media were slowly closed down as the state took over virtually all broadcast media.

Putin attempted to introduce pension reforms in 2005, but the pensioners took to the streets in protest, and the government was forced to back down. After that, economic reform ceased. The rise in oil prices and strong GDP growth from 2000 to 2008 bolstered Putin’s self-confidence and determination not to be subordinate to the West.

During his second term, Putin increasingly turned against the West, and in his third presidential term, which began in 2012, foreign policy was largely used to bolster his domestic ratings. In 2011, he had been shocked by demonstrations protesting falsified parliamentary elections and his announced return to the Kremlin. A change in US ambassadors further convinced Putin that Washington was out to undermine him. Career diplomat John Beyrle, whose father had fought with both the US and Soviet armies in World War Two, after escaping German captivity, was replaced by Michael McFaul, a Stanford professor and adviser to Barack Obama who had worked on democracy promotion in Russia in the 1990s and who was hounded by the Russian media from the day of his arrival in Moscow. 28

Once the Ukraine crisis began in late 2013, Russia portrayed itself as being at war with the West, accusing its “fifth columnists” inside Russia of trying to destroy the country. With his approval rating hovering around 90 percent and an increasingly assertive and unpredictable policy, Putin had managed to persuade many in the West that dealing with Russia was not like dealing with another great power and that the more authoritarian the government, the more aggressive the foreign policy. Nevertheless, many non-Western countries view Russia as a partner that does not interfere with their domestic policies or their internal political system and that seeks to create new international rules and organizations not dominated by the West.

Vladimir Putin has skillfully appealed to tsarist and Soviet nostalgia to emphasize Russia’s unique place in the world and his own part in restoring Russia’s rightful role as a great power. The tsarist two-headed eagle—symbolizing that Russia looks both East and West—has replaced the hammer and sickle on the Russian flag. The rousing tune of the Soviet national anthem has been brought back after Yeltsin’s experiment with a new tune failed miserably. But the anthem now has new words. While extolling Russian exceptionalism, Putin has re-created the enemy image of the West and its purported agents in Russia. He portrays himself as the protector of Russians living in the near abroad, because of the perceived historical injustice that followed the Soviet collapse. He defends Russia’s right to restore the global role it lost after 1992.

Russia is unlikely to become a truly modern state if it looks too much to its past glories and grievances. The problem with the appeal to the past as the harbinger of Russia’s future is that it idealizes the nineteenth century, when Russia was a major player in the Concert of Europe, and the Red Army’s victory in World War Two under Stalin’s leadership. But that is no model for the twenty-first-century global disorder in which Russia finds itself today. Trying to re-create the Congress of Vienna with nuclear weapons and many international players will inevitably lead to rifts with countries that have a different stake in the emerging global order. If the new Russian Idea is the old Russian Idea popularized with twenty-first-century technology, it threatens to render Russia a continuing prisoner of its past.