Russia’s is a stunted democracy, malformed in the womb and maltreated after birth. Its people have negligible influence over who will occupy the presidency, premiership or cabinet. The security agencies assign their own personnel to official posts throughout the political and economic order. The Russian state eliminates serious opponents of the ruling group with methods ranging from electoral exclusion to murder. Parliamentary institutions have been neutered, and exert authority only when the leadership’s internal divisions spill out into factional struggle in the State Duma. The courts are subservient to the rulers. The vertical machinery of command has been reconstructed from the debris of the USSR. It is true that the Kremlin’s orders are frequently ignored, as they were in Soviet times, but when the Putin administration focuses efforts on particular objectives, it can trample down opposition. National pride is trumpeted. Sport and entertainment – as well as naked military power deployed beyond the Russian borders – are used as distractions. Patriotism, religion and traditional social values are promoted. Vladimir Putin is presented as the embodiment of everything that is good about Russia.
He and his associates boast of their successful expulsion of assetsnatching ‘oligarchs’ from political power, a process reminiscent of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where no sooner had the pig revolutionaries got rid of Mr Jones, the hated farmer, than they themselves lorded it over the other animals, dressing in splendid attire and gorging themselves on fine food and wine. Putin’s appointees feasted on the benefits of high political office and cultivated relationships of mutual advantage with those ‘oligarchs’ who complied with the demand to stop interfering in politics. The powerful secured their power by ruthless means. The secret services operated with impunity and free of governmental or parliamentary supervision. Criminal gangs were employed to do dirty business. The political class passed on its privileges to families and friends. Bulging bank accounts were lodged abroad, including offshore in the Cayman Islands. Switzerland and the French Riviera became playgrounds for the Russian rich, and London was its counting house of convenience for money laundering, where British lawyers, accountants and some politicians made money as facilitators of business from the east.
Russian economic strength grew in line with rising hydrocarbon revenues, and the recovery of Moscow’s confidence imprinted itself on Russia’s behaviour abroad. Russian secret services were blamed for the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and for the 2007 cyber-attack that afflicted Estonia and other countries to the west. In 2008 Russia’s army and air force invaded Georgia.
In 2014, Crimea was occupied and annexed. This was followed by armed intervention in eastern Ukraine, an intervention that continues to this day as Russia’s troops and equipment are covertly deployed to confront the Ukrainian armed forces. Russian armed forces entered the Syrian civil war to rescue the Assad administration, and Russia placed itself on the opposite side to the United States. The Kremlin interfered in politics in the European Union, consistently financing parties that sought to weaken its unity and prevent its expansion. Russian hackers and IT companies disrupted America’s 2016 presidential election. As the Western powers retaliated with economic sanctions, Putin consolidated Russia’s partnership with the People’s Republic of China. Calling for multipolarity in world politics, he pinned his foreign policy on a challenge to American global power. His activity pointed in a single general direction while including a number of improvised moves.
But though Putin plans ahead, he has often been taken aback by unexpected reactions. Bush and Obama were temperate about Georgia, whereas Obama was stern on Crimea and became ever sterner. Putin’s forward thinking lacked the flexibility demanded by the course of events.
His rule is not a silhouette in black and white but a canvas of diverse colours. The disorderliness of the 1990s has been surmounted. The old press and the new internet and newer social media have retained a limited space of freedom. People have privacy as a reality, not just as a formal right. Russians continue to travel abroad and to watch and listen to foreign broadcasts as never before in their history. Religious toleration is observed for the country’s main faiths. Education, science and technology are promoted. Personal property is respected in the courts as long as high politics and big business have no dog in the fight. Capitalism flourishes. In every town, entrepreneurs are running businesses. Russia is integrated into the global economic system.
Some say we should celebrate rather than carp at the Russian transformation. Most commentators, at least in the West, are not so much pro-Kremlin as anti-anti-Kremlin. They allege Western bias, pointing out that the established democracies of Europe, North America and Asia took a long time to be consolidated, and are still far from being perfect expressions of the popular will. Russia endured a longer period of totalitarian rule than any other country, and had an inevitable legacy of problems from communism that will require many years to resolve. Every country, of course, has its own history and inclinations, and the Russian people are unlikely to accept a mould that others have made for their own different circumstances. One of the benefits of decommunization is that Russia can choose its new way of life. The anti-anti-Kremlin grouping contains some who are admirers of Putin. Why, they ask, do people fail to recognize what his leadership has achieved in the face of daunting difficulties?
Such queries are usually premised on denying that it was moral or sensible for NATO to expand its membership into the USSR’s satellite countries, on the theory that every great power secures a zone of influence in nearby states. Russia, unlike Ukraine or Kazakhstan, it is also noted, is heir to the Soviet Union’s arsenal of nuclear weapons and maintains the largest conventional forces in Europe. It is imprudent, say the anti-anti-Kremlin grouping, to tweak the tail of a bear.
Criticism is certainly heaped on Russia even though China’s penal camps are more brutal. Beijing subjugates the press, internet and social media, and the Chinese Communist Party monopolizes power, but discussions in the West focus on Russian iniquity. A degree of racism is certainly involved, because less is expected of the Chinese than of the Russians. But foreigners are not alone in setting a different standard for Russia. Russian rulers have themselves often identified the country as quintessentially European. Gorbachëv dreamed of a ‘common European home’; Yeltsin for a while refrained from speaking of ‘the West’ because he wanted the world to stop thinking of Russia as an outsider. Putin too started out by claiming Russia to be a part of European culture, but his commitment to ‘European values’ faded. Europe’s own politics underwent change as Hungary and Poland pulled down the scaffolding of their own legal order and democratic procedures. As ‘European’ values and traditions became a matter of controversy, Russia no longer seemed quite as peculiar as it once had done, and the Putin administration continues to express pride in Russia’s idiosyncratic values, practices and ‘civilization’.
When Russian disengagement from the West gathered momentum, Moscow’s spokesmen put their stress on multipolarity as a way of counteracting America’s alleged ambition to dominate the world as the sole hyperpower. Russia’s challenge to American ‘hegemony’ was widely touted as both timely and justified. No great power has pursued an unblemished foreign policy in the past quarter-century, however, and the United States is no exception. That said, the charges of American misbehaviour at Russia’s expense are overdrawn.
Although Gorbachëv had received some oral assurances about a reunified Germany, there was no such clarity about what was meant to happen in the former USSR and the ex-communist eastern Europe. During the 1990s a tornado of unpredicted events raged, and NATO and the European Union began their eastward expansion. The Western powers were tugged into the vortex of the wars in many parts of old Yugoslavia. The Americans led NATO forces in an aerial bombardment of Belgrade to free the Albanian majority in Kosovo from vicious ethnic persecution, and in the end judged Kosovan independence to be the only way to resolve the matter. But when Putin asks how this diverges from what he did later in Crimea, he ignores the conspicuous difference that Bill Clinton did not occupy and annex Kosovo: America still has only fifty states and Kosovo is not one of them. Russian recriminations do not stop there, but although there is some justification for Russians to say that economic sanctions from Soviet days persisted into the twenty-first century, the new sanctions were a reaction to the horrors that took place on Putin’s watch, and would not have been applied had the Russian state behaved better.
As for the idea that America was responsible for the Chechen separatist insurgency, or that the West played midwife to the birth of the Russian business ‘oligarchs’, this is merely a way for the Kremlin to palm off Russian responsibility for what happened in Russia after the collapse of communism. It was Russians who caused most of their troubles. Putin is unconvincing when he attributes all ills to external interference.
Whenever Russian spokesmen fossick in historical annals for evidence of the sins of America, NATO and the West, they omit to consider why their neighbours continue to be fearful of and have suspicions about the motherland. The post-1945 suppression of national freedoms in all Europe to the east of the Elbe is lodged in the regional memory. Whereas Putin can fairly say that Russians suffered alongside other Soviet peoples under the USSR, the fact remains that it is primarily Russia that the societies in eastern and east-central Europe blame for imposing a brutal communist order. But the Russian government still holds to the idea that it has seigneurial rights over the region. Countries in eastern and east-central Europe formed an impatient queue of petitioners for entry into NATO and the European Union: they were not cudgelled into it by the United States. Their concerns appeared justified when, under Putin, Ukraine’s gas supplies were cut off and Estonia fell victim to a nationwide cyber-attack.
Western economic investment has been thinner in Russia than in the countries on its western borders, and the fault lies chiefly with Russian rulers who failed to establish an accountable legal order. International sanctions are not the main reason why the Russian economy has failed to realize its full potential – and anyway Russia has coped adequately with the specific difficulties that the sanctions introduced after Magnitski, Crimea and Salisbury. But when Russia’s politicians highlighted the history of Western economic attacks, they conveniently made no mention of the part they had played in provoking them and ignored entirely the damage caused by their failure to institute the rule of law.
Russian behaviour in world affairs worsened decisively after Putin returned to the presidency in 2012. The spirit of compromise with America disappeared again. The year 2014 marked another turning point and the devouring of Crimea and the battering of eastern Ukraine confirmed that Russia could no longer pretend to be the victim of external malefactors when it inflicted such harm on a vulnerable neighbour. The Syrian military intervention corroborated the stereotype of the wild, unpredictable bear. Russian agencies reinforced this image when they were found to have hacked the Democratic Party’s email accounts in the 2016 American presidential election. Interference in European politics was widespread and systematically conducted on the side of parties hostile to European unity. In Syria, the Russians sided with Bashar al-Assad and indulged his use of chemical weaponry and other atrocities against rebel forces and cities. Russia’s hooded subversion and naked military power were activated from the North Sea to the Mediterranean.
Other contenders for presidential office would have acted differently – or at least tried to. From Kasyanov and Nemtsov through to Navalny, a less harsh way of governing Russia and handling the West was the likely result if only they had been able to mount an effective challenge to Putin. Instead, between 2008 and 2012 the country had a tepid interlude under Medvedev, who made promises of reform, of which few were realized and fewer still outlasted Putin’s return to presidential office.
Putin reimposed his external and internal policies in a strengthened format. He had always been his own man, or at least someone formed by his background in the KGB, and he was not alone. In St Petersburg and other big cities in the 1990s there were several former security agency personnel in the city administration. This cohort shared the frustrations of many public officials who were angry about the business ‘oligarchs’ who strutted round on the political stage. The instabilities and unfairnesses in society annoyed most people, and there was a widespread yearning for Russia to move back to the centre of world affairs. This was the informal mandate that Putin received in 2000 when he first became president. He and his supporters were initially willing to test the possibility of mutual accommodation with America, but they had no intention of allowing a serious challenge to their power at home. As hydrocarbon prices soared and Russia achieved budgetary stability, they could turn their back on the Western powers. They did this with determination after the ‘colour revolutions’ in Ukraine and other nearby states in 2003–4. Democracy and the rule of law were never on Putin’s true agenda – and this was going to be the situation regardless of what the West did.
Inside the Putin administration, ideas underwent ossification, reflecting Russia’s post-imperial, post-superpower mindset. The benefits of a strong, orderly state under central control were emphasized. Nationalism was accentuated. Religious faith, especially the Christianity of the Russian Orthodox Church, was stimulated. The uniqueness of Russian values – including the notion of a distinct Russian civilization – was proclaimed. Social conservatism was promoted. Russia’s right to influence nearby states was reasserted, culminating in the armed action in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. In Russia’s name, Putin gleefully took on the role of Grand Disrupter in global politics. He threw away his chances to rinse the bad blood out of Russia’s relations with the West. The result is that no Western leader – with the obvious exception of Donald Trump, and even he is far from a clear-cut case – is going to place trust in Putin again. The feeling is probably mutual – something the West has tended to overlook – because Putin has decided he cannot rely on the United States to abide by any compromise he might agree to.1 Though President Trump called for reconciliation with Russia, his administration – and the American ‘deep state’ – has frequently moved in the opposite direction. Regardless of who is president in America and Russia, pressures persist that drive the countries apart, and Russia has little to offer that would tempt America to relax its posture.
The unfortunate likely consequence in the immediate future is that Ukraine’s distress and peril will continue. If respite is to be achieved, it needs to be by way of cast-iron agreements with realistic penalty clauses. European security has to be a prerequisite for any deal. What adds to the grimness is that neither Putin nor his team is likely to choose a successor who would lessen the authoritarianism at home or the disruptiveness abroad. Nationalism has been inscribed in the Kremlin’s codebook: Putin’s vision has to have public appeal if it is to remain an asset for his administration. Russia, however, is not the only country where national feelings run high. Ukraine’s people, in their vast majority, hate the Kremlin for what it has done to their country. Putin’s actions since 2014 have had the unplanned effect of making it all but impossible for anyone to win the Ukrainian presidency without attacking Russian quasi-imperial pretensions. Meanwhile, Petro Poroshenko’s administration became discredited for its failure to root out fraud and profiteering. Against him in the sensational presidential election of April 2019 stood the popular actor and comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. Like Poroshenko, he was committed to facing down Putin, but he also promised to put an end to the rampant corruption. Zelensky won a landslide electoral victory despite refusing to sketch out a programme of practical policies. On assuming power, he taunted that Ukraine, unlike Russia, was a free country with free elections, media and internet.2
Whereas the task of cleansing the Augean stables of Ukrainian public life may prove beyond Zelensky’s strength, Ukraine’s example of open politics fills Kremlin leaders with dread that it might be transferred to Russia. It is a situation laden with dangers for the wider world but also with possibilities for a degree of conciliation if chances are seized. Though Putin has persistently rejected the calls for him to moderate his disruptive objectives in foreign policy, there are two possible scenarios under which Russia and the West could reconverge, one positive and the other negative. The Middle East could become such an acute danger to world peace that the Western powers might welcome Russia as an intermediary. A second possibility is that Russian economic difficulties might become severe enough for a more moderate foreign policy to commend itself to the Kremlin leadership.
The West’s options are limited. It would nevertheless be wrong to abandon the demand for the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, including Crimea. This is not a cause for war, even a future war, but neither should the Crimean question be wiped off the slate. Nor should the slightest doubt be allowed to arise about the commitment of NATO and the European Union to the security of all their members. If this requires military reinforcement in countries that lie near to the Russian frontiers, so be it. The Russian authorities must also be put on credible notice that cyber-attacks will bring about retaliation. Economic sanctions have to be enforced more systematically until such time as Russia improves upon its record abroad. Channels of financial credit and technological transfer should be kept available to increase the pressure on Moscow. Russian money-laundering facilities have to be closed down in the City of London and elsewhere. Super-rich Russians close to Putin must be made to feel a pinch in their pockets.
Too often, Western politicians have levelled their charges exclusively against Putin. Though he bears ultimate liability for the ruling group’s actions, he is the captive of the order that brought him to power. Though he has done far too little to reform that order, nobody should underestimate the difficulty of the task. Moreover, Putin does not and cannot know in advance everything done by the Russian authorities. He is the leader of a team with a shared strategy for external and internal affairs, but its members have their own ideas. Russia’s ascendant politicians and businessmen are combative and ambitious. Putin is one of their kind, and he has to prove himself to fellow proponents of nationalist, authoritarian politics. But he and his team are also pragmatic, and have shown flexibility in the past: in 2000–3 Putin was open to compromise with the West, and in 2008 Medvedev unbolted some of the doors again. There is no such thing as an unchanging template of Russian governance.
The interests of peace and stability require that links between Russia and the West are maintained at all levels. Academic and cultural exchanges as well as business are useful ties. Sport helps, as do music, museum exchanges and literature. The broadcast media and internet websites can convey the message that a better way of life is available under the rule of law and with respect for principles of free competition in politics and business. But Russian hackers and fake news distributors are at an advantage in being able to attack open democratic elections. It was understandable but self-defeating when Obama indicated that retaliatory action might be taken quietly, out of the public gaze, because for it to work the Putin administration had to pay a demonstrable price for misconduct. International conflict by means of cyber-technology is complex and dangerous, but not all action needs to be confined to the shadows.
It remains a problem for the West that the Kremlin has a stranglehold on the Russian electoral process and television news services. Western policy-makers need to show that hostile measures are aimed not at the Russian people but at their rulers and leading associates in politics, administration and big business. And although their efforts to derail Putin and United Russia were ultimately unsuccessful, much more could have been done. An appeal has to be made to the Russian people’s self-interest: most of them know something is wrong with how they are governed, and Western cable channels, internet outlets and magazines could do more to undermine the Kremlin’s manicured image of official policies, practices and privileges. They could also focus on the activities of Westerners who aid and abet the Putin team. Consultants and spokesmen for so-called oligarchs must be exposed too; likewise the lawyers and accountants who protect them. And here is a small but heartfelt piece of advice: cartoonists, instead of portraying Putin as omniscient and omnipotent, should do what they usually do to politicians – scoff at him and his malpractices. He is not and never will be the demiurge of world affairs.
Change, when it comes to Russia, will be a project for Russian hands. Putin’s image-builders have successfully disguised the fragilities of the ruling group, but street protests continue despite growing legal restrictions. Social media enables critics to argue their case and organize opposition. ‘Colour revolutions’ happened in Ukraine and Georgia earlier this century when public anger at oppression and corruption erupted, and the Kremlin leadership has been acutely sensitive to the potential for the same to happen in Russia. Although authoritarian controls have been tightened to prevent such an outcome, freedoms survive that are unimaginable in China, Saudi Arabia or North Korea. It is unclear whether Russians will be able to untie the country’s political straitjacket and compel the introduction of reforms. The current economic problems, despite having roots in official policy, have not produced a crisis of public order, so if there is to be a political volte-face in the Kremlin, it will probably require serious fissures in the leadership. This in turn means that dissension has to become open conflict, perhaps in the forthcoming struggle for the Kremlin succession. Currently this seems unlikely, but authoritarian states have in the past been particularly prone to sudden, unpredicted convulsions.
The consequence of Putin’s political cult and his dominant style of leadership is that, as the Russian people increasingly object to official policies, his personal responsibility comes under scrutiny. It is not inconceivable that his team will find it advantageous to get rid of him and then heap the blame on him for the country’s ills. Alternatively they could offer him an honourable retirement such as Yeltsin obtained from Putin.
Russian rulers have often shown a fondness for Lord Palmerston’s remark in 1848 that England [sic] had no permanent allies, only permanent interests. In Russia’s case, the position is rather bleaker. In the mid-nineteenth century, the United Kingdom had friendly allies and clients. In the 1990s the Russians came into a daunting bequest: when the Soviet Union was at its peak, it had many allies in eastern Europe, even though all of them were involuntary. Their peoples hated Russian domination and called communism a Russian plague. In all those countries, that dislike of Russia remains deeply embedded. The USSR had more willing allies in Cuba, Vietnam, parts of the Middle East and east Africa, and capitalist Russia, somewhat surprisingly, inherited some of them. Among the new states of the former Soviet Union, Ukraine was prized as a potential ally before it was subjected to war and partial conquest, but the others, except those in want of armed assistance, were wary of Russia’s embrace. In eastern and east-central Europe the bitter memory of subjugation by the Red Army and the secret police has not faded. It makes diplomacy and business infinitely more difficult for the Kremlin.
Palmerston’s words have been unduly exalted because they implied that everyone agreed on what constituted national interests. Just as the House of Commons then was regularly divided on the question, so Russia’s politicians and commentators are constantly clashing, and there are several who challenge Putin’s vision of the national destiny.
Russian liberals stuck to their argument that security and welfare would be enhanced through a smoother relationship, even a partnership, with the United States and the European Union. When Putin picked China as a partner, there was little direct public criticism. China is one of those factors that few Russian commentators choose to analyse in depth. This reticence is unhealthy and unlikely to last; the strong probability is that Putin, by exasperating Washington and relying on Beijing, made an unforced error that sooner or later will have to be corrected. He also merely promised to diversify the Russian economy and break the addiction to hydrocarbon exports, rather than actually delivering. The Opposition, from liberals through to communists, has been united in pointing out his failure. Even many supporters of the government have stressed the need for a fresh strategy to attract foreign investment and promote Russia’s small businesses and start-ups. They also want to suspend the privileges that the security services enjoy, maintaining that the state’s role in economic and social affairs must be reduced. Some add that the focus has to be widened from Moscow and St Petersburg to all regions of the Russian Federation, to give them an equal chance of prosperity.
Ultimately all Putin has done is steer the country further down a cul-de-sac. He leapt into the driver’s seat of a limousine that was already moving in that direction in economics and politics. It may frighten passers-by, but under the bonnet it is less powerful than the manual proclaims. To remain a great power, Russia also has to become an international technological power, yet while it is an impressive producer and seller of armaments, in most other sectors it consistently lags behind America, China, Japan, Germany and South Korea. Present-day Russia is still only halfway down the cul-de-sac. Its passengers – the Russian people – are as talented and lively as they always have been. There is still time to reverse.
Internationally the situation is worse than at any time since the early 1980s, and it may deteriorate further, as UN Secretary General António Guterres told his Security Council on 13 April 2018: ‘The cold war is back — with a vengeance, but with a difference. The mechanisms and the safeguards to manage the risks of escalation that existed in the past no longer seem to be present.’3 Russian leaders have expressed no fixed opinion, sometimes accusing America of having started a new cold war, at others denying that such a war has begun.4 The same, though, has been true of successive American leaderships. Words matter, because they have an impact on how we think and react, and it is important not to diminish the comprehensive conflict that consumed America and the USSR from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s, a conflict that was political, ideological, economic, social and cultural as well as military. Capitalism contested communism on a global scale. Superpower confronted superpower, each with alliances throughout the world.
The twenty-first century, however, has a number of great powers contending for authority. The current struggle involves values and prestige as well as influence and sovereignty, and today’s contest between Russia and America is a vivid example. Democracy is at least a formal condition of membership of both NATO and the European Union, but the Kremlin flatly declines to be interested in the democratic credentials of countries, political parties or social movements willing to assist Russia’s geopolitical objectives around the world; in fact, the Putin administration is openly sympathetic to rulers who suppress the freedoms of their peoples. Its basic goal is both to spread Russian influence and to shake the kaleidoscope of global politics. Putin set the theme at his Valdai conference in October 2017: ‘Creative destruction: will a new world order emerge from conflicts?’5 He was too canny to answer yes, or even admit that he aimed to destroy anything. But if one judges him by his actions, he seeks a redrawing of the rules of global politics in Russia’s favour. He knows that tension with the United States is the unavoidable result.
There are unmistakable differences, however, between the current situation and the Soviet era up until the late 1980s. Since the end of communism the Russian leadership has adopted capitalist economics. Russia now fosters religious faith. Putin and his associates know that they have too much to lose from a total rupture with the United States and the European powers. They want to continue to enjoy the products and pleasures of the West. Though satisfied with their military operations in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and engaging in another in Syria, they are not mad enough to risk the outbreak of a Third World War. Both they and the West have a vital interest in achieving security through nuclear arms reduction.
The geopolitical tension is likely to last for some years. Russian leaders are toughing it out, ruling a country with many chronic problems that they have hardly begun to solve. At New Year 2019 Putin wrote to Trump stressing that he was ‘open to dialogue’ on a broad agenda. He gave no clues as to what concessions he might put on offer or what demands he would make. Nevertheless fresh talks were certainly an urgent necessity, and it was not just the Russians who had an interest in taking them seriously. At the G20 summit in Osaka in June 2019 Trump and Putin behaved like old friends. At a joint press conference Trump wagged his finger in mirth when telling Putin not to meddle in the next American election, and Putin beamed with delight at the banter. On the summit sidelines he himself gave an extended interview to the Financial Times in which he derided the difficulties facing liberalism and its agenda around the world. He said that the West had harmed itself and other countries by promoting multiculturalism and omitting to control immigration. He traced the rise in populism in America and Europe to a refusal by Western elites to appreciate what their peoples really wanted and needed. Russians, he implied, are pleased to have a leader who understands them – and he expressed pride in the course that he has set for Russian foreign policy.
Putin’s words could be a shock only to those who had not listened to him over the years. His message has a razor’s sharpness. The Kremlin ruling group that he leads would like to receive plaudits in Russia and everywhere else but, whenever this is unforthcoming, it will settle for respect based on fear. This has been the firmly held objective ever since Putin returned to the presidency in 2012. A pattern underpins his thought and behaviour. Abroad he is a forceful disrupter, at home a forceful stabilizer. He has done little to settle the global atmosphere and much to render it more volatile, and Russia itself has fallen further and further into the shadows of unfreedom. It is a depressing situation. Not all the lights, however, have gone out and total pessimism is not yet called for. Change is still possible both in Russia and in world politics, even in the depths of a Kremlin winter.