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

The interaction between Russia and Germany has been one of the defining—and sometimes fateful—influences on the security and prosperity of Europe. In the twentieth century, Germany played a major role in the birth and death of the Soviet Union. After imperial Germany’s defeat in World War One and the Bolshevik Revolution, both “new” countries decided to forge a new relationship. The 1922 Treaty of Rapallo established diplomatic relations between Weimar Germany and Bolshevik Russia and was signed when both countries were outcasts in the international system. It was the midwife to the infant Soviet state’s birth as a European power and to its entry into the world of international diplomacy. At the end of World War Two, Germany was divided and Stalin helped himself liberally to economic reparations from the German Democratic Republic in order to help rebuild the Soviet Union’s shattered economy. Forty years later, in 1990, German unification was the final act in the decline and fall of the Soviet Union’s imperial project. It sounded the death knell for Soviet power in Eastern Europe and ultimately for the USSR itself. The Soviet–West German–East German triangle was the defining relationship of the European Cold War. Control over East Germany—and East Berlin—was the sine qua non of Moscow’s relationship with the West. The central nightmare for Soviet leaders was a revived and militarized united Germany looking—and marching—east, as it had in 1941. Hence Germany’s continuing gratitude toward Russia for having allowed unification to happen peacefully.

Historically, Germans played an important role in imperial Russia’s development—much more so than Russia played in Germany’s development. Russians have always admired Germany’s technological and organizational prowess. Peter the Great first brought Germans to Russia to help in developing the economy. Catherine the Great was even more convinced than Peter that Russia needed Germans to modernize its economy. She created a large German immigrant colony on the Volga River with the promise of no taxation so they could help develop Russia’s agricultural sector. There were also a significant number of aristocratic Germans who played an important role in the life of the imperial court. The house of Romanov often intermarried with the German nobility.

Germans also had a major impact on the development of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Russian political movements of the Right and the Left. Karl Marx inspired Russian radicals as they sought to overthrow the tsarist system. He himself was skeptical about whether imperial Russia was ready for a socialist revolution—since it had barely developed a capitalist system. But in one of history’s great ironies, Bolshevik Russia was the first country to put his ideas into practice, and Lenin certainly considered himself a Marxist. On the Right, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy influenced the rise of the Slavophile movement and Russian nationalism.

There were also less edifying meetings of minds between the Russian and German rulers. Both Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II were admirers of the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to prove there was a nefarious international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. (The pamphlet was in fact penned by the Russian secret police.) Both rulers attributed their forced abdications to a Jewish plot. Indeed, Nicholas took a copy of the pamphlet with him into his exile in Ekaterinburg, where the Bolsheviks ultimately killed him and his family. 33

The tangled history of German-Russian relations has left three main legacies whose echoes continue to resonate in the twenty-first century. The first is a powerful one and as relevant in the nuclear age as it was in the nineteenth century. It is the legacy of geography and resources and their impact on both countries’ national identities and national interests. The lack of natural frontiers between the two countries and the compatibility of their economies—Russian raw materials in exchange for German manufacturing—inevitably produced both cooperation and confrontation. Russians have traditionally depicted Germans as a major potential threat to their security, focusing on Germany’s invasion of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War. Germans likewise focused on the Russian threat during the Cold War. The heavily fortified Fulda Gap separated the two German states during the Cold War and would have been the route through which the USSR could have invaded West Germany. On either side were heavily armed East and West German soldiers eyeing each other warily.

The second legacy is that of two kinds of cooperation between Russia and Germany. The benign partnership—often in economic, scientific, and cultural fields—has had a positive impact on Russia and Germany and on their common neighbors in Central Europe. But there is also a malign cooperation between the two countries at the expense of their neighbors and wider Europe. The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact enabled the USSR to stay out of World War Two for two years, and its secret protocols divided territories in Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states between the two occupying countries. Soviet–East German collaboration in repressing their own populations and those in other countries reinforced a historical pattern of Russo-German cooperation to the detriment of the security and independence of the countries that lie between them.

The third legacy is of Russo-German enmity, which produced two world wars and made the divided city of Berlin the tensest outpost of the Cold War. Soviet–West German relations for the first two decades of the Cold War were largely confrontational. Then Willy Brandt became chancellor in 1969. An exile in Norway during World War Two, he came to power determined to mitigate the division of Germany by pursuing a more conciliatory policy toward the USSR. His Ostpolitik was based on the premise of “Change Through Rapprochement,” believing that Moscow would modify its policies on the two Germanys if Bonn were to offer incentives. 34He signed treaties normalizing relations with Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, and East Berlin, ushering in an era of détente that began to erode the Iron Curtain. All subsequent German leaders have been determined never to repeat the pattern of Russo-German enmity.

Although Gorbachev came to power intending to strengthen both the Soviet Union and its ties to its “fraternal” Eastern European allies, he eventually had to accept that he could no longer keep the Soviet empire intact by force. He allowed Germany to reunify without a shot being fired, and agreed that a united Germany could be a member of NATO. Germany remains grateful to him and his successors for permitting the Berlin Wall to fall, and remains committed to pursuing peaceful engagement. This gratitude is always mixed with a deep sense of historical responsibility for what the Nazis did to the Russians during a war in which twenty-six million Soviet citizens perished.

In 1994, Berlin hosted a formal send-off to bid farewell to the last Soviet troops leaving Germany. Boris Yeltsin was the guest of honor. The ceremony began at the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park. But later Yeltsin went off script. To the consternation of his German hosts (and his own retinue) an obviously inebriated Yeltsin seized the baton from the conductor of the military band. He then proceeded to conduct the band himself and sing along. His German hosts were dumbfounded. 35Later he admitted that he had drunk to ease the stress, explaining, “I snapped.” 36

It was a major challenge to arrive at this point. In 1990, Germany emerged from unification geographically larger but economically weakened by the staggering costs of unification (eventually costing $1.7 trillion) and unsure where its future lay. The USSR was still intact but ailing. In August 1991, while Gorbachev was on vacation on Crimea, a group of disgruntled hard-line Soviet officials unsuccessfully tried to oust him. He was held captive in his summer home, but the coup plotters were so inept that they failed to arrest Boris Yeltsin, then head of the Russian republic, who led the resistance to the coup. During the tense three-day coup, Germany worried whether the commitments Gorbachev had made—primarily the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Germany—would be kept. After the coup collapsed, Gorbachev returned to the Kremlin for another four months until he was ousted by Yeltsin in December 1991. Yeltsin’s ascension to the Kremlin also caused great concern in Germany because the emerging Russian state looked quite weak and unpredictable. The Germans were worried too by the prospect of an independent Ukraine, the military-industrial heartland of the USSR, which at that point was the third largest nuclear state in the world. But Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who in 1987 had said that he did not believe German unification would happen in his lifetime, was determined to develop a good relationship with the new occupant in the Kremlin and offered German assistance in rebuilding Russia.