‘The Russians are bent on world dominance,’ argued the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition in January 1976. ‘And the Russians are playing to win.’ A few days later, the Soviet press called Margaret Thatcher ‘the Iron Lady’. Her uncompromising message reached far and wide. When a minor gas explosion woke up my neighbourhood not long after Thatcher’s subsequent election, the lady across the road had a common reaction. ‘I thought the Russians were coming!’ she told us. More persistent than any other aspect of the Russia Anxiety is her age-old fear: the Russians are coming. Speculation that Russia was going to invade its NATO neighbours, or the conviction that it was already engaged in ‘hybrid war’ with the United States itself, drove the international crisis of the 2010s. ‘Putin’s attack on the US is our Pearl Harbor,’ wrote two American journalists in a widely read piece of July 2018, as if a military assault had already taken place and thousands were dead.1
The Russia Anxiety is a syndrome with three sets of symptoms: fear, contempt and disregard. Disregard and contempt join with fear in a destructive cycle of relations with Russia. A crisis produces fear; the crisis is resolved, and disregard sets in; disregard causes a crisis; fear returns. ‘We won’t be hearing from them again,’ says ‘the West’, seeing Russia as a busted flush following a military or economic disaster. It forgets about Russia, reconfiguring Europe’s security, even changing its map, while Russia is in no position to voice objections. At such times of disregard, ‘the West’ does not really accept that Russia might have legitimate interests of its own. And when Russia eventually responds, rhetorically, defensively or pre-emptively, the West again fears Russia, misreading it, overestimating it, expressing itself with extravagant bombast.
There are no laws in history: the cycle of international relations that derives from the Russia Anxiety is a suggestive explanation, not a definitive one. But interpreting the cycle takes us towards the right questions, about how ‘great powers’ relate to each other and cause war or peace. It diverts us from the wrong assumptions, about guilt or innocence, fault and blame, and empty moral outrage. The great powers always misbehave, now and in the past, America and Britain, Germany and France, China and Japan – and, not least, Russia. They invade other countries, topple foreign governments while pretending not to, take sides in civil wars while claiming to look the other way, prepare for war while misleading their own populations. Too often for its own good, though, Russia has misbehaved from a position of weakness, when other powers have misbehaved from a position of strength.
Talk of Russia versus ‘the West’, meanwhile, is always overblown, because ‘the West’ has never been a cohesive category (and Russia has anyway been an element inside it). Even in the 2010s, when ‘the West’ was in theory fairly tightly aligned and recognizable within international organizations like NATO, there were major divisions, caused by such things as the euro crisis, energy supplies, Brexit and the election of Trump. And notwithstanding the noisy talk in much of the media, opinion on Russia was split across ‘the West’. Social media indicated that scepticism about the Russia Anxiety was rife, if unfocused; common sense suggested the same. Very many people doubted that the Russians really were coming, or that a wider war was a good idea. This was crucially the case in Germany, where eastern areas were partly ‘russified’ in their assumptions, the Left was sceptical about anti-Russian reactions, the energy industry was open for big business with Moscow, and the government was trying to keep it all together. There was nothing new about this. Fractures of class, ethnicity, gender, region and empire, not to mention arguments between governments, have always counterbalanced a fundamental Western unity associated with individual rights. After all, in the long centuries when the European powers were either divided by clashing alliances or at war with one another, there was no single ‘Western’ power bloc at all. Russia simply took its place in a wider landscape of European power politics.
These provisos remind us that the cycle of the Russia Anxiety is a simplification. But it is a helpful one. Let’s take two examples, from the 1850s and the 1990s.
Fear of Russia and an epidemic of Russophobia was the context in which the Crimean War broke out in 1853. By 1856, the alliance of Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire had defeated the Russian army. The Russians licked their wounds, retreating from European affairs and beginning a process of modernization. With Russia off the scene, the centre of Europe was completely transformed. First Italy was unified within a few years, then Germany was unified in little more than a decade, in both cases without reference to Russia’s legitimate interests in the European balance of power. As Russia recovered, the disdain of the other powers – especially Germany – gave way to fear again. As we will see in detail later in this chapter (and as was mentioned at the start of chapter 1) these German fears of Russia contributed to the outbreak of the First World War.
In the 1990s, Cold-War fear of the Soviet Union gave way to disregard for the wrecked new Russia. Following the collapse of the USSR and ‘defeat’ in the Cold War, and grappling with a devastated economy, the new Russian Federation was in no condition to play a role in international affairs that was appropriate to its size, history and nuclear arsenal. Russia was irrelevant: we won’t be hearing from them again. American and other Western politicians comfortably talked about the end of the Cold War as a victory, even though this was probably meaningless and certainly tactless. If Russia was a defeated power, as the rhetoric suggested, what were its people to make of the Americans who were promoting the economic reforms that were causing such great pain to so many of them? This was the time of Washington’s full-spectrum dominance, the new American Century, when democracy was a synonym for American power, and Russians feared that their country was disappearing demographically. It was during the 1990s and 2000s, in disregard of Russia’s interests, that NATO extended itself as far as Russia’s borders. Such a redrawing of the security map of Europe was bound to be destabilizing; it could only happen when Russia was too weak to say or do much about it. Given the logic of the Russia Anxiety’s cycle, though, Russia was bound eventually to respond, and Western disregard would give way to fear.
When Russia is out of synch with the international system, Europe as a whole is vulnerable. Europe is much more secure when Russia is at the centre of international affairs, an indispensable partner, given its due. The most spectacular examples of that were during the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War. But the willingness to take advantage of moments of Russian weakness has often made this impossible. Instead, ‘the West’ has been foxed by the feedback loop of the Russia Anxiety. Unwilling to plan for the medium term, makers of foreign policy in Western capitals have tended to assume that moments of Russian weakness will last indefinitely. Thinking that ‘now’ is forever, policymakers don’t imagine the world of tomorrow, when Russia recovers and exploits their own weaknesses mercilessly. Too often they fall instead for the diplomacy of ‘instant history’, the flawed concept of how past and present are connected that we debated in chapter 1.
In this chapter, we’ll look at three things: the legitimacy of Russia’s international interests, disregarded by the Russia Anxiety; the cycle of the Russia Anxiety; and the normality of Russia’s international relationships and diplomatic conduct, which of course the Russia Anxiety cannot see.
What can ‘normal’ mean? Russia is one of history’s exceptions: it is the world’s largest country with some extreme experiences in its past. Risk-averse, defensive, prickly, fearful, Russia has had to deal with the reality of overstretch brought on by the world’s longest borders. It has faced uncertainty and danger, and has been prone to reimagine plausible threats as existential crises. Such themes have run through centuries of Russian history. And yet Russia’s responses have usually been predictable. It has behaved in the ‘normal’ way associated with great-power politics and the diplomatic norms of the day. Russian invasions and foreign occupations have been the exception rather than the rule and can’t be explained as an historical tendency.
And what about legitimacy? We might think of a cardinal example. ‘Russia’ – actually the Soviet Union – was a country with ordinary and legitimate international interests even at the peak of its ideological distinctiveness and historical weirdness in the two decades that followed the Russian Revolution. With Germany unmistakably a ‘bad actor’ in the international arena by the 1930s, the inability of Britain and France to recognize Soviet interests, even when they aligned with their own, was ultimately devastating. Alexandra Kollontai was the Soviet diplomatic celebrity of the time. This situation was her purgatory. What follows is a case study of the need to recognize Russia’s legitimate interests in European affairs, and not to disregard them.
Alexandra Kollontai lived for the Russian Revolution and suffered for its place in the world. Born into the noble Domontovich family in St Petersburg in 1872, when Alexander II was on the throne and Marx’s First International was eight years old, she grew up in a progressive and modern household. Her mother, for whom she was named, dressed her for comfort and hygiene, and her father, Mikhail, was gentle and scholarly. In 1877, when the Russian and Ottoman Empires went to war with each other, Mikhail served as a staff colonel. It seemed a just cause. The Bulgarians, who were Slavic and Orthodox kin of the Russians within the Ottoman Empire, rose up – quixotically – in 1876. A year later, Russia and Turkey were at war over the matter. The Russian victory led to the creation of an independent Bulgaria, granted statehood at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Mikhail Domontovich was promoted to general and given the post of Russian vice-consul in Sofia. The six-year-old Alexandra Kollontai went to live in the new Bulgarian capital, but the family were back in St Petersburg just over a year later, and were there when Alexander II was assassinated in March 1881. Mikhail, moderate and open-minded, was briefly arrested on the basis of a personal connection with an alleged terrorist. The fact that two of the six people hanged for the crime were women captured the girl’s imagination, though not yet her sympathy.2
These two themes – the projection of Russian power and the projection of Russian socialism – ran through Kollontai’s life. She had to face the questions of war and peace that dominated her time. No retiring daughter of the nobility, she had a rigorous schooling, learned history and literature with professors from St Petersburg University, trained as a teacher and married a Marxist called Vladimir Kollontai. She learned about the revolutionary cause. What concerned her most was what it could do for women. As a young mother – her son Mikhail was born in 1894 – this had a practical dimension, born of experience. But it was about sex, too. She praised the fulfilling possibilities of open marriages based on ‘free love’, just as she deplored the sexual harassment that such licence could give to men. The key was revolution. Without it, real liberation of any kind was impossible. An end to property would mean an end to prostitution; the opening up of marriage would eliminate women’s double burden of paid and domestic labour. She had affairs herself. ‘The question arises whether in the midst of all these exciting labours and Party assignments I could find time for intimate experiences, for the pangs and joys of love,’ she wrote, looking back, after the Revolution. ‘Unfortunately, yes!’3
She stepped onto the international revolutionary circuit, learning economics in Zurich, writing about workers in Finland, joining the Bolsheviks, standing on the barricades in 1905, joining the Mensheviks, going to Germany to learn from socialist women, fleeing Russia when the police put out a warrant for her arrest, ending up in Berlin, befriending Klara Zetkin, travelling on to Brussels, Paris and London, and writing about feminism in the reading room of the British Museum. She agitated for Marxism and the ‘woman question’ in Scandinavia and the United States. Then she came back to Petrograd in early 1917 to play the fullest possible role in the revolution. Her son was grown up. She was forty-five. Kollontai had led a revolutionary life across the Western hemisphere, given form by her gender and her conviction that the revolution could transform sexuality for the happiness and liberation of all. ‘It was not sexual relations that defined the moral profile of a woman,’ she later wrote, ‘but her value in the sphere of labour, of socially useful labour.’4 Sex was something women had a right to as much as men did; it was not a moral category to divide them. This made her a controversial choice to talk about questions of Soviet war and peace on the European stage. When she later became ambassador to Sweden, her hosts lost no opportunity to dismiss her as an oversexed harridan, before she won them round.
Kollontai had a distinguished career in Soviet government during the Revolution and Civil War, blending the skills of publicist, intellectual, organizer, ideologist, writer, campaigner, and administrator. When the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, Kollontai was elected Commissar of Social Welfare. She liked to recount that when she showed up at the old ministry building, the commissionaire, still in tsarist regalia, told her to come back during visiting hours. Still, she immediately organized a conference of female workers. Hundreds of delegates attended, mostly from the capital, but also from Moscow and surrounding towns. On the basis of such meetings, Kollontai used her authority to prepare legislation to support mothers and children. She also had Party roles, famously leading the new Women’s Department, or Zhenotdel. But she sided with the Workers’ Opposition in protest against the narrowing of Party democracy at the end of the Civil War. Marginalized and underemployed, she was given a way out. The Soviet Union did not have proper diplomatic recognition in the early 1920s, but it did conduct informal diplomacy and trade negotiations. Kollontai was sent to Norway as a member of the Soviet trade delegation in 1922. When her head of mission was transferred to Ankara, and diplomatic relations with Norway were formalized, she found herself promoted to ambassador. Transferred to Sweden in 1930, she continued to represent the Soviet Union in Scandinavia for more than twenty years, notwithstanding an unhappy nine-month spell in Mexico.
She could be technocrat, revolutionary and old-style intelligent. A master of detail, she learned the facts about commodities and local politics alike. In October 1923, for example, she caught the train to Berlin to conduct trade negotiations with the Soviet Union’s main diplomatic interlocutor, Weimar Germany, a role which required her to know all about a range of goods from bread to oil.5 She conformed to the needs of court protocol, but remained a revolutionary. In December 1922, addressing trade unionists in The Hague, she attracted support and admiration for her promise that the Bolsheviks would not cease to pursue the struggle for women’s equality.6 But despite her Bolshevism, she remained her parents’ daughter, balancing a commitment to people and ideas with the requirements of power and revolution. ‘Alexandra Kollontai simply could not fail, situated as she was in her visible diplomatic post, but become the centre of gravity of a significant part of the Left-inclined Swedish intelligentsia,’ remembered an awe-struck junior colleague who was later an adviser to Brezhnev and Gorbachev. ‘And that’s what she became.’7
This was the combination of values which in other contexts could be mutually exclusive – Bolshevism tempered by warmth, revolutionism alongside humanity – that she brought to the conduct of Soviet foreign policy. In the 1930s, Scandinavia was far from a backwater, and together with a couple of other old survivors, her friends Ivan Maisky, ambassador to London, and Maxim Litvinov, long-time commissar for foreign affairs until Molotov replaced him in 1939, she remained a venerable diplomatic voice, strangely indispensable. Against the odds, she was not consumed by the Terror. Kollontai stayed in Sweden until 1945, when she came home to a busy working retirement. She died of a heart attack seven years later, a few months before Stalin succumbed to a stroke.
On 18 September 1934, the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations. The application process had been a long one. ‘Only now,’ wrote Litvinov to Kollontai, ‘can we properly take our place in the international arena.’8 One year on, Kollontai was invited to join the Soviet delegation to the XVI Assembly of the League. She arrived in Geneva on 5 September and checked in at the Richmond Hotel. The Soviet delegation took up all of the second floor and had access to a miserable dining room, though Litvinov had a two-room corner suite. Kollontai was there to talk about women’s rights, relating to the recent Montevideo Convention on gender equality. The backdrop to the Assembly, though, was the League’s response to Italy’s looming war on Abyssinia: yet another colonial war by a Western European power on an African people, but one of particular ferocity. In the wider context of the 1930s it warranted sanctions, and seemed part of an emerging reckoning with fascism. In the same year, 1935, the Soviet Union concluded a defensive pact with France. Both countries were alarmed by the rise of Germany, as well as the militarization of Italy.
For Kollontai, being in Geneva reminded her of revolutionary exile before the First World War. Yet coming to the League of Nations demonstrated the different set of international questions that Europe faced twenty years on, and the new style of diplomacy that now existed to confront them. No longer were secret negotiations and ad hoc conferences of statesmen the norm. Half the players in European diplomacy had changed, with the post-war disappearance of four European empires. The new format was structured and institutional. ‘In the League, and especially in the commissions, they don’t like verbosity on issues of principle,’ Kollontai recorded in her diary while she was in Geneva. ‘It is, probably, just the way it is, but for us the League is a world arena and we have to be able to use it for the USSR and in the matter of women’s rights.’9
This was a revolutionary diplomacy. It took place in a transformed environment, one which was unable to prevent the outbreak of another European war, but which offered a precedent for the United Nations a decade later. If the USSR had long given up on using foreign policy to export revolution, its diplomacy still had an ideological dimension. After all, the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs had brought Kollontai, one of the world’s leading feminists and also one of their busiest ambassadors, from Stockholm to Geneva to talk about women’s rights. Stalin would soon insist on greater ideological purity in the conduct of foreign affairs, describing, for instance, the non-communists in left-wing Popular Front governments in Spain or France as ‘social fascists’. Soviet diplomacy was revolutionary in another sense. It was committed to defending the Revolution. This was its raison d’être. This meant ditching the ‘social fascist’ rhetoric when a higher purpose, of national defence, conflicted with it. After all, Stalin had declared during the First Five-Year Plan that industrialization and agricultural collectivization had to proceed at such a breakneck speed precisely because the Soviet Union had ten years to prepare itself for invasion from the West.
Defending the Revolution meant avoiding risks, seeking allies where one could find them, and preparing for the ultimate conflict with Germany. In 1936, the Soviet Union sent military support to the Republican side – a whole ragbag of Leftists – in the Spanish Civil War, where they fought against Germans and Italians as well as Franco’s fascists. Britain and France declined to support the Republic, contributing thereby to the Fascist victory. Kollontai and others worked to gain capitalist allies, ultimately fruitlessly. She was as worried as anyone when the Nazi–Soviet Pact was agreed in the absence of an alliance with Britain and France. But she helped secure Swedish neutrality when the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway in the spring of 1940.
Adapting to the manners of the Swedish royal court one day, and expounding on international feminism the next, Kollontai was the face of a radically new Bolshevik foreign policy as much as a traditional Russian diplomacy. It was a matter of Soviet Russia’s legitimate interests. Defending the Revolution had become a legitimate thing for the Soviets to do, and even the Swedish king understood it.
Few questions in European history seem easier to answer than why the Second World War broke out. It was a result of German aggression. Prefigured in Nazi ideology, built into the logic of Nazi economic, foreign and racial policy, and clarified beyond doubt by its annexations of Austria and Czechoslovakia, Germany’s aggressive intentions were there for all to see. When the Wehrmacht invaded Poland in 1939, France in 1940 and the Soviet Union in 1941 – not to mention their attacks on Scandinavia, the Balkans, the Low Countries, Central Europe, North Africa, their aerial bombardment of Britain and their destruction of Jews everywhere – they were prosecuting a war of extermination for a Greater Germany. They were driven in part by an economic need to annex land in the East; by its nature, as long as Nazi Germany existed, it could not be contained. Their task was made easier by the repertoire of violent practices which Europe’s global empires had developed, and which the Germans now deployed within Europe itself. The ultimate aim of racial purity required violence against Jews (and Slavs) not just inside Germany’s 1933 borders but also beyond them.
Yet the clarity of this reasoning is obscured by the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939 to June 1941, the short-lived non-aggression treaty whose secret clauses permitted Soviet control of eastern Poland and the Baltic states. Was the pact a legitimate measure to delay a very probable war, a fair strategy on Stalin’s part in the age of great-power imperialism? Stalin thought so. Meanwhile, despite her incomprehension at the agreement with the Nazis, Alexandra Kollontai was only one major Soviet diplomat apparently pursuing legitimate means, of talks with all possible interlocutors, and legitimate ends, of frantic war-avoidance at all costs. Or does the pact show that Soviet policy in the run-up to war was opportunistic and unlawful, facilitating German aggression for the sake of a Soviet agenda that was itself expansionary and conspiratorial? This is, after all, the long-running assumption of the Russia Anxiety, and it continues to shape European politics. In 2018, one former Polish foreign minister compared work on the Nord-Stream 2 gas pipeline between Germany and Russia to the Nazi–Soviet pact.10
Seen in these terms, the historical question has become a moral problem. Some historians think of Hitler and Stalin as two profiles on either side of the same totalitarian coin; the Nazi-Soviet pact was the moment of truth, and the Soviet occupation of part of Poland and the Baltic states its ultimate reality. ‘Hitler and Stalin were birds of the same totalitarian feather,’ writes a recent historian of these matters. ‘[F]ar from being anomalous, the Nazi–Soviet pact might be seen as symptomatic of their shared misanthropy.’ Another historian writes: ‘German policies of mass killing came to rival Soviet ones between 1939 and 1941, after Stalin allowed Hitler to begin a war.’11 The notion of Nazi–Soviet equivalence is, understandably enough, toxic in contemporary Russia, and it troubles many historians from other countries. In the age of Trump and Putin, the argument has come into vogue. It seems to possess a logic of its own: that Hitler is equivalent to Stalin, who is equivalent to Putin, who is equivalent to Trump, who has something of Hitler about him, while Ukraine is equivalent to Czechoslovakia, and the two locations of peace negotiations – Minsk (2014–15) and Munich (1938) – are really the same place. A. J. P. Taylor, the great historian-provocateur of the last century, had no truck with this kind of reasoning. Writing about the origins of the Second World War twenty years after the events in question, he worried that historians were fighting contemporary, not historical, battles, especially about ‘appeasing’ the dictators of their own day, not those of the 1930s. ‘Historians often dislike what happened or wish that it had happened differently,’ he wrote. ‘There is nothing they can do about it.’12
A. J. P. Taylor was responding to criticism of his infamous book The Origins of the Second World War, which was published in 1961. A famous troublemaker, Taylor, as usual, wanted to overturn conventional wisdom, and he pushed the envelope with his argument that Hitler was a rational statesman in the Bismarckian mould.13 But Taylor stuck close to the documents, was a master of old-fashioned diplomatic history, and some of his other conclusions have withstood decades of scrutiny. For Taylor, the Nazi–Soviet pact was a diplomatic deal of the kind that had been common in Europe since the eighteenth century. The Soviet Union was a great power facing a devastating threat from another great power, Germany. It was conducting a normal great-power foreign policy: seeking national security and allies, while avoiding invasion and war. Even though Stalin’s domestic policies were extraordinarily bloodthirsty, his foreign policy was quite ordinary. It was as legitimate as that of the other great powers, not least Britain and France.
In this light, Alexandra Kollontai’s diplomacy makes sense. She was committed to defending the Revolution: a ‘communist’ aim that required ‘normal’ diplomacy. Within her own arenas, in Scandinavia, the League of Nations, and in other international meetings, her methods were usually conventional, even if her ultimate goals were radical. Viewed from Stalin’s office, too, the immediate purpose of Soviet foreign policy was a traditional one: to prevent the Western powers, which wanted to put a stop to the construction of socialism, from invading Soviet territory. This was not an irrational fear. After all, if a revolution had taken place in Russia before 1914, the Western powers would probably have invaded, invoking monarchical solidarity, in order to strangle the first socialist state at birth. When it came in 1917, though, the revolution was saved by the great powers, by their actions and omissions. The armies of Britain and France could barely advance beyond their own trenches, let alone stop a revolution more than a thousand miles to the east, while the Germans, fighting the Russians, were only too pleased to help the anti-war Bolsheviks and allowed Lenin to travel back to Petrograd from his exile in Zurich. Following the German defeat, Britain and other capitalist powers faced no obstacle to intervene during the Civil War against the Bolsheviks. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet intelligence services informed the Kremlin of constant Western threats. Objectively speaking, these threats only became urgent or even realistic as late as 1938, but the barbed language and mixed signals of the Western powers always made the threat seem real in the minds of the Bolsheviks. As we’ll see again in chapter 10, Stalin himself made the point at a famous speech to industrial bosses in February 1931. ‘We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries,’ he said. ‘We must catch up in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed.’ The task of Soviet foreign policy was, therefore, to ensure that the Soviet Union was not attacked during that decade, that it had the chance to fulfil the promise of the Revolution. When the Germans invaded in June 1941, Stalin’s disbelieving and despairing response was that he and his team had squandered their inheritance from Lenin.
This does not mean that Stalin pursued Realpolitik abroad and conspiratorial, ideology-soaked violence at home, that he was simultaneously modern statesman and totalitarian dictator. For Stalin’s most recent biographer, the same worldview ran through Stalin’s foreign and domestic policies: the tendency to divide the world into two camps, of friends and enemies. Britain, France, and Germany were all potential enemies, capitalist destroyers of one type or another, and a nimble policy should find the moments of shared interest that allowed deals to be struck with whichever partner was most willing, delaying international conflict and enabling domestic revolutionary change to keep unfolding.14 The greatest threat came from Germany. France was the most likely anti-German ally. But why, if the political weather changed and made it more likely in the short term, should the Kremlin rule out a temporary pact with the Germans? The aim, after all, was to delay a German invasion for as long as possible. It was not to expand beyond existing borders. The strategy was cautious, not reckless.
In May 1935, the French foreign minister (within weeks, prime minister), Pierre Laval, came to Moscow and agreed a mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union. It was not uncontroversial in France, but the agreement was ratified in February and March 1936. Franco–Soviet cooperation was not easy, thanks to residual suspicion, especially among military leaders, the opposition of the British, and Stalin’s ‘two camps’ worldview. The predicament was made worse by the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936. Spain’s tragedy was precipitated by the polarization of Left and Right. It was a Spanish war with Spanish causes, but for many outsiders it seemed to reflect the troubled politics of Europe as a whole. The Spanish split took on a continental scale with the interventions of the USSR and Nazi Germany in the conflict. Germany and Italy, prefiguring their alliance, joined the fascist side; Soviet involvement, anticipating the lack of an anti-Nazi coalition before 1941, scared off the British and the French from offering any assistance to the Spanish Republic. As a result, Franco’s victory became more likely. The experience worried the Soviet government. It demonstrated the growing power of Germany, confirmed that Nazi ideological obsessions were focused on foreign as much as domestic policy, and exposed again the difficulty of forging an anti-Nazi agreement with the Western powers of Britain and France. Meanwhile, the British government sought to undermine military cooperation between the French and Soviet armies, seeing the Soviets as an unreliable anti-German force. But this was not a universal view in London. Lord Vansittart, permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, and Winston Churchill, loose cannon, repeatedly met the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, to pursue the alternative of a British–Soviet accord.15
Churchill illustrated the pragmatism that ran through the minds of those from Moscow and London who favoured an agreement. No one had hated communism more. From the War Office in 1919, he had ordered British troops to intervene on the side of the Whites in the Russian Civil War. As home secretary between 1924 and 1929, he always had the domestic red menace in his sights. He spoke of ‘the baboonery of Bolshevism’. But during the 1930s, Churchill was convinced that it was Germany, not the Soviet Union, that was the danger to Britain and her Empire. In the run-up to the Czechoslovak crisis in 1938, Churchill wanted a ‘grand alliance’ of ‘England’, France and ‘Russia’ against Germany just as show trials were taking place in Moscow.16 He had the capacity to weigh up the national interest without succumbing to the Russia Anxiety. But the decision-maker was Neville Chamberlain, not Winston Churchill, and time was running out.
The problem was Czechoslovakia. Germany had already started expanding in Europe. Reoccupying the Rhineland (March 1936) could be justified as the return of German territory that was unfairly removed at Versailles. Annexing Austria (March 1938) could be explained away as a Germanic union based on substantial Austrian support; it was only after 1945 that the Austrians rewrote themselves as ‘Hitler’s first victim’. Yet Czechoslovakia was another matter.
In the autumn of 1938, the Germans were threatening to enter the Sudetenland, that part of Czechoslovakia with a majority of German inhabitants. This was a first-rate European crisis. If the French intervened to defend Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union would be obliged to support them, according to the terms of the Franco-Soviet treaty. This raised logistical questions for the Soviets as they did not share a border with the Czechs. They seemed to be readying themselves nonetheless. But it became an academic question. The French made it clear that they would not get involved.
British non-involvement was still more ostentatious. Britain’s prime minister went all the way to Munich to avoid war, his famous flight lit up for posterity by the flashbulbs of the world’s newspapermen. The Munich summit of September 1938 between the German chancellor and the British prime minister was the third of three ‘appeasement’ meetings. Chamberlain stepped back from confrontation, accepting Hitler’s promises about German intentions in Czechoslovakia, and claiming that he had secured ‘peace in our time’. Of course, the Germans invaded anyway shortly after. The chance to nip Nazi expansionism in the bud and avoid global war had been missed. Interpreted ever after as the failure to stand up to a tyrant, ‘Munich’ is eternal shorthand for weak, short-termist, counterproductive diplomacy. Churchill himself came to dispute this reading of Munich, in a generous tribute when Chamberlain died in 1940.17 Tony Blair, as determined as Churchill never to be an appeaser, said similar things in his autobiography.18 And A. J. P. Taylor saw the ‘appeasers’ as men who were simply doing their best to avoid another terrible European war, who acted within the political culture of their time and according to the expectations of their electorate. Few thought that Britain was guilty for the outbreak of the Second World War, but ‘Munich’ still became a codeword for diplomatic guilt by omission.
For some people, Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler are never far away. ‘We run the risks of repeating the mistakes made in Munich in 1938,’ David Cameron was reported to have said – about Ukraine – in September 2014. In the same month, an EU official who was present at EU–Russia–Ukraine talks warned from Brussels 2014 that ‘it is Munich 1938’. Five months earlier, Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster and democracy campaigner, wrote a Time article on Ukraine under the headline ‘Obama’s Munich moment’, citing the words of John Kerry, the United States secretary of state, who had called the Syrian crisis ‘our Munich moment’ in September 2013.19
For seventy-five years, almost every diplomatic crisis has been compared to Munich 1938. It is as if thousands of years of international history have yielded only a single reference point to guide those who make and report on foreign affairs. For Anthony Eden during the Suez Crisis of 1956, Nasser was Hitler; for George H. W. Bush after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Saddam Hussein was Hitler. The problem derived in part from the need to dress up a foreign policy that is understandably and always interest-driven – such as the need to reset the equilibrium of oil distribution in the Middle East after Iraq invaded Kuwait – in the moral language of standing up to the schoolyard bully, personified by Hitler. ‘The “we must stand up to Putin as we did to Hitler” line is pure schoolboy politics,’ wrote the senior diplomat Tony Brenton at the height of the Ukraine–Russia crisis of 2014. ‘Putin, of whom I saw a fair amount as UK ambassador to Moscow, is not an ideologically driven fanatic, but much closer to Talleyrand – the calculating, pragmatic rebuilder of his country’s status in the world.’20
Talleyrand was Napoleon’s leading diplomat; he was still in office during the July Monarchy in the 1830s. As foreign minister, he led the French delegation at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the peace conference that marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars, complete with a diplomatic stellar cast: not just Talleyrand, but also Metternich, Castlereagh, and Alexander I. After pushing Napoleon all the way back from Moscow to Paris, Alexander was keen to accept the garlands of victory at the Congress, and to project Russia’s undisputed status as a top-table powerbroker. The aim of the Congress of Vienna, though, was not to advance Russia’s interests, or any other single power’s interests, at the expense of wider security; the goal was to prevent the outbreak of another major war. It was important to control France, to strip it of its Napoleonic territorial gains, and to impose reparations, but not to eliminate France’s place in European diplomacy. France had been defeated, but she still possessed legitimate interests. Europe was made less safe by disregarding these. Russia could not be allowed to push its borders much further westwards, but it was indispensable to the diplomatic process. And Britain had to be included in the system, not allowed to go its own way.21
Instead, a Concert of Europe should maintain a balance of power, securing the interests of the victorious and the defeated alike, and keeping peace between them as these interests changed and their relationships waxed and waned. As Talleyrand pointed out, in Europe’s complex map of large empires and small states, the balance was not secure, and peace would always be vulnerable. ‘Such a situation only admits of a very artificial and precarious equilibrium which’ – he wrote – ‘can only last for as long as some large states continue to be animated by a spirit of moderation and justice that will preserve it.’22 As we saw in chapter 1, the Congress of Vienna opened the way to a revival of the Russia Anxiety, especially in France, as fear of Russia’s military prowess, and shame of defeat at its hands, set in. But Nicholas I, who was tsar at the height of this post-Napoleonic outbreak of the Russia Anxiety, was charming in company and keen to secure ties with the other great powers, notwithstanding his reactionary reputation. He visited Britain twice. The balance held until the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853.
At its core, the Concert of Europe assumed that peace could be maintained when each power respected the basic interests of each other power, and responded to crises in a fluid and pragmatic way. Peace would not come by generating ambitious shared interests, of the type to which the United Nations is, in theory, committed. From the Russian perspective in the twenty-first century, it can seem that international organizations – the complicated and institutionalized successors of the Concert of Europe – simply do not accept Russian interests as legitimate. Combining hard power with a rhetoric of freedom, NATO has extended itself as far as Russia’s borders. A European Concert that was charged with protecting states’ most basic interests and rebalancing international relationships might have found a better compromise than this.23 It might also have done a better job of protecting the interests of Ukraine. Few approaches seem less in the spirit of pan-European values or less designed to promote durable security than the suggestion in 2013 that Ukraine now had to choose between the EU and Russia.
Far from being demolished in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War framework for international relations survives, both in the institution of NATO and in the mentalities of policymakers and observers everywhere, from Moscow to Brussels to Washington (via London). In such a framework, it becomes difficult to recognize that Russia has any legitimate interests in European affairs at all. It would seem impossible to explain the crisis in Ukraine without taking account of this major structural failure of international politics.24
In February 2007, when Russia and America were still cooperating in many areas of foreign policy, Vladimir Putin went to Munich to make a robust speech about Russia’s place in the world. By sharply criticizing American ‘unipolar’ domination, he was seen as bringing a chill into foreign affairs, and his comments have become notorious. But much of the speech was a plea for Russia to be respected and for its interests to be taken seriously. Putin’s speech in Munich 2007 suddenly seemed a more useful reference point for explaining international affairs in the twenty-first century than Chamberlain’s umbrella in Munich 1938.
In August 2008, the south Caucasian country of Georgia, formerly a republic of the Soviet Union and before that a territory of the Russian Empire, attacked Russian forces on its border. Russia had long supported autonony for Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which were sovereign Georgian territory but pro-Russia separatist enclaves. Georgia had finally succumbed to what it saw as a provocation. A major Russian incursion into Georgian territory followed. The war lasted five days. Russia succeeded, at least temporarily, in postponing the accession of Georgia into NATO. The brief conflict, played out while the Olympic Games were taking place in Beijing, was a shocking moment: terrifying and tragic for those seeking shelter from the onslaught in Tbilisi and elsewhere, but shocking because Russian foreign policy has historically been more measured.
Moscow’s complaint was that NATO was wilfully expanding into zones which exposed Russia to undue risk, with its long borders, diverse neighbours and complex security dilemmas. In 1990, a reunified Germany stayed in NATO, rather than becoming a neutral power, and in 1999, the pass was sold when Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic became members. Seven more countries in East-Central Europe, including Estonia and Latvia on Russia’s border, joined in 2004. NATO’s strategy was to continue to enlarge, projecting American power, the reach of global financial institutions based in the United States, and the promises of Western values. On 4 April 2008, at the time of a landmark NATO summit in Bucharest, Putin outlined his countervailing point: ‘It is obvious that today there is no Soviet Union, no Eastern bloc and no Warsaw Pact. So NATO exists to confront whom?’ He talked about the expansion of NATO into former Soviet spheres of influence and territory, and up to the present-day Russian border, disputing the avowedly peaceful intention of this expansion and the argument that it was not an anti-Russian step. ‘You know,’ he told the assembled journalists, ‘I have a great interest in and love for European history, including German history. Bismarck was an important German and European political leader. He said that in such matters what is important is not the intention but the capability.’ Putin homed in on the oft-repeated grievance. ‘We have withdrawn our troops deployed in Eastern Europe, and withdrawn almost all large and heavy weapons from the European part of Russia. And what happened?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘A base in Romania, where we are now, one in Bulgaria, an American missile defence area in Poland and the Czech Republic. That all means moving [NATO] military infrastructure to our borders.’25
Eight years later, during a sequence of interviews with the American film director Oliver Stone, Putin expanded on this point.26 He argued that the logic of NATO (‘the Atlantic camp’, or America writ large) required it to have ‘an external enemy’ – Russia. There was a constancy about this. When Stone asked what changed when a new American president is elected, at least in Washington’s interactions with Russia, Putin replied, ‘Almost nothing.’ Putin went on, ‘Everywhere, especially in the USA, there is a strong bureaucracy which in effect rules the world.’ Was this a conspiratorial ‘deep state’, or just really-existing international institutions like NATO, as well as the top officials who serve long-term in national administrations, regardless of parties or elections? If it was a conspiratorial world view, it has typically been attributed to Putin’s early KGB career. But the foreign policy of Putin’s third term actually fitted inside a longer heritage, one that was illuminated by the origins of the world wars, with their stories of zero-sum blocs, unreliable would-be allies and Western disregard of Russia’s interests. If a weakened, distracted Russia had no option but to respond to NATO expansion between 1990 and 2004 with risk-avoidance and unremitting pragmatism, its embrace of risk thereafter seemed to reflect the cyclical turns of the Russia Anxiety.
But were Russia’s reflex kicks into Georgia, Crimea and east Ukraine part of a grand strategy to bring down Western democracy? If they were, they can scarcely have been prompted by legitimate foreign-policy concerns on Russia’s part. For Michael McFaul, the US ambassador in Moscow from 2012 to 2014, NATO expansion was irrelevant, Russia’s perception of foreign threats was overblown or invented, and foreign policy changes were caused by domestic politics, especially Putin’s return from the office of prime minister to the presidency in 2012.27 According to this explanation, Putin and his team were stung by the Colour Revolutions, not least the uprising in Egypt in early 2011. They were uneasy about the urban protests in Russia that began later that year. If those demonstrations really were supported by Hillary Clinton and the US State Department, as some claimed, then a revolution might even follow. External violence was a way of harnessing internal control by giving a focus for Russian national feeling and thereby bolstering national unity. It was the mood music of a stand-off between Russia and the West.
Nevertheless, this domestic backdrop coincided with NATO’s apparent encroachment on Moscow’s vital interests. The most prolific and balanced of Anglophone scholars on contemporary Russia concludes in his most recent book: ‘Russia’s assertion of an independent position in international affairs is justifiable, in the sense of being both reasonable and rational.’ For him, global peace was more at risk that at any time since the fall of the Berlin Wall precisely because of a systemic failure of the post-Cold-War order to generate common understandings of security in all parts of Europe.28 After all, the naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea had been a point of contention when the Soviet Union unravelled, and the government of Ukraine agreed then that it could remain home to Russian vessels. At the same time, they agreed to give up the Soviet nuclear weapons stockpiled on their territory. What were the Russians to make of a Sevastopol that might be controlled by NATO? By 2018, when the Russians raised this question, the American media could only respond in the abstract language of sovereignty and freedom, and seemed bemused by concrete geopolitics, defined in part by which great-power city, Brussels, Washington or Moscow, had the most influence over Crimea’s biggest naval base.29
For years, NATO enlargement became a consensus among policy specialists on Ukraine, the Baltic states and the countries of the former Warsaw Pact. The Russia specialists who favoured it, not least Condoleezza Rice, George Bush’s national security adviser at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, were often those who supported a forward, interventionist and regime-change approach to foreign policy. McFaul himself was often more cautious, but he had long favoured the universal democratic models that we discussed in chapter 4. By the Trump presidency, an enlarged and forward-facing NATO enjoyed support across the floor of Congress, from liberal Democrats to neoconservatives. To raise doubts – as Trump did – was to flirt with treachery. But many commentators had spoken up against NATO enlargement during the 1990s. In 1997, George Kennan argued that it would be ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era’, that could well ‘restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East–West relations’ and ‘impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking’.30
When Germany captured the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Britain and France accepted that war was coming. Hitler had unmistakably played his hand. In doing so, he had eliminated the only substantial democratic and anti-Nazi force in Central Europe, improved Germany’s strategic position and gained stocks of military equipment which the Wehrmacht would soon make use of. Britain and France now promised to defend Poland’s borders. This was unlikely to give Hitler pause; it seemed improbable that the British would really fight for Poland. Instead, the one anti-Nazi partnership that might prevent an attack on Poland and stop further German expansion was a reprise of the old Triple Entente from the era of the First World War, between Britain, France and the USSR. In April, the commissar of foreign affairs, Maxim Litvinov, offered precisely this. But with Neville Chamberlain in Downing Street, the British responses were half-hearted and negative in turn, and always late. The French, with their record of agreement with the Soviets, were keener than the British on a new Triple Entente, but not keen enough. Soviet negotiators pressed the point: it seems clear that they wanted agreement.
It was to no avail.31 Everyone could hear the clock ticking. Germany was likely to attack Poland within weeks. It would bring the Germans to the Soviet border. Stalin could not face in isolation such an overwhelming threat to Soviet security. Clear reasons existed for Stalin to think the unthinkable and come to terms with the implacable ideological foe that, he knew, would sooner or later attack the USSR anyway. Unlike a Western alliance, it promised immediate territorial security on the border, at the expense of Poland, with its especially despised right-wing authoritarian politics, and perhaps too of the Baltic states and Finland, which only two decades earlier also had been outposts of the Russian Empire. An agreement with the Germans could offer serious trading advantages. There were recent connections that could be revivified, the trading and military ties that had quietly emerged between the Weimar Republic and the USSR when they were international pariahs in the 1920s. And as an old Marxist, Stalin had an underlying sympathy for German civilization, just as he distrusted ‘the English’ as imperial, class-bound, perfidious relics. But talks with the Nazis represented a huge, counter-intuitive risk. The preference remained for a pact with Britain and France.
On 24 May, the British Cabinet bounced Chamberlain into renewing negotiations before the Soviets sought a defensive agreement with the Germans. By then, frustrated by the inability to enter into mutual protection with the Western powers, and appreciating the imminence of German violence, the Soviet Union was already talking to the Nazis. But even at that point Stalin had not given up on the Anglo-French option, and Molotov, Litvinov’s successor, pushed the possibility of the three powers protecting the sovereignty of Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, Belgium, Greece and Turkey.32 The British claimed not unreasonably that the Soviets had improper designs on the Baltic states, but Stalin did not believe that the imperialist British would halt an alliance on what must surely seem, to them, such flimsy grounds.33 By August, with the British dragging their feet, and the Germans dangling mendacious territorial guarantees to the Baltic and eastern Poland before the Soviets, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact became a reality.
The Second World War was caused by German aggression which Britain, France and the Soviet Union misjudged and failed to stop. An alliance between France, Britain, and the USSR would surely have prevented the Germans from invading Poland. Part of the reason why this alliance was never concluded was the British government’s disregard for reasonable and legitimate Soviet defensive interests. In the end, the Soviet government made ice-cold calculations, of an anti-ideological pragmatism that outstripped the Polish goverment’s simultaneous non-aggression pacts with Germany and the Soviet Union, both concluded in 1934 and lasting through to the war.
But the Soviet side was also predatory. The Soviet Union took advantage of the secret clauses of the Nazi–Soviet pact and invaded eastern Poland sixteen days after the Nazi invasion from the West. They went to war in Finland and occupied the Baltic states. For the opponents of A. J. P. Taylor, this proved that the pact between Hitler and Stalin was a ‘moment of truth’, and the dictators were fundamentally the same.
Stalin took advantage of the international constellation in 1939 and 1940 to expand Soviet influence westwards with great brutality. The Katyn massacre of April and May 1940 was only its most notorious episode. But this confuses the means and the ends. During Soviet history from its beginning to its finish, even during the age of ‘tears without end’ that we discussed in chapter 5, Soviet power was not driven by a logic of expansionism. Socialism was something to be built in one country. When the chance came, in 1939–40, and again with the onset of the Cold War from 1945, the Soviet Union established a zone of socialist influence beyond its borders, underwritten by military force, and, in Stalinist times, characterized by awful violence and dramatic social change (though much of it was ‘de-Stalinized’ after 1956). But the existence of the Eastern bloc was not built into the logic of the Soviet project; it emerged as a product of particular circumstances in 1939 and 1945. Although Nazi Germany (1933–45) and the Stalinist USSR (1928–53) were defined by extreme violence, they were quite different dictatorships when it came to questions of war and peace. The whole point of Nazi Germany was that it had to go to war: to create living space, to make its autarkic economy work and to eliminate racial impurity. By contrast, the Soviet Union could do everything it wanted to, including collectivization and Terror in the Stalin era, without fighting. As early as 1918, it had decided that exporting revolution was not an option. Much of the Soviet Union’s pre-war diplomacy until 17 September 1939, then, involved the pursuit of interests that were plausibly legitimate in conventional terms of national defence.
The origins of the Second World War are not an analogy of later events, but they illuminate persistent ways of thinking in international affairs that derive from the West’s Russia Anxiety and Russia’s responses to it. Russia has historically preferred peace to war, and security to risk, and in that way has been a normal great power conducting a legitimate foreign policy. The conflicts and crises of the 2010s were not driven by a grand anti-Western strategy or an inbuilt historical tendency to expansionary violence, but instead followed failures of international and domestic politics that were partly given shape by the Russia Anxiety. When the world looks at Russians remembering the Second World War every 9 May, with a military parade and mass rallies of ordinary people carrying photographs of their relatives who lived during the war, it might be useful to assume the absence of warmongering and cynicism on the part of the people who are marching. Victory Day could be a time to turn down the heat on the Russia Anxiety. After all, the Anxiety tends to follow a cycle.
A defence official in the United States explains the problem with Russia. It’s a threat to the free world, a clear and present danger. And in seeking to undermine freedom where it sees it, Russia possesses opportunities that are not in the repertoire of other countries. The implication is that the Russians can do things that the Americans cannot. They have a ‘unique ability’: they can ‘impose tight control over their own domain while destabilizing the enemy’s’. Therefore, they ‘rely most heavily on political means’, including ‘military power used for purposes of intimidation’. Their preference is ‘to commit to military operations by proxy forces rather than their own’. They espouse hybrid war for the long term. ‘This kind of imperialism calls for a protracted, patient and prudent but unremitting war of political attrition,’ writes the analyst. ‘Its purpose is to undermine the authority of hostile governments and the will of their citizens to resist, while maintaining their own base, solid, impregnable, and in a permanent state of mobilization.’34
It sounds like Hillary Clinton during the period of the elections of Trump and Putin that we discussed in chapter 1. But this analysis comes from three decades before Trump’s election. It’s from the pen of Richard Pipes, just after he had left President Reagan’s White House. The Russia Anxiety re-forms itself for every generation, and sometimes it disappears, but in the moments when it is accelerating, it has qualities that stay the same. Russia becomes a phantom: sinister, conspiratorial, combining mighty power with fundamental weakness, malign in intention and strategic in resolve. People think that they have seen Russia take on a new shape, adapting its approach as new technologies emerge and geopolitics change, but really they are repeating what has been said before. ‘The Russians don’t drive their tanks across borders any more,’ said veteran newsman Bob Scheffer on the Charlie Rose show, filmed in New York in October 2017. ‘They’ve found out it’s much cheaper to use cyber, and to adopt soft power methods.’ This was the instant history that we encountered in chapter 1: the assumption of novelty. But Scheffer’s insights drew on the experts. The next generation of Washington’s Russia hands probed Russia’s impact on Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe. They used the same analytical framework that Richard Pipes had done thirty years before. ‘Russian influence centres on weakening the internal cohesion of societies,’ they suggested. ‘This is achieved by influencing and eroding democratic governance from within its own institutions.’35 When it comes to the Russia Anxiety, the point is not whether these commentators are right or wrong, but that they are repeating themselves and each other, and that their assumptions are not neutral in their effects, but contribute to a public discourse that heightens risk.
This way of talking, oft-repeated and raised to the status of unarguable truth, soon enough assumes a unique malice on the part of Russia. No wonder that it generates fear among decision-makers and ordinary people alike. To understand just how much risk is embedded in the cycle, as it switches between fear, disregard, contempt and fear, we should turn to the origins of the First World War.
The outbreak of the First World War was occasioned by the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife. On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrived in Sarajevo with his wife, Sophie. Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzogovina, was ruled from Vienna. It was inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a collection of connected territories in Central, Eastern and South-eastern Europe. Bosnia was a Balkan backwater that had become a strategic problem. Long part of the Ottoman Empire, it had slowly slipped from the control of Constantinople while Vienna had steadily taken advantage, until, in 1908, only six years before, the Austrians formally annexed the territory following a major international crisis. The visit of the archduke and archduchess was a celebration of imperial harmony, as well as of the loving couple’s wedding anniversary.
By then, Europe’s age of nationalism – freedom for peoples, foundation of nation states – was underway, and the old-fashioned empire of Austria-Hungary was struggling to contend with it. There were many among Bosnia’s large Serb population who looked to Belgrade, not Vienna, for leadership. Belgrade was the capital of neighbouring Serbia, a principality of the Ottoman Empire for much of the nineteenth century, but a new nation state since 1878. One of the irredentist Bosnian Serbs was Gavrilo Princip. He became a member of a terrorist cell, part of the Serbian Black Hand movement. Sunday 28 June 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie came to visit Bosnia, was a day marked not just by their wedding anniversary, but also by a commemoration of Serbian nationhood, the anniversary of defeat in 1389 by the Ottomans in the Battle of the Field of the Blackbirds. In this group which gathered to attack Franz Ferdinand, Princip was the assassin who held his nerve, and shot the couple as their Graef und Stift sports car went slowly past.
They were killed. Princip was beaten up by the crowd but he survived. It was clear that he was operating on the fringes of an organization that was connected at several removes to elements in the Serbian government. To Vienna this looked like a regicide on Austro-Hungarian soil orchestrated by a rival power. Over the next three weeks the temperature among the great powers rose remorselessly. At 6 p.m. on 23 July, the Austro-Hungarian government sent an ultimatum to Belgrade. It demanded the destruction of the anti-Austrian underground. And it insisted that representatives from the Empire be allowed unlimited access to Serbia to take part in this destruction, as well as in the investigation into the Sarajevo assassination. By then the Serbs were prepared to make concessions to avoid war, but they couldn’t accept such humiliating terms. The ultimatum expired forty-eight hours later. On 28 July, one month after the murder of its heir to the throne, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.
And this was something that Russia could not tolerate. Despite the situation in which they found themselves in 1914, Russia and Austria-Hungary might have been friends. They were neighbours: long-lived monarchies that ruled over multinational land-based empires, which meant that they faced the same challenges posed by industrialization, urbanization, democracy and nationalism. Mutual survival was no doubt in each other’s interests. But these interests collided in the Balkans. The Sarajevo assassination ripped the Romanovs and the Habsburgs apart for ever.
Russia mobilized its army. Some elements in the government were enthusiastic, though others, and the tsar himself, were fearful, seemingly clear in their minds that this would lead to war across Europe. Now under imminent threat, and prepared to defend its Austrian ally, Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August. German strategy, which was based on a fear of encirclement by the alliance of France and Russia, required first a rapid attack westwards through Belgium before turning to the enemy in the east. When Germany invaded Belgium, Britain asserted her own ambiguously held treaty obligations and declared war on the Germans on 4 August. Europe was now at war, with all the great powers lined up against each other – Russia, France and Britain on one side, Germany and Austria on the other – with Italy, Turkey and the Balkan states all soon to join in.
On 7 May 1919, six months after signing the Armistice that ended the First World War, the victorious Allies handed their peace terms to the German government at the Trianon Palace Hotel in Paris. Russia did not take part, having withdrawn from the war after the Bolshevik Revolution; it had received its own dictated peace terms from Germany at Brest-Litovsk the previous year, and was in the midst of civil war. The Paris document was the result of complex negotiations among the victors. But its message seemed simple to the Germans. For Max Warburg, the leading banker, it was ‘the worst act of world piracy ever perpetrated under the flag of hypocrisy’.36 Germany would be cut up, with 13 per cent of its land, together with 10 per cent of its population, going to other countries. The Germans would have to pay inflation-proof reparations of 60 billion marks. And why? Because, according to Article 231 of what history came to know as the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was responsible for the damage caused by the war. This was the ‘war guilt clause’.
Was Germany guilty? Even in 1919, it was a controversial question, among the Allies as well as in Berlin. John Maynard Keynes thought the judgement was a travesty. A century on, the moral category of guilt seems redundant, helpful neither in explaining why the war broke out nor in allowing us to learn twenty-first-century lessons from it.
Instead, the cycle of the Russia Anxiety helps to explain the outbreak of the First World War, and offers a cautionary tale for the age of Trump and Putin. For a start, one can see the cycle at work in the destabilizing relations between Britain and Russia before 1914. British fear of Russia had been one of the major factors in its foreign and domestic policy over several decades. This fear was often fuelled by misperceptions about Russia’s strengths and intentions in Central Asia. In their Convention of 1907, the two countries at last came to a formal understanding with each other. They were both partners of France, and now they were effectively allied to each other. Britain’s decision fitted with the cycle of the Anxiety. Fear gave way to disdain following Russia’s defeat against Japan in 1905. Now was the moment for the British to ‘tether’ the fallen power. This alliance did nothing to restrain either country. Nor did it keep the peace. Perhaps it encouraged recklessness in July 1914. It did not help Germany to decode Britain’s inscrutable intentions during that final crisis.
The 1907 Convention and its consequences had something in common with the attempt by NATO to ‘tether’ a weak Russia in the 1990s, during a parallel ‘disregarding’ stage of the Anxiety’s cycle. It did so in a succession of agreements: the Partnership for Peace of 1994, the Founding Act in 1997 and the NATO–Russia Council in 2002.37 The stated aim of cooperation was to increase familiarity and trust. But rather than enhancing transparency, it did nothing to clarify NATO’s agenda of expansion as far as Russia’s border, or, after these agreements with Russia had lapsed, to restrain NATO from declaring the ambitions that were almost seen as declarations of war in Moscow: the accession of Ukraine and Georgia to the alliance. For Putin, the prospect of NATO servicemen in Sevastopol was not unreasonable grounds to take control of Crimea.
More important, though, was the feedback loop of misperceptions that powered the cycle of the Russia Anxiety in Berlin during the run-up to 1914. What Germany saw when it looked eastwards was a waking giant. A key index was troop numbers. When the German high command made calculations and estimates about Russian forces, the figures looked terrifying. The Russian industrial economy was growing rapidly and outgoings on the armed forces were ever higher. Army spending was up by a third between 1909 and 1914; naval spending tripled.38 It seemed that Germany’s window of national survival was closing. If the Germans did not go to war at an advantageous moment soon, they would be crushed by the Russians in a few years. All this was hopelessly misunderstood and exaggerated. While Russia’s economy was improving, its performance was uneven, and the political system was unstable. Russia had just been defeated by Japan, even if it had begun to learn lessons from the war. True, St Petersburg was increasing the proportion of its economic and human capacity that was available for the armed forces in the thirty years before 1914, overtaking the proportions that Britain and France made available, far outstripping Austria-Hungary, and closing in on Germany. Yet the military numbers did not take into account differences in quality – a raw Siberian recruit had little in common with a hardened Prussian NCO. In the year that war broke out, Berlin was able to boost its defence spending in a way that St Petersburg could not, to more than double that of its rival, before the numbers somewhat evened out in 1915 and 1916.39
The danger of the Russia Anxiety was multiplied by the feedback loop of misperception it encouraged. In the run-up to war, the Russians noticed German perceptions of them, confusing themselves in the process. General Sukhomlinov, war minister from 1909, who had an attractive young wife and problematic finances,40 made the absurd prediction that Russia could defeat Germany, the military superpower of Europe, if it came to it. Meanwhile, the French, who had been allies of Russia for thirty years, were growing alarmed by Russian power. Under the presidency of Poincaré, the feeling grew that Russia was becoming so rich and strong that soon it would no longer need France. It would be able to dictate terms to Europe by itself. Better to take the chance and go to war alongside Russia, Poincaré calculated, than be left out in the cold. Again, the feedback loop closed in: Russia’s foreign minister, Sazonov, began to worry that the best moment for ensuring France’s support in war was passing, as Poincaré’s presidential term would soon end. Better to take a chance to go to war while French support was still available. And the British began to fret that they would lose out in a world dominated by France and Russia after the two powers had defeated Germany.41
On 30 July 1914, therefore, the government in St Petersburg mobilized its army. It knowingly made a European war probable. It acted partly for ideological reasons, supporting the Serbs, their fellow Slavs and Orthodox believers. According to pan-Slavist ideas, which influenced some of Russia’s leading ministers, peoples such as the Serbs were bound by fraternal interests to Russia, and deserved the benevolent guidance of the Russian monarchy and robust support from Russian power. But Russia had not always been quick to leap to the Serbs’ defence – it had backed down, for instance, during the crisis of 1908, when Austria-Hungary took formal control of Bosnia – and it had become decidedly nervous about the growing power of Bulgaria, another Balkan Slav nation, which Alexandra Kollontai’s father had gone to war to defend thirty-seven years before. Founded as an independent sovereign state under Russian protection in 1878, and sharing centuries of entangled Slavic history before that, its interests had recently diverged from Russia’s, especially during the First Balkan War of 1912, as a result of which it doubled in size and briefly threatened to absorb Constantinople. Russia might have been on Serbia’s side in 1914, but the Bulgarians would in fact join the Germans and Austrians during the First World War (just as they would fight alongside the Nazis from 1941). In other words: pan-Slavism might be an instinctive emotion, but it was not enough to make Russia want to go to war.
So Russia’s Balkan interests were not only ideological, but strategic. They concerned security and trade. The Russian and Ottoman Empires had frequently gone to war over the centuries, and so Russia was as worried by the prospect of a newly strong Turkey as it was of the growing power of her other Balkan rivals. In 1914, once again, the Russians wanted to ensure that their southern borderlands were safe, from the Turks, historically the power in the region, from the Austrians and Germans, with their Balkan scheming, and even from the Bulgarians, who were getting above themselves. The Russian government was especially worried about the economic consequences of geopolitical changes in the region. Russia depended on access from the Black Sea through the Straits of Constantinople and into the outside world. Without it, its grain exports would be dramatically reduced and its naval strength compromised. Turkey had ordered two dreadnought battleships from Britain, which were due for delivery in the summer of 1914. This force threatened the Russian naval position in the Black Sea region. Meanwhile, in late 1913, a German military mission under the command of General Otto Liman von Sanders came to Turkey. In Russian eyes, this looked like potential German control of Constantinople and the Straits: a catastrophic outcome.42
Even reasonable men, such as the foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, began to sound bellicose. The most powerful restraining voice in Russian policy, the long-time finance minister and then prime minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, had been removed from office in January. Weakened by geopolitical circumstances and sometimes by pan-Slav fantasies, the Russians stood on the edge of a strategic and national abyss in 1914. They were deafened by the feedback loop of exaggerated perceptions that derived from the Russia Anxiety. The Germans and Austrians were taking over the Balkans; Turkey was reviving its navy; control of the Straits, a Russian worry for centuries, was about to go for good. Economic failure was threatened, and great-power irrelevance would follow. Perhaps revolution would come in its train. The Sarajevo assassination and the July Crisis that followed gave the Russians a last roll of the dice. They gambled recklessly, betting not only their own house but threatening to break the bank of the whole European casino. In backing Serbia so strongly – and perhaps even having a hand in the assassination at Sarajevo, who knows? – they forced war with Austria-Hungary and Germany. The Austrians were entitled to expect that the Russians would not take advantage of regicide, after all; and Russia had indicated repeatedly in the diplomatic crises of recent years that it would not push Austria-Hungary in the Balkans as far as actual war. The response in July 1914 seemed out of proportion, arbitrary and even the result of conspiracy.43
There is something of the Russia Anxiety in the framing of this retrospective charge sheet: the claim of recklessness, unpredictability and opacity in Russia’s relations with its rivals; the assumption that Russia’s interference in neighbouring countries was more heavy-handed and less legitimate than that of other powers; the air of cloak-and-dagger intervention; and the implication that this was the foolish behaviour of a failing power. But if Russia really did see this as the last chance to assert its imperial pretensions, then France, taking its own opportunistic chance to harness itself to Russia and together take on Germany, was quick to back her up. Russia might have been bellicose in its defence of Serbia during July, ultimately mobilizing, but Austria was the one to send the ultimatum designed to provoke war, and then to declare war. If Russia had not always been straightforward or clear in its Balkan dealings, or in signalling how far it would go towards war in its relations with the other powers, then what about Britain? Britain was Russia’s ally, but it had sold battleships to Russia’s Black Sea rival, Turkey. This really did seem like the actions of perfidious Albion. And Britain seemed to hedge its bets during the July Crisis. In not making its intentions fully clear – would it really defend Belgium, or would it not? – it encouraged Germany to take its chance and attack, thinking that the British might not call them out.44
And if Russia looked at times as if it were the country prepared to gamble on war in order to preserve its status as a great power, then that seemed precisely what Austria-Hungary was doing in Serbia: taking the chance, once and for all, to secure its imperial status in the Balkans before it was too late. Germany was the biggest gambler of all, still more openly reckless, alarmed by Russia’s growing economy, its capacity for reform and what looked like its unlimited military reserves. Some of its main decision-makers were rendered myopic by the Russia Anxiety. For some in the German high command and civil government, seeing a shortfall of nearly a million soldiers between the two alliances and feeling ‘panic’ as new French loans stretched Russian rearmament even further,45 this was the last best chance to stop Russia before it became the star of Europe, outshining Germany for good. By 1917, they feared, Russia would be too strong. July 1914 was too good a crisis to waste. The ‘blank cheque’ – the unquestioned support that Germany gave to Austria-Hungary over its aggressive ultimatum to Serbia – allowed the Austrians to take their chance to eliminate the Serbian threat without worrying about the consequences. If Russia mobilized, Germany would help the Austrians. There had been crisis after crisis in European affairs in the decade before 1914, and the knowledge among all the continent’s statesmen that war would bring universal disaster was enough to act as a final deterrent.46 But in the summer of 1914, the deterrent failed: for the gamblers, the incentive to go to war was too great.
The Treaty of Versailles would be predicated on the idea of German guilt. German responsibility indeed lies at the heart of the origins of the First World War. It was Germany that set off arms races it could not win, imperial rivalries it could not sustain, tensions it could not defuse. In the final analysis, it was Germany that took the risk that European civilization could not bear. But so much of what happened was caused by the tragedy of the Russia Anxiety.
1914 proves that the international system is only secure when all of its biggest decision-makers can draw on accurate knowledge about Russia. Such knowledge would allow them to make plausible and sober calculations about Russian intentions, and strive to keep Russian power in synch with their own, so that the cycle of fear, contempt and disregard is broken. Yet in the post-Cold-War era, major states cut back on Russia expertise in universities and government, and in some cases even reduced provision for foreign-language instruction in schools. For Henry Kissinger in 2014, a successful American foreign policy rested on two things: America’s post-1945 commitment to universal values, plus the unerring focus on balance between the powers that had been a guide to stability since the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. But this combination could not work without ‘a recognition of the reality of other regions’ histories and cultures’.47 At that very point, Federal funding for scholarly visits and graduate training in the former Soviet Union was under threat. In February 2015, before the Brexit vote and in the midst of the Ukraine conflict, a report by the British House of Lords noted ‘a decline in [European Union] Member States’ analytical capacity on Russia’. Echoing (deliberately or not) the title of the bestselling book that had recently been published on the origins of the First World War, it suggested that the EU was found ‘“sleepwalking” into the current crisis’.48 Defining what is legitimate in Russia’s interests and overcoming the cycle of the Russia Anxiety will require expertise as well as goodwill. Only an Anxious view of Russia will be possible if the EU’s core knowledge of its neighbour is constructed by the ignorant, or if NATO’s Russia position is set by vested interests.
And yet the year 1914 is instructive in another way: Russia was no more and no less likely to be at war than the rest of Europe. In the end, the most important counterbalance to the Russia Anxiety is that Russia’s history of war is pretty much like everyone else’s.
Russia has usually been at peace with the Western powers and enjoyed friendly relations with them. Like the other powers, though, Russia can be provoked; one scholar suggests that Russia has been historically peaceful until the moments when it feels the need to defend its honour.49 Things have been more complicated with the nearest neighbours, but not to an unusual degree in European history. (The sheer length and complexity of Russia’s borderlands can make comparison difficult, though,50 and we won’t return here to the internal conflicts of colonization that were the subject of the previous chapter.) In the three great conflicts that created modern Russia – with the Mongol Horde, Napoleonic France and the Third Reich – the ‘homeland’ was invaded, and Rus-Russia-USSR was the target, not the instigator. Europe’s East Slav region was shaped by repeated violence, but not more than other parts of Europe have been, and only sometimes because of ‘Russian’ rather than foreign aggression.
In the medieval period, as Rus and Muscovy, its borders were formed by conflicts with, among others, Vikings, Byzantines, Mongols, Teutonic Knights and Lithuanians. The Mongol invasion especially was a crushing and cruel experience. Since early modern times, when Muscovy and then the Russian Empire took on a more recognizably Russian shape, new and old enemies appeared. Ivan the Terrible led wars against Swedes (1554–7) and Livonians, who weresupported periodically by Danes and Poles (1558–83). His southwards expansion of Muscovy brought him into conflict with the Ottoman Empire over Astrakhan (1568–70) and Crimea (1570–72); he also faced local powers, such as the Crimean Tatars. Boris Godunov, serving as regent before acceding to the throne, went to war with Sweden (1590–93) before he and then his successors faced the Polish and Swedish invasions that came during and after the Time of Troubles (1609–18). During the seventeenth century, there were more wars with Sweden (1610–17, 1656–61) and with the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania (1632–4, 1654–67). Sustained conflict with the Turks set in (1676–81, 1695–1700), though these soon brought the Russians into European alliances with Austria and Poland-Lithuania.51 None of this quite matches the centuries of warfare between England and France.
Periodic Asian wars began, first with the Persians (1651–3, 1722–3, 1796, 1804–13, 1826–8, and 1909–11). As Muscovy’s borders expanded ever further eastwards, skirmishes with the Chinese, especially around the Amur river, took place (1652–89), in whose context were two battles with Koreans (1654 and 1658). Centuries later came the Korean War (1950–53), when Soviet forces unofficially participated alongside the Chinese on behalf of the communist North. Russia played a part alongside all the other powers in humiliating China during the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901). The catastrophic war against Japan (1904–5) was one conclusion of Russia’s risk-driven Asia policy. But Eastern temptations remained. The Soviet Union joined with its Western allies by declaring war on Japan following the defeat of Germany in 1945. It seized territory in Japan’s Kuril Islands, which remains a source of strategic tension in East Asia, and took back south Sakhalin, lost forty years before. Russia’s military and political leaders are unlikely to repeat the costly mistakes of the war in Afghanistan (1979–89) anytime soon, though Russia’s fear of radical Islamism persists, and has contributed to conflict inside the country, notably the two devastating wars in Chechnya in the 1990s, which left a legacy of terrorism, from Beslan to St Petersburg. Still, despite the vast run of its borders, Russia-in-Asia does not have ancient external enmities that endure. The vast, empty spaces on either side of its Asian borders can be burdens but also strategic reserves. On the one hand, Russia is on the back foot in Asia, under pressure from China’s economic growth, its patient strategy, and even from Chinese migration into Russia. It would be an even bigger risk than in 1950 to take part in a hypothetical second Korean War. On the other, though, closer relations with China remain one route out of Russia’s apparent strategic impasse in the West; combined military exercises in 2018 took place in the context of America’s attempt to ‘contain’ both powers simultaneously.
But Europe is a different matter. In the eighteenth century, Russia became a member of the European system, the shifting alliances of great and minor powers that were periodically at war with each other. The Great Northern War (1700–1721) was a sequence of conflicts between Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden, brought about by Charles’s massive invasion of Russia, and ended by the Battle of Poltava. Russian armies also went south at this time and fought the Turks with less happy results. The war brought Russia into alliance with Sweden’s Scandinavian enemies, as well as Prussia, Hanover and Saxony. Poland-Lithuania and Britain swapped sides. Russia’s place in the international order was defined by the multi-state European wars that followed. The War of the Polish Succession (1733–8) brought Russia onto the side of Poland’s Augustus III, together with Saxony, Prussia and Austria, against Augustus’s challenger, who was backed by Spain, Sardinia and France. And then the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) allied Russia with Austria, together with Britain, Hanover and Sardinia. Their enemies were Prussia, Spain, France, Sweden, Bavaria and Genoa; Saxony swapped sides. In retrospect, the sequence of events seems bewildering. But it was the way that international affairs worked, and imperial Russia was just a normal part of the European system.
During the reign of Elizabeth, the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) gave Russia one of the decisive roles in the development of European, even global, affairs, fighting with France, Austria, Spain, Sweden and Saxony against Britain, Portugal, Prussia and several other German states. Franco–Russian relations, and the prestige of France in St Petersburg, were at their height. But this ended, temporarily at least, with the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. With Catherine the Great on the throne, Russia joined Austria and Prussia in partitioning Poland (1772), the Russians gaining more land with the second partition that followed their defeat of Poland-Lithuania in 1793. (The complete dismemberment of the long-standing Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by these three powers took place with a third partition in 1795.) Catherine’s armies also fought over Sweden’s Finnish territory (1788–90), a job which Alexander I completed by defeating the Swedes and incorporating Finland into the Empire (1808–9). Looking back, it seems not exactly edifying. But most of this was the normal foreign policy of a European power.
By the turn of the nineteenth century, then, Russia was an indispensable great power, no more aggressive than the others, and less threatening than some. In fact, it became their saviour.52 The Russian Empire was a member of the coalitions that went to war three times against France (1799–1807), before Alexander I and Napoleon came to terms at Tilsit. Yet when the French invaded in 1812, the Russians endured, halting Napoleon and then pushing him back to Paris (1812–14). At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, all the great powers, including Russia, wanted to prevent France from starting wars on this scale again, and all of them, apart from Russia, were also keen that Russia should not get too big for its boots. It was clear that a strong Russia made Europe secure, though the other great powers were never keen to admit this. This is a useful history lesson. Russia has most obviously posed risks to European security – elevating the chance of war between it and other European powers – when its government has felt exposed, and when it has lacked a face-saving diplomatic exit, such as in the run-up to the Crimean War, in 1914, in the late 1940s, even in the 2010s.
Rus-Muscovy-Russia’s geopolitics were for centuries played out in the shadow of Byzantium, even if the shadow lengthened and weakened over time. All the leaders of the East Slavic lands, from Kievan Rus through to the Russian Federation, kept one eye on the south, worried about clashes over trade, religion or contested territory. Military confrontations sporadically resulted. The crucial contests were with the Ottoman Empire. As Muscovy expanded southwards during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, it came face to face with Ottoman forces, first in Astrakhan (1568–70) and then in Crimea (1570–72). A century later, on the back foot, Fedor III’s troops withstood military pressure from the Turks (1676–81). From the reign of Peter the Great onwards, Imperial Russia was drawn more deeply into anti-Turkish European alliances. St Petersburg cast a jealous eye on Constantinople – the second Rome to Moscow’s third – and in time wanted secure access to the straits that led in and out of the Black Sea. Russia was allied with Austria and Poland-Lithuania (1686–1700) in war with the Ottoman Empire, enjoying a famous victory at Azov, though when the Turks joined the Swedes in the middle part of the Great Northern War (1710–14), they inflicted defeats on the Russians. Anna’s armies fought alongside the Austrians (1735-39) to secure some revenge, and when Catherine the Great led her forces against the Ottomans (1768–74, 1787–92) Russia was again victorious, but this time alone. It found common cause with Britain and France during the Greek War of Independence, when the navies of the three powers inflicted losses on the Turks at the Battle of Navarino (1827); Nicholas I continued the conflict alone (1828–9), securing concessions from the Turks in the Treaty of Adrianople. Famously, the Russians fought the Turks during the Crimean War (1853–6) and again over Bulgaria (1877), and Russo-Turkish mutual suspicion exacerbated the July Crisis in 1914. But they were both major European and Eurasian empires, ready to pursue belligerent policies. Over the long term, neither was the victim.
Russia’s history of warfare has, therefore, been a normal history of warfare. Its wars were usually similar to the wars of other leading countries, and when it went to war with one set of European powers, it usually did so in alliance with another. When it really mattered, Russia was on the same side as ‘the West’, which was especially important during the world wars. But the Cold War is the big exception to all this. Recent and important, it is understandably a dominant presence in the popular memory of international affairs. Yet this distorts the wider pattern of history, making Russia seem exceptionally aggressive and a default adversary of the United States.
By definition, the Cold War placed the Soviet Union and ‘the West’ on opposite sides. It was an ideological clash between capitalism and communism whose prehistory went back to the October Revolution;53 Washington did not send an ambassador to Soviet Moscow until 1933. After 1945, when the Cold War had begun, the Soviet Union retained control over the countries of East-Central Europe, requiring them to implement its Stalinist programme of a centrally planned economy, imposing government through a single socialist-communist party and enforcing consensus through secret-police violence. For all the diverse composition of ‘the West’, it was quite different from the Eastern bloc. The ideological division underwrote global affairs until 1989. It defined the Soviet Union and its satellites and supporters as adversaries of the West. But while the ideological division was fundamental, the politics of diplomacy were contingent.54 Much of Soviet foreign policy remained pragmatic, devoted to defence of the Revolution and the borders of the fatherland. After all, the United States fought alongside the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Specific decisions – that could have gone more than one way – created the division of Europe, kept Soviet forces in the Eastern bloc and caused the arms race. Soviet control of the Eastern bloc was not part of a pattern of expansionism. At the end of the Second World War, for example, a putative Soviet intervention in Iran came to nothing, and a quite different consequence of European expansionism, the British Empire in India, was still just across the border. The Cold War was a system of international relations, not a war, though it had casualties. Conflict occurred outside Europe. The Soviet Union fought its major war in Afghanistan – its Vietnam – and intervened in smaller conflicts in the ‘Third World’. Moscow’s proxy wars in Africa were the strategic equivalents of Washington’s armed interventions in Latin America. But the very term ‘Cold War’ creates the sense that the Soviet Union was the only villain, and that the United States and the USSR were at war with each other for decades. It helps to explain the loose language of war between them in the 2010s.
This is a long history of warfare. But it is a shorter history than Britain’s, thanks not least to its many years of conflict with France, and its permanent involvement in wars great and small across the length of the twentieth century. Is Russia unusually warlike? Despite the Russia Anxiety’s constructions of history, it would be difficult to stick to the facts and say that Russia has been more warlike than the other great powers.
A. J. P. Taylor spent much of his career studying the great powers as they conducted diplomacy and war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He went to great lengths, for example, to see the world from Bismarck’s point of view, writing a biography of him. Taylor was also a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a mass-membership protest group that was founded in 1958. Going on marches and carrying banners, he was convinced that the lesson of 1914 was that the deterrent would fail soon enough. Yet Taylor was no starry-eyed marcher for peace. He saw the dynamics of foreign policy as calculations of interest. ‘As a private citizen, I think that all this striving after greatness and domination is idiotic,’ he wrote. ‘As a historian, I recognize that Powers will be Powers.’55
Russia flexed its status as a twenty-first century power with military support for President Assad in Syria. Clear reasons existed for this policy. Like the United States, the Soviet Union had projected a forward position in the Middle East ever since the foundation of the State of Israel. It trained cadres of experts on the region, such as the future prime minister of the Russian Federation in the late 1990s, Yevgeny Primakov, and President Putin’s own top specialist, the deputy foreign minister, Mikhail Bogdanov. Through people like Bogdanov, post-Soviet Russia inherited interests in and knowledge of the Middle East, together with connections with particular actors, such as Assad and his father. As a major exporter of arms, like the United States, Russia is tied into regional arms contracts. With historic links to Iran, it is inclined to counterbalance Israel. Worried about Islamist terrorism in the north Caucasus, it has looked for ways to root out international terrorist networks, often by cooperating with the United States. In Syria, the Russians intervened on behalf of a government that was waging a civil war against militants backed by Islamic State. Most important of all, the intervention was a statement about Russia’s reach. Under Putin’s leadership, it looked like a global power again. But Russia became implicated in Assad’s deadly strategy, which included the destruction of Aleppo, the use of chemical weapons and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians. The assumptions of the Russia Anxiety kicked in: Russia had transgressed norms in a uniquely malicious way. It was the global cowboy. No one else behaved like this.
The same assumption – of a solitary bad actor, stalking on the fringes of the international community and outside the great-power consensus – informed the allegations about Russian interference in the United States presidential election of 2016. American intelligence agencies made the case that Russia-backed hackers penetrated electronic voting databases in four US states and unsuccessfully targeted others. Factories of Russian trolls manipulated social media debate in swing states, spreading fake news and undermining Hillary Clinton’s case. Cyber attacks were launched on the Democratic National Committee, with the private emails of leading figures, such as John Podesta, published online. The charge was that Russian hackers used Wikileaks as a conduit for exposing the compromising materials (the so-called kompromat), while Russian agents might have penetrated the National Rifle Association as a route into Republican networks. Robert Mueller was appointed to head an inquiry into the collusion question: had the Trump campaign illegally cooperated with representatives of the Russian government? In the two years that followed November 2016, few people wanted to claim that the Russians had changed the course of the election, though speculation about a Trump-Putin conspiracy never ended. Instead, a different claim circulated widely: that the Russians’ real goal was to sow seeds of doubt in the national conversation about the integrity and usefulness of US elections. It was only one part of a wider grand strategy against Western democracy. Further claims followed, of Russian interference in elections in France, Germany and Sweden, even in Mexico, as well as in the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom.
Historians can’t add facts to the debate about what happened in 2016, nor can they take sides on the basis of historical judgement. But they can provide a chronological perspective, one which shows there’s nothing unusual about one country interfering in the elections of another. In the presidential election of 1996, there was a real chance of the Communists returning to power in Russia. Their candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, offered a determined challenge to the incumbent, Boris Yeltsin. The group of American political consultants who have often been credited with turning Yeltsin’s campaign around had close ties to President Clinton. One of those consultants, Richard Dresner, updated the White House on a weekly basis, and advised Bill Clinton on how best to articulate his support for Yeltsin in Moscow. Clinton also helped ensure that an IMF loan of ten billion dollars arrived in time for election day. Four years later, Tony Blair took gentler but still unconventional steps to back Vladimir Putin, signalling respect from the international community to the Russian electorate. One political scientist has found evidence of interventions in sixty-two foreign elections by the American government during the Cold War. Much of this activity was in the form of CIA covert operations. One of the most famously successful of these came in Italy in 1948, when the CIA worked to divert support away from the Communists to make sure that the Christian Democrats would lead the government.56
In a sense, this was the thin end of the wedge of political intervention. Stuck between the risk of nuclear war and a distaste for détente-style diplomacy, newly elected President Reagan looked to the CIA to stand out against communism, which meant covert operations against left-wing groups in Latin America. It came at a cost. Military and economic aid flowed, for example, into Honduras, reaching 298 million dollars in 1985, against a background of hundreds of assassinations and ‘disappearances’.57 In the preceding decades, CIA-backed assaults, such as at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in 1961, were combined with a cultural Cold War. The CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom imported US propaganda into the region.58 This mixture of approaches would in a later age be described as ‘hybrid warfare’. Yet what set America apart was that some of these covert schemes and interventions were exposed and investigated, such as the Iran-Contra affair, a complex conspiracy planned in the White House and famously involving Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council to divert resources illegally to anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua. North was convicted in 1989, but a year later the convictions were found unsafe and were reversed; in 2018, he was appointed president of the National Rifle Association. Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame, was on hand to document it all, just as he would be thirty years later when it came to the Russia scandal in the Trump White House.59
But why make these comparisons? They sound like ‘whataboutism’. Or we could go further, and ask a sequence of related questions.
Is external interference in an election more egregious when it happens to the United States? Has Russia’s Syria policy done more to destabilize the Middle East than the interventions of the United States in the region? Has Russia’s facilitation of the Syrian war done more to kill civilians than the American war in Iraq? Is ‘hybrid war’ in Eastern Europe and even the United States different from CIA covert action in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and elsewhere? Is Russia’s choice of partners any different from America’s selections of friendly dictators? Is the projection of Russian power through social media and the international TV channel Russia Today in the same category as American cultural diplomacy or even the ubiquity of global American brands? Are the human rights interventions of the twenty-first century any different from the imperialism of the nineteenth? Is hacking worse than drone strikes? Are oligarchs worse when they are Russian?
There is no point in answering these questions. They are rhetorical and provocative. You might find them offensive. Any answers to them are meaningless. These questions only exist to be asked. But the act of asking the questions disrupts one’s assumptions and destabilizes the Russia Anxiety, because the quickest cure for the Anxiety is self-awareness. Asking these unanswerable questions invites one to experiment with the notion that the leading powers, for all their differences, share moral failures. In turn, this opens up the possibility that the cycle of the Russia Anxiety might be broken.
It will take pragmatists to achieve this, those unwilling to cast the first stone, those uncomfortable with bold moral statements or at least prepared to suspend their preference for them. Such people have taken a lead at important moments. Anxiety-reducing pragmatism has helped solve some of the most dangerous foreign policy crises. Let’s look at three examples.
At 10 p.m. on 6 October 1939, Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to Britain, entered Winston Churchill’s office at the Admiralty. It was still nine months until Churchill would become prime minister, but five weeks since the declaration of war against Germany, and six weeks since the signature of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Churchill was, of course, the great anti-appeaser, who had spent much of the 1930s warning about the German threat. He had been world history’s most famous voice in the wilderness since Cassandra. Now he had some power to decide who was Britain’s enemy and who was Britain’s friend. On that pitch-black evening, it seemed that everyone had gone home. The nightwatchman took an age to open up the gate. Maisky eventually found his way through the dark building and up to the office of the first lord of the Admiralty. Churchill’s feelings were clear. ‘Better communism than Nazism,’ he told Maisky, effectively saying that the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union was an understandable insurance policy for the Russians.
For Churchill, the intentions of Nazi Germany were malign, its diplomacy dishonourable, and the word of its leaders untrustworthy. Germany was a true enemy. But what about his stance on the USSR? This seemed less morally clear. He remained a capitalist and a conservative, a willing participant in competitive elections, and the opposite of a Bolshevik. As we’ve seen, though, his view on foreign affairs migrated from anti-communism in the 1920s to anti-fascism in the 1930s. His language about the Soviet Union lost its vitriol. In facing the Soviet Union, he moved away from moral certainty, from an ideological stance to a pragmatic one. Churchill’s conversation with Maisky on the night of 6 October 1939 symbolized the possibility of constructive dialogue at the most unpromising moment. ‘We parted “like friends”,’ Maisky wrote in his diary. ‘Churchill asked me to keep in close touch and to turn to him without ceremony whenever the need arose.’60 This was an essential connection for Churchill. It helped him read the Soviet Union when he became prime minister. A year after that, when geopolitics changed beyond either’s control, and the two countries became allies, his connection with Maisky was an important source of insight, facilitating the construction of the Grand Alliance and offering Churchill ways of reading Stalin better, to their mutual benefit.
Not much more than a decade later, Bobby Kennedy was supporting Joe McCarthy in the communist witchhunts of the early 1950s. At his father’s request, Kennedy joined William Douglas, a justice of the Supreme Court and friend of the family, in his tour around the Soviet Union in the summer of 1955. Kennedy’s display of ill-feeling and distrust towards those Soviet citizens he met was extravagant. He largely refused to eat their food. When he became feverish and ill in Siberia, he turned down medical treatment, until his more senior travelling companion intervened and insisted that he take the help of the doctors, who saved him with penicillin.61
Following their return, Kennedy’s tone was softer – just. ‘We must have peaceful coexistence with Russia,’ he declared at Georgetown University in October, echoing Khrushchev, ‘but if we and our allies are weak, there will be no peace – there will be no coexistence.’62 It was tough talk – he was no soft touch for the post-Stalin order – but it held out the glimmer of a more pragmatic understanding of the USSR’s role in international affairs. Five years later, as attorney general in his brother’s administration, Kennedy was becoming still more flexible in his understanding of policy problems generally. He formed a durable connection with a Soviet diplomat, Georgy Bolshakov, meeting fortnightly and establishing the back channel that made communication possible during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The two men had their ups and downs, but at the most dangerous moment in the nuclear stand-off, Bobby Kennedy was ready to trust Bolshakov and thereby Khrushchev, and they were ready to trust him.
Two years later, Denis Healey became the defence secretary of the United Kingdom. Born in 1917, he was a twin of the Russian Revolution, but unlike many of his peers, he had no truck with the Russia Anxiety and tried to understand the Soviet Union for himself. Healey was a communist in 1930s Oxford who spent his career at Labour’s moderate centre. He was distinguished by a lifetime commitment to politics, huge political skill, deep intellectual seriousness, a certain common touch and great knowledge of policy, which he brought to all the offices he held: defence secretary, chancellor of the exchequer and, had Labour won in 1983 or 1987, would-be foreign secretary.
Healey was a tough-minded defence secretary in the 1960s, serving in that office for six years. Twenty years earlier, he had fought in the Second World War. But he was also a calm diplomat who did not resort to name-calling or obvious bluff. He did not believe that the Soviet Union was ever going to attack NATO. Instead, he recognized that, until the end of the 1980s, Moscow was prepared to use force to keep hold of its Warsaw Pact satellites. This was not just a moral problem: it was the greatest threat to NATO members, because ‘once fighting started there, it might conceivably slop over the Iron Curtain and involve the West’. NATO’s priority in Europe should be to maintain ‘conventional forces at least large enough to control such incidents’. Reducing the nuclear risk was paramount.
Healey travelled widely and frequently, and visited Moscow many times. His repeated snapshots of Soviet life suggested to him that ‘ordinary Russians had seen substantial improvements in their standard of living during the Brezhnev years’. Writing some time before the collapse of the Soviet Union, he argued: ‘I suspect that Gorbachev may come to regret the record of unrelieved failure he has attributed to his predecessor, particularly if perestroika fails to produce similar improvements for the average citizen.’63 This hit straight to the risk that Gorbachev was taking. Again, Healey forewent an easy moral judgement, instead drawing an independent conclusion based on observation. Eschewing platitudes helps dissolve the Russia Anxiety.
On 28 May 2016, President Obama visited Hiroshima. The American media speculated about whether he would apologize for the atomic bombing of the city. Republicans waited for yet another selling-out of America. But Obama recast the problem. ‘We have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history,’ he said, ‘and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.’64 Obama was not apologizing, but he was suggesting that modern states of all types can face similar pressures that require the most difficult decisions to be made.
President Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb sprang from the need to defeat an enemy which had attacked the United States. But in justifying the bomb in the name of peace – it would save many more lives than the alternative, which was a costly and bitterly fought invasion of Japan – Truman, and his secretary of war, Henry Stimson, revealed again that all modern states have something in common: they cannot avoid the logic that in extreme situations the ends justify the means.
Stalin could understand that. The Stalinist system was a radical simplification of modern politics, when the ends (communism) never stopped justifying the means (destroying individuals). Dropping an atomic bomb to solve a problem seemed to fit inside a Stalinist mentality.
Thanks to well-placed spies, such as Klaus Fuchs, the Soviet leadership was aware of America’s atomic bomb. Stalin’s suspicion of potential enemies and cynicism about political life told him why they would use it: not only were the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a matter of defeating Japan quickly, but of keeping the Soviets from encroaching further into Asia, and of showing them the awesome might of American power. In August 1945, the Red Army was already in China and Korea, and was eyeing up a Soviet-US partition of Japan. The atom bomb put a stop to that. Stalin had no doubt that the bombing of Hiroshima was directed against the Soviet Union.65
There were voices in America that made the same point, such as William R. Castle, undersecretary of state under Stimson between 1931 and 1933, who wrote controversially in his diary in February 1947: ‘[Stimson] knew that Japan was suing for peace, that its economy had been destroyed … I wonder whether Stimson … wanted war to continue for long enough to give them a chance to try out the atom bomb on Japanese cities.’66
Castle had his own axe to grind. The US Army Air Force set about destroying Japanese cities with conventional bombs as soon as it got within reach; it did not wait. Japan could have surrendered at any point. And, as Churchill pointed out, the atomic bomb was built to be used. But President Truman still made a decision. Other options existed. Half a century on, in August 1995, George F. Kennan, the conscience of American foreign policy, wrote in a private letter of ‘our obligation to ourselves – to our sense of what it was suitable and decent for such a country as ours to be doing … We should have swallowed our militant pride and consented to sound out the Japanese on the possibilities … of compromise.’67
But even if Stalin simplified Truman’s mentality, and those without power sniped at him from a safe distance, the American president faced a decision of giant moral complexity and weight at a time of ongoing national danger. Seventy years on, his successor’s moral explication was more powerful than an apology. ‘We’re not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past,’ Obama claimed in Hiroshima. ‘We can tell our children a different story, one that describes a common humanity, one that makes war less likely and cruelty less easily accepted.’68
Even if you agree with Obama’s words, you can draw different policy prescriptions from them. But at their heart is the assumption that history does not make particular nations predisposed to war. Perhaps every leading politician in Europe and the United States should remember this idea every day. Ordinary Russians, whose history tilts them towards peace, and who have feared war viscerally since 1941, can agree with this statement of pragmatism and war-avoidance. The present day gives them at least as much to lose from war as any of us, and history gives them more to fear from war than most of us. In the twenty-first century, Russia is vastly more open and vastly less ideological than it was before 1991. Its deepest interests in economic, financial and security terms are aligned with the West as a whole, while the way people live, at least in major centres of population, is more similar than ever to other parts of Europe. The World Cup of 2018 convinced people from across the world of this. ‘Russia has confounded the expectations of its biggest influx of visitors since the Nazi invasion,’ wrote a leading journalist on the London Times, an old Russia hand himself. Almost 3 million foreigners came to eleven cities,69 meaning that they could not but see the rough as well as the smooth. ‘In Moscow it was not hard to find an English fan with bad things to say about their hosts,’ he went on. ‘It was impossible.’70 The new age is nothing like the Cold War, which also means it is less stable than before: it’s unpredictable, the nuclear deterrent is less certain, and rapid change for the worse as well as the better is possible. Russia has no ambitions to invade the European Union and therefore to go to war with America,71 though the lesson of 1914 is that a crisis can distort perceptions and undermine the deterrent of civilizational destruction. History provides consolations and warnings alike. As we’ll see in part III, the materials of history – time and memory – are implicated in the Russia Anxiety, though they might offer a solution.