- the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, ending in Russia’s humiliating defeat;
- the first “proletarian” revolution of 1905, igniting large-scale urban violence;
- World War I of 1914–1917, with its millions of casualties and massive economic dislocation;
- the civil war of 1918–1921, again consuming several million lives and devastating the land;
- the Russo-Polish War of 1919–1920, ending in a Russian defeat;
- the launching of the Gulag in the early 1920s, including the decimation of the prerevolutionary elite and its large-scale exodus from Russia;
- the industrialization and collectivization drives of the early and mid-1930s, which generated massive famines and millions of deaths in Ukraine and Kazakstan;
- the Great Purges and Terror of the mid- and late l930s, with millions incarcerated in labor camps and upward of 1 million shot and several million dying from maltreatment;
- World War II of 1941–1945, with its multiple millions of military and civilian casualties and vast economic devastation;
- the reimposition of Stalinist terror in the late 1940s, again involving large-scale arrests and frequent executions;
- the forty-year-long arms race with the United States, lasting from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, with its socially impoverishing effects;
- the economically exhausting efforts to project Soviet power into the Caribbean, Middle East, and Africa during the 1970s and 1980s;
- the debilitating war in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989;
- the sudden breakup of the Soviet Union, followed by civil disorders, a painful economic crisis, and the bloody and humiliating war against Chechnya.
Not only was the crisis in Russia’s internal condition and the loss of international status distressingly unsettling, especially for the Russian political elite, but Russia’s geopolitical situation was also adversely affected. In the West, as a consequence of the Soviet Union’s disintegration, Russia’s frontiers had been altered most painfully, and its sphere of geopolitical influence had dramatically shrunk (see map on page 94). The Baltic states had been Russian-controlled since the 1700s, and the loss of the ports of Riga and Tallinn made Russia’s access to the Baltic Sea more limited and subject to winter freezes.
Although Moscow managed to retain a politically dominant position in the formally newly independent but highly Russified Belarus, it was far from certain that the nationalist contagion would not eventually also gain the upper hand there as well. And beyond the frontiers of the former Soviet Union, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact meant that the former satellite states of Central Europe, foremost among them Poland, were rapidly gravitating toward NATO and the European Union.
Most troubling of all was the loss of Ukraine. The appearance of an independent Ukrainian state not only challenged all Russians to rethink the nature of their own political and ethnic identity, but it represented a vital geopolitical setback for the Russian state. The repudiation of more than three hundred years of Russian imperial history meant the loss of a potentially rich industrial and agricultural economy and of 52 million people ethnically and religiously sufficiently close to the Russians to make Russia into a truly large and confident imperial state. Ukraine’s independence also deprived Russia of its dominant position on the Black Sea, where Odessa had served as Russia’s vital gateway to trade with the Mediterranean and the world beyond.
The loss of Ukraine was geopolitically pivotal, for it drastically limited Russia’s geostrategic options. Even without the Baltic states and Poland, a Russia that retained control over Ukraine could still seek to be the leader of an assertive Eurasian empire, in which Moscow could dominate the non-Slavs in the South and Southeast of the former Soviet Union. But without Ukraine and its 52 million fellow Slavs, any attempt by Moscow to rebuild the Eurasian empire was likely to leave Russia entangled alone in protracted conflicts with the nationally and religiously aroused non-Slavs, the war with Chechnya perhaps simply being the first example. Moreover, given Russia’s declining birthrate and the explosive birthrate among the Central Asians, any new Eurasian entity based purely on Russian power, without Ukraine, would inevitably become less European and more Asiatic with each passing year.
The loss of Ukraine was not only geopolitically pivotal but also geopolitically catalytic. It was Ukrainian actions—the Ukrainian declaration of independence in December 1991, its insistence in the critical negotiations in Bela Vezha that the Soviet Union should be replaced by a looser Commonwealth of Independent States, and especially the sudden coup-like imposition of Ukrainian command over the Soviet army units stationed on Ukrainian soil—that prevented the CIS from becoming merely a new name for a more confederal USSR. Ukraine’s political self-determination stunned Moscow and set an example that the other Soviet republics, though initially more timidly, then followed.
Russia’s loss of its dominant position on the Baltic Sea was replicated on the Black Sea not only because of Ukraine’s independence but also because the newly independent Caucasian states—Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—enhanced the opportunities for Turkey to reestablish its once-lost influence in the region. Prior to 1991, the Black Sea was the point of departure for the projection of Russian naval power into the Mediterranean. By the mid-1990s, Russia was left with a small coastal strip on the Black Sea and with an unresolved debate with Ukraine over basing rights in Crimea for the remnants of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, while observing, with evident irritation, joint NATO-Ukrainian naval and shore-landing maneuvers and a growing Turkish role in the Black Sea region. Russia also suspected Turkey of having provided effective aid to the Chechen resistance.
Farther to the southeast, the geopolitical upheaval produced a similarly significant change in the status of the Caspian Sea basin and of Central Asia more generally. Before the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Caspian Sea was in effect a Russian lake, with a small southern sector falling within Iran’s perimeter. With the emergence of the independent and strongly nationalist Azerbaijan—reinforced by the influx of eager Western oil investors—and the similarly independent Kazakstan and Turkmenistan, Russia became only one of five claimants to the riches of the Caspian Sea basin. It could no longer confidently assume that it could dispose of these resources on its own.
The emergence of the independent Central Asian states meant that in some places Russia’s southeastern frontier had been pushed back northward more than one thousand miles. The new states now controlled vast mineral and energy deposits that were bound to attract foreign interests. It was almost inevitable that not only the elites but, before too long, also the peoples of these states would become more nationalistic and perhaps increasingly Islamic in outlook.
In Kazakstan, a vast country endowed with enormous natural resources but with its nearly 20 million people split almost evenly between Kazaks and Slavs, linguistic and national frictions are likely to intensify. Uzbekistan—with its much more ethnically homogeneous population of approximately 25 million and its leaders emphasizing the country’s historic glories—has become increasingly assertive in affirming the region’s new postcolonial status. Turkmenistan, geographically shielded by Kazakstan from any direct contact with Russia, has actively developed new links with Iran in order to diminish its prior dependence on the Russian communications system for access to the global markets.
Supported from the outside by Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, the Central Asian states have not been inclined to trade their new political sovereignty even for the sake of beneficial economic integration with Russia, as many Russians continued to hope they would. At the very least, some tension and hostility in their relationship with Russia is unavoidable, while the painful precedents of Chechnya and Tajikistan suggest that something worse cannot be altogether excluded. For the Russians, the specter of a potential conflict with the Islamic states along Russia’s entire southern flank (which, adding in Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, account for more than 300 million people) has to be a source of serious concern.
Finally, at the time its empire dissolved, Russia was also facing an ominous new geopolitical situation in the Far East, even though no territorial or political changes had taken place. For several centuries, China had been weaker and more backward than Russia, at least in the political-military domains. No Russian concerned with the country’s future and perplexed by the dramatic changes of this decade can ignore the fact that China is on its way to being a more advanced, more dynamic, and more successful state than Russia. China’s economic power, wedded to the dynamic energy of its 1.2 billion people, is fundamentally reversing the historical equation between the two countries, with the empty spaces of Siberia almost beckoning for Chinese colonization.
This staggering new reality was bound to affect the Russian sense of security in its Far Eastern region as well as Russian interests in Central Asia. Before long, this development might even overshadow the geopolitical importance of Russia’s loss of Ukraine. Its strategic implications were well expressed by Vladimir Lukin, Russia’s first post-Communist ambassador to the United States and later the chairman of the Duma’s Foreign Affairs Committee:
In the past, Russia saw itself as being ahead of Asia, though lagging behind Europe. But since then, Asia has developed much faster…. we find ourselves to be not so much between “modern Europe” and “backward Asia” but rather occupying some strange middle space between two “Europes.”[1]
In brief, Russia, until recently the forger of a great territorial empire and the leader of an ideological bloc of satellite states extending into the very heart of Europe and at one point to the South China Sea, had become a troubled national state, without easy geographic access to the outside world and potentially vulnerable to debilitating conflicts with its neighbors on its western, southern, and eastern flanks. Only the uninhabitable and inaccessible northern
