The lurch toward the West was not only a matter of admiration for capitalism; it was rooted in a deeper set of prejudices and teleologies. 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.{7} This attitude was soon reflected in Russia’s policy stance, as Soviet-era ties to China, India and the Arab World were largely neglected. Still more crucially, Russian policymakers began to include in the non-West most of the former USSR – viewing those countries as burdens they fortunately no longer had to carry. In the summer of 1993, Russia unilaterally scuttled the rouble zone that had been agreed during the breakup of the USSR, sending the successor states scrambling to print new currencies even as Russia’s price deregulation made rouble inflation spiral. Moscow also raised new tariff barriers, which frayed still further what had already been a meagre lifeline for the other ex-Soviet territories. In the 1980s, Russia had accounted for around half or more of every other republic’s trade – almost three-quarters in the case of Ukraine.{8} The planned economy that had disintegrated in 1991 had been an interdependent whole, but now most of the USSR’s components were left with senseless fragments, which helped make the 1990s’ economic slump far deeper in these countries than in Russia.{9}
The Kremlin’s early turn away from the rest of the former USSR also accelerated a centrifugal dynamic among the ex-Soviet states themselves. For several of the republics, sovereignty had come as a surprise – the Central Asian states barely managing to squeeze in declarations of independence before the USSR fell apart. All the Soviet Union’s former components, apart from the Baltics, soon joined the ‘Commonwealth of Independent States’ created by Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in the 1991 Belovezha agreement that dissolved the Soviet Union. But although the CIS was, in Russian, actually called a soiuz – a ‘union’ as the USSR had been – 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’, in the words of Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk – a way to preserve appearances, perhaps, while living separate lives.{10}
Beneath the CIS’s forms, symbols and occasional pacts, what took place over the next few years was a process of regional disintegration, as each of the former Soviet states consolidated itself as a separate sovereign unit, the policy interests and trade links of each pulling in a different direction from the others. This development was all the more striking given the many basic commonalities between them, especially in the political realm. Across most of the post-Soviet space, ‘imitation democratic’ regimes similar to that of Yeltsin came to power – from Lukashenko’s in Belarus to Nazarbaev’s in Kazakhstan – and developed along comparable lines, each experiencing its own version of the conflict between president and parliament that Yeltsin resolved with tanks in 1993.{11} Yet despite these parallels, the very fact of sovereignty seemed to create widening divergences between the ex-USSR’s parts.
The centrifugal momentum continued even after Kozyrev’s removal in 1996 brought a change of direction in Russian foreign policy. The disasters of ‘shock therapy’ had undermined Yeltsin’s popularity and boosted the electoral fortunes of the Communists and nationalists in the 1993 and 1995 Duma elections. They also drained what little support there had been for the Westernizing line. Kozyrev’s replacement, Evgeny Primakov, a Middle East specialist and former spy chief, represented a rather different school of thought – a statist tendency that aimed not to join the West but to balance against its overweening power. The recalibration of policy meant cultivating ties with East and South Asia and the Middle East, and reconnecting with Russia’s former Soviet neighbours in the hopes of forming a regional support base.{12} Yet this still did not represent a fundamentally anti-Western orientation: even if the goal was to revise the terms on which Russia engaged with the West, that engagement remained the central focus of policy.
Primakov’s new course certainly proved more popular than Kozyrev’s, and he continued it during his brief stint as prime minister in 1998–99. But its success was premised on the West’s willingness to treat Russia as an equal on the world stage, as something like the great power it no longer was. This was a delusion the US and its allies were not prepared to share. 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 per cent 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 – in dollar terms committing more to its armed forces than the next eleven highest-spending countries combined.{13} Flushed with Cold War victory and now holding uncontested sway over the globe, the lone superpower had a free hand to remake the international order as it saw fit. A crucial component of the strategic design that took shape in the first half of the 1990s was a bid to nail down Washington’s new advantage by extending NATO eastward, to the former Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe. This project shaped the foreign-policy environment in which Russia has had to operate ever since, so it is worth delving further into its origins and the motivations behind it.
The idea of expanding NATO was already in the air even before the Soviet Union fell apart – despite assurances given to Gorbachev by several Western leaders that ‘nothing of the sort will happen’.[13] The organization’s London summit of July 1990, for example, issued an invitation to the Warsaw Pact countries to begin diplomatic exchanges. But the policy only gathered real momentum under the Clinton administration, coalescing as a priority by 1993–94.{14} Its main proponents within the administration saw it as very much part of a politico-economic project to reshape Eastern Europe along liberal capitalist lines.{15} In September 1993, Clinton’s national security adviser, Anthony Lake, announced that ‘we have arrived at neither the end of history nor a clash of civilizations, but a moment of immense democratic and entrepreneurial opportunity… The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement – enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies.’{16} In this neo-Wilsonian vision of an expanding free-market Pax Americana, the prospect of NATO membership was a means of pressuring East European governments to keep up the pace of ‘reform’; indeed, first among the ‘Perry Principles’ laid down for would-be NATO members at the time by US defense secretary William Perry was a commitment to ‘democracy and markets’, with ‘defence of other allies’ much further down the list.{17}
13
The words of British Prime Minister John Major. According to declassified documents published in 2017, similar assurances were given to Gorbachev by US Secretary of State James Baker – using the now famous formula ‘not one inch eastward’ – as well as by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, French President François Mitterrand, and NATO Secretary-General Manfred Woerner. See Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, ‘NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard’,