Putin’s continued vilification of the United States nevertheless doesn’t mean Russia wants to become a pariah state by seeking armed conflict or prolonged confrontation. Many of its positions, such as its criticism of the war in Iraq and independence for Kosovo, might be dismissed as bluster. Still, its obstructionism can pose serious problems in international affairs.
Richard Pipes believes Russia’s geography makes it a major player in global politics. “She is not only the world’s largest state with the world’s longest frontier, but she dominates the Eurasian land mass, touching directly on three major regions: Europe, the Middle East and the Far East,” he wrote. “This situation enables her to exploit to her advantage crises that occur in the most populous and strategic areas of the globe.”1
Westerners are especially confused by the Kremlin’s occasional switch to cooperative and conciliatory rhetoric. That often comes when Russia sees opportunities to use geostrategic leverage to drive hard bargains. Allowing NATO to fly supply planes over Russian territory made Moscow appear helpful. In fact, Russia has squeezed hundreds of millions of dollars from Washington, profiting handsomely by allowing the United States to tackle one of its own major security issues.
However, Moscow has other tools at its disposal. When the United States and thirteen other members of the UN Security Council voted for a resolution in 2012 calling on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down after his government had killed thousands of civilians, Russia used its veto to derail the measure. China followed Moscow’s lead, crippling the international ability to pressure Assad, who proceeded to launch military assaults that killed many tens of thousands more people in Syrian cities. Responding to Hillary Clinton’s labeling of the Russian veto as “despicable,” Russia’s stern foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, called her reaction “indecent” and “almost hysterical.”
A staunch protector of failing dictatorships’ national sovereignty—no doubt because he can easily picture his own country in the same position—Putin was dismayed by NATO’s earlier bombing of Libya and blamed other countries for tricking Russia into supporting the UN resolution that opened the way for military action. Syria would be different. Moscow’s last Cold War–era ally in the Middle East provided a port for Russia’s naval ships and orders for its arms, and Damascus was even more important for the leverage it provided the Kremlin. Suddenly all diplomatic eyes were on Moscow because little could happen without its consent. Putin used the limelight to lash out at Western countries, accusing them of backing the Arab Spring to advance their commercial interests. “I can’t understand that bellicose itch,” he wrote in one of his election manifestos. Instead of promoting democracy, he said, the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya had given rise only to religious extremism.
Putin’s moment of diplomatic glory came when he stymied a Western military response to the Syrian government’s chemical weapons attack against civilians. Appealing to a U.S. administration loath to take action, the Kremlin proposed an unlikely plan to put Syrian chemical weapons under international control. After the White House agreed, Putin made it clear Russia would undermine any Security Council resolution that would back the scheme with force, and the Syrian war continued ravaging the country unabated.
Moscow also had broader geostrategic considerations concerning the Middle East’s tortured politics. Syria’s Shia leaders were backed by Russia’s longtime ally Iran. Traditionally suspicious of Tehran’s Sunni rival and Washington ally Saudi Arabia, Moscow had built a nuclear power reactor in Iran and pushed back against several American-led drives to impose sanctions in response to fears that Tehran was building nuclear weapons in secret. No doubt the Kremlin will continue to attempt to obstruct US policies in the Middle East, posing as a facilitator and peacemaker in order to punch above its weight in international relations. After its energy supplies to European countries, Moscow’s veto power in the Security Council is its most powerful foreign policy tool.
Little wonder Russian officials are frequently compelled to restate Moscow’s position that the UN is the sole appropriate forum for resolving international conflicts. During the standoff over Syria in 2012, Medvedev went so far as to warn that the principle of state sovereignty was at such risk that it threatened to destroy the world order through nuclear war. The same Medvedev also once stridently advocated a proposal for a new European security structure that was so vague few took it as anything more than an attempt to undermine NATO and other existing organizations Moscow sees as hostile.
The arrival in Russia of the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden in July of 2013 could have been seen as nothing less than a gift for Putin, who proceeded to play the fugitive American and US officials off against each other. The leader with the appalling human rights record seized the opportunity to take the moral high ground by portraying Russia as a supporter of Snowden’s civil liberties and accusing the White House of hypocrisy. When human rights activists act “under the auspices of the United States and with their financial support, information and political backing, it is comfortable enough to do,” he said, presumably about critics of the Kremlin. “But if someone is going to criticize the United States itself, it is, of course, much more complicated.” Obama’s decision to cancel a summit meeting with Putin appeared to signal the end of the reset.
Russia will no doubt remain less collected about American missile defense policy. Moscow has threatened to quit the New START pact if Washington continues its plans to deploy a missile shield over Russian objections. In late 2011, Dmitri Rogozin, the ambitious deputy prime minister in charge of the defense industry, repeated Putin’s threat to target missiles at Europe, accusing Washington of seeking the capability of delivering a nuclear first strike against Russia and citing the missile shield’s supposed ability to knock out Russia’s submarine-based warheads as evidence.
No knowledgeable observer takes such claims seriously. Were the United States to attack Russia, an early warning radar system would give Moscow plenty of time to deploy its fifteen-hundred-odd nuclear warheads for a counterstrike, a deterrent no missile shield could affect. “It is as if Rogozin, Putin and many other top officials are living in the early 1980s, when the Kremlin truly believed the United States might deliver a ‘decapitating’ nuclear first strike, undermining the mutually assured destruction theory,” wrote military expert Alexander Golts. “The irrationality of Rogozin’s and Putin’s arguments proves that Russia’s hysteria over U.S. missile defense has no relationship whatsoever to the country’s national security.”2
When the White House decided in March 2013 to abandon the part of the missile shield against which Moscow had focused its ire—the installation of long-range interceptors in Poland and Romania, over which the Kremlin had all but threatened war—Russian officials responded with a barrel of cold water, saying the change was no concession to Russia. Rogozin appeared to throw in the towel soon after, however, by pouring scorn on Washington’s plans. Moscow had “solved the issue of penetrating the missile shield,” he announced. “We regret that the United States wastes their money on missile defense and compels us to do the same,” he added. “The missile shield is nothing for us. It’s a bluff. It poses no military threat but remains a political and economic problem.”
Whether or not the matter is finally put to rest, however, officials have stuck to the view that the missile shield plans are evidence of America’s drive to attain global military supremacy. Moscow continues to link the issue to Obama’s goal of cutting both countries’ nuclear arsenals beyond New START, something Putin has further complicated by saying other nuclear powers should also be included. Columnist Yulia Latynina described Putin’s “imaginary role as the point man in the geopolitical confrontation with Washington” as virtually impossible to pierce. “Every time Western leaders tried to avoid aggravating the bully by making concessions to the Kremlin,” she wrote, “Moscow took that as a confirmation of its policy. But when the West refused to bow to Moscow’s demands, the Kremlin perceived i
t as a personal insult, a sign that there is an exclusive club of chosen leaders that reaches agreements on how to rule the world.”3
However, Cold War–style posturing may pale in comparison to the very real threat Russia may pose to international Internet security. The term cyberwar first drew public attention in 2007, when Internet sites in the Baltic Sea country of Estonia came under a series of attacks. They coincided with a bitter war of words between the former Soviet republic and a Kremlin furious over the relocation of a statue of a Red Army soldier from the center of the Estonian capital, Tallinn.
Seeing the bronze soldier as a symbol of Soviet occupation, most Estonians thought their government—now a member of the European Union and NATO—was well within its rights. Russia saw it differently and condemned the statue’s removal as an affront to the memory of what it calls the Soviet liberation of Estonia from Nazi control in World War II. In Moscow, the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi organized street protests against “Fascist” Estonia as the government cut off oil shipments. Then a flood of requests overwhelmed a number of Estonian Internet sites maintained by parliament, various ministries and banks, among other organizations.
Many of the so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were executed by botnets, groups of infected computers carrying out instructions from a handful of hackers. Estonia’s then-defense minister, Jaak Aaviksoo, was certain they were meant to “destabilize society and question the government’s capabilities to maintain law and order in cyberspace.” Although he told me there was little more than circumstantial evidence that the Russian government orchestrated the attacks, he nevertheless pointed to the Kremlin. “The nature of those attacks, the high level of coordination and focus,” he explained, “means there were considerable material and human resources behind them.”
Although the attacks were the most serious of their kind, they were far smaller and more disorganized than another wave that took place the following year in another former Soviet republic that had rubbed Moscow the wrong way. During Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008, DDoS attacks against the presidential administration, various ministries and private companies disrupted communications and disabled twenty sites for more than a week.
Russia has denied any involvement in either of the attacks. However, Irakli Porchkhidze, President Saakashvili’s deputy national security adviser at the time, told me the assault actually began a month before the conflict broke out and involved tens of thousands of botnets, mostly controlled by a St. Petersburg criminal group. Some of the attacks disseminated images of Saakashvili in Nazi uniform and other propaganda. The size, timing and complexity of the assault implicated the Kremlin, which Porchkhidze believes used the attacks as a weapon. “It was a new page in the history of cyberwarfare,” he said.
More recently, the arrests on piracy charges of Greenpeace activists who attempted to hang a banner on a Gazprom Arctic oil rig reflect Moscow’s hard-nose tactics in the emerging drive to stake claims to natural resources there.
Russia’s various forms of opposition to Western policies fit a general pattern of thinking that what’s good for its perceived rivals is bad for Moscow—and, conversely, what’s good for Moscow is bad for its rivals. It will probably continue to act according to that zero-sum calculus as long as Putin or one of his circle remains in power. For Westerners in general and Americans in particular, that means Russia’s perennial instability will almost certainly create problems far into the future because even more than in Western societies, its leaders’ personal needs will continue determining the direction of foreign policy. Good things rarely come from the feelings of insecurity that go together with those of inferiority. In Russia’s case, those feelings, present no matter how powerful the country’s military establishment may be—and Russia’s will long remain weak—often prompt defensive posturing and sometimes, as in the war with Georgia, dangerous aggressiveness.
Dealing with them will require the kind of tactical flexibility Obama displayed early in his presidency by attempting to integrate Russia into the international community where possible. But it will also require doing significantly more to draw lines in the sand on important issues—such as democracy in former Soviet republics—and calmly making clear that Western countries will stand up for their values. Ensuring the stability and security of Russia’s neighbors will be crucial for encouraging Moscow to alter its current path. More important, developed democracies must do far more to support the opposition and the protesters who are trying to establish democracy in their own country. One matter is essential, however: for Russia policies to work, Western countries must have no illusions about what kind of country they are dealing with.
Living in Russia often seemed to me an ongoing lesson in precisely how not to conduct politics, business and almost every other human endeavor. But although Moscow’s streets are generally dangerous in addition to being dirty and difficult to negotiate, the capital can’t be faulted for being boring. The loud and often smelly megalopolis shares something with New York in that it serves as a magnet for strivers from far and wide. Restaurants, theaters and all sorts of other establishments are constantly opening and closing, and there’s always something worthwhile to see or do—in short, the city is very much alive. I feel instantly at home arriving in Moscow because it’s exciting in its way, seething with raw human emotion. That still often appeals to me more than the museum-like qualities of many Western cities, where superficial niceties and the dull veneer of normal life conceal their own inequities and injustices.
My friend Kolya Pavlov remains typically Russian in many ways. His youthful idealism having been worn down by Moscow’s dog-eat-dog reality, much of his free time away from his work as a television producer—along with his disposable income—has gone toward respite in the form of shopping for clothes or consumer goods and visiting nightspots where prodigious amounts of vodka are downed. Although just hearing about the frenetic pace of his entertainment seeking often exhausts me, and although when I was living in Russia we sometimes didn’t see each other for weeks or more, we still share an understanding that comes from observing no formalities or pretenses. No problem was or is too embarrassing or dull to stop one from burdening the other; no plan for journalistic projects or exotic vacations too unrealistic to discuss in detail—often while luxuriating at the banya. Our friendship opened an aspect of human experience, a dimension of unquestioned camaraderie and ability to utterly relax, that I’ve rarely found in the West and that continues to attract me to Russia.
Cultural differences are much harder to reconcile in marriages, however. They were largely responsible for my parents’ divorce after twenty-five years together. My mother never lost the traits that enabled her to evade and buck communism’s restrictions, particularly her delight in defying all conventions that stood in her way, nor did she doubt she would achieve even her most improbable goals. Whereas my father, much as he loved Russians’ uninhibited natures and personal warmth, appreciated many Western practices she found superficial.
When they were still living in London in the 1970s, Serafima joined them by traveling there on a tourist visa, then applying to stay. The serious effort to obtain permission for her visit included an article George wrote for Reader’s Digest that prompted one of the many human rights demonstrations in front of the Soviet embassy, near Hyde Park. I remember a photograph from the time of demonstrators carrying signs that read FREEDOM FOR SERAFIMA LEIMER! However, that kindest and gentlest of souls, who had never really recovered from Zhora’s arrest, did not adapt to her life in the West.
Utterly dependent on her willful daughter and foreign husband, she endured regular admonitions about her overly cautious nature and various faux pas, such as dropping an occasional tissue during the walks my parents all but forced her to take for exercise. Having taken her unconditional love for granted, I’m haunted by a memory of her imploring me, when I was six years old or so, to climb down from a tree along a country road in Spain. Ignoring my order to leave,
she refused to budge even after I proceeded to throw stones in her direction, stopping only after one hit the bridge of her nose. When my parents later asked why it was bleeding, she didn’t dream of telling them.
After suffering a stroke in 1985, Serafima returned to spend her last days back in Moscow. Cared for by her cousin Olga Kiva—who had taken her and Tatyana in when they had nowhere to live after they returned from Siberia at the end of World War II—she was soon diagnosed with cancer and died. Her remains are interred in a wall of Moscow’s famed Novodevichy Convent beside her beloved firstborn daughter, Natasha.
Novodevichy is on a pond in a district otherwise consisting of severe Stalin-era apartment houses. It’s one of Moscow most beautiful sights, and its onion-dome cupolas seem to dispel the sense of passing time and daily worry. The cemetery’s entertainingly ornate tombstones, with their reliefs and statuettes, read like a work of Russian history: Gogol and Chekhov are buried there, along with the composer Sergei Prokofiev, Andrei Tupolev—the airplane designer and mentor to Zhora Leimer—Khrushchev and Yeltsin. Visiting the site inevitably reminds me of my personal connection to Russia and its tragedies, reinforcing my conviction that Russians don’t have a unique soul that must forever remain a mystery to outsiders and that their great country isn’t irrevocably fated to repeat its history. Like my parents, I’ve always hoped, sometimes even trusted, that it will someday take its place among more civilized countries.
But as I’ve tried to show, Russia’s fate can no longer be ascribed to bad luck, however much of it the country has endured. Its fundamental beliefs, attitudes and ways will almost certainly remain essentially the same as long as they form the foundation of its society’s practical workings. As the Kremlin challenges almost every Western foreign policy initiative, from Darfur to South America, the importance of accepting that Russian political and social bodies work according to their own logic can’t be stressed enough. That’s my message, at least, although others may dismiss or deny it, insisting that Western logic is the only real logic.
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