I referred earlier to the torment the Russian people and the elite suffered from their breaking with familiar habits. That same point fully applies to foreign policy. From the moment the USSR ended, many of those engaged in the foreign policy arena in Russia suffered likewise and experienced a total break similar to an inveterate narcotics addict going cold turkey. The Soviet imperial monster disintegrated into fifteen states, but several, to be sure, did not fundamentally change as a result of this collapse, at least not in their outlook.
One might think that after the end of the Cold War it would be possible to breathe a sigh of relief on both sides of the Iron Curtain that until recently had divided Europe. But that’s not how it was. The death agony of what had seemed to be the unshakable foundations of the world order occurred at an excruciating pace. The reason was simple: the changes were so profound that they occurred only with difficulty. Unless one grasped the actual changes in the situation, this new reality clashed with prior conceptions of what it would be like, a state of affairs that could engender the most serious consequences. Moscow’s corridors of power continued to echo with laments that “earlier they respected and feared us, but now they do not.” Many officials were literally tormented by nostalgia for the Cold War, for saber rattling. The withdrawal symptoms from the phantoms of greatness and power led to the revival of an aggressive Russian foreign policy and to a new Russian imperialism.
I realized the gravity of the situation while I was still in the diplomatic service and when the Soviet empire had barely exited the stage of history. From the swivel chair of the chief of the Foreign Ministry’s department responsible for human rights, cultural, and humanitarian questions that I temporarily occupied while the chief was on another assignment, and after his return when I worked as the deputy chief, I witnessed the beginning of extremely strange developments. Paradoxically, in essence the breakup of the USSR was marked by the rise of revanchist moods within the Russian political elite. These moods were particularly evident with respect to the Baltic states and Georgia, which did not join the Commonwealth of Independent States, Russia’s stillborn ersatz imperium in the post-Soviet era.
Regrettably, the history of Soviet international relations and foreign policy is often ignored in analyzing what occurred after the collapse of the USSR. However, it is precisely that history, reflected in the distorting mirrors of those Kremlin offices engaged in formulating and implementing Moscow’s foreign policy, that plays such a vital role in their decision-making procedures. Therefore, let us briefly review the sources of post-Soviet foreign policy, those very same sources over which Russian reactionaries of every stripe wax nostalgic.
The foundation of post-Soviet revanchism is the indisputable fact that the USSR lost the Cold War. The cornerstones of the world order that existed from 1945 to 1992 were set in place by World War II’s victorious powers during the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences. Let us review the basic features of the postwar world that were determined by the decisions made at these conferences.
The first divided Europe into spheres of influence for the USSR and its Western allies in the anti-Hitler coalition. The USSR received the opportunity to colonize the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria entered the Soviet empire. Initially, it also included Albania. To them may be added Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which were annexed by the USSR in 1940 in line with the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Naturally, a personal factor played a significant role, since the achievement of these territorial acquisitions was directly linked to Stalin. Thus, the words postwar world order and the Yalta-Potsdam system of international relations are euphemisms for the Stalinist model.
The second vital feature of the Yalta-Potsdam system was that the victorious powers in the Second World War monopolized what might be called the right to truth in international affairs. This was expressed most clearly in the UN Charter, which secured the position of the United Kingdom, China, the USSR, the United States, and France as permanent members of the UN Security Council with the power of veto. Subsequently, the special role of these countries was reaffirmed when international law permitted only these five nations to possess nuclear weapons and their means of delivery.
Third, the Yalta-Potsdam system was characterized by a global confrontation between the USSR on the one side and the United States and other Western countries on the other. The fundamental struggle between the USSR and the West took place in Europe. In organizational terms the creation of the Warsaw Pact and NATO marked the division of Europe into two opposing blocs. There also developed a face-off between the two blocs in other regions of the world, sometimes leading to direct clashes involving military force.
Overall the Yalta-Potsdam system of international relations was marked by confrontation, the hegemony of ideology, and a neocolonial relationship between the USSR and the countries within its sphere of influence. Naturally, such a model could not long endure.
When Gorbachev came to power, the USSR was politically, economically, socially, and ideologically bankrupt. Nevertheless, it continued the full-scale confrontation with the West that was draining its last ounces of strength. Although Gorbachev may not have been fully conscious of just what he was doing, in reality dismantling the Yalta-Potsdam system was one of the foundations of his foreign policy and signified a complete break with Stalinism not only domestically but in international affairs as well. It must be borne in mind that the Yalta-Potsdam system, like any other forceful division of the world, could exist only under certain historical conditions and, thus, had objectively determined temporal limits.
Until the last moment, many Russian liberals, politicians, diplomats, and scholars refused to acknowledge that the USSR had lost the Cold War. There was a certain logic to this refusal. Under Gorbachev the USSR itself had renounced the Cold War; it had gotten over the Cold War itself. The liberals did not taste the bitterness of the vanquished; rather, they felt the pride of the victors. The reactionaries, for their part, asserted that the Cold War had been lost exclusively due to the policies of Gorbachev, Shevardnadze, and Yakovlev; the treachery of mythical “influential agents”; and other such absurdities.
The Russian public was inclined to identify the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War with the fall of the Berlin Wall, a simple and obvious symbol. In fact, the Soviet Union’s defeat in the Cold War had occurred long before the start of Gorbachev’s perestroika. The pre-Gorbachev Soviet leaders, unable from the outset to understand in time that their foreign policy would inevitably fail and, later, to recognize that it already had failed, repeated the eternal mistake of having generals preparing to fight the last war. By hewing to a policy of isolation from the outside world and confrontation with the West, they accelerated the USSR’s economic decline. Meanwhile, efforts to increase its military potential did not lead to strengthening but to undermining Soviet security. Such, for example, was the case with the development of the SS-20 missiles, which the United States responded to by stationing highly accurate Pershing and guided missiles in Western Europe. The Soviet economy did not survive the arms race. Orienting Soviet science and production toward military ends came at the cost of constantly growing scientific and technological backwardness in all other areas. A situation in which minerals were the chief export and grain the main import, while the economy was primarily directed toward satisfying constantly growing military demands, inevitably led toward catastrophe.
Some Soviet leaders realized that victory in a full-scale war was impossible, while the liberals among them grasped the ruinous character of existing Soviet foreign and domestic policy. This had made it possible for Moscow to accept the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (1973–75) that asserted the willingness of the USSR and its allies to cooperate in the sphere of human rights and humanitarian affairs. Despite the marked reluctance of the Soviet leadership to fulfill the obligations it had assumed, that the Soviet Union signed the Final Act signaled the possibility of altering the country’s human rights policies.1 Consequently, this objectively contributed to the erosion of the ideological foundations of the Yalta-Potsdam system. The final chord in the funeral march about the greatness of the USSR was its aggression against Afghanistan in 1979.
Grasping the catastrophic situation, soon after he came to power, Gorbachev determined to jettison the very foundations of Soviet foreign policy—the Leninist “class approach” to international relations. Such an approach had entailed the confrontation with the West, the arms race, and the pursuit of security primarily through military means, as well as ideological warfare and a policy of colonialism. Gorbachev’s new direction led to both anticipated and unanticipated results.
Among the anticipated results was the end of ideological warfare, the termination of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the disappearance of the threat of all-out nuclear war, the end of the arms race, the provision of freedom of choice to the countries of Eastern Europe, and, finally, the end of the Cold War. The Velvet Revolution of 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the unification of Germany essentially spelled the end of the Yalta-Potsdam system dividing the world and, therefore, constituted the first steps in eliminating the Stalinist model of international relations.
However, such major changes inevitably brought about some unplanned results, although in part they were quite predictable. First was the voluntary dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (known as Comecon), which had been the foundation, respectively, of military cooperation and economic cooperation between the USSR and the East European countries. The withdrawal of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia from the USSR was a natural result, although it was unanticipated for some reason by the Soviet leadership. Of course, the major unanticipated consequence of perestroika was the collapse of the USSR.2
Naturally, it would have been easy for Gorbachev to continue the policies of his predecessors. Both the Soviet Union’s “allies” and the West would have accepted that as a matter of course. According to the logic of the Cold War, international tension would have increased. Significantly greater upheavals than those that resulted from the fall of the USSR would inevitably have occurred at the international and domestic levels.
Although Gorbachev’s change of course in Soviet foreign policy was objectively necessary, the overwhelming majority of the Soviet leadership, foreign affairs specialists, and the politically active part of the population did not see it that way. After all, Moscow retained the instruments needed to continue its diktat vis-à-vis the states of Eastern and Central Europe and the “socialist-oriented” developing countries elsewhere. The illusions regarding the military-political and economic potential of the USSR remained in place. Thus, Gorbachev’s decision to provide freedom of choice to the “people’s democracies,” to employ the terminology of that time, was voluntary. It would be unfair to underestimate the intellectual and moral feat that Gorbachev and his associates accomplished.
The collapse of the Soviet empire created an opportunity for the further, profound transformation of Russia, of its foreign policy, and, consequently, of the entire system of international relations. However, this did not happen. The imprint of the Yalta-Potsdam system was too deeply embedded in the consciousness of Russian politicians, who were too accustomed to living by the old rules and to perceiving Russia as a besieged fortress. If it seemed from the sidelines that Russian foreign policy was evolving in a more commonsense direction, then something very different was visible from the inside—that is, the influence on Russian diplomacy of subjective and objective as well as external factors.
Subjective factors are listed first since they played the determining role in Yeltsin’s foreign policy. He took power completely unprepared in the foreign policy arena, and he did not even understand the consequences of the Belovezhe Accords, which dissolved the USSR and established the CIS, that he himself signed. As was evident from the outset, Yeltsin surrounded himself with a weak team dominated by reactionaries. Naturally, there was a struggle between the reactionaries and the liberals within his retinue. Yeltsin often found the old, pre-perestroika approaches more congenial because he could understand them more easily.
The members of the political elite either did not want, or were unable, to come to terms with the relative weakening of the country’s foreign policy potential compared to the period prior to 1992, the loss of familiar allies and the Soviet sphere of influence in Europe and beyond, and the illusory nature of the Commonwealth of Independent States. They felt keenly Russia’s loss of status in the international arena. Their discomfort was exacerbated by changes in the agreements for guaranteeing international security that they were unable to control.
The fact of the matter was that the multilateral arrangements for guaranteeing international security that Russia had entered into had lost much of their efficacy. The world situation had fundamentally changed, and the international organizations created during the Cold War were either unable or unwilling to adapt to the new conditions. Conflicts, particularly in the former Yugoslavia and on the territory of the Commonwealth of Independent States, starkly demonstrated the complete incapacity of existing international law and multilateral international organizations to respond adequately to situations of that kind.
Despite its democratic facade, the United Nations was one of the basic components of the Yalta-Potsdam system. While proclaiming that the General Assembly was its highest organ, the founders of the organization gave real power to the Security Council, whose permanent members were the victorious states in the Second World War and had the right of veto, and this arrangement predetermined its ineffectiveness. The General Assembly became an ideological arena that decided nothing; the work of the UN was blocked by the conflicting interests of its members.
As for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)—known as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe up to 1994—it played an important role in reducing the level of confrontation during the Cold War. But in its present guise, the OSCE has fulfilled its mission and has exhausted the resources invested in it at the time it was established. In this situation, NATO, which possesses the necessary means, including powerful military forces, to resolve problems confronting it, then acquired a key role. Naturally, NATO became the main attraction for the former allies of the USSR, now freed from Soviet domination, in keeping with their national interests and historical experience.
But I cannot fail to mention Moscow’s response to the expansion of the European Union: it was viewed as the next threat to Russia’s national security. The Kremlin and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs seriously believed that the expansion of the EU would lead to Russia’s being in opposition to a unified European stance on a wide range of international issues. In this connection, Russian officials and observers emphasized various “NATO-centrist tendencies” that were supposedly capable of seriously weakening Russian diplomatic positions. Russian thinkers were simply unable to understand that the United States was the natural ally of the EU. Moscow was seriously disturbed that Russia had only an insignificant share of EU foreign trade and that the European Union could supposedly apply pressure on Russia at virtually no cost.
The populism of Yeltsin and the opposition compounded these mistakes given their professional incompetence. They failed to understand and come to terms with the new situation in which Russia found itself. From the outset the incompetence of Russian foreign policy, beginning in 1992, landed the country on the sidelines of international relations.
The inutility of the Belovezhe Accords of 1991, the precipitous collapse of the USSR, the inattention to foreign policy issues, and the lack of qualifications of Yeltsin’s advisers—all played a significant role in ensuring that for a long time Moscow was basically focused on problems of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Problems of the post-bipolar world order entirely escaped the view of the Kremlin and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Yet despite its frequent inconsistency, in the initial post-Soviet period, as far as possible Moscow pursued a course oriented toward democratic values through the efforts of Andrei Kozyrev, the first foreign minister of the Russian Federation, and his rather small number of liberal professionals. In reality, however, this was merely the semblance of a democratically oriented policy that, therefore, discredited itself. There was actually no such policy. To the extremely weak professional credentials of Yeltsin’s team in the sphere of international affairs must be added Yeltsin’s superficial understanding of democratic values; perhaps it was unsurprising for one who until recently had been a communist big shot. Instead of devising an intelligent foreign policy aimed at securing Russia’s long-term interests both at home and abroad, Moscow made a partial move toward several Western countries while simultaneously denying that the very essence of Serbian president Milošević’s politics was antidemocratic. Russia’s support of the dictatorial regimes of Milošević in Serbia, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus clearly illustrated this. Kozyrev made concessions to the reactionary parliament in order not to further complicate Yeltsin’s position in the sharp domestic political struggle. The result, as previously noted, was that foreign policy was reduced to a matter of small change whose value regularly diminished. What seemed at the time to be merely tactical concessions smoothed the path for Russia’s slide toward revanchism and new confrontations both with its neighboring post-Soviet states and with the West.
The situation fundamentally changed when Russia’s diplomacy was headed by the revanchist Yevgeny Primakov, who succeeded, with startling rapidity, in turning Russians against the West and especially against NATO and in broadly instilling in them anti-Western sentiments. Russia’s foreign policy acquired an unmistakably anti-Western cast. Kozyrev’s concessions to the reactionaries were now transformed into a consistent policy. Russia’s opportunity to achieve democracy was irretrievably lost. For a short time, its politics had changed direction, but under Yeltsin they remained essentially Bolshevik. Nevertheless, despite Yeltsin’s fecklessness with regard to international affairs, during his presidency he managed to partially neutralize the intrigues of the hawks.
The difficulties Russian foreign policy encountered during that period were caused not only by domestic political haggling and dilettantism but also by the objective situation. Russia’s economic and social problems were relegated to the back burner during the struggle for power between Yeltsin and the opposition. With an economy still dominated by the state, weakened by the arms race, focused on military and ideological security rather than on common sense, and engaged in an absurd degree of paternalism toward a population accustomed to being treated that way, Russia seemed ungovernable either because that is what the rulers desired or because of their inability to think straight. One of the inevitable consequences of the Belovezhe Accords was that Russian industry faced a crisis given that the economic specialization of various Soviet regions had resulted in the mutual economic interdependence of the former Soviet republics. The only existing, if poorly functioning, economic mechanism had been thoughtlessly destroyed, with all sorts of pernicious consequences.
These factors contributed to a lack of vision on the part of Russia’s leadership regarding foreign policy interests and objectives, to diplomatic inconsistency and aimless blundering during Yeltsin’s presidency, and, in the following period, to the cultivation domestically of fertile soil for what seemed almost a natural return to imperialism. The sum total of these deficiencies significantly facilitated the carnival trick of propagating the thesis about Russia’s loss of its role as a superpower and the further weakening of its international position.
The intellectual sluggishness of Moscow’s top leaders engendered an almost constant deterioration in Russia’s foreign policy positions. Russia’s leaders and diplomats stubbornly failed to take note of the changes occurring around them. While the European Union was opening its borders among its member countries, shifting to a single currency, taking measures to work out a unified foreign policy, and ensuring its security, Russian foreign policy was convulsively clinging to the inexorably vanishing shades of the past. The profound transformation taking place in the world order was passing it by.
To be fair, not only Moscow but also Washington and other capitals failed to recognize the new political realities. Instead of taking advantage of the end of the Cold War to bring about a fundamental and widely acceptable restructuring of the world, the United States, as if on auto pilot, continued to assert its own unilateral leadership in world affairs. Several West European leaders also failed to act in the common good. These factors virtually guaranteed the emergence of a new Russian revanchism founded on the Big Lie, whose roots reach deep into history and psychology. This multilayered and diverse but holistic lie constitutes the foundation for the worldview of a large number of Russians and their rulers. The heart of this lie is the belief that the regime founded by Lenin and Stalin was a great and glorious empire. This view ignores both the criminality of those who created and maintained this regime and the fact that the USSR was driven to extinction by its own sins and mistakes as well by the defects of its intellectual and moral development. Given this delusion, the USSR’s imperial policy, its confrontation with the West, and the Cold War are extolled. Moreover, as I have already noted, ever since the demise of the USSR, a core article of faith of Russia’s hawks is the contention that the Soviet Union collapsed as the result of its democratic reforms.
Russian revanchism also feeds upon the absurd theory that the USSR ceased to exist as a result of the policies of Western countries. This theory brings to mind the concept familiar to psychiatrists about a lack of critical self-awareness. Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of Russian history knows the theory is wrong. Of their own accord, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia signed the decision to terminate the USSR. That decision was instantaneously and almost unanimously ratified by the parliaments of what had been three constituent Soviet republics.
Russian revanchism is rooted in incompetence and fabrications that are entirely divorced from reality. At its foundation is an assertion equating a country’s greatness with its military might and the consequent fear and confrontation. Another component is the capacity to hold one’s own and other peoples in slavery.
After Putin came to power, the hitherto contradictory character and inconsistency of Russian foreign policy were replaced by a pronounced anti-Western thrust. A return to the epoch of the Cold War was clearly observable. Russia emphasized its relations with China, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and Iraq even as significant cooling occurred in relations with Western Europe and the United States. The aforementioned scandal involving Edmund Pope, who was accused of espionage and then freed by Putin, was a well-understood signal.3 Another indicator of Moscow’s mood was that Azerbaijan occupied one of the privileged positions in the Commonwealth of Independent States. It was headed by the former KGB chief of the republic Gaidar Aliev, a shady and odious character even in Soviet times. In the conflict in Moscow’s corridors of power, the Slavophiles, or nativists, who stood for savagery and lawlessness, triumphed unconditionally over the Westernizers, as partisans of universal values were called in Russia. As a staff member of the Russian Security Council, I saw clearly that inveterate but cunning and hypocritical reactionaries had come to power.
Meanwhile, the new autocrat was only just hitting his stride. His visit to Havana in December 2000, and other openly anti-American and anti-Western acts, did not produce the desired result. Relations with the West deteriorated sharply but yielded nothing in return. This tough pragmatist, brought up in the KGB, faced a dilemma. Should he continue and further develop his neo-Stalinist convictions, or should he try to extract the maximum benefit from his position as the leader of the largest, and one of the best-endowed, countries in the contemporary world? It was not an easy choice, but nothing is impossible for unprincipled, cynical politicians. Initially he could pose with the leaders of the democratic world as if he were “one of them,” and later he could execute a 180-degree turn.
In his effort to appear as one of them, nothing could have been more timely for Putin than the 9/11 tragedy in the United States. If it had not occurred, Putin would have had to invent something like it. This tragedy became the turning point in Russia’s relations with the West and served as justification for present and future outrages in Chechnya and other post-Soviet territories. Moscow wagered everything in its diplomatic game on the card of joint struggle against international terrorism, a bet that succeeded with the help of President George W. Bush at the EU-Russia summit in Brussels in 2001.
After establishing the vertical of power, seizing control of the minds of Russians, and utilizing the torrent of petrodollars, Putin employed a broad range of means and created opportunities to confront Western and other countries he disliked. Such conduct was typical of the Cold War. Russia began using energy blackmail and invoked terrorist acts carried out by others as levers to pressure other countries—in particular, Georgia—as well as engaging in provocations and demonstrations of force against individual members of NATO and their armed forces. Moscow had not engaged in such behavior since before Gorbachev took power. Meanwhile, inside Russia a mood of xenophobic hysteria gathered strength.
Putin, the KGB protégé, eliminated all moral, ideological, and political constraints in his rigid confrontation with the West. This had been impossible under Yeltsin, partly because of the collapse of Russia’s economy and military establishment. Putin himself was lucky, for he inherited the country’s reins on the threshold of its emergence from financial crisis.
A distinctive intellectual and ideological mustiness emanated from almost all of the papers and resolutions addressed to the new president. Putin never concealed his negative view of the West or of democracy. He made his position crystal clear even while making buffoonish bows in the direction of Western politicians who were satisfied with his performance. From the moment Putin came to power, although he was still restricted by his prime minister, Russia again began ratcheting up international tension. Yet when Putin began confronting the West, an indispensable component of a full-scale Cold War was lacking—that is, the existence of comparable capabilities on the opposing sides that makes the outcome of the contest as a whole, as well as any particular episode within it, impossible to predict.
There are other key differences between Putin’s confrontation with the West and those of the Cold War decades. First is that the Cold War developed at a time when the USSR and the Western countries had clearly divided Europe into their respective spheres of influence. Their struggle was often in the form of conflicts that usually did not involve direct confrontation; rather, they occurred at the periphery. Now, after losing its allies among the developing countries, Russia no longer possessed what might be called its strategic depth in confrontation with the West. Nevertheless, Moscow declared that the post-Soviet republics constituted its sphere of vital interests and asserted its right to order them about. It thereby assumed the role of a regional power.
There is an additional, perhaps decisive, difference. From the Cuban missile crisis to the end of the Cold War, nuclear restraint was the bedrock foundation of the Cold War. After 1992 it seemed partially to have lost its efficacy. A paradoxical situation developed. In terms of military potential, Russia could not really depend on anything but nuclear weapons. At the same time, Russia was certain that Western and other nuclear powers would never use their nuclear weapons against it. In effect the policy of restraint turned into a one-way street that provided Moscow assurance that it could engage in adventurism with impunity.
Another important element to consider is the indisputable fact that the Russian pseudo elite keeps its capital in Western banks, in real estate, and in other forms of property. This not only makes the Russian elite very vulnerable and cautious but also inspires hope that Moscow will not cross the extremely dangerous line that it has drawn.
By 2004 the signs of Moscow’s return to Cold War policies were visible even to the naked eye. Unprejudiced observers clearly observed the symptoms even prior to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Moscow’s complaints that the OSCE was too concerned about human rights—as it was bound to be in accordance with the Final Act signed during the Cold War—is a striking example of this. Something that even Brezhnev had swallowed ceased being palatable under Yeltsin, to say nothing of Putin’s distaste.
The motivation for Russia’s confrontational policy is very simple: it is nostalgia for a phantom of past greatness. Unfortunately, not only the public but also the overwhelming majority of the political elite associate this supposed greatness with the Cold War, saber rattling, and the “monolithic unity of society.” They are blind to the fact that precisely this pseudo greatness, consisting of a militarily powerful and economically underdeveloped country, was what brought the Soviet Union to ruin. The Russian authorities’ distorted understanding of national greatness and well-being, shared by an easily swayed public, psychologically serves the purpose of revanchism and a one-sided revival of the Cold War.
Another equally important factor is that the Kremlin needs an alibi to divest itself of responsibility for the existing socioeconomic and political situation in Russia. For a rather long time, Yeltsin’s, and then Putin’s, “escape route” from domestic and foreign policy problems was to manipulate references to an “internal enemy.” Initially it was the struggle against the “red-brown threat”—the communist-fascist threat—that gave Yeltsin a free pass with the West; then it was the struggle against the oligarchs and Chechen terrorism, which Moscow neatly transformed into “international” terrorism.
The Kremlin also benefited from ratcheting up tension with the West. Inducing a state of public hysteria made it easy to manipulate the Russian people. The revanchists succeeded in doing this from the outset, and this hysteria became one of the foundations of Putin’s domestic policy from the moment he came to power.
Putin’s anti-Western proclivities and aggressiveness grew in well-cultivated soil. As far as I could judge from my office in Moscow and from Russian representatives at European meetings in Brussels, for a long time Western colleagues did not reject Putin’s policies, especially since he invoked familiar causes to justify his tough policies at home and abroad. For example, Putin effectively turned to his advantage the tragedy of the hostage taking on September 1, 2004, in Beslan and characterized it as “an attack on our country.” He used it both to ratchet up tension inside Russia and in international affairs and to launch a further assault on democracy. “We are dealing,” he declared, “with the direct intervention of foreign terrorism against Russia. With total, brutal, and full-scale war.”
I was just then leaving the diplomatic service and knew very well that although there was not the slightest foundation for such statements, a critical turning point had occurred in Russia’s foreign and domestic policy. Nor was there any doubt that this turning point had been prepared in advance. By then a real or imaginary remilitarization of Russia was under way, and Russia publicly proclaimed itself a revanchist country; however, these declarations made no impression upon the West. Although the Kremlin and the Foreign Ministry were doing almost everything possible to increase tension with the West, for some reason the West was giving Moscow a free pass.
Putin’s message to the Council of the Russian Federation Assembly on May 10, 2006, contained an open proclamation of confrontation with the West. “The main lesson of the Great Patriotic War is the need to maintain the battle readiness of the Armed Forces,” the president pronounced. But Russia, it seemed, was spending very little on this. Putin formulated very clearly the meaning of his foreign and defense policies: “We must make our house . . . sturdy, reliable, because we can see what is going on in the world. . . . As the saying goes, ‘Comrade Wolf knows whom to eat.’ He eats, but listens to no one. And, it’s clear, he has no intention of listening.” (“Comrade Wolf” is a pure Stalinist expression. Although the United States was not named directly, it was perfectly clear the United States was the country he had in mind.) Putin then asked bombastically, “What’s all this fuss about the need to struggle for human rights and democracy when what’s really important is to achieve our own interests? Here, it seems, everything is possible, and there are no limits whatsoever.” To stand up to Comrade Wolf and other foes, according to Putin, “present-day Russia needs an army possessing all the means to respond adequately to current threats. We must have Armed Forces capable of simultaneously fighting in global, regional, and, if necessary, in several local conflicts.”4 In essence he asserted that Russia should be prepared to take on the whole world at the same time. This message might be called the doctrine of an unlimited number of wars. Due attention has not been paid to it.
No wonder. Nothing like it was possible since the Cold War; moreover, even communist leaders such as Brezhnev, Chernenko, and Andropov did not speak like that. This message was also a barely disguised declaration of a willingness to return to the bad times of confrontation between Russia and the West.
The most obvious sign of Russia’s return to Cold War policies was Putin’s signature in July 2007 on a decree announcing Russia’s withdrawal from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) and the associated international agreements. This treaty had been signed in Paris in 1990 and adapted to new conditions in 1999 at a summit of the OSCE in Istanbul. It restricted the number of tanks, armored vehicles, large-caliber artillery, warplanes, and helicopters. Putin cynically justified his decision by arguing that the modified treaty had been ratified only by Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. The other countries had weighty reasons for not ratifying the modified treaty since Russia had not implemented the original treaty, having failed to withdraw its troops from the territory of Georgia (about which more follows) and Moldova. They refused to ratify the CFE, and naturally, the NATO countries expressed solidarity with them. The West’s refusal to fast-track ratification of the agreement to modify the CFE served as Moscow’s main argument. Withdrawal from the CFE was a rather infantile reaction to the changing relationship of forces in Europe following the demise of the USSR and the diminution of Moscow’s power in world and European affairs. Moscow was irritated by the expansion of NATO, which then supposedly significantly exceeded the quantitative limits on weapons established by the treaty. This was a phony argument as the modified CFE calculated weapons not according to military-political alliances, as previously, but according to each separate member state. Moscow refused to accept the U.S. intention to station “essential military forces” at bases in the former Soviet colonies of Bulgaria and Romania, which had joined NATO. Russia added that Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia had not participated in the modified CFE.
Another chronic, acute disarmament problem was the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, signed by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1972, that provided one of the main foundations of strategic stability. After the Republicans came to power in 2001, Washington declared its intention to withdraw from this treaty, calling it obsolete. At the end of 2001 the United States officially announced its withdrawal from the treaty, which lapsed in the summer of 2002. In December Washington began to create a national ABM system. Moscow viewed Washington’s actions as intentionally aimed against Russia, ignoring the fact that nuclear missile weapons had proliferated to additional countries since the treaty had been signed thirty years earlier. Russia was especially perturbed by the U.S. intention to deploy elements of the ABM system in Europe. The Kremlin declared that if the American ABM system was implemented, then Moscow would prepare an “asymmetrical response.” This streamlined formula masked the utter mental vacuity of Russia’s politicians and military on this question. The asymmetrical Russian reaction was taken to the point that, in the words of Lt. Gen. Vladimir Popovkin, commander of the space forces, the Russians were studying the question of placing on Russian Embassy grounds in various countries radio-location surveillance stations to monitor outer space. Popovkin asserted that this would enable them to pinpoint the launch point of missiles that could not be seen from Russian territory and to target the Russian ABMs on them. Rattling its weapons, Moscow publicly announced its intention of targeting its missiles on countries that agreed to take part in implementing the Americans’ plans.
Some countries are fortunate. Russia, for example, is extremely fortunate to possess an abundance of useful minerals, especially oil and gas; a large population; and a favorable geographical location. Yet combined with the mentality of the vertical of power that emerged right after the Bolshevik coup of 1917, these natural riches, a veritable “gift of the gods,” turned into a curse.
During Putin’s first term, a flood of petrodollars inundated Russia. Unfortunately, the authorities were absolutely irresponsible with regard to this bonanza. Obviously, the funds should have been invested in modernizing the country, above all in revitalizing the collapsing economy, in diversifying it, in improving the catastrophic social safety net—in sum, in what Alexander Solzhenitsyn called “preserving the nation.” Instead, Russia became merely a supplier of energy and other useful minerals to other countries. Russia’s rulers were pumping Russia’s natural resources abroad, like a primitive pump, and were unable even to consider the possibility of using the revenues to address long-festering internal problems.
But it was not simply that nothing was done. Paradoxically, the increase in revenues even worsened the situation in Russia. The aggressiveness of the hawks, until then restrained by their penury, was unleashed by the influx of petrodollars, which facilitated the remilitarization of the country or, more accurately, enabled the hawks to flex the remnants of their atrophied military muscles. (Moreover, given the universal corruption, the funds allocated to this sector could be used for purposes other than those intended and, with varying degrees of cynicism, diverted into the pockets of those in power.) In addition, the rise in oil and gas prices stimulated a division of property that made free enterprise in Russia completely impossible. Finally, the rulers in Moscow now had additional opportunities to blackmail Western and post-Soviet countries that the Kremlin disliked and had a heightened interest in doing so. Putin immediately placed his bets on gas as Russia’s main instrument in international politics, for the post-Soviet states depend upon Russian liquid fuel for 60–80 percent of their needs. Moreover, Russia supplies about 25 percent of the EU’s needs.
The year 2006 could have been a banner year for Russian diplomacy as for the first time Russia was chairing the Group of Eight (G8). And though 2006 did become such a year, Russian politicians and Russian businesspersons, who by this time had become synonymous, began to saw off the branch on which they were sitting. On January 1, Russia cut off supplies of natural gas to Ukraine and reduced the amount of fuel it was pumping into the European pipeline system. Thus, from the very beginning of its chairmanship of the G8, Russia did everything possible to ensure its failure in that role and to undermine the trust that is the basis of political and economic cooperation. By this action Russia was seeking to punish Yushchenko’s Ukrainian government, which it disliked, and to intimidate the West or, at least, to keep it on starvation rations. Moscow also wanted to gain control of Ukraine’s gas pipeline system by obtaining for Russia’s own Gazprom a 51 percent share of the company that operated it. Starting with this conflict, the Putinocracy probably took a final decision to construct a vertical of power in its relations with adjacent countries. It would be able “to rise from its knees” again by administering blows to Georgia and Ukraine and by emphasizing Western Europe’s dependency on Russian gas and, consequently, on the Kremlin’s beneficence.
Russia inherited from the USSR not only gas, oil, and other useful minerals but also an enormous, collapsing military establishment that resisted essential reforms. It exhibited all of the defects that had proved fatal to the Soviet empire, including stereotypical modes of thinking and an acute inferiority complex, as well as old and newly acquired weaknesses. The enormous size of Russia’s military establishment greatly increased the likelihood of its being deployed, and that is precisely what happened: first in Chechnya, then in Georgia, and most recently in eastern Ukraine.
An obvious stimulus for hardening Moscow’s policy toward the post-Soviet republics were the “color revolutions.” But if, as a result of the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003, one leader whom Putin disliked was replaced by another whom he liked no better, then it was quite another thing with regard to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine the next year; that really frightened him. Moscow asserted that the Orange Revolution was a Western, basically American, creation that had been engineered by Western-financed NGOs.
The Kremlin had decided to bet on its favorite, the incumbent, acting Ukrainian prime minister Viktor Yanukovich. No one in the Kremlin realized that openly supporting one of the candidates on the eve of the elections would be seen as anything other than gross intervention into the domestic affairs of a sovereign nation. But that wasn’t enough. The Kremlin launched a campaign against presidential candidates Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Timoshenko, apparently blithely ignoring the high probability that they would wind up as the leaders of Ukraine.
Of course, many governments try, with varying success, to exert influence not only on foreign governments but also on foreign public opinion, including with respect to elections. However, they try to act without publicity so as not to spoil relations with other candidates. Moscow did everything crudely and openly.
As noted earlier, Russian diplomacy ceased being a science and an art, the application of mind and tact. None of these components could be observed in the Kremlin, in the Russian government, in the Foreign Ministry, or in Russia’s overseas embassies. The leaders and officials stopped trying to identify and study problems of international relations and to look for possible, mutually beneficial solutions. Instead, they endlessly repeated the same prefabricated positions without any preliminary probing or even genuine, deep analysis. These positions, moreover, were hastily slapped together when it was already too late to do anything.
After Yushchenko’s victory, Moscow’s irritation with Ukraine, and toward him personally, escalated. Yushchenko did not hide his sympathies with Georgia. His effort to free Ukraine from the obtrusive and menacing presence of Russia’s Black Sea fleet in Crimea and to place limits on its activities and his desire for Ukraine to join NATO infuriated Moscow.
Russian diplomacy actively and cynically exploits the existence of so-called overseas compatriots and the Russian-speaking population of post-Soviet republics to pursue its foreign policy objectives. This conjures up distressing allusions to the transfer to Hitler’s Germany of the Sudeten district of Czechoslovakia on the supposed grounds that the Czechoslovak authorities were constantly violating the rights of the solid bloc of ethnic Germans living there. The project of employing “overseas compatriots” for geopolitical objectives began almost immediately after the breakup of the USSR when the Russian Foreign Ministry, acting on orders from on high, raised the question of defending Russian-speaking populations in post-Soviet states. Here I must emphasize the international legal and political impropriety of posing the question, not as a matter of protecting Russian citizens, but as one of protecting “Russian-speaking” persons and “ethnic Russians.” This was particularly strange since the Russian authorities were unwilling to offer Russian citizenship to those they were supposedly defending. Moreover, Moscow did not pursue routine diplomatic work to secure human rights in post-Soviet countries. Instead, it engaged in patently ineffective, provocative, loud-mouthed démarches. Thus, from the beginning, the defense of compatriots abroad was marked by virtually undisguised double standards and blatant hypocrisy.
Yet there really were human rights problems in post-Soviet countries. According to estimates used by the Russian authorities, more than twenty million Russian compatriots were living in the post-Soviet states.5 Moscow asserted that in the majority of post-Soviet states, with the exception of Belarus—despite their formal proclamation of the equality of citizens irrespective of ethnicity, faith, and language—ethnic Russians were inadequately represented in the organs of power at all levels. By this statement Moscow, in effect, made perfectly clear that its main concern was power.
Veiled discrimination existing in the sphere of work and employment and limitations on rights in the fields of education, culture, and language took a variety of forms. The problem was that these Russian-speaking former citizens of the USSR, who had remained in place after the collapse of the Soviet Union and had done nothing to provoke hostility, had suddenly come to be viewed as a dubious and undesirable element even though Russian remained one of the official languages in these former Soviet republics. Naturally, elementary courtesy requires at least a modest knowledge of the national language of the country in which those who speak another official, but non-native, language are living. In Soviet times, however, this was not encouraged. On the contrary, attempts were made to suppress the national languages in favor of Russian. This effort was accompanied by a deliberate policy of settling Russians in the union republics, often at the initiative of the local authorities.
It was natural for the new authorities to take every possible advantage of a situation where the former Soviet republics were acquiring sovereignty. Among the steps they took were establishing their national languages as the official languages; sharply constricting Russian-language cultural, informational, and educational spaces; and squeezing the Russian language out of official records and daily use. These actions were consistent with the introduction of the languages of the indigenous-majority peoples as the official languages. For example, the language problem and the policy of compulsory “Kazakhification” were some of the main reasons for the exodus of Russian speakers from Kazakhstan that was dubbed the Great Flight. (Over two million Russians left Kazakhstan after its independence.)
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the process of reducing the Russian component from the cultural life of Ukraine had led to a decline in the number of Russian theaters from forty to nine, the removal of Russian cultural monuments, and the renaming of Russian street names. In Russian-speaking Kiev, the number of schools teaching in the Russian language was reduced by a factor of ten. In the Ternopol, Rovno, and Kiev regions, Russian-language schools were closed, and only three remained open in eight other regions.
In Latvia and Estonia, which the USSR annexed in 1940 as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the situation was exacerbated by mass deprivation of citizenship. Moscow rejected the option of bringing these problems up directly with the member states of the CIS, fearing, in the language of the Russian Foreign Ministry, their “unhealthy and sometimes even inadequate reaction.” It chose to pursue “quiet diplomacy” (as it was referred to in Foreign Ministry documents), but that turned out to be quite ineffective in this case. Meanwhile, Moscow “took everything out on Latvia and Estonia.” This occurred because of the orientation of the Baltic states, which joined NATO and the European Union. However, even here Moscow’s words—even the harshest words—were not backed up by any measures aimed at actually supporting the ethnic Russians. Clearly they were merely being used as a political card.
Russians in the Baltic states repeatedly asked the ministry (including me, personally) not to defend them since such expressions of “concern” only made things worse for them. But the Kremlin and the Foreign Ministry ignored these requests. Nothing was done for the people who really needed help. Apart from their propaganda value, the authorities had no use for them and, therefore, were uninterested.
At the very least, the Kremlin’s efforts to establish its dominion over the Slavic part of the former USSR, Russia’s dependence on happenings in the CIS, and the clumsiness of Moscow’s pseudo diplomacy inevitably alienated the post-Soviet states. Nowhere did Moscow’s attempts to transform this interstate quasi union of the CIS into a decent cloak for the increasing contradictions evoke any understanding. By the time Putin came to power, considerable efforts had already been made to whip up hysteria among the Russian public over their so-called compatriots.
Moscow had an opportunity in the spring of 2007 to confront Estonia in the spirit of the Kremlin’s xenophobic imperial policy. The authorities in Tallinn decided to move the Bronze Soldier, a monument to Soviet servicemen who had died in Estonia during the Second World War, as well as their graves while fully observing all military honors and traditions. A majority of Estonians viewed this monument, which stood in the center of their capital, as a symbol of the Soviet occupation. On September 22, 1944, the Soviet army had “liberated” Tallinn from the lawful authorities of Estonia since by then almost no German troops remained there. Estonian flags were removed from government buildings, and members of the Estonian government were arrested, with later some being shot and others sent to the GULAG. Therefore, the monument to the “soldier-liberator” was known to Estonians as the “monument to an unknown aggressor.”
Behaving in an openly provocative manner, Russia declared that it had received no information about the transfer of the monument and the graves, and it organized pro-Russian demonstrations in Estonia that escalated into riots. In Moscow a “shock brigade” literally besieged the Estonian Embassy, while representatives of the pro-Putin youth organizations Nashi and Molodaia Gvardiia held demonstrations both in Moscow and in Estonia. The Russian ambassador to Estonia refused to attend the solemn ceremony of reinterring the remains. The mayor of Moscow called upon Russian consumers to boycott Estonian goods, and activists set up a camp on the Estonian border in an attempt to block automobile traffic between the two countries. Russian deliveries of oil, which were usually shipped to Estonian ports by rail, abruptly stopped supposedly because of repairs to the railbed. Passenger rail service between Moscow and Tallinn suddenly became unprofitable and likewise ceased. On May 9, the day when Russia marks its victory over the Nazis, the Russian side unexpectedly closed the main highway linking the two countries to heavy truck traffic.
Russian mass media also misinformed the Russian people. It alleged that hundreds of ethnic Russian arrestees had been savagely beaten in the terminal of Tallinn’s port and that a Russian who died in the course of the disturbances was supposedly beaten to death by police when he actually was the victim of an ordinary knife fight. Additional disinformation was thrown in for good measure that the Bronze Soldier had been sawed into pieces. These false reports accompanied provocative calls for a Bronze Revolution in Estonia and for an insurrection on May 9, in which the entire Russian-speaking community of Estonia should take part.
At the same time this hysteria was mounting, in the suburban Moscow town of Khimki a monument to fallen warriors was quietly moved, and other military graves were cynically destroyed. Not a peep was heard about this from either the authorities or the public. There is no doubt that Moscow, counting on the support of a large number of Russian-speaking people in Estonia, was trying to escalate the situation there from within while assisting this effort in every way possible by actions in Russia as well.
The imperial syndrome, combined with political incompetence and irresponsibility, led to obscene Russian behavior with respect to the principle of the inviolability of borders. While verbally declaring its adherence to this principle, in the post-Soviet period and as early as the presidency of Yeltsin, the Kremlin pursued a policy aimed at supporting separatists who wanted to split Trans-Dniestr from Moldova and to break up Georgia by splitting off South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The majority of the area’s people, contrary to international law, were given Russian passports.
Russian policy on these questions became particularly vociferous after the proclamation of Kosovo’s independence and its recognition by a number of Western countries. Russian diplomacy outwardly opposed such recognition. Meanwhile, with poorly disguised satisfaction, Russia embraced it as a precedent that untied its hands with regard to recognizing the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
There is no doubt that extremely serious problems exist in Georgia, among them Abkhazia. The problem of Abkhazia was created in the first years of Bolshevik rule. Ever since then the Abkhazy have sought independence from Georgia; however, the region’s status in international law is unambiguous. From the time the USSR broke up, Abkhazia has been considered part of Georgia, but Abkhazian separatists have received military as well as moral and political support from Moscow.
Georgia’s other sore point—South Ossetia—is also a legacy of the Soviet era. After the demise of the USSR, Ossetia, like the Ossetian people, found itself divided between different states. South Ossetia became part of Georgia, while North Ossetia remained part of Russia. In the Soviet period this hardly mattered since the internal boundaries of the USSR were purely administrative and did not affect people. The situation changed drastically after the collapse of the USSR. The third, subjective, problem was the personality of Georgian leader Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who came to power in 1991 and brought his country to the edge of catastrophe.
The Russian authorities believed—or pretended to believe—that Georgia was actively helping the Chechen fighters. This was a rather doubtful proposition, considering the active role of the Chechens in the Georgian-Abkhazian armed conflict on the side of the Abkhazian separatists. Yet this assertion was extremely useful to Moscow since it facilitated the immediate solution of two problems: it enabled the Kremlin to call terrorism on Russian territory an international issue and to intensify pressure on Georgia.
Moscow nudged Abkhazia and South Ossetia toward separatism in every way possible with the goal of incorporating them into Russia. “We will never leave Abkhazia,” declared Sergei Shoigu, then the minister of emergency situations—that is, de facto head of the coercive apparatus, an alternative to the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of the Interior—at a meeting of the diplomatic staff when I worked at the Russian Mission to the UN in Geneva in 1992–96. The conflict between Tbilisi and Abkhazia forced Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze to make Georgia a member of the CIS in the hope of somehow neutralizing Russian aggression vis-à-vis Tbilisi.
In December 2000 under the patently concocted pretext of Georgia’s unwillingness to enter into a mutually acceptable agreement on the means of securing the Russian-Georgian border, Russia unilaterally introduced a visa system governing the trips back and forth of Russian and Georgian citizens. One of the main arguments was that Georgia was supposedly supporting Chechen international terrorism. It also maintained that criminal elements, including Chechen extremists, were congregating in the Pankisi Gorge and several other parts of the Akhmetskii District; that training centers for fighters were located there along with hospitals to treat them; and that organizations that hated the special services, and were providing material, technical, and financial assistance to the terrorists, were operating there under the guise of humanitarian missions.
Pro-Russia inhabitants of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, however, were accorded a special status and exempted from the visa regime. The politicians in Moscow knew that an overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of Abkhazia and South Ossetia lacked Georgian documents and that traveling to Tbilisi, the location of the lone Russian consulate in Georgia, to obtain visas would supposedly pose a real threat to their safety. According to imperial logic, instituting a visa regime on the Abkhazian and South Ossetian portions of the border constituted a de facto “blockade” of these regions of Georgia. No attempt was made to conceal that hindering the earnings and provisioning of the population of these regions that were directly connected with Russia, and depriving them of the opportunity of crossing the Russian border, would certainly turn into a humanitarian catastrophe for the people living there. The Georgian government correctly deemed the maintenance of a visa-free regime along the Abkhazian and South Ossetian portions of the Russian-Georgian border as Russia’s de facto annexation of these regions. Moreover, starting from the early 2000s, Russia began issuing Russian passports to inhabitants of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, thereby transforming the population of these separatist republics into its own citizens, whom they were not only able but also now obligated to defend. Preparations for the division of Georgia entered what was, in principle, a new phase with obvious historical analogies.
The advent to power of pro-Western president Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia as a result of the Rose Revolution of 2003 produced a sharply negative reaction in Moscow. The very fact of a broad popular movement, one that led to a change of government, did not sit well with the architects and builders of the vertical of power. The Russian authorities looked askance on Saakashvili’s policies, which aimed at bringing Georgia closer to the West in all respects and at its entering NATO.
An extremely revealing event, particularly in light of subsequent developments, as well as improbable from a diplomatic perspective, occurred during preparations for Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s visit to Tbilisi in February 2005. He refused to visit the memorial in Tbilisi to Georgian soldiers who had died fighting for Georgia’s territorial integrity in the early 1990s.
In March 2006 Russia prohibited the transit through Georgia of agricultural products from third countries, asserting that frequently they came with false certification. Soon Russia banned the importation of Georgian wine and Borzhomi mineral water on the specious grounds that they were of poor quality. Russia refused to evacuate Georgian citizens, including children, from Lebanon during the conflict there in July 2006, prompting indignant responses.
In September 2006 Moscow interpreted the spy scandal involving five Russian servicemen arrested on charges of espionage in Tbilisi as an anti-Russian provocation. Putin also took note of this occasion, characterizing what was happening as an “indication of the reinstatement of the policies of Lavrenty Beriya [Stalin’s secret police chief] both domestically and in the international arena.” This is a case of a thief crying, “Stop thief!” On September 30 the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs distributed videos and transcripts of phone conversations regarding the activity of the Russian servicemen detained on charges of espionage. According to the ministry’s information, in addition to espionage they were engaged in sabotage and terrorist activities. Specifically, according to the Georgian authorities, those arrested were implicated in a terrorist act in Gori in 2005 and in blowing up the Liakhvi and Kartli-2 power lines; the railroad in Kaspi on October 9, 2004; and the oil pipeline in Khashuri on November 17, 2004. Moscow’s whining that the Georgians specially whipped up this scandal is entirely groundless.
Moscow’s response was harsh and unprecedented. In October 2006 Russia cut off air links with Georgia and terminated postal and transportation communications between the two countries. Russia recalled its ambassador and other diplomats from Tbilisi and stopped issuing visas to citizens of Georgia. Georgian restaurants and casinos in Moscow were shut down. Schools compiled lists of ethnic Georgian pupils. An anti-Georgian propaganda campaign was launched, and Georgian businesspersons in Russia began to encounter particular difficulties.
Previously, in June 2006 while responding to Western demands that Russian troops be withdrawn from parts of Moldova and Georgia, the Russian Foreign Ministry officially and publicly declared that the unrecognized post-Soviet republics had the right of self-determination. In other words, Russia announced its readiness to recognize the separatist regimes in Trans-Dniestr, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. This was “punishment” for the actions of Moldova and Georgia in strengthening their ties with the West and asserting their European orientation.
The watchword of the oprichniks was that actions must follow words, and this translated into trade and natural gas wars against Georgia and Moldova. But even that was not enough. Moscow began openly to establish bilateral relations with the authorities in the unrecognized republics. The presidents of Trans-Dniestr, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia were demonstratively received by the Foreign Ministry, which concluded bilateral agreements with them on economic cooperation and financial assistance.
In November 2007 the Russian special services were again implicated in anti-Georgian activities in connection with a days-long antigovernment meeting in Tbilisi. At a special briefing, Givi Targamadze, the chairman of Georgia’s parliamentary committee on defense and security, revealed transcripts of telephone conversations between several leaders of the opposition and officials of the Russian special services. “These people openly coordinated their actions with the plans of Russian intelligence. This cooperation . . . has a long history. We didn’t speak about it earlier, but now we publicly declare that what is currently going on in Tbilisi is nothing other than a direct and massive Russian attack on Georgia,” he declared. For Georgians news that the list of Russian agents included the leader of the Labor Party, Shalva Natelashvili; a member of the leadership of the Republican Party, Levan Berdzenishvili; the former minister of state Georgy Khindrava; and Konstantin Gamsakhurdia, the leader of the Freedom Party and son of the first president of Georgia, was an earthshaking revelation. The transcripts of their phone conversations with Russian intelligence officers were broadcast on Georgian television.6
In August 2008 Russia launched a broad-scale war against Georgia, hypocritically cloaking it in its duty to protect Russian “peacemakers” and other Russian citizens. (Recall in this connection that Russia had issued Russian passports to Georgian citizens.) Naturally, Moscow prepared this ideological cover poorly. Also naturally, Russia easily won this war in the pro-Russia parts of Georgia. This was not a war against the people, unlike the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya. Thus, Russian politicians succeeded in the plans that they had formulated in the early 1990s, saying, “We will never leave Abkhazia.”
Of course, the Russian-Georgian war inevitably produced reverberations in Moldova, which, like Georgia, had become an independent republic following the collapse of the USSR. (Parenthetically, the inhabitants of Trans-Dniestr, the region of Moldova that Russia targeted, were also issued Russian passports.) Meeting at the end of August 2008 with Moldovan president Vladimir Voronin, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s stunt man, drew a direct analogy between what was going on in Georgia and what might happen in Moldova.
Several aspects of this conflict must be highlighted. First, Bessarabia, a part of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, was arbitrarily attached to the Soviet Union in 1940 by the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Thus, it is hardly surprising that many Romanian-speaking Moldavians favor uniting their country with Romania. The Russian-speaking inhabitants of Trans-Dniestr, the separatist left bank of the Dniestr River, categorically oppose it.
The Trans-Dniestr region, which occupies 12 percent of the territory of Moldova, constitutes a vital interest for Russia. It contains 28 percent of Moldova’s industrial production, the foundation of which is heavy industry, and was part of the USSR’s former defense complex. Moreover, 90 percent of the country’s electrical energy is generated on the left bank. A gas pipeline passes through the Trans-Dniestr and carries Russian gas, via Ukraine, to Romania and Bulgaria. Russia’s interest in economic cooperation with the Trans-Dniestr region centers on the area’s developed agro-industrial complex as well as the output of light industry, electronics, radio technology, and the defense industry; machine building; and metallurgy. As its main foreign economic partner, Moscow maintains a policy toward Trans-Dniestr that is very similar to its policy toward Abkhazia and South Ossetia. There, too, the aim is to split up Moldova, again by making use of the Russian-speaking population.
At this point we must step outside the chronological framework to grasp the logic of events. As a historian and international relations specialist, not even in my worst dreams, especially after the end of the Cold War, could I imagine that Russian foreign policy would assume the mantle of Hitler’s foreign policy. Did this happen, like so much else, from ineptitude? I don’t think so. Soon after the breakup of the USSR, the theme of “compatriots” and “Russian-language speakers” emerged and fit in very well with the imperial moods of the majority of the Russian elite, especially those weighed down with epaulets.
I don’t know specifically who planned and began implementing the criminal plan right after Yeltsin became the master of the country. I only know that it existed from the start. (I myself took part in drafting the initial papers on this matter without realizing where it was heading, since I had not the least conception of the authorities’ schemes.) It was probably not Putin, who was then just a small fry, although he knew Germany firsthand. It was probably not any of those who then occupied center stage in Russian politics. Most likely it was someone from among the Soviet “dinosaurs,” if not by age—though that, too, is possible—then by his view of the world. It was obviously someone familiar with the history of international relations. A person (or a group of persons) with imperial and totalitarian convictions. In addition, a consummate manipulator. It seems it was someone from the security services, or siloviki, although I can’t rule out persons working in the Foreign Ministry, where many nasty things were going on.
But that is not the crux of the matter. The main point is that starting in 1992, Moscow’s revanchist, imperial policy became one of the dominant motifs of domestic politics and an important factor in international relations.
The West played an extremely significant role in the revival of the Cold War and Russia’s recoil from democracy, thereby letting slip a historic opportunity to move Russia in the direction of real democracy. The chain of mistakes began in Gorbachev’s time when the leaders, politicians, and diplomats of democratic countries were unable or unwilling to believe in the sincerity of the new Soviet leader’s reformist intentions and of his diplomacy. For good reason one of the key phrases in Gorbachev’s Nobel lecture in Oslo on June 5, 1991, was this appeal: “We wish to be understood.” But in response to the unprecedented openness and readiness to compromise of Gorbachev’s foreign policy, the West continued to pursue its traditional diplomacy of pressure on its longtime potential adversary. Western leaders came around to believing Gorbachev when it was already too late in the game.
Then, in the framework of Realpolitik, the West, particularly the United States, supported Yeltsin, the winner, who was incapable of rising above the level of a provincial party boss. A series of glaring mistakes was made regarding Yeltsin. For example, when the semiliterate leader of this great power declared that the country he headed wanted to join NATO, the West responded immediately but did not invite Russia in. It could have been wiser. The ultrasensitive Yeltsin was deeply offended, and the reactionaries in his retinue were handed a powerful argument against cooperation with the West.
What followed—namely, the 1993 coup pitting Yeltsin against Russia’s parliament—was a nightmare both for Russia and the West. Naturally, the West bet on Yeltsin, but it also conferred its de facto blessings on any actions of the more democratically inclined authorities of the moment. By the time of the 1996 presidential election, the West was so frightened of the quite real possibility that the communists might return to power that it supported Yeltsin unconditionally. Against this background, notwithstanding public concern, Western politicians kept mum about the First Chechen War, giving President Yeltsin a free pass. The West not only facilitated but also guaranteed the massive and flagrant violations of human rights in Russia, the genocide of Russia’s own people in Chechnya, and the appointment of KGB officer Putin to the position of president.
During the era of perestroika under Gorbachev, ideals are what really drove Soviet politics. Unintentionally, the politics of ideals sometimes sounds as if it were divorced from reality. Such an approach, however, is far from the case. To be sure, Gorbachev put forward what may have seemed unrealizable goals as, indeed, not a few of them turned out to be so. Among them were reducing the danger of war; establishing a common European home; creating a nuclear-free, nonviolent world in the realm of foreign policy; building socialism with a human face via democratization in the USSR; and providing its citizens with a full spectrum of human rights at home. Pursuing these goals, he was forced, on the one hand, to maneuver within the upper leadership of the USSR that was then mostly hostile to reforms and, on the other hand, metaphorically to breach the wall of mistrust and misunderstanding of his Western partners who doubted the sincerity of the new Soviet leader.
Gorbachev’s policy of ideals was pursued in the real world, which was largely hostile to such ideals. Skeptics argue that if politics does not reckon with reality and is not the art of the possible, it can hardly be called politics at all. That begs the question of what is possible and what is not. A politics of ideals expands the limits of the possible. Gorbachev’s political experiment clearly illustrates the absence of contradictions between the politics of ideals and that of reality.
Unfortunately, the West was either unable or unwilling to step outside the framework of its traditional approaches. Despite obvious Soviet progress by 1988 to secure human rights and the success of Soviet-American negotiations in this sphere, even someone inclined to stimulate democratic changes in the USSR such as U.S. assistant secretary of state Richard Schifter indirectly acknowledged that he and others like him were not ready to try unconventional, breakthrough approaches. For example, the U.S. State Department demanded certain confirmations of Soviet sincerity in this sphere before agreeing to the final document of the Vienna conference of the CSCE. Members of the outgoing administration of President Ronald Reagan, and Secretary of State George Shultz in particular, were invested in the success of the Vienna conference as they wanted to open the door to negotiations on conventional forces in Europe. For its part, as noted in chapter 1, Soviet diplomacy conditioned its acceptance of the Vienna document on an agreement to convene a conference on human rights in Moscow. The Americans had a hard time making up their minds and insisted upon various conditions before condescending to agree.
During a three-hour conversation with Anatoly Kovalev, then the second-ranking person in the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Schifter identified the question of allowing exit visas for refuseniks as the key issue for the Americans, emphasizing that the number of fast-tracked cases had to be significant. He explained his thinking as follows. The Reagan administration had approximately six weeks remaining in its term to explain to the American people whether an agreement in Vienna was possible. Schifter believed it would be risky to name too high a figure, for the Soviet foreign policy establishment might not be able to manage it. However, during a five-day workweek it was possible to review 2 cases before lunch and 2 after lunch; so in Schifter’s opinion, in the course of a week, the Soviet bureaucracy could review 20 cases. On this basis, Schifter came up with a figure of 120 and the following day handed the Soviet side a list with that number of refuseniks. In essence, this signified agreement to the Soviet proposal to host the CSCE human rights meeting in Moscow.7
On the one hand, this looked like a splendid example of cooperation in pursuit of common and noble goals. On the other hand, despite the obvious evidence of fresh and positive approaches, Schifter still lacked sufficient trust in his Soviet interlocutors and did not fully understand that in the Foreign Ministry only through such démarches were his Soviet interlocutors able to solve long-festering problems in the interest of their own country. In a confidential conversation, Anatoly Kovalev told me of his disappointment that Schifter had not asked for more.
Meanwhile, many Western politicians were taking advantage of the developing situation in the USSR, especially after the August 1991 coup, to extract the maximum benefit for themselves without giving much thought to the long-term consequences. During Gorbachev’s perestroika a positive interaction generally existed between Realpolitik and the politics of the idealists—Gorbachev, Shevardnadze, and Yakovlev—but after President George H. W. Bush changed American policy in the direction of greater “pragmatism,” this positive sum game collapsed.
With the breakup of the USSR, Realpolitik became an even stronger trend in international politics. To a large extent this was the paradoxical result of the West’s no longer having to face the critical question of how to coexist with an unpredictable Soviet giant armed to the teeth. During the periods of international détente, Western leaders behaved more decorously than they did after the breakup of the USSR. For objective reasons they had to enter into dialogue with the USSR, but they neither bowed and scraped before its leadership nor evinced friendly feelings. After the breakup of the USSR, Western leaders pursued a policy of political expediency, a derivative of Realpolitik. In this context political expediency was a poisonous byproduct of cynicism, fear, hypocrisy, and political shortsightedness. Such a policy alone allows one to support those whom, in a normal system of contacts, it would be impossible to support. Most likely one should look for the roots of political expediency in 1938 in Munich, where, to put it mildly, the shortsighted leaders of Great Britain and France demonstrated political expediency toward Hitler, who wanted to receive the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. Everyone knows what happened afterward.
Munich—it is precisely this shameful label that best describes the Russia policies of several Western countries. It applies to a wide range of issues, from their virtually silent acquiescence to the partition of Georgia, crimes in Chechnya, and political assassinations to their unwillingness to discuss questions of human rights and democracy with the Russian authorities. The West’s politically expedient policy of Realpolitik has already come back to haunt both it and Russia, which should not under any circumstances be confused with its rulers.
Ironically, no matter how paradoxical it may seem, the Soviet masters behaved more decorously, too, during the Cold War than did their successors in the Kremlin. Starting with Brezhnev, the leaders during the period of stagnation, looking at the West, understood that if they behaved otherwise, that would be the end of détente.
Unfortunately, neither history nor historians are currently very popular among politicians or voters. What is valued are technocrats and so-called pragmatists who often not only are unversed in the past and its lessons but also believe they have no need for advice from experts in those fields. The result is that what they do is grounded in myths and incompetence rather than in realities, and it cannot be considered politics.