Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

The key word here is ‘weakness’. Having lost the Cold War and the postwar world, and having squandered its oil profits and the remaining shreds of its reputation, Russia is incapable of constructively solving the world’s problems. Instead, it prefers to make them worse. It doesn’t welcome and settle refugees from the Third World on its own territory; instead, it sends wave after wave of them into Western Europe across its land borders with Finland and Norway, using them as an instrument of hybrid warfare in order to deepen the migration crisis in Europe and provoke anti-immigrant sentiment there. It doesn’t solve humanitarian and political problems in Syria, but meddles in an already existing conflict with selfish geopolitical aims, thus taking it to an even higher level. It doesn’t assist the objective international investigation of the shooting down of MH17, but tries to knock it off course, constantly putting forward versions that contradict each other. And Russia didn’t cooperate with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and international sporting federations in order to eliminate the epidemic of doping in modern sport, but tried to discredit and destroy WADA with information overload and attacks by hackers.

And it has to be said that for now it is all working out well for Russia. The combined efforts of the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Ministry, the Russia Today (RT) television channel and the individual assault squads of ‘people’s diplomacy’ – from football fanatics in European stadiums and so-called ‘Orthodox bikers’ touring Europe to hackers and Internet trolls flooding Western networks – are ensuring that the export of fear and uncertainty is growing at maximum volume with minimum cost. The Russian threat seems to loom over the West on every corner: in the movement of Assad’s forces and the provocations of the Donetsk separatists; in any cyberattack, be it breaking into the servers of the headquarters of the Democratic Party in the USA, to attacks on Yahoo’s servers (which, the Internet company confirmed, were linked to Russian government agencies); in the unidentified submarines in the Baltic Sea; in the waves of migrants in European cities; and in the financing of Donald Trump and Marine le Pen. It no longer matters to what extent Moscow is linked to each of these episodes, or whether it was a carefully planned special operation or simply the actions of individual patriotic citizens. Russia has created a shimmering space of uncertainty in which its role is demonized and, most likely, exaggerated; but that’s exactly what Putin is trying to do.

The amount spent on the production of fear is minimal: according to the RBK news agency, Russia’s operation in Syria came in at under one billion dollars: chickenfeed by Russian standards, the cost of just a few hours of the Sochi Olympics. As President Putin said cynically about Syria: ‘We can train our army there for quite a long time without having any real effect on state finances.’ [17] https://tass.ru/politika/2536355 (in Russian), 17 December 2015. Add in the cost of the Russia Today information agency, the work with the various Russian diasporas in the West and with politicians like Gerhard Schroeder and Silvio Berlusconi, and aid to right-wing populist and separatist parties in the West, and you still get a comparatively small sum; certainly, one that cannot be compared to the ruinous investments in the infrastructure of fear during the Cold War.

On the other hand, compared to thirty years ago the West today simply does not have either the necessary organization or the will to resist. Relaxed by a long period of peace, and demoralized by the postmodern, ‘post-heroic’ era, the West is passive, disunited and too dependent on consumerism: Russia exploits this weakness. Minimal funds were dug up to deal with the archetypal Russian threat, which had been dozing in the back of the West’s consciousness since Gorbachev’s time; but this threat has raised itself once more to its full height, like an emaciated bear coming out of hibernation in the spring. It is no coincidence that whenever their team plays away, Russian football fans – in the front row of Putin’s hybrid war – take with them huge banners with a roaring bear, or that the group of hackers who broke into the WADA server call themselves Fancy Bears. On their logo they have a bear wearing the Anonymous mask. Thirty years on, the symbolic economy of the Cold War has returned to its starting position: Russians blame Obama for everything, and Americans look for the Russian threat under the bed.

However, the West is not rushing to buy life insurance or security services from the ‘Russia’ defence factory. The racketeer’s strategy works when he manages to tie the client into his ‘protection’, his defence; but the West is not exactly falling over itself to enter into talks about ‘a new security system’, and it does not see Putin as a new Stalin of the 1945-type, with whom you have to sit down around the map of the world and divide it up into spheres of influence. That is why it is more accurate to compare Russia less with a racketeer than with a small-time thug. As they say, Russia may have got up off its knees, but it is still only squatting. Since he doesn’t have real strength, the thug holds the neighbourhood in fear and manipulates the law-abiding parts of society by issuing small threats. All he has in his arsenal is a collection of petty ritual gestures (such as beating up a weakling, nicking a mobile phone, cheeking the police, flashing a knife, baring his chest), all designed to show those around him that he’s prepared to break the law and violate convention. But the thug immediately shrinks in the face of any outside force or organized opposition. For that to happen, though, such opposition must be evident, and in the current system of international relations, with Obama on the way out and the EU weakened by Brexit, that strength simply isn’t there.

What next? At first glance, it seems that the aim of this hybrid war has been achieved: the world has started to listen to Russia and started to fear it; but this is on a par with the fear that the world has for Iran or North Korea, which have been global scarecrows for decades. Russia has not so much returned to the club of the leading world powers, which it was a part of before 2014, as turned into a worldwide horror story. And in this it should be compared not with Libya or North Korea, but with the Soviet Union at the start of the 1980s. In the very same way, that country squandered the resources and the respect it had, lost all its allies and, not having the strength to solve global problems, carried out a destructive foreign policy, from the arms race to the war in Afghanistan. Pathetic in its global pretensions and its dreams of past greatness, inflated on the outside, but empty within, the Soviet Union turned into a warhead stuffed full of rubbish, a shadow of what it once was. It seemed to be eternal and unshakeable – until it collapsed overnight. ‘This was forever, until it ended’, as the sociologist Alexei Yurchak wrote in his book on the collapse of the USSR. But projects such as this always end unexpectedly, ridiculously and unstoppably. [18] Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton University Press, 2005).

In the build-up to the Sochi Winter Olympics, the Olympic Flame continued its march around Russia’s wide expanses, accompanied by hundreds of security personnel, police, guard dogs and patriotic bikers (who nowadays carry out the role of the emperor’s mounted guard). Life along the route of the VIP cortège came to a standstill: whole towns froze; roads were closed; trains came to a halt. From being a celebration on the move, the Olympic Torch Relay became a mobile police operation. The centre of Moscow shut down for three days; in St Petersburg, thousands of soldiers cleaned Palace Square and cordoned off the city’s main thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt.