A few critical voices in the West warned against too much optimism. One of them was Zbigniew Brzezinski. “Unfortunately,” he wrote as early as 1994, “considerable evidence suggests that the near-term perspectives for a stable Russian democracy are not very promising.”[17] Brzezinski was right. It did not take long, indeed, before the West grew disappointed. After the chaotic, but democratically still promising decade of the 1990s under Yeltsin the Russian spring turned into a chilly winter. While the façade of a multiparty democracy was kept in place, elections were falsified and stolen, corruption was rampant, democratic freedoms were trampled upon, journalists, lawyers, and human rights activists were killed, the judiciary lacked independence, and not the people, but the spymasters of the KGB—rebaptized into FSB—became the country’s supreme masters. Despite Medvedev’s repeated mantras on modernizatsiya, it was not the modernization of the country, but its own self-perpetuation that was the real objective of the regime.
Three times—in 1856, 1905, and 1917—modern Russia had tried to reform itself after a lost war. Three times it failed. The only enduring success was the abolition of serfdom by tsar Alexander II. After the end of the Cold War it had—probably for the first time in its history—a real chance to join the democratic mainstream. Unfortunately, Russia missed this unique historical opportunity. Russian despotism could be likened to a mythical monster: every time it lies down on the ground and appears finally defeated, it rises to power again. This despotic nature of the Russian polity is not only a problem for the Russian population, its immediate victim, but also for the neighboring peoples, and—ultimately—for the whole world. The reason for this is that Russian despotism is intimately linked with Russia’s imperial drive.
THE FOUR ROOTS OF RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM
This “eternal” Russian imperialism has four origins:
1. Russia’s geographical position
2. Russia’s economic system
3. Russia’s expansionist tradition
4. A deliberate expansionist policy conducted by the Russian ruling elite
Historically it was Russia’s geographical position, near Siberia—a huge and almost empty space—that made expansion easy. This was a great advantage for Russia compared with the countries of mainland Europe that competed for territorial expansion in an area where land was scarce. Russia’s opportunities for territorial expansion were enhanced after Ivan III (The Great), who reigned from 1462 to 1505, had succeeded in driving the Mongols back. Under his grandson Ivan IV (The Terrible), who reigned from 1547 to 1584, Russia—as if driven by a horror vacui—started to conquer the vast expanses of Siberia. Within a century the Russians had reached the Pacific. They did not stop there, but crossed the Bering Strait and went on to conquer Alaska. In the early nineteenth century Russian colonists went as far as California, where, in 1812, they founded Fort Ross north of Bodega Bay on the Pacific coast, just above San Francisco.[18] According to the American geopolitician Nicholas J. Spykman, “It was fair to assume that if the grip of Spain in California ever weakened, Russia would be eager to take her place.”[19] However, Russian territorial expansion into the South, the West, and the North was less easy. Here it was less pull factors of an easy expansion than the push factors of a deliberate imperialist policy that prevailed.
An important push factor for Russia’s imperial expansion was Russia’s economic system. It was based on agriculture in feudal properties, and the labor force consisted largely of serfs. This agriculture was not capital-intensive, as was mostly the case in Western Europe, but coercion-intensive.[20] This meant that it was neither innovative nor efficient and rendered only marginal profits to the landlords who disposed of two methods only to raise their profits: increasing the exploitation of the serfs or adding new land. Because the exploitation of the serfs could not be increased beyond certain physical limits, this led to a continuous search for new land and territorial expansion. This tendency was reinforced by the fact that “the Russian state took shape in a capital-poor environment.”[21] The state simply did not have enough money to pay or reward faithful servants of the state and successful military commanders. “[T]he logic of warmaking and statemaking in a region of little capital led rulers to buy officeholders with expropriated land,”[22] and with newly acquired land. The two above-mentioned factors led to Russia developing a tradition of territorial expansion from an early stage. Territorial expansion became, as it were, the normal “way of life” of the Russian state. It was like an organism that grows and grows and continues to grow until it has reached its full size, preordained by its biological nature. But unlike an organism, Russia did not have a genetically preordained “normal size.” It could go on and on, growing beyond any limit. And in a certain sense that was what happened. According to Colin Gray, territorial expansion was “the Russian way,” just as it has been “the Soviet way.”
It is estimated, for example, that between the middle of the 16th century and the end of the 17th, Russia conquered territory the size of the modern Netherlands every year for 150 years running. Furthermore, unlike the case of most other imperial powers conquest by Russia became a permanent and nonnegotiable political fact (save under conditions of extreme duress, as with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918).[23]
Traditions can be upheld and followed with more or less constancy and enthusiasm. A country can become an imperial power by making this an explicit choice or in a more or less accidental way. The British Empire, according to the nineteenth century British historian Sir John Seeley, was acquired “in a fit of absence of mind.” There existed no previous, elaborated British plan to build an empire. Edward Dicey, a British journalist and writer, wrote in 1877:
We have never been a conquering nation. Since the days when the Plantagenets essayed the conquest of France we have never deliberately undertaken the conquest of any foreign country; we have never made war with the set purpose of annexing any given territory. We have had no monarchs whose aim and ambition it has been to add fresh possessions to the crown, in order simply and solely to extend the area of their dominions.[24]
Although the British perception that their empire was created in “a fit of absence of mind” may be exaggerated, it is not an exaggeration to say that from its early beginnings the Russian empire has been conceived as a deliberate project. The twin objectives of territorial expansion and the subjugation of other peoples were consciously and purposively pursued by Russia’s political elite. An exemplification for this mindset is tsarina Catherine the Great’s famous dictum: “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.”[25] It was not only a supposed fragility of the Russian state that was at the root of its continuous expansion. “The fact that, unlike Western Europe, the formation of the empire does not succeed the construction of the state, but accompanies it, has also blurred the dividing lines. The concept of the nation and imperial ambition merge as soon as Moscow, the first centre of the modern state, gains the upper hand over rival Russian principalities and, then, over the weakened mongol overlord.”[26] The fact that in Russia empire building was a constitutive part of the process of state formation indicates a fundamental difference with empire building by the Western European states, which only began after the national states had been consolidated. While Russia was a “product of empire,” this was not the case here. John Darwin, for instance, emphasized the fact that Britain “was not in any obvious way a product of empire. It was not ‘constituted’ by empire—a modish but vacuous expression. The main reason for this was that its English core was already an exceptionally strong and culturally unified state (taking language and law as the most obvious criteria) long before it acquired an empire beyond Europe.”[27] The same was true for Portugal, Spain, France, and even the Netherlands (which from 1568 to 1648 was fighting a war of independence against Spain).
17
Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,”
18
Daniel Headrick contrasts this smooth, swift, and easy conquest of Siberia by the Russians with the slow conquest of its Western frontier by the young United States, where, due to the fierce resistance of the Native American tribes, “the conquest was slow, difficult, and costly” (Headrick,
19
Nicholas J. Spykman,
21
Charles Tilly,
23
Colin S. Gray, “The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era: Heartland, Rimlands, and the Technological Revolution,” Strategy Paper No. 30, National Strategy Information Center, Inc., (New York: Crane, Russak & Company, Inc., 1977), 35. Charles Tilly even spoke of “two and a half centuries, [in which] Russian expansion scarcely ceased” (cf. Tilly,
24
Edward Dicey, “Mr Gladstone and Our Empire,” September 1877, in
25
Quoted in Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard, “The Spectre of a Multipolar Europe,” Policy paper (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2010), 32.
26
Claire Mouradian, “Les Russes au Caucase,” in
27
John Darwin,