The government is highly attuned to one dynamic in particular: the price of oil. Yegor Gaidar, the prime minister who oversaw Russia’s drastic economic reforms of 1991 and 1992, argued that oil exports enabled the Communist Party authorities to offset serious structural problems in the 1970s and ’80s, including the need to buy vast volumes of foreign grain to make up for stagnating production at home.18 The arrangement lasted until a glut in global oil production sent prices plummeting to less than ten dollars a barrel in 1986. The ensuing decline in Soviet production hastened economic collapse by starving Moscow of the hard currency it desperately needed.
Others disagree about the importance of oil’s role in the Soviet collapse. However, one point is clear: the government today is far more dependent on energy than the Soviet Union ever was. Since the economy recovered from the economic meltdown in 1998 that sent the Yeltsin administration into crisis, the quadrupling of oil prices enabled various governments under Putin to increase federal budget expenditures ninefold in real terms in a decade, while wages almost tripled.19 But economists predict the government will eventually run into trouble. Although its 2008 budget was calculated to balance with oil at sixty dollars a barrel, the level necessary for balancing soon rose to $120, and even that may not be high enough in the future, thanks to Putin’s pledges to increase, by hundreds of billions of dollars, federal wages and other expenses aimed at generating support from the masses. And although energy sales have brought annual trade surpluses of almost eight hundred billion dollars, Russians’ huge desire for foreign products has driven an inexorable rise in imports that may one day surpass exports.
The country got a taste of what may happen when cash starts to become short in late 2011, when Putin lashed out at several cabinet members for failing to fund his election promises in a new budget. Some ministers, including Medvedev, had the temerity to snipe back for the first time in recent memory, prompting temporary speculation that Putin’s authority was declining. That exchange took place when oil prices were still climbing to record highs. With new drilling techniques increasing global production, that may not last. Even if prices stay level, the Russian oil industry is still largely living off Soviet-era investment. To maintain production levels, which are expected to decline by 2020, the government will have to invest far more—which will probably prompt bitter battles over oil profits. Lack of investment and failure to reform the economy have added urgency to predictions of dramatically slowing growth and worries about looming recession that have heightened anxieties about the future.
If civil society fails to topple Putin’s regime—or that of a chosen successor—perhaps economic decline will. With corruption also taking ever-larger slices of the national wealth, the masses who continue supporting Putin—because they feel the government provides them with more benefits and stability than they would otherwise enjoy—may not do so indefinitely.
To truly join the Western world, however, Russians will have to do more than change their political establishment because the obstacles lie not just in Putin but also in the formative factors of geography, climate and history, which remain powerful shapers of Russian behavior. Among other vital things, the people will have to move beyond looking to the state to compensate for the country’s traditional backwardness and resulting insecurities.
Real change would require fundamentally new ideals. “After a brief period of declaring allegiance to Western values in the 1990s, we’ve moved away from them,” Arseniy Roginsky of Memorial reminded me. “We said we would respect the individual, but it never happened. That path was far more difficult than we ever imagined.” Instead, he said, “the search for stability and a Russian national identity led right back to the old Soviet anti-Western sentiments.”
The foreign affairs scholar Georgy Mirsky, who taught at Princeton and New York University, told me he believes the process will take generations. “Whenever my American students asked why bad news was always coming out of Russia, with its great culture, I’d tell them to imagine being put into a psychiatric asylum when they were three years old and released at thirty. Could you be a normal person? Of course not. After seventy years of Soviet rule, one of the most antihuman regimes in history, how can you expect the next generation to be normal?”
Russian forces outside the Georgian city of Gori in August 2008.
Kolya Pavlov (right) and I in Chechnya, in front of a bus to Grozny.
12
Future Delayed
Russia has only two allies—her army and navy.
—Alexander III, reigned 1881–94
The sun was baking the Mediterranean-like landscape that stretched out below the foothills of Georgia’s Caucasus Mountains when I passed through in August of 2008. The military truck in which I was riding belonged to a Russian convoy rumbling toward Gori, the faded provincial city Moscow had occupied after Tbilisi tried to seize back its Russia-supported breakaway region South Ossetia. The truck bed’s metal sides were supposed to prevent the handful of reporters within them, who were being hosted by the Russian military, from witnessing the destruction outside, but I managed to peek through a rip in the canvas top. Chipped by tank treads, a two-lane road lined by stately rows of tall poplar trees traversed golden-brown fields. We passed burned-out Georgian military pickups and cars abandoned on the edge of the asphalt. Some were still smoldering, together with patches of fields that were sending up black smoke in the distance. Apart from an occasional elderly man or woman who stared at the invaders roaring through their empty villages, no one was visible.
The countryside seemed even more eerie because I’d traveled some of the same roads during a reporting trip barely two months earlier. Seeing the familiar landscape under such very different circumstances filled me with depression. Entering Gori, we passed bullet-riddled buildings and shop windows broken by looting South Ossetian separatists. The convoy halted on the barren main square, where Russian soldiers emerged from their personnel carriers near a statue of Stalin, who had been born there.
Wary residents jostled in a nearby line for bread handed out by Russian forces, who boasted that they’d brought security to the city. Most locals were hungry, very frightened and didn’t know what to expect. One jittery man, drunk like many others, couldn’t recall his last name for a beat. Finally remembering it with relief, Lyova Mazmishvili told me Georgians wanted to live under their former Soviet masters again. “We never should have split from Russia,” he stuttered unconvincingly, within earshot of the Russians. “We’re brothers.” Away from the main square, opinions were very different. A middle-aged woman named Dali Neberidze told me she was afraid of losing her mind. “It was a nightmare,” she told me of the Russian aerial bombardments. “The Russians just want to show their might. Look what they’ve done to our city!”
Back on the central square, the lounging soldiers seemed relaxed, as if on a lark. A swaggering colonel named Andrei Babrun shrugged and smirked when I asked how long he expected Russian forces would stay. “There has to be peace in this region!” he lectured. “We must answer Georgian force properly.” Others joked about awaiting orders to move on Tbilisi, just fifty miles away.
Fellow reporters who had covered the first war in Chechnya remarked how much better the Russian military looked now, starting with the sober, or at least not visibly drunk, privates. Still, their unwashed appearance inspired little confidence. Although Moscow’s scattering of the puny Georgian army had showcased Russia’s resurgence, the campaign revealed important weaknesses. Faulty intelligence, poor coordination and a reliance on aging Soviet equipment reflected badly on the Kremlin’s long-running effort to reform a military characterized by vicious hazing among conscripts and massive corruption in the officer corps.
The government’s ancient military doctrine was partly to blame. Moscow had to stop pretending it was a global counterweight to the West, military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer told me at the time. Only then could it start building an effective fighting force instead of trying to revive the old Soviet one. “This mil
itary is not very good for anything at all.”
It was good enough to bloody the nose of Georgia’s brash young president, Mikheil Saakashvili, however. The New York–trained lawyer had transformed his impoverished country from a nearly failed state whose capital enjoyed only intermittent electricity into a promising emerging market. He also vowed to return South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another Moscow-supported separatist region, to Georgia. Both had broken away after a bloody civil conflict in 1992 that had been largely provoked by Georgia’s nationalist former president Zviad Gamsakhurdia and halted with the introduction of Russian peacekeepers.
When I sat next to him at dinner earlier in 2008, Saakashvili spoke about his far-fetched promise—and his personal loathing of Putin—with such conviction that I was hardly surprised when the conflict broke out. The evidence suggests the Kremlin goaded him into attacking South Ossetia after many years of low-level violence and rhetorical brinkmanship. When Georgian troops stormed the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, Russia launched a massive counterattack by troops who supposedly happened to be still massed on the country’s southern border after taking part in military exercises there the previous month. Moscow had distributed passports to South Ossetians for years. Now it said it was acting to protect its own citizens from Georgian aggression.
Although it’s easy enough to dismiss Russia’s all but forgotten invasion as a comeuppance for Saakashvili, the Kremlin’s intentions were far from clear at the time. Those who feared an attack on Tbilisi included a sober foreign policy scholar in Washington whom I telephoned days after the hostilities began. When she paused after I asked what she believed might happen, it took a few seconds for me to realize she was crying on the other end of the line. Regardless of Saakashvili’s mistakes, the weeklong war marked Russia’s decision to turn its back on the West if it had to by launching a military attack on a sovereign, democratizing US ally for the first time since the end of communism. And not just an attack. While politicians thumped their chests about Russia’s international duty, state television news concocted alarmist propaganda about Georgian sabotage plots. It all sounded very Soviet-like and boded ill for the future of a country that appeared to see force as the surest means of getting its way in the world—in this case, force against a neighbor many Russians loved for its cuisine, charm and historically close ties.
Much finger-pointing followed in the ensuing weeks and months, including revisionist reports by the BBC and The New York Times that blamed Saakashvili for taking Moscow’s bait—as if the conflict had been between equals. Unfortunately, there was less talk about Russia’s longtime practice of fanning ethnic conflict for the sake of increasing its influence over the region. Or about how two decades of brainwashing South Ossetians had perpetuated a frozen conflict that reduced their economically unviable region to an impoverished dependency on Moscow. Now the Kremlin was stationing thousands of troops there in defiance of a French-brokered cease-fire, in confidence that critics would do little about it.
After Gori, I traveled to the ruined South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali, the epicenter of the recent fighting. Traffic there mainly consisted of Russian personnel carriers and army trucks. Many buildings had been destroyed and trees blown apart. Disabled Georgian tanks stood in the middle of a road where locals praised the Russians as saviors.
Violence was still taking place: outside the town, a handful of ethnic Georgian villages were being systematically destroyed. Blazing in the darkness of night, houses burned in the forest. During the day, bulldozers emerged to eradicate neighborhoods in what could only be called small-scale ethnic cleansing. In Gori, I had met a group of Georgian refugees who fled the attacks by Russian troops and their South Ossetian allies. A gray-haired woman named Manana Giashvili wept as she described how she and thirty others had hidden in a field for several days. “We were told to get out of our houses or we’d be shot,” she said. “Then they burned down the village, and now my husband is missing.”
Western countries brushed the invasion under the carpet. NATO reestablished its council with Russia after a brief hiatus, the EU resumed talks on a special partnership agreement, and even Moscow’s recognition of independence for South Ossetia and Abkhazia—essentially revenge for the West’s recent recognition of Kosovo—passed with little controversy. Seeing compromise and accommodation as weakness, Moscow exulted in what it saw as a significant victory.
It also felt relief. Russia’s invasion had been partly motivated by fear of the color revolutions in former Soviet republics. Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003—which installed Saakashvili in place of longtime President Eduard Shevardnadze—was followed by Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, prompting alarm in Moscow that popular discontent could also contaminate Russia. Accusations that the West meddled in both countries by helping remove their old regimes have since become a constant trope in Russian foreign policy. Never mind that the Kremlin spent millions of dollars campaigning for the pro-Moscow candidate Viktor Yanukovych during the Ukrainian presidential election, when outrage over his victory in rigged voting prompted tens of thousands to take to the streets.
When Gazprom cut off natural gas to Ukraine after a price dispute during a bitterly cold winter the following year, Moscow said it was simply implementing a long-delayed end to Soviet-era subsidies in favor of market rates. In fact, Russia broke a five-year contract to provide gas at a very cheap price, which it had urged Ukraine to accept in 2004 in order to boost Yanukovych’s election chances.
Russian fears have since waned, at least temporarily. After Georgia’s humiliation in 2008, Yanukovych repudiated the Orange Revolution by winning the next Ukrainian presidential election in 2010, setting Moscow further at ease about its dominion over the former Soviet republics Medvedev once called part of Russia’s “special zone of influence.” However, such nineteenth-century formulations will continue stoking tensions by reinforcing the belief that being feared means being respected, a Soviet foreign policy model the Kremlin has tried to emulate.
In the 1970s, my father occasionally met with the London representatives of Novosti, the Soviet news agency that dealt with foreign correspondents while providing flimsy cover for countless KGB officers and agents. During one meeting, he wondered aloud why Moscow kept refusing permission for a handful of Russian women who had married Englishmen to join their husbands abroad. British newspapers’ periodic articles about such puzzling cruelty colored the perceptions, not at all brightly, of British people who otherwise cared very little about the Soviet Union. The answer of the Novosti men said something about Soviet bureaucracy. They said of course they knew what he was talking about, but “our bosses don’t give a fig about British readers. They only care about trying to please their bosses, who also know nothing about the West.”
Thirty-five years later, I’m often asked why Moscow savages its reputation by cutting off gas to Ukraine and threatening Europe with nuclear missiles. Rather than not caring about its image abroad, however, the Kremlin, I believe, sees bad publicity as valuable in its way. Treating Russia as an actor they see as rational—that is, led by people who make decisions based on their benefit to the country rather than to themselves—Western governments often seem to miss that about Russia. Many foreigners also fail to notice another key trait: Russians tend to believe the rest of the world functions as their country does. When American newspapers publish articles critical of Putin, for example, Russians often perceive them to be ordered by the White House because that’s how things are done, aren’t they? When Medvedev sought to explain one of Putin’s accusations that Washington wanted to overthrow his government, he suggested it was normal for the United States to seek to influence Russian domestic politics “because we also try to do that.”
In Putin’s conception, his government valiantly steered an exemplary economy through a global financial crisis that other countries foisted on Russia. Chief among them is the United States, a “parasite” on the global economy that lives beyond its means and threatens financial market
s by destabilizing the dollar. Such pronouncements, usually intended for a domestic audience, catch foreigners by surprise because Russia isn’t Yemen or North Korea. The world’s biggest country in area and volume of energy resources, it has nuclear weapons, a sizable economy and seemingly every reason to engage constructively with an international community in which it still holds considerable influence. But Moscow, seeing conspiracies everywhere that reinforce its assumption that the rest of the world functions as it does, rarely responds to constructive engagement.
President Obama’s recent “reset” policy toward Russia succeeded in changing such attitudes enough to boost cooperation, which brought benefits to both sides. In addition to his main achievement in relations with Russia, a nuclear arms reduction agreement called New START, the two countries signed a long-delayed deal to cooperate on civil nuclear power technology. Moscow allowed US troops and supplies to cross Russia en route to Afghanistan, albeit for almost extortionate payment. And the Kremlin, motivated partly by its own frustration with its ally Iran, agreed to new UN sanctions against Tehran in response to its nuclear ambitions. Russia got American help to finally enter the World Trade Organization after applying for almost two decades, while the White House tacitly agreed not to directly challenge Russia’s interests in Ukraine, Belarus and other countries in what it considers its backyard.
That finally began to change in late 2012, when Hillary Clinton warned that Moscow was trying to re-create a new version of the Soviet Union under the guise of economic integration. “It’s going to be called a customs union; it will be called Eurasian Union and all of that,” she said at a news conference. “But let’s make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.”
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