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

The year 2014 was in many ways a watershed for the West in its relations with Russia. The annexation of Crimea and subsequent launch of a war in Southeastern Ukraine led the United States and its allies to question the basic premises of their assessments and expectations of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The Obama administration had realized that the “reset” policy it had pursued with Russia after 2009 ended once Putin returned to the Kremlin in 2012, after the four-year interlude during which he had traded places with Dmitry Medvedev. But Russia’s other major Western partner, Germany, reacted differently. After all, Germany had extensive business ties to Russia and imported significant amounts of Russian gas. Moreover, Berlin felt a strong historical responsibility to maintain close ties to the Kremlin both because of the twenty-seven million Soviet casualties inflicted by Germany during World War Two and out of gratitude for Mikhail Gorbachev allowing East and West Germany to reunite peacefully. But the Ukraine crisis changed all that for Chancellor Angela Merkel. She grew up in East Germany, conversed with Putin in both Russian and German, and was his chief Western interlocutor. She concluded that he frequently misled her about what was happening in Ukraine. This was especially true after the shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines plane over the Donbas region of Ukraine in July 2014, in which the Kremlin denied any involvement. Russia’s actions in Ukraine caused Germany to rethink its Ostpolitik—the policy of engaging Russia—and produced much greater solidarity between the United States and many of its key European allies. This surely was not the outcome Putin had sought when he sent his troops into Crimea and Southeastern Ukraine.

Most Western leaders had to admit that the expectations they had harbored after the Soviet collapse had been misplaced. They had hoped a post-communist Russia would eagerly cast off the shackles of a dysfunctional twentieth-century ideology—communism—and would embrace joining the democratic, capitalist modern world. That would also mean they would eschew an assertive foreign policy directed against Western interests. President Bill Clinton and his administration believed that democracies did not go to war with each other, and they focused on promoting democratic change inside Russia to help it become a less aggressive state that would work with the West.

But Americans, and to some extent Europeans, failed to understand the humiliation that millions of Russians felt at suddenly losing their “inner” and “outer” empire—the post-Soviet states and Eastern Europe. It was difficult for Russians to accept that they no longer had a natural right to dominate their neighborhood and exercise influence beyond their borders. Certainly the Germans understood this better than the Americans, given their dark twentieth-century history, and they warned the United States that it would take many decades for Russia to accept the loss of empire and status. From the Russian point of view, there was a double humiliation: the loss of the post-Soviet states and the fact that the United States and its allies had created a global order to which they expected Russia to conform. It was indeed a unique unipolar movement with a dominant United States and a Russia that had lost its ability to project power globally. No wonder it sought to recoup its power and influence as soon as it could.

But not everyone had the same expectations as the United States or Europe. China, India, and other countries in the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa viewed Russia through a different lens. They were less concerned about Russia becoming a democracy than about the United States—which they viewed with different degrees of wariness—becoming an even more dominant global power after the Soviet collapse. This was clear when the United Nations General Assembly in March 2014 voted to condemn Russia’s annexation of Crimea. While Western countries voted in favor and only a handful of countries, including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Syria, and North Korea, voted with Russia against the resolution, many countries abstained, including China, India, Brazil, and South Africa. These countries believe Russia has historically dominated its neighborhood and will inevitably seek to do so in the future. And they believe it is not their or anyone else’s business to foist Western democracy on a Russia that does not appear to desire it.

In grappling to understand why Russia has evolved so differently from what the West sought and expected, it has been tempting to personalize the answer: it is all due to Vladimir Putin and his small group of Kremlin insiders. Putin is indeed a striking leader, voted most powerful man in the world by prominent Western publications for several years. Whether he is riding a horse bare chested, salvaging an ancient amphora from a lake, descending to the bottom of the Black Sea in a submarine, or riding a Harley-Davidson motorcycle with the Night Wolves, a Russian biker gang, he cuts an imposing figure. In an opaque system where only one man appears to make decisions, it is tempting to attribute everything to the agency of the president. But that oversimplifies how Russia is ruled. Behind the new tsar stands a thousand-year-old state with traditions and self-understanding that precede Putin and will surely outlast him. He views himself as the defender of Russia’s historical legacy and is determined to restore Russia to its rightful place in the world, whether or not other countries like it.

To understand Putin’s world, one has to start with the history and geography—and, yes, culture—that shaped it. These factors explain how Russia has been able to bind its diverse population together through the development and propagation of a compelling historical narrative that largely depicts the West as its enemy. And, indeed, how it relies on that depiction for its own legitimacy.

A month after introducing that epic tour of Russian history at the Sochi Olympics, Vladimir Putin addressed an admiring audience in the ornate Kremlin Hall in March 2014 to proclaim triumphantly that Russia had annexed Crimea. His speech was replete with historical references to Russia’s greatness and its long ties to Crimea, bolstered by accusations that the West was trying to weaken Russia and that it repeatedly failed to respect Moscow’s interests. The combination of resentment, criticism of the West, and declarations of Russia’s greatness was vintage Putin, and it highlighted an uncomfortable truth for Russia’s Western partners. Contrary to what the United States and its allies had hoped and expected, Russia had not accepted its loss of empire. After seventy years of an experiment in building Soviet-style socialism, Moscow was interested in working with the West—but only on its own terms, not ones imposed by Washington or Brussels.

But perhaps the West should have reflected more on Russia’s historical legacy before assuming that Russians and their leaders would begin the long and painful journey away from an imperial mindset and would happily accept a new position as a junior partner to a dominant West. What were the closest analogies for the situation in which Russia found itself? Was the year 1918 relevant? World War One had destroyed three empires: the Ottoman, the German, and the Austro-Hungarian. A fourth, the Russian, had collapsed in revolution, but after a three-year bloody civil war, a new Soviet empire had emerged. Like the Russian and Soviet empires, the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian were multiethnic, landed empires ruled by the dominant ethnic group. But unlike the USSR, they were defeated in war. Their empires were broken up during and after the 1919 Versailles peace settlement. They had little choice but to accept the settlement because of their military defeat. Even then, it took many years for their political elites to accept the loss of empire.