Poor
Russia! Look how Russia has been humiliated by the West when NATO expanded to
include its erstwhile Warsaw Pact allies and its former Baltic possessions, not
to mention the promise to bring Ukraine into the EU, thereby threatening the 1500
mile-long border Russia shares with Ukraine. Isn’t Russia vulnerable enough
already! Besides, shouldn’t a former empire – 63% of Russians believe Russia is
a “great power” – be able to exercise
its influence over the territory it used to control while an empire? How can the
Americans and the Europeans be so callous with such a peace-loving,
cooperative, exceedingly friendly – and great – nation? How could Russia not
feel vulnerable and threatened by the rich and powerful West? Doesn't the West
understand that Russia has been on its knees far too long and now must rise
again? Besides, who can take Ukraine seriously as an independent state,
especially with a third of its population speaking Russian?
These are, in a nutshell, the
sentiments of those both outside and inside Russia who advocate humoring Vladimir
Putin with regard to Ukraine. For home consumption, the Kremlin and its media toss out to red meat about
the Nazi takeover of Ukraine and, in the words of the Speaker of the State
Duma, Sergei Naryshkin, “the genocide of the Russian people” there.[1]
The campaign for the dehumanization of the Ukrainians (“fascists,” “Nazis”) has
been going on for months, including the WWI-style favorite propaganda myth of the
Ukrainian soldiers crucifying a Russian child in Slaviansk. The report appeared
on Channel 1 on July 12 and is still there: http://www.1tv.ru/news/world/262978.
Much of this rhetoric is predicated
on the alleged deep, unbridgeable antagonism between Russia and the West. But first of
all, Russia v. the West is a false dichotomy and Russia v. the EU, even more so.
None of the EU member nations, separately or together, are interested in
territorial expansion into Eurasia, nor NATO whose primary function has been to
guarantee Europe’s post-WWII borders, nor its leading member, the United States.
Putin himself has repeatedly proclaimed Russia to be a European power and
seemed committed to this 300-year-old vision until he began to pivot towards
Russian nationalism in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq. Still, the
ambiguity persisted with profound political and economic implications. The difficulties the EU has been having with the sanctions in response to Russia’s annexation of
Crimea shows the high degree of Russia's integration into the web of the EU economic
and cultural relations. Visa-free travel for Russians to the EU was about to be
negotiated when the Crimea debacle put everything on hold. Indeed, by
historical reckoning, Russia's integration into the West since the fall of communism has been truly fast-track and, as it appeared, perhaps, a little too fast-track
for the EU, given its long hesitation in responding to Russia’s blunt
aggression in Ukraine.
But what about the issue of NATO expansion? When
I was in Moscow in June, a die-hard Putin opponent told me he was sure that US
and/or NATO had been planning to establish a military base in the Crimea and
Russia’s take-over of the peninsula was meant to prevent it. I did my
research. Apparently, the US requested a few years ago to be integrated into the old
Soviet early warning system for missile defense against Iranian ballistic
missiles. It is this request that has been morphed by the Russian propaganda machine into a menacing American plan to establish a military base on the Crimean peninsula. I have no doubt that a satisfactory arrangement
could have been reached to allay Russia’s fears that the anti-missile defense
system, still in the works, targeted at Iran, was “dual-use” and could have been
pointed at Russia.
But what about the more general
argument that seems intuitively right: Shouldn’t Russia feel legitimately
threatened, as it is surrounded by NATO members? Seen from the United States (except
through Sarah Palin’s windows), Russia may not loom too large (compare the 2013 US
military budget of $640 billion to Russia’s $88 billion); however, seen from
Western Europe, Russia’s might is far more menacing (Russia spends about twice
as much on the military as do France, the UK, or Germany).
Russia, in fact, is the unrivalled European superpower in the military,
nuclear, and, increasingly important, the hydro-carbon sense. Such a
high-profile military posture is pretty hard to maintain while standing on
one’s knees. Furthermore, let us not forget that for half a century following
WWII, when the Russians – or, rather, their leaders – held their heads high (under Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko), Russia’s
legal antecedent, the USSR, oppressed its citizens and turned the countries of
East-Central Europe into de-facto colonies. Who can, then, blame Poland,
Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, as well as the Baltic states that had been
occupied by the Soviets under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, for scrambling
to assert their national sovereignty at the first historical opportunity and
securing their statehood by joining NATO and the EU? Is there any rational reason
for Russia to think that these nations are poised to start nibbling at Russia’s
territory?
That there is no NATO threat to
Russia should have become obvious even to the most thick-headed analyst in the
wake of the Georgia War of August 2008. Resulting in loss of territory for Georgia, this
conflict demonstrated that no outside power had the inclination (some say the
ability) to challenge Russia in Russia’s own back yard, Senator McCain’s
hollow saber rattling notwithstanding. In fact, the opposite argument has been
legitimately made: the West’s demure reaction to Russia’s shenanigans in
Georgia was realistic -- and a singular factor in Putin’s calculation when he decided to move
into Crimea. Today, according to
NATO’s internal documents, disclosed in Der Spiegel on 19 May 2014, NATO lacks the
ability to defend its members among the Baltic states, should Russia choose to
invade them (http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/ukraine-crisis-shows-up-cracks-in-nato-a-970248.html).
The threat to Russia from the West,
then, is literally a travesty: the reverse is true, if one understands “the West”
as a stable political order that has governed European borders since WWII and,
by mutual consent, since the collapse of communism. The "threat from the West" is nothing but a propaganda myth, a
dusted-off old Soviet saw about "capitalist encirclement" and the looming external enemy. In the late 1980s and early
1990s, Mikhail Gorbachev, Edward Shervadnadze and Alexander Yakovlev did a lot to demystify it but,
apparently, not enough.
Now, as under communism, this
propaganda assault on the people, amplified by the craven, state-controlled
Russian media (with very few digital media exceptions) is meant to shore up the
legitimacy of the political class and its leader, who have proven incapable of
setting their country on a course that would diminish its monumental corruption
and narcotic dependency on the export of hydro-carbons. As a result, Putin and
his United Russia Party, the political machine he jerry-rigged from the rubble
of the Soviet one-party national-security state, are feeling vulnerable. The
world has changed, and Russia’s new cosmopolitan elite, the so-called creative
class, that has arisen since the
collapse of the Soviet Union and has established itself economically in the
prosperous oil-rich Russia, instinctively resists Putin’s authoritarian and
increasingly ineffective rule. One common denominator of their protests was their sense humiliation at the corrupt political process, a violation of their citizenship. After their protest demonstrations of 2011 and
2012, Putin turned away from this natural constituency for a modernizing
leader, instead embracing the nationalism of the “silent majority” – populist, socially
conservative, sanctimonious, and not infrequently chauvinistic. This must have been a desperate move on the part of the man who had previously condemned Russian chauvinism as a dangerous force
that might lead to the break-up of the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional
Russian Federation. A student of history, Putin has to be aware that the Russian empire of the Romanovs fell, in part, because
of the autocracy’s embrace of exclusive Russian nationalism. Is today's Russia next?
No need, then, to feel sorry for
Russia or the Russians as victims of the powerful West. Rather, as throughout
much of Russia’s history, Russians continue to be the victims – surely undeservedly – of their own government. True, there are many Russians, affected by the imperial visions of the Kremlin propaganda machine, who have been assiduously imagining themselves standing on their knees under the diktat of the evil West.
Even under the best conditions of partnership, according to some of them, the
West has treated Russia as a second-class citizen in the world community. This
is what Tony Blair picked up during his friendship with Putin in the early
2000s: “Vladimir later came to believe that the Americans did not give him his
due place (my italics, GF). Worse, he saw them circling Russia with Western-supporting 'democracies' who were going to be hostile to Russian interests.”[2]
In a recent interview, Putin’s crony, billionaire Timchenko, echoed such
sentiments and declared that his Western business partners had always treated
him as “second league.” Complaints such as these, needless to say, involve what Max
Weber called “the prestige of great powers,” ever hungry for self-aggrandizement and extra recognition, not the dignity of individual
citizens. The former must have the pyramids and the most fearsome weapons; the latter, property and respect.
Few will deny that the average
middle-class Russian has been enjoying the best standard of living in all of
Russia's history, replete with vacations abroad, separate apartments, country
dachas, and late-model German, French, and Japanese automobiles. Aleksander
Yakovlev used to say that Soviet citizens could not feel free because they did
not own any property, for him the necessary condition of freedom. By this token, many of his compatriots may feel free
these days and indeed they do hold their heads high. For years now, my
undergraduate students at Stanford who havd gone to Moscow to study alongside their
Russian counterparts have complained that they felt a bit diminished by their
colleagues’ off-campus spending habits. Yes, these are elite students, but I also
remember my Stanford undergraduates traveling to study in Russia in the 1980s and telling me how shocked they were by the limited horizons and
economic insecurity of their Russian counterparts. The 1980s are long gone! In my seven days of pounding the
pavement in Moscow (after a twelve-year absence), I was able to spot only one
Russian Zhiguli sedan, the most ubiquitous vehicle in Moscow circa 2002, but I
noticed that Bentley has a dealership in the, yes, Revolution Square next
to the Kremlin (in case you are wondering, you can get one, slightly used, for just
half a million dollars). Luxury cars aside, as individuals, middle-class
Russians feel as proud and dignified as at any time since 1917, whatever their
politics. It is the political class that runs the country and its leader Putin,
a deeply corrupt regime, presiding over a profoundly corrupt bureaucracy, who
feel the need to buck up their sagging prestige with a “little victorious war”
while conjuring up the spectre of the big bad US and NATO and the “fascist”
Ukraine.
Surely, there may be an occasional
clash of interests over this or that tariff or import/export issues, but there
has not been a fundamental antagonism between Russia and its Western partners.
Quite the opposite. The new, post–Communist Russia was embraced by the West,
cautiously, to be sure, but embraced nonetheless, as well as aided considerably
by governments and NGOs as it struggled with the transition from Communism. It was
the United States, to use just one example, that was the strongest supporter of
Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization.
The benign international climate,
perhaps, the most benign in all of Russia’s history, the absence of actual
military threat from the West or elsewhere, and Russia’s deep integration into
the EU seem to have been taken by Putin’s government for granted while Russia
had a free hand in preventing a newly independent nation from electing the
government it likes and the form of economic modernization it chooses. This is
what happened in Ukraine (and before it, in Georgia). By some accounts, Putin's
decision to annex Crimea was an intemperate reaction to the sudden resignation
of Ukraine’s president after months and months of popular protests against him.
A sly tactical move taking advantage of Ukraine’s weak care-taker government, the
annexation of Crimea was strategically an irrational act: it produced the
opposite effect of anything one could wish for one’s own country – it
diminished rather than enhanced Russia’s security by turning the world’s most
powerful nations, economically and militarily, against Russia. But above all, it
united against Putin the politically and ethically diverse, as well as historically fractious,
Ukraine and forced the EU
states, ever a quarrelsome lot, to step back and agree, at last, on some
concerted action to raise the stakes for Putin in his “big game” and to force
him to reconsider his policies. After all, who wants a super-power bully in the EU's own back yard, a bully on the scale of a Stalin or a Hitler? With Western
support for Ukraine now assured, Putin's adventure is liable to result in
continuing turmoil on Russia’s borders that Putin himself may not be able to control –
and a substantial strengthening of NATO’s Eastern and Northern borders. Poland
used to have about a dozen US soldiers stationed on its soil prior to the
annexation of Crimea. There are now about 500 US and NATO troops there and
more are coming.
The analogy with Hitler's Germany
and the 1930s has been surfacing repeatedly since the annexation of Crimea (first made on 1 March 2014 by Professor Andrei Zubov of the prestigious Moscow Institute of International Relations).
Well, similarities stare us in the face. The Germans, some Germans, did feel
sorry for themselves. To paraphrase the rhetoric of the day: Oh poor Germans!
The Treaty of Versailles brought our proud nation to its knees! And now Germans
must rise! Hitler saw to it. Germany got up and raised its head. This rising from
the knees began in March 1936 with the re-militarization of the Rhineland in direct
violation of the treaties of Versailles and Locarno. Putin’s annexation of
Crimea invites itself as an analogy: he violated the solemn agreement made by Russia,
Great Britain, and the United States with Ukraine which agreed to get
rid of its nuclear weapons in exchange for the affirmation of the inviolability
of its present borders (The Budapest Memorandum of December 1994). Back in
1936, no significant reaction followed from the international community, except
for phony outrage while Hitler’s action merited an iron-fisted push-back. This
was appeasement Act 1. Two years later, Hitler swallowed Austria. No reaction
followed. That was appeasement Act 2. The analogy today would be the take-over
of Eastern Ukraine by the Russian-sponsored irregulars, who have their sights
set on a still larger chunk, the entire “Novorossia,” including Odessa. Act 3 was,
of course, the Munich Agreement and the resulting fall of Czechoslovakia – the archetypal
appeasement. Here we must gasp at the analogy: the Munich moment was followed
by WWII; further appeasement of Putin raises the spectre of WIII.
To be sure, analogies are
imprecise, which is why they are analogies, not equivalences. Putin is no
Hitler. In Putin's case, what seems to be driving his expansionist agenda is
not so much the wounded pride of the son of a former Great Empire (there is
that, too, and yes, it hurts), but his fear for his own position as a head of
state with his apparent aspirations for a life-time tenure. Back in 2011-12,
when he realized in the wake of the shamelessly rigged parliamentary elections
that he no longer enjoyed political support among the professional and
cultural elite of the capitals (the cosmopolitans), he turned to the anti-cosmopolitan
silent majority. Members of this constituency are far easier to convince of the
just causes for their resentments (xenophobia, ethnic prejudice), as they have
been sidelined during Russia's most recent spurt of modernization (a common
enough phenomenon in the age of globalization and all too familiar to us in the
United States – just watch Fox News). Putin spoke to them in language they
could well understand, ratcheting up the rhetoric of incitement: first, the
persecution of Pussy Riot, then the jailing of the demonstrators in the 2011
and 2012 protest rallies, and now the crescendo proclaiming Ukraine a nest of
fascists.
Of course, if you happen to run
into Putin in your neighborhood bar and ask him, why, Vladimir, why did you do
it? He would say he was afraid, no, not for himself, but for Russia, lest it
disintegrate in a political free-for-all, and for that reason and it alone, he
had to tighten the screws and start the little bloody war. But motivations,
ultimately, are beside the point. A nationalist bully is a nationalist bully -
whether because of the “stolen victory” in the Great War (Hitler’s well-known
beef) or the insufficient magnanimity on the part of the Cold War victors
(Putin’s whine). For unless a bully is stopped right away, his appetite will
grow as it feeds on appeasement. To wit, unless Putin is stopped through
diplomacy and other forms of soft power, including sanctions, we –
meaning all of us here and in Russia -- will soon be staring into the new guns
of August, and this is not a prospect that any of us will enjoy.
August 7, 2014
Berkeley-Stanford