The keys to understanding Russia’s geopolitics, its people and its leaders, have been the nation’s faith—the stress on the communal rather than the individual in either Christian Orthodoxy or communist brotherhood—and its giant territory and what it holds. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia shed satellite nations in Eastern Europe and republics in the Baltics and Central Asia. Abroad, it then began to be seen not as the center of a Eurasian civilization, but as an extension of the West.
The Putin decades, however, have changed that perception as Russia, once again, began to reimagine itself in civilizational, not just national or geographical, terms. The country that Barack Obama dismissed as a “regional power” after the Crimea annexation looks set to rival the United States. Not least because Russia, like the United States, occupies a “region”—a continent, actually—verging on two oceans.
Also like the United States, Russia, contrary to its convictions, does not constitute a separate civilization—civilizations, as those of Persia or China, possess independent frames of reference. Russia derives much of its identity from the West, either in imitation of it or in opposition to it. It has both striven to define itself as Western and what the West is not. The pro-Russian patriots who became known as the Slavophiles in the nineteenth century believed in Russia’s religious and spiritual uniqueness, which set it apart from the West and assured it future glory. Another group, the Westernizers, argued for the rational, European approach to Russian matters. Even though at least half of Russia’s landmass is in Asia, it does not see itself as Asian.
Russia, then, is a mutant, an oxymoron of geography, a self-enclosed empire defined by its central government and its rule over an extensive territory on which dwell dozens of peoples speaking many languages. However, Russian is the mother tongue of eight out of ten Russian citizens, and the lingua franca of virtually everyone.
Russia’s gross domestic product stands at $1,283 billion, which makes its economy the world’s twelfth, behind those of India, Brazil, and South Korea.4 It spends $70 billion annually on its military, less than China does, and only one-seventh of the defense budget of the United States.5 In economic terms, Russia hardly seems like much of an empire.
But either way, relatively few outsiders have seen much of it. How many foreigners, or even Russians, have made a concerted effort to traverse its vastness, as the American song has it, “from sea to shining sea”?
Demonized as a dictator, at least in the United States, Putin has nevertheless overseen a turn in Russia’s fortunes that was impossible to imagine during the chaotic Yeltsin years of the 1990s, often deemed democratic in the West. Stepping in to reverse the excesses produced by the collapse of socialism and the sudden introduction of the free market, Putin nationalized, or rather took under the Kremlin’s control, Russia’s hydrocarbon industry, assuring his almost bankrupt government of much-needed revenues. Aided by high world energy prices, he was able to pay pensions and salaries owed to miners, railroad workers, and teachers, and so many others whom the Yeltsin administration had largely abandoned. Under Putin, roads and bridges were built, factories began functioning, and the jobless index fell to below 5 percent by 2017,6 and this is despite the many rounds of sanctions imposed by the West after the Crimea annexation.
The Russia Putin built has largely survived notwithstanding the government’s self-punishing response when it decided to levy its own countersanctions. These retaliatory measures—blocking import of European food and agricultural products and barring certain American politicians and businesspeople from visiting Russia—hurt the Russian economy and its partners much more than those at whom the countersanctions were aimed. But such was Russia’s state of mind—when dealing with the West it often addresses matters emotionally, not pragmatically.
Such harmful actions add to the many already existing problems—an undiversified economy, graft, nepotism, aging infrastructure, in addition to shrinking space for free speech, free assembly, and the press. Despite these infringements on democracy, however, many Russians appear to share Putin’s belief that only a centralized Russia can achieve the desired greatness, or at least the mythology of it. That mythology is mostly based on the idea of Russia’s superior soul and its imperial stature as a unique nation straddling the East and West. The president recently confirmed this: “We are less pragmatic than other people, less calculating. But then we have a more generous heart. Perhaps this reflects the greatness of our country, its vast size.”7
Russia’s other enduring myth is that of a caring and benevolent czar—be it Ivan the Terrible; Peter the Great; or Nicholas I, who announced that the three pillars of Russia’s empire were pravoslavie, samoderzhavie, narodnost (the Russian Orthodox faith, absolute state power, and the people). After the March 2018 presidential elections, with Putin winning an impressive 77 percent of the votes,8 and a subsequent inauguration fit for a czar, many Russians have begun to see Putin as Putin the First.
Do the three imperial pillars of Russia’s past still uphold an empire of Putin’s present? We were determined to find out.
1
KALININGRAD
THE AMBER-TINTED GAZE OF AN EMPIRE
TIME ZONE: MSK-1; UTC+2
When Kant assumes that something outside of us, a thing-in-itself, corresponds to our ideas, he is a materialist. When he declares this thing-in-itself to be unknowable, transcendental, other-sided, he is an idealist.
—Vladimir Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
Kaliningrad, formerly the German city of Königsberg, has often been called Russia’s western door, yet this door is not always a welcoming one. From here, the country’s exclave (officially, the Kaliningrad Oblast, or region) that borders Poland, Lithuania, and the Baltic Sea, the empire gazes with suspicion at anyone who may doubt its superiority and strength.
We arrived late one cool, clear-skied April afternoon at Kaliningrad’s shambolic, undersized airport—an architectural remnant from Soviet times when it was a “closed” city (off-limits, that is, to nonresidents, owing to its strategic significance as the Soviet’s westernmost military outpost) and had just a handful of visitors. We found ourselves greeted with distrust. As we walked off the runway and entered the terminal building, stern blue-uniformed border guards brusquely took all the passengers’ passports. The guards divided us into two lines, one for foreigners, the other for Russians. One guard detained Jeff, an American citizen, and led him up to a “detention” office—a room on the second floor that was empty, save for a fluorescent light and a desk. The guard handed his detainee over to his two colleagues, who questioned him about why he had come to Kaliningrad and the people on his contact list for the city.
“What do you think of Putin?” one of the officers demanded, his doughy face, slack paunch, and diminutive stature belying the seriousness of his expression. His comrade noted down Jeff’s answers. The short man’s questions were coming at a rapid pace.
“What are you doing here?”
“How is it that you speak Russian?”
“You say you’re writing a book about Russia. About what, exactly?”
“Where are you staying in Kaliningrad?”
“Who’s accompanying you?”
“What flight are you taking out of here, and on what date?”
The Western press was reporting that Russia, in apparent violation of a decades-old arms control treaty signed with the United States, had been busy stationing nuclear-capable intermediate-range Iskander missiles in the oblast, so such scrutiny was to be expected. Yet the guards relented when they learned that Jeff was a frequent foreign-policy commentator on the Russian airwaves and was married to a Russian.
Then the officers asked him to call Nina, a Russian citizen, and have her come up for her own cross-examination.
Easier said than done. The airport officials, when she had asked for directions, did not know where the apparently “secret” facility was located. Impatient, the border guards finally sent the American subject of their in
terrogation down to find her himself.
Nina found it hard to take her interrogator seriously, given his resemblance to the Pillsbury Doughboy. But then it dawned on her—this clever, persistent young man had overcome his looks to turn himself into a duty-bound Guardian of the Motherland, though, as it turned out, a polite and apologetic one. Nonetheless, his questions were still intrusive, a point-by-point verification of all the answers Jeff had given; the guard treated Nina as if she were Jeff’s minder, as they would have done to most women seen with foreign men during the Cold War. They paid particular attention to his feelings about Putin.
“Does he approve of him? Do you?”
“Sometimes,” she answered.
The point came, though, when she had had enough.
“Why all these questions?” she asked. “Kaliningrad isn’t a closed city anymore, right?”
“Of course not,” he replied. “We’re very sorry. You see, this American is a foreigner. You do understand, don’t you?”
Nina nodded, recalling similar interviews by American border officials when she first arrived in New York almost three decades earlier. And now, with relations between the two countries worsening by the day, a guarded approach to Western visitors was back in vogue again.
Jeff, for all intents and purposes a Muscovite now, didn’t bat an eye at such a suspicious reception. Nina, living in New York, was choking with disgust.
“I feel violated,” she said, shaking her head.
Finally we made our way out of the terminal. From the various souvenir stalls and a medley of amber amulets and portraits of varying dimensions made in his image, Vladimir Putin’s stern gaze was fixed upon us with icy distrust. In addition to the amulets, the stalls held an array of amber bracelets, statuettes, and portraits of the double-headed eagle—Russia’s coat of arms.
Amber, colloquially known as Baltiyskoye zoloto (“Baltic gold,” except that it is fossilized tree resin), was everywhere on display, crowding shelves in the terminal’s cluttered arrival hall. Artisans had turned the oblast’s signature treasure into a local strategic resource on a par with oil and gas but utilized it to glorify the nation’s president and insignia of state. It is, of course, a valuable resource. Nine-tenths of the world’s supply of this unique substance originates in the oblast; Kremlin insiders hold a monopoly on its trade, worth more than a billion dollars a year.
Annexed by the Soviets after World War II—in Russia most commonly known as the Great Patriotic War—the Kaliningrad Oblast had previously belonged to the seven-hundred-year-old East Prussian region of Germany. Königsberg was the region’s serene redbrick capital. Renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 to honor the just-deceased Soviet prime minister Mikhail Kalinin, the ceremonial head of state under Lenin and Stalin, the city became the capital of the Soviet Union’s westernmost territory. Yet, apparently, some young people nowadays do not even know the origins of its name. We asked a twenty-five-year-old resident if he knew who Kalinin was, but, flustered, he admitted he did not. In any case, Kaliningrad’s history is fraught with contradictions: the city has retained a Soviet functionary’s name but has removed its hulking Lenin statue from its main square. In its place, municipal authorities have erected an obelisk to the Great Patriotic War. Nobody here would argue with that.
We took a taxi into town, approaching its skyline of mostly ten-story concrete apartment blocks and then trundling down often mud-splattered, potholed, and at times unmarked roads busy with slick, foreign-made cars. Some cars—especially BMWs, Audis, or Volkswagens, bore bumper stickers that read as an exhortation to attack: ON TO BERLIN, AGAIN! That militancy—Russians had defeated Nazi Germany and now use their automobiles to relive the victory—also displayed deep insecurity and evoked a sad, telling irony: they prize German automobiles above their own. The war had dealt cruelly with the city: the old cobbled German streets and quaint, gingerbread German houses remain intact almost exclusively in the Amalienau and Maraunenhof districts. Elsewhere, Kaliningrad, two and a half decades after the demise of the communist state, is Soviet and gray.
A Soviet war trophy of sorts, the Kaliningrad Oblast was, oddly, never formally transferred to the communist government; although Germany has never officially demanded its return, it has never renounced it, either. Perhaps, because of this, the fear of “re-Germanization” looms. Today, the Kremlin uses the exclave’s very ambiguity to ratchet up anti-Western rhetoric.
But what does the fear of “re-Germanization” mean, exactly? Germanization in Kaliningrad—as understood by Russians—is the belief that Germany is eager to relocate ethnic Germans back to Kaliningrad, actively and aggressively infusing the territory with German culture. If such were to occur, it would surely be as bad as the Nazi occupation, the state insists. This fear of “re-Germanization” isn’t novel; it was a constant undercurrent in Kaliningrad’s Soviet history. And even though people here frequently travel to the Baltics, Poland, and Germany on long-term Schengen visas and witness little evidence of this “threat” while there, in a country where the state is so imposing, how does one disregard the propaganda? The Western menace is often discussed on television and the harrowing memory of Nazism is never allowed to quite fade into historical oblivion. And, the argument goes, just about the only thing protecting the country from this threat is Putin.
The next day was rainy and cool—typical Baltic weather. Maxim, the enterprising, thirtysomething son of a Moscow acquaintance of ours, kindly offered to give us a tour of the city and the surrounding towns. We drove out in his slick black Audi through morning traffic into the rain-sodden fields and forests of the countryside, briefly stopping at the military hamlet of Pionersky, our first encounter with Putin’s specter on this trip. Rumor has it that the Russian president, who visits frequently, stays in a villa behind a tall green wall. We also dropped in on Svetlogorsk, an up-and-coming resort hardly renowned during the Soviet era. Then, the Soviets boasted of Latvia as their major Baltic vacation spot.
Maxim had previously worked as an engineer in the ports of Kaliningrad and Baltiysk (formerly the German town of Pillau) but now finds himself employed by the Chinese, preparing their soybean oil containers for shipping. These two ports shelter Russia’s Baltic fleet and have, since the Soviet era, formed the epicenter of the region’s military-oriented economy. Maxim told us that he was disappointed to have lost his state-related job recently owing to the Kremlin’s shift of resources toward the Crimean Peninsula.
Crimea—in 988 it became the cradle of Orthodox Christianity for Kievan Rus, the original protostate for both Russia and Ukraine—had been officially Russian since 1783, when Empress Catherine the Great seized it from the Crimean Khanate, then a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. In the Soviet Union Crimea remained under the Kremlin’s jurisdiction, but in 1954 Nikita Khrushchev, who succeeded Joseph Stalin after his death, transferred it to Ukraine, which was, just like Russia, one of fifteen Soviet Republics within one country, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). There were many reasons for that transfer, administrative and economic, but uppermost was the desire to overcome Stalin’s legacy of central control. Khrushchev thought of Ukraine and Russia as equal nations; he assigned historical primacy to ninth-century Kiev, not to Moscow, which until the 1100s was just an obscure village in the woods.
But following the Euromaidan protest movement in Kiev that led to the 2014 overthrow of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ally, Russia annexed Crimea with a stealth invasion. Announcing the annexation in March 2014, Putin insisted that “in people’s hearts and minds, Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia.”1 He thereby vilified Khrushchev—by whose action Russia was not “simply robbed, it was plundered.” The speech set up a dichotomy that now stands at the core of Russian identity: strong-hand rulers like Putin or Stalin—those who collect Russian lands—standing against reformers like Khrushchev or Mikhail Gorbachev, who give them away. Kievan Rus, too, was eventually torn apart—Great Russia versus Small Russia (“Malorossiya,” an ol
d Russian name for Ukraine).
Arguing that for sixty years the Crimean dream has been to return under the wings of Mother Russia, the Kremlin had to deliver on its promise to improve life on the peninsula. The minimum monthly cost of living on the peninsula has been around 14,000 rubles ($240), which is more than half the average salary and 10 percent higher than that of Russia’s southern regions bordering Crimea.2 Moreover, the price for upgrading or rebuilding the peninsula’s economic and social infrastructure has been calculated—so far—as anything from $10 billion (300 billion rubles) to $85 billion (3 trillion rubles).3 And since Crimea lacked an overland connection to Russia (one of the reasons for Khrushchev’s transfer), Russia constructed a bridge across the Kerch Strait, which consumed funds (almost $4 billion) that would have gone to other regions of the country. The bridge opened last year, shortly after Putin’s triumphant win in presidential elections and his inauguration; its opening was, as one would expect, a grand affair, with Putin the first to cross it—in a giant Kamaz truck, an event broadcast throughout the country. The almost twelve-mile-long steel structure—the longest bridge in Europe—physically reunited Russia and Crimea. Or “Russia’s birthplace,”4 as Putin called it in his remarks.
To build that bridge and accomplish everything else it planned to do, the Russian government had been awarding contracts to Crimean businesses to keep them afloat as they went through the transition from Ukrainian to Russian sovereignty. And even though the military has been aggressively returning to the Kaliningrad exclave—as a strategic territory inside the West it has recently become one of Europe’s most militarized places—the city’s ports, which had once been thriving shipping centers, have slowly been abandoned as commercial entrepôts and taken on an important status as military installations. Replacing the Baltics, Crimea has become the new Russian showcase.
In Putin's Footsteps Page 2