Russia, to modify what US Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously said about Great Britain, fifteen years after the Second World War, ‘has lost an empire and not yet found a role’.
In Russia the domestic foundations of a new global role, markedly different from the failed aspirations of the Soviet empire, are being redesigned. No longer Soviet power but the Russian federation is being praised, a halfway house between an overblown nation state and a continental empire, in uneasy cohabitation with a restive Muslim population. In economic terms, everything so far is based on oil wealth and the building of powerful, though in many respects inefficient state concerns comprising industries designated by the Kremlin as strategic. The outside world would be well advised to understand both the brutal power accumulated and the brittle nature of the power structure on top. There are some golden fortresses in Moscow, St Petersburg and elsewhere throughout the Russian federation, but beneath the proud towers the foundations are unstable.
Defining the international environment
The population base is probably the foremost long-term concern of Kremlin leaders, to be reconstructed and strengthened. The demographic challenge, for Russia more serious than for the rest of Europe, is seriously undermining recruitment in the army and other employment sectors, particularly natural sciences. It is also a threat to the homogeneity of the Russian federation. Rarely spoken of in public, it is an ever-present concern, the modern Russian equivalent of France’s ‘Jamais en parler, toujours en penser’, referring to Alsace-Lorraine: always think of it, never speak of it.
The Iron Curtain provided a symmetry of friend and foe, without many grey zones in between. This is, after the disillusionment of the 1990s, still a point of departure in public discourse, East versus West, with Russia pretty much alone, and Putin at Munich must have been aware that, while raising eyebrows in the world at large, he was winning at home. By contrast, democracy in Russia is associated with weakness and intrusions by the West into the Russian sphere of influence. Domestic support and foreign policy orientation correspond.
Today one out of two Russians believes that during Soviet times the international situation was more favourable to Russia, stable and reliable – the misery of Afghanistan being conveniently forgotten. Only one in twenty Russians would name the time of Yeltsin as being good for Russia’s international standing. To produce a sense of direction, it helps to have a foreign enemy. When, however, Putin refers to the enemy, people are given to understand that it is, without always being specifically named, the United States of America that dropped the first atom bomb in anger, poisoned Vietnam and is, above all, envious of the rise and glory of the motherland.
Europe by contrast is liked, to some extent admired and certainly not feared. Four out of five Russians admit to positive emotions about Europe and Europeanness. This should not, however, be taken as a final farewell to Russia’s Asian vocation. One out of two Russians asserts that Russia was never of Europe or in Europe, and should therefore do everything to cultivate Russian traditions and Russian values. In terms of global players, Europe and the various European countries are not big enough to be deemed worthy of the enemy image: what power can an assemblage of twenty-seven states wield? What sovereignty can be exercised by a Commission that is the servant of twenty-seven masters big and small ?
In search of enemies
Big powers need big enemies, and superpowers deserve a superpower on the other side. The greater the enemy, the greater the glory of standing up to him. Only America qualifies, for better or for worse, as a worthy antagonist. But while the US is part of the new Great Game, Britain, yesterday’s great power, serves as the focus of Kremlin wrath. The bitterness seems to have started with oligarch Berezovsky narrowly escaping, with most of his money, Russian rough justice and receiving British citizenship. The Litvinenko murder in 2006 created acrimony and uncertainty. It was meant to remain a perfect enigma and a threat to any future defector. But it pointed the finger at unidentified agents who can obtain polonium-210, certainly a deadly poison not to be bought in the drugstore round the corner but available only to state agencies. The Russians refused to hand over the main suspect, Andrei Lugovoy, and added insult to injury by first harassing British embassy personnel in every conceivable way and then forcing the British Council to close down its operations, especially language teaching in St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg. This was an unfriendly act by any standard and sent a message of some significance: we do not care about the outside world.
The creation of a new identity from the top down is both a substitute for Soviet ideology, too absurd to resurrect, and the domestic reflection of an ongoing quest to define Russia’s place in the world and its posture among the great powers of today and tomorrow. Russia is being presented to its denizens as the new promised land. The West, a model to be emulated during the early Yeltsin years, has lost its shine among both the people and the policy-makers.
China is too alien, too threatening, too vast to be an alternative model – notwithstanding the positive noises accompanying every meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, joint military manoeuvres with China’s People’s Liberation Army and the growing sales of technology and military hardware. To most Russians, the generals included, China is a brooding presence and too close for comfort. Rumour has it that more than five million Chinese have settled in Siberia, not much less than the remaining Russians. In Moscow’s foreign policy think tanks China is praised as a potential ally against the US, but in cultural terms China is worlds apart. When Russians consider countries to travel to, or settle in, their thoughts turn to Italy, Spain or the peaceful villages around the lakes of Upper Bavaria, or the mild climate of Baden-Baden in the Upper Rhine valley. When Russians look for cultural role models, they choose Italian fashion, French cuisine, German cars and Japanese electronic toys. China is an ally not of choice, but of necessity.
For the time being, China serves as a counterweight to the dominance of the United States but, as they say, only a diamond is forever. The Kremlin’s rulers must surely be aware of the unlimited potential for conflict over Siberia and the Far East: all the people and no resources on the Chinese side, all the resources and no people on the Russian side of the divide. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, bridging the gap, serves both sides, but in the long run Russians will look to Europe and the US to find their elective affinities.
Even after the loss of most of Central Asia, Ukraine and White Russia, the Kremlin still rules over a country of vast proportions, its more than eighty different entities stretching across eleven time zones from Kaliningrad Oblast in the west to Vladivostok in the Far East, bordering on the Pacific, the White Sea in the north, the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, a country of vast Eurasian dimension and ambiguity. It is indeed a continent in all but name, with brutal contradictions not only in climate and demography but also in geopolitical terms. There exist vast differences between Russia west of the Urals and Russia east of the Urals, and thanks to China’s ever-growing presence and mounting pressure they are bound to become more marked with time.
Pragmatism of power
The West should not expect a coherent foreign policy on the part of Russia. There is a basic philosophy, but no comprehensive system of thought, as in the time of the world revolution, only a multitude of political influences, manoeuvres and methods, and the usual divide between short-term convenience and long-term strategy. And anyway, given Russia’s diversity in time and space, why should Russian foreign policy be any more coherent than that of the US? Even during Soviet times, Moscow would act in one direction today, in the opposite direction tomorrow, uninhibited by too much theory.