Those who point this out are often depicted as Kremlin stooges, as if to note a disparity in power between the two parties were somehow to take the weaker side. To be sure, Putin has found sympathizers in unlikely places – on the left as well as the right. Some, for example, insisted on seeing Russia’s bombing of civilians in Syria as part of a ‘counter-hegemonic’ design. But there is a huge distance, politically and ethically, between measuring how much power Russia really has and defending what Putin does with it. One of the effects of the escalating rhetoric of the ‘New Cold War’ has been to conflate the two, and thus to prevent any serious discussion of the actual international balance of power. Yet it’s impossible to understand the course of relations between Russia and the West over the past three decades without taking the disparity between the two sides into account.
Once we do, a rather different picture emerges. The events of 2014 and after are indeed highly significant in global terms, not because they confirm any atavistic tendencies on Russia’s part but because they represent a break with the dominant foreign-policy framework of the post-Cold War period. They signal the demise of the idea of Russian integration or alliance with the West. For much of Russia’s modern history, it was relations with Europe and, later, the West more broadly, that shaped the way the country’s leaders imagined its role in the world – whether that meant being engaged in inter-imperial competition, locked in Cold War antagonism, or set on post-Soviet dreams of convergence.{1} After 1991, the Russian elite tended to see the country’s future as lying either alongside or within the liberal internationalist bloc led by the United States. This commitment first gained ascendancy in the Kremlin under Gorbachev, and reached its peak during the Yeltsin years; but it remained substantially in place under Putin and Medvedev too – lasting much longer than is assumed by the general run of Western media commentary. It was only finally undone in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, to be succeeded by a more combative vision.
The downfall of the pro-Western idea in Russia represents a major geopolitical watershed in its own right. It marks our entry into a period of great uncertainty, in which relationships between the major world powers are likely to be less stable and less predictable than they have been for a lifetime. The consequences of this will resonate far beyond the scandals over Russian influence buying and electoral meddling that have occupied so much attention in the US and Europe over the past few years. Indeed, they will strongly affect how the rest of the twenty-first century unfolds. All the more reason, then, to get a clearer understanding of how and why relations between Russia and the West deteriorated as they did.
The end of the Cold War brought a sudden and dramatic downsizing for Russia, in several respects. The most literal one was territoriaclass="underline" when the red flag was lowered from above the Kremlin at the end of 1991 and replaced with the tricolour of the tsars, the Russian president ruled within borders that roughly matched those of 1700. The fourteen 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 itself, the national sovereignty of former Soviet territories often produced a confused post-imperial resentment.
The sense of a reduction in Russia’s stature was also fuelled, of course, by its rapid pullback on the global stage. 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 defence spending by 95 per cent.{2} The USSR’s military-industrial complex had notoriously swallowed an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of Soviet GDP; for most of the 1990s, the equivalent figure for Russia was about 4 per cent of a far smaller GDP. But perhaps the true measure of Russia’s military slump came in the First Chechen War, when a poorly equipped, ill-trained army of conscripts – many of them teenagers – was sent to crush separatist militias and was instead fought to a stalemate in the ruins of Grozny. One of the most acute contemporary assessments of that war dubbed it the ‘tombstone of Russian power’.{3}
Compounding these reductions in geopolitical influence and military weight, the 1990s also saw Russia slide down the global economic hierarchy – a shift made all the more pronounced by the simultaneous rise of China and East Asia, which rapidly overtook Russia as economic powers. At the start of the decade, the GDP of the Russian component of the USSR had been one and a half times that of China and almost double that of South Korea, but by 2000 stood at only 20 per cent and 46 per cent of each respectively. The figures relative to major economies over the same period were even worse: a drop from less than 10 per cent of US GDP to a mere 3 per cent, and from 17 per cent of Japan’s to 5 per cent. At the dawn of the new century, in absolute GDP terms Russia ranked lower than Brazil or India and only slightly higher than Turkey.{4}
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 UN Security Council seat and a vast nuclear arsenal. It had a large, if increasingly dilapidated, military-industrial complex, and the remains of a significant scientific-technical apparatus. Less tangible but also important were cultural factors: a language used extensively outside its new borders – including by a 20 million-strong ethnic Russian population that was now effectively a diaspora – and a literary and artistic patrimony of global renown.
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. Subjectively, many Russians – including a good portion of the policymaking elite – retained a superpower worldview, feeling the areas where the country’s strength had diminished as so many geopolitical phantom limbs. They had not yet become accustomed to the world they now inhabited, nor had they adjusted their thinking to the demands of an international system that was being forcefully reshaped by their former adversaries. From the very start of the post-Soviet era, a significant gap opened up between Russian assumptions and Western ambitions.
The diminution of Russia’s significance on the world stage coincided – not by chance – with the period of maximum alignment between the Kremlin and the West. An affinity with the West had begun to take root among the Russian intelligentsia and scattered members of the party–state apparatus as early as the 1960s. But it was only with Gorbachev’s rise to power that the ‘New Thinking’, as it was known, was installed as the guiding principle of Soviet foreign policy.{5} Gorbachev went much further than détente, speaking in 1989 of building a ‘common European home’. He envisaged an ultimate integration of Russia and the Warsaw Pact countries into a harmonious bloc of broadly social-democratic states, a kind of Greater Scandinavia. 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 foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev could not identify any, and even asked Nixon to help him out with some suggestions.{6}