23. “Georgia Conflict: Key Statements.”
24. “South Ossetia conflict FAQs,” RIA Novosti (September 17, 2008).
25. Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” 79.
26. François Paulhac, Les accords de Munich et les origines de la guerre de 1939 (Paris: Vrin, 1998), 139.
27. Pavel Felgenhauer, “After August 7: The Escalation of the Russia: Georgia War,” in The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia, eds. Cornell and Starr, 172–173.
28. Illarionov, “Another Look at the August War,” 1.
29. Paul Kennedy, The Realities Behind Diplomacy: Background Influences on British External Policy 1865–1980 (London: Fontana Press, 1989), 294.
30. “EU Must be United and Firm on Russia,” Financial Times (September 1, 2008).
31. On this lukewarm response, see Marcel H. Van Herpen, “Russia, Georgia, and the European Union: The Creeping Finlandization of Europe,” The Cicero Foundation (September 2008). http://www.cicerofoundation.org/lectures/Marcel_H_Van_Herpen_Russia_Georgia_and_the_European_Union.pdf.
32. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, La Russie entre deux mondes (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2010), 291.
33. Carrère d’Encausse, La Russie entre deux mondes, 293.
34. On September 11, 2008, during a meeting of the Valdai Club with Vladimir Putin in Sochi, Carrère d’Encausse asked Putin if he would respond positively to Kokoity’s demand for integration of South Ossetia into the Russian Federation. She wrote: “Vladimir Putin answered with the greatest firmness that such a hypothesis was excluded. He explained that if Russia in this specific case was unable to ignore the will of the Ossetian people to be independent, it was firm regarding the principles of respecting the inviolability of existing frontiers. This principle, according to him, applied without exception to the Russian Federation which could not, therefore, welcome into its midst a nation or territory that so desired.” Putin’s double-talk (he is speaking about the “inviolability of existing frontiers” just after having changed the frontiers of Georgia by brutal force) brings her to the—naive—conclusion that “the blunt refusal that was opposed to the Ossetian demand for integration into Russia makes the Russian position clear: the August intervention in Georgia . . . could lead to a settlement of a conflict between Georgia and its separatist minorities, [but] in no case to a dossier that was of interest to Russia.” (Carrère d’Encausse, La Russie entre deux mondes, 298–299.)
35. Cf. “Medvedev: August War Stopped Georgia’s NATO Membership,” Civil Georgia (November 21, 2011). Cf. also Brian Whitmore, “Medvedev Gets Caught Telling The Truth,” RFE/RL (November 23, 2011).
36. Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: My Years in Washington (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 688.
37. Rice, No Higher Honor: My Years in Washington, 688.
38. Tony Blair, A Journey: My Political Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 447.
39. “Saakashvili: Georgia Was Ready to Trade NATO for Breakaway Regions,” RFE/RL (August 8, 2013).
40. “Saakashvili: Georgia Was Ready to Trade NATO for Breakaway Regions.”
41. “8 Avgusta 2008 goda. Poteryannyy den.” http://rutube.ru/video/eddef3b31e4bdff29de4db46ebdd4e44/.
42. Cf. Pavel Felgenhauer, “Putin Confirms the Invasion of Georgia Was Preplanned,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 9, no. 152 (August 9, 2012).
43. Felgenhauer, “Putin Confirms the Invasion of Georgia Was Preplanned.”
44. Quoted in Stephen Ennis, “Russian Film on Georgia War Fuels Talk of Kremlin Rift,” BBC (August 10, 2012).
45. Felgenhauer, “Putin Confirms the Invasion of Georgia Was Preplanned.”
Chapter 16
Conclusion
After World War II the American diplomat and Russia expert George Kennan wrote: “It would be useful to the Western world to realize that despite all the vicissitudes by which Russia has been afflicted since August 1939, the men in the Kremlin have never abandoned their faith in that program of territorial and political expansion which had once commended itself so strongly to Tsarist diplomatists.”[1] These words were true after World War II, but are they still true today? Could one say, paraphrasing Kennan’s dictum, “that despite all the vicissitudes by which Russia has been afflicted since August 1991—the KGB inspired coup and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union—the men in the Kremlin have never abandoned their faith in that program of territorial and political expansion which had once commended itself so strongly to Soviet diplomatists”? This was the central question of this book. Could a great power for which a quasi-permanent, continued, and centuries-long territorial and political expansion has been the natural way of life, suddenly become a “normal,” post-imperial state? If one listens to some analysts, post-Soviet Russia simply had no choice but to adapt to its status of post-imperial country. Alexander Motyl, for instance, wrote:
Despite empire’s long and venerable track record . . . , there are strong reasons to think that empire building is no longer a viable political project. Imperial states have acquired territory in three ways: by marriage, by purchase, and by conquest. Marriage no longer works, as no contemporary ruler (not even a dictator) claims to own the territory he rules. Purchase is a dead end, as all the world’s land is divided among jealous states and oftentimes empowered populations. Conquest is still possible in principle, and the twentieth century is full of instances in which it was attempted in practice. But the limits of conquest are clear, in the aftermath of Iraq if not before. International and most national norms, for example, now hold that the conquest of foreign nations and states almost certainly involves violations of human rights and the principles of self-determination and cultural autonomy, and is therefore illegitimate. Moreover, nation-states are unusually effective vehicles of mass mobilization and resistance, making sustained conquest harder now than in the past . . . . In sum, while history suggests that being or having an empire is a guarantee of longevity, it also shows that acquiring an empire is probably no longer possible.[2]
Motyl wrote these words in 2006, two years before the Russian invasion of Georgia and the dismemberment of this small neighboring country. Another author, who explicitly considered the demise of the Russian empire as definitive, was Manuel Castells. According to Castells,
[T]here will be no reconstruction of the Soviet Union, regardless of who is in power in Russia . . . . I propose, as the most likely, and indeed promising future, the notion of the Commonwealth of Inseparable States (Sojuz Nerazdelimykh Gosudarstv); that is, of a web of institutions flexible and dynamic enough to articulate the autonomy of national identity and the sharing of political instrumentality in the context of the global economy. Otherwise, the affirmation of sheer state power over a fragmented map of historical identities will be a caricature of nineteenth century European nationalism: it will lead in fact to a Commonwealth of Impossible States (Sojuz Nevozmozhnykh Gosudarstv).[3]
Castells wrote these words in 1997, a year in which Russia seemed to have accepted definitively the loss of empire. Moreover, Castells was certainly right that there would be no reconstruction of the Soviet Union, which had disappeared, forever, with its ideological glue: communism. But empires do not need to be communist, as history teaches us. And empires need not be built only in a nineteenth-century way: relying almost exclusively on military power. They can also be built—or rebuilt—in a postmodern way, making use of a smart mix, which not only includes blackmail, pressure, and naked military power, but also financial instruments, economic leverage, and soft power.
We already cited in the introduction Dmitry Trenin, who, in the same vein as the two aforementioned authors, wrote: “The Russian empire is over, never to return. The enterprise that had lasted for hundreds of years simply lost the drive. The élan has gone.”[4] Unlike the other authors, who gave their optimistic assessments before the Russian invasion of Georgia, Trenin’s book was published after the invasion of Georgia and after the gas wars with Ukraine in 2006 and 2009. Trenin, who gave his book the t
itle Post-Imperium, added the subtitle A Eurasian Story. He probably did so without any prior knowledge of Putin’s latest geopolitical project: his book was published before Putin wrote his famous Izvestia article in which he announced the formation of a Eurasian Union[5] and also before the summit on December 19, 2011, during which the presidents of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, officially launched the project of the Eurasian Union. Paradoxically—and ironically—Trenin added Putin’s latest, and most important imperial project as a subtitle to a book in which he argued that Russia had definitively lost its imperial drive.
The Crucial Year 1997
Looking back however, it was not the year 2011—the year in which Putin launched his project of the Eurasian Union—which was crucial to Russia’s new course, nor was it the year 1999, when Putin became acting president. In retrospect, the crucial year was 1997. In this year Russia stood at a crossroads. On May 27, 1997, after long hesitation, President Yeltsin signed the “Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation.” In this act the Russian Federation committed itself to a set of common principles. Among these principles was featured the “respect for sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of all states and their inherent right to choose the means to ensure their own security.”[6] The Kremlin’s recognition of the inherent right of all states “to choose the means to ensure their own security” was a major step forward on the road to a post-imperial state. It was the recognition of the sovereign right of both the post-Soviet states and the former Soviet bloc countries of Eastern Europe to choose their own alliances, including the right to become a member of NATO. In the same year—in July 1997—at the Madrid NATO summit, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were invited to join the Alliance.
Reactions in the West were more than positive. In an article with the title “From Empire to Nation State,” Chrystia Freeland wrote in the Financial Times: “After devoting five centuries to imperial expansion, Russia seems abruptly to have reconciled itself to a diminished global role.”[7] She quoted Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the Moscow-based Center for Strategic Studies, who said: “This spring was a turning point in Russia’s choice between being an imperial power and a nation state. It marked a strong decision to reject empire.”[8] And he added: “The really surprising thing is that the negative reaction to the loss has not been stronger.”[9] However, the Russian advance toward a democratic, post-imperial state during Boris Yeltsin’s second presidential term was not as straightforward as these enthusiastic comments seemed to suggest. Russia’s progress resembled rather the dancing procession of Echternach, in which three steps forward are preceded and followed by two steps backward. This is because, in the same year—on April 2, 1997—Yeltsin signed with the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko a Union Treaty leading to a Union State of Russia and Belarus. The signing of the treaty, wrote the Financial Times, “drew rare praise for Mr. Yeltsin from his Communist and nationalist opponents.”[10] This praise was no surprise, because the initiative put Russia on a quite different track: that of a neoimperial state. The French paper Le Monde referred to a debate in the Russian government between “occidentalists,” wanting to join the European democratic mainstream, and “Slavophiles,” wanting to build a Slavic Union under the aegis of Russia. The first group included two deputy prime ministers: Boris Nemtsov and Anatoly Chubais, and the leader of the liberal Yabloko fraction, Grigory Yavlinsky.[11] The second group included not only ultranationalists, such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the communist Gennady Zyuganov, but also Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov.[12] Primakov, who would shortly afterward become prime minister, was the former head of the SVR, the external intelligence service, a follow-up organization to the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. Primakov was described by Ronald Asmus as someone, who “had made his career by standing up to the West—‘the man who could say Nyet.’”[13] He “saw his job as masking Russian weakness while rebuilding Moscow’s strength. By his desk, he kept a small bust of Prince Alexandr Gorchakov, a 19th-century Russian Foreign Minister under Czar Alexander II who had presided over Russia’s recovery from its total defeat in the Crimean war. Partnership with the U.S. was not part of his lexicon.”[14]
In an editorial Le Monde wrote at that time that the treaty on the Union State between Yeltsin and Lukashenko “emphasizes in the first place the permanent desire of the Kremlin to gather around it the former Soviet republics, at least the Slavic ones. Everything suggests that Ukraine will be next to bear the brunt of the Russian pressure: already dependent of her ‘big brother’ for her energy, she finds herself surrounded on three sides by Russian garrisons.”[15] This commentary was, indeed, farsighted. The objective to bring Ukraine back in its orbit would become the overriding motive behind the Kremlin’s policies in the next decade. The choice facing Russia in 1997 was the choice between becoming a “normal,” democratic nation state, living in peace with its neighbors, or becoming—again—an empire. In the crucial year, 1997, the Founding Act with NATO pointed in the direction of the former, the Union Treaty with Belarus toward the latter. It was as though both initiatives mimicked the Russian coat of arms: the double-headed eagle whose heads face in two opposite directions. It was clear from the beginning that these two strategies could not be reconciled. As soon as 1994 Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote: “In not being an empire, Russia stands a chance of becoming, like France or Britain or earlier post-Ottoman Turkey, a normal state.”[16] He added the warning: “If not openly imperial, the current objectives of Russian policy are at the very least proto-imperial. That policy may not yet be aiming explicitly at a formal imperial restoration, but it does little to restrain the strong imperial impulse that continues to motivate large segments of the state bureaucracy, especially the military, as well as the public.”[17] Brzezinski’s caution was certainly justified. It was shared by the Russian liberal politician Yegor Gaidar, who was Yeltsin’s prime minister from June 15, 1992, to December 14, 1992. Referring to the years 1918–1922—when the Red Army, in only four years, reconquered most of the lost tsarist territories—he wrote: “Russia is unique in restoring a failed empire.”[18]
Putin’s project for a Eurasian Union is the Kremlin’s latest attempt to reintegrate the post-Soviet space. According to Jeremy Smith, a professor of Russian history at the University of Eastern Finland, “It is less clear what economic advantages Russia gains from the Union, given that so much of its trade is orientated to Europe, China, and elsewhere.”[19] According to Smith, “this has fuelled the suspicion that the whole project is a way of enhancing Russian regional hegemony and, in the most alarmist interpretations, moving toward the recreation of some form of the USSR. . . . Critics of the project maintain that, like the European Union, pressures for political integration will follow close upon the heels of economic integration, with the major difference that there will be a clear hegemonic power, Russia, dominating the Union.”[20] One must add here one important reservation: the project of the Eurasian Union was not launched to recreate the Soviet Union, and the objective is not to reintegrate the Central Asian states into Russia proper. Its real and overriding objective is preventing Ukraine from establishing closer relations with the European Union and NATO, bringing this country definitively and irreversibly back into the orbit of its Slavic “brother country” Russia. This objective is openly admitted. Fyodor Lukyanov, for instance, a prominent Russian political scientist, wrote in a comment on Putin’s Eurasia article: “The paradox of the Eurasian Union is that its primary goal is not Eurasia. Its most desired object is Ukraine.”[21] Lukyanov considered membership of Ukraine—a country of 45 million—an economic necessity to make the Eurasian Union work. He also mentioned that “the growth of xenophobia [in Russia] . . . means that building an integrationist unification with the Central Asian countries will be accompanied by increased tensions. Ukraine is, in this sense, the ideal partner, together with Belarus, in as much as it immediately brings a sense of
‘Slavicness’ to the created structure.”[22] Lukyanov spoke further, tellingly, of an “attempt to bring together what is profitable [the Slavic countries] and dissociate oneself from ‘ballast’ [i.e., the Central Asian countries].”[23]
The Kremlin’s Obsession with Ukraine
During the Russia-NATO Council session in Bucharest in April 2008, Putin called Ukraine “a complex state formation. If the NATO issue is added there,” he said, “along with other problems, this may bring Ukraine to the verge of existence as a sovereign state.”[24] Later during the same summit, in a discussion with U.S. President George Bush, Putin said that Ukraine was “not a real country.” This is clearly light-years away from the “common principles” laid down in the Founding Act, signed by Russia and the members of NATO in 1997, in which Russia had recognized the inherent right of all countries “to choose the means to ensure their own security.” Putin’s declaration was a scarcely veiled threat that Russia would intervene if Ukraine decided to join NATO. Doubts on Ukraine’s viability as a sovereign state were expressed on many occasions by leading Russians. On March 16, 2009, the Kremlin ideologue Gleb Pavlovsky wrote in the Russkiy Zhurnal, a Russian online magazine of which he is the owner, an article titled: “Will Ukraine Lose Its Sovereignty?”[25] This article was followed four days later by an interview with Sergey Karaganov, the éminence grise of the Russian foreign policy community and head of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. This article had the title: “No One Needs Monsters. Desovereignization of Ukraine.”[26] Karaganov depicted Ukraine as a failed state that was in a process of “passive desovereignization.” The process was, however, not only “passive.” Karaganov warned that “Russia will not want to see absolutely ungovernable territories close by.”[27] Yuriy Shcherbak, former Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, wrote in response: “In military language it is called the ideological-propagandistic support of the future operation on capturing the territory of a sovereign state.”[28] In fact, Russian politicians continued to denounce Ukraine as an “artificial” country that had no right to exist. At the height of the financial crisis Valery Fadeyev, editor of the political journal Ekspert, wrote: “Ukraine is cheap, we can buy it.”[29] It sounded less aggressive, almost as a joke, but it expressed the same contempt for Russia’s neighbor and its status as an independent, sovereign state.
Putin's Wars Page 37