On the other hand, for more than three hundred years, if we count from the time of Peter the Great (or almost five hundred, if we start with Russia’s first encounter with the technology of the gunpowder revolution at the time of Ivan IV, ‘the Terrible’), Russia has jealously copied the West, from time to time rebelling against this imitation. This phenomenon of constantly trying to catch up with modernization while continually lagging behind the world leaders in the basic socioeconomic indicators (Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the USA in the twentieth and twenty-first) is a fertile breeding ground for resentment in the foreign policy sphere. Russia either sees itself as Cinderella, unfairly forgotten by the evil stepmother and the ugly sisters, or presents itself as a nation sacrificed, which puts itself on the line to save the world from destruction, be it from the Mongol hordes or the fascist tanks.
The early twentieth-century Russian philosopher, Vasily Rozanov, pointed out on a number of occasions this sense of Russians as being victims. He compared them to the Jews, who also have a strong sense of being a people sacrificed. It is no coincidence that conspiracy theories are so developed in Russia, as are fantasies about ‘worldwide behind-the-scenes deals’, which have been hatching plots against our country for centuries. But all this amounts to nothing more than variations on the theme of resentment, which all comes from the inability to change the external conditions of our existence, and from our inability to catch up with the West and overcome our own provinciality. This impotence expresses itself in the demonization of the opponent and in the creation of a dreamt-up reality, where Russia stands alone in opposing the rest of the world.
Russia in the first decade of the twenty-first century is a classic example of where resentment has become state policy. One of the main propaganda myths of the Putin era that began to spread almost in the first few months after Putin came to power was the ‘theory of Russia’s defeat’, beginning with the lamentation about the collapse of the USSR as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’, going right through to the similar meme about the ‘evil nineties’. A sensible way of looking at it was that the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union (in contrast, for example, to the explosive collapse of Yugoslavia) was not a defeat for Russia but a new opportunity for it: it had retained its principal territory, its population, its nuclear potential and it was considered as the successor state to the USSR. Yet it had thrown off the costly ballast of empire, it could complete the transition to the post-industrial state, and it could align itself with the Northern Hemisphere’s richest nations. Strictly speaking, the active part of the Russian population, including all the ruling elite and President Putin himself, used this opportunity successfully. In the early 2000s, Russia came to terms with the crisis of 1998,[27] and, capitalizing on the windfall created by the weak rouble and rising oil prices, doubled its GDP, joined the World Trade Organization and cooperated with the USA in the war on terror. However, at the same time the myth was constantly repeated for domestic consumption about the geopolitical defeat, the humiliation and plundering of Russia by global liberalism and its henchmen: President Boris Yeltsin and the architects of the economic reforms, the Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, and the Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais.
The idea about defeat and the feeling of offence against the reformers and the world outside became a convenient excuse for the lack of social progress and the parasitism of the Putin era, and it tied in well with the deep Russian tendency towards resentment. As the modern Russo-American philosopher Mikhail Iampolski has remarked:
The whole of Russian society, from Putin to the humblest worker, carries with him the same amount of resentment. For Putin the source of this resentment is that on the world stage neither he nor Russia is treated as an equal, respected player. For the worker, it is because of his helplessness in the face of the police, the bureaucrats, the courts and the crooks… The resentful fantasies of the authorities at some moment struck a curious resonance with the resentment fantasies of the ordinary people.[28]
Modern Russian resentment divides into two levels. On one level, political commentators and analysts who support the state have skilfully constructed the idea of ‘the humiliation’ of Russia by the West: the political scientist, Sergei Karaganov, talks about ‘the creeping military and economic and political expansion that has been going on for almost a quarter of a century into the areas of Russia’s vital interests, which is in effect a “Versailles policy in kid gloves”, which has brought out in a significant part of the elite and the population of the country a sense of humiliation and a desire for revenge’.[29] In fact it seems that a totally contradictory process has taken place: over the course of twenty-five years the West tried to integrate Russia into its institutions, proposing privileged conditions for partnership with both NATO and the European Union, at the same time as this ‘humiliated’ elite was rushing to spend its oil dollars on Western real estate, citizenship for their families and education for their children. But Russia as a whole didn’t make use of the open window of opportunity, instead chanting the mantra about being offended and humiliated and inflating NATO’s war in Kosovo in 1999 to the level of a universal catastrophe. Operation ‘Allied Force’ (the NATO codename for the military operation in Kosovo) was indeed a rushed, poorly thought-out and not legally justified action; but it wasn’t aimed directly at Russia, and, what’s more, this mistake by the West certainly does not give Russia the right the build a foreign policy on the principle, ‘The West can do it, so why can’t we?’
Vladimir Putin’s thinking on foreign policy, judging by his speech at a session of the Valdai Club in Sochi on 24 October 2014, is constructed totally on the paradigm of respect and humiliation:
You may remember the wonderful saying: Whatever Jupiter is allowed, the Ox is not. We cannot agree with such an approach. The ox may not be allowed something, but the bear will not even bother to ask permission. Here we consider it the master of the taiga, and I know for sure that it does not intend to move to any other climatic zones – it will not be comfortable there. However, it will not let anyone have its taiga either…. True, the Soviet Union was referred to as ‘the Upper Volta with missiles’. Maybe so, and there were loads of missiles. Besides, we had such brilliant politicians like Nikita Khrushchev, who hammered the desk with his shoe at the UN. And the whole world, primarily the United States, and NATO thought: this Nikita is best left alone, he might just go and fire a missile, they have lots of them, we should better show some respect for them.[30]
The expressive string of words such as ‘taiga’, ‘bear’, ‘shoe’ and ‘missile’ indicate how important for the Russian president are such ‘male’ concepts as ‘respect’ and ‘authority’. According to this logic, the West did not show the necessary respect; it failed to answer Russia’s openness to cooperation after 9/11, when Vladimir Putin was the first world leader to declare his support for George Bush and offered him a global partnership in the war against terror. As Igor Yurgens, an economist, lobbyist and a man with many years’ experience observing the life of the Kremlin, noted: ‘Both Putin and his close circle had a feeling of humiliation and betrayal on the part of the West (at least, that’s how it looked to them).’
27
In August 1998 Russia defaulted on its debts and almost overnight the rouble crashed to about a quarter of its value. This made imported goods very expensive, and it acted as a stimulus for Russian industry.
28
https://www.colta.ru/articles/specials/4887-v-strane-pobedivshego-resentimenta.
29
https://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2014/07/28/izbezhat-afganistana-2.