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

by Andrei A. Kovalev

  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.

  Déjà Vu

  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 ta
nks, 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.