Undermining Atlanticism: Building a “Strategic Triangle” Moscow-Berlin-Paris

In this part we will analyze the effects of Moscow’s propaganda and soft-power offensive in two European countries: Germany and France. This is an explicit choice because Germany and France occupy a special place in the Kremlin’s foreign policy agenda, which consists of building “strategic triangles.” This project predates Putin’s rule. Samuel Huntington had, in 1999, already observed that

Immediately after Putin’s assumption of the Russian presidency, he began to implement the “Primakov doctrine.” It was a fundamental change to Moscow’s foreign policy course, which, under Yeltsin, in spite of recurring tensions, had been oriented toward integration with the West. Putin took the initiative for the organization of the BRICS, the core of which consists of Primakov’s Russia-China-India triangle. Another forum was the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a group founded by Moscow and Beijing in which India has observer status. However, Putin has also invested much time and money in building a second triangle: a Moscow-Berlin-Paris axis in Europe. This triangle had already been dreamed up by his predecessor Boris Yeltsin,^[3] who had a good personal relationship with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. However, it would become an explicit strategic goal only under Putin. In the spring of 2000, immediately after his election, Putin declared Germany to be “Russia’s leading partner in Europe and the world.”^[4] Although he succeeded in establishing a close relationship with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the real breakthrough in Russian-German relations came with the Iraq War. “In the Iraq War,” writes Alexander Rahr, “Putin succeeded with the help of Germany and France in isolating America in the Security Council. Encouraged by the traditionalists in the Kremlin, he may dream of setting up in the future, together with the two most powerful states of the old continent, a regime of ‘soft containment’ of America.”^[5] By building these two triangles, Putin wanted to realize three objectives: first, to enhance Russia’s global role; second, to build a countervailing coalition against the hegemonic
Anglo-Saxon world (the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand); and third, by participating in two separate triangles to give Russia a central position.^[6] Already in June 2003 John C. Hulsman, an American analyst, warned that

In 2015, twelve years later, Hans Kundnani would again point to the dangers for the West’s coherence if Putin’s efforts were to be crowned with success, writing that

It is, therefore, not surprising that Putin started the construction of his European triangle with a soft-power offensive directed toward Germany. He was able to take advantage of several favorable circumstances which made this task easier. In the first place, there was Germany’s immense gratitude toward Gorbachev, who had agreed with the reunification of Germany. There was, further, the personal friendship between Putin’s predecessor, President Boris Yeltsin, and the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, followed by the even closer friendship between Putin himself and Kohl’s successor, Gerhard Schröder. There was, furthermore, the specific German “disposition”—characterized by pacifism and an aversion to military adventures abroad, which was present amongst both the German people and its political class—which reassured the Russians that Germany, having become a peaceful giant, would not meddle in what the Kremlin considered its privileged affairs in Russia’s Near Abroad. There was, finally, Germany’s position as the most developed European export economy, which enabled it, in Russian eyes, to play an important role in the economic modernization of Russia. This economic complementarity was augmented by a psychological attraction between both countries: clearly, a Russian-German axis was in the making.

The Testament of Peter the Great

The idea of a Russian-German axis was, in itself, not new. In the nineteenth century, for instance, a document emerged that was said to be the “Testament of Peter the Great.” The document became a subject of heated discussions in European capitals and embassies. The central question was: Is the document authentic? “Peter became retrospectively implicated in Russia’s territorial ambitions by the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Testament of Peter the Great,’” writes John Sainsbury, “the first English translations of which appeared at the beginning of the Crimean War. In it, Peter appears to lay down a blueprint for Russian expansionism. (The provenance of this curious document is furiously debated.)”^[9] The origin of the document was, indeed, contested. It is assumed that it was a forgery and that the British government was behind its publication. This does not make the document less interesting, because it provides a good insight into how European governments in that period regarded Russian foreign policy. Among tsar Peter’s fourteen “instructions,” two precepts in particular catch the eye because they still seem to be inspiring Putin’s foreign policy today. These two precepts are:

It is striking how Putin almost literally followed the “instructions” of tsar Peter because in his foreign policy we find both

In 1997 Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote: “Both France and Germany consider themselves entitled to represent European interests in dealings with Russia, and Germany even retains, because of its geographic location, at least theoretically, the grand option of a special bilateral accommodation with Russia.”^[11] Brzezinski would have been surprised how an option that he considered in 1997 only “theoretically” possible had become an existing reality a decade later. One could not only observe the emergence of a flourishing bilateral economic cooperation but also a relationship that had developed into a real entente cordiale. The relationship had even become so warm and close that some observers—inside as well as outside Germany—had started to worry. Was it true that what Brzezinski in 1997 was still calling a “theoretical” option had developed into the reality of an emerging Moscow-Berlin axis—an axis not unlike the one that existed at the time of Bismarck between imperial Germany and tsarist Russia?

In this chapter we analyze the first three of the above-mentioned factors—seen from the Russian side. In the next chapter we will do the same but from the German perspective. The fourth, economic, factor we will analyze in a separate chapter.

Putin “the German”

It is a well-known fact that from 1985 to the end of 1990 Vladimir Putin worked as a KGB agent in Dresden in the former German Democratic Republic. Those five years were of great importance to him. Putin not only became fluent in German, but he also learned to appreciate the German way of life, which was, in the former communist GDR, more strict and regulated than in the Federal Republic. In particular, the East German preoccupation with order and discipline was completely in tune with Putin’s deeper inner self.^[12] His time in Dresden also brought him many important contacts: not only with agents of the Stasi—the East German sister organization to the KGB—but also with leaders of the East German political and economic establishment. Putin’s (ex-) wife, Lyudmila, a former flight attendant, was also fluent in German, as are his two daughters, who later attended the German School in Moscow. When Putin became an adviser to Leningrad’s Mayor Anatoly Sobchak in May 1990, he got the nickname nemets, which in Russian means “the German.” To be called “the German” in Russia was something positive because in present-day Russia, anything German is highly valued.^[13] It is no exaggeration to say that in recent years a majority of Russians have become convinced Germanophiles. Andreas Umland writes:

It is telling, for instance, that in the paragraph on foreign policy of the party program of Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party one can read: “The party of Zhirinovsky is in favor of peaceful cooperation in Europe, especially with Germany.”^[15] In a Russian opinion survey conducted by Levada in May 2007, respondents, asked to mention Russia’s enemies, mentioned Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, the United States, and Lithuania. Asked to mention Russia’s friends, Germany occupied third place—after Kazakhstan and Belarus but before China.^[16] This Russian Germanophilia leads to several questions, such as, for instance: What are the roots of this phenomenon? How do the Germans react to Russian overtures? Is this Russian Germanophilia reciprocated by an equivalent Russophilia in Germany? And what will be the eventual consequences of this German-Russian rapprochement for the EU, NATO, and the transatlantic relationship?

The Five Reasons Behind Russia’s Germanophilia

Let us start with the first question. What are the reasons for Russian Germanophilia? There are at least five reasons: psychological, historical, cultural and philosophical, geopolitical, and economic.

The psychological reasons for Russian Germanophilia are rooted in the Russian people’s long-standing admiration for specific character traits that are generally ascribed to Germans: their intellectual rigor, their Protestant work ethic, their punctuality, their discipline, and their trustworthiness. Most of these character traits are what the Germans call Sekundartugende: not real, but secondary virtues.^[17] They do not necessarily make people behave more ethically but tend to create affluence, make social life more orderly, and make government action more efficient and predictable. In Russian public opinion polls, this admiration for Germans is often expressed. A sociological study published in 2004, at the end of Putin’s first presidency, included two chapters on Russian-German relationships, one titled: “What Do Russians Think about Russian-German Relationships and Perspectives for Their Development,” and the other, “The Image of Germany and the Germans in the Russian Consciousness.”^[18] In this study one could see a growing optimism in the Russian population concerning the bilateral relationship. Asked in 1996 whether they thought that the relationship with Germany would improve in the long term, 36 percent thought that this would be the case. This percentage had jumped to 55 percent by 2002.^[19] This sympathy, wrote the researchers, was based partly on the fact that “the majority of the Russians do not observe in contemporary Germany any specific expansionist tendencies, which is different from, for instance, the United States.”^[20] The sympathy for Germany, however, was not evenly divided across the population. The younger generation and those with higher incomes or with relatives in Germany were more positive. Members of the Communist Party were more skeptical than members of centrist and right-wing parties. Other factors were at play here because this party had relatively older and less wealthy members. Asked what they considered to be the major barriers to Russian-German relationships, respondents answered that the most significant problem was the status of the Kaliningrad region. This might surprise a Western reader, but it could indicate uncertainty concerning this former German region which was annexed by Stalin after World War II. The second important problem mentioned by the respondents—and this is more in line with what one might expect—was the memory of the Second World War. A third problem that was mentioned was the unwillingness of Germany to render Russian works of art that were stolen during the war.

When asked to characterize Germany, 56 percent of the respondents mentioned “order and discipline”; 30 percent that “one can learn from them”; 22.1 percent that it is an “example of economic success”; and 20.3 percent that “they produce quality products.”^[21] However, this Russian admiration for German Gründlichkeit (thoroughness) and Tüchtigkeit (proficiency) was only one side of the coin.^[22] When asked to attribute a list of virtues and attitudes to Germans and Russians, Russian respondents gave much higher scores to Germans not only for good manners (65.3 percent versus 17.6 percent), punctuality (88.8 percent versus 4.2 percent), accuracy (94.4 percent versus 2.5 percent), and law abidingness (79 percent versus 8.3 percent), but also for egoism (46.1 percent versus 14.4 percent) and greed (72 percent versus 5 percent). At the same time, the Russian respondents gave themselves much higher scores for virtuousness (84 percent versus 4.7 percent), hospitality (87 percent versus 8.2 percent), tolerance (80.4 percent versus 6.3 percent), courage (78.5 percent versus 5.8 percent), and spirituality (62.9 percent versus 14.4 percent).^[23] Russian admiration for the positive German character traits was, therefore, qualified. It was the secondary virtues of the Germans which were highly valued by the Russians. They thought that they themselves did not possess these sufficiently. However, at the same time, they had a sense of superiority in the area of primary virtues, such as virtuousness, hospitality, and tolerance: the real virtues that count in life.

Russian Germanophilia is not a new phenomenon; in fact, it has a long history. In the eighteenth century Germany was, together with Holland, a model for the modernizing tsar Peter the Great. In his youth tsar Peter had direct personal experience of the German way of life because Germans had their own quarter in Moscow. “From the time of his youth in the German section of Moscow, Peter had viewed the West as superior in technology, organization, and cleanliness. These virtues were what Peter wanted to import to Russia.”^[24] Interestingly, he gave his new capital Saint Petersburg a German name: Sankt Peterburg (Санкт Петербург), including the German prefix, Sankt, instead of the Russian word svyatoy.^[25] In 1763, tsarina Catherine the Great, herself of German origin, issued a manifesto inviting foreign settlers, especially Germans, to Russia and offering them free land and freedom from taxes, which led to an influx of farmers, the so-called Volga Germans, who settled along the Volga River. In the nineteenth century other groups of Germans followed, settling in the Black Sea region, the Crimea, and Bessarabia (present Moldova). Germans were considered the ideal immigrants by the Russians because of their highly praised “secondary virtues”: they were hardworking, frugal, and efficient. But Germans were not only Russia’s favorite immigrants to cultivate its new farmlands. According to Herfried Münkler,

It is also interesting to note that in the hundred years after 1816, no fewer than three Russian foreign ministers were of Baltic German origin.^[27]

The Double Amnesia or
“the Great Historical Parenthesis”

The nineteenth century—the time of the Holy Alliance and the Concert of Europe following Napoleon’s defeat—was particularly a golden age for
Russian-German (Prussian) relations, and this may also be the reason that in present-day Russia, interest in this period is livelier than ever. One might ask where this interest comes from. Have Russians suddenly forgotten that in the twentieth century they fought two world wars against Germany? It may seem strange, but this is—almost—the case, because in contemporary Russia, a double reinterpretation of history is taking place. The first concerns the history of Russia itself, and the second concerns the history of Russian-German relations. To start with the former: Russians are constructing what I would call the Great Historical Parenthesis. They tend to consider the communist era (1917–1991) as a temporal deviation from the “normal” course of Russian history. A partly conscious, partly unconscious amnesia is taking place by which Russians are trying to forget^[28] their communist past, wanting to reconnect with the pre-communist era of “normal Russia.” This “normal Russia” was Russia as it existed before World War I. It was the Russia of the tsars: an Orthodox, capitalist, and imperialist Russia.^[29]

Back to Bismarck?

This process of reconnecting with the pre-communist past has led simultaneously to a reevaluation of Russian-German relations and of German history. The “Great Historical Parenthesis” suppresses not only the bad memories of the Stalinist period^[30] but equally the bad memories of Nazi Germany.^[31] It is a strange process, full of contradictions, because at the same time the Great Patriotic War (World War II) continues to play a key role in the national consciousness. However, Germany can be said to have profited from the fact that the Russian historical memory has put the communist period between brackets and has reconnected with the nineteenth century. The autocratic tsar Alexander III (1881–1894) in particular is enjoying immense popularity in present-day Russia, a popularity he shares with his German contemporary, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck knew Russia well. Before German unification, he had already been Prussian ambassador in Saint Petersburg between 1859 and 1862. Bismarck was, if not a full-fledged friend, a close ally of Russia. He had his strategic reasons for this. Wanting to avoid the possibility of a defeated France forming an anti-German coalition with either Russia or Austria, which could lead to a war on two fronts for Germany, in 1873 Bismarck took the initiative for the Dreikaiserbund: the “League of the Three Emperors” that linked Germany with Russia and Austria.^[32] “There is so much strength in an alliance between the two empires,” writes Bismarck to Count Pyotr Shuvalov, the Russian ambassador in London, “that I get angry at the very idea that one day it could be compromised for no political reason whatsoever, only by the whim of some statesman who wants change or who finds the Frenchman more pleasant than the German.”^[33] “Over what could Russia and Prussia ever seriously come into conflict?” he asked. He gave himself the answer: “There exists no issue between them that would be serious enough.”^[34]

Bismarck was eager to maintain the coalition with Russia, even after the “League of the Three Emperors” finally collapsed.^[35] It is interesting that on the Russian side, admiration for Bismarck remained intact in Soviet times. “Beginning with Lenin,” writes Georgi Derluguian, “the Soviet leaders deeply envied the effectiveness of German bureaucracy, and thus their inspiration was Bismarck perhaps even more than Karl Marx.”^[36] During World War II, Bismarck was “rediscovered in Soviet pamphlets as a representative of a better, more moderate Germany.”^[37] It is, therefore, no surprise that in recent years Bismarck has become a kind of icon for Russians. He is by far their favorite German politician.^[38] The Russian presidential administration is even reconstructing Bismarck’s villa near Kaliningrad,^[39] the former East-Prussian town of Königsberg. It is also telling that Bismarck has been employed to improve the image of Stalin. In new textbooks for teachers of history, introduced by Putin in 2007, not only is the communist dictator portrayed as “the most successful Russian ruler of the twentieth century,” but he is also explicitly compared with Bismarck.^[40] The first signs of the Russian drive to rebuild a Bismarckian Russia-Germany axis were already emerging in 1992–1993, immediately after the demise of the Soviet Union, when Karl-Heinz Hornhues, deputy leader of the CDU Bundestag faction, reported that Russian leaders were suggesting that Germany and Russia form a counterweight to the United States.^[41] It was, in fact, the continuation of a historical line. “A number of Russian statesmen,” writes Andrei Tsygankov, “beginning with foreign ministers Nikolai de Giers and Alexander Gorchakov, have historically favored a strong continental alliance with France and Germany, viewed as essential for preserving peace and continuing with modernization at home.”^[42]

The Ever-Present Russian Appetite
for German Ideology

Apart from the aforementioned psychological and historical reasons, there exists a third reason for Russian Germanophilia, which is the enduring cultural and philosophical influence Germany has exerted over Russia during the past two centuries. German philosophy has found fertile soil in Russia. This is especially true for German philosophy with historicist undertones that could be used in a messianic (re-)interpretation of Russian history. It was no surprise, therefore, that in the nineteenth century Hegel and Marx became extremely popular in Russian intellectual circles.^[43] Both offered a vision of history as a progressive, dialectic process. For Hegel it was the Weltgeist (the world spirit) that developed itself to higher stages of consciousness. For Marx it was the dialectic between the productive forces and the relations of production that inevitably would lead to the advent of communism. We should not forget that the Soviet Union was the inheritor and executor of a German philosophy: Marxism. Half of the quartet that made up the Soviet pantheon—Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin (in Soviet times abbreviated to MELS)—were Germans. Ernst Cassirer has pointed to the Hegelian legacy, which led to two combating schools: the Left Hegelians, represented by Marx and Engels, and the Right Hegelians, the state-abiding nationalists who were the forerunners of Hitler’s national socialists. He asks “whether the struggle of the Russians and the invading Germans in 1943 was not, at bottom, a conflict between the Left and Right wings of Hegel’s school.”^[44] Cassirer adds: “That may seem to be an exaggerated statement of the problem but it contains a nucleus of truth.”^[45]

Halford Mackinder’s Eurasian Heartland and the Moscow-Berlin Axis

Today’s post-communist Russia has abandoned Marxism. This does not mean, however, that German ideology has lost its influence on Russian politics. On the contrary: in recent years the ideological void that emerged after the collapse of communism has been filled with another German ideology: Geopolitik. The English word for Geopolitik is geopolitics. “Geopolitics” is, in itself, a neutral word. It was a new discipline, developed at the end of the nineteenth century, concerned with the analysis of how the geographic conditions of a country tended to influence its foreign policy. Because geographic conditions over time do not fundamentally change, they give rise to more or less permanent foreign policy patterns, which are relatively independent from ideological considerations. One of the leading and most influential theorists was an Englishman, Sir Halford Mackinder, who in 1904 developed the theory of the “pivot area.”^[46] This “pivot area,” or “heartland,” was, according to him, the Eurasian continent. Around this “heartland” was an inner crescent of coastal areas, which included Western Europe and South and Southeast Asia. Farther away was a periphery, an outer crescent of islands: the Americas, Japan, and Australia. According to Mackinder, the power that dominated the Eurasian heartland was able to dominate the world. It was, therefore, in the interests of the island powers to prevent the formation of a power monopoly in the heartland because this would pose an immediate threat. Mackinder adapted his theory—without, however, changing the basic concept—during his active life as a geopolitician, which spanned a period of forty years. In one of his last articles, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” published in Foreign Affairs in July 1943,^[47] he stated that

In 1943, when the German defeat became imminent, Mackinder considered the Soviet Union as the potential hegemon of the heartland. His greatest fear, which he had already articulated in his article of 1904, was a possible alliance of Russia and Germany. In 1904 he wrote: “The oversetting of the balance of power in favour of the pivot state, resulting in its expansion over the marginal lands of Euro-Asia, would permit of the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would then be in sight. This might happen if Germany were to ally herself with Russia.”^[49]

Russia’s Recent Reception of German Geopolitik

Mackinder published his first article on the Eurasian heartland in 1904. This was the same year that the father of German Geopolitik, Friedrich Ratzel, died. Anglo-Saxon geopolitics, in both its English and American variants, was never a totally value-free science. Even if it did not directly serve the national strategic interest, it undoubtedly had implications for national policy choices. In Germany, however, things were different. German Geopolitik did not even try to uphold the objective of scientific value neutrality. In the 1920s and 1930s it became an outright legitimation theory and a direct ideological tool in the service of German territorial expansionism and aggressive Nazi conquest.

This tendency was, in principle, already present in the theory of Friedrich Ratzel. Ratzel developed an organic state theory. States were, according to him, living creatures that could not be restricted by frontiers: they expanded or contracted according to their organic structure. They needed Lebensraum, “living space.” This was a fortiori the case for Germany. Because at the end of the nineteenth century the recently unified Germany was in a growth phase, it needed Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. It is clear that Ratzel’s theory was incompatible with the principles of international law concerning the inviolability of national frontiers. Later German geopoliticians, such as Karl Haushofer and—even more so—the Nazi ideologue Carl Schmitt, adapted Ratzel’s theory to the needs of Hitler’s Germany. Schmitt, for instance, claimed for the German Reich a “spatial sovereignty” (Raumhoheit), which was directly inspired by Ratzel’s theory of “living space.” Schmitt was also very clear about the practical implications of this concept. This German spatial sovereignty, he wrote, “exceeds its national frontiers.”^[50]

After World War II, German Geopolitik was considered an integral part of the Nazi ideology and banned from German universities. It even led to a more widespread taboo on geopolitical thinking in other countries by a process of “guilt by association.”^[51] It is interesting to note that this taboo was very strong in the Soviet Union. According to Jean-Christophe Romer, “one can find only one single Soviet work, explicitly on geopolitics, that has been published in the Soviet Union during a period stretching from Stalin to Chernenko.”^[52] And this single work, he wrote, was “very critical.” One reason for this absence of geopolitical thinking in the Soviet Union was ideological:

The gradual comeback of geopolitical thinking in the United States and Western Europe at the end of the 1970s, to which Romer refers, left the Soviet Union untouched. The new emerging geopolitical thinking in the West, however, did not rehabilitate its German variant, Geopolitik, but reconnected with the Anglo-Saxon tradition and authors, such as Alfred Thayer Mahan, Halford Mackinder, and Nicholas Spykman. The reason why this revival of geopolitical thinking did not take place in the Soviet Union in the 1980s is not only because of ideological reasons—as Romer suggests. Overstretched by its imperialist adventure in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union went through a period of deep internal crisis that led to Gorbachev’s perestroika. Absorbed by its huge economic and societal problems and subject to extremely strong centrifugal forces, this was for Soviet Russia certainly not the moment for imperialist geopolitical speculation.

This situation changed, however, after the sudden dissolution of the Soviet empire and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In a period of somewhat more than three years, Russia was reduced from a huge empire to a country that found itself globally within its seventeenth-century frontiers. This was a tremendous shock for the Russian psyche. Territories that for centuries had been part of the Russian empire suddenly became foreign countries. And in these foreign countries lived sizable Russian minorities. The traumatism caused by this situation was experienced as the Great Historical Amputation. And this “Great Historical Amputation” provided a fertile soil for the return of geopolitical thinking in Russia in the 1990s. “Geopolitics as a theory has been almost an outcast for nearly half a century,” writes Sergei Karaganov, Honorary Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. “In [the] Soviet Union it was blacklisted as bourgeois, while in the West it was blacklisted as politically incorrect.”^[54] “These days,” he continues, “geopolitics is a catchword on everybody’s tongue again, and it is quickly regaining both political correctness and legitimacy.”^[55]

The revival of geopolitics in Russia concerned in the first place the theories of Halford Mackinder. With his theory of the Eurasian heartland he gave Russia the special position Russians craved. He also offered theoretical support for their hope that Russia could regain its former status as a world power. However, the 1990s provided a fertile soil not only for the reception of Anglo-Saxon geopolitics but also for its other—less presentable—branch: German Geopolitik. This was a surprising development: for the second time in a century a German ideology, which was unpopular or banned in its country of origin, found refuge in Russia. The first time this concerned Marxism. The second time this concerned German Geopolitik because it is, indeed, the German variant of geopolitics—based on naked power politics and with grandiose territorial ambitions—which, in recent years, has become influential in Russia. This emergence of German Geopolitik is not accidental. It was the historic conditions of the Weimar Republic that provided the fertile soil for the rise of German Geopolitik. The historic situation in Russia in the 1990s was almost identical: both countries lost important territories, both passed through a protracted period of internal turmoil and deep economic crisis, both countries had authoritarian political traditions, and both countries experienced a rise of extremist political parties with nationalist and revanchist agendas.^[56]

Aleksandr Dugin: The Russian Apostle of Geopolitik

Every theory needs its apostles to spread the message. In the case of Marxism, it was Lenin and the leaders of the Bolshevist Party who played a crucial role in the reception and adaptation of this originally German ideology to the Russian situation. German Geopolitik equally found its Russian apostles. The most well known is Aleksandr Dugin, a semimythical thinker who in the 1980s was close to conservative and even monarchist circles. After the demise of the Soviet Union, he drew closer first to Zyuganov’s Communist Party and then to the even more extremist National Bolshevik Party, whose leader, Edvard Limonov, described Dugin as “the Cyril and Methodius of fascism, because he brought Faith and knowledge about it to our country from the West.”^[57] Dugin’s influence was in the beginning restricted to nationalist movements and political parties of the extreme right, such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s crypto-fascist Liberal-Democratic Party. But after the publication in 1997 of his book The Foundations of Geopolitics: Russia’s Geopolitical Future, his influence became much broader. The book has been reissued four times in three years and became a best seller in academic and political circles. Dugin found many admirers, especially in the army. He was invited to lecture at the Academy of the General Staff and at the Institute for Strategic Research in Moscow, and he wrote columns in the Krasnaya
Zvezda (the Red Star), the official army paper. On April 21, 2001, Dugin started his own political movement, Evraziya (Eurasia), with the help of the Kremlin pundit Gleb Pavlovsky.^[58] One year later, on May 30, 2002, Dugin transformed the Evraziya movement into a political party that claimed ten thousand members and was welcomed by Aleksandr Voloshin, head of Putin’s presidential administration. But after an alliance with the reactionary Rodina (Fatherland) Party, led by Dmitry Rogozin, failed, he left electoral politics definitively and, in November 2003, transformed the party into the “International Eurasian Movement.”

What Is “Duginism”?

Dugin is not an original thinker. His geopolitical ideas are a sort of a mixture of Halford Mackinder’s heartland theory and Carl Schmitt’s Großraum (large space) theory, which—again—is a variant of Ratzel’s Lebensraum theory. He is also a great admirer of other national conservative German writers and thinkers, such as the novelist Ernst Jünger or Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, who coined the term “Third Reich.” According to Marlène Laruelle,

Not only is Dugin an avid reader of German Geopolitik, he also gives Germany a prominent place in his theories. He divides the world into four civilizational zones: the American zone, the Afro-European zone, the Asian-Pacific zone, and the Eurasian zone. Russia should seek alliances that are organized in concentric circles. In Europe, Russia should ally itself with Germany because Germany, situated in the heart of Europe, will dominate Central Europe. In Asia, Russia should ally itself with Japan; in the south, Russia should ally itself with Iran. In this Russia-Germany-Japan-Iran alliance, the principal role will be played by Russia, which occupies the central heartland. This Eurasian quartet has to take on the “thalassocracies” (sea powers), consisting of the United States, Britain, China, and Turkey. This “goal of Eurasian geopolitics—the establishment of a Moscow-Berlin-Tokyo axis”—
reappears in Dugin’s founding declaration of his International Eurasian Movement.^[60] Although Dugin’s ideas have unmistakably influenced the Russian political leadership and in particular Putin’s project for a Eurasian Union, it is clear that they have not been adopted 100 percent. Putin, for instance, preferred to build a Moscow-Beijing axis instead of a Moscow-Tokyo axis.^[61] However, as concerns the two other geopolitical priorities formulated by Dugin, building a Moscow-Tehran axis and a Moscow-Berlin axis, these two objectives have become central pillars of Putin’s foreign policy. The influence of “Duginism” has become even more prominent during Putin’s third presidency. In an article in Izvestia in October 2011, Putin announced the creation of “Eurasian Union” (Evraziyskiy Soyuz) as the main foreign policy goal of his new presidential term.^[62]

Notes

Vladimir Putin, “Pages of History: Reason for Mutual Complaints or Ground for Reconciliation and Partnership?” article for Gazeta Wyborcza (August 31, 2009), available at http://www.premier.gov.ru/eng/events/3514.html.

Samuel P. Huntington, “The Lonely Superpower,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 2 (March/April 1999), 44–45.

Cf. Charles Clover, “Dreams of the Eurasian Heartland: The Reemergence of Geopolitics,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 2 (March/April 1999), 11.

Cf. Angelo Codevilla, “Europe’s Dangerous Dalliance with the Bear,” Wall Street Journal Europe (June 7, 2001).

Alexander Rahr, “Will Russland die ‘weiche Eindämmung’ Amerikas?” GUS-Barometer, no. 33 (April 2003), 3.

However, participating in a triangle does not per se mean that one plays a central role. On the basis of an analysis of the voting behavior of the member and observer states of the SCO in the United Nations General Assembly, Flemming Hansen concludes that although a policy convergence had taken place, “Russia remains a leading outlier. The policy convergence is a Chinese-led process, and it seems safe to assume that Beijing is more satisfied with this development than is Moscow. . . . What is good for China . . . is of course not necessarily good for Russia.” (Flemming Splidsboel Hansen, “China, Russia, and the Foreign Policy of the SCO,” Connections 11, no. 2 (Spring 2012), 102.)

“Prepared Statement of John C. Hulsman, PhD, Research Fellow for European Affairs, The Davis Institute for International Studies, The Heritage Foundation,” House Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Europe (June 11, 2003), http://www.house.gov/international_relations/108/huls0611.htm.

Hans Kundnani, “Leaving the West Behind: Germany Looks East,” Foreign Affairs 94, no. 1 (January/February 2015), 116.

John Sainsbury, “Peter the Great through British Eyes: Perceptions and Representations of the Tsar since 1698,” Canadian Journal of History (April 2003).

10.

“The Testament of Peter the Great,” available at http://www.nipissingu.ca/faculty/coryf/HIST2705/resources/THE%20(forged)%20TESTAMENT%20OF%20PETER%20THE%20GREAT.doc.

11.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 42.

12.

In Putin’s biographical First Person, his wife Lyudmila made the following observations on life in the GDR: “Of course life in the GDR was very different from life in Russia. The streets were clean. They would wash the windows once a week. . . . There was one detail that surprised me. It was trivial—should I even mention it? It was the way German women would hang out their clothes. In the morning, before work, about 7:00 A.M., they would go out in the backyard. And each housewife would stretch a rope between these metal poles, and then she would hang her laundry out on the lines in very, very neat rows, with clothespins. They were all alike. The Germans were very orderly in their daily life, and their standard of living was better than ours.” (Cf. Vladimir Putin, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President, with Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnikov (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 75.)

13.

Cf. Matthias Nass and Stefan Schirmer, “Sie nennen ihn den Deutschen,” Die Zeit (May 22, 2014). Boris Reitschuster, who worked as a German journalist in Moscow for the magazine Focus, experienced personally this positive appreciation of Germany and Germans in present-day Russia. Ordinary Russians told him, for instance, that in the time that (the German) tsarina Catherine the Great was in charge, “there reigned more order in Russia.” Equally, according to Reitschuster, “when with Putin a ‘German’ again occupies the Kremlin, most Russians associate it with the hope for orderliness, trustworthiness, zeal, determination, and cool pragmatism.” (Cf. Boris Reitschuster, Wladimir Putin: Wohin steuert er Russland? (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2004), 101.)

14.

Andreas Umland, “Post-Weimar Russia? There Are Sad Signs,” History News Network (May 28, 2007), http://hnn.us/articles/38422.html.

15.

Obrashchenie Vladimira Zhirinovskogo predsedatelya Liberalno-Demokraticheskoy Partii Rossii k chlenam LDPR i sochuvstvuyushchim—Programma Liberalno-Demokraticheskoy Partii Rossii—Ustav LDPR (Moscow, 1992), 9.

16.

Andrei Zagorski, “Russian Opinion Surveys: Friends and Enemies, International Relations,” in Russian Foreign Policy: Key Regions and Issues, ed. Robert Orttung, Jeronim Pero-
vic, Heiko Pleines, and Hans-Henning Schröder, Forschungsstelle Osteuropa Bremen, Arbeitspapiere und Materialien No. 87 (November 2007), 11.

17.

Even trustworthiness, which at first sight seems to be a primary moral virtue, may in practice be only a secondary virtue—as in the case of a criminal who is considered trustworthy by other gang members because he always shows up in time for a planned burglary.

18.

M. K. Gorshkova, N. E. Tikhonovoy, and L. A. Belyayeva, Izmenyayushchayasya Rossiya v zerkale sotsiologii (Moscow: Letniy Sad, 2004).

19.

Gorshkova, Tikhonovoy, and Belyayeva, Izmenyayushchayasya Rossiya, 233.

20.

Gorshkova, Tikhonovoy, and Belyayeva, Izmenyayushchayasya Rossiya, 235.

21.

Gorshkova, Tikhonovoy, and Belyayeva, Izmenyayushchayasya Rossiya, 248.

22.

The Russian self-image of a people lacking discipline is mirrored in the way Germans view Russians. According to Gerd Ruge, “It was the nationalistic fantasies of German historians and politicians, who considered times of unrest proof of the fact that the Russians (and more generally the Slavs) as Slavs were unable to build a well-ordered state and could be governed and civilized only by strong rulers (preferably of German origin).” (Cf. Gerd Ruge, Russland (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 2008), 110.)

23.

Gorshkova, Tikhonovoy, and Belyayeva, Izmenyayushchayasya Rossiya, 252, table 77. The results are for the year 2002.

24.

Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (New York: Penguin, 2004), 86.

25.

After the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, when anti-German feelings ran high, the German name of the town was Russified into Petrograd. In 1924 this name was changed into Leningrad. It is interesting that since 1991, Leningrad has regained its original German name.

26.

Herfried Münkler, Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 23. Richard Pipes remarks that “the idea of office-holding as a public service was entirely alien to the Russian bureaucracy; it was something imported from the west, mainly Germany. It was Baltic Germans, who first demonstrated to the Russians that an official could use his power to serve society. The imperial government greatly valued these men and they acquired a disproportionate share of the topmost ranks.” (Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (London and New York: Penguin, 1995), 286–287.)

27.

They included Count Karl Robert Nesselrode, foreign minister from 1816 to 1856; Nikolay Von Giers, foreign minister from 1882 to 1894; and Count Vladimir Lambsdorff, foreign minister from 1900 to 1906. Karl Nesselrode was born in Lisbon, where his father was Russian ambassador. Because his mother was a Protestant, he was baptized in the British embassy and thereby became a de facto member of the Church of England. Minister Von Giers was also a Protestant. This was no impediment to the Orthodox, Slavophile tsar Alexander III’s retaining him until the end of his reign. It is interesting that Hitler in Mein Kampf also referred to these Baltic German nobles who served the Russian state—but only to denigrate the Slavs, writing that “the organisation of a Russian state was not the result of the state political capacities of the Slavs in Russia, but more just a wonderful example of the state political activity of the Germanic element in an inferior race. . . . For centuries Russia has profited from this Germanic core of its higher leading echelons.” (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Verlag Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1933), 742–743.)

28.

This amnesia concerns especially the negative aspects of the communist era. Apart from this process of amnesia—which is actively promoted by a vigorous policy of suppression of the memory of these negative aspects by the Russian leadership—a parallel process of reinterpretation is taking place in order to save the “positive accomplishments” of the communist era.

29.

Interestingly, a similar process seems to be taking place on the German side. Jacob Heilbrunn writes that “Germany is forging a new national identity that is less influenced by the Nazi past and that looks to the broader sweep of the country’s place in European history dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Germany is increasingly looking back at its Prussian ideals, which it sees as having been betrayed, not represented by, Nazism.” (Jacob Heilbrunn, “All Roads Lead to Berlin,” The National Interest no. 122 (November/December 2012), 41.)

30.

The recent rehabilitation of Stalin seems to contradict this theory. But this is only superficially so. Stalin is rehabilitated only insofar as he has continued the tsarist, imperialist policies of “normal Russia” and created the greatest Russian empire ever. Stalinist repression and mass murders, on the contrary, almost disappear into oblivion.

31.

Christopher Clark has drawn attention to the fact that even during World War II, the Russians still made a distinction between Prussia and Hitler’s Nazi regime. Unlike the Western powers, for instance, they evaluated positively the assassination attempt by Prussian officers on Hitler on July 20, 1944. According to Clark, this was an expression of the specifically Russian view of Prussian history. This is because the history of the relations between both states was certainly not one of “reciprocal hate.” Other examples of the “long tradition of cooperation” between the two countries that Clark mentions, are the support for the beleaguered Bolshevists in 1917–1918 and the close cooperation of the German Reichswehr and the Red Army in the Weimar period. (Cf. Christopher Clark, Preußen—Aufstieg und Niedergang 1600–1947 (Munich: Pantheon Verlag, 2008), 765–766.)

32.

The League of the Three Emperors held until 1887. It was interrupted in the period 1877–1881 due to Russian-Austrian rivalry in the Balkans.

33.

In the original: “Il y a tant de force et de sécurité dans une alliance des deux empires, que je me fâche à l’idée seule qu’elle pourrait être compromise un jour sans la moindre raison politique, uniquement par la volonté de quelque homme d’état qui aime à varier ou qui trouve le Français plus aimable que l’Allemand.” (Letter of Bismarck to Count Shuvalov of February 15, 1877. In Otto Fürst von Bismarck, Gedanken und Erinnerungen, 2. Band (Stuttgart and Berlin: J. G. Gotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1919), 254.)

34.

Bismarck, Gedanken und Erinnerungen, 264.

35.

When the League of Three Emperors collapsed in 1887, Bismarck continued his cooperation with Russia, signing the Reinsurance Treaty on June, 18, 1887. In this treaty, Germany promised to stay neutral in the event of Russia being attacked by Austria, and Russia promised to stay neutral should Germany be attacked by France. German Emperor Wilhelm II’s refusal to renew this treaty in 1890 led to an 1892 Russian-French alliance and the development of two opposing blocks in Europe, something which Bismarck had tried to prevent.

36.

Georgi Derluguian, “Introduction—Whose Truth?” in A Small Corner of Hell—Dispatches from Chechnya, by Anna Politkovskaya (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 15.

37.

Dieter Langewiesche, “Mächtiger Gegner: Der Bismarck-Mythos im Übergang vom deutschen Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (May 26, 2008).

38.

It is telling that the first signs of anti-German feelings in Russia appear only at the end of Bismarck’s reign. The Russian Pan-Slavist Nikolay Danilevsky writes, for instance, in his pamphlet “Rossiya i Evropa” (“Russia and Europe”) (1889), that “Europe does not recognize us as its equal. It considers Russia and the Slav in general as something strange and at the same time as something that simply cannot serve as material . . . which can be formed and shaped . . . as the Germans especially have done, who, despite their famous cosmopolitanism, await the salvation of the world only from a salvaging of German civilization. Europe considers therefore the Russian and the Slav not only as a strange, but also as a hostile element.” (Nikolay Danilevsky, “Russland und Europa,” in Russischer Nationalismus: Die russische Idee im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Darstellung und Texte, ed. Frank Golczewski and Gertrud Pickhan (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 181.) However, it is interesting to note that this critical assessment of Germany by Russian Pan-Slavists still had German roots. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit rightly stress that “Russian Slavophilia was rooted in German romanticism, just as Russian liberalism took its cues from German liberal ideas.” (Buruma and Margalit, Occidentalism, 77).

39.

The villa, of which only four walls are left, is being rebuilt in accordance with archive documents. (Cf. “Russia Rebuilds Bismarck’s Villa,” Kommersant (February 28, 2008).

40.

Undoubtedly Putin has a great personal admiration for Bismarck. In an interview with the Italian paper Corriere della Sera Putin mentioned Bismarck, quoting his dictum “It is not speeches, but potential, that is important.” (In reality Bismarck said: “The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions, but by iron and blood.”) (Cf. Paolo Valentino, “Putin al Corriere della Sera: ‘Non sono un aggressore, patto con l’Europa e parità con gli USA,’” Corriere della Sera (June 15, 2015).) Also Putin’s idea of introducing “patriotic” history textbooks seems to have been inspired by Bismarck. On June 20, 2007, at a conference on the reform of history textbooks organized by the Kremlin, Vladislav Surkov, deputy head of the presidential administration, recalled “the famous words of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who contended it was the Prussian teacher who won the decisive battle of Sadowa during the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Surkov maintained Russia’s own future victories would be owed to the service of its teachers.” (“‘Sovereign Democracy’ and Politicization of History: Commentators See Politics Behind Putin Comments on History,” Finnish-Russian Civic Forum, (July 18, 2007), available at http://www.finrosforum.fi/?p=360.) Cf. also Leon Aron, “The Problematic Pages,” in The New Republic (September 24, 2008); Simon Sebag Montefiore, “Putin in the Shadow of the Red Czar,” The New York Times (August 24, 2008); Michael Knox Beran, “Bismarcks´s Shadow: Freedom in Retreat,” National Review (September 28, 2007); and Steve Chapman, “Putin and Stalin: Revising the Past,” Chicago Tribune (September 2, 2007).

41.

Cf. Marc Fisher, “Germany Says Russia Seeks a Policy Ally,” International Herald Tribune (February 3, 1993), quoted in Kenneth N. Waltz, Realism and International Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 196.

42.

Andrei P. Tsygankov, “Preserving Influence in a Changing World: Russia’s Grand Strategy,” Problems of Post-Communism 58, no. 1 (March–April 2011).

43.

This despite the fact that both Marx and Engels were often openly anti-Russian. Friedrich Engels, for instance, does not hesitate to call them “barbarians” when, in 1849—after the revolution of 1848—Russian troops were ready to intervene in Germany: “Half a million armed and organized barbarians,” he writes, “wait for the opportunity to attack Germany and to make us serfs of the Pravoslavny Tsar, the Orthodox tsar.” (Friedrich Engels, “Die Russen,” originally published in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, on April 22, 1849. Published in Marx Engels Werke (MEW), Band 6, (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1969), 432–433.)

44.

Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975), 249.

45.

Cassirer, The Myth of the State, 249.

46.

Halford J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” republished in Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1996), 175–193.

47.

Halford J. Mackinder, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” republished in Democratic Ideals and Reality, 195–205.

48.

Mackinder, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” 201.

49.

Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” 191–192 (emphasis mine).

50.

Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997), 256.

51.

This is how the decline of geopolitical theory in the United States is—in part—explained by Colin S. Gray. (Cf. Colin S. Gray, The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era: Heartland, Rimlands, and the Technological Revolution, Strategy Paper no. 30, National Strategy Information Center, Washington, DC (New York: Crane, Russak, 1977), 11.) Two other reasons for this decline were, according to him, “academic fashion” and changes in military—especially nuclear—technology.

52.

Jean-Christophe Romer, Géopolitique de la Russie (Paris: Economica, 1999), 25.

53.

Romer, Géopolitique de la Russie, 25–26.

54.

Sergei Karaganov, “The Map of the World: Geopolitics Stages a Comeback,” Russia in Global Affairs (May 19, 2013).

55.

Karaganov, “The Map of the World.”

56.

See, for a detailed comparison of the situation in Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia and the many striking resemblances, my book Putinism: The Slow Rise of a Radical Right Regime in Russia (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan), 2013.

57.

Quoted in Marlène Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Washington and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 109.

58.

Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism, 111–113.

59.

Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism, 116 (emphasis mine).

60.

Aleksandr Dugin, Evraziystvo ot filosofii k politike: Doklad na Uchreditelnom sezde OPOD ‘Evrazii’ 21 aprelya 2001 g., Moskva (Moscow, 2001).

61.

According to Ilan Berman, “these developments are not inconsistent with Dugin’s theories: Given Moscow’s current difficulties with Tokyo, Dugin sees Sino-Russian alignment as a viable strategic partnership in the near term, to be replaced later by a Russo-Japanese bloc.” (Cf. Ilan Berman, “Slouching toward Eurasia,” Pundicity (September–October 2001), http://www.ilanberman.com/5947/slouching-toward-eurasia.)

62.

Vladimir Putin, “Novyy integratsionnyy proekt dlya Evrazii: budushchee, kotoroe rozhdaetsya segodnya,” Izvestia (October 3, 2011).

Germany’s Kremlin-Friendly Political Class

In the previous chapter we saw that in the Kremlin there exists an explicit political will to build a Moscow-Berlin axis. However, it is clear that the realization of such a project needs the support of the other side. The question is, therefore, whether Russian Germanophilia is met by an equivalent Russophilia on the German side. This chapter takes a closer look at the German side and shows in more detail how German politicians and political parties, as well as the German press and media and German intellectuals, react to Russian overtures.

According to a 2007 survey commissioned by the German economic magazine Capital and conducted among a German “elite panel” made up of six hundred leaders coming from politics, business, and the government, 67 percent of the panel thought that the relationship between Germany and Russia was “good to very good.” According to the Capital editor,

What is striking here is the great tolerance towards Moscow’s hard political course displayed by the German elite. One might even wonder whether this is a case of “Putinophilia” rather than Russophilia. According to Rolf Füchs, director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a think tank connected to the Green Party, one of the factors behind the German Russophilia is German guilt toward Russia for Germany’s role in World War II. These views would especially hold sway in the Social-Democratic Party (SPD), a party with a graying membership where memories of the war, until recently, were still vivid.^[3]

Kremlin-Friendly Socialists

One of the Kremlin’s biggest trump cards is, indeed, the existence of a powerful pro-Russian lobby in Germany’s political establishment. The most telling example is former SPD chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who was not only a political ally of Putin but also a close personal friend. The Putin and Schröder families spent their Christmas holidays together, and in August 2004 Gerhard Schröder and his wife adopted a three-year-old girl from an orphanage in Saint Petersburg, thanks, it was said, to the personal intervention of Putin. “For those interested in symbolism,” writes the New York Times in a commentary at the time, “the adoption is yet another sign of the warming trend in Russian-German relations over the past few years. Bitter enemies in World War II, tense neighbors during the cold war, the two are in the midst of a burgeoning political and culture exchange.”^[4] In an article in the German paper Welt am Sonntag Henry Kissinger writes that Schröder had won the elections of 2002 through a “combination of pacifism, leftwing and rightwing nationalism, and an appeal to a specific German way that recalls reminiscences of Wilhelmine Germany.”^[5] “But when Germany insults the U.S.,” writes Kissinger, “ . . . and acts without consultation with the other European states in the name of a ‘German Way,’ it is threatened by isolation and a return to the European situation that existed prior to World War I.” Kissinger concludes: “The new German way is not only a challenge to the USA, but also to Europe. . . . It allows the emergence of questions about the European leadership, eventually in cooperation with Russia, that point to many Prussian ideas of the 19th century.”^[6] A similar concern is expressed by Robert D. Kaplan, who writes: “So will a debellicized Germany partly succumb to Russian influence, leading to a somewhat Finlandized Eastern Europe and an even more hollow North Atlantic Treaty Organization? Or would Germany subtly stand up to Russia through various political and economic means, even as its society remains immersed in postheroic quasi pacifism?”^[7] These were, indeed, pertinent questions.

After leaving office, Gerhard Schröder became the well-paid president of the shareholders’ committee of the Nord Stream consortium that built a direct gas pipeline between Russia and Germany under the Baltic Sea. Nord Stream, of which 51 percent is owned by Gazprom, obtained a secret €1 billion German loan guarantee issued a few days before the German chancellor left office. “His close relationship with Putin triggered charges of cronyism from German politicians, as well as claims that he’s sold his country out,” wrote Time Magazine at the time. “‘Gazprom is Putin and Putin is Gazprom. By taking this job, Schröder has made himself a salesman for Putin’s politics,’ alleged Reinhard Bütikofer, a leader of Germany’s Greens.”^[8]

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a socialist foreign minister and former vice chancellor, is equally known for his Kremlin-friendly behavior. He started his career in the 1990s as chef de cabinet of Gerhard Schröder when Schröder was prime minister of the German state of Lower Saxony. Later, when Schröder became chancellor, he followed his boss to Berlin. Being in the right place at the right time, this loyal civil servant, who had never been elected to any public office, was catapulted to the position of foreign minister and vice chancellor in the Great Coalition of SPD and CDU/CSU in 2005 thanks to the personal intervention of Gerhard Schröder. As a foreign minister Steinmeier became the most outspoken protagonist of a Russia-friendly policy in the coalition government. At the Bucharest NATO summit In April 2008, he fervently opposed granting Ukraine and Georgia NATO Membership Action Plans, telling his colleagues that a “divided” Georgia would not be fit to join because of its “frozen conflicts” in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Condoleezza Rice retorted “that these conflicts were ‘not Georgia’s problem, but Russia’s.’”^[9] She added that if this argument had been used in 1955, Germany—at that time equally divided—would not have become a NATO member. After the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008, Steinmeier maintained his “even-handed” approach, refusing to distinguish between the military actions of Georgia that were conducted within its national borders and the military actions of Russia that were an invasion of a foreign, sovereign country. He also opposed putting substantial sanctions in place against Russia after those events. In 2012, when Steinmeier was leader of the opposition, he wrote an essay titled “Realism and Principled Attitudes—Foreign Policy in the Sign of New Global Balances,”^[10] in which he attacked Chancellor Angela Merkel’s values-based foreign policy. He declared himself to be against a policy of “moral rigorism” and against “accusations and a refusal of dialogue.” Instead, he wrote, one should start a dialogue with the “emerging powers in the East” without allowing oneself to be held back by “setbacks” in the realization of democracy and human rights. After the elections of September 2013, when a new coalition government of CDU/CSU and SPD was in the making, the German weekly Die Zeit published an article titled “Why He Should Not Come [Back] to the Foreign Ministry.”^[11] “Steinmeier,” wrote the paper, “considers himself a friend of Russia,” and therefore “he can be the leader of the parliamentary group, a Labor Minister or a Finance Minister. However, preferably not a Foreign Minister.”^[12] Criticisms like these of his Kremlin-friendly attitude did not prevent Steinmeier from becoming—again—foreign minister in the new Great Coalition government, which was formed on December 17, 2013. During the Ukraine crisis in 2014, Steinmeier remained a steadfast supporter of “dialogue” with Moscow. In November 2014, after Putin got an icy reception at the G20 summit in Brisbane from his Western colleagues—including Chancellor Merkel—Steinmeier went to Moscow to meet with Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov, pleading for “moderation,” risking an open rift with the chancellor.^[13] Some weeks later an open letter was published in the weekly Die Zeit, titled “Once More War in Europe? Not in Our Name.”^[14] The open letter, which was signed by sixty-three public personalities, suggested that any informed journalist “will understand the fear of the Russians after NATO members invited Georgia and Ukraine in 2008 to become members of the alliance. It is not about Putin. Political leaders come and go. It is about Europe.” The signatories, who did not mention the Russian invasion of Georgia, which took place equally in 2008, and—almost reluctantly—admitted that Russia’s annexation of the Crimea was “against international law,” emphasized in particular “the Western expansion to the east, which was threatening for Russia.” “We need a new policy of détente for Europe,” they wrote. “We may not push Russia out of Europe.” The reader could get the impression that, far from being the aggressor in Ukraine, Russia was the victim. It was certainly no surprise that the hard core of the signatories consisted of SPD dignitaries, led by Gerhard Schröder.^[15] Another signatory of the open letter, former SPD chairman Matthias Platzeck, who is not only a close friend of Steinmeier but also chairman of the German-Russian Forum, was the most explicit representative of the German socialists’ appeasing mood. In an interview, he said that “after the fact the annexation of the Crimea should be legalized in international law, so that it is acceptable to everyone.”^[16] This plea for a legal recognition of Putin’s land grab led in Germany to a wave of criticism. However, this appeasing mood of the political elite found an echo in the population: in a poll conducted for the ARD TV station, 39 percent of Germans wanted the annexation of Crimea to be recognized (48 percent were opposed), and 27 percent of Germans wanted the sanctions imposed on Russia to be lifted.^[17]

Neutralist and pro-Russian tendencies are, as such, not new in the SPD. In 1959 the SPD was already wanting to develop an independent “third way” between East and West when it launched its “Deutschlandplan”—a plan for a neutral, reunified Germany that tried to revive earlier proposals made by Stalin in 1952. Stalin had proposed a reunified, neutral Germany to prevent Germany’s rearmament. Western analysts feared, however, that the withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany and of American and Allied troops from West Germany was more risky for the Western side than for the Soviets.^[18] At that time Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (CDU) chose the irreversible integration of Germany into Euro-Atlantic structures—including NATO. Adenauer’s reaction was equally negative when, in 1963, Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko for the first time proposed the building of a gas pipeline between Russia and Germany.

When in 1969 the Social-Democrat Willy Brandt became chancellor and began to implement his “Ostpolitik,” the first result of this “Opening to the East” was the signing of the famous “pipes in exchange for gas” contract in 1970 with the Soviet Union. In the late 1970s, 60 percent of Mannesmann’s production of large-diameter pipes (for the transportation of natural gas) was exported to the Soviet Union.^[19] Russian gas began to flow in 1973.^[20] Brandt’s Ostpolitik of “small steps” in the field of human contact and economic cooperation was intended to bring about “change through rapprochement” (Wandel durch Annäherung). It certainly brought a certain détente in the relationship between the two Germanies. But did it also encourage Russia towards more peaceful behavior, as the SPD claimed it did? “Presented as the route towards a future peace,” Jean-Sylvestre Mongrenier rightly observes, “This first East-West pipeline did not prevent the Soviet Union from starting a new expansionist policy (Angola and Mozambique, 1975), from deploying SS-20 missiles in Europe (1977) and from invading Afghanistan (1979).”^[21] The growing Russian-German interdependence in the 1970s, far from encouraging Soviet Russia toward more peaceful behavior in Europe and elsewhere, seemed rather to have the opposite effect of increasing Russian belligerence.

The pro-Russia stance of Schröder and Steinmeier could also be observed in another SPD heavyweight, former chancellor Helmut Schmidt. In a best-selling book published in 2008, titled Ausserdienst: Eine Bilanz (Out of Service: An Inventory), Schmidt writes that “also after the demise of the Soviet Union Russia under Yeltsin and Putin has remained peaceful. . . . Putin has succeeded in restoring great self-confidence to the Russian nation.”^[22] Schmidt continues: “Unfortunately, in the Western world, especially in the United States, they do not understand the immensely difficult internal problems with which each Russian government is confronted day after day, neither do they acknowledge the fact that since Gorbachev we deal in Moscow with friendly governments that are willing to cooperate with the West.”^[23] Schmidt expresses his surprise that “one hardly ever comes across Russians expressing anti-German resentment.” According to him, “we have to be grateful for this.” And he concludes: “For this reason alone we do not have the right to have anti-Russian feelings.”^[24] It is not clear whether Schmidt equates criticism of the Kremlin’s repressive policies with the expression of “anti-Russian feelings.” However, he shows less restraint vis-à-vis the United States, which he attacks in the same book for its supposed “excrescences of military thinking” (Wucherungen eines militärischen Denkens).^[25]

It would be interesting to know whether, after the Russian invasion and dismemberment of Georgia, the annexation of the Crimea, and the slow-motion invasion into Eastern Ukraine, Schmidt still supports the view that Russia under Putin has remained “peaceful” (his book was published shortly after the war in the Caucasus but probably written before). Ultimately, however, even these deliberate acts of aggression might not change Helmut Schmidt’s positive view of Putin. Schmidt has the reputation of being a political realist: he was in the 1970s the first European politician to ask the United States to station Pershing II missiles and cruise missiles in Europe to counter the Soviet deployment of SS-20s. One can only speculate as to why Schmidt’s realism has given way to this rosy view of the Putin regime. Is it due to his advanced age (in 2008, the year in which the book was published, he celebrated his ninetieth birthday), to naïveté, or to German feelings of guilt vis-à-vis a nation that seems to have forgiven its former enemy?

An even more telling example of a pro-Kremlin bias is Erhard Eppler, Willy Brandt’s minister for development cooperation (1968–1974), who warned against the “demonization” of Putin. After the Russian annexation of the Crimea he declared: “I cannot imagine that a Russian president, whatever his name, would patiently watch whilst a clearly anti-Russian government tries to push Ukraine toward NATO, [and] even less so when this government has not been elected.”^[26] Eppler also criticized “the West’s insistence on the integrity of Ukraine’s territory.”^[27] The guilty conscience of an old man? (Eppler joined Hitler’s NSDAP in 1944 when he was seventeen). Or are Eppler’s and Schmidt’s rosy views the result of the permanent Russian charm offensive in Germany’s direction? This charm offensive had already started under Gorbachev (who, with the nickname “Gorby,” is still the most popular Russian politician in Germany) and continued under Yeltsin, who went to the sauna with Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Under Putin, this charm offensive has not only been put into a higher gear, but it was also given a new focus. Yeltsin’s friendship with Kohl was—apart from personal affection—driven mostly by economic motives. In the early 1990s, Germany was the most important source of loans and foreign direct investment. The German government also paid for the housing in Russia of former Red Army personnel who left East Germany after reunification. Under Putin this economic dimension is still present, but a second, geopolitical dimension has been added: Germany—in Putin’s eyes—has become the most important European ally in the fight against what is perceived by him as the “the Anglo-Saxon world hegemony.”

More Russophiles:
The Green Party and the Left Party

Among the German political parties, the SPD is the most important representative of the new German-Russian rapprochement. However, a pro-Russia stance is not confined to the SPD. It is equally present in the Green Party and the liberals of the FDP. An interesting case is the former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer of the Green Party. In an interview in Der Spiegel in 2007, he distanced himself from his former coalition partner Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Asked what he found “most objectionable” in Schröder, he answered: “His position on Russia.”^[28] But in January 2009, in an op-ed in the Guardian, Fischer seemed to have become much more open to Russia’s needs than two years earlier. Five months after the Russian invasion of Georgia, Fischer wanted to give Russia “a significantly enhanced role within NATO, including the perspective of full membership.” “Why not think about transforming NATO,” asked Fischer, “into a real European security system, including Russia?”^[29] Why did Fischer suddenly come up with this far-
reaching proposal? NATO membership for an illiberal, authoritarian country, such as Russia, with a sham rule of law, would, in the first place, be in flagrant contradiction of the preamble of the Washington Treaty, according to which membership is open to parties that are “determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” In the second place—and this would be even more important—Russian membership in NATO would give Russia the possibility of vetoing and blocking any NATO initiative. It would in fact emasculate and bury the organization, which is a long-time, explicit Russian foreign policy goal.

Pro-Russian attitudes are also present in Die Linke, the party of the radical left, a merger between a group of dissident social democrats and the PDS, the successor party of the SED, the East German Communist Party. The party got 8.7 percent of the vote in the parliamentary elections of 2005, 11.9 percent in 2009, and 8.6 percent in 2013. Because of its East German communist roots, Die Linke is not only the third-biggest party in the “new lands” of Eastern Germany, but it has also inherited its pro-Russian bias. According to Wolfgang Gehrcke, the foreign affairs speaker of Die Linke in the German parliament, “Germany should become in the European Union the protagonist for an improvement in relations with Russia. This is socially, economically, and strategically, in Germany’s interests. A new European Ostpolitik is necessary.”^[30] Attacking the SPD from the left, Die Linke presents itself as the true and real friend of Russia and as the real inheritor of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik.

The Pro-Russian Volte-Face of the
German Extreme Right

Other—more unexpected—defenders of a close German-Russian relationship are the German parties of the extreme right. Like Die Linke, these parties have found a fertile soil in the eastern part of Germany.^[31] It is an interesting phenomenon, for instance, that these parties, which tended to be virulently anti-communist, seem to have moved to a more positive assessment of the former communist regime. “In the former Eastern Germany,” writes Pascal Perrineau, “one of the most important parties of the German extreme right, the NPD, finds virtues in the former communist regime of the ‘German Democratic Republic’ and pretends that the GDR was a better Germany than the Federal Republic.”^[32] This positive reassessment of the GDR goes hand in hand with affection for the GDR’s former “communist mother country,” Russia. Since the end of communism, the extreme right German parties have embraced like-minded parties and organizations in Russia, with which they not only share the same political ideas but also the same revisionist and revanchist geopolitical goals. Six weeks after the war in Georgia, for instance, the National-Zeitung, the paper of the extreme right party Deutsche Volksunion, published an interview with Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the crypto-fascist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, with the title “Together Germany and Russia Cannot Be Blackmailed.”^[33] This interview starts as follows:

The champion of Russian chauvinist revisionism is playing the German revisionism card in order to create a common German-Russian front in Europe that is reminiscent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with its secret protocol to divide the countries of Central and Eastern Europe between them. However, these pro-Russia feelings of the German extreme right are less extravagant than they, at first sight, seem to be. Walter Laqueur writes that in the 1920s, Goebbels and other Nazis were already dreaming of a Russian-German alliance against the capitalists of the “plutocratic” West but that these plans were thwarted by Hitler, who had other plans.^[35]

The Pro-Russian “New Right”

Anti-Atlanticist, nationalist, and pro-Russian attitudes cannot only be found in the “official” political parties of the extreme right, such as the NPD, DVU, and the Republikaner. In 1996 Jacob Heilbrunn had already drawn attention, in Foreign Affairs, to the emergence of the so-called New Right, a more civilized form of German nationalism and anti-Atlanticism. “The German new right,” writes Heilbrunn, “consists not of skinheads in jackboots but journalists, novelists, professors, and young lawyers and business executives.” “Paradoxically,” he continues, “the new right is made up of nationalists from both ends of the political spectrum. Nationalists on the left hope to remake the SPD; nationalists on the right, the Free Democratic Party.”^[36] “Hatred of the United States,” he concludes, “is what binds the right nationalists and defectors from the left who make up the movement.”^[37]

It is no surprise that the representatives of this New Right target especially Germany’s Westbindung, its bond with the West. In a book with the same title,^[38] published shortly after Germany’s reunification, many of their geopolitical arguments are to be found. The authors criticize Chancellor Konrad Adenauer for his decision to anchor Germany in the West. They openly question whether Adenauer really wanted Germany’s reunification and complain that “since the 1960s it was often considered a taboo to speak of national interests and to analyze geopolitical facts as conditions for action.”^[39] The New Right authors say they want to “overcome taboos,” and their new keywords are “nation,” “neutrality,” or “non-alignment” (Blockfreiheit)^[40] and Germany’s “special location” (Sonderlage), which would lead to “a special consciousness” (Sonderbewußtsein). They plead for a Germany that is neutral. Germany’s neutrality is, according to them, logical because of Germany’s supposed “fate to be situated in the center” (Schicksal der Mittellage) which makes it “a mediator between East and West.”^[41]

One of the authors, Rainer Zitelmann, expressed his admiration for Reich Chancellor Gustav Stresemann, who, in 1922, signed the Treaty of Rapallo with the Soviet Union, notwithstanding the fact that this treaty was considered by the Western powers as an overt anti-Western pact that was directed against the Treaty of Versailles. “For him (Stresemann) foreign policy necessity was more important than the wishes of his Western friends,” writes Zitelmann. The author regrets that “the work of Stresemann afterwards had been ditched. The mistake of foreign policy after 1945 has been the belief ‘that one just could forget about the geographical situation of Germany. The old task of Germany, to be a mediator between East and West, had been denied.’”^[42] The message is clear: Germany should mind its own interests and no longer let its foreign policy choices be influenced by Western powers or by guilt over its past. Another author writes, “[The fact] that ‘military pacts and national interests’ collide in politics, is not new knowledge.”^[43] Members of the New Right are not only against NATO membership, they are also critical of European integration. They criticize the Treaty of Maastricht and warn about the risks of a policy “that prescribes the utopia of Germany’s total integration into the West, into a European federal state.”^[44] The author uses here the German neologism Totalwestintegration. One has only to say it aloud slowly to taste the hidden allusion to something hideous and totalitarian.

Neutralism and anti-Americanism go hand in hand, but, as Jan Herman Brinks rightly remarks: “This anti-western position, which is primarily directed against the United States . . . generally goes with a latent sympathy for Russia.”^[45] The reason for this “latent sympathy” of the New Right for Russia is the fact that the old foe, Soviet communism, no longer exists. Russia has transformed itself into a country that comes close to the ideals of the extreme right and the New Right: it is anti-Western, xenophobic, anti-American, authoritarian, and state capitalist, and it glorifies a strong state.^[46]

Alternative für Deutschland: The New Russophilia of the Political Center

Until 2013 the new German Russophilia was restricted mainly to parties of the extreme right and extreme left, as well as sections of the SPD. The German political center-right, the CDU, seemed largely to resist Moscow’s siren songs, notwithstanding that some members of the CDU’s conservative Bavarian sister organization, the CSU, did not hesitate to express their sympathy for the Kremlin. In March 2013, for instance, during a meeting of the foreign affairs committees of the Bundestag and the Duma, the conservative CSU MP Peter Gauweiler raised “in ‘really pathetic words’ the German-Russian friendship. Thereupon, deeply moved, Gehrcke took the stage: that he, as a ‘German communist,’ could live to see the day that he agreed with a ‘German conservative.’”^[47] The Süddeutsche Zeitung commented: “Whenever it concerns Russia strange alliances are formed in the Bundestag.”^[48] These are signs that the pro-Russia consensus also has a grip on the conservative fringe of the CDU/CSU. Due to the euro crisis and an increasing malaise amongst the German population concerning the role of their country as Europe’s Zahlmeister (paymaster), there are more indications that the political center has begun to shift. On April 14, 2013, in Berlin a new party, the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD, was founded. It was a Eurosceptic party that wanted the crisis-ridden Eurozone countries of southern Europe—including France!—to leave the Eurozone voluntarily. This should then lead to a restoration of the German deutschmark or to the consolidation of a smaller Eurozone, consisting of Germany and some central and northern European countries, which shared Germany’s competitiveness and budgetary discipline. The new party, led by Bernd Lucke, an economics professor from Hamburg, was said to be “founded by an alliance of economics professors, constitutional lawyers, and conservative commentators.”^[49] The party, called a Professorenpartei (professors’ party), could not be accused of cheap populism or extreme right ideas. It attracted predominantly (male) representatives of the liberal professions and counted amongst its membership many academics. According to a secret (but leaked) paper from the SPD, the party was “a populist splinter from the CDU and FDP, [and] it confirms the trend of political erosion of black-yellow [the CDU-FDP coalition government]. Half of the national leadership of the AfD consists of former CDU-members.”^[50] This was true. Party leader and spokesperson Bernd Lucke, for instance, was a member of the CDU for thirty-three years and left the party only in December 2011. One of the three deputy spokespersons, Alexander Gauland, is a former CDU politician who was state secretary in the government of the Land of Hessen under Prime Minister Walter Wallmann (CDU). According to Manfred Güllner, director of the opinion polling agency Forsa, support for the party was “coming from a peculiar section of the population of which the nucleus is the radicalized middle classes.”^[51] Güllner used the expression “radicalized middle classes” possibly to assuage the concerns of outsiders, but unfortunately, it evoked memories of the 1930s before the advent of Hitler, when a radicalized middle class left the political center and drifted to the right. The leadership, however, tried to do its best to avoid anything that could be used by opponents to denounce the party. Therefore, the party program, voted in April 2013, was very concise.^[52] It was, for instance, completely silent on foreign policy.

However, when this omission was rectified by an official paper, written by Alexander Gauland and presented to the party leadership on September 10, 2013, it included a real surprise. The last part of this paper—about a third of the text—was completely dedicated to Germany’s relations with Russia. The author writes that “Russia never got over the separation from ‘Holy Kiev,’ the embryo of Russia. That is also difficult to imagine, because this separation can be compared only with the separation of Aachen or Cologne from Germany. The EU should, when moving closer towards these countries, act with great caution, taking into account Russia’s sensitivities.”^[53] The author continues: “Germany and Europe have no interest in a further weakening of Russia and with it also of the whole Eurasian space. We should always manage the relationship with Russia carefully. We Germans sometimes forget that at decisive moments in German history Russia has played a positive role and has saved Prussia from defeat. That is true of 1763, 1806/07, 1813, Bismarck’s unification of 1866/70 and the German reunification of 1990/91.”^[54] Therefore, concludes the author, “elements of Bismarck’s reinsurance policy vis-à-vis Russia should be maintained.”^[55] Bismarck’s secret reinsurance treaty of 1887 guaranteed that Russia would remain neutral in any future war between Germany and France. France, which the AfD wants removed from the Eurozone, still seems to be considered the hidden enemy. In his paper the author makes no mention of the French-German axis—the centerpiece of European integration. He also denies that his pro-Russian policy would have negative consequences for relations with Poland, which has fallen victim several times to a German-Russian rapprochement. “After the integration of Poland into the EU and NATO,” he writes, “such a policy cannot be understood as anti-Polish, because both countries are too closely connected.”^[56] “Back to Bismarck” and to Bismarck’s pro-Russia policy seems to be the new slogan of the German neonationalists from the right, the left, and the center—irrespective of their political affiliation. In Moscow, as well as in Berlin, Bismarck seems, indeed, to be the pivotal historical figure and necessary point of reference for those who want to establish a close German-Russian cooperation.

Warm Feelings towards Russia in the Former GDR

It is telling that the importance of Bismarck for Russian-German relations was already recognized in the former GDR, where, in February 1983, the (communist) Central Institute for History in East Berlin had accorded Bismarck the title of “statesman of high rank” (Staatsmann von hohem Rang).^[57] It is, therefore, no surprise that the former GDR still plays a central role in the new wave of sympathy toward Russia. We have to bear in mind that the reunified Germany anno 2014 with its capital in Berlin is no longer the old Federal Republic anno 1989 with its capital in the small, provincial town of Bonn in the western part of Germany. Almost simultaneously both Russia and Germany have experienced huge changes in territory and population size. These changes took them in opposite directions. While Russia experienced a painful territorial contraction, accompanied by a substantial loss of population, the territory of the reunified Germany expanded, and its population grew from about sixty to eighty million. But the twenty million East Germans who suddenly became citizens of a new, reunified Germany were—and still are—different from their West German fellow countrymen. Since 1933 they had lived without interruption under a totalitarian regime: first under the Nazis, then under the communists. Three generations of these new Germans had never experienced what it was like to live in a democracy with free elections, free media, an active civil society, and an independent judiciary. In itself, this lack of democratic tradition is a problem that can be overcome, as the experience in other former communist countries of Eastern Europe shows. The problem was that in the German “new lands” the jubilation of the first years quickly soured into a growing disaffection with the capitalist economy and Western democracy. In the east not only did there emerge a nostalgia (ironically called Ostalgie: “east-algia”) for the tranquility and job security of the former GDR, but there also survived a broad popular reservoir of warm feelings towards Russia, the former Warsaw Pact ally and “socialist brother country” with which East Germany had been aligned for almost half a century. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann wrote in 1993: “In the past decades East Germans have developed a sense of community with Eastern Europe, which will certainly have consequences in the future.”^[58]

She was right. It is, therefore, no coincidence that today East Germans play a prominent role in German-Russian organizations. On the board of the Deutsch-Russisches Forum (German-Russian Forum), we find, for instance, Lothar de Maizière, the first and last freely elected prime minister of the GDR, and Manfred Stolpe, who after 1990 became a minister in the cabinet of Helmut Kohl and who was minister president of the East German Land of Brandenburg. Both men have been accused of links with the Stasi, the powerful East German secret service.^[59] East Germany combines both: it is the most pro-Russian part of Germany, and it is also the most fertile soil for right-wing extremism. In a survey by the Free University of Berlin conducted in 2005, one could read “that extreme right orientations can generally be found one and a half times more frequently in the East compared to the West (27 percent against 18 percent).^[60] Jan Herman Brinks writes:

It was these secondary German virtues—as we saw in the previous chapter—that evoked the admiration of ordinary Russians, and it was these same virtues that they admired in their leader: “Nemets Putin” (“Putin the German”).

Notes

“President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev’s Speech at Meeting with German Political, Parliamentary and Civic Leaders,” Berlin (June 5, 2008), text available at website of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation.

“Deutsche Führungsspitzen auf Kuschelkurs mit Russland,” Capital (November 19, 2007).

Cf. Gregory Feifer, “Too Special a Friendship: Is Germany Questioning Russia’s Embrace?” RFE/RL (July 11, 2011).

Mark Landler, “Schröder’s Bond with Russia: A Little Girl, Now His Own,” The New York Times (August 18, 2004).

Henry Kissinger, “Deutschland droht die Isolation,” Welt am Sonntag (October 20, 2002) (emphasis mine), http://www.welt.de/printwams/article608216/Deutschland_droht_die_Isolation.html.

Kissinger, “Deutschland droht die Isolation.”

Robert D. Kaplan, “The Divided Map of Europe,” The National Interest, no. 120 (July/August 2012), 24.

Adam Smith, “Gerhard Schroder’s [sic] Next Big Job,” Time Magazine (December 17, 2005). According to Edward Lucas, “Tom Lantos, the American congressman and Holocaust survivor . . . wanted to call Schröder a ‘political prostitute,’ but that the sex workers in his congressional district objected.” (Cf. Edward Lucas, The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 167.)

“With Allies Like These,” The Economist (April 5, 2008).

10.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, “Realismus und Prinzipientreue: Außenpolitik im Zeichen neuer globalen Balancen,” in Wertewandel mitgestalten: Gut handeln in Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft, ed. Brun-Hagen Hennerkes and Georg Augustin (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 2012), 82–99.

11.

Jörg Lau, “Warum er nicht ins Auswärtige Amt sollte,” Die Zeit (October 3, 2013).

12.

Lau, “Warum er nicht ins Auswärtige Amt sollte.”

13.

Nikolaus Blome, Peter Müller, Christian Neef, Ralf Neukirch, and Christoph Schult, “Am Nullpunkt,” Der Spiegel (November 24, 2014).

14.

“Wieder Krieg in Europa? Nicht in unserem Namen,” Die Zeit (December 5, 2014), http://www.zeit.de/politik/2014-12/aufruf-russland-dialog.

15.

Other names on the list include Hans-Jochen Vogel (SPD), former minister of justice; Herta Däubler-Gmelin (SPD), former minister of justice (who, in 2002, resigned after having compared US President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler); Manfred Stolpe (SPD), former prime minister of the Land Brandenburg and federal minister of transport (in 2003 it was revealed that he had collaborated with the Stasi, the East German secret service, under the code name “IM Sekretär”); Erhard Eppler (SPD), former minister of development cooperation (who, in the 1970s, was a vocal opponent of NATO’s double decision); Matthias Platzeck (SDP), former party chairman; Walther Stützle (SPD), former state secretary of defense; Lothar de Maizière (CDU), former prime minister of the German Democratic Republic (he resigned in 1991 as chairman of the CDU Brandenburg after it became known that he had worked with the Stasi under the code name “Czerni”); and Klaus Mangold, former chairman of the “East Committee” (Ostausschuss) of the German employersʼ organization and honorary consul of the Russian Federation in Baden-Württemberg.

16.

“Platzeck fordert Anerkennung der Krim-Annexion,” Die Zeit (November 18, 2014), http://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2014-11/platzeck-russland-ukraine.

17.

Cf. Artur Ciechanowicz, “Russia Is Driving a Wedge into Germany,” OSW Analyses, Warsaw (November 26, 2014).

18.

Cf. Philip Windsor, German Reunification (London: Elek Books, 1969), 67: “And there was a risk: a reunified Germany would have been subject to Soviet influence to a far greater extent than to American influence, if the bulk of the American troops had gone home. Soviet forces could always return much more quickly than American forces.”

19.

Cf. “Germany: Regulatory Reform in Electricity, Gas, and Pharmacies,” OECD Country Studies 2004 (Paris: OECD, 2004), 9.

20.

It is telling that East German households did not receive any gas from their Russian “brother country” until after they left the Eastern bloc and were integrated into the Federal Republic. (Cf. “Germany: Regulatory Reform,” 9.)

21.

Jean-Sylvestre Mongrenier, “La sécurité énergétique, nouvelle frontière de l’Union européenne,” in Tribune (Institut Thomas More), no. 23 (January 2009), 4.

22.

Helmut Schmidt, Ausserdienst: Eine Bilanz (Munich: Siedler, 2008), 115.

23.

Schmidt, Ausserdienst, 117.

24.

Schmidt, Ausserdienst, 118.

25.

Schmidt, Ausserdienst, 211.

26.

Erhard Eppler, “Putin, Mann fürs Böse,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (March 11, 2014), http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/russlands-praesident-wladimir-putin-mann-fuers-boese-1.1909116-2.

27.

Eppler, “Putin, Mann fürs Böse.”

28.

Joschka Fischer, “An Anti-American Axis? That’s Nonsense,” Spiegel Online (February 10, 2007).

29.

Joschka Fischer, “Finding Russia’s Place in Europe,” The Guardian (January 11, 2009).

30.

“EU-Russland-Gipfel muss Ausgangspunkt für neue europäische Ostpolitik werden,” Presseerklärung Die Linke (November 14, 2008).

31.

In the 2004 election for the regional parliament of Sachsen, the neo-fascist NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands) won 9.2 percent of the votes, and in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 7.3 percent. Another party of the extreme right, the DVU (Deutsche Volksunion), won in 2004 6.1 percent of the votes for the parliamentary elections in Brandenburg. (Cf. Delphine Iost, “L’implantation du NPD dans les nouveaux Länder allemands,” in Hérodote: Revue de géographie et de géopolitique, no. 128 (1er trimestre 2008), 87–102.) In the elections of 2009, the DVU remained stable in Brandenburg with 6.08 of the votes, but in Sachsen the NPD got only 5.6 percent.

32.

Pascal Perrineau, “De quoi le populisme est le nom,” in Populismes: l’envers de la démocratie, edited by Marie-Claude Esposito, Alain Laquièze, and Christine Manigand (Paris: Vendémiaire Éditions, 2012), 77.

33.

National-Zeitung, Pressemitteilung (September 22, 2008).

34.

“Zusammen sind Deutschland und Russland nicht erpressbar, Interview mit Dr. Wladimir Schirinowski, Vizepräsident der russischen Staatsduma,” http://www.news4press.com/1/MeldungDruckansicht.asp?Mitteilungs_ID=392669. Zhirinovsky had already expressed similar ideas before in his book Poslednyy brosok na yug (Last Push to the South) (Moscow:
Liberalno-Demokraticheskaya Partiya, 1993), in which he wrote that “the Germans will throw back the Poles. Poland may be built somewhere in the region Wolin, Brest” (139).

35.

Walter Laqueur, Mein 20. Jahrhundert: Stationen eines politischen Lebens (Berlin: Propyläen, 2009), 35.

36.

Jacob Heilbrunn, “Germany’s New Right,” Foreign Affairs 75, no. 6 (November/December, 1996), 81.

37.

Heilbrunn, “Germany’s New Right.”

38.

Rainer Zitelmann, Karlheinz Weismann, and Michael Grossheim, eds.,Westbindung: Chancen und Risiken für Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main and Berlin: Propyläen, 1993).

39.

Michael Grossheim, Karlheinz Weismann, and Rainer Zitelmann, “Einleitung: Wir Deutschen und der Westen,” in Zitelmann et al., Westbindung, 13.

40.

The word “blockfrei”—free of being integrated into a military block—is often preferred over its equivalent “neutral.” This is a deliberate choice. “Neutral” has a more or less negative connotation of indecisiveness and aloofness; “block free” has a positive connotation of freedom and being liberated of the pressure from awkward allies.

41.

It is interesting that many arguments of the German New Right resemble that of Russian Eurasianists, such as Aleksandr Dugin, who equally claims for Russia “a position in the center” and the function of a “bridge” between Europe and Asia. Russia’s “special situation” is for Dugin a reason to claim for Russia equally a special political status in which Western values, such as individual freedom, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, do not apply or do not apply in the same way. This relativization of Western values can also be observed in the German “New Right.”

42.

Rainer Zitelmann, “Neutralitätsbestrebungen und Westorientierung,” in Zitelmann et al., Westbindung, 176.

43.

Heinz Brill, “Deutschland im geostrategischen Kraftfeld der Super- und Großmächte (1945–1990),” in Zitelmann et al., Westbindung, 271.

44.

Grossheim, Weismann, and Zitelmann, “Einleitung: Wir Deutschen und der Westen,” 15.

45.

Jan Herman Brinks, “Germany’s New Right,” in Nationalist Myths and the Modern Media: Cultural Identity in the Age of Globalisation, ed. Jan Herman Brinks (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 129 (emphasis mine).

46.

The demise of the Soviet Union made possible a convergence of the positions of the New Left and the New Right. After the end of communism, both the New Left and the New Right were united in their shared anti-Americanism.

47.

Daniel Brössler, “Eigentümliche Allianzen,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (March 14, 2013).

48.

Brössler, “Eigentümliche Allianzen.”

49.

Quentin Peel, “Germany’s Eurosceptic Party Could Yet Tip Electoral Scales,” Financial Times (August 16, 2013).

50.

Frank Wilhelmy, “Vermerk: Die Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) nach ihrem Bundesparteitag” (April 17, 2013).

51.

Tony Paterson, “Rise of the Eurosceptics Casts Shadow over German Election,” The Independent (September 5, 2013).

52.

There were, however, some party activists with rather radical opinions. Roland Vaubel, for instance, an economics professor and member of the scientific advisory board of the party, published in 2007 proposals for a two-chamber system in which one chamber would be elected by those who paid most direct taxes—a proposal which would reintroduce a census (tax-based) suffrage and suspend the principle of democratic equality. (Cf. “Brüche im Establishment (II),” German-Foreign-Policy.com (September 12, 2013).) Another case was that of Dr. Irina Smirnova, a professor at St. Petersburg University, called by the press “a mysterious Russian woman.” She was one of the ten people elected to the board of the party. Being an expert on “PR, political ‘imageology,’ intercultural hermeneutics, and journalism,” she was responsible for the party’s integration policy. Smirnova proposed compulsory education for immigrants. According to her, the number of immigrants would increase “and consequently the problems also”—apparently forgetting that she herself was an immigrant. (Cf. “Mysteriöse Russin sorgt für Wirbel bei Anti-Euro-Partei,” Focus online (June 7, 2013); and “Rätselhafte Russin im Vorstand der Euro-Gegner AfD,” Eurasisches Magazin, no date.)

53.

“Thesen zur Außenpolitik von Dr. Alexander Gauland zur PK vom 10.09.2013,” available on the website of the party, https://www.alternativefuer.de/2013/09/11/thesenpapier-aussenpolitik/ (accessed September 17, 2013).

54.

“Thesen zur Außenpolitik.”

55.

“Thesen zur Außenpolitik.”

56.

“Thesen zur Außenpolitik.” In September 2013 the party won 4.7 percent of the vote—a respectable result for a new party, although not enough to get over the 5 percent barrier and enter the Bundestag, the German parliament. However, the party was more successful on August 31, 2014, in Saxony, where it won 9.8 percent of the vote in regional elections, and on September 14, 2014, in Thuringia and in Brandenburg, where it got respectively 10.6 percent and 12.2 percent of the vote.

57.

Cf. Günther Lachmann, “Die AfD will zurück zu Bismarcks Außenpolitik,” Die Welt (September 10, 2013).

58.

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, “Der Westbindung im Spiegel der Demoskopie,” in Zitelmann et al., Westbindung, 291.

59.

Lothar de Maizière joined the East German Christian Democratic Union (a bloc party, linked with the communist SED in the “National Front”) in 1957. He became minister without portfolio in October 1990 in Kohl’s first cabinet of a reunified Germany but had to resign in December of the same year after allegations that he had worked for the Stasi, the East German secret service. Manfred Stolpe was between 1969 and 1981 secretary of the Union of Evangelical Churches in the GDR and received in 1978 the “Medal of Merit of the GDR.” Although he denied having been an unofficial collaborator of the Stasi, he had met with agents of the Stasi and appeared in the files of the Stasi under the code name “Secretary.”

60.

“Projekt Gewerkschaften und Rechtsextremismus,” Freie Universität Berlin, Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft (2005), 434, http://www.polsoz.fuberlin.de/polwiss/forschung/oekonomie/gewerkschaftspolitik/materialien/GEWREXSCHLUSS/Kapitel_In.pdf.

61.

Jan Herman Brinks, “Nationalism in German Politics as Mirrored by the Media since Reunification,” report for the one-day workshop “Apocalyptic Politics, Archaic Myths and Modern Media” (London, March 28, 2006), 6, http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/cgjs/publications/PolicyReportBrinks.pdf. In a 2008 survey on the mutual images of Germans and Russians, one questionnaire—on the appreciation of freedom—contains a subdivision for answers from West Germans and East Germans. Questions on “freedoms that are personally very important” get the following scores:

Free speech: West Germans 83 percent positive, East Germans 74 percent, and Russians 36 percent.
Freedom to demonstrate: (respectively) 38 percent, 31 percent, 10 percent.
Having a choice between different political parties: (respectively) 62 percent, 49 percent, 17 percent.

East Germans clearly lagged behind West Germans in the appreciation of liberal democratic values. However, their scores were closer to those of West Germans than those of Russians. (Cf. Prof. Dr. Renate Köcher, “Das Russlandbild der Deutschen—das Deutschlandbild der Russen—Ergebnisse repräsentativer Bevölkerungsumfragen in Deutschland und Russland,” Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach, Berlin (September 18, 2008).)

Russian-German “Verflechtung”

Another important factor that explains the German Russophilia is the existence of a powerful pro-Russian business lobby in Germany. This business lobby is led by some of the biggest and most important German banks and companies. Both Russia and Germany view each other as mutually economically complementary nations. Russia sells Germany the energy and minerals it needs, while Germany produces the machinery and high-tech products Russia needs to modernize its antiquated industrial base. When analyzing Russian-German economic relations, we have to keep in mind, first, that before German reunification both Germanies, the GDR and the Federal Republic, had already been major trading partners with the Soviet Union and, second, that after the negative experience with US advice on Russia’s economic transition, the Russian government preferred to emulate the German model, which provided for a larger state role in the economy.^[1] On this existing basis, the German-Russian trade relationship has rapidly expanded in recent years. Exports from Germany to Russia exploded between 1995 and 2004, growing by 76 percent and making Russia the number one export growth market for Germany.^[2] German exports to Russia continued to grow: they almost doubled between 2003 and 2007.^[3] In 2007 Russian exports to Germany were worth €28.8 billion (of which 69 percent consisted of oil and gas), and Russia’s imports from Germany were worth €28.1 billion (mostly cars, trucks, machines, and chemicals). In 2007 Russia ranked number ten on the German list of importing countries and number twelve on the list of exporting countries.^[4] Due to the economic crisis, the dynamism of the economic relationship decreased somewhat in 2010, when Russia’s imports stood at only €26.3 billion. The value of exports from Russia to Germany, however, increased to €31.7 billion.^[5] In 2011 the value of German exports to Russia further increased to €34.4 billion and imports from Russia to €40.5 billion.^[6] An important feature of the blossoming economic relationship between the two countries is the large number of small and medium-sized German companies that are active on the Russian market. In November 2008, 4,600 companies were involved, of which 4,300 were small and medium-sized enterprises.^[7] The total number of German companies active in Russia increased in 2012 to about six thousand.^[8]

A few big companies and banks have taken the lead. Prominent are the two German energy giants, E.ON Ruhrgas and Wintershall, a subsidiary of BASF. Both companies maintain close ties with the political leadership in the Kremlin. On December 14, 2008, for example, the CEO of Wintershall, Reinier Zwitserloot, was awarded the Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation, the highest state decoration that can be awarded to a non-Russian citizen. Wintershall’s competitor, E.ON Ruhrgas, which had already been involved in the “gas-for-pipes” deal that was signed in 1970 with the Soviet government, is one of Gazprom’s most important Western partners. It owned 6.5 percent^[9] of Gazprom and was, as such, an example of the strategy of “rapprochement through interlocking” (Annäherung durch Verflechtung), a strategy proposed by Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier at the end of 2006.^[10] A corollary of this economic strategy of “rapprochement through interlocking” was a second—political—doctrine of “change through rapprochement” (Wandel durch Annäherung). The strategy of economic interlocking was expected to have all manner of positive effects on the internal situation in Russia—leading to not only an economic but also a political modernization by strengthening Russia’s young democracy and improving the human rights situation. Both doctrines, therefore, promised the Germans the best of all possible worlds: not only would they boost their exports, but at the same time they would help the Russians in bringing about a modern democratic political system in Russia.

“Interlocking” Russian and German Companies:
How It Worked

The first part of this strategy, the interlocking of German and Russian companies, seems to have worked out well. Since the year 2000, for instance, Dr. Burckhard Bergmann, the CEO of E.ON Ruhrgas, has had a place on the board of directors of Gazprom. In 2006 Bergmann was also appointed honorary consul of the Russian Federation in North-Rhine Westphalia, and in 2007 he was elected Director of the Year in Russia. Bergmann is deputy chairman of the East Committee of the German Employers Association BDI (Ost-Ausschuss der deutschen Wirtschaft). The chairman of this committee, Dr. Klaus Mangold of Daimler AG, is honorary consul of the Russian Federation in Baden-Württemberg. The process of “interlocking” between the captains of German industry and the siloviki in the Kremlin does not stop here. E.ON Ruhrgas and Wintershall cooperate with Gazprom in the joint venture that built the Nord Stream gas pipeline. In this project Gazprom assured itself of a strategic 51 percent of the shares, which gave it the power to nominate the CEO.^[11]

The CEO of Nord Stream is a German, Matthias Warnig. Warnig is the former head of Dresdner Bank in Moscow. Warnig, however, was originally neither a banker nor an energy expert. He started his career as a senior officer of the Stasi, the powerful East German secret service which, at the end of the 1980s, employed 91,000 people and had 300,000 informants and was, as such, bigger than Hitler’s Gestapo (which had 40,000 employees in 1939 and during the war grew to 150,000—including informants). In a small country the Stasi organized one of the most effective and repressive police states of the Eastern bloc. Putin and Warnig both declared to have met for the first time in St. Petersburg in 1991. However, according to Irene Pietsch, a personal friend of Putin’s wife Lyudmila, Putin’s and Warnig’s families had close relations when Putin worked in the GDR as a KGB agent in the 1980s.^[12] This may have been instrumental in Warnig’s promotion to CEO of Nord Stream.^[13]

E.ON Ruhrgas not only has its CEO on the board of Gazprom, it is also “interlocked” with Dresdner Bank and its subsidiary Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. Dr. Herbert Walter, the CEO of Dresdner Kleinwort, is a member of the supervisory board of E.ON Ruhrgas. The role played by Dresdner Kleinwort in Russia is a controversial subject. On behalf of the Russian government, Dresdner Kleinwort had valued the assets of Yukos after its CEO, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was jailed.^[14] Together with Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Kleinwort was a member of the consortium of banks that made the auction of Yukos possible. This auction was branded by international investors as an illegal asset grab. According to Pavel K. Baev,

In 2005, Commerzbank, one of the members of the “team,” was involved in a case of alleged money laundering for Telekominvest, a Russian company created in 1994 by Leonid Reiman, Putin’s telecommunications minister. Reiman amalgamated two state-owned phone companies in St. Petersburg during the time that Putin was deputy mayor.^[16] According to other sources, Putin’s wife Lyudmila would have been directly involved in these deals.^[17]

Russia’s Meta-Robber Capitalism

The impression one gets is of a close, very close—even “cozy”—relationship between a powerful part of the German business elite and the Russian business world. In itself, there is nothing wrong with close business contacts, and it is quite normal for these sometimes to develop into a genuine friendship. The problem, however, is that business contacts with Russia are, as such, seldom normal—due to the specific situation of Russia. In the 1990s Russia first went through a phase of robber capitalism, which was followed by a second and even more violent phase of meta-robber capitalism during Putin’s presidency. In this second phase of meta-robber capitalism, large chunks of the economy, which had been privatized in the 1990s, were partly renationalized and brought under the control of Putin’s siloviki. I am using here the term meta-robber capitalism because, unlike the oligarchs in the 1990s, the new class of siloviki used not only state finances for their asset grabs but also the judiciary and the repressive state organs. Legal threats, criminal investigations, “tax-measures,” imprisonment, blackmail, and allegedly even death threats and assassinations were among the means used to obtain a transfer of assets or an outright expropriation. Western investment banks have, through their involvement, sometimes lent an aura of respectability to these illegal and often criminal practices. By a process of contagion, German firms also exposed themselves to the risk of being enmeshed in corrupt affairs. An example of this is Siemens, which paid bribes in Russia. Lilia Shevtsova of the Moscow Carnegie Center comments: “Some Western companies have even adopted traditional Russian business practices: A German court recently investigated the multinational conglomerate Siemens for bribery of Russian officials. In Siemens’s defense, it was merely playing by the rules of the game—rules written and enforced by the authorities to maintain their opaque, corrupt system.”^[18]

Another problem connected with doing business in Russia—especially in this second phase of meta-robber capitalism—is that in the Russian context, business-to-business contacts are barely disguised business-to-government contacts. This may be less so for small and medium-sized companies, but it is always the case where large German energy firms and banks have business contacts with the Russian energy giants Gazprom and Rosneft. Both companies are used as powerful instruments in the hands of the Kremlin to further its political goals. These political goals, moreover, can conflict with the interests and goals of the government of its trading partners. The limits of the policy of economic “interlocking” became clear when Russia started to use its sovereign investment fund to buy industries in Germany. The strong Kremlin involvement in this fund led to an outcry in Germany. According to the vice-chairman of the CDU, Robert Koch, “We didn’t just go through all our efforts to privatize industries like Deutsche Telekom or the Deutsche Post only so that the Russians can nationalize them.”^[19]

The Shtokman Syndrome: Why Germany’s Energy Giants Act as the Kremlin’s Spokesmen

In an interview in the German weekly Der Stern, Robert Amsterdam, lawyer for the imprisoned Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky, drew attention to a phenomenon which he called the “Shtokman syndrome.” The syndrome is named after the Shtokman field, the world’s biggest gas deposit, located in the Russian part of the Barents Sea, 550 kilometers off the coast, at a depth of about 330 meters. Amsterdam uses the “Shtokman syndrome” as an analogy to the “Stockholm syndrome,” the psychological state characterizing former hostages who tend to identify with their hostage takers and even go so far as to defend them.

Maybe Robert Amsterdam’s fears about a shtokmanization of German foreign policy are exaggerated. However, there are reasons for concern. In 2010, for instance, Spiegelonline, the online edition of the German weekly Der Spiegel, published an article on a draft report of the Future Analysis Department of the Bundeswehr Transformation Center, a think tank of the German army tasked with developing scenarios for the future. The experts, led by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Will, analyzed the consequences of a situation of “peak oil” for Germany’s foreign policy. “Peak oil” refers to a situation in which global oil reserves pass their zenith and begin gradually to decline. According to the report, there was “some probability that peak oil will occur around the year 2010 and that the impact on security is expected to be felt 15 to 30 years later.”^[21] This new situation would strengthen the position of the oil-exporting countries, and states dependent on oil imports would, according to the authors, be forced to “show more pragmatism toward oil-producing states in their foreign policy.” The article quoted some interesting examples of this “pragmatism”:

This report, published in 2010, seems to have lost much of its relevance—due to the shale gas revolution which, in coming years, will increasingly challenge Russia’s prominent position as Germany’s energy provider. However, it is telling that a think tank of the Bundeswehr was anticipating a situation in which the German government should be more accommodating in relation to Moscow’s foreign policy objectives. In this case, the shtokmanization would no longer have been restricted to (parts of) the German business community, but it would have directly affected the policies of the government in Berlin—a situation of self-inflicted dependence which would have come close to what was called “Finlandization” during the Cold War.

Apart from the political risks, there must also be mentioned the risks for the ethical business climate in Germany, and—consequently—in the EU as a whole. Russia is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. According to Transparency International, in 2006 it occupied the 121st place on the Corruption Perceptions Index out of a total of 178 countries, a place it shared with Rwanda and Swaziland. Its ranking even deteriorated between 2006 and 2010: by 2010 it occupied 154th place.^[23] In July 2008 the Munich court of first instance sentenced former Siemens director Reinhard Siekaczek to two years’ imprisonment and a fine of €108,000. The writing was on the wall. Siekaczek had been charged with, between June 2002 and September 2004, forty-nine cases of channeling payments of altogether close to €50 million through an “impenetrable web of fake companies.”^[24] The money served to finance bribe-based transactions. The Siemens case was rather unique. This is not because paying bribes by German companies must be considered a rare phenomenon, but because

The Impact of Germany’s Pro-Russian Stance on Its Relations with Its Western Partners

The question that emerges from this is: What is the risk that Germany’s policies will be influenced by the leaders of the Kremlin to such an extent that Germany may no longer be considered a reliable partner—not only for the United States, but also for its neighbors in Eastern Europe, and, more generally, for the other member states of the European Union? Four areas are of particular concern:

An Increasingly Strained German-US Relationship?

German-American relations reached a historical postwar low under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who not only opposed the war in Iraq but also gave an anti-American edge to the German election campaigns of 2002 and 2005. Schröder’s (Social-Democratic) minister of defense, Peter Struck, even went so far as to plead for an attitude of “equidistance” between Moscow and Washington, an unprecedented novum in the postwar US-German relationship.^[26] Schröder continued the “Russia first” approach of his predecessor, Helmut Kohl. Not only did he strongly personalize German-Russian relations, making these relations interest driven rather than value driven, but he also concentrated government’s policy on Russia in the chancellor’s office, leaving his foreign minister Joschka Fischer (Green Party) to handle relations with the other East European countries.^[27] This dual approach continued under his successor, Angela Merkel, but this time the roles between the chancellor and the foreign minister were inverted. The pro-Atlantic Merkel mended fences with the United States, while Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who had become foreign minister in the Great Coalition under pressure from his former boss Gerhard Schröder, became Moscow’s favorite interlocutor. Steinmeier’s critical stance vis-à-vis the United States led on several occasions to head-on collisions with Condoleezza Rice and US Vice President Dick Cheney.^[28] Although the election of Barack Obama led to an improvement in German-US relations, there remained a number of caveats. The improved German-US relationship was very much linked to the person of Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Christian Democratic Party. But the opposition could still tap into a strong groundswell of anti-Americanism in Germany, especially in the former GDR, a territory where—without interruption—the United States has been the “official enemy” from 1933 through 1989.^[29]

Germany and NATO

The weak spot where this popular anti-Americanism could erupt and have a direct impact on German politics is NATO. In the past two decades the German attitude towards NATO has undergone important changes. Germany, together with Britain, used to be one of the most trustworthy US allies in Europe. This unconditional support for NATO was in the direct interest of Germany, which was situated on the front line of the East-West conflict with 200,000 US troops stationed on its soil. After reunification Germany’s role changed from being mainly a security receiver into that of a security provider. It was a role for which Germany was less prepared and which it was also less willing to play. On a number of occasions the US administration expressed its dissatisfaction with Germany’s low defense expenditure and its reluctance to take on battle duties in the war in Afghanistan. With the reintegration of France into the military organization of NATO, one could witness a curious inversion of roles. France, the former enfant terrible of the alliance, was making a glorious comeback as a trustworthy US ally,^[30] while Germany, the former Musterknabe (model boy) of NATO, had developed a tendency to openly oppose US policies.

At the Bucharest NATO summit in April 2008, Germany (together with France) opposed a US proposal to give both Ukraine and Georgia Membership Action Plans (MAPs) as a preparation for full NATO membership. This refusal had a direct negative impact on the situation in the two MAP candidate countries. According to a Russian expert, “Were the two Western European states to support NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, it would have taken longer for the colored revolutions to run out of steam.”^[31] An even more serious controversy between Germany and the United States took place prior to the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in December 2008, when US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice—knowing that the MAPs for Ukraine and Georgia had no chance of being accepted by France and Germany—announced that the United States would withdraw the MAP proposals. Germany, suspicious that Washington wanted to let Georgia enter NATO without a MAP, put pressure on the United States to reaffirm that a MAP was a necessary step for entry. Such direct opposition to the United States by a German government led by a Christian Democrat chancellor was unexpected and quite new. According to Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the Russian Federation Council (upper house), Germany was Russia’s “biggest helper” in its successful attempt to block the eastward enlargement of NATO.^[32] The diverging views on the necessity for NATO enlargement and a more global role for NATO did not augur well for the future of German-US and German-NATO relations. According to two US analysts, the Obama administration was “unlikely to be able to restore U.S.-German cooperation to its previous levels anytime soon. For the first time in more than a generation, seismic geopolitical shifts—a restive Russia, a stalling EU and an over-stretched America—have begun to change, perhaps fundamentally, the way America’s German ally looks at itself and its role on the wider transatlantic stage.”^[33] George Friedman, chairman of Stratfor, provided geostrategic reasons for German reticence:

Friedman, however, seemed to forget that Germany, as a member of NATO, is bound by article 5 of the Washington Treaty, and is, as such, already expected to guarantee the security of the Baltic countries and Poland—together with the other members of NATO. It cannot opt out of that obligation without leaving NATO.

Germany and the New EU Member States

Any loosening of Germany’s Westbindung and further rapprochement to Russia will lead to growing concern in the neighboring countries to the east. The populations of Poland, the Baltic states, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia all have deep-seated memories of the traumatic experiences of the 1930s. The German-Polish relationship, in particular, is still not completely normalized. While, on the one hand, the Poles still feel resentment towards Germany, there exists, on the other hand, in Germany a specific kind of xenophobia directed at Poles, for which Germans even have a special word: Polenfeindlichkeit (animosity to Poles). This is telling, because no such word exists to express hatred for other neighbors. Anti-Polish feelings are especially strong in the eastern part of Germany. In a study by the University of Potsdam conducted among secondary school pupils living in Brandenburg’s border region with Poland, one third express negative feelings towards Poles, and 64 percent say that they feel uneasy in the presence of Poles.^[35] The strained relations between Germans and Poles is explicit also in opinion polls conducted in 1996 in which Americans were twice as much prepared to defend Poland against an attack by Russia compared with Germans (Germany, 30 percent; United States, 61 percent).^[36] During the Soviet occupation, the mutual animosity between Poles and (East) Germans was stimulated by Moscow in a policy of divide and rule, used to discipline the unruly Poles. Former Polish minister of foreign affairs, Stefan Meller, states that

Anti-Polish feelings, however, were not confined to East Germany: they were equally present in West Germany. Former foreign minister Joschka Fischer, for instance, says that

It is not surprising, therefore, that a raw nerve was touched in Poland when Germany and Russia announced their plans for the Nord Stream gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea that would circumvent Polish territory. It was considered by the Poles as an overtly hostile project. The German-Russian rapprochement also explained the Polish and Czech willingness to install on their territory ten missile interceptors and a radar system of the American ballistic missile defense, despite Russian threats to deploy Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad. For them the American military presence on their soil meant an extra security guarantee, and they did not hide their disappointment when President Obama changed the project.

During the coalition government of the CDU/CSU with the liberal FDP that was installed in the autumn of 2009, however, things seemed to change. The FDP foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, whose portfolio included the East European countries, seemed willing to rebalance Germany’s Ostpolitik in favor of its direct neighbors. “Germany is now more sceptical about Russia and more focused on its neighbours,” wrote The Economist. “One reason is business. The Czech Republic buys more German exports than Russia. Add Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, and Central Europe counts for nearly a tenth of Germany’s foreign trade. Exports in the first half of 2010 were €41 billion ($56 billion), against only €11 billion to Russia; imports were €40 billion, against €15 billion from Russia (including energy).”^[39] However, East Europeans would soon be in for an unpleasant surprise when, on February 9, 2011, Klaus Eberhardt, chairman of Rheinmetall—a German defense firm famous for its production of the Leopard tank—signed a contract with the Russian defense minister, Anatoly Serdyukov. Rheinmetall was to build a new-generation combat training center in Russia. Defense cooperation between the two countries was not new. Previously, in April 1993, “defense ministers Volker Ruhe and Pavel Grachev signed a defense cooperation agreement . . . providing for military cooperation between Russia and Germany.”^[40] The impact of this agreement, however, at that point remained limited. The combat training center, to be located at Mulino near Nizhny Novgorod, was a new departure. It would be the first high-tech facility of this kind in Russia, using the latest state-of-the-art equipment to simulate realistic battlefield conditions. The project, estimated at 280 million euros, could train thirty thousand troops a year. It would enable the Russian army to shorten and improve the training process, to evaluate more effectively the competences of individual soldiers, and to cut expenses substantially. According to Igor Korotchenko, chief editor of Natsionalnaya Oborona (National Defense), the center would give Russian forces access to best-practice German training methods.^[41] Polish commentators expressed their concern. “The nature of this co-operation is not strictly commercial,” writes Andrzej Wilk, a Polish security analyst, “as progress in the implementation of the project to construct the centre is made, co-operation is being intensified between the Russian armed forces and the German army (they signed a memorandum of co-operation in the training of officers and non-commissioned officers in February this year [2011]).”^[42] Wilk adds that “the German-Russian co-
operation on the building of the combat training centre has never been an issue discussed in the press. In Germany this is a taboo subject.”^[43] Why this project was a taboo subject one can only guess. One of the main reasons might be to silence criticism of Germany’s new NATO allies, who are directly affected by the German-Russian military honeymoon. This is also the opinion of Jakub Grygiel, who writes:

Rheinmetall chief Klaus Eberhardt emphasized that the training center was built “with the permission of the federal government.”^[45] He enthusiastically called Russia a “market of the future” and stated his intention to export complete weapon systems to Moscow. This intention did not take long to materialize. By the end of 2012, Rheinmetall armored vehicles were already being tested in Russia.^[46] This newly emerging German-Russian military cooperation gives rise to a feeling of déjà vu. Between 1926 and 1932, Rheinmetall-Borsig was among the German defense companies which actively participated in a secret project for German-Soviet military cooperation that started after the signing of the Rapallo Treaty in 1922. With the help of Soviet Russia, Germany was able to circumvent the restrictions imposed on it by the Versailles Treaty, training its troops and testing its tanks (called “tractors” in official documents) near Kazan in the Soviet Union.^[47] Condoleezza Rice writes:

One might well wonder: Is history repeating itself today? After the annexation of the Crimea in March 2014 and the continuing Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine, the Molina project was suspended as part of the EU sanctions regime. However, this did not mean that the project was definitively off the table. Hit by the sanctions regime, the Kremlin reacted by raising the stakes—apparently with success. In March 2014 Siemens boss Joe Kaeser met with Putin in Moscow.^[49] On April 14, 2014—one month after the annexation of Crimea—Rüdiger Grube, the CEO of the German railway company Deutsche Bahn, traveled to Paris to discuss with his counterpart from the Russian Railways, Vladimir Yakunin, a contract to build a high-speed railway, 800 kilometers in length, connecting Moscow with Kazan. The consortium for the contract, worth 20 billion euros, consisted of Deutsche Bahn, Siemens, Deutsche Bank, and the French railway company SNCF.^[50] “Business as usual” was also the motto for the German-Russian Chamber of Foreign Trade, which, on October 6, 2014, organized a seminar in Moscow on “Practical Aspects of Doing Business in Crimea,” where participants were informed on subjects such as “Legal Restructuring of Doing Business in Crimea—Paying Attention to Company Law, Labor Law, and Tax Law.”^[51]

Is Germany Cooling towards France and the EU?

Another equally pressing question was what the impact would be of a
German-Russian rapprochement on Berlin’s relationship with France. It is interesting that right from the beginning, this rapprochement was viewed positively in Paris. In an article on the “dynamic of the German-Russian relationship,” published in Le Monde in December 2001, the paper writes: “What if Russia, thanks to Germany, comes closer to the European Union?”^[52] Is it not positive, asks the paper, that Germany could serve “as a stepping stone for Russia’s attachment to Europe?” However, it warns, “it is not sure . . . that the new trust accorded to Russia is completely justified.”^[53] Interestingly, Russia’s strategy of building a strategic triangle in Europe with the aim to weaken the transatlantic relationship was viewed here from an opposite—European—perspective, namely to attach Russia to Europe. Why should Paris be opposed to that? However, soon the Franco-German relationship would be challenged by the flourishing German-Russian “rapprochement through economic interlocking.”

The Franco-German friendship is the cornerstone of the European Union. Every time these two countries have worked in tandem, the European project has progressed. It is no secret, however, that the close cooperation that existed under the duos of de Gaulle-Adenauer, Giscard-Schmidt, and
Mitterrand-Kohl gave way to a more distant relationship under Merkel and Sarkozy. This even led to speculations that “the Franco-German couple is on the verge of divorce.”^[54] This was not only a question of the “chemistry” between the two leaders, it was—even more so—an expression of underlying structural differences of interest between both countries, differences that in recent years have only grown. The French tendency to build “national champions” and to block German companies from taking over French companies—which is partly inspired by a fear of German economic hegemony—has on some occasions led to a dangerous tit-for-tat from which, apparently, Russia is profiting.

Germany was, for instance, not satisfied with the way in which the French annexed one of Germany’s industrial champions, Hoechst, to create the drug giant Sanofi-Aventis. Nor did the Germans appreciate how Sarkozy, as a finance minister, blocked Siemens from a takeover of French Alstom. Another example of mutual French-German disaffection was the refusal of France to give Siemens a direct stake in Areva, the state-controlled nuclear group, with which it was co-operating in a joint venture to build nuclear reactors. In February 2009 Siemens gave notice that it intended to sell its 34 percent holding in the joint venture. Shortly afterwards, Siemens announced that it had made an agreement with the Russian state company Rosatom to design, build, and operate nuclear power plants. This move created a serious competitor for Areva on a growing global market in which four thousand nuclear power plants are planned by 2030 with an investment volume of €1 trillion.^[55] The German initiative took the French totally by surprise. The danger of cooling Franco-German relations and warming Russian-German relations for the European project was that Germany, satisfied with the existence of the EU as a market for its exports, will lose its interest in a further political integration of the EU. A Germany that is losing its interest in the EU and is on the way of becoming a reticent ally in NATO could be tempted to enter into some Rapallo-like security arrangements with Russia.^[56]

The present psychological climate in Germany, especially in its eastern part, is characterized by a simultaneous presence in the population of a deep-seated anti-Americanism and an often unconditional Russophilia. Both combine to influence the way in which Germans look at security problems. Anti-Americanism and Russophilia are the two lenses through which the security environment is viewed. Clearly, if one lens is too rosy and the other too dark, this will lead to a disfigured representation of the security environment. This seems, indeed, to be the case. In Germany there exists a tendency to have too negative a view of American security proposals and too positive a view of Russian initiatives in this field. This tendency exists not only amongst the wider population but also amongst the political elite.

This mental framework is not new. In the 1970s already existed a broad peace movement in Germany that was more concerned with Western reactions to the deployment of Russian SS-20 missiles than with the origin of the threat.^[57] When after German reunification the archives of the Stasi, the East German secret service, were opened, it was revealed that the Stasi had not only infiltrated the West German peace movement on a massive scale but had even formulated its slogans. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of the two Germanies led in West Germany to a wave of “Gorbymania.” The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev acquired the status of an idol: a mixture of peace apostle and Russian Bismarck, who personally had made the second unification of Germany possible. Suddenly one seemed to have forgotten that for more than forty years, Soviet Russia had installed an oppressive regime in the eastern part of Germany, and it seemed equally to have receded into the German subconscious that it had been the United States that, for the first time in German history, had installed a stable democracy in Germany’s western part and rescued West Berlin from annexation by the communist regime.

In the past decade one has been able to observe a growing tendency in Germany to disapprove of US security initiatives and to approve of Russian initiatives in this field. An example of this was the frequently harsh criticism in Germany of the American Ballistic Missile Defense project, originally a project of ten(!) missiles to be stationed in Poland with a radar system in the Czech Republic, tasked with the interception of nuclear ballistic missiles, eventually launched by Iran. This project had nothing to do with Russia’s nuclear arsenal. If it had been conceived by some Dr. Strangelove at the Pentagon (as many Germans seemed to believe) to intercept a Russian attack, one could characterize the project not only as totally idiotic but also as ineffective and a huge waste of money, this for four reasons that are obvious to any military expert—Russian experts included:^[58] first, because this very modest system would be confronted by an overwhelming number of Russian missiles; second, because many alternative launch trajectories are available (the shortest way for Russia to attack the United States is not via Western Europe but via the North Pole); third, because Russia has a panoply of different launching platforms at its disposal (Russian submarines could always launch an attack from near the American coast); and fourth, because different launching methods are also available (for instance, the utilization of cruise missiles that closely follow the earth’s surface and cannot be targeted by anti-ballistic missiles). The Russian propaganda offensive against the American ballistic missile system was obviously aimed at obtaining concessions in other, not directly related fields. In Germany, however, it was taken at face value. It was no surprise that Putin’s friend Gerhard Schröder took the lead in the attacks. On March 11, 2007, the German weekly Der Spiegel published an article under the title “Schröder Lashes Out at Bush’s Anti-missile Defense.”^[59] Six months later it was former chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s turn to give an interview on the same subject. The title of the interview was less aggressive, but its message was similar: “Former Chancellor Schmidt Speaks Out against the U.S. Anti-missile Defense.”^[60]

Helmut Schmidt also wrote an article, critical of the U.S., together with former German President Richard von Weizsäcker, former Foreign Minister Dietrich Genscher, and Egon Bahr, the architect of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on January 9, 2009, entitled “For a nuclear-arms free world.”^[61] In this article, the four éminences grises of German politics wrote that stability in Europe “would be threatened for the first time (since 1990) by the American desire to deploy missiles with a supporting radar system on extraterritorial bases on NATO’s eastern border in Poland and the Czech Republic.” Please note that this article appeared in January 2009—exactly five months after the Russian invasion and dismemberment of Georgia. To claim that stability in Europe would be threatened for the first time by the deployment of the BMD—a defense system not directed against Russian missiles—and to say nothing about the Russian aggression at Europe’s border that took place only a few months earlier, shows a surprising blind spot on the part of the authors.

Russophilia and Germany’s Loosening
Ties to the West

It is not only foreign observers who fear that the emergence of an informal Moscow-Berlin axis constitutes an imminent danger for European and transatlantic unity. This fear is also shared by German analysts. Jan Techau, in his position of director of the Alfred von Oppenheim-Centre for European Policy Studies at the DGAP (German Council on Foreign Relations), writes, for instance,

According to Beate Neuss, there exists “a moralizing, mostly idealistic and sometimes irrational view of international politics amongst sections of the (German) elite and population.”^[63] Unfortunately, this moralizing attitude increasingly concerns Germany’s Western allies while a blind eye was turned to the ugly reality in Russia. The worrisome loosening of ties to the West, to which Jan Techau referred, seemed to become a reality on March 17, 2011, when Germany did not support the French-British resolution no. 1973 in the Security Council to authorize a no-fly zone over Libya to stop the killing of civilians by Khadafi’s army, thereby taking a stance against the United States and its most important EU allies. The Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote: “Now Germany, under the charge of Merkel and Westerwelle, has voted against the Americans, British and French, and with the Chinese, Russians, Brazilians, and Indians—against its most important Western allies and on the side of dictators, autocrats and two far democracies. Why?”^[64] Former foreign minister Joschka Fischer called it a “scandalous mistake.”^[65] As one might have expected, the most enthusiastic supporter of the government’s policy was Die Linke, the successor organization to the former East German Communist Party and, not surprisingly, Westerwelle’s pro-Russian predecessor Frank-Walter Steinmeier. A feeling of malaise, however, was palpable among Germany’s Western allies. “In the Foreign Ministries everyone is wondering,” wrote Le Monde. “For the first time in its history the Federal Republic is taking a different stance from all its traditional partners, the United States, France and the United Kingdom, and—while voting for an abstention—is adopting the same position as Russia, China, Brazil, and India.” The paper sadly concluded: “The image of Germany is tarnished”^[66]

Is Berlin again seeking a German Sonderweg: a specifically “German” path, like Russia, which seems to have already elected for such an outsider position? It is too early to judge. After the return of Putin to the Kremlin in May 2012 and the subsequent introduction in Russia of a series of repressive laws, the climate in Germany seemed to change. Andreas Schockenhoff, deputy fraction leader of the CDU-CSU fraction in the Bundestag and Germany’s commissioner for the coordination of German-Russian civil society, was the coauthor of a draft resolution in the Bundestag which formulated a strong criticism of these measures. The resolution was adopted on November 9, 2012. The Economist wrote in a comment that “Germany is increasingly prepared to be tough with Vladimir Putin.”^[67] The argument of Schröder and Steinmeier that the economic modernization of Russia would also lead to a political modernization seemed to be losing its powers of persuasion. Except, of course, for seasoned Russophiles, such as the analyst Alexander Rahr, who changed his job in the DGAP, Germany’s leading foreign policy think tank, for a job in the oil and gas concern Wintershall that has a direct relationship with the Kremlin. Rahr continued to believe that Germany “must not lose patience, must not lose Russia,” and that Wandel durch Handel (change through trade) is a better approach.^[68] The Bundestag resolution—dubbed by Le Monde “a real requisitory”^[69] —demanded that the government insist in its consultations with Moscow on the development of democracy and the rule of law. It was significant that the fractions of the SPD and Die Linke did not support the resolution and chose to abstain. Some analysts considered this resolution as an important policy shift. Lilia Shevtsova of the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment, for instance, writes: “The very fact that the debate took place at all is of great significance and marks a shift in Germany’s Russia policy. . . . This marks the first serious attempt to free Germany from the suffocating relationship with the Kremlin.”^[70] Dmitri Trenin, her director, however, who is closer to the Kremlin, expressed his concern. “The special relationship, which has already existed for several decades between Berlin and Moscow (before, as well as, in particular, after German reunification), underwent from the German side an important erosion. If this continues, there is a danger that also from the Russian side such an erosion takes place. As a result the relationship between Russia and Germany, which is the most important foundation for the stability and cooperation in Europe, can disintegrate and the international consequences of this will be serious.”^[71]

Is the German government, exasperated by Putin’s heavy-handed methods, returning to a values-based foreign policy? A bit, but not quite. It became clear that the power of the German Russia lobby was still intact when, in March 2013, the German government suddenly asked for EU visa liberalization for so-called service passport holders.^[72] This would grant Russian government officials—including officials of the military and the secret services—EU visa freedom, but not ordinary Russians. Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, said: “If the visa liberalization for service passports happens, it would be nice, welcomed progress. It is a very important topic to them. Putin brings it up all the time, so it is important for us too.”^[73] Why a topic, brought up all the time by Putin, should be “important for us too”—apart from pleasing the Kremlin—was not explained. The German proposal was heavily criticized. It came at a period during which the Russian government was accumulating repressive measures against the opposition, and the US Congress had just adopted the Magnitsky Act, prohibiting entrance to the United States of Russian officials who were involved in the death of the lawyer Sergey Magnitsky. “Arguably,” wrote Kadri Liik, “granting visa-free travel for service passport holders was a bad policy from the beginning, as it effectively would have given the Kremlin the right to decide who got it. The EU should seek to retain that right for itself.”^[74]

Despite German criticism of Russia, it cannot be denied that in recent years Germany’s attachment to the Western bloc has been weakened, and it is a matter for concern that Eurosceptic and pro-Russian positions are no longer confined to the fringes of the political spectrum, but—with the advent of the Alternative für Deutschland—have reached the democratic center. After the parliamentary elections of September 2013, the Russia-friendly SPD made a comeback, and the new coalition government of the CDU/CSU and the SPD was expected to be more Kremlin-friendly than the former government. The Foreign Office has a reputation for being “realist” in its relations with Russia. The return of Frank-Walter Steinmeier as Germany’s foreign minister certainly pleased the Kremlin. Gernot Erler, the SPD deputy fraction leader, who regretted that “the West, in the Syria tragedy, attributes to Moscow the role of bad guy,” immediately warned that the “Russia bashing” should stop.^[75] After Russia’s annexation of the Crimea in March 2014 and the Russian aggression in east Ukraine, Germany was one of the countries that were against applying harsh sanctions. Former foreign minister Joschka Fischer wrote that

The question formulated by Robert D. Kaplan: “Will a debellicized Germany partly succumb to Russian influence, leading to a somewhat Finlandized Eastern Europe and an even more hollow North Atlantic Treaty Organization? Or will Germany subtly stand up to Russia . . .?”^[77] is, therefore, still fully on the table.

Notes

Cf. Nikolas K. Gvosdev and Christopher Marsh, Russian Foreign Policy: Interests, Vectors, and Sectors (Los Angeles: CQ Press, 2014), 255.

In the same period, German exports to France, the Benelux countries, Austria, Poland, and China decreased. (Cf. Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschland, “Deutsche Export Performance steigt seit dem Jahre 2000 wieder an,” Pressemitteilung no. 437 (October 17, 2005).)

Außenhandel 2007: Rangfolge der Handelspartner im Außenhandel der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Statistisches Bundesamt, Wiesbaden (November 14, 2008).

These figures, however, should be put in perspective. Imports as well as exports between Germany and Russia in 2007 did, for instance, not even represent half the value of the imports and exports between Germany and the Netherlands (another gas exporter to Germany). However, Russia remains a huge potential growth market for Germany.

Data from the Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschland, Statistiken Aussenhandel 2010. In 2010 Russia still ranked number ten on the list of countries exporting to Germany, but it went down one place—ranking number thirteen—on the list of countries importing from Germany.

Data from the Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschland, Statistiken Aussenhandel 2011. In 2011, Russia went up two places and ranked number eleven on the list of countries importing from Germany, preceded by Poland at place number ten. It ranked number seven on the list of countries exporting to Germany.

Ostausschuss der Deutschen Wirtschaft, “Neue Impulse für eine Deutsch-Russische Wirtschaftspartnerschaft,” Pressemitteilung 24/08, November 11, 2008, http://www.ost-ausschuss.de/pdfs/11_11_2008_pm_mittelstandskonferenz.pdf.

Cf. Artur Ciechanowicz, Anna Kwiatkowska-Drożdż, and Witold Rodkiewicz, “Merkel and Putin’s Consultation: The Economy First of All,” Centre for Eastern Studies (November 21, 2012).

This percentage has gone down to 3.5 percent since the implementation of a deal made on October 2, 2008, on the participation of the two German energy companies in gas production in the Siberian field of Yuzhno-Russkoye. E.ON Ruhrgas (as well as BASF Wintershall) acquired a 25 percent stake minus one share. In return, Gazprom received from E.ON Ruhrgas a package of its own shares that totals 3 percent.

10.

Steinmeier did not want to limit this interlocking (Verflechtung) to economic cooperation. It should, according to him, have a spillover into the political field. He writes, “Therefore we, Germans, should make an effort, so that in the future also we will remain an important and indispensable partner for Russia. For this reason I choose interlocking and not only an economic one.” (Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Mein Deutschland: Wofür ich stehe (Munich: C. Bertelsmann, 2009), 182.)

11.

The two German companies each got 20 percent, and the Dutch Gasunie 9 percent. In January 2009 Gazprom’s CEO, Aleksey Miller, invited the French energy company GdF Suez to become a new partner in the project. He declared: “Gazprom does however stress that it does not intend to decrease its 51-percent stake in the project. That leaves the issue to the other partners who will have to reduce their respective 20 percent and nine percent shares.” Miller’s generosity was deceptive. He was offering GdF Suez a cigar from his partners’ cigar box. (Cf. “Nord Stream Partnership Might Expand,” Investmarket (January 6, 2009), available at http://eng.investmarket.ru/NewsAM/NewsAMShow.asp?ID=514799.) On March 1, 2010, GdF Suez joined the Nord Stream consortium, acquiring a 9 percent stake (4.5 percent each from Wintershall and E.ON Ruhrgas).

12.

Cf. Jürgen Roth, Gazprom: Das unheimliche Imperium (Frankfurt am Main: Westend Verlag, 2012), 162.

13.

Cf. Edward Lucas, The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 169.

14.

Conal Walsh, “Gerhard and Vladimir—Is It Hot Air or Gas?” The Observer (December 12, 2004).

15.

Pavel K. Baev, “Disentangling the Moscow-Berlin-Axis: Follow the Money.” Eurasia Daily Monitor 2, no. 148 (August 1, 2005).

16.

Carter Dougherty, “Commerzbank Linked to Russia Money-Laundering Inquiry,” International Herald Tribune (July 26, 2005).

17.

According to Vladimir Kovalev, Putin needs to clarify “the business with the company SPAG that was mentioned by German authorities in relation to cases of money laundering and in which Putin allegedly worked as a consultant, as well as the most recent development over details of the privatization of Telekominvest. . . . According to the Frankfurter Rundschau, the names of Putin’s wife Lyudmila, as well as the Russian communications minister Leonid Reiman, are mentioned in connection with shady deals over the communications company with the involvement of Commerzbank. The bank is currently under scrutiny by German law enforcement agencies investigating the case of money laundering.” (Cf. Vladimir Kovalev, “Putin Should Settle Doubts about His Past Conduct,” The Petersburg Times (July 29, 2000).)

18.

Lilia Shevtsova, Lonely Power: Why Russia Has Failed to Become the West and the West Is Weary of Russia (Washington, DC, and Moscow: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010), 111.

19.

Quoted in Marshall Goldman, Oilopoly: Putin, Power, and the Rise of the New Russia (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 205.

20.

Robert Amsterdam, “Die SPD lässt sich von Russland erpressen,” Der Stern (November 20, 2007). The Shtokman field was operated by a joint venture consisting of Gazprom (51 percent), Total (25 percent), and Statoil (24 percent), which in the first decade of this century invested about 12 billion euros. The plan was to liquefy the gas and export it to the United States. However, the shale gas revolution in the United States was undermining its profitability. With the United States no longer available as a future export market, the project had to be suspended—probably for several decades. (Cf. “Gazprom May Shelve Shtokman Project as US Shale Revolution Bites,” RT (June 3, 2013).)

21.

Stefan Schultz, “‘Peak Oil’ and the German Government: Military Study Warns of a Potentially Drastic Oil Crisis,” Spiegelonline (September 1, 2010).

22.

Schultz, “‘Peak Oil.’”

23.

Cf. “Corruption Perceptions Index 2010,” Transparency International, http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2010/results.

24.

Cf. Wolfgang Hetzer, “No Punishment for Bribery? When Corruption Is Business as Usual,” in Corruption, SIAK Scientific Series, Republic of Austria, Sicherheitsakademie of the Ministry of the Interior (Vienna: 2010), 69.

25.

Hetzer, “No Punishment for Bribery?” 84.

26.

Cf. Hans Stark, La politique étrangère allemande: entre polarisation et politisation, Note du Comité d’études des relations franco-allemandes (Cerfa), no. 60, IFRI, Paris (January 2009), 12. In fact, Struck’s advocacy signaled that he wanted Germany to copy de Gaulle’s policy of equidistance between the Soviet Union and the United States. But even de Gaulle’s “equidistance” between the two superpowers was never really equidistant. In fact, de Gaulle was much closer to its transatlantic ally than he was ready to admit.

27.

Cf. Dr. Iris Kempe, From a European Neighborhood Policy toward a New Ostpolitik—The Potential Impact of German Policy, Policy Analysis No. 3, Center for Applied Policy Research, Munich (May 2006), 6: “German Foreign Ministers had little alternative but to cede eastern policy to the Chancellor’s Office while formulating their own agenda beyond the ‘Russia first’ approach. For example, during his term in office, Joschka Fischer placed a strong focus on conflict management in the Balkans. Other Foreign Office policies, such as an emphasis on developing a new European neighborhood policy, have sought to take a more differentiated approach toward Eastern Europe as a means of counterbalancing the ‘Russia first’
strategy.”

28.

After the SPD lost the Bundestag elections in September 2009 and Guido Westerwelle (FDP) became the new German foreign minister, there were signs that Chancellor Merkel was taking back the Russia portfolio, leaving Westerwelle in charge of “the rest” of Eastern Europe—as was the case with Joschka Fischer under Chancellor Schröder. A sign of this was the new emphasis Westerwelle put on the relationship with Poland, which was the first country he visited in his new function, and his wish to revive the Weimar Triangle, the summit meetings of Germany, Poland, and France, founded in 1991. (Cf. “Le nouveau chef de la diplomatie allemande veut mettre le cap à l’Est,” Le Monde (December 30, 2009).)

29.

And even before 1933, if we take into account US participation in World War I and the co-responsibility of the United States for the Treaty of Versailles that was deeply resented in Germany.

30.

On the rapprochement of France to NATO, cf. Marcel H. Van Herpen, “I Say NATO, You Say No NATO,” The National Interest, no. 95 (May/June 2008). A longer version of this text is available at http://www.cicerofoundation.org/lectures/Marcel_H_Van_Herpen_SARKOZY_FRANCE_AND_NATO.pdf.

31.

Andrei P. Tsygankov, “Preserving Influence in a Changing World: Russia’s Grand Strategy,” Problems of Post-Communism 58, no. 1 (March–April 2011).

32.

Quoted in Owen Matthews and Stefan Theil, “The New Ostpolitik,” Newsweek International (August 3, 2009).

33.

Cf. Donald K. Bandler and A. Wess Mitchell, “Ich Bin Ein Berliner,” The National Interest online (January 22, 2009), http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=20664.

34.

Cf. George Friedman, “Why Germany Is Lukewarm about Nato” (October 7, 2008), available at http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/why_germany_is_lukewarm_about_nato/.

35.

Markus Hess, “Kurzfassung zur Studie ‘Perspektiven einer Grenzregion’ im Rahmen des gemeinsamen Fördervorhabens Junge Menschen in Grenzregionen der neuen Bundesländer,” Institute for Applied Research on Childhood, Youth, and the Family, University of Potsdam, 2002, 15–16, available at http://www.mbjs.brandenburg.de/sixcms/media.php/bb2.a.5813.de/kurzbericht_grenze.pdf.

36.

Beate Neuss, “Von Bonn nach Berlin: Gibt es einen Wandel in der außenpolitischen Kultur Deutschlands seit der Einheit?” Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Auslandsbüro Tschechische Republik, Prag (April 21, 2005), 15, available at http://www.kas.de/wf/doc/kas_6366-544-1-30.pdf.

37.

“Stefan Meller über die polnisch-russischen Verhältnisse,” available at http://www.skubi.net/meller_de.html.

38.

Joschka Fischer, “Aus Feinden wurden Nachbarn” (June 6, 2004), available at http://www.michael-cramer.eu/europa/41472.html.

39.

“Frau Fix-It,” The Economist (November 18, 2010).

40.

Gvosdev and Marsh, Russian Foreign Policy, 255.

41.

Quoted in Vladimir Socor, “Made in Germany for Russia’s Army,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 8, no. 31 (February 14, 2011).

42.

Andrzej Wilk, “France and Germany Are Establishing a Closer Military Co-Operation with Russia,” Eastweek (June 29, 2011).

43.

Wilk, “France and Germany Are Establishing a Closer Military Co-Operation with Russia.”

44.

Jakub Grygiel, “Europe: Strategic Drifter,” The National Interest, no. 126 (July/August 2013), 34.

45.

“Rheinmetall will Waffen nach Russland liefern,” Die Welt (October 27, 2012).

46.

“Leopard-Hersteller plant Rüstungsdeals mit Russland—‘Nesawissimaja Gaseta,’” RIA Novosti (October 30, 2012).

47.

“Leichte Traktor—Grosstraktor I/II/III—Neuaufbaufahrzeug PzKpfw V/VI,” www.achtungpanzer.com (accessed July 10, 2013).

48.

Condoleezza Rice, “The Making of Soviet Strategy,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 666.

49.

Cf. “How Very Understanding,” The Economist (May 10, 2014).

50.

Konrad Popławski, “Germany Trying for a Lucrative Contract in Russia,” OSW, Analyses (April 24, 2014).

51.

Cf. Veranstaltungsmanagement und Mitgliederservice Deutsch-Russische Auslandshandelskammer, http://russland.ahk.de.

52.

Françoise Lazare, “La dynamique des relations germano-russes,” Le Monde (December 7, 2001).

53.

Lazare, “La dynamique des relations germano-russes.”

54.

Emmanuelle Belohradsky and Odile Benyahia-Kouider, “Le couple franco-allemand est au bord du divorce,” Challenges (October 10, 2007), available at http://www.challenges.fr/magazine/0096005058/le_couple_francoallemand_est_au_bord_du_divorce.html.

55.

Cf. “Siemens Plans Nuclear Cooperation with Russia,” Spiegel Online (February 25, 2009); and Paul Betts, “Fabled Franco-German Relationship Turns Radioactive,” Financial Times (March 5, 2009). This estimate predates the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011 and, therefore, needs to be revised downwards.

56.

The Rapallo Treaty of 1922 between Germany and the Soviet Union led to a secret cooperation between the Reichswehr and the Red Army. General Von Seeckt, the head of the German armed forces, saw the treaty as the start of a German-Russian axis that would lead to the complete extinction of Poland. (Cf. Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 59 and 203.)

57.

It is telling that in 1989, Dutch defense minister Frits Bolkestein, talking about the peace movement in the Netherlands, which was as active as its counterpart in Germany, said: “At the moment Dutch opinion is, I would say, much more realistic in matters appertaining to international affairs and East-West relations than is German public opinion. In Germany, things are different.” (Cf. Michael Richard Daniell Foot, Holland at War against Hitler (London: Routledge, 1990), 195.)

58.

Bobo Lo (Vladimir Putin and the Evolution of Russian Foreign Policy, The Royal Institute of International Affairs (London: Blackwell, 2003) reports that “my (Russian) MFA sources consistently dismissed the possibility that American deployment of a national missile defence system could materially affect the Russia-US strategic balance” (154). Lo writes that despite Russia’s vociferous opposition to American strategic missile defense plans, “there was never much credence attached to the notion that these might, in time, nullify Russian retaliatory strike capabilities”(88).

59.

“Schröder geißelt Bushs Raketenabwehr,” Der Spiegel (March 11, 2007).

60.

Matthias Schepp, “Altkanzler Schmidt spricht sich gegen US-Raketenabwehr aus,” Der Spiegel (September 25, 2007). In this same interview, Schmidt “noted that since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan neither Gorbachev, nor Yeltsin or Putin had invaded a foreign terri-
tory. Nevertheless some Americans and also, to a certain degree, NATO, remained suspicious.” One year later the Russian army would invade the sovereign state of Georgia, which was followed, in 2014, by the annexation of the Crimea and the invasion of Eastern Ukraine.

61.

Helmut Schmidt, Richard von Weizsäcker, Egon Bahr, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, “Für eine atomwaffenfreie Welt,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (January 9, 2009).

62.

Jan Techau, “Germany’s Eastern Temptation,” Central Europe Digest, Center for European Policy Analysis (September 1, 2009), available at http://www.cepa.org/ced/view.aspx?record_id=198&printview=1.

63.

Beate Neuss, “Von Bonn nach Berlin,” 4.

64.

Daniel Brössler, “Deutschland an der Seite von Diktatoren,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (March 19, 2011).

65.

Joschka Fischer, “Deutsche Auβenpolitik—Eine Farce,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (March 22, 2011).

66.

Frédéric Lemaître and Marion Van Renterghem, “Le malaise allemand,” Le Monde (April 3–4, 2011).

67.

“The Shocking Mr Schockenhoff,” The Economist (November 10, 2012).

68.

“The Shocking Mr Schockenhoff.”

69.

Frédéric Lemaître, “L’Allemagne s’éloigne de la Russie et se rapproche de la Pologne,” Le Monde (November 18–19, 2012).

70.

Lilia Shevtsova and David J. Kramer, “Germany and Russia: The End of Ostpolitik?” The American Interest (November 13, 2012).

71.

Dmitri Trenin, “Germanii nuzhna novaya politika po otnosheniyu k Rossii,” Moskovskiy Tsentr Karnegi (November 21, 2013).

72.

Valentina Pop, “Germany Wants EU Visa-Free Travel for Russian Officials,” EUobserver (March 6, 2013).

73.

Quoted in Andrew Rettman, “EU and Russia in Visa Talks, despite Magnitsky ‘Regret,’” EUobserver (March 21, 3013).

74.

Kadri Liik, “Regime Change in Russia,” Policy Memo, European Council on Foreign Relations (May, 2013), 6.

75.

Gernot Erler, “Schluss mit dem Russland-Bashing,” Zeit Online (June 9, 2013).

76.

Joschka Fischer, Scheitert Europa? (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2014).

77.

Robert D. Kaplan, “The Divided Map of Europe,” The National Interest 120 (July/August 2012), 24.

The Kremlin’s Conquest of France

The Russian-French Friendship
from Chirac to Sarkozy

Apart from Germany, there was another leading European country with which the Kremlin wanted to establish close political and personal ties: France. France was the third pole in Putin’s strategic “Berlin-Moscow-Paris Triangle.” In Germany, Vladimir Putin had found a soul mate in Gerhard Schröder. However, at the beginning of Putin’s presidency the relationship with French President Jacques Chirac was far from cordial. When Chirac visited Putin in Moscow in July 2001, the Nouvel Observateur wrote: “As concerns the atmosphere between the two men . . . the relationship does not seem to be very warm.”^[1] But the US war in Iraq proved to be an unexpected godsend. It permitted Putin not only to strengthen his relationship with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder but also to forge closer ties with Chirac. The three leaders, opposing the US war plans, presented themselves to the world as the “peace camp.” Like Putin, Chirac declared himself to be in favor of a “multipolar world.” Both men were convinced that a multipolar world, instead of bringing instability, would foster peace.^[2] Chirac’s emerging friendship with Putin, who at that time was conducting a war in Chechnya which led to accusations of genocide, was not, in France, appreciated by everybody. The French philosopher André Glucksmann, for instance, criticized the new French-Russian alliance directed against the United States. Glucksmann wrote that Putin’s troops “bound Chechen civilians together like bundles of sticks, blew them up with explosives, and threw their remains into the ditch. But despite such barbaric behavior, and despite the murder of an estimated one hundred thousand civilians during the Chechen war, for French president Chirac, ‘Russia fascinates, its immense riches sharpen the appetite, its brute, disproportionate use of force inspires respect.’”^[3] Indeed, to say that Russia’s “brute, disproportionate use of force inspires respect” was a baffling statement for the leader of a Western, democratic country. When Chirac criticized Poland and other East European countries for supporting the United States, he told them they had “missed a good opportunity to shut up.” Chirac’s rude and disrespectful behavior toward these countries stood in sharp contrast with his plea to treat Moscow “with respect.” Alain Besançon, a French historian, comments: “One would have wished that president Chirac should understand that the dominant sentiment of these countries vis-à-vis Russia is not respect, but fear.”^[4] He adds that people close to the president had said that he defended “a strategic vision.” “It is now my turn to be afraid,” writes Besançon. “Is the pro-Russian bias of our foreign policy (after having been pro-Soviet) so ineradicable?”^[5]

However, these critics could not spoil the newly emerging French-
Russian honeymoon. The cherry on top of the cake of Chirac’s friendship with Putin came on September 22, 2006, when Chirac decorated the Russian leader with the Grand-Croix of the Légion d’honneur, the highest French state order. It was the first time this order had been granted to a citizen of the Russian Federation. The ceremony was heavily criticized by Reporters without Borders, who called the award “unworthy of France” and “an insult to those who fight for freedom of speech in Russia.” Putin promptly returned the favor in 2007, when Chirac visited Moscow, granting Chirac the State Prize of the Russian Federation for Humanitarian Activities. When Putin left the presidency in May 2008, his first trip as prime minister brought him to Paris, where he met with his former colleague. Again Chirac expressed his feelings of “very deep friendship” for Putin, adding: “My esteem comes from the remarkable manner in which you led Russia. Without doubt, these 10 [sic] years have been great years for Russia.”^[6]

When Chirac left the Élysée, this was felt in the Kremlin as a genuine loss. And this was even more so because Chirac’s successor, Nicolas Sarkozy, seemed intent on radically changing course. Sarkozy not only planned a rapprochement with the United States and the reintegration of France into the military organization of NATO, but he also announced a new foreign policy that, unlike that of his predecessor, would be strictly based on human rights. Sarkozy had written very clearly in this respect. Respect of human rights, he wrote, “is not a ‘detail’ in my eyes. It is the foundation of the very idea of international community.”^[7] And he added: “You cannot place our economic interests and the respect of universal values on the same level.”^[8] Sarkozy further wrote:

These were beautiful words. Sarkozy also mentioned that, in his opinion, “one cannot and must not remain silent in face of the Chechen drama, the illegitimate Russian interventions in Belarus, the guilty hesitations when there was the orange revolution in Ukraine.”^[10] Reasons enough, therefore, for Putin to fear that the cordial French-Russian relationship, established under Chirac, would turn cold. His pessimism seemed to be confirmed when Sarkozy chose André Glucksmann as one of his close advisers. This was the French philosopher who had criticized Chirac so vehemently for neglecting the atrocities committed in the Chechen war. However, things turned out quite differently than expected. Putin would soon find out that Sarkozy was not the principled fighter for human rights and democracy he had pretended to be in his election campaign. Far from being a French Jimmy Carter-bis, he was rather a Malenkiy Shirak—a “Little Chirac.” Sarkozy’s conversion to the principles of Realpolitik started the day after his inauguration as president. However, his conversion into a full-fledged drug Putina (“friend of Putin”) would take longer, and the occasion on which this conversion took place, was—to say the least—surprising.

Sarkozy’s Pro-Putin Conversion

Sarkozy’s warm personal relationship with Putin began one year later, at a moment that seemed rather inauspicious for it: the war between Russia and Georgia in August 2008. Sarkozy, at that moment president of the European Council, acted as a mediator in the conflict. Sarkozy’s mediation effort has been criticized from different sides for the amateurish way in which it was conducted.^[11] Being a complete novice in foreign policy, he was easy prey for the shrewd, well-oiled, and extremely well-prepared Russian diplomacy machine.^[12] However, one can still forgive the naïveté of an inexperienced president who had to act under great pressure at a moment while the United States, the leader of the West, preferred to stay aloof. More serious, however, was the character flaw the French president showed on that occasion. Because one has to query why at precisely this crucial moment, when Russian troops had, for the first time since the invasion of Afghanistan, invaded a sovereign and democratic country and prepared to dismember it, had he thought it opportune to start a close and even cozy partnership with the invading power. Unfortunately, however, this was exactly what happened. On August 12, 2008, Sarkozy flew to Moscow to negotiate with the Russian leaders—at that time called “the tandem,” consisting of President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Both men had prepared themselves very well for the arrival of the French president. They informed him about the Georgian “aggression” and the “ethnic cleansing” conducted by the Georgian army in South Ossetia. But the talks in Moscow were not only about the war and how the war could be ended. The presence of the French president within the Kremlin walls offered the Russian “tandem” a golden opportunity to talk about other things, for instance how to improve French-Russian cooperation and how to strengthen mutual business ties. Juicy contracts were suggested. The Russian charm offensive was crowned with success. On August 12, 2008, at a point when South Ossetian militias were still conducting an ethnic cleansing of Georgian villages in South Ossetia, Saul Sarkozy became Paul Sarkozy: the former critical presidential candidate, the self-proclaimed defender of human rights, definitively joined the ranks of the group of “Putin-friendly” European leaders. A sign of this was a proposal made by Sarkozy in November 2008 to “stop talking” about the US missile defense shield in Europe, which, he said, “only complicates things.”^[13] This unilateral French proposal for a moratorium on the ballistic missile defense project was heavily criticized by Poland and the Czech Republic, which had participated in the project. The fact that some weeks earlier Russian President Medvedev had threatened to deploy short-range Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad did not help. Sarkozy seemed to give in to Russian blackmail without taking into account the interests of its new allies in NATO. Alexandr Vondra, the deputy prime minister of the Czech Republic, wrote an op-ed in Le Monde, titled “A Bit of Respect, Mister President,” in which he reminded the French president that not only in April 2008 all NATO members, including France, had agreed with the project, but also that “there was no agreement of the 27 [EU members] in the name of which the [French EU] Presidency could speak about this project.”^[14] It is no surprise that Putin, in an interview with Le Figaro one month after the war, had only words of praise for Sarkozy. “Nicolas Sarkozy has played an important role in the pacification process [in Georgia],” he said, adding: “our relationship has a constructive character, and, progressively, we have established an extremely friendly relationship. We more and more confide in each other.”^[15]

A Cold Mistral Blows over the Black Sea

On September 19, 2008, a few days after this interview, Sarkozy sent his prime minister, François Fillon, to the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi, where Fillon met with Putin to negotiate contracts for French firms. At that very moment, Russian troops were still in Georgia. Not only had Russia not fulfilled the “six principles” negotiated with Sarkozy to end the Georgian conflict, but some weeks before, Russia had recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, de facto dismembering Georgia. Fillon’s business visit to Sochi was considered by the Georgian government as a stab in the back. It was also heavily criticized by Poland, Britain, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states. But nothing could stop Sarkozy’s new honeymoon with the Russian leadership. Soon a big project was on the table: the sale of two French helicopter carriers of the Mistral class to Russia. This ship is the pride of the French navy. It can carry sixteen heavy or thirty-five light helicopters, four landing craft, nine hundred soldiers, and up to seventy armored vehicles, including forty tanks. The Russian navy commander Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky would declare in September 2009 that in the war with Georgia, “such warship would take just 40 minutes to do the task that the Russian Black Sea Fleet ships did in 26 hours.”^[16] The deal was estimated to be worth over €1 billion and the largest Russian procurement purchase abroad to date. It would be the first sale of this kind by a NATO country to Russia. “I hope you can buy this splendid ship,” said Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, when he visited Moscow together with Defense Minister Hervé Morin in October 2009.^[17]

However, the plan met with criticism not only in France, but also in Russia itself. “The Mistral purchase will have a devastating effect on Russian shipbuilders’ already difficult task of selling their ships to other countries,” wrote Mikhail Barabanov, a defense expert, who argued that “it would be hard to develop a more damaging advertising campaign for Russia’s defense industry. Russia’s shipbuilders don’t deserve this negative PR.”^[18] However, the proposed sale caused much greater concern among Russia’s neighboring states. On November 27, 2009, Georgian foreign minister Grigol Vashadze told an audience at the French Institute for International Relations (IFRI) in Paris that he was “tremendously worried” about the purchase. “The only destination for this kind of ship,” he said, “is the Black Sea.”^[19] On December 18, 2009, six US senators, including former presidential candidate John McCain, wrote a letter to the French ambassador in Washington, with a copy to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in which they expressed their concern with the proposed sale. They drew attention to the fact that Russia had suspended its participation in the CFE Treaty; did not honor its 1999 commitments to withdraw from Georgian and Moldovan territory; and was not in compliance with the Russian-Georgian cease-fire agreement negotiated by the French government. “We fear,” they wrote, that “this sale sends Russia the message that France acquiesces to its increasingly bellicose and lawless behavior.” The French ambassador answered in a letter of December 21, 2009, “that Russian authorities, at the highest level, have clearly rejected the irresponsible statement that you mention.” This sounded almost like a joke: the ambassador was referring to the “irresponsible statement”. . . made by Admiral Vysotsky that the Mistral ship would have allowed the Russian invaders of Georgia in August 2008 to accomplish their task in forty minutes. The ambassador added: “We have been keen to consult our partners, notably Georgia, before any move.” “To consult” seemed for the French government only to mean “to inform” and obviously did not include the need to listen to the other side and to take the concerns of the Georgian government seriously. Thereafter, Russian officials were prudent enough to stop talking about the Black Sea. General Vladimir Popovkin, deputy minister of defense responsible for arms procurement, declared “that we need it [the Mistral] for the defense of the Kaliningrad enclave and the Kuril islands.”^[20] But it was evident that the Black Sea remained the most attractive place for Moscow to deploy the Mistral. Not only would it be an important reinforcement of the Black Sea Fleet, but as a helicopter carrier, the Mistral also had the advantage that it would not qualify as an aircraft carrier, which, as such, would be banned from passing through the Bosporus Strait and the Dardanelles under a 1936 convention. The diplomatic implications of the arms deal were warmly welcomed in both countries. Philippe Migault, analyst at IRIS, a French think tank, called the Mistral contract “a huge diplomatic opportunity,”^[21] which, he said, would open “a new diplomatic era in Europe.” This, because “a
Moscow-Berlin-Paris-Rome quartet, without London, subservient to Washington, would not only make sense, but it would permit to exercise an even greater influence internationally.” In the same vein, Max Fisher wrote an article in the Atlantic entitled “Russia-France: The New Alliance That Could Change Europe.”^[22] Also, for this author, the sale of the Mistral had “a huge political significance”: “After standing alone in Europe for nearly a century, Russia seems to be developing its first real European partnership in generations.” Fisher added: “France may seem an unusual choice, but the interests of the two nations could intertwine with surprising elegance, and there is a long history of French-Russian involvement.”^[23] One got the impression of experiencing a remake of the old Franco-Russian alliance, which existed for a quarter of a century between 1892 and 1917. The Kremlin’s strategy, therefore, seemed rather successful. After the German-Russian side, the Franco-Russian side of its strategic “European Triangle” began to take shape.

However, the US administration, concerned about the Mistral deal, put pressure on the French government to sell the ship without the NATO standard high-tech equipment for radar and command and control. Moscow, on the other side, insisted that the electronic equipment also be included and threatened to buy the ships elsewhere. Thereupon, Sarkozy started a charm offensive. On March 9, 2010, he invited Sergey Chemezov to the Elysée Palace and decorated him with the Légion d’honneur.^[24] Chemezov was not only director of Rosoboronexport, the Russian state arms export firm, but also director-general of Rostekhnologii, a huge complex of military-
industrial state companies. Chemezov’s background is interesting. Having worked in the 1980s as an undercover KGB agent in Dresden in the German Democratic Republic, he told Itogi magazine in 2005 that in East Germany, he was Putin’s neighbor.^[25] However, even if a Légion d’honneur for Putin’s close friend Chemezov was not bad, Putin wanted more.

Showing that he and not President Medvedev was in charge, in June 2010 Putin instructed his deputy prime minister Igor Sechin to set up a working group on French-Russian cooperation in military shipbuilding.^[26] In September 2010, the Kremlin increased the pressure. Although having promised Paris that the negotiations were exclusive, Russia opened an international tender and began to contact shipyards in Spain and the Netherlands. The Russian pressure had success. The French government gave in. On November 1, 2010—just four days before the international tender expired—the Russian shipyard OSK and the French military shipyard DCNS signed an agreement to form a common consortium. According to the CEO of DCNS, Patrick Boissier, the consortium could participate in tenders for the construction of “military and civilian ships.”^[27] It was no surprise when this consortium won the tender. At the end of January 2011, an agreement was signed in Saint-Nazaire between the French minister of defense, Alain Juppé, and Russian deputy prime minister Igor Sechin. The agreement concerned four ships, two of which would be built in France and two in Russia. However, this was not the end of the affair. The Russian government went on to haggle. In March 2011 Moscow said it wanted to pay only 980 million euros for the two Mistrals. Paris wanted at least 1.15 billion.^[28] One Mistral costs between 500 and 700 million euros. Even the pro-government paper Le Figaro began to express its doubts. The paper revealed how at the last moment the Russian side had manipulated the Saint-Nazaire agreement, changing the wording of an article referring to the transfer of technology. The French “contribution” to a transfer of technology was alleged to have been changed into a “guarantee.” This last-minute change was signed by the French defense minister Alain Juppé.^[29] Again, as in August 2008, when Sarkozy conducted negotiations with the Kremlin to end the war in Georgia, the French appeared to be poor negotiators. When, finally, a deal was made, the French government refused to make the details of the technology transfer public. However, there were few doubts that the Kremlin had obtained what it wanted. Even the pro-government paper Le Figaro wrote: “Today France would be prepared to sell almost all technology with which the Mistral, one of the flagships of the national navy, is equipped.”^[30] Some of this technology, however, belonged to NATO and was blocked. But most of it was French. The paper wrote: “According to information obtained by Le Figaro, Paris appears thus to have accepted handing over the command and communication systems, including their codes. One of the ultrasophisticated communication systems of the Mistral, Sinik 9, is directly derived from Sinik 8, with which the Charles de Gaulle [the French aircraft carrier] is equipped. Even the director of the shipyards of Saint-Nazaire has acknowledged that there existed “a risk” in connection with the transfer of technology.”^[31] These doubts, however, were not enough to stop the project. In June 2011 the final agreement was signed. Le Figaro published a page-long article, titled “France-Russia: The New Strategic Axis,”^[32] in which the sale of the Mistral was presented as “only the beginning of the story.” Apparently, the Kremlin could be satisfied.

The sale of the Mistral was not only a matter of concern because of the security risks that were involved for NATO members and NATO partners neighboring Russia. It was also an important precedent. “The French Mistral sale,” wrote Vladimir Socor, “can trigger a rush by other NATO countries to sell arms to Russia, bypassing NATO and undermining Allied plans and policies. With Mistral the precedent-setting case (if this sale is allowed), a sale-and-purchase pitch has already started.”^[33] He warned: “If NATO fails on this issue now, then the entire issue of arms sales to Russia will spin out of the Alliance’s ability to control.”^[34] In the aftermath of the financial and economic crisis, security concerns seemed to have become totally subservient to purely mercantilist concerns. In 2010 French arms sales almost halved, passing from 8 billion euros in 2009 to 4.3 billion euros. This situation was, according to Le Monde, due to the “lack of big contracts.”^[35] The sale of the Mistral, undeniably a “big contract,” was expected to give French arms sales a boost of 25 percent.

The sale of the Mistral, presented by Sarkozy as a great personal success and a boon for the French defense industry, became a growing embarrassment for France. The delivery of the first Mistral, the Vladivostok, was scheduled in September 2014. At that moment, Russia was hit by Western sanctions because of its occupation of the Crimea and its invasion of eastern Ukraine. In late June 2014 four hundred Russian sailors arrived in the French port of Saint-Nazaire to be trained on board. A first ten-day training voyage with 250 Russian sailors and 200 French specialists was made in the middle of September.^[36] Despite the sanctions, President François Hollande did not cancel or suspend the delivery; he only postponed it. Among the reasons put forward was that a cancellation of the contract would not only lead to expensive penalties but also damage France’s credibility as an arms supplier on the global arms market. These were shaky arguments because delivery under these circumstances would constitute a more important blow to France’s reputation in Western capitals with not only moral but also direct economic consequences. Jeff Lightfoot rightly remarked that

An Orthodox Cathedral in the Heart of Paris: House of God or Den of Spies?

The year 2010 was a year of celebration for the growing French-Russian entente, not only because of the preparation of the Mistral deal. In that year also une année croisée was organized. This “crossed year” consisted of a “Year of Russia” in France and a “Year of France” in Russia. The combined events in the two countries included up to four hundred cultural manifestations, ballets, and theater performances. There was an exhibition in the
Louvre and high-level visits of Medvedev and Putin to Paris. The Russians hired the prominent French PR bureau Euro-RSCG to organize the publicity. The new partners praised each other, and comparisons were made with the Franco-Russian Alliance between 1892 and 1917, of which the Alexandre III bridge, a monumental Seine bridge named after tsar Alexander III and built between 1896 and 1900, is the enduring symbol. The “Year of Russia” created the right atmosphere and the necessary goodwill for another important breakthrough for the Kremlin—this time not in the field of arms sales but in the field of religion.

Since 2008 the Kremlin has had an eye on the building of Météo France, the French Meteorological Institute, which was for sale. The building was situated in a strategic location, at the Quai Branly in the heart of Paris, not far from the Eiffel Tower. Moscow wanted to build an Orthodox cathedral on this plot of 8,400 square meters. There was only one problem: Canada and Saudi Arabia were also interested in buying the building. There followed aggressive lobbying by the Russian ambassador, Alexander Orlov, who was assisted by Vladimir Kozhin, an ex-KGB officer and the head of the Kremlin’s Presidential Property Management Department, a bureaucracy which employs fifty thousand employees. Putin was deputy head of the same department when he began to work in Yeltsin’s presidential administration in June 1996. The department is not only tasked with the management of state property within Russia but also with the property of the Russian Orthodox Church abroad. For the operation “Paris Cathedral,” the Russians had hired another French lobbying firm: ESL & Network, which had access to the highest echelons of the French government. Moscow had made it clear that it would consider it an unfriendly act if the Kremlin were not to obtain the building. In December 2009 President Medvedev spoke with Sarkozy about the project during the climate summit in Copenhagen. Sarkozy is said to have immediately phoned his budget minister from Copenhagen. A few days later the Kremlin’s chief of the Property Department, Vladimir Kozhin, was invited to the ministry.^[38] The Kremlin asked for a direct sale, but Paris preferred an open tender. When, on January 28, 2010, the five envelopes were opened, the offer of the Kremlin, 70 million euros, was the highest. According to an insider, quoted in Le Nouvel Observateur, “[The offer] was superior to the evaluation of the Property service, which is secret.”^[39] The magazine asked: “Has Russia benefited from privileged information? Bercy [the French Ministry of Finance], of course, denies this.”^[40]

Unfortunately, the sale of the site for the new cathedral was not purely a question of religion. The site is not far from the Palais de l’Alma, a dependency of the presidential Elysée Palace, in which the postal service of the Elysée and sixteen apartments for the staff of the president are located. Jean-David Levitte, diplomatic adviser to Sarkozy, and General Benoît Puga, Sarkozy’s private chief of staff, had apartments in the building. These men, wrote Le Nouvel Observateur,

These reservations, however, had no impact on the final decision. On March 17, 2011, a team of architects was constituted, led by the Spaniard Manuel Nuñez Yanovsky, in association with the Russian Arch Group, to construct what was no longer being called a church but a “Russian spiritual center.”^[42] The building in the heart of Paris would further boost the Russian Orthodox presence in France, where, in 2009, in Épinay-sous-Sénart, the biggest Russian seminary of Western Europe, had been opened to train French-speaking priests. However, there still remained some stumbling blocks. In November 2012 Sarkozy’s successor, President François Hollande, suspended the project, which Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë had criticized for its “mediocre” architecture. Delanoë had not been the project’s only critic. The French Ministry of Culture also was not happy with the baroque building with its five gilded onion towers and glass curtain roof, which did not suit its environment. The French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte, who had participated in the contest (but was not selected), was tasked with developing a new proposal together with the architects of the original project.^[43] Finally, in the summer of 2014—notwithstanding the fact that at that time economic sanctions were being imposed against Russia—the construction of the building began.

The new cathedral in Paris was part of the Kremlin’s strategy to gain a hold over Orthodox church buildings in France, and—via the buildings—over Russian émigré communities. France has a large Russian immigrant population, which arrived after the October Revolution. These “White” Russians have their own churches in Biarritz, Nice, and Paris. In the 1920s these churches broke with the Kremlin-dominated Moscow Patriarchate and chose instead to belong to the Constantinople Patriarchate. Since the election of Putin, the Russian Orthodox Church has been trying to bring these parishes back into the womb of the Moscow Patriarchate. To achieve this goal, the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church did not shy away from using heavy-handed methods. In December 2004 they organized in Biarritz a putsch against the local council of the Orthodox parish by letting “believers” come from neighboring Spain and organize a parallel council that voted to join the Moscow Patriarchate. However, the real council went to court and won the case. In Nice the Kremlin had more success. “In 2005 in Nice they sent officers of the SVR, the external espionage service, to try to retake the cathedral of Saint Nicolas by legal action (the Kremlin was to finally win the case in first instance in January 2010).”^[44] The victory in Nice was due to the fact that in the meantime, the legal position of the Russian Orthodox Church had been strengthened. On May 17, 2007, the exiled church and the Russian Orthodox Church had been reunited. “So many churches, so many pieds-à-terre that will from now on officially expand the noble mission of infiltration that the Russian state has defined for itself,” wrote Hélène Blanc and Renata Lesnik on this occasion.^[45] The parish of the Orthodox cathedral Saint Alexandre Nevski in the Rue Daru in Paris, however, defended itself with success against a hostile takeover. This would have been an additional reason for the Kremlin to opt for the project of the new cathedral in the center of the French capital.

These seemingly religious struggles hide, in reality, something else: a struggle for the Kremlin’s control of the Russian diaspora. The project of the cathedral in the heart of Paris was also important for another reason: it was the pièce de résistance of a combined effort of the Kremlin and the Moscow Patriarchate to make the Russian Orthodox Church into a global church. In this project France—and within France, the region of Paris—has been assigned the position of the West European hub from which to start this religious conquest. The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has, certainly, the same rights as other churches to proselytize. The problem, however, is that the ROC is different from other churches, especially in its close, symbiotic relationship with the Kremlin and with the Russian secret services, which is a reason for concern.

The Meseberg Initiative: Toward an EU-Russia Strategic Partnership?

During Sarkozy’s presidency, the Kremlin also notched up an important diplomatic success in France. This was built upon an initiative taken by Sarkozy on the occasion of the celebrations in Moscow on May 9, 2010, of the sixty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Sarkozy wanted to promote the project of a common European space based on an entente between France, Germany, and Russia—a project that could only please Moscow as it was an exact copy of the geopolitical “triangle” the Kremlin wanted to build in Europe. In a two-page paper, the Elysée had prepared a document in which the “common values” of Europe and Russia were stressed and the wish expressed that they should become “privileged partners.” Le Monde wrote that “France seeks to place itself in the center of a new dialogue with Moscow on political-military questions in Europe.”^[46] The sale of the Mistral was considered an example of this new dialogue and partnership.

During a meeting in Castle Meseberg near Berlin on June 4–5, 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev even went so far as to propose an “EU-Russia Political and Security Committee.” This would imply that Russia not only would have regular bilateral and trilateral meetings with the two leading EU countries but would get nothing less than a seat at the EU security table. In a tripartite follow-up summit meeting on October 18–19, 2010, in the French beach resort of Deauville, which was attended by Merkel, Sarkozy, and Medvedev, further details of this plan were discussed. Sarkozy spoke of an EU-Russia economic space “with common security concepts,” emphasizing eventual arms deals between Russia and the EU, a domain of direct interest to France. The meeting was unique: it was the first time since 1945 that French, German, and Russian leaders had discussed European security problems without the participation of the United States and outside the NATO framework. The Poles were upset. Gazeta Polska, a Polish newspaper, wrote a report on the Deauville meeting under the headline “Troika Carves Up Europe.”^[47] Although Paris and Berlin sought to reassure Washington that the three-way meeting “had none of the anti-American undertones of the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis that emerged in the wake of the US-led invasion of Iraq,”^[48] Americans were not amused. “Will the U.S. Lose Europe to Russia?” was the title of an article in the New York Times. In the article, a senior US official is quoted as saying: “Since when, I wonder, is European security no longer an issue of American concern, but something for Europe and Russia to resolve? After being at the center of European security for 70 years, it’s strange to hear that it’s no longer a matter of U.S. concern.”^[49]

Vladimir Chizov, Russian ambassador to the EU, could not hide his satisfaction. He told a reporter that Russia wanted a formalized relationship with the COPS, the EU’s Committee on Foreign and Security Policy. “I don’t expect to be sitting at every committee session,” he declared with false modesty, “but there should be some mechanism that would enable us to take joint steps.”^[50] The proposed EU-Russia Security Committee would be chaired by the EU’s high representative for foreign policy and Russia’s foreign minister. The new forum would not only be used for consultations but also for setting ground rules for joint civilian and military crisis management operations by the EU and NATO. This would mean, writes Vladimir Socor, that

The dangers of this new structure were, indeed, manifold. It would, first, give Russia access to the EU’s decision-making process in security matters without giving the EU an equivalent influence on Russian decision making. Even if it was intended to do so, this was excluded given the highly secretive and authoritarian character of the Kremlin’s power vertical that could more easily influence discussions in a divisive EU with twenty-seven members than the other way around. Second, it would realize the hidden aim of Medvedev’s project for a Pan-European security pact, which was to drive a wedge between the United States and its European allies. After Medvedev’s original project had been dismissed by the West, the EU-Russia Security Committee could therefore be considered the Russian “plan B,” which would replace Medvedev’s security pact.^[52] Europeans, however, seemed not to be conscious of the risks of such a continental Alleingang. Two defense experts of the European Council on Foreign Relations, Mark Leonard and Ivan Krastev, for instance, pleaded for an enlargement of the proposed bilateral EU-Russia forum into a trilateral security forum consisting of the EU, Russia, and Turkey. “Setting up an informal trialogue,” they wrote in an op-ed in the Financial Times, “could give new life to the old institutional order and—to paraphrase Lord Ismay—work to keep the EU united, Russia post-imperial and Turkey European.”^[53] Unfortunately, rather the contrary could happen. This proposal would not only sideline the United States, but—instead of keeping the EU united—the Russian presence at the European security table would offer Russia a golden opportunity to play on the many disagreements among the EU-27. It would further give Russia a unique possibility to drive a wedge between Europe and the United States. It would further by no means keep Russia post-imperial because Russia’s post-imperial phase ended with the start of Putin’s reign.

However, ideas of a European-Russian security alliance seemed to find more and more supporters. In France, Jean-Bernard Pinatel, a former army general, published in 2010 a book with the title Russie, alliance vitale (Russia, Vital Alliance). In this book, he writes:

What Pinatel proposed was, in fact, an old foreign policy goal of Russia: to sever the security bonds between Europe and the United States. In his book Pinatel also addressed “the fear of our East European partners.” They were told by him to do the same as De Gaulle did: “To reach out to the occupying forces of yesterday.”^[55] In the end, these ideas about a Russian seat at the EU security table did not materialize due to a lack of support from the other EU member states. However, it is telling that with its charm offensive, the Kremlin almost succeeded in reviving the anti-Iraq coalition of Russia, France, and Germany—forging a trilateral entente in security affairs that excluded the United States.

The French initiative to form a strategic triangle between Moscow, Berlin, and Paris was also nurtured by the existence of a bilateral French-Russian strategic platform, the French-Russian Cooperation Council on Security Questions (CCQS),^[56] created in January 2002 on the initiative of Vladimir Putin. This council consists of the ministers of defense and foreign affairs of both countries and convenes at least once a year. Michel Barnier, Chirac’s minister of foreign affairs, called “this four-person dialogue . . . quite unique. I don’t think that it exists with any other country.”^[57] For the Kremlin this forum, which, between 2002 and 2015, was convened eleven times, is of great importance, and it is eager to enhance its themes and its participants. One of the proposals, published on the website of the French-Russian Observatory (Observatoire franco-russe), a think tank created in March 2012 by the Economic Council of the French-Russian Chamber of Commerce, was “to expand the format of the CCQS” by also inviting the two ministers of the interior.^[58] Another proposal, published on this website, was to launch “a permanent dialogue on strategic stability between France and Russia, initially on the level of experts.” Arnaud Dubien, the leader of the French-Russian Observatory, made himself a mouthpiece of Moscow’s ambitions, pleading for a Russian seat at yet another European table: the Weimar Triangle, writing that “one of the most promising formats is that of the Weimar Triangle (France, Germany, Poland), enlarged with Russia.”^[59]

A Galaxy of Pro-Kremlin Associations, Coordinated by the Russian Embassy

The Kremlin’s honeymoon with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his prime minister, François Fillon, was supported by a broad Russian soft-power offensive which targeted French civil society and public opinion. In June 2010, during the “Russia Year in France,” Putin and Fillon opened a Russian exhibition in the Paris Grand Palais. On that occasion Putin reminded his colleague “that one should not only look at the ‘common past,’ but also at the ‘common future.’”^[60] An important instrument of the Russian soft-power offensive was the monthly paid supplement Russie d’Aujourd’hui, delivered with the French paper Le Figaro. The Kremlin’s policies were also supported by the paper France-Soir, owned by Alexander Pugachev, son of the Russian oligarch Sergey Pugachev. This paper, however, did not survive. Pro-Kremlin or Kremlin-sponsored organizations also played important roles. One of these organizations is the Institut de la Démocratie et de la Coopération (Institute of Democracy and Cooperation) (http://www.idc-europe.org/). This foundation, based in Moscow, Paris, and New York, organizes political debates. The institute is headed by Natalya Narochnitskaya, a former Duma member for Dmitry Rogozin’s ultranationalist Rodina (Fatherland) Party. Narochnitskaya shares the paranoid worldview of the Kremlin leaders. On her website (http://www.narochnitskaia.ru/) she has written that “in all Caucasian wars there are non-Islamic instigators.” One of the speakers invited to her conferences in 2011 was General Alexander Vladimirov. In 2007 this general spoke about “the inevitability of war between Russia and the United States within 10 to 15 years.”^[61] Another forum in France is the Cercle Aristote (http://www.cerclearistote.com), which also organizes debates and conferences in the French capital. These debates have titles, such as “The Russian Opposition and Western Manipulation” (January 10, 2012) or “Should France and Britain Quit the European Union?” (June 20, 2011). The Cercle Aristote publishes a magazine called Perspectives Libres. Articles in this magazine have in general a Eurosceptic tendency (“Let Us Leave Europe,” “The Destruction of the Nation in Europe,” “The Agony of the Euro,” and so on) and praise patriotism and the national state (“Youth and Patriotism in Russia,” “Patriotism in Russia—A Military Point of View”). In the magazine one can find an interview on patriotism with Boris Yakemenko, the leader of the reactionary Orthodox wing of Putin’s Nashi youth movement. Recently one could observe in France a real proliferation of pro-Russian associations. In the autumn of 2011 this galaxy of initiatives was brought together in a Coordination Committee of the Forum of Russians of France (CCFRC),^[62] under the aegis of the Russian embassy in Paris. This committee is headed by Dimitri de Kochko, a descendant of White Russians, whose great-grandfather was chief of Moscow’s criminal police. Kochko has become one of the most aggressive defenders of Putin’s regime in France. For Moscow he is the right man because the purpose of the CCFRC is not only to organize Russians living in France but also to get in touch with French citizens of Russian origin, in particular with descendants of White Russians. The Russian diaspora in France, consisting of “new” Russians and old émigré communities, is estimated at about 300,000.^[63] Creating “coordination committees” under the aegis of the Russian embassy is part of a broader strategy. This practice is also evident in other countries. In Estonia, for instance, there exists a Coordination Council of Russian Compatriots. According to Estonian security services, the purpose of this council is “to organize and coordinate the Russian diaspora living in foreign countries to support the objectives and interests of Russian foreign policy under the direction of Russian departments.”^[64] One of the active members of the CCFRC in France is Prince Alexander Trubetskoy, a descendant of White Russians who heads the Association Dialogue Franco-Russe (www.dialoguefrancorusse.com), an official forum which brings together the political, cultural, and business elites of both countries. In 2011 Vladimir Yakunin, president of the Russian Railways, and Thierry Desmarest, honorary president of the French group Total, were co-presidents. Among its members were Sergey Mndoyants, Russian deputy minister of culture, and Anne-
Marie Idrac, former president of the French railways and former state secretary for foreign trade in the second government of François Fillon. This high-level group resembles the German Ost-Ausschuss (East Committee) of the German Employers’ Organization, but it has a broader scope than simply business interests.

Putin’s Russia and the French Front National: Mutual Warm Feelings

Another forum that must be mentioned here is the Alliance France-Europe Russie (http://www.alliance-france-europe-russie.org), a club which was headed in 2010 by Fabrice Sorlin. Sorlin is not only a former candidate of the extreme right Front National, but he was in 2010 also president of the extreme right Dies Irae group, to which are ascribed paramilitary practices and racist discourses.^[65] Speakers in the seminars of the alliance include David Mascré, a member of the politburo of the Front National, and the honorary consul of Russia in Biarritz. The enthusiasm of the extreme right Front National for Russia is not new.^[66] Already in 1996 the leader of the party, Jean-Marie Le Pen, came to Moscow to back the presidential bid of the extreme right nationalist candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who at that time was barred from free movement within France after having spat on Jewish students in Strasbourg.^[67]

In an interview in October 2011 with the Russian paper Kommersant, Marine Le Pen expressed her admiration for Vladimir Putin and announced that if she were to win the French presidential elections in May 2012, France would leave NATO.^[68] The Front National is deeply anti-Atlantic and anti-American. “The diplomacy that Marine Le Pen dreams of is built around a Paris-Moscow axis.”^[69] Leaving the integrated structure of NATO and building a “trilateral alliance Paris-Berlin-Moscow” was mentioned as the first point on the list of foreign policy proposals on her 2012 election website.^[70] Another sign of the warm relations between the Front National and Putin’s United Russia Party was a visit in December 2012 by Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, Marine’s niece, who is a member of the French parliament, to Moscow. The French daily Le Monde even spoke of a “mysterious visit.”^[71] The young MP was invited by Aleksey Pushkov, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Duma, a man described by Le Monde as “anti-American, anti-Western, he is representative of the Putinist hard-liners.”^[72] Marion Maréchal-Le Pen was probably invited because she is a member of the friendship group France-Europe-Russie.

After the annexation of the Crimea and the Russian intervention in Eastern Ukraine, the relationship between the Kremlin and the Front National grew even closer. On March 16, 2014, Aymeric Chauprade, Marine Le Pen’s foreign affairs adviser (who was to become a member of the European Parliament in May 2014), was an observer at the fake referendum in Crimea on joining Russia. Chauprade’s website, Realpolitik.tv, defends Moscow’s geopolitical views. In 2011 Louis Aliot, vice president of the Front National and Marine Le Pen’s partner, founded the Club Idées-Nation, which similarly didn’t hide its sympathy for Putin. The close cooperation between the Kremlin and the Front National also led to some painful inconsistencies. The Ukrainian Svoboda Party, for instance, which, in 2014, was accused by Putin of being a fascist party, was in 2009 received by Jean-Marie Le Pen, who, on that occasion, emphasized the fact that both parties “held shared ideas.”^[73] Apparently the “anti-fascist” Kremlin had no problem with such inconsistencies. On November 29 and 30, 2014, Andrey Isayev, deputy chairman of the Duma, and Andrey Klimov, deputy chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Federation Council, participated in the fifteenth congress of the Front National in Lyon.^[74] A week earlier the FN admitted having received a loan of 9 million euros from the First Czech-Russian Bank (FCRB). According to Mediapart, known in France as a reliable source, the amount of the Russian loan was likely to be much higher: the 9 million was said to be the first tranche of a loan of 40 million euros.^[75] This happened at the very moment that President Putin brought in a law forbidding Russian political parties to accept financial support from abroad.

However, admiration for Putin is not restricted to the Front National. It can also be found in Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Front de gauche (Left Front), amongst left-wing “sovereignists” such as Jean-Pierre Chevènement, amongst centrist politicians such as senators Yves Pozzo di Borgo (a member of his family was ambassador to the tsar) and Aymerie de Montesquiou,^[76] or in the Gaullist UMP (Union for a Popular Movement, the name of which, in May 2015, was changed into Les Républicains), where many admire Putin’s policies aimed at restoring Russian national grandeur—whether openly or secretly. Putin also has his admirers in academic circles, such as the well-known historian Hélène Carrère d’Encausse or the economist Jacques Sapir. French movie stars, similarly, are seduced by him. Tax fugitive Gérard Depardieu was offered Russian nationality and became a close friend of both Putin and his Chechen proxy Ramzan Kadyrov. Brigitte Bardot, the famous French star and a prominent Front National sympathizer, also did not hide her admiration for Vladimir Putin. In an interview with Nice Matin, when asked whom she considered the ideal president, she answered without hesitation: “Putin. I find him very good and every time I ask him for something in principle he grants it. He has done more for the protection of animals than our successive presidents.”^[77]

Total and IFRI

In France—as in Germany—it is the great energy firms that are the Kremlin’s most powerful and active supporters. The French company Total is a prominent investor in Russian oil and gas projects and has an excellent relationship with the Kremlin. It is, therefore, not a surprise that Thierry Desmarest, honorary president of Total, is co-president of the high-level group Dialogue Franco-Russe. It is quite natural for a firm like Total to become the Kremlin’s voice in France. Total’s CEO, Christophe de Margerie, for instance, spoke out against sanctions against Russia over Ukraine.^[78] After his death in October 2014 in a plane crash in Moscow, he was hailed by Putin as “a real friend of Russia,” and a Duma member even asked that he be honored with a statue at Vnukovo Airport.^[79] Total not only has a direct political influence on French government policy through its participation in high-level French-Russian forums, it also has an indirect influence on the formation of elite opinion. An example is IFRI, the biggest French think tank. Only 28 percent of IFRI’s budget comes from the government. The rest is financed by private clients, mostly big business, who sponsor research projects. “On Russia,” wrote L’Express, “the most important sponsor is Total: the oil company pays for three researchers.”^[80] The IFRI research projects on Russia, subsidized by Total, will certainly not be characterized by an overly critical tone, even if Thomas Gomart, IFRI’s vice president for strategic development and director of IFRI’s Russia/NIS Center, reassures us that “the intellectual honesty of the researchers is not affected . . . nor the objectivity of the research, but it is true that subjects that do not find funding are abandoned.”^[81] Despite the proclaimed intellectual honesty of IFRI’s Russian projects subsidized by Total, which we do not doubt, one may, however, ask whether projects that displease the Kremlin have any chance of being initiated. IFRI researcher Tatiana Kastoueva-Jean, when asked about the sanctions against Russia after the Russian aggression in Ukraine, said: “I am being asked: ‘are you for or against sanctions?’ . . . In general I answer that I’m neither for, nor against, I just try to get on with my research.”^[82] It is telling that this IFRI researcher, confronted with unacceptable Russian behavior, refuses to take sides, seeking refuge in so-called value-free science. Another example: on October 7, 2012, on the occasion of Putin’s sixtieth birthday, Thomas Gomart, who is not only director of IFRI’s Russia Center but also a prominent member of Putin’s Valdai Discussion Club, had the honor of being quoted in a special frame on the bottom of the home page of the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti with the text: “Vladimir Putin’s main success is his ability to be elected the president of Russia for two terms; he is certainly a leader with a prominent standing in Russian history.”^[83] In the original article, published on the Valdai website, another Valdai expert, Alexander Rahr, who is senior adviser on Russia for Wintershall Holding, the German energy giant, wrote that “Vladimir Putin will go down in history as a leader who stabilized Russia. In a couple of decades he will probably be compared to Charles de Gaulle in France or to Konrad Adenauer in Germany. He established a functioning economic and political system in Russia. Moreover, under his presidency the Russians started to live better than all of the previous generations.”^[84] Putin, who had already been compared with Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Vladislav Surkov, the deputy chief of the presidential administration,^[85] will certainly not be dissatisfied at being put on the same level as Konrad Adenauer or Charles De Gaulle.

One thing is clear: the Kremlin, having made a massive effort in recent years to embellish its image, has achieved undisputable successes. The question is, however, whether these successes will prove to be permanent. With the election of the socialist François Hollande in May 2012 as French president, not only did Vladimir Putin lose his favorite interlocutor in the Élysée, but also the wind began to turn. In May 2012, a few days after Hollande’s election, I wrote:

Nine months later this early prognosis seemed to be confirmed when French-Russian relations reached a historic low. After the farcical story of Putin, who personally granted Russian citizenship to French actor and tax exile Gérard Depardieu, Le Monde spoke about “a Cold War climate between Paris and Moscow.”^[87] Bilateral problems concerned not only conflicting positions on Iran and Syria but also “recent operations of the DCRI [French counter intelligence] to thwart intense Russian secret services activities in France. One can add to this the verification procedure, launched by Hollande’s team, of all armaments sales abroad negotiated under Sarkozy’s presidency, in particular the potential transfer of technology. No contract has been cancelled, but ‘the Russians have felt a cold wind,’ says an informed source.”^[88] The paper quoted an unknown official who said that “the Russians, who are resuming soviet ways . . . have, in fact, always preferred a right-wing government in France.”^[89] This was confirmed by Arnaud Dubien, head of the Franco-Russian Observatory, who said that the “socialists tend to show little interest in Russia and . . . hold more prejudices against Russia than the previous administration.”^[90]

Here also, however, the last word has not yet been heard. On February 28, 2013, when Hollande visited Putin in Moscow, both men oversaw the signing of a number of economic cooperation agreements, and the climate was visibly improving. “Hollande and Putin Warm Relations,” wrote The Moscow Times.^[91] Although Hollande took care to meet also with human rights activists and members of the opposition, the message was clear: France would opt for a pragmatic approach. In August 2013 Arnaud Dubien concluded with satisfaction that Hollande’s presidency had brought no downturn in Russian-French relations, writing that initial “hesitations were settled in the fall of 2012 when President Hollande appointed Jean-Pierre Chevènement as special representative to Russia. His record is impressive—former minister of the interior, defense and higher education, at the age of 35 chosen by François Mitterrand to author the Socialist platform. He is a genuine heavyweight and one of the few Socialists who has always been keen on Russia in the belief that the partnership should be a foreign policy priority.”^[92] He was right. The choice of Chevènement as France’s special envoy to Russia could only please Moscow. On March 8, 2014—at the very moment that Russia had occupied the Crimea—Chevènement published an article in Le Figaro, titled “Without Russia Something Is Missing in Europe.”^[93] In this article, not only did Chevènement support the Kremlin’s demand to federalize Ukraine, but he also said that “no one can contest the fact that historically [the Crimea] is Russian.” He spoke out further in favor of a free trade zone from Brest (France) to Vladivostok, adding that “for 23 years Russia has been respecting the rule of law.” Chevènement’s article led to angry reactions. Vincent Jauvert wrote in the left-leaning L’Obs that “for some time his opinions seem to have been growing closer to those supported by the Kremlin than by the Quai d’Orsay [French Foreign Ministry].” Jauvert asked: “Can he remain France’s special representative to Russia?”^[94] A good question, indeed.

The Future of the “Strategic Triangle” after Ukraine

What will be the future of the “strategic triangle?” In 2010 the Kremlin’s objective of creating a “Moscow-Berlin-Paris Triangle” seemed within reach with the Meseberg initiative. However, the Kremlin’s project has been jeopardized by Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine. Does this mean that Russia has abandoned its strategic goal? Not at all. One should not forget that Russian foreign policy has always been characterized by its focus on long-term goals. Another point is that the Kremlin, helped by an unprecedented propaganda offensive, was able to create in France, as well as in Germany, a large reservoir of sympathizers. These Putinversteher (Putin apologists), who did not hesitate to condone Russia’s acts of aggression, are overrepresented in parties of the extreme right and the extreme left. However, one can also find them in moderate parties, such as the German SPD and the French UMP/Les Républicains. And it is not only politicians and intellectuals who are seduced by Moscow’s siren songs. Leading entrepreneurs, too, lured by the promise of lucrative contracts, have become the Kremlin’s allies. The Mistral affair is a case in point. It has become a test case and a litmus test for Hollande’s presidency. If Hollande were to decide to deliver the Mistral to a government which does not respect international treaties, is invading other countries, and is committing war crimes, this will not only be a political error, it will be a grave moral mistake, undermining the very values Europe is supposed to defend. In 2015 the Kremlin will accelerate its information war in both countries when RT will start French- and German-language broadcasts. It is no coincidence that the Kremlin has chosen these two languages: France and Germany remain Moscow’s main targets in its project to build a “multipolar world.” This does not mean that Moscow would neglect the smaller European states. On the contrary, Moscow has been very successful in forging friendly and close relations with the governments of Orbán in Hungary, Zeman in the Czech Republic, and the new Syriza government in Greece. These small alliances are part of a bigger strategic game: distancing Europe from the United States and making Europe a close ally of Russia. In this game, building a strategic triangle of Berlin-Moscow-Paris remains Moscow’s main objective.

Notes

“Chirac-Poutine: oui, mais . . . ,” Nouvelobs.com (July 3, 2001).

On Chirac’s multipolar dreams, cf. Marcel H. Van Herpen, “France: Champion of a Multipolar World,” The National Interest Online (May 14, 2003), available at http://nationalinterest.org/article/france-champion-of-a-multipolar-world-2345.

Kenneth R. Timmerman, The French Betrayal of America (New York: Crown Forum, 2004), 248.

Alain Besançon, “Jacques Chirac trop ‘russophile?’” Le Figaro (March 2, 2004) (emphasis mine). On Chirac’s remark that Europeans could show “a bit more respect” vis-à-vis Russia, Le Monde wrote in an editorial: “The remark is even more surprising because it was made in Budapest, the capital of a country which has not always been ‘respected’ by Moscow.” (“Respecter la Russie,” Le Monde (February 26, 2004).)

Besançon, “Jacques Chirac trop ‘russophile?’”

“Chirac Lauds ‘Great Years for Russia’ under Putin,” Moscow News (June 6, 2008).

Nicolas Sarkozy, Témoignage (Paris: XO Éditions, 2006), 264.

Sarkozy, Témoignage, 264.

10.

Sarkozy, Témoignage, 265.

11.

For an assessment of Sarkozy’s foreign policy, see Marcel H. Van Herpen, “The Foreign Policy of Nicolas Sarkozy: Not Principled, Opportunistic, and Amateurish,” Cicero Foundation Great Debate Paper, No. 10/01, Cicero Foundation, Maastricht/Paris (February 2010), available at http://www.cicerofoundation.org/lectures/Marcel_H_Van_Herpen_FOREIGN_POLICY_SARKOZY.pdf.

12.

According to Le Monde, American documents revealed that Sarkozy fell into a trap because the Russians made “a second ceasefire text, which was a bit different from the text authorized by the Elysée. It was only below this text that president Medvedev had put his signature. Therefore, two versions of the agreement circulated, with small differences of presentation and contents, which the Russians could take advantage of on the ground.” (Natalie Nougayrède, “Washington réservé sur la médiation française en Géorgie,” Le Monde (December 3, 2010).)

13.

Valentina Pop, “Sarkozy Wants New EU-US-Russia Security Accord,” euobserver.com (November 14, 2008).

14.

Alexandr Vondra, “Un peu de respect, M. le président,” Le Monde (November 20, 2008).

15.

“Nicolas Sarkozy a joué un grand rôle de pacification,” interview with Vladimir Putin by Étienne Mougeotte, Le Figaro (September 13, 2008).

16.

“FM: Tbilisi Worried over Possible Russia-French Mistral Deal,” Civil.ge (November 26, 2009).

17.

Marie Jégo, “La vente d’un porte-hélicoptère à la Russie étudiée par l’Élysée,” Le Monde (October 7, 2009).

18.

Mikhail Barabanov, “Mesmerized by the French Navy,” The Moscow Times (August 31, 2009).

19.

“Georgia Lobbies France on Warship,” The Moscow Times (November 26, 2009), http://www.themoscowtimes.com/sitemap/free/2009/11/article/georgia-lobbies-france-on-warship/390431.html.

20.

Viktor Litovkin, “NATO derzhit ‘Mistral’ na privyazi,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta (April 14, 2010).

21.

Philippe Migault, “Contrat Mistral: Une formidable opportunité diplomatique,” IRIS, Observatoire Stratégique et Économique de l’Espace Post-Soviétique (January 5, 2011).

22.

Max Fisher, “Russia-France: The New Alliance That Could Change Europe,” The Atlantic (March 2, 2010).

23.

Fisher, “Russia-France: The New Alliance.”

24.

“Sergeyu Chemezovu vruchili vyshuyu nagradu Frantsii,” lenta.ru (March 10, 2011).

25.

“Agents in Power,” The St. Petersburg Times (February 12, 2008).

26.

“Putin Orders Sechin to Form France-RF Mil Shipbuilding Coop Group,” Itar Tass (June 11, 2010).

27.

“La France et la Russie créent un consortium de chantiers navals,” Le Monde (November 11, 2010).

28.

“Ventes de Mistral: négociations dans l’impasse entre Paris et Moscou,” Le Monde (March 3, 2011). How hard the Kremlin was playing ball becomes clear if one takes into account that on December 30, 2010, the Russian English-language news channel RT still presented the French proposal to sell the first ship for €720 million and the second for €650 million, making the total price €1.37 billion, under the heading “France offers New Year discounts on Mistral helicopter carriers.” Cf.http://rt.com/news/prime-time/mistral-helicopters-discount-france/print/.

29.

Isabelle Lasserre, “Avis de gros temps sur le Mistral,” Le Figaro (March 15, 2011).

30.

Lasserre, “Avis de gros temps.”

31.

Lasserre, “Avis de gros temps.”

32.

Isabelle Lasserre, “France-Russie: le nouvel axe stratégique,” Le Figaro (May 25, 2011).

33.

Vladimir Socor, “US Embassy in Moscow Indicates Acceptance of Mistral Deal,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 7, no. 85 (May 3, 2010).

34.

Vladimir Socor, “La France d’abord: Paris First to Capitalize on Russian Military Modernization,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 7, no. 29 (February 11, 2010).

35.

“En baisse—Les ventes d’armes,” Le Monde (March 24, 2011).

36.

Cf. “Mistral-Class Ship with Russian Crew Arrives in Saint-Nazaire after Training Voyage,” TASS (September 22, 2014), http://itar-tass.com/en/russia/750617.

37.

Jeff Lightfoot, “Mistral Mysteries,” The American Interest 10, no. 3 (January/February 2015), 45. In May 2015 it was announced that France was seeking an agreement with Russia to break the contract. Paris would offer to pay back €785 million with the possibility to look for other buyers for the ships. Russia would be asking about €1.15 billion, withholding permission for sale to third parties. “The gap,” the Economist writes, “suggests the beginning of a hard bargaining process.” (“Scrapping the Mistral Deal,” The Economist (May 15, 2015).) On August 5, 2015, the French and Russian presidents came to a final agreement. France immediately began negotiations with Egypt, which was mentioned as a possible buyer of the Mistral.

38.

“French Secret Service Fear Russian Cathedral a Spying Front,” The Telegraph (May 28, 2010), available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7771858/French-secret-service-fear-Russian-cathedral-a-spying-front.html.

39.

Vincent Jauvert, “Opération cathédrale,” Le Nouvel Observateur (May 27–June 2, 2010).

40.

Jauvert, “Opération cathédrale.”

41.

Jauvert, “Opération cathédrale.”

42.

Cf. “La nouvelle église orthodoxe de Paris,” Le Monde (March 19, 2011).

43.

Claire Bommelaer, “La Russie va modifier le projet de l’église orthodoxe du quai Branly,” Le Figaro (November 21, 2012).

44.

Jauvert, “Opération cathédrale.”

45.

Hélène Blanc and Renata Lesnik, Les prédateurs du Kremlin 1917–2009 (Paris: Seuil, 2009), 263.

46.

Cf. Natalie Nougayrède, “Paris veut sceller un accord avec Berlin et Moscou sur ‘l’espace commun européen,’” Le Monde (May 12, 2010).

47.

Quoted in Walter Laqueur, After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent (New York: St. Martin’s, 2011), 91.

48.

Katrin Bennhold, “At Deauville, Europe Embraces Russia,” The New York Times (October 18, 2010).)

49.

John Vinocur, “Will the U.S. Lose Europe to Russia?” The New York Times (October 25, 2010).

50.

Vinocur, “Will the U.S. Lose Europe to Russia?”

51.

Vladimir Socor, “Meseberg Process: Germany Testing EU-Russia Security Cooperation Potential,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 7, no. 191 (October 22, 2010).

52.

The German weekly Der Spiegel shared this opinion, writing that “such a move would bring Medvedev closer to his goal of a new European security architecture.” (“Sarkozy Dreams of a European Security Council,” Spiegel Online (October 18, 2010).)

53.

Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard, “We Need New Rules for a Multipolar Europe,” Financial Times (October 20, 2010).

54.

Jean-Bernard Pinatel, Russie, alliance vitale (Paris: Choiseul, 2010), 122, 129.

55.

Pinatel, Russie, alliance vitale, 129.

56.

The French name is Conseil de coopération franco-russe sur les questions de sécurité.

57.

Natalie Nougayrède and Laurent Zecchini, “La France et la Russie vont renforcer leurs relations militaires,” Le Monde (January 23–24, 2005).

58.

Website of L’Observatoire franco-russe, http://obsfr.ru/, accessed January 10, 2014.

59.

Arnaud Dubien, “France-Russie: renouveau et défis d’un partenariat stratégique,” Note de l’Observatoire franco-russe, no. 1 (October 2012), 17.

60.

Igor Naumov, “Ot matreshek do Kuru,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta (June 11, 2010).

61.

Theo Sommer, “Moscow Is Elbowing into Its Place in the Sun,” The Atlantic Times (August 2007).

62.

The French name is Comité de coordination du forum des Russes de France.

63.

Cf. Lorraine Millot, “Les trolls du Kremlin au service de la propagande,” Libération (October 24, 2014), http://www.liberation.fr/monde/2014/10/24/les-trolls-du-kremlin-au-service-de-la-propagande_1129062.

64.

Quoted in Massimo Calabresi, “Inside Putin’s East European Spy Campaign,” Time (May 7, 2014).

65.

Caroline Monnot and Abel Mestre, Le système Le Pen: Enquête sur les réseaux du Front National (Paris: Éditions Impacts, 2011), 46.

66.

On the attractiveness of Putin’s political system to extreme right parties, see Marcel H. Van Herpen, “Putin’s Authoritarian Allure,” Project Syndicate (March 15, 2013), http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/putinism-as-a-model-for-western-europe-s-extreme-right-by-marcel-h--van-herpen.

67.

“Zhirinovsky Bid Backed by Le Pen,” The Independent (February 10, 1996).

68.

Yelena Chernenko, “Frantsiya vydet iz NATO” (France will leave NATO), interview with Marine Le Pen, Kommersant (October 13, 2011).

69.

Monnot and Mestre, Le système Le Pen, 121.

70.

Website of Marine Le Pen, http://www.marinelepen2012.fr/le-projet/politique-etrangere/politique-etrangere/.

71.

“Le mystérieux voyage de Marion Maréchal-Le Pen en Russie,” Le Monde (December 15, 2012).

72.

“Le mystérieux voyage de Marion Maréchal-Le Pen en Russie.”

73.

Daily Motion, http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1j5vzu_les-neo-nazis-de-svoboda-ukraine-et-le-front-national_news.

74.

Cf. Isabelle Mandraud, “Deux hauts responsables russes en ‘guest stars’ au congrès du FN,” Le Monde (November 30–December 1, 2014).

75.

Marine Turchi, “Le FN attend 40 millions d’euros de Russie,” Mediapart (November 26, 2014).

76.

Cf. Lorraine Millot, “Le bataillon des naïfs,” Libération (October 24, 2014).

77.

“Poutine? Brigitte Bardot le ‘trouve très bien,’” Nice Matin (April 19, 2012).

78.

Sam Schechner and James Marson, “Total SA CEO Spoke Out against Russian Sanctions over Ukraine,” The Wall Street Journal (October 21, 2014), http://www.wsj.com/articles/total-sa-ceo-spoke-out-against-russian-sanctions-1413908105.

79.

Cf. “Russian Lawmaker Suggests Building Monument to TOTAL CEO Dying in Jet Crash,” ITAR-TASS (October 23, 2014), http://itar-tass.com/en/russia/755943.

80.

Dominique Lagarde, “Des chercheurs dans le désert,” L’Express, no. 3123 (May 11–17, 2011).

81.

Lagarde, “Des chercheurs dans le désert.”

82.

“Le débat russe, un terrain glissant,” interview with Tatiana Kastoueva-Jean by Lorraine Millot, Libération (October 24, 2014).

83.

Thomas Gomart, Alexander Rahr, Richard Sakwa, and Timothy Colton, “Vladimir Putin Turns 60,” Valdai Discussion Club (October 5, 2012). In an interview with the French paper Le Monde, Gomart held both Russia and the West responsible for the crisis in Ukraine. The Western powers were said to have “denied the existence of a post-Soviet space.” The Europeans were to blame because “everywhere in the world they encourage regional integration processes, except in the post-Soviet space.” (Gaïdz Minassian, “Occident-Russie, la paix froide?” Le Monde (September 30, 2014).) The reality here was, of course, that most post-Soviet states did not want to be reintegrated with the former center (Russia) and preferred an integration into Euro-Atlantic structures.

84.

Thomas Gomart, Alexander Rahr, Richard Sakwa, Timothy Colton, “Vladimir Putin Turns 60.”

85.

“Vladimir Putin Is Franklin Roosevelt of Our Time,” Pravda (February 14, 2007).

86.

Marcel H. Van Herpen, “The Foreign Policy of François Hollande: U-Turn or Continuity?” Cicero Foundation Great Debate Paper, No. 12/03, The Cicero Foundation, Paris/Maastricht (May 2012), 9–10, available at http://www.cicerofoundation.org/lectures/Marcel_H_Van_Herpen_%20FOREIGN_%20POLICY_%20HOLLANDE.pdf.

87.

Natalie Nougayrède, “Derrière la saga Depardieu, le coup de froid franco-russe,” Le Monde (January 9, 2013).

88.

Nougayrède, “Derrière la saga Depardieu.”

89.

Nougayrède, “Derrière la saga Depardieu.”

90.

Arnaud Dubien, “Socialist President in France and Future of Russian-French Relations,” Valdai Discussion Club (May 25, 2012).

91.

Nikolaus von Twickel and Irina Filatova, “Hollande and Putin Warm Relations,” The Moscow Times (March 1, 2013).

92.

Daria Khaspekova, “There Has Been No Downturn in Russian-French Relations—Interview with Arnaud Dubien,” Russian International Affairs Council (August 16, 2013), http://russiacouncil.ru/en/inner/?id_4=2231.

93.

Jean-Pierre Chevènement, “Sans la Russie, il manque quelque chose à l’Europe,” Le Figaro (March 8, 2014).

94.

Vincent Jauvert, “Chevènement peut-il encore représenter Fabius en Russie?” L’Obs (March 8, 2014). Chevènement was not alone in condoning the annexation. Before him, Sarkozy also expressed his understanding for the Russian land grab. (Cf. Tristan Quinault Maupoil, “Nicolas Sarkozy légitime l’annexion de la Crimée par la Russie,” Le Figaro, (February 10, 2015).)

Conclusions

From Soft Power Offensive to Information War

In the first decade of the twenty-first century the Kremlin, trying to enhance Russia’s soft power, began a “soft-power offensive.” However, this offensive soon turned out to be something quite different: the start of an all-out information war. In Ukraine this information war has become part of a real war. The West has not only greatly underestimated the scale of the Russian propaganda effort, it has also failed to understand its function in Russia’s new, “hybrid war” in its Near Abroad. At first, Russia’s efforts were not even taken seriously but were regarded with a certain skepticism, if not condescension. Western commentators pointed out that soft power—a power of spontaneous attraction—could not be enhanced by government action. However, the hybrid war in Ukraine, in which the Russian propaganda outlets played a substantial role, and maybe even a decisive role, has shown that, ultimately, building soft power abroad was not the driving factor behind the Russian efforts. The real issue at stake was a policy of reimperialization of the post-Soviet space, and the Russian propaganda machine was attributed a specific role in this strategy. This role was to impose its own interpretation of events on a Western audience and in this way to undermine popular support for Western countermeasures. Even if the Kremlin did not succeed in convincing the Western public of the solidity of its arguments, it was enough to sow seeds of doubt as to the validity of the Western arguments. In this sense the Russian propaganda offensive has been very successful, and the West is still struggling to come to terms with this new, unprecedented situation.

The Kremlin’s Eleven Successes

What, exactly, are the Kremlin’s successes? At first sight, the overall results are impressive. Let us enumerate:

The Limits of Russia’s Soft Power

Given this extensive list, Russia’s propaganda offensive seems at first sight to be an unrivaled success story. However, we have to keep in mind that this offensive had two different objectives which were not completely compatible. In the first place, it was meant to enhance Russian soft power abroad. In the second place it was assigned a role in the Russian information war with the West. This second objective led to a reinterpretation of “soft power,” transforming it into the Russian government’s instrument in the geopolitical “hard-power” competition. In the first chapter we identified three dimensions in the Russian “soft-power offensive.” These were, respectively, mimesis, invention, and rollback. Mimesis consisted of copying Western practices and agencies. Invention consisted of the introduction of new methods to enhance Russian influence abroad. Rollback consisted of the introduction of (repressive) laws aiming at restricting the activities of Western NGOs in Russia, as well as of Russian NGOs which were partially or wholly funded from abroad. Examples of mimesis are agencies of public diplomacy, such as Rossotrudnichestvo, Russkiy Mir, and the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation. RT—Russia’s international cable TV channel—also falls into this category, as does the Kremlin’s international radio station, the Voice of Russia. The latter is the successor of the Soviet radio station Radio Moscow. Its new name leaves no doubt about its model: it has simply copied the name of the Voice of America.

The second pillar of Russia’s “soft-power offensive” is innovation. The Kremlin invented many new ways of influencing public opinion abroad. One example is the project “Russia beyond the Headlines,” which started in 2007. Monthly supplements were funded and added to leading papers worldwide, which included the Washington Post (United States), the New York Times (United States), the Daily Telegraph (United Kingdom), Le Figaro (France), Repubblica (Italy), El País (Spain), and the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). Another innovation was to hire Western PR and communication firms to “sell” the Kremlin’s policies to Western governments and Western publics. The Kremlin had no difficulty in engaging the most prestigious firms of the United States and Europe. The Valdai Discussion Club also was an important innovation. This project was quite unique in organizing face-to-face discussions between the Russian leadership and Western experts, who, not enjoying such access to the leaders of their own countries, were, therefore, pleasantly surprised. Also new was the phenomenon of Russian oligarchs buying Western papers: France-Soir in France, and the London Evening Standard and the Independent in Britain. Although it cannot be proved that these initiatives (especially Lebedev’s in Britain) were directly inspired by the Kremlin, they fit well within the Kremlin’s overall strategy. Other attempts at gaining influence abroad, such as (illegally) funding political parties, were, in themselves, not new. Party funding was an instrument already used by the Soviet Union. In Soviet times, however, the majority of the funded parties were communist parties (although sometimes also noncommunist parties could be funded, such as the party of Finnish president Urho Kekkonen). However, with the end of communism, communist parties stopped being the beneficiaries of Russian largess, and a new phenomenon could be observed: that of Kremlin-related oligarchs offering financial support to a great variety of political parties.

Attempts at gaining political influence were not confined to political parties. They included approaching directly leading political personalities. Alleged attempts at gaining influence included the French center politician and presidential candidate François Bayrou, leaders of the British Conservative Party, President Roland Paksas of Lithuania (who was impeached), the Centre Party in Estonia, and the Citizens’ Rights Party of Miloš Zeman in the Czech Republic. Another instrument for gaining influence abroad was espionage. Of course, this instrument was not new. A famous historical example of this approach is Günter Guillaume, Chancellor Willy Brandt’s personal secretary, who worked for the Stasi, the KGB’s East German sister organization. The Kremlin is still using this instrument, but it is innovating in the ways in which it is used. The opening of the frontiers after the demise of the Soviet Union led to free travel by Russian citizens and, consequently, to a huge increase in Russians studying, living, and working abroad. This made it possible to recruit new personnel for espionage activities. Young, attractive Russian girls, working as interns, have made their appearance in international organizations and in European government circles.

The Russian Orthodox Church comes closest to what can be called genuine soft power in the definition of Joseph Nye Jr. The moral authority of this venerable religious institution with a centuries-long history is great. However, the close cooperation between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Kremlin undermines its soft-power potential—at least abroad. Using the Orthodox Church for political objectives is not new in Russia. It is a long-established practice—not only under the tsars, but even under the officially “atheist” Communist regime. Under Putin the Kremlin has shown a great creativity, not only in its relationship with the church but also in terms of the objectives of this cooperation. Putin himself was personally committed to bringing about the merger between the Russian Orthodox Church and the ROCOR, the church abroad. At the same time, the Foreign Ministry began to lay claims to church property abroad—often successfully. An example of the close cooperation between the church and the Kremlin are Patriarch Kirill’s pastoral visits to Ukraine, which had a clear political impact and fit perfectly with the Kremlin’s strategy of bringing Ukraine back into the Russian orbit. Through the merger with ROCOR, the ROC has achieved a much greater international presence, enabling it to go beyond the confines of Russia and the former Soviet Union and become a genuinely “global” church. This expansion of the reach of the Russian Orthodox Church must be considered a major component of the Kremlin’s “soft-power offensive.” The Kremlin wants to establish Russia as an independent, alternative ideological and cultural powerhouse, propagating so called traditional values, which challenge Western values, presented as “decadent,” “materialistic,” and “gay-friendly.” In this new ideological mission, the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church are working hand in hand.

How the Kremlin’s Rollback Strategy Is Backfiring

The third pillar of the Kremlin’s “soft-power offensive” is rollback. It is clear that such a concept is completely at odds with the original definition of soft power given by Joseph Nye Jr. However, it is a constitutive component of the Russian “soft-power” variant, developed by the Kremlin. For Joseph Nye, soft power is the power of attraction. This attraction is, as a rule, spontaneous and not manipulated. Moreover, this power of attraction is sui generis, not in competition with the soft power of third parties. The attraction of a painting by Vermeer in the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam is not diminished by the attraction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in the Paris Louvre or Goya’s Los Fusilamientos in the Prado of Madrid. Each of these is attractive in its own way. The Kremlin’s concept of “soft power,” however, is different. It is based on the supposition that soft power is a zero-sum game and that the soft power of one country diminishes the soft power of another country, and vice versa. Soft power, therefore, is modeled after hard (military) power. It is considered, while not necessarily a constitutive part of a country’s hard power, then at least supportive of its hard power. For this reason, it is important not only to develop and promote one’s own soft power by all possible means, but it is equally important to check—and eventually diminish—the soft power of eventual competitors.

It is here that “rollback,” the third component of the Russian “soft-power offensive,” finds its place. The rollback strategy can be conducted outside Russia—as in the case of the “Kremlin trolls,” who are active in the social media and write pro-Russian and anti-Western comments on Western blogs and in Western papers. Rollback, however, is conducted in particular within Russia itself, where it is directed at curtailing the influence of Western NGOs as well as of Russian NGOs which are funded by Western sources. A law, adopted by both houses of parliament in the first weeks of July 2012 and signed by President Putin on July 21, 2012, forced NGOs in Russia that were receiving funding from abroad and engaging in “political activity” to register with the Justice Ministry as inostrannyy agent (foreign agent). Putin compared these NGOs with the biblical disciple Judas, the historical prototype of the traitor, adding that this was “not the most respected biblical figure among our people.” Putin’s government went even further. It wanted not only to harass critical NGOs in Russia by taking their funding away but also to criminalize their activities. This was put into effect by the adoption by the Duma, on October 23, 2012, of amendments to articles 275 and 276 of the criminal code. These amendments introduced a much broader definition of treason. Treason would no longer be limited to illegally handing over secret information to foreign governments but would, in the future, also include “providing assistance in the form of information, funds and consultation to Western and international organizations.” “Western organizations” could also mean Western NGOs.

At this point, however, the contradictions inherent in the Kremlin’s “soft-power” concept became crystal clear. The new repressive laws led to an outcry in Europe and the United States, and the Russian government was accused of attacking and undermining the freedom of association, a fundamental political freedom. As a result, Russia’s real soft power, its power of attraction, was severely damaged. On March 21, 2013, two thousand offices of NGOs in Russia were searched, including the office of Amnesty International in Moscow. Some days later, on March 26, 2013, in St. Petersburg the office of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, linked with the German Christian Democratic Party, was searched. A computer was confiscated. In Moscow, on the same day representatives of the Prosecutor’s Office and tax authorities visited the office of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, an agency linked with the German Social-Democratic Party. A report on these events in the German weekly Die Zeit were given the heading “Razzia” (roundup)—a word which in Germany evokes connotations of the Nazi past.^[1] Another example of how Russia’s rollback strategy backfired was on September 19, 2013, when Russian special forces arrested twenty-eight Greenpeace activists of nineteen nationalities, together with a Russian photographer and a British videographer, after boarding their ship, Arctic Sunrise, in international waters.^[2] One day earlier, four members of the group had tried to occupy Gazprom’s oil platform Prirazlomnaya in the Pechora Sea as a protest against offshore drilling in this fragile Arctic environment. Actions like these are widely accepted in Western countries, where they are considered as a legitimate (although not always lawful) action of civil society. Not so with Russia. The Kremlin considered that this was a Western “soft-power” attack, which was a part of the “hard-power” struggle between the West and Russia over the Arctic’s energy resources. Rosneft head Igor Sechin accused Greenpeace of acting at the behest of foreign companies or foreign governments. “Look who is paying them for this action,” he said, without providing any evidence for his allegations.^[3] Ilya Ponomaryov, a Duma member who worked for Khodorkovsky’s expropriated Yukos oil firm, commented: “The government rejects the idea that Greenpeace could act alone because they are all former KGB agents and look for conspiracy theories everywhere.”^[4] The problem, however, is that Sechin’s view was widely shared by the Russian population.^[5] The outcome was self-defeating. Worldwide, the Russian action led to a wave of negative publicity. The French Le Monde published an editorial with the title “The Knout against Greenpeace, a Russia of Another Age,”^[6] and the government of the Netherlands (where the Greenpeace icebreaker was registered) filed a lawsuit in the Hamburg-based International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.^[7] This happened during the Netherlands-Russia Friendship Year, a “soft-power event” meant to improve mutual relations, with cultural events taking place in Russia and the Netherlands. In April 2013, during a visit to Amsterdam to celebrate this “Friendship Year,” Putin had already been confronted by angry protesters, attacking the homophobic laws that Russia had introduced shortly before. These are clear examples of incompatible Western and Russian “soft-power” concepts. For the Kremlin, the organization of a government-sponsored cultural “Friendship Year” in the Netherlands was an excellent “soft-power” initiative. It had organized similar events together with France (in 2010 and 2012) and Germany (2012–2013). The problem is that soft power cannot be reduced to public diplomacy or to the organization of cultural events because an important part of a country’s soft power consists of its policies and its political values. “The Russian state has had little success in improving its foreign image,” wrote Robert Orttung. “Russia often inflicts serious damage to itself in moves that receive wide attention in the Western media. Russia’s invasion of Georgia, energy conflicts with its neighbors, high levels of corruption and human rights violations at home win considerable attention in the West. The negative consequences of such actions greatly overshadow the positive benefits Russia receives from its wide ranging PR campaigns.”^[8] According to a Russian expert, “Russians are always irritated that Europeans speak about so-called ‘shared values.’ However, even for a stupid person it is clear that we don’t share these [values].”^[9]

Although Western countries clearly have the lead in the world’s “soft-power league,” this does not mean that they can sit back and relax because, as shown by the analysis in the first chapter, soft power is a variable currency and can be subject to significant fluctuations. The PRISM scandal, for instance, which was revealed in 2013 by whistleblower Edward Snowden, is a clear example of a credibility crisis that undermined US soft power—even among its closest allies.^[10] Snowden’s leaks have shown, write Farrell and Finnemore, that Washington “is . . . unable to consistently abide by the values that it trumpets.”^[11] “Yet as the United States finds itself less able to deny the gaps between its actions and its words,” they continue, “it will face increasingly difficult choices—and may ultimately be compelled to start practicing what it preaches.”^[12] This is a fundamental truth: the United States in particular—the world’s “soft-power champion”—has to live up to its proclaimed ideals and should not deviate for too long. However, in this readjustment of its practice to its theories, the United States has an important trump card, which is its existing soft-power reservoir. Building such a soft-power reservoir is a long-term process. A country which has such a reservoir can afford temporary “dips.” It can repair its mistakes and make a fresh start because of this existing reservoir of goodwill. A country which does not have such a long-established soft-power reservoir and which—like Russia—in addition has to bear the brunt of a negative historical image, will face an uphill battle. For Russia, with its legacy of the Gulag and totalitarian Stalinism, this is no easy job. However, it is not impossible to overcome a negative legacy and rebrand a country’s image. Germany, which over the past sixty years has successfully built a new soft-power reservoir, is a good example. The problem in Russia’s case is that the goodwill created in the Gorbachev and Yeltsin era has been depleted by Putin’s siloviki. The results of the “soft-power offensive” initiated by Putin’s government will therefore remain ephemeral as long as this offensive is not accompanied by serious reforms. The Kremlin, acting abroad as a staunch supporter of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria and internally taking an increasingly authoritarian and repressive course, has become entangled in the contradictions of its own “soft-power” strategy. After the annexation of the Crimea and the destabilization of Ukraine, which led to Western sanctions, Russian soft power in the West has reached a nadir. Even the successes the Kremlin booked in its bilateral relations with Germany and France are far from guaranteed. The only viable strategy for Russia is, therefore, to develop a genuine soft-power reservoir. This implies giving up its imperialist and revisionist foreign policy, implementing enduring, deep, and comprehensive economic and political reforms, leading to an attractive, modern polity with a robust political democracy, a vibrant civil society, and an independent judiciary. It is clear that Putin’s Russia has not taken this road. Instead it has, in recent years, transformed its “soft-power offensive” into an instrument of the information war which accompanies its “hybrid” wars in its Near Abroad. These hybrid wars are real wars with the objective of recolonizing and reimperializing the former Soviet space. This is the reason why the West cannot ignore Russia’s expanding propaganda machine. It is no longer a question of Russian soft power versus Western soft power but a question of war and peace, of containing Russia’s aggression and territorial revisionism: in the end, it is about safeguarding peace and security in Europe as well as in the world as a whole.

Seven Proposals to Counter the
Russian Propaganda Offensive

How can the Russian propaganda offensive be countered? There are, at least, seven measures which should be considered:

Spend More Money

In the past ten years, Russia has constantly been augmenting the budget for its propaganda effort. During this time, Western governments have been steadily decreasing the budgets made available for public diplomacy. This has already led to warnings by leading politicians, such as Hillary Clinton. Western governments should understand that in today’s new international constellation, players such as Russia and China consider public diplomacy as instruments of an undeclared information war. Therefore, the West no longer has the option to take a backseat, trusting to its supposed superior soft power to do the job. Government-supported public diplomacy was and still is an important instrument for disseminating Western values, which, we should not forget, have a universal validity and a universal attraction. This does not mean that Western public diplomacy agencies should practice active “democracy promotion” nor that they should present their democracies as models to be copied and emulated elsewhere in the world. It is enough to present their countries in an objective way, just the way they are.

Create an Alternative Russian-Language TV Station

An interesting initiative is an idea floated by Poland’s former foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, of creating an EU-funded Russian-language TV station. After the downing of flight MH17 in July 2014 over Donetsk, killing 193 Dutch nationals and 105 others, the Dutch government has stepped in with a grant of €500,000 to fund a study by the Brussels-based European Endowment for Democracy (EED) to enable new actors in the Russian-language infosphere, including TV, social media, and internet portals.^[13] However, such an initiative requires a long-term investment and a long-term commitment. Since it is not certain that all EU member states would support such an initiative, it could also be considered by a “coalition of the willing,” consisting of a group of EU member states and the United States.

Analyze the Facts

An important feature of the Russian propaganda effort is that it contains misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation is completely false, invented information. Disinformation is a mixture of true and invented facts, or it consists of true facts that are placed in a dubious context. Misinformation, as such, is easier to debunk. The story of the “crucified child in Ukraine,” for instance, which was broadcast by the Russian First TV Channel on July 12, 2014, is a clear example. The lies were so obvious that Russian journalists asked questions about it during Putin’s press conference on December 18, 2014. Disinformation, on the other hand, is a more difficult matter, because it is based on real, verifiable facts. The downing of the Malaysian MH17 jet on July 17, 2014, in the Donetsk region is such a fact. Russian media immediately denied that pro-Russian militias or Russian soldiers were implicated, suggesting instead the existence of a supposed Ukrainian “plot” to shoot down a plane in which Putin was returning to Russia. On another occasion they spoke of an attack by jets of the Ukrainian airforce, although there were no Ukrainian planes flying in this zone. Both myths could soon be dispelled. The huge Russian disinformation campaign was the motivation behind Ukrainian analysts setting up a special website (stopfake.org) to check the facts and debunk Russian propaganda. This is a model which could be emulated, for instance, by setting up an “anti-information war agency” under the aegis of the EU and/or United States

Raise Public Awareness

Debunking propaganda is important. Equally important, however, is raising public awareness according to the well-known proverb “forewarned is forearmed.” This is also the case here. In education, more emphasis should be placed on analyzing how propaganda works and on finding ways to prevent people being easily taken in by it. As a rule, more educated people tend to be more skeptical. However, more educated people are more susceptible to the so-called third-person effect. This is the belief that propaganda has a greater effect on others than on oneself. This belief is, as a rule, unfounded: “We often watch the mass media while we are in a mindless state. The communications are typically just not that involving or interesting. But, ironically, that often makes them all the more persuasive. In such cases . . . we . . . do not make much of an attempt to refute the message and, as a consequence, are often persuaded.”^[14] Of course, raising awareness and developing critical thinking skills are long-term educational investments. They should, however, be part of the secondary education curriculum in democratic societies.^[15]

Tell the Truth

Western media should resist the temptation to react to Russian propaganda by producing counterpropaganda. One of the most precious Western soft-power instruments consists of its independent and objective media. This fundamental fact was emphasized by Peter Horrocks, former executive in charge of the BBC’s global news operations, who said that “the role we need to play is an even handed one. We shouldn’t be pro-one side or the other, we need to provide something people can trust.”^[16] The Western media should, therefore, not be afraid to expose the ugly sides of the West, as were the cases, for instance, regarding Guantánamo or the Abu Ghraib prison. Conveying objective and impartial news should remain its vocation and primary obligation. The truth of independent news brought by conscientious journalists will debunk all the lies disseminated by Orwellian Ministries of Truth, however intelligent and carefully these lies may be constructed. While the Kremlin acts according to Lenin’s adage, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth,” the West should keep in mind the words attributed to US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that “repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.” General David Petraeus, American former commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, wrote in his counterinsurgency guidance:

Telling the truth also implies that one does not shrink from calling things by their right name instead of describing unacceptable facts in woolly language, clouding the issue—as can often be observed in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “There are few fierce and fearless journalists like Oriana Fallaci to scream uncomfortable truths at timid politicians,” writes Eliot Cohen. “But we can try, beginning perhaps with Havel’s inspiration, by clinging to the truth. We can call things by their names—using words like invasion and fanaticism, for example, and not pretending that they are something tamer and less dangerous.”^[18]

Don’t Be Too Tolerant

With RT the Kremlin has created a mighty weapon to influence Western public opinion. The Russian cable TV channel has direct access to the homes of tens of millions of Europeans and Americans. In most hotel rooms in Europe and the United States, RT is available on cable. Moscow has exploited the many opportunities offered by our open Western society to their full potential while at the same time harassing Western news agencies and Western journalists who work in Russia. In a law adopted on September 23, 2014, Western financial participation in Russian media outlets has been reduced from 50 percent to 20 percent. The law also bans foreigners from being founders of Russian mass media companies—restrictions which also apply to residents and Russians who have other citizenships. The law, which comes into force on January 1, 2016, seems to be directed, in particular, against the liberal business paper Vedomosti, which is owned jointly by News Corp of America, Pearson of Britain, and Sanoma of Finland. Axel Springer, a German firm which publishes the Russian edition of Forbes, will also have to sell.^[19] Kremlin-related oligarchs are preparing to pick up the pieces and install Kremlin-friendly editors. In this situation of an undeclared information war with the Kremlin, there is no reason for the West to grant Russian media freedom which the Russian government does not grant to Western media. Reciprocity should be a condition for the Russian media presence in the West. One should keep in mind the words of Josef Korbel, a Czech émigré and Madeleine Albright’s father, who pointed out that “democratic regimes create spaces for other countries to present their case directly, even when they do not reciprocate.”^[20] He noted that “Soviet leaders had access to the American press while Americans enjoyed no such direct access to the Soviet population.”^[21] As concerns this reciprocity, not much has changed since Soviet times. There is another point: Western governments should also not accept RT diffusing explicitly biased or one-sided information. Some countries already have adopted the necessary instruments. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), a government-approved regulatory and competition authority for the broadcasting, telecommunications, and postal industries, ensures that TV channels with a British broadcasting license provide impartial news coverage. Ofcom’s code, section 5.1, demands that “news, in whatever form, must be reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality.” Already several times RT has been found in breach of these regulations. In November 2012, a documentary about Syria, broadcast on July 12, 2012, was judged biased because an interviewee was crediting “a massacre [in the Syrian conflict] to the rebels and not the government and was not challenged in any way.”^[22] In November 2014, Ofcom judged four RT programs—broadcast on March 1, 3, 5, and 6, 2014, during the occupation of Crimea by unidentified militias—to be in breach of the rules of due impartiality.^[23] Another case is Lithuania, where on March 21, 2014, broadcasts of Gazprom-owned NTV Mir station were banned. The reason given by the government was that the station spread lies about Lithuania’s move to declare independence from the Soviet Union in early 1991.^[24] On April 3, 2014, Latvia’s National Electronic Mass Media Council suspended the broadcast rights of Rossiya RTR for three weeks on the grounds that the station was disseminating “war propaganda.”^[25] However, repressive measures should be reserved for only flagrant breaches of the code of impartiality and objectivity. Estonia, for instance, “opted to leave Russian channels on and instead to compete with a barrage of ‘counter-programming’ through Russian-language TV, radio, and print media.”^[26]

Fight Trolls

The Kremlin uses an army of trolls who flood the Internet with pro-Kremlin comment. Trolls are warriors, working for the Kremlin as paid online mercenaries: “Each troll is expected to post 50 news articles daily and maintain six Facebook and ten Twitter accounts, with 50 tweets per day.”^[27] Overwhelmed by these posts, which clog internet forums and make a genuine dialogue impossible, papers sometimes decide to close their comment sections. On November 18, 2014, for instance, the Moscow Times published the message that “due to the increasing number of users engaging in personal attacks, spams, trolling and abusive comments, we are no longer able to host our forum as a site for constructive and intelligent debate. It is with regret, therefore, that we have found ourselves forced to suspend the commenting function on our articles.”^[28] The question is whether this is the only solution available. It would be a shame if the Kremlin were able to undermine the unique new communication channels, created by the internet, which play an important role in modern civil society. Apart from closing forums, one could, for instance, think about setting up blacklists of trolls, who then will be automatically blocked from accessing a forum. Compiling such lists is, of course, painstaking work, and the trolls will certainly try to find ways to create new identities and circumvent the lists. This kind of work could eventually be done by the same agency set up by Western governments to debunk Kremlin propaganda.^[29]

Notes

“Russland lässt deutsche Stiftungen durchsuchen,” Die Zeit (March 26, 2013).

“Russia ‘Seizes’ Greenpeace Ship after Arctic Rig Protest,” BBC (September 23, 2013).

Quoted in Yekaterina Kravtsova, “Greenpeace Rebuffs Talk of Arctic Protest Con-
spiracy,” The Moscow Times (November 1, 2013).

“Greenpeace Rebuffs Talk of Arctic Protest Conspiracy.”

According to the Moscow Times, in a poll conducted by the state pollster VTsIOM, “42 percent said the Greenpeace action was plotted by foreign intelligence agencies and governments to take Russia’s natural resources and territories in the Arctic.” (“Russians See Greenpeace Protest as a Foreign Plot,” The Moscow Times (October 29, 2013).)

“Le knout contre Greenpeace, une Russie d’un autre âge,” Le Monde (October 10, 2013). The knout is a scourge-like multiple whip that was used in Russia for corporal punishment.

“Netherlands to Sue Russia over Greenpeace Ship Seizure,” RIA Novosti (October 21, 2013).

Robert W. Orttung, “Russia’s Use of PR as a Foreign Policy Tool,” Russian Analytical Digest, no. 81 (16 June 2010), 9.

Ivan Preobrazhensky, “Evropeytsy na rayone,” Russkaya Mysl, no. 43/11 (November 2013), 9.

10.

On the PRISM scandal and US and Russian soft power, see Marcel H. Van Herpen, “The PRISM Scandal, the Kremlin, and the Eurasian Union,” Atlantic-Community.org (July 19, 2013), www.atlantic-community.org/-/the-prism-scandal-the-kremlin-and-the-eurasian-union.

11.

Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore, “The End of Hypocrisy,” Foreign Affairs 92, no. 6 (November/December 2013), 24.

12.

“The End of Hypocrisy,” 23.

13.

Andrew Rettman, “EU Mulls Response to Russia’s Information War,” EU Observer (January 8, 2015), https://euobserver.com/foreign/127135. Latvia has proposed a Baltic-wide Russian-language channel. Estonia, however, preferred a national channel that will be launched in the second half of 2015. (Cf. Chris McGreal, “Vladimir Putin’s ‘Misinformation’ Offensive Prompts US to Deploy Its Cold War Propaganda Tools,” The Guardian (April 25, 2015).)

14.

Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion ( New York: Holt, 2002), 335.

15.

According to Janis Karklinš, director of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga, it is necessary “to raise awareness of the methods that are used, explain what trolls are, how they operate and what their targets are. There is one very simple remedy, although it will not have an immediate effect: I strongly believe that information literacy should become a part of every school curriculum, and in their education through primary and secondary school, children need to acquire certain skills that will help them orient themselves in and distil this deluge of information, including the disinformation that is present on the internet.” (Wojciech Przybylski, “Controlling the Trolls—A Conversation with Janis Karklinš and Paul Rebane,” New Eastern Europe 1, no. 15 (January–February 2015), 52.)

16.

Josh Halliday, “BBC World Service Fears Losing Information War as Russia Today Ramps Up Pressure,” The Guardian (December 23, 2014). In a comment titled “Europravda? Nein, danke!” (Europravda, no, thank you), the German paper Der Tagesspiegel was quite clear in its rejection of setting up an EU agency tasked with “anti-Kremlin propaganda.” (Nik Afanasjew, “Europravda? Nein, danke!” Der Tagesspiegel (March 20, 2015).) The paper thinks, however, that an EU-sponsored agency that translates articles from Western media into Russian would be “a step in the right direction.”

17.

Quoted in Lt. Col. Aaron D. Burgstein, “You Can’t Win If You Don’t Play—Communication: Engage Early, Engage Often,” in Air and Space Power Journal 5, no. 4 (4th quarter 2014), 23.

18.

Eliot Cohen, “The ‘Kind of Thing’ Crisis,” The American Interest 10, no. 3 (January/February 2015), 11.

19.

Cf. “Interesting News,” The Economist (November 8, 2014).

20.

Quoted in Moisés Naím, The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 153.

21.

Naím, The End of Power.

22.

“Ofcom Broadcast Bulletin,” no. 217 (November 5, 2012), 26, http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/enforcement/broadcast-bulletins/obb217/obb217.pdf.

23.

“Ofcom Broadcast Bulletin,” no. 266 (November 10, 2014). In these programs one reporter stated that an “assault on administrative buildings in Ukraine’s Crimea, ordered by Kiev, is thwarted by local self-defense forces.” There were no such assaults. A Ukrainian MP made a statement that the interim Ukrainian government “might acquire nuclear weapons and use these against Russia.” http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/enforcement/broadcast-bulletins/obb266/obb266.pdf.

24.

Cf. Massimo Calabresi, “Inside Putin’s East European Spy Campaign,” Time (May 7, 2014).

25.

Calebresi, “Inside Putin’s East European Spy Campaign.”

26.

Calabresi, “Inside Putin’s East European Spy Campaign.”

27.

Paul Roderick Gregory, “Putin’s New Weapon in the Ukrainian Propaganda War: Internet Trolls,” Forbes (September 12, 2014). Note that not only the “trolls” are warriors but all the participants in Moscow’s information war, a fact which is publicly acknowledged by Margarita Simonyan, head of RT, who declared: “When there is no war, it seems as if it (RT) is not needed. But damn it, when there is a war, it’s (RT is) downright critical. You can’t create an army a week before the war starts.” (Quoted in “Putin. War: An Independent Expert Report Based on Materials from Boris Nemtsov” (Moscow, May 2015), 9.)

28.

Note to readers in article comment section, The Moscow Times (November 18, 2014), http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/putin-s-g20-snub/511377.html.

29.

It is interesting that the Kremlin already closely monitors what is happening in the world of social media. This is done by Zvezda—Tsentr Strategicheskikh Issledovaniy i Razrabotok (Zvezda Center for Strategic Research and Development), which monitors Twitter tweets that have hashtags such as #Russia, #Ukraine, #Putin, and so on. (Zvezda Center, accessed January 19, 2015, http://zvezda.center/tw.php.)

Undermining Atlanticism: Building a “Strategic Triangle” Moscow-Berlin-Paris

An Emerging Moscow-Berlin Axis?

Introduction: Moscow’s Two “Strategic Triangles”

The Testament of Peter the Great

Putin “the German”

The Five Reasons Behind Russia’s Germanophilia

The Double Amnesia or “the Great Historical Parenthesis”

Back to Bismarck?

The Ever-Present Russian Appetite for German Ideology

Halford Mackinder’s Eurasian Heartland and the Moscow-Berlin Axis

Russia’s Recent Reception of German Geopolitik

Aleksandr Dugin: The Russian Apostle of Geopolitik

What Is “Duginism”?

Notes

Germany’s Kremlin-Friendly Political Class

Kremlin-Friendly Socialists

More Russophiles: The Green Party and the Left Party

The Pro-Russian Volte-Face of the German Extreme Right

The Pro-Russian “New Right”

Alternative für Deutschland: The New Russophilia of the Political Center

Warm Feelings towards Russia in the Former GDR

Notes

Russian-German “Verflechtung”

“Interlocking” Russian and German Companies: How It Worked

Russia’s Meta-Robber Capitalism

The Shtokman Syndrome: Why Germany’s Energy Giants Act as the Kremlin’s Spokesmen

The Impact of Germany’s Pro-Russian Stance on Its Relations with Its Western Partners

An Increasingly Strained German-US Relationship?

Germany and NATO

Germany and the New EU Member States

Is Germany Cooling towards France and the EU?

Russophilia and Germany’s Loosening Ties to the West

Notes

The Kremlin’s Conquest of France

The Russian-French Friendship from Chirac to Sarkozy

Sarkozy’s Pro-Putin Conversion

A Cold Mistral Blows over the Black Sea

An Orthodox Cathedral in the Heart of Paris: House of God or Den of Spies?

The Meseberg Initiative: Toward an EU-Russia Strategic Partnership?

A Galaxy of Pro-Kremlin Associations, Coordinated by the Russian Embassy

Putin’s Russia and the French Front National: Mutual Warm Feelings

Total and IFRI

The Future of the “Strategic Triangle” after Ukraine

Notes

Conclusions

From Soft Power Offensive to Information War

The Kremlin’s Eleven Successes

The Limits of Russia’s Soft Power

How the Kremlin’s Rollback Strategy Is Backfiring

Seven Proposals to Counter the Russian Propaganda Offensive

Spend More Money

Create an Alternative Russian-Language TV Station

Analyze the Facts

Raise Public Awareness

Tell the Truth

Don’t Be Too Tolerant

Fight Trolls

Notes

Undermining Atlanticism:
Building a “Strategic Triangle”
Moscow-Berlin-Paris

The Double Amnesia or
“the Great Historical Parenthesis”

The Ever-Present Russian Appetite
for German Ideology

More Russophiles:
The Green Party and the Left Party

The Pro-Russian Volte-Face of the
German Extreme Right

“Interlocking” Russian and German Companies:
How It Worked

Russophilia and Germany’s Loosening
Ties to the West

The Russian-French Friendship
from Chirac to Sarkozy

Seven Proposals to Counter the
Russian Propaganda Offensive