Through 3 presidential terms and 2 stints as PM, he has enjoyed approval ratings that would be the envy of any world leader. Since he first took office as Yeltsin’s premier in August 1999, even surveys made by independent pollsters have rarely put him below 70%, and he has largely remained above 80% since the spring of 2014, as tensions with the West have steadily mounted.
Time and again, the characteristics of the man are used to explain the behaviors or interests of the state. The conflation is to some extent understandable: Russia is a country in which political power is not only highly concentrated but deeply personalized, so the preferences and whims of the figure at the very heart of the system take on an outsized importance.
At the height of the Cold War, Western views of the USSR often came packaged in pat formulas about tyranny and freedom, totalitarianism versus democracy. But at least there was a sizeable body of writers, scholars, activists and thinkers who could supply a more nuanced perspective, based on first-hand experience. The West’s levels of expertise and awareness about Russia have, sadly, declined steeply since then, opening the way for all kinds of ill-informed speculation — often churned out by individuals with no knowledge of the place, let alone of the people or the language — to circulate unchallenged. As a result, public opinion and policy decisions are based on a very shallow understanding of the country.
Throughout, the system’s main priority has been to defend capitalism in Russia — if necessary at the expense of democracy, as the consistent resort to electoral rigging, from the 1990s to the present, demonstrates. The authoritarianism for which Putin is widely criticized is not the product of any sinister personal preference, but rather than integral feature of the system he inherited and has continued.
From the outset, the installation of capitalism in Russia was dependent on the deliberate political decisions of the state, which set about creating a class of wealth-owners by handing out pieces of the planned economy at absurdly low prices. After 2000, the terms of the relationship between the state and private wealth began to change, but the state’s commitment to the principle of private gain — and to the tremendous inequalities it generated — did not.
For much of the post-Soviet era, the Russian elite — Putin very much included — were committed to an ideal of alliance or even integration with the West. Over time, however, it became increasingly clear that this was a one-sided fantasy, and Russia’s elite gradually abandoned it, swapping dreams of integration for a more strident defense of Russian interests.
This change in attitude did not take place because of any regression to Soviet thinking. It was driven, rather, by the underlying dynamic of relations between Russia and the West, which since the end of the Cold War have been characterized by a stark imbalance of power. Russia’s weakness after 1991 freed the West — the US in particular — to pursue its own strategic designs, foremost among them the expansion of NATO. In the face of Western dominance, Russia was compelled to accept these moves as faits accomplis. This profound asymmetry was always likely to generate resentment and tension, and sure enough, conflicts developed between Russia and the West over Kosovo in 1999 and 2007-08 and over Georgia in 2008. But it was only with the Ukraine crisis and annexation of Crimea in 2013-14 that Russia finally dropped the idea of alliance with the West — a development that places us on the other side of a major geopolitical watershed.
This has raised with renewed urgency the question of Russia’s place in the world. Now that the Russian fantasy of integration with the West has crumbled, the country once again finds itself confronting a series of large-scale dilemmas. Where is Russia going, and what role might it play in the 21st century? What are the internal dynamics and external forces that are likely to constrain its choices? Demographic trends and the economy’s increasing tilt toward natural-resource exports will reshape Russian society in complex and unpredictable ways. At the same time, the country faces a contentious and competitive global environment, in which it will likely occupy a less prosperous and prominent position. Yet it will, for all that, remain a significant player, with considerable resources at its disposal. Much hinges, in the end, on how it chooses to use them, and for whose benefit.
Personal connections like these are crucial to understanding how Russia works. In the Soviet period, informal influence, or blat — translated as “pull” — often dictated access to scarce goods, housing or coveted jobs. Its use was widespread because it was so essential to getting by. What was distinctive about the way blat came to function in the 1990s, however, was that personal connections were increasingly used as a means of making money. Previously a way for ordinary people to get around the inadequacies of the planned economy, they now served the powerful, blurring the lines between state office and private enrichment, and entangling the formal rules of government in a web of informal connections. In Russia, in any contest between legality and personal loyalties, the latter have generally won out.
A virtual unknown in Moscow before his arrival, Putin proved adept at navigating the byzantine paths of Kremlin politics and, perhaps more important, shoed a marked personal loyalty to his bosses and patrons. This quality no doubt smoothed his progress through the ranks of the Yeltsin administration.
But just as important was Yeltsin’s search for a reliable successor who would guarantee him immunity from prosecution after leaving office. It had become clear that Primakov, who served as PM, was not going to oblige. Worse still, Primakov showed signs of wanting to investigate irregularities in the privatization process Yeltsin had forced through a few years earlier.
When Yeltsin designated the apparently quiet, colorless Putin, many Russians initially thought he, too, would be a mere placeholder. But behind closed Kremlin doors, the coterie around Yeltsin, known as The Family, had already decided Putin would play a much more significant role. Here Putin’s loyalty to his patrons was decisive: he could be relied upon to shield Yeltsin and his clique from prosecution.
Three years on, a key part of Putin’s popular appeal was his commitment to reversing the humiliation inflicted in the North Caucasus — famously summed up in his vow to “wipe out” Chechen separatists “in the outhouse.” Warmly endorsed by the major Western powers, the assault on Chechnya — labelled an anti-terrorist operation — provided the springboard for Putin’s rise to the Kremlin, sending his approval rating from a mere 31% In August 1999 to 80% 3 months later.
The Chechen campaign was the stage on which Putin tested and developed his presidential persona. This took time to emerge fully. It is striking now to watch footage of his first address to the nation as acting president. Putin speaks haltingly, as if unprepared or lacking in conviction; but beneath the stilted delivery, there is a determination that would not have escaped viewers’ attention. His sobriety, too, is in stark contrast to the rambling, drunken incoherence of Yeltsin’s speech that same evening. Putin’s low-key style was well received by much of the Russian public, who had grown tired of the high-sounding but empty rhetoric of the 1990s’ politicians.
Lauded in the West as the architect of democracy in Russia, Yeltsin showed little respect for its principles in practice. In October 1993, faced with a fractious legislature — the Congress of People’s Deputies elected in 1990 — he sent tanks to shell it into submission, and then rewrote the constitution, increasing the president’s powers exponentially; the changes were approved by a rigged referendum in December.
In December 2003, Boris Gryzlow, the Duma chairman, summed up the legislature’s negligible role by declaring, “Parliament is not a platform for political battles.” Having reined in regional elites by appointing plenipotentiaries over their heads, in 2004 Putin further restricted their autonomy by abolishing elections for governors and mayors (though these were partially reintroduced in 2012).
State dominance of the energy sector is not in itself out of the ordinary: majority state ownership is in fact the global norm, and when Putin came to power, Russia was one of the very few oil-producing states where production was largely in private hands. Before entering the Kremlin, Putin had expressed a commitment to the idea that the state should play a decisive role in strategic sectors.
This combination of neoliberal and statist impulses produced what the political scientist Gerald Easter calls an “upstairs-downstairs” economy: large strategic industries remained directly or indirectly subordinated to the state, while private enterprise took care of the rest, from banking and construction to retail and petty trade. But what both strands of Putin’s economic policy share is a respect for profit-making. This is not an incidental feature, nor is it simply driven by desires for personal enrichment or corruption at the top. The defining characteristic of the Putin system has been its commitment to defending the capitalist model put in place during the 1990s.
The Kremlin’s own ideologues called it “sovereign democracy” or “managed democracy” — to which Russian wits responded by saying that either adjective was to “democracy” what “electric” is to “chair.” Later, as Russia’s relations with the West began to worsen, new terms joined the latter’s lexicon: “mafia state,” “kleptocracy.” The various labels stressed different aspects of the regime: its increasingly authoritarian bent, reflected in the suppression of dissent and the spread of democratic rituals such as elections, emptied of any actual democratic content; and its artful manipulation of appearances through its grip on the media.
Throughout this period, the dominant political form in the countries of the former USSR was what he termed “imitation democracy”: a system in which a formal commitment to democratic norms and procedures coexisted with a total absence of actual alternatives to the current regime.
In the spring of 2014, the US, the EU, Canada and several other countries imposed sanctions on dozens of individuals, many of them high-ranking friends of Putin, in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
According to the logic of the sanctions, since power and wealth are highly concentrated in Russia, punishing those with personal connections to Putin is the best way to strike at the heart of the regime. Yet the belief that a handful of people wield absolute political and economic power over the country — or that it is ruled by a “kleptocracy” centered on Putin — mistakes a symptom for a prime cause. Even if sanctions brought about a change in policy or personnel, they would do little to alter the underlying conditions that produced the regime in the first place. The Putin system isn’t simply a corrupt, dictatorial structure imposed on a helpless population; it’s embedded in the social, economic and political fabric of the country. In other words, if we really want to understand how Russia is ruled, we need to look beyond the individuals at the summits of wealth and power to the system that enables them to thrive.
By 2007, Anders Aslund, a former adviser to the Yeltsin government, was bemoaning the fact that Puin had unleashed a great wave of re-nationalization, adding that the president’s chums from St Petersburg are taking over one big, well-run private company after another, turning them into less efficient state-owned firms. This was no longer the familiar liberal capitalism of the 1990s, but an ugly hybrid of the Soviet planned economy and something older — “state capitalism,” “crony capitalism,” “neo-feudal capitalism”.
This view, though dominant, is misguided. It is based on a fundamental misreading of the relationship between the state and private capital in post-Soviet times. It assumes, in particular, that state and business are distinct realms, and that business has since 2000 been struggling to protect its legitimate terrain of activity from the clutches of an overbearing state.
The story most often told is that the oligarch of the 1990s piled up their fortunes through the rough-and-tumble of private initiative, whereas the magnates created under Putin derived theirs solely from proximity to the Kremlin. Yet the oligarchs of the Yeltsin era were always closely entangled with the state, and from the outset owed their fortunes to it. The cronyism attributed to the Putin years was central to the making of Russian capitalism long before Putin took the stage.
The history of post-Soviet capitalism should be understood not as a lurch away from free markets toward statism, but as a series of struggles for power and profit within a single elite that spanned the worlds of government and private business.
For most of the USSR’s history, it was not material wealth that defined the ruling elite, but an individual’s position within the party-state apparatus. The nomenklatura, the core of the administrative elite, enjoyed privileges denied to the mass of the population: spacious apartments, holiday homes, even chauffeurs and servants, as well as access to special shops stocking scarce goods. Party membership, too, conferred advantages, especially in terms of career advancement or favors that could be called in through informal channels. Economic status was firmly subordinated to political power. But in the final Soviet years, the ground started to shift.
“Cash” and “non-cash” were kept strictly separate — until the end of 1987, when Komsomol was granted permission to convert non-cash budgetary allocations into actual currency. Khodorkovsky realized he had found a way of “making money out of thin air,” and quickly set up his own bank.
At first, Russia’s most successful entrepreneurs were those who exploited the cracks that were appearing in the planned economy. But soon enough, state enterprise managers and apparatchiks were joining the fray.
At the same time, entire blocs of the Soviet economy were being taken out of ministerial control and placed under that of new commercial entities. In 1989, the natural gas ministry became the company Gazprom, and the same year the ministry of metallurgy spawned the firm Norilsk Nickel, while the state bodies responsible for water, construction, chemicals and petroleum refining had morphed into dozens upon dozens of new firms. Most of these were still “state-owned,” but did not remain so for long.
Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the process of privatization — widely referred to at the time as “grab-it-ization.” The Yeltsin government’s massive sell-off of state assets was explicitly designed to smash the Soviet command economy and create a market system dominated by a new class of wealth-holders. Every enterprise ripped out of the state and transferred to the hands of a private owner was a way of destroying Communism in Russia. At that stage, it didn’t matter at all to whom these enterprises went, who was getting the property.
Privatization took 3 forms, each of which benefited different segments of the nascent economic elite. The first was a “massive privatization” scheme, launched with great fanfare in October 1992, in which citizens were issued with vouchers entitling them to buy shares in enterprises slated for privatization. Normally intended to create a kind of “popular capitalism,” in practice this produced a concentration of ownership and control among well-placed insiders from the nomenklatura and Soviet managerial elite. Managers often gained control of their workers’ shares, either by purchasing them or through more underhand means. And because voucher privatization took place in the middle of a catastrophic downturn, many workers sold their vouchers at a fraction of their face value to get hold of desperately needed cash.
The crisis conditions had another crucial effect: the assessed value of state enterprises was not indexed to inflation, so the real cost of acquiring them was plummeting by the day. The result was a fire sale of the Soviet economic apparatus. The voucher-auction price of shares in Gazprom implied the company’s total value was $228M — about one-thousandth of the estimation made by Western investment banks at the time. All told, the total value of Russian industry, according to voucher auction prices, was a mere $12B.
The second main form privatization took was even less transparent, involved much larger sums of money, and transferred far more significant assets out of state hands. Starting in mid-1992, Yeltsin effectively created a pool of magnates by state fiat, through a process of “privatization by decree” that kept transactions free from democratic scrutiny. This involved, in particular, the enormous assets of the natural resource sector — oil and gas, coal, diamonds, gold, and so on. The new owners were initially draw mostly from among the “red directors” who had managed these concerns under Soviet rule.
A third form of privatization involved not state assets but budgetary flows. Entrepreneurs acquired formidable power and wealth by acting as “authorized” intermediaries for a range of government bodies. Funds for many of the ministries were not handled by the central banks, but instead routed through accounts in various privately owned “plenipotentiary” banks. Like the winners of the voucher auctions and the magnates designed by decree, the new financial tycoons were effectively subsidized by the state.
To become a millionaire in our country, it is not at all necessary to have a good head or specialized knowledge. Often it is enough to have active support in the government, the parliament, local power structures and law enforcement agencies. One fine day, your insignificant bank is authorized to conduct operations with budgetary funds. Or quotas are generously allotted for the export of oil, timber and gas. In other words, you are appointed a millionaire.
“Insiders” dominated large-scale industry — natural resources, energy, metallurgy, engineering — while “outsiders” mostly made their initial fortunes in banking, consumer goods, the media. One group tended to own physical assets, the other financial wealth.
Insiders tended to be better connected to the regional and national government apparatus, often through informal ties forged in the Soviet era. These now served as a form of political insurance, allowing them to secure state approval and assistance for their business activities. Outsiders, on the other hand, had largely profited from symptoms of the USSR’s collapse, and lacked such connections. As a result, they had to seek insurance in other ways: either through bribery or by funding their own candidates for political office.
The penetration of state institutions by business interests was especially marked in the Duma: Most deputies were more or less openly on the payroll of one oligarch or another.
Strapped for cash and in desperate need of support for his re-election bid the following year, Yeltsin authorized a series of rigged auctions through which stakes in a dozen companies were offered to select oligarchs as collateral on loans totaling $1B. In exchange, the media outlets they owned offered full-throated backing for Yeltsin’s presidential campaign.
“Loans for shares” is often invoked as the most brazenly crooked of the Yeltsin government’s privatizations, which it probably was. But it was not, as is commonly supposed, the origin of the leading oligarchs’ wealth. Rather, it stood as public proof of these outsider tycoons’ hold on the country, and of their ability to bend the state to their will. Having acquired phenomenal wealth during the first half of the decade, they now used it to obtain political power, the better to cement their grip on their fortunes. After all, they had so far made their money between the cracks of the state; how much more could they make if they were in control of the whole thing?
She argued that the country was witnessing the emergence of a new “oligarchy,” since the biggest tycoons not only dominated the national economy, they were also beginning to control the political scene.
From my point of view, in general, power and capital are inseparable. If something is advantageous to capital, it goes without saying that it is advantageous to the nation.
The new century seemed to bring an abrupt break with the oligarch-dominated politics of the 1990s. Early in his presidency, in July 2000, Putin met with 21 of the country’s richest tycoons and reportedly spelled out new rules of the game: the state would remain “equidistant” from all business interests, and the latter would refrain from attempting to direct state policy. Those who abided by these rules could continue to enjoy their fortunes; those who did not, it soon became clear, would be expropriated and hounded out of the country. Gusinsky, whose media empire had been critical of Putin during the 1999-2000 election cycle, was forced to sell his prize assets and flee to Spain. Berezovsky, who had boasted of his role as Kremlin kingmaker in bringing Putin to power soon followed: he quickly lost control of ORT, Russia’s main TV channel, and was in exile in the UK.
Many explanations for the fate of Yukos have been advanced: Khodorkovsky’s attempts to sell a stake to the US oil major Chevron; his plans to build a new private pipeline to China, competing with state’s line to Japan; his support for opposition parties and apparent desire to run for president in 2008; the personal disrespect he is alleged to have shown to Putin. All of these likely contributed to his downfall. But more than anything, his ruin was intended as a raw demonstration of state power, and to lay out a new elite bargain in which those with links to state power had the upper hand over those who simply had money.
This 2-way traffic between the worlds of the state and of private enterprise will no doubt be entirely familiar to many readers: the same kind of revolving door notoriously sustains elites around much of the globe, enabling them to waltz effortlessly between the boardrooms of Goldman Sachs and the corridors of power in Washington, London, Rome and elsewhere. Russia’s government and business became similarly interwoven, leading to the emergence of an increasingly hybrid elite, able to hop amphibiously between domains that were formally separate but which for them, in practice, were one.
For our friends we have everything; for our enemies, the law.
As for high-end political corruption, in the mid-2000s, amendments to existing legislation cost $200K; for $500K you could yet your own law custom-made; a false budget entry cost 4% of the sum involved.
To some extent, corruption helped the Putin system to function, outsourcing some of the costs of government onto the population even as it fostered cohesion within the elite itself, bound to each other by complicity in illicit self-enrichment. It was bad for everyone else, of course. Corruption metastasized into almost every sphere of life.
Though nepotism was far from unknown under Soviet rule, its scale never came close to that reached in the Putin era, when familial ties became a mechanism for inheriting social rank, much as they had been in tsarist times.
It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Russia is run and largely owned by the same people.
More diffuse than either of these, but more insidiously powerful, is the idea that a Soviet mindset still lingers within society as a whole, a set of assumptions and habits forged by decades of submission to power that supposedly keeps Russians mired in passivity to this day.
But although it enjoyed distinct advantages relative to everyone else, the nomenklatura was not a closed group — it was recruited, albeit somewhat unevenly, from all sectors of society — and it did not technically own any property that it could transmit to its heirs, in the manner of an aristocracy or even a bourgeoisie. At most, the nomenklatura could have been called a proto-class, dedicated to preserving its collective power — which it would soon seek to convert into property.
By 2014 the financial wealth held by a handful of Russians abroad was equal to the total wealth of the entire population within Russia’s borders.
Their consumption habits involved a patient process of exploration and comparison, making each transaction significant, almost a miniature rite of passage. In a sense, this made them “ideal consumers”: much more loyal and informed than people who are better off than they, because for the latter, the interval between waiting to buy and making the purchase is too short.
It’s not hard to see why the authorities would do this, given that the size of the middle class was at the same time widely seen as a measure of governmental success. But, of course, it wasn’t just the state that saw middle-classes as a desirable status. It was at the heart of the whole ideological climate and culture, which made the middle class the “leading class” of the day, just as the proletariat had been in the Soviet Union.
Those calling for the Soviet past to be left behind should perhaps be careful what they wish for. That past, far from being a hindrance, has actively facilitated the construction of the new capitalist order — and when the last vestiges of the Soviet world have vanished, the subsidy that first Yeltsin and then Putin enjoyed will run out. The protests that burst onto the national stage in 2011, though widely interpreted as signs that the parallelism is fading. The factors that helped muffle discontent in the 1990s and early 2000s are ceasing to apply; meanwhile new grievances have emerged, as well as new ways of expressing them.
Once he had regained the presidency, Putin adopted an increasingly strident nationalistic rhetoric. A new official ideology, which placed ever greater emphasis on “civilizational” differences between East and West, had begun to coalesce before Putin’s reelection as president, hovering in the background of Russia’s confrontations with the US and its allies. Now it moved to the fore — and burst onto the international stage with the annexation of Crimea. But though shaped by external pressures, it was also a strategy for dealing with dissent at home, driving a wedge through Putin’s opponents by framing everything in polarized, friend-enemy terms.
LGBT rights were presented in the Russian official media as the dividing line between Western “decadence” and an embattled Russian “normality.” In this atmosphere, the mere fact of being gay was reframed as an act of subversive foreign propaganda.
As the experience of the West has shown, means-tested benefits and “targeted” welfare have functioned as a way of withdrawing social guarantees, pulling the rug out from under a whole swathe of society while subjecting them to onerous and humiliating bureaucratic burdens. Public-private partnerships would saddle the public with colossal debt while pouring revenues into the pockets of private companies. More privatizations would amplify the already tremendous imbalances in wealth and power. And raising the pension age in Russia without first drastically improving health indicators would stretch most people’s working lives beyond their life expectancy.
The post-Soviet economy has not thrived as it should because the source of money is not entrepreneurial talent, rather money is born from power.
Yet this line of thinking rests on at least 2 mistaken assumptions. One is a belief in an abstract, idealized capitalism that could incarnate free-market principles in an undistorted fashion. No such model exists: there is no capitalism, no market, no economic activity even, outside of history. The “capitalism” Russian oppositionists aspire to emulate is the product of the specific and diverse histories of Europe and the US, shaped by concrete events and flesh-and-blood people. A related but still more consequential error is the idea that what Russia has now is not — or is not yet — capitalism, and that the failure to establish “proper” capitalism is what accounts for the perversions of the present.
For that to take place, Putin’s opponents need to do more than imagine another way for Russia to be governed and for its entrepreneurs to make money: they must address the questions of what kind of lives and livelihoods Russia’s citizens are entitled to, whose needs are to be prioritized and what, in the end, the purposes of economic growth are. They would need, in short, to envision an alternative model for Russian society. This would be an extremely tall order for any opposition movement — and not just in Russia.
Indeed, the fundamental fact that has been defined relations between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War is the huge imbalance in power and resources between the two sides. All other geopolitical calculations have flowed from it — including both the West’s impulse to drive home its advantage through the expansion of NATO, and Russia’s growing resentment of that process, as well as its inability to halt or reverse it.
The 14 other republics that had composed the Soviet Union became foreign countries overnight, and though Russians until recently referred to the ex-USSR as the ‘near abroad,” these states have moved inexorably out of Moscow’s orbit in the years since the Soviet Union’s fall — a historic reversal of centuries of regional dominance. Outside Russia the break-up of the USSR was often depicted as the resumption of a long process of decolonization, but in Russia, the national sovereignty of former Soviet territories often produced a confused post-imperial resentment.
By the mid-1990s, Moscow had withdrawn its troops from Eastern Europe, the Transcaucasus and Mongolia and had all but shut down its bases in Cuba and Vietnam. Over the course of that decade Russia underwent what a former Soviet military analyst described as “one of the most stunning demilitarization processes in history,” shedding two-thirds of its armed personnel and slashing defense spending by 95%. The USSR’s military-industrial complex had notoriously swallowed an estimate 15-20% of Soviet GDP; for most of the 1990s, the equivalent figure for Russia was about 4$ of a far smaller GDP.
At the start of the decade, the GDP of the Russian component of the USSR had been 1.5 times that of China and almost double that of South Korea, but by 2000 stood at only 20% and 46% of each respectively.
Post-Soviet Russia, then, though it was spared the total disintegration that other fallen empires have suffered — Austria-Hungary, for example — nonetheless lost much of what had made it a force of global stature. Moscow could no longer project power much beyond its borders. Its ideological reach was similarly circumscribed. Meanwhile, its economic position was disastrous and worsening relative to most of the world’s. Yet at the same time, it retained many of the attributes of a state much more powerful than it now was. It still had a UNSC seat and a vast nuclear arsenal.
The disparity between limited resources and lingering pretensions was the source of much confusion and frustration, the foundation for a great-power nostalgia that was often divorced from any real attachment to the Soviet system itself.
Under Yeltsin, however, what had been an impulse toward convergence turned into a project to make Russia into a “normal” liberal democracy, firmly under the tutelage of the US. If Gorbachev and his Politburo had stunned their Cold War interlocutors with the concessions they had been willing to make, Yeltsin’s government went still further, at times seeming to abdicate altogether from having policy goals of its own. In 1992, when asked by a visiting Richard Nixon what his country’s particular interests now were, Russian FM Andrei Kozyrev could not identify any, and even asked Nixon to help him out with some suggestions.
Kozyrev spoke of Russia’s desire to join what he called the “community of civilized states” — with the implication that the West itself was what constituted “civilization” and that the non-West was backward, even barbaric. This attitude was soon reflected in Russia’s policy stance, as Soviet-era ties to China, India and the Arab world were largely neglected.
But although the CIS was, in Russia, actually called a “union” it was from the outset intended to be a far looser form of association. Indeed, it was widely described even at the time as a mechanism for “civilized divorce,” a way to preserve appearances, perhaps, while living separate lives.
The fundamental fact of the post-Cold War order, after all, was the colossal imbalance between the US and all other powers. With less than 5% of the world’s population, by the mid-1990s the US accounted for a quarter of its total economic output, a fifth of its manufacturing, and two fifths of its military spending.
There were concerns, too, that overly aggressive moves by the US to benefit from Russia’s weakness now might produce a backlash there later — that a punitive post-Soviet Versailles settlement might produce a revanchist Russian nationalism. Yet these considerations were overpowered by 2 other motivations. One was precisely the chance to wrest Eastern Europe out of Moscow’s orbit for good. Unlikely to come around again, it was simply too good an opportunity to pass up — especially since many of the new governments in Eastern Europe were themselves keen to join.
The other was a deep suspicion of Russia among Western policy-making elites, dating back through the Cold War all the way to 1917. The Bolshevik Revolution had created a breach in the international state system, a hole in the map that no amount of diplomacy or detente had been able to close. NATO expansion was therefore to some extent an insurance policy against an outcome that, ironically, the expansion would ultimately help to create: the return to the world stage of an independent Russia, with interests distinct from those of the West.
It’s bad enough having you people tell us what you’re going to do whether we like it or not. Don’t add insult to injury by also telling us that it’s in our interests to obey your orders.
The drive for NATO expansion also made it clear that there was no room for Russia within European institutions or Euro-Atlantic security arrangements. The Yeltsin government several times floated the idea of joining NATO, but Russian membership was never seriously considered.
According to Brzezinski, “the political decisive fact is that Russia bulks too large, is too backward currently and too powerful potentially to be assimilated as simply yet another member of the EU or NATO. It would dilute the Western character of the European community and the American preponderance within within the alliance.” As part of NATO or an expanded EU, for example, it would have been on a par with Germany or France in terms of its decision-making influence, capable of banding together with either to block US designs.
Putin’s point of reference were European even when they weren’t at all flattering: at the end of 1999, he said that it would take 15 years of rapid growth for Russia to draw level with Portugal’s current per capita GDP.
Though this was widely interpreted by the mainstream media as an outburst of angry anti-Western sentiment, it makes more sense to see it as a fit of frustration — which had built up precisely because Russia’s attempts to forge a pragmatic alliance with the West, and to develop closer trade and economic ties, kept failing.
In February, Kosovo’s declaration of independence was swiftly recognized by the US and other leading NATO states, setting a precedent Russia deemed alarming. In April, a NATO summit in Bucharest raised the prospect of membership for Georgia and Ukraine, in the face of Putin’s strenuous objections.
Medvedev invoked the West’s own doctrines of “humanitarian intervention” and the “responsibility to protect”, as deployed in Kosovo in 1999 and agreed at the UN’s 2005 World Summit, respectively.
In the West, the reasons for this are often sought in Putin’s authoritarian persona, or in a broader Russian nostalgia for superpower status. But while both these factors were certainly present, neither was as important as the underlying dynamic of Western-Russian relations, which remained unaltered by the empty diplomatic gestures of the “reset.”
For much of the 1990s and 2000s, Russia was powerless to prevent the advance of this project. But enforced passivity should not have been mistaken for willing acceptance. What has happened over the past decade, far from being an unforeseen escalation of tensions, is a collision — delayed or masked for a time — of incompatible interests.
For both Russia and its neighbors, the EU was not the main partner, accounting for about half of imports and exports in each case. In effect, the disintegration of the USSR into separate political units had segued into a geopolitical and economic dispersal.
Despite the Kremlin’s mounting concern over the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO and becoming more closely integrated with the EU, it was unable to make Kiev a genuinely better offer. Putin’s plan to buy $15B of government debt and give Ukraine deep discounts on gas came too late to help Yanukovych, but it wouldn’t have made much difference if it had been offered earlier. Russia simply could not match the West’s combined economic and ideological appeal.
The Kremlin was in effect frantically drawing one line in the sand after another, lines the West kept blithely ignoring. The rapid escalation of Russia’s response and the very crudity of its methods were in themselves a measure of the asymmetry of power between it and the West.
US secretary John Kerry called it “an incredible act of aggression,” adding with the straightest of faces — “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country on a completely trumped-up pretext.”
The 2008 war with Georgia had, among other things, revealed how far behind Russia was in terms of technology and military organization, prompting a major overhaul and upgrading of weapons. Syria, already devastated by years of war, provided a testing ground — and a showroom — for the new-look armed forces and weapons systems.
But the central aim of the Kremlin’s intervention in Syria was, in my view, neither to protect Assad nor to prevent regime change per se; it was, rather, an attempt to re-establish Russia’s importance on the world stage. Russian FM Sergei Lavrov told a TV interviewer that the US “needs to be taught that affairs can only be conducted on the basis of equality, balance of interests and mutual respect.”
All indications are that the Kremlin, like so many other observers, expected Clinton to win anyway. But Russia quickly became a convenient, all-purpose signifier enabling many American liberals to avoid discussing the multiple factors behind Trump’s disastrous success, from the anti-democratic distortions of the electoral college system to the disenfranchisement of voters.
Why, then, has the Cold War framework proved so tempting as a means of understanding relations between Russia and the West? For hardened hawks and Beltway pundits it no doubt offers the comfort of familiarity, as well as a ready repertoire of tropes and imagery. The idea of a “New Cold War” seems, more than anything, designed to fill a conceptual vacuum — compensating for the lack, in the minds of many, of ways to grasp the disconcerting novelty of the current geopolitical moment.
The Kremlin’s actions were tactical improvisations rather than moves in any alternative grand strategy. The suddenness and decisiveness of these actions seemed almost an end in themselves, designed to alter the parameters of the geopolitical situation so radically and abruptly that the West would be compelled to change course. The problem with this approach, however, was that after each dramatic move, the situation began to settle once more into its normal pattern, creating the need for another, still more drastic move.
Once used, the methods of war have a way of generating their own reasons, until they become normalized instruments of policy — as the example of the US itself, engaged in multiple unwinnable wars disguised as limited, “surgical” intervention, shows.
Fittingly, in 2015, Dugin became chief editor of “Tsargrad,” at TV station set up to wage an Orthodox information jihad against Western liberalism.
He picked up the idea of Eurasia as a “world-island,” a zone with Russia at its heart that served as “the geopolitical pivot of history.” He adopted a binary opposition between land powers and sea powers which would always ultimately set Russia against the West.
All told, its 2015 military budget came to around 8% of the total for NATO as a whole, almost 70% of which was spent by the US alone. What enables Moscow to pose a military threat to its neighbors at present is not so much the scale or strength of its armies as its readiness to use force quickly and decisively.
For all the concern about the tentacular spread of Putin’s influence, its actual capacity to shape political outcomes has proved negligible to non-existence — the 2016 US elections very much included.
The disproportionate size of the primary-resource sector spells trouble for the rest of the economy, as the experience of many other countries has shown, from the “Dutch Disease” of the 1960s to the impact of oil on Nigeria and Venezuela. The overwhelming weight of lucrative export commodities causes currency appreciation that leaves other industries uncompetitive; this makes it all the more difficult to pursue alternative strategies for growth, deepening the “resource trap.”
What this means in turn is that Russia will struggle to regain its Soviet-era niche as an industrial power. The transition to capitalism brought an accelerated deindustrialization, increasing Russia’s reliance on energy exports without producing any compensating gains in employment. After all, one of the features of what is known as the “fuel-energy complex” is that it requires considerably less labor than manufacturing. Russia’s already diminished industrial sector has thus far been unable to attract the levels of investment, domestic or foreign, that would be required for a new burst of growth, making a Chinese- or East Asian-style “miracle” hard to imagine, even if those earlier successes hadn’t already raised the levels of global competition still higher.
Shorter life expectancy and higher mortality rate than in the West or Japan, say, mean that the Russian pension system is already heavily subsidized by men and women who do not survive to retirement age.
Since fertility rates among non-ethnic Russians are at present higher than among ethnic Russians, the demographic preponderance of ethnic Russians will visibly be eroded soon enough, regardless of migratory flows.
Nominally, Russia today is a federation, comprising 83 territorial “subjects” — plus 2 more since 2014 — each of which possesses its own constitution, government, parliament and flag. On paper, these entities have many of the attributes of statehood, and only delegate certain powers to the federal centre in Moscow. But the reality is very different: in practice, Russia is a highly centralized polity, and the country’s supposedly federal subunits are little more than administrative divisions within a clear hierarchy — what Putin himself famously called a “vertical of power.”
In 2001, tax revenues were split roughly 50-50 between Moscow and the regional governments, but by 2008, the federal government’s share had risen to 70%.
By a historical irony, the hollow constitutional structures of the USSR came to be filled with national content that helped pull the Union apart.
Yet the very character of the system — a predatory, authoritarian elite presiding over a vastly unequal society — will inevitably generate further social tensions, sparking recurrent crises which cannot all be resolved by patriotic mobilizations or military adventures abroad.
Since it had long been obvious what the outcome of the 2018 elections would be, in the run-up to the vote many minds in Russia turned to the end of Putin’s forthcoming term, when he would be constitutionally ineligible to run again. Who or what would succeed him in 2024?
The imitation-democratic system has indeed functioned much to the satisfaction of Russia’s elite with Putin in charge. But it is fundamentally a system — that is, a set of power structure and political practices that has enabled Russia’s particular, post-Soviet form of capitalism to thrive. The system can certainly continue with another person at its summit — perhaps less smoothly, or perhaps better.
Overall, the Putin government’s aim seems to be an inertial scenario. It has entered “calorie-conservation mode.” There is an obvious danger here, of aimless drift or complacent decline. Systems that lose their sense of purpose can rapidly end up losing their grip on power too, overtaken by emergencies they lacked the imagination or energy to foresee.