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

Putin’s fourth inaugural ceremony in May 2018 showcased the new Russian Idea, emphasizing tradition and patriotism. He was filmed leaving his office and walking briskly to a shiny new Russian-made armored limousine—the first time the vehicle had been used. He emerged from the limousine at the Great Kremlin Palace and swore his oath on a copy of the Russian Constitution. In his brief speech, he evoked Russia’s glorious past, with an appeal to the future.

We all are the inheritors of Russia and its thousand years of history, the inheritors of this land that has given birth to exceptional sons and daughters, workers, warriors, and creators. They have passed down to us this huge, great state. There is no doubt that we can draw strength from our past. But even the most glorious history is not enough to ensure us a better life. Today’s generations of Russians must reinforce this grandeur through their own acts. 29

This is the vision that animates Putin’s world.

Every Russian ruler since Peter the Great has looked to Europe with both fascination and suspicion, and Putin is no exception. In the interview with Italian journalists in which he denied seeing Europe as a mistress, he claimed to want a “serious relationship” with it. But he also complained about the European Union’s discrimination against Russia. Indeed, geography and history have ensured that Europe plays a crucial role in Vladimir Putin’s evolving view of Russian national interests, as it did for tsars and Soviet Party leaders before him. Russia lies in the strategic heartland of Eurasia and, since Peter the Great, has looked to Europe as an economic partner. Today Europe is the largest market for Russian energy, and its investments and exports have fueled Russian economic growth. But Europe since the 1940s has also been the United States’ key ally in containing Russia. So the USSR and post-Soviet Russia sought to minimize the impact of transatlantic cooperation on Russia’s freedom of maneuver. Europe’s current and future development remain a major influence on Russia’s foreign policy.

Where does Russia belong? In Europe or Asia? The maps illustrate the reason for this ambiguity. Over the centuries, Russian leaders have offered different answers, but for at least the past two centuries two things have been clear. Russia belongs to both Europe and Asia, but it is neither fully European nor fully Asian. This unique Eurasian identity has meant that Russia can adopt from both civilizations. But it has also meant that neither Europe nor Asia has accepted Russia as an integral part of its own orbit. Historically, the Russian state has interacted far more with Europe than with Asia. Indeed, Russia became a great power by virtue of its role in the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe. But its leaders have often eyed Europe warily, and European leaders certainly questioned whether Russia was a European country.

Russians have at best been reluctant Europeans, and this ambivalence continues today. So far, Europe has not succeeded in integrating Russia since 1991 largely because Russia has been neither willing nor able to accept the conditions for integration that are on offer and Europe has rejected what Russia insists are prerequisites for greater integration. The Ukraine crisis dramatically exacerbated tensions between Russia and Europe and brought that relationship to its lowest level since the fall of the USSR, a process of “escalated alienation.” But the inherent tensions and contradictions of Russia’s relations with Europe have been there since the end of the Soviet era. Russia has so far not decided where it belongs, and neither has Europe.

This chapter will examine how Europe and Russia have dealt with each other since the Soviet collapse, and ask whether Putin, in many ways the most “European” of Russian leaders in the past century, can reconcile his vision of Russian exceptionalism with the reality of a Europe facing unprecedented challenges to its own future. Where does Europe fit into Putin’s world?

Europe has historically been important for Russia in three distinct but interrelated ways: as a political idea, an economic model, and a geopolitical reality that enabled Russia to become and remain a great power. The idea of “Europe” involves concepts associated with the legacy of the Enlightenment: the importance of the individual, representative government, religious tolerance, limits on the power of rulers, the development of a Rechtsstaat —in which the rule of law prevails—and, later, the development of capitalism and democracy. For hundreds of years, until 1991, Russia was ruled first by tsars, who were absolute monarchs, and then by commissars and general secretaries, who faced few limits on their powers. Thus, the idea of Europe appealed to only the few progressive, intelligentsia, the Westernizers who wanted Russia to become truly European.

The question of why a Westernized Russian intelligentsia who looked to Europe in the nineteenth century was unable to prevail politically—and is still unable to gain much traction even today—was addressed by the British historian E. H. Carr sixty years ago:

From the Russian political equation, as from the economic equation, the middle class was absent. The Russian intelligentsia was no substitute for the Western middle class. Institutions and social groups, deriving directly from imitation of Western models, were quickly transformed in Russian conditions into something alien to the West and distinctively national. 3

It proved impossible to transplant Western normative practices such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and due process to Russia because Russia’s rulers were determined not to let them take root. The idea of Europe has repelled those who supported authoritarian rule, from the tsarist autocracy to the communist nomenklatura . 4

The current Kremlin also regards these freedoms as a threat. Putin views the European Union’s attempts to draw Russia into its “community of values” as a challenge to his system of “managed” or “sovereign” democracy.

Europe as an economic model has always had a different and broader resonance for Russians. From Peter the Great to Putin, Russian rulers have admired Europe as a collection of technologically advanced societies whose economic achievements were to be emulated even if their political systems were considered inappropriate for Russia’s unique conditions. Russian leaders have for centuries tried to import European economic practices and technology that could make Russia a more prosperous, stronger country. Peter the Great traveled incognito to Western Europe to learn its ways, especially its shipbuilding techniques. In 1697, he set off as “Peter Mikhailov” with a large entourage to Sweden, Germany, Holland, and England. “Wherever he went, Peter was dazzled by the technical sophistication of the West, while the West was horrified by his uncouth ebullience and barbaric rages: few royal trips have had so many diplomatic incidents.” 5

Three centuries later, Dmitry Medvedev, after a trip to Silicon Valley, was determined that Russia should build its own “innovation city.” He chose Skolkovo, a business complex in the suburbs of Moscow, as his project. Declaring that the complex would have its own laws protecting intellectual and other property rights, he partnered with businesses and universities in the US and Europe. He hoped to import Western scientists and their innovation culture by creating a small city where innovation would be directed from the top down. But, although Skolkovo has a respected business school and some successful businesses, it has not become a hub for start-ups, simply because innovation happens usually from the bottom up, not the top down. Although Russian attempts to import European modernization techniques have historically had some impact, their success always has been limited by the fact that Russia’s authoritarian political system discourages both political and technological innovation. Russia has for centuries been a borrower and importer of European technology. Today Russia still faces the challenge of becoming a twenty-first-century technological innovator, even though Putin has promised that it will become a leader in artificial intelligence.