This is the main difference between Russia and other former empires, such as France, Britain or the Netherlands. In the postcolonial era, they have managed to transform their experience of empire into a sense of responsibility for the peoples whom they oppressed for centuries, into a proactive policy of immigration, assimilation and tolerance. In recognition of their moral responsibility for colonialism, the great nations have demonstrated generosity, having no fear for their gene pool and cultural immunity. If Russia wants to be a global player, if it wants to influence events in Syria and in the Balkans, to hold talks on a par with the USA and China, it must accept its responsibility for the centuries of colonialism, for ‘its’ Tajiks and Dagestanis, for their markets and their ethnic quarters, for the builders and cleaners from these regions, for the mosques and the doner-kebab kiosks. This is normal; this is the legacy of empire. And today, holding ‘great nation’ status includes being welcoming.
Unfortunately, the word ‘welcoming’ does not come into the Russian political lexicon. With its discordant ‘Russian March’, with its pretend Cossacks, its Nazis, its heathens and its football fanatics, Russia is turning away from an empire and becoming a mere province; as is evident in the distant Moscow suburb of Biryulyovo.
SEDUCED BY GEOPOLITICS
Political scientists have always had a hard time in Russia. It’s a country where there have never been free universities; where independent political thought has led to prison sentences; and where critical thinking has remained the stuff of dreams. This is a country where political science has been simply a timid servant, at the beck and call of those in power, and where you could count genuine political scientists on the fingers of one hand.
There is, however, one sphere of knowledge in which political thought in the Fatherland has been allowed to develop fully: the secretive and mystical discipline known as ‘geopolitics’. One hundred years ago, at the time of the fathers of geopolitics, Rudolf Kjellén and Friedrich Ratzel, the concept was infused with a particular intellectual freshness; but in the past fifty years it has grown considerably stale, and in Western political science it has been kicked into a far-off corner of a cupboard as one of the guises of the theory of political realism. It has become the destiny of veterans of the Cold War, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski or John Mearsheimer, whose article in Foreign Affairs in July 2014, talking about how the West had ‘missed its chance’ with Russia, was greeted with delight by Russian experts.
On the contrary, in post-Soviet Russia, with its virginal political thought, geopolitics became the queen of the sciences. Provincial teachers of Marxism, military philosophers in military uniform and mere charlatans flocked to it, covering up their lack of knowledge of the humanities with this deceptively thin theory, which, to the kind Russian heart, looked like a conspiracy containing pretty words such as ‘Eurasia’, ‘heartland’ and ‘Atlantic civilization’. In Russia, for the ruling class geopolitics removed the need for a critical outlook on the wider world, suggesting instead messianic myths and simulacra such as ‘national interests’ and ‘the struggle for resources’.
In the Russian understanding of geopolitics, the world consists of unitary states, all of which have their own ‘interests’ and political will and which exist in a Darwinian battle for resources. Vladimir Nabokov beautifully described this view of the world in his novel The Gift, using as an example a Russian émigré, Colonel Shchyogolev, who analyses the world from his couch:
Like many unpaid windbags, he thought that he could combine the reports he read in the papers by paid windbags into an orderly scheme… France was AFRAID of something or other, and therefore would never ALLOW it. England was AIMING at something. This statesman CRAVED a rapprochement, while that one wanted to increase his PRESTIGE. Someone was PLOTTING and someone was STRIVING for something. In short, the world Shchyogolev created came out as some kind of collection of limited, humourless, faceless and abstract bullies, and the more brains cunning and circumspection he found in their mutual activities the more stupid, vulgar and simple his world became.[28]
In reality, of course, everything is much more complicated than this. There is no unified ‘West’, or ‘Russia’ or ‘America’; nor are there any abstract ‘national interests’. There are the interests of Vladimir Putin and Igor Sechin (the President of the oil company, Rosneft); the interests of Putin’s friends, the Kovalchuk brothers and the Rotenberg brothers; the corporate interests of the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the External Intelligence Service (SVR). There are the interests of the White House and the Pentagon; the interests of NATO, and of the [then] President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko. Then there are the interests of corporations such as Siemens and Shell. In other words, there is a complicated multilayered configuration of strategies, institutions, bureaucracies, selfish intentions and fatal errors, all pulling in different directions. And there is no single point where these interests coincide, however much the lovers of these narrow theories might wish for it to be so. ‘Geopolitics’ in today’s Russia is simply an ideology that justifies imperial ambitions and the state’s priority over the individual in the allegedly eternal confrontation between Russia and the West in the battle for resources.
In actual fact, there is no competition for ‘Russian resources’; Russia is merely flattering itself thinking that there is. There is simply a normal concern that our country, like the Saudis, regularly produces oil, buys its iPhones and its cars from the West, and doesn’t interfere in the internal affairs of the West. Back home, as far as the West cares, Russians can carry out exorcisms or light the bonfires of the Inquisition. In the West, they gave up caring long ago about the state of democracy or human rights in Russia. And when a single ‘petrol pump which pretends to be a country’ (in the very apt words of Senator John McCain) suddenly starts to kick up a fuss by saying it has been insulted, and takes out its offence on those around it, the West simply sees it as a fire or health hazard and puts it into quarantine.
The fiasco in Ukraine is a good example of how Russia, acting upon its geopolitical fears and myths (a fear of strategic encirclement, Ukraine joining NATO or the European Union), rather than on a rational assessment of the risks and advantages, has forced itself into a trap. Moscow turned its fears into self-fulfilling prophecies: by annexing Crimea and starting a war with Ukraine it simply pushed Ukraine into the embrace of the EU and NATO, wrenching away from itself and embittering a formerly fraternal people. Russia has shot itself in the foot, leaving the West simply to look on in amazement at what Russia is doing, and then gave itself a headache about what to do with this Ukraine that has suddenly fallen into its hands. All this is the result of an erroneous assessment of Russia’s ‘national interests’ and the false conclusion that they lie in a battle with the West for Ukraine in the geopolitical space of Eurasia.
If we look at this closely, we see that Russia is not facing any sort of ‘challenge from the West’. There is the challenge of globalization and of the post-industrial society, and the West and Russia must both face up to that. After 1991 Russia was offered the chance to play by the general rules of the game, perhaps not as a world leader but certainly as a regional player. Over the course of twenty or so years, a unique architecture for mutually advantageous cooperation was constructed, in which Russian resources were exchanged for Western investment, technology and institutions. A Westernized consumer society was created in Russia which, in the words of the American political scientist Daniel Treisman, turned Russia into a ‘normal country’. By the start of the twenty-first century, the West had given up on the idea of a democratic transition in Russia and gave Putin licence to maintain internal stability. At the same time, no one promised Russia a role in resolving global issues simply because of its past merits and victories. Today such a role is guaranteed only by deep structural changes and the construction of a competitive economy and responsible foreign policy, as in China.
28
Vladimir Nabokov,