GEOSTRATEGIC PHANTASMAGORIA
A period of historic and strategic confusion in postimperial Russia was hence unavoidable. The shocking collapse of the Soviet Union and especially the stunning and generally unexpected disintegration of the Great Russian Empire have given rise in Russia to enormous soul-searching, to a wide-ranging debate over what ought to be Russia’s current historical self-definition, to intense public and private arguments over questions that in most major nations are not even raised: What is Russia? Where is Russia? What does it mean to be a Russian?
These questions are not merely theoretical: any reply contains significant geopolitical content. Is Russia a national state, based on purely Russian ethnicity, or is Russia by definition something more (as Britain is more than England) and hence destined to be an imperial state? What are—historically, strategically, and ethnically—the proper frontiers of Russia? Should the independent Ukraine be viewed as a temporary aberration when assessed in such historic, strategic, and ethnic terms? (Many Russians are inclined to feel that way.) To be a Russian, does one have to be ethnically a Russian (“Russkyi”), or can one be a Russian politically but not ethnically (that is, be a “Rossyanin”—the equivalent to “British” but not to “English”)? For example, Yeltsin and some Russians have argued (with tragic consequences) that the Chechens could—indeed, should—be considered Russians.
A year before the Soviet Union’s demise, a Russian nationalist, one of the few who saw the end approaching, cried out in a desperate affirmation:
If the terrible disaster, which is unthinkable to the Russian people, does occur and the state is torn apart, and the people, robbed and deceived by their 1,000-year history, suddenly end up alone, and their recent “brothers” have taken their belongings and disappeared into their “national lifeboats” and sail away from the listing ship—well, we have nowhere to go….
Russian statehood, which embodies the “Russian idea” politically, economically, and spiritually, will be built anew. It will gather up all the best from its long 1,000-year kingdom and the 70 years of Soviet history that have flown by in a moment.[2]
But how? The difficulty of defining an answer that would be acceptable to the Russian people and yet realistic has been compounded by the historic crisis of the Russian state itself. Throughout almost its entire history, that state was simultaneously an instrument of territorial expansion and economic development. It was also a state that deliberately did not conceive itself to be a purely national instrument, in the West European tradition, but defined itself as the executor of a special supranational mission, with the “Russian idea” variously defined in religious, geopolitical, or ideological terms. Now, suddenly, that mission was repudiated as the state shrank territorially to a largely ethnic dimension.
Moreover, the post-Soviet crisis of the Russian state (of its “essence,” so to speak) was compounded by the fact that Russia was not only faced with the challenge of having been suddenly deprived of its imperial missionary vocation but, in order to close the yawning gap between Russia’s social backwardness and the more advanced parts of Eurasia, was now being pressed by domestic modernizers (and their Western consultants) to withdraw from its traditional economic role as the mentor, owner, and disposer of social wealth. This called for nothing short of a politically revolutionary limitation of the international and domestic role of the Russian state. This was profoundly disruptive to the most established patterns of Russian domestic life and contributed to a divisive sense of geopolitical disorientation within the Russian political elite.
In that perplexing setting, as one might have expected, “Whither Russia and what is Russia?” prompted a variety of responses. Russia’s extensive Eurasian location has long predisposed that elite to think in geopolitical terms. The first foreign minister of the postimperial and post-Communist Russia, Andrei Kozyrev, reaffirmed that mode of thought in one of his early attempts to define how the new Russia should conduct itself on the international scene. Barely a month after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he noted: “In abandoning messianism we set course for pragmatism…. we rapidly came to understand that geopolitics… is replacing ideology.”[3]
Generally speaking, three broad and partially overlapping geostrategic options, each ultimately related to Russia’s preoccupation with its status vis-à-vis America and each also containing some internal variants, can be said to have emerged in reaction to the Soviet Union’s collapse. These several schools of thought can be classified as follows:
- priority for “the mature strategic partnership” with America, which for some of its adherents was actually a code term for a global condominium;
- emphasis on the “near abroad” as Russia’s central concern, with some advocating a form of Moscow-dominated economic integration but with others also expecting an eventual restoration of some measure of imperial control, thereby creating a power more capable of balancing America and Europe; and
- a counteralliance, involving some sort of a Eurasian anti-U.S. coalition designed to reduce the American preponderance in Eurasia.
Although the first of the foregoing was initially dominant among President Yeltsin’s new ruling team, the second option surfaced into political prominence shortly thereafter, in part as a critique of Yeltsin’s geopolitical priorities; the third made itself heard somewhat later, around the mid-1990s, in reaction to the spreading sense that Russia’s post-Soviet geostrategy was both unclear and failing. As it happens, all three proved to be historically maladroit and derived from rather phantasmagoric views of Russia’s current power, international potential, and foreign interests.
In the immediate wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Yeltsin’s initial posture represented the cresting of the old but never entirely successful “westernizer” conception in Russian political thought: that Russia belonged in the West, should be part of the West, and should as much as possible imitate the West in its own domestic development. That view was espoused by Yeltsin himself and by his foreign minister, with Yeltsin being quite explicit in denouncing the Russian imperial legacy. Speaking in Kiev on November 19, 1990, in words that the Ukrainians or Chechens could subsequently turn against him, Yeltsin eloquently declared:
Russia does not aspire to become the center of some sort of new empire… Russia understands better than others the perniciousness of that role, inasmuch as it was Russia that performed that role for a long time. What did it gain from this? Did Russians become freer as a result? Wealthier? Happier?… history has taught us that a people that rules over others cannot be fortunate.
The deliberately friendly posture adopted by the West, especially by the United States, toward the new Russian leadership was a source of encouragement to the post-Soviet “westernizers” in the Russian foreign policy establishment. It both reinforced its pro-American inclinations and seduced its membership personally. The new leaders were flattered to be on a first-name basis with the top policy makers of the world’s only superpower, and they found it easy to deceive themselves into thinking that they, too, were the leaders of a superpower. When the Americans launched the slogan of “the mature strategic partnership” between Washington and Moscow, to the Russians it seemed as if a new democratic American-Russian condominium—replacing the former contest—had thus been sanctified.
That condominium would be global in scope. Russia thereby would not only be the legal successor to the former Soviet Union but the de facto partner in a global accommodation, based on genuine equality. As the new Russian leaders never tired of asserting, that meant not only that the rest of the world should recognize Russia as America’s equal but that no global problem could be tackled or resolved without Russia’s participation and/or permission. Although it was not openly stated, implicit in this illusion was also the notion that Central Europe would somehow remain, or might even choose to remain, a region of special political proximity to Russia. The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and Comecon would not be followed by the gravitation of their former members either toward NATO or even only toward the EU.
Western aid, in the meantime, would enable the Russian government to undertake domestic reforms, withdrawing the state from economic life and permitting the consolidation of democratic institutions. Russia’s economic recovery, its special status as America’s coequal partner, and its sheer attractiveness would then encourage the recently independent states of the new CIS—grateful that the new Russia was not threatening them and increasingly aware of the benefits of some form of union with Russia—to engage in ever-closer economic and then political integration with Russia, thereby also enhancing Russia’s scope and power.
The problem with this approach was that it was devoid of either international or domestic realism. While the concept of “mature strategic partnership” was flattering, it was also deceptive. America was neither inclined to share global power with Russia nor could it, even if it had wanted to do so. The new Russia was simply too weak, too devastated by three-quarters of a century of Communist rule, and too socially backward to be a real global partner. In Washington’s view, Germany, Japan, and China were at least as important and influential. Moreover, on some of the central geostrategic issues of national interest to America—in Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East—it was far from the case that American and Russian aspirations were the same. Once differences inevitably started to surface, the disproportion in political power, financial clout, technological innovation, and cultural appeal made the “mature strategic partnership” seem hollow—and it struck an increasing number of Russians as deliberately designed to deceive Russia.
Perhaps that disappointment might have been averted if earlier on—during the American-Russian honeymoon—America had embraced the concept of NATO expansion and had at the same time offered Russia “a deal it could not refuse,” namely, a special cooperative relationship between
