Russia's Dead End: An Insider's Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin

by Andrei A. Kovalev

  Earlier in Russia there were great writers, philosophers, and poets who inspired their contemporaries by defining the great issues of the day. They set the parameters for thought. Now they have been replaced by those who repress thought and who traffic in thoughtlessness. They are manipulators who fear an informed and thoughtful public. There is an ugly feature of Pandora’s box: it is easy to open, whether from curiosity or for other reasons, but it is much more difficult to recapture the disasters that have been let out of it. As it is said, he who sows discord in his own house will inherit the wind.

  From the time of the great Spanish painter Francisco Goya comes yet another truth: the sleep of reason gives birth to monstrosities. There can be no doubt about the prolonged sleep of reason of the Russian state. The monsters stare us in the face.

  7

  The New Russian Imperialism

  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.

  In the Mirrors of the Yalta-Potsdam System

  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 Eur
ope. 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.

  Missed Opportunities

  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.