This provoked Putin’s critics to draw comparisons with Hitler’s policies of bringing all Germans under one roof and the use of German minorities to undermine neighboring countries before their annexation or subjugation. Not only Latvia and Estonia, with their proportionally large contingents of ethnic Russians, many of them still – twenty-five years after independence – without the citizenship of their countries of origin, but also Russia’s own allies, such as Belarus and Kazakhstan, became worried. It took some time for the neighboring countries to see that the analogy with Hitler was wrong: the Kremlin had no plans to stoke ethnic tensions in order to destabilize and then annex former Soviet lands.
In the days of the abundance of financial resources, Russian money was considered to be a major tool in the hands of the Kremlin to buy influence in the West, not only “wholesale” but in a retail mode as well, recruiting “agents of influence.” In the most celebrated case, Gerhard Schroeder, soon after resigning as German chancellor in 2005, agreed to serve as chairman of the board of North Stream, Gazprom’s pipeline to Germany. A number of other senior Western businessmen, retired politicians and the like were offered positions in Russian companies, including some that were state-owned. Many accepted. A Washington K Street public relations company, Ketchum, was tasked with improving Russia’s public image in the West.
Certainly, Russians then were looking for partners and image-makers in Europe and America to help them move around and integrate into the wider West which they aspired to join. They were doing what others – Asians, Middle Easterners, and the like – were doing before them. They were probably doing less than those others. And, clearly, Russian penetration of Western societies was no match for Western penetration of the Russian government in the early to mid-1990s, when US and European advisers acted at times as decision-makers in Russian ministries. Yet, this is definitely passé. In the current climate in Europe and the United States, being linked to Russian interests is a kiss of death for anyone with a public career in mind. Russia is now more appealing to retired actors and sports figures.
Russian spying in the West was an issue during the Cold War. Then there was a brief period, in the early 1990s, when a premium was laid on cooperation on issues of common concern, such as non-proliferation, terrorism and transnational crime. In a sincere and unique but obviously foolish step, the Russians in 1991 even gave the Americans plans of their listening devices in the US embassy in Moscow. CIA officials, such as Robert Gates, were fêted in Moscow as colleagues and nearly comrades-in-arms. In 2001, Putin ordered the General Staff to give full intelligence support to the US operation in Afghanistan. The return of adversity in Russia–NATO relations saw, predictably, a fresh expansion of traditional and new (cyber, etc.) intelligence activities. Still, what struck the Europeans in recent years more than reports of Russian intelligence becoming more active were the revelations of friendly spying on them and their leaders by their senior ally, the United States.
For the Western liberal establishment, the very nature of the Russian political and economic system is a threat. In the Western mind, Russia has long been associated with tsarist autocracy, then communist totalitarianism, and now authoritarian kleptocracy. Its successive political systems have been the very antithesis of the rule of law, political freedom and human rights. Now, it is clearly authoritarian, despite the formal trappings of democracy. Its political economy is bureaucratic capitalism, which lives off natural resources and favors those closest to the center of power. Property rights are conditional, and the legal system is managed by the powers that be. Civil society is under pressure.
The present primacy of the raison d’état – when corporate interests have been satisfied – rests on the memories, ideas and ideals taken from the past. Today’s Russia is frankly statist, patriotic/nationalistic and revisionist. Having lost the state in the botched attempt at reform under Gorbachev, the Kremlin is now focused on upholding its own supremacy. Having lost their empire, Russians are now in the process of building a multi-ethnic nation-state which puts a premium on nationalism. And, having been unable and unwilling to adapt to the US-dominated post-Cold War world, Russia is out to rebel against it, breaking the written and unwritten rules of behavior as it seeks to obtain recognition for its great-power status.
The Byzantine system of governance still prevailing in Russia makes the Kremlin decision-making process opaque, while the concentration and centralization of power in the hands of the sole individual at the top provides for policy steps which can be both sudden and surprising to outsiders. Whereas, in the US system, taking a decision on the use of force can take a lot of time and require a major effort at the inter-agency level, as well as between the White House and Congress, in the Russian system, one man essentially decides all. As a result, Russia can move very quickly, and by stealth, surprising even seasoned outside observers – as in Crimea, Donbass and Syria.
Many in the West traditionally view Russia as a country apart from Europe, the classical “Other.” The 1990s Western debate on the “borders of Europe,” which accompanied the NATO/EU enlargement process, revealed strongly held convictions – though by no means universal – that Russia was, indeed, an outsider, which could at best be a partner of Europe, not part of it. In the late 2000s and 2010s, the center of gravity shifted to the view of Russia as an authoritarian alternative to the European values, norms and principles. Initially, the view of a “Russian model” was supported by the country’s rapid oil-fired economic growth. When the growth stalled and was followed by recession, Russia came to be portrayed as a country that bullies its neighbors and corrupts everyone around.
Indeed, the Kremlin has a different approach than the EU governments to a number of important issues: state sovereignty, the use of military force, and the world order. Angela Merkel was right to say in 2014 that Vladimir Putin lives in a different world. This is a realist’s world. Whereas the countries of Europe, and Germany above all, have largely transcended their troubled history, Russia is still going through it. But, truth be told, wherever Russia may be, it keeps company there with much of the rest of the world. The EU is a happy exception: not even the United States, with its distinct view of America’s exceptionalism, sovereignty, military power and world order – one “American century” succeeding another – is where Europe is on these issues.
To strengthen the case of Russia’s un-European nature, adherents of that view pointed to official Russian concepts of the country as a separate Eurasian civilization, facing both the East and the West. These concepts, of course, have deep roots in Russian history – and this is another issue of concern to the West.
Post-Soviet Russia’s unwillingness to do to the Soviet Union’s legacy what West Germans had done to that of the Third Reich is disturbing to quite a few people in Europe. In Russia, the Communist Party was not put on trial, nor were its members limited in their political rights. The Soviet Union itself is viewed as a historical form of the Russian state, a seventy-year period in Russia’s millennium of history, a legitimate polity rather than a criminal aberration – even though officially the Romanov dynasty is revered and the Bolshevik revolution is rejected. In this scheme of things, Stalin, the World War II commander-in-chief and builder of the Soviet state, is a more respectable figure, despite his well-known crimes, than Lenin, who destroyed the Russian imperial state and worked for Russia’s defeat in World War I.