The Kremlin’s fears for the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation worked against any systematic planning of economic development. Moscow and St Petersburg may be dynamic metropolises, but many other parts of the country languish in chronic neglect – indeed, Moscow and its surrounding area distort the national statistics by earning 40 per cent of the gross domestic product. Putin may finance big infrastructure projects like the Olympics zone around Sochi, the science city at Skolkovo and the Kerch Bridge but, as his friend and former Finance Minister Kudrin has tirelessly pointed out, this is never going to be enough to create a globally competitive economy. Instead, Kudrin called on the government to nurture ten to fifteen urban ‘agglomerations’ as a way of raising regional morale and productivity: only then would Russia be able to cope with competition across its borders with China and Europe. The metropolitan fixation had to give way to more equal distribution of government favours.1
But Kudrin’s pleas have fallen on infertile ground. Putin’s attitude to ‘the regions’ is regulated by the desire to stop their leaders making political trouble, and the ruling group’s insistence on maintaining their income and privileges. In 2007, in a parody of a quantitative approach to administration, an assessment system was introduced using forty-three tick-boxes to gauge the performance of leaders in the republics and provinces, with additional grants offered to leaderships judged successful. Predictably, provincial leaders fudged and distorted the figures. But it ignored the essential problem: that the authorities in Moscow feared anarchy and fraud if the localities were freed to have self-governance. Numerical assessments were not going to provide a solution.2
Moscow’s desire for political and economic control over far-flung regions has its parallel in its treatment of the independent states of the former Soviet Union. Though Ukraine remains the most acute case, there is no part of the ex-USSR which does not disturb Moscow if it ever moves hard against Russian interests or accepts the American embrace. Russia’s leaders hold on to some of the same assumptions about security as earlier rulers. Their country has endured centuries of being overrun, by Mongols, Poles, French and Germans, and their ideal is compliant buffer states. The ‘near abroad’ – the ex-USSR – is a zone where Russia’s interests have absolute precedence, as Georgia learned to its cost in 2008.
It was a policy difficult to apply in an absolute fashion. In the successor states of central Asia it was undesirable to foster weakness if there was the slightest chance that radical Islamists would be able to exploit the situation. It was one of the reasons Russia supported dictatorships in the countries with Muslim majorities. From Tajikistan to Azerbaijan there had emerged ferocious regimes that annihilated political opposition and seized tight control of natural resources, but the judgement in Moscow was that this was of crucial assistance in preventing the contagion of jihadism spreading towards the borders of the Russian Federation. But, as in Chechnya, where Putin had turned a blind eye to the violence under Ramzan Kadyrov, the consequence was that rulers asserted themselves by declining to toe the Russian line with consistency. Kremlin leaders were frequently exasperated by events on the southern tier of Russia’s frontiers.
They were even angrier about ex-Soviet republics along the western tier. As a stable and prosperous democracy Estonia was a constant irritant. Estonians bitterly remembered the chaos and privation of the 2007 cyber-attack, widely blamed on the Russian leadership. Meanwhile the Russian authorities continued to complain about the decision to remove the bronze statue erected in front of the National Library in Tallinn in 1946 to commemorate the Red Army’s defeat of the Third Reich, and relocate it to a military cemetery on the outskirts.3 This was the nub of the problem when it came to official remembrance: Russians, whether they lived in Russia or Estonia, wanted eternal reverence to be shown for the valour of Soviet forces in ending the Nazi occupation; Estonians declined to applaud the reoccupation of their country by a foreign foe, namely Stalin’s USSR.
Absolute proof was lacking that Russian official agencies had conducted the cyber-attack – the source was traced back to private hackers in Russia – but circumstantial evidence pointed strongly that way. It was assumed the Kremlin’s purpose was not only to knock out the Estonian network of communications but also to show the world what it could do – as well as to allow its disruptive specialists to conduct a real-life test of what became known as hybrid warfare. Without setting foot outside the Russian capital they could do enormous harm abroad. The Baltic countries felt particularly vulnerable: the Crimean annexation had shown that Kremlin rulers did not regard as sacrosanct the borders bequeathed by the USSR. The Russo-Estonian frontier near Narva was disputed, and there were other cities west of the long Russian frontier from the Baltic Sea down to the Black Sea where Russians lived in large numbers and, in several instances, complained about their treatment at the hands of their governments. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania didn’t help matters by each legislating for their native tongue to be recognized as the state language. Putin frequently spoke of his fears for his co-nationals outside the Russian Federation – and people remembered how zealously he had upheld the rights of Russians in Crimea even before 2014.
The NATO contingent in Estonia, small though it was, was a deterrent to the use of force by Russia. If a British trooper was killed in an incursion from Russia, there would be war in which the Estonians would not be alone and the use of firepower could rise unpredictably, perhaps even to the level of nuclear missiles. The wars of 2008 and 2014 had given politicians in all the bordering states food for thought. Not even Belarus could be completely confident about Russia’s long-term trustworthiness. Vitebsk, the largest city in its north-east, had once belonged to the Russian Soviet republic, as Russian nationalists were just as capable as academic geographers of pointing out. Poland’s former Defence Minister Radek Sikorski suggested that President Alyaksandr Lukashenka should keep an eye on the situation.4
Northern Kazakhstan is another zone about which Russian nationalist opinion has displayed a certain sensitivity. Russians are outnumbered by Kazakhs in the country, and Kazakhstan has steadily increased the Kazakh component of its ideology, politics and public appointments, which has in turn given rise to unease about the conditions imposed on the Russian minority. Thoughts have turned back to the circumstances in which Kazakhstan was established. Before 1936 it was an ethnic region inside the Russian Soviet republic; then Stalin gave it its own status as a Soviet republic, with the same rights and authority as the Russian one from which it had been detached. He and his successors also presided over an influx of Russians as new cities and economic enterprises were developed. The Kazakhs, most of whom had until the early 1930s lived an age-old nomadic existence, were forcibly moved to collective farms, where their task was to learn modern agricultural methods and increase cereal production. Tensions between Russians and Kazakhs were endemic, and in the late Soviet period riots had broken out. Just as Boris Yeltsin’s expressions of concern for his compatriots had given rise to fears of eventual armed intervention, so Putin’s words and actions evoked the same emotion from the Kazakh leadership. Nevertheless Russia’s links stayed friendly enough for it to continue to use Baikonur in Kazakhstan as its space rocket launching base. The Kremlin, however, was less happy about the attitude to the Crimean annexation in the Kazakh capital, Astana – President Nazarbaev was understandably alarmed by the possibility that Putin might manufacture a political crisis and occupy northern Kazakhstan.
Putin had fewer grounds for worrying about Kyrgyzstan, but he could not fail to notice Kyrgyz criticisms of Ukraine’s Yanukovych, whom Putin publicly supported. Uzbekistan, which refused to enter the Union, went further by declining to endorse the referendum to incorporate Crimea in the Russian Federation. In Belarus, Lukashenka ridiculed Yanukovych for his lack-lustre leadership in 2013–14. But shortly afterwards Lukashenka made overtures to the new Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko – hardly a sign that Belarusian policy unequivocally took Russia’s side.5
The benefits that accrued to Russia from the end of empire were mixed. Ex-Soviet republics like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were hostile. Ukraine spent the 1990s and early 2000s tussling with the Russian government and from 2014 was confirmed in its enmity. All the other republics of the former USSR proved awkward about one thing or another. Without aiming to reconstitute the USSR, Putin and his ministers sought to exert pressure on each ex-Soviet republic, still considered a better policy than becoming entangled in the kind of local disputes, administrative costs and budgetary demands that had made things difficult for successive communist rulers.
The unspoken rule was that none of the new independent states – with the involuntary exceptions of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and latterly Ukraine – should try to subvert the political and economic requirements set out by the Kremlin. If a state wished to promote its nationhood and traditional faith, Russian rulers had no objection. If nearby foreign rulers engorged themselves with corruptly obtained riches, the Putin team saw nothing wrong because its own members did the same.
Yet there remained a desire to prevent foreign states beyond the borders of the ex-USSR from interfering with Russia’s post-imperial machinations. Some were easy to deal with. Poland rarely strayed, with the exception of its intervention in the Ukrainian crisis of 2013–14, and, in the analysis of the Kremlin, in unhelpfully pushing NATO into increasing its foreign presence in eastern and east-central Europe. Turkey was involved in commercial links with Azerbaijan that cut across the purposes of Gazprom and Rosneft, and its premier, and latterly president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, expressed displeasure about the occupation of Crimea, though he subsequently let the matter drop. Iran had an ambition to spread its Shia Islamic faith abroad, but prudently decided to limit its activity in the former Soviet central Asia to distributing the Koran. Tehran wanted good relations with Moscow, particularly after the agreement on operations in the Syrian civil war.
Then there was the problem of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, wanting to spread their faith and influence, had the opportunity to appeal to the many Sunni populations in the southern tier of the old USSR. But Riyadh caused less trouble than might have been expected. Putin’s relations with the Saudi royal family steadily improved, and he gained its backing for Russia to acquire observer status at the Organization of the Islamic Conference from 2005. The two countries resolved to avoid conflict.
The whole region to the south of Russian frontiers down across the Middle East as far as the Arabian Gulf, Putin learned, was full of cross-cutting and jarring aspirations. However much Russia outmatched the other regional states in firepower, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates rivalled it in financial might. The Russians accepted the importance of negotiations as well as threats. By and large it succeeded in keeping the states of the ‘outer abroad’ out of Putin’s zone of influence, namely the former USSR.
But America, in the eyes of the Kremlin, was tirelessly seeking to expand its influence in every part of the old USSR. Whenever Russian politicians or businessmen were baulked, the suspicion in the Kremlin was that an American hand was operating the levers. In 2001 Russia had not objected when the United States asked permission to use an air base in Uzbekistan for its bombers to attack the Taliban in Afghanistan. As relations with the Americans worsened, such friendliness ceased. Though the Americans were less active than they had been in the 1990s, nervousness remained among Russian leaders that America would find ways to infiltrate central Asia. President Karimov, the Uzbek leader, Putin noted, subsequently alternated between favouring Russia and America so as to give himself a degree of freedom from Moscow’s importunities. But by allowing Russian investment in Uzbek oil exploration and exploitation Karimov courted Putin’s sympathy, and in 2014 the Russian Finance Ministry cancelled Uzbekistan’s debts.
As we shall see later, even more intrusive was Chinese influence, as China pursued its Belt and Road Initiative. Russia sought to contain China’s ambitions by embracing the Chinese as partners. Washington’s ambitions in ex-Soviet central Asia were less grand than those of Beijing, but Moscow could not afford to express resentment of Chinese encroachment for fear of offending and losing its important friend in the East.
The Kremlin leadership tried to strengthen its position by building up regional organizations, chief among them the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Neither had fulfilled Yeltsin’s hopes of providing Russia with unconditional dominance, though, and in Putin’s time their influence continued to disappoint. Georgia withdrew from the Commonwealth in 2008 after the Russian invasion; Ukraine, which had never agreed to more than associate membership, ended its link entirely in 2018, and Russia’s aggression against them both severely reduced the trust of neighbouring countries in any military pact with the Kremlin leadership. The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) came under deeper suspicion. None of its member countries was willing to endorse the Russian armed intervention in Georgia. The Crimean annexation intensified their concerns, and CSTO Secretary Nikolai Bordyuzha had to issue a statement affirming that there would be no joint deployment in Ukraine.6
Putin concentrated his efforts on gathering support for a Eurasian Economic Union, which after years of negotiation was at last formed in January 2015. Treated as a pariah by the Western powers, the Kremlin aimed to extend its regional influence by drawing the neighbouring ex-Soviet republics into a single market with free movement of people, goods, capital and services. It fell a long way short of its objective. Initially the only other member states were Kazakhstan and Belarus. Though Armenia and Kyrgyzstan joined shortly afterwards, the list remained a disappointment to Russian leaders. The conspicuous omission was Ukraine, which had been courted assiduously since the idea had first occurred to Yeltsin and others. The Crimean annexation ruled this out permanently, and no aspiring Ukrainian political leader would be so imprudent as to suggest it again even as a way of balancing the European Union. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had never been candidates at all. Georgia took the same approach. But several other former constituent republics of the USSR had also refused Putin’s invitation. Moldova, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan all decided for their own reasons that it was better to ignore Russia’s fishing expedition.
The Eurasian Economic Union was supposed to have no political agenda, distinguishing it from the European Union, which established a common parliament and a coordinating commission and aspired to pursue common foreign and defence policies. President Nursultan Nazarbaev demanded politics be kept out of the treaty. Despite Russia’s efforts this has remained the case. The Union has no stated ideology or political goals, and the citizens of member countries do not hold Union passports.
With only 5 per cent of Russian exports going to its other members,7 the Union cannot really be called a vibrant international phenomenon, and commercial progress has been racked by disputes. There have been ‘meat wars’ between Russia and Belarus, after Belarusian products were found to be falling below acceptable standards. Similar conflict arose between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan over potatoes.8 It was a turbulent baptism for the Union when, in December 2014, in retaliation for the Russian ban on Belarusian animal products, Belarus’s Lukashenka restored customs posts. Russia subsequently raised gas prices for Belarus, which was totally reliant on the Russians for its fuel. In February 2017 Russia introduced its own border controls.9 The Eurasian Economic Union had hardly been created when it succumbed to disputes that pulled it apart.
Problems were aggravated in 2015 when Kazakhstan, after years of negotiation, was granted accession to the World Trade Organization. On both agricultural and industrial products the agreed tariff levels were lower than Russia had set when it joined five years earlier. It did not pass unnoticed in Moscow that this would damage Russian interests when goods entered Russia via the lower barrier permitted in Kazakhstan. The government in Astana promised to set about renegotiating its World Trade Organization tariff levels to bring them up to the Eurasian Economic Union norms.10
A sign that Putin sees the need for tact when trying to attract countries into the Eurasian Economic Union is that, unlike many, he has ceased to use the condescending term ‘near abroad’ to refer to the rest of the ex-Soviet Union.11 It was not always so. In August 2014 Putin referred dismissively to Kazakhstan’s statehood by asserting that the country had not existed until Nazarbaev brought it to independence, and Kazakh opinion was affronted. Putin had commented in similar fashion about Ukrainian statehood at the Bucharest NATO summit in 2008, Kazakhs recalled – and now, just months after annexing Crimea, he cast a shadow over Kazakhstan. There was talk of sending Putin a history textbook. Nazarbaev declared that Kazakhstan reserved the right to withdraw from the Eurasian Economic Union if that independence was to be threatened. ‘Our independence is our dearest treasure,’ he said, ‘for which our grandfathers fought.’12 If Putin wanted to establish and expand the Eurasian Economic Union he would have to choose his words more carefully.
It seems that Kazakhstan decided in favour of the Eurasian Economic Union because it hoped to bind the Russians into a framework of peaceful commitments. A strictly economic motivation was not paramount: over half the country’s exports went to the European Union, and only 10 per cent to Russia. But Nazarbaev, even before the Crimean annexation, wanted to reduce Russo-Kazakh tensions, and the Eurasian Economic Union Treaty appeared a good first step.
Armenia had originally been even more reluctant. Public opinion was deeply sceptical about Russia’s purposes, with the sale of military equipment to Azerbaijan, the old enemy of the Armenians, exacerbating anti-Russian feelings. In 2013 President Serzh Sargsyan unexpectedly dropped his objections after a private discussion with Putin offered a number of commercial enticements, but what probably made up his mind was the promise of a Russian security guarantee. Behind the scenes, pressures of a non-economic nature were an ingredient.
For Kyrgyzstan it was a simpler matter. The Kyrgyz economy heavily depended on remittances from its migrants working in the Russian Federation. Membership of the Union would make it easier for Kyrgyz to find employment than Uzbeks and Tajiks.13
If Russia wants to be a regional economic power within a formal institutional structure, it cannot afford to humiliate its partners. Yeltsin understood this, but not all Putin’s ministers and officials do. Nationalist opinion ascribed Russia’s difficulties with its neighbours not to any recent fault of its own, or even to centuries of suspicion, but – for Putin’s economics adviser Sergei Glazev, for example – to American machinations. Glazev saw the planet’s widespread Russophobia as a ‘mystification’ sponsored by America. He looked back fondly to the Eurasian school of intellectual thought that arose in the 1920s and saw in the past a seamless record of inter-ethnic harmony under the Golden Horde, the Russian Empire and the USSR.14 It is self-deception of staggering proportions when a public figure such as Glazev can so casually dismiss the historical reality and lasting effects of national and religious persecution. Ukrainians or Kazakhs whose parents or grandparents starved in the 1930s did not need American propaganda to make them feel suspicious of Moscow.
One of the growing anxieties in Russian public opinion is economic migration, especially from central Asia. Putin, a Russian nationalist, has consistently spoken in favour of allowing Uzbeks and Kyrgyz to find work in the Russian Federation, even while admitting that free passage for people and goods from central Asia facilitates the illegal drugs trade – like many Russians, he notes that foreign migrants are widely involved in distributing and selling heroin and cocaine. But he sets his face against the introduction of a visa system. The Russian economy is heavily dependent on migrant labour, especially in manual jobs but also in small businesses. Russia also has to keep its frontiers open for citizens of the Eurasian Economic Union.
Azerbaijan showed a willingness to assert itself by carrying through its project to pipe oil from Baku directly to Erzurum in north-east Turkey, from where the supplies were to be sent to Europe, ignoring the Russian preference for their oil to use pipelines that crossed into Russia and drew in Russia’s biggest hydrocarbon corporations as partners. The Azerbaijanis also had experience of the Kremlin’s chronic failure to take Azerbaijan’s side definitively against Armenia in the decades-old dispute over the Armenian-inhabited enclave on Azerbaijani territory. The Turkish connection gave Azerbaijan a degree of security from Russian pressure. Gazprom and Rosneft were huge businesses with ambitions to spread their operations widely around the world, but their closeness to the Kremlin made leaderships in the ex-USSR edgy about accepting their embrace. Russian assertiveness caused problems, especially when in January 2014 it suspended part of the oil pipeline between Baku and Novorossiisk on the Russian Black Sea coast.
When Moldova’s government agreed to sign an association agreement with the European Union the Kremlin applied economic sanctions against it. Moldovan wine was banned from sale in Russia.15 This only served to motivate the Moldovans to redouble their outreach to the West.
All the while Russian military and economic pressure on Ukraine intensified. The ceasefire introduced by the Minsk Accords of February 2015 quickly broke down. Russia’s fighting contingents went on confronting the Ukrainian army in eastern Ukraine. Ukrainians in their vast majority supported Poroshenko in his defiance. Cities like Donetsk were subjected to the presence of fighters from both sides. Pleas by the United Nations were issued in vain. Though Gazprom continued to sell gas supplies to Ukraine, it raised its prices since Russia could no longer count on a friendly neighbour. The Russian navy blocked access to the Sea of Azov through the new Kerch Bridge for every ship until it had been inspected, a practice that allowed the Russians to discriminate against traffic out of Ukrainian ports and disrupted the economy of those parts of eastern Ukraine still held by the Ukrainian authorities. The Kremlin’s economic sanctions were maintained. The message to Kyiv was that Russia had the patience and resources to make life difficult for Ukrainians while they continued with their choice of the European Union for their strategic partner, whatever the cost in lives and prosperity.
In 2018 the Trump administration took account of the Ukrainian plight by forwarding advanced lethal weaponry to improve Kyiv’s defences against the Russians. Poroshenko countered Russian patience and violence with Ukrainian endurance. Nobody was left with the illusion that Ukraine was about to crumble. The great prize of Russian regional political and economic diplomacy after the fall of communism was kept beyond Russia’s reach. Battered but unbowed, Ukraine was determined to stay free. Its sole state language was Ukrainian. Its school textbooks and Orthodox Church were Ukrainian. Its rulers, even those not brought up to speak the Ukrainian tongue, were proud of their Ukrainian nationality. Putin had lost the great game of the end of communism, and no amount of posturing about the acquisition of Crimea would disguise it. He had also made Russian ambitions visible to all the countries of the former USSR. Their edginess was understandable, and it was by no means obvious that Russia’s geopolitical purposes benefited. For Russians with an imperial mentality this was bound to be a disappointment.