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

What was the international component of Marxism-Leninism? Ironically, Karl Marx believed that international relations would be irrelevant once the revolution took place. “The worker has no country,” he wrote. 12Foreign policy was the preserve of the bourgeoisie. Once the proletariat was in power, there would be no more national states. Of course, in Marx’s thousands of pages of writing, he said very little about the future, only about the past and present. It was left to his Russian disciple Vladimir Lenin to explain how Marx’s ideas pertained to relations between states. Lenin’s major contribution was his treatise Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916, in which he sought to explain why World War One had broken out and why it would bring about the end of the capitalist system and the beginning of the socialist era. Without delving into the minutiae of Lenin’s arguments, Imperialism explained that capitalist countries would inevitably come to blows over competition for colonies, and the proletariat in both the metropolises and the colonies would rise up to defeat their oppressors. Long after Soviet citizens had become cynical about their ideology, this theory retained its appeal in third world countries—and one can hear echoes of these theories in contemporary Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela. Lenin remained a committed internationalist until his early death in 1924, as did his would-be successor Leon Trotsky. But Trotsky was no match for his rival, the one-time Georgian seminarian Joseph Stalin, who defeated him in the succession struggle in the late 1920s and eventually had him murdered with an ice pick in Mexico City in 1940.

Unlike the other Bolshevik leaders, Stalin had spent very little time abroad, spoke no European languages, and was suspicious and resentful of his more cosmopolitan comrades. But precisely because his rivals did not take him as seriously as they should have, he was able to outmaneuver them and amass power. Once he was securely in the Kremlin, Stalin realized the international revolution predicted by Marx and Lenin would not happen any time soon—if ever. So he redefined internationalism in 1928: “An internationalist is one who unreservedly supports the Soviet Union.” From then until the end of the USSR, Soviet ideology, under the guise of internationalism, became increasingly nationalistic. Behind the rhetoric was an understanding that Russian national interests should be paramount and that the Soviet Union’s Eastern European allies after 1945 should define their interests in terms of Moscow’s needs. During the height of Sino-Soviet hostility, when the USSR and China engaged in a brief border war in 1969, the struggle was explained in ideological terms, while the real reason was a classical struggle for territory, power, and influence. Therefore, by the end of the Soviet era, very few in the Soviet elite believed in the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. It was only when Gorbachev came to power that the USSR officially eschewed the doctrine of the inevitable clash between communism and capitalism and began to promote the idea of mutual interdependence. Nevertheless, the dialectical view of the world continued to influence many officials—including a mid-level KGB officer working in Dresden in the late 1980s.

While Soviet leaders espoused the official doctrine of internationalism and world revolution, another Russian view of the world was emerging, one developed by anti-communist exiles and one from which Vladimir Putin has increasingly drawn. Both of these ideologies grapple with issues that also engaged the nineteenth-century Slavophiles and Westernizers, namely why Russia had not followed a political and economic path similar to that taken by Europe and what it should aspire to be going forward. Eurasianism was a worldview developed in the 1920s by exiled Russians who despised communism and dreamed of a conservative utopia. But it also had its dissident adherents within the USSR, the most prominent of whom was Lev Gumilev, who spent much of his life in and out of labor camps. A rejection of Western values, Eurasianism stressed Russia’s unique civilization, which incorporated both European and Asian elements, including the coexistence of Christianity and Islam, celebrating Russia’s Asian heritage. 13The early Eurasianists argued that Russia had an inalienable right to rule over its imperial territories and urged Russia not to try to emulate the West. 14One conservative exiled Russian philosopher whose writings have influenced Putin is Ivan Ilyin, who accused the Bolsheviks of knowing nothing about Russia, failing to understand its unique national traditions, and deciding to “rape it politically.” 15Ironically, although they passionately disagreed, the Stalinists and their exiled opponents both believed that Russia had a unique destiny that set it apart from the West and legitimized its right to rule over large swaths of adjacent territory.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the official ideology abruptly disappeared, with nothing to replace it. The country had imploded and with it the justification for an expansionist foreign policy. Indeed, territories that had for two centuries or more been part of imperial Russia and the USSR suddenly emerged as fifteen independent states. How were the new—and old—elites to deal with this? Amid the chaos of the Soviet collapse almost immediately came the search for a new Russian Idea.

A small group of pro-Western liberals around the new president, Boris Yeltsin, initially sought to redefine Russia’s interests in a revolutionary way: Russia should join the West. Chief among them was a young diplomat, Andrei Kozyrev, who had worked in the Soviet Foreign Ministry and had decided to throw his lot in with Yeltsin in 1990, acting as an important liaison with the United States during the abortive August 1991 coup against Gorbachev. Yeltsin appointed him foreign minister in 1992, much to the consternation of the old Soviet diplomatic corps. Kozyrev’s position was clear: “Our choice is… to progress according to generally accepted rules. They were invented by the West, and I am a Westernizer in this respect…. The West is rich, we need to be friends with it…. It’s the club of first-rate states Russia must rightfully belong to.” 16Note the acknowledgment that the West had set the global rules and Russia had to accept them—a sentiment Putin later came to reject vigorously. 17

The idea that Russia could find greatness again by renouncing its uniqueness and otherness went against centuries of Russian traditions. Russia’s American and European interlocutors welcomed the apparent desire of Yeltsin’s reformers to become part of the West. But in their enthusiasm to reform and reimagine Russia, they misjudged the extent to which these desires were shared by the majority of the political class. Kozyrev’s own views of the West became more skeptical and ambivalent as the decade wore on. Boris Yeltsin replaced Kozyrev in 1996 with the veteran Soviet diplomat Yevgeny Primakov, who repudiated a pro-Western stance. Instead, he proposed an alliance among Russia, China, and India. 18Today Kozyrev lives in the United States, and his ideas have been uniformly rejected by his successors.

After the USSR’s collapse, the debate between post-Soviet Westernizers and Slavophiles reprised. This time the Westernizers called themselves Atlanticists, and the Slavophiles, Eurasianists, harking back to the 1920s. The immediate focus was on how Russia’s relations with the former Soviet states—the “near abroad,” as they preferred to call them—should evolve. Andrei Kokoshin was a prominent writer and member of the Duma, the newly elected parliament, which had taken its name from the prerevolutionary days. He advocated that Russia create, on the territory of the former Russian Empire and USSR, a new Eurasian state political structure. The Russian Federation would be the nucleus around which all other states would unite on a mutually beneficial basis. The Russian language would be an important factor in this reintegration. 19