Текст книги "Implosion. The end of Russia and what it means for America"

Автор книги: Ilan Berman

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Yet Russia’s regional presence appears anything but permanent. Throughout the region, an emerging consensus holds that Russia’s influence is on the decline and that Moscow soon will become a spent force in Asia. ²⁴That same consensus holds that, despite the Kremlin’s best efforts, a Russian retreat from Asia is inevitable, as it is subsumed by a rising and increasingly assertive China.

A CHALLENGE FROM CHINA

Similar assessments increasingly predominate in Moscow. Over the past decade, China’s explosive economic growth has fueled a surging demand for energy. As a result, PRC officials consistently have sought to forge an energy partnership with Russia. At the core of their plans is a pipeline to bring oil from Siberia to northern China by way of a spur around Russia’s Lake Baikal. That route, which is expected to bring roughly three hundred thousand barrels of oil to China daily over the next two decades, went operational in January 2011. As of January 2013, it had delivered thirty tons of Russian crude to China, making Russia a significant energy provider to the PRC. ²⁵

But Beijing is seeking still more. China has made clear that it wants to absorb all of the available oil carried by Russia’s Eastern Siberia Pacific Ocean pipeline once that energy route—now under construction—comes online circa 2014. ²⁶In the process, it has fanned fears among Russian policymakers that, if they are not careful, their country could easily end up becoming nothing but an “energy appendage” to an insatiable China. ²⁷

Yet Moscow is doing little of substance to alter this trajectory. Putin’s government has pledged approximately $1 trillion through the end of the decade to modernize the country’s aging infrastructure. But such investments, observers say, do not include infusions of capital into sectors such as health and human welfare ²⁸—investments that are sorely needed if Russia is to sustain and expand its presence in the Far East. And because Russia is not making these investments, its pivot to Asia remains a matter of aspiration rather than reality. It is, moreover, an aspiration that is harder and harder to sustain.

CHAPTER NINE

REBUILDING THE EMPIRE

In January 2013, Alexei Kudrin sat down for an in-depth interview with Germany’s influential newsweekly Der Spiegel. The interview was noteworthy because Kudrin, a former finance minister, is one of very few people whom Russian president Vladimir Putin counts among his confidantes. In fact, even though he is no longer in government (having left the Kremlin in late 2011 to become dean of St. Petersburg University), Kudrin’s political star is still on the rise, and some see him as a possible future prime minister. Kudrin’s stature made the comparatively progressive ideas he espoused in his interview—about economic diversification and the need for greater democracy, free elections, and a real dialogue with Russia’s political opposition—all the more surprising.

But it was Kudrin’s comments about his country’s ideological outlook that were perhaps most striking. “There is a widespread attitude that I call ‘imperial syndrome,’” he lamented. “A sizeable number of Russians place their country above other nations and see neighboring countries as part of our zone of influence.” ¹

IDEOLOGUES OF EMPIRE

Today in Russia, this yearning for empire is embodied in a collection of influential politicians and thinkers who extol the virtue of an expanded Russian state.

Among the most conspicuous is Alexandr Dugin. At first blush, the bearded fifty-one-year-old KGB archivist-turned-political-theoretician seems like an unlikely power broker in the rough-and-tumble world of Russia’s identity politics. Yet more than a decade and a half after emerging in earnest onto Russia’s post-Soviet political scene, Dugin remains influential. His extreme ideas about Russian greatness and the country’s geopolitical destiny as an empire have greatly influenced Russia’s political leadership—and, by extension, the country’s foreign policy direction.

Since the mid-1990s, Dugin has become a noted political philosopher. A prolific writer, he has authored numerous books and articles about Russian nationalism, its foreign policy, and its place in the world. But the cornerstone of his thinking is elaborated in Osnovi Geopolitiki(“The Foundations of Geopolitics”), a rambling, 924-page treatise that lays out Dugin’s strategy for recreating an anti-Western Russian empire. ²The tome is a manifesto of sorts for renewed national greatness—and for the idea that Russia, as Dugin puts it, “cannot exist outside of its essence as an empire, by its geographical situation, historical path and fate of the state.” ³It is also an eloquent articulation of why, according to him, Russia and the United States are destined for global confrontation. “The strategic interests of the Russian nation,” Dugin has written, “must be oriented in an anti-Western direction . . . and toward the possibility of civilizational expansion.” ⁴

But Russia cannot do so alone. In light of its current, diminished international stature, Dugin posits a series of strategic alliances—with Iran, Germany, and possibly even Japan—through which Russia can again achieve international dominance. These partnerships, Dugin believes, should be based on the common “rejection of Atlanticism, strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us.” ⁵

Dugin’s ideas have taken concrete form. In 2000, he presided over the creation of “Eurasia,” a sociopolitical movement dedicated to the revival of the art of geopolitics—and to the idea of a “Greater Russia” stretching from the Middle East to the Pacific. Two and a half years later, Dugin’s ideas were formally entrenched in Russian political discourse with the chartering of his “Eurasia Party,” a political faction deeply supportive of President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy line. Today, he occupies the chairmanship of the Department of Sociology of International Relations at the prestigious Moscow State University, where he fills eager young minds with his ideas about Russia’s geopolitical destiny.

Over the years, Dugin’s influence has ebbed and flowed with the currents of Russian foreign policy. But he remains a figure to watch because his popularity represents a bellwether for Russia’s relationship with the West, as well as its global aspirations. Today, Dugin is again prominent on the Russian political scene, featured regularly in the national media in support of Putin’s plans for a Eurasian Union unifying Russia with Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. ⁶Most recently, he has even emerged as a voice for the Russian government on the international scene, penning a March 2013 editorial in the Financial Timesurging the West to better “understand” (and accommodate) Putin’s global efforts. ⁷

Even more significant and politically relevant is Dmitry Rogozin. At one time the deputy chairman of the State Duma, the ultra-nationalist Rogozin has long argued that Russia’s government needs to work toward a post-Soviet Union of Slavic peoples. In his book We Will Reclaim Russia for Ourselves, published in the late 1990s, Rogozin makes the case that the country “should discuss out loud the problem of a divided people that has an historic right to political unification of its own land.” Russians, he contends, “must present ourselves with the problem of a union, no matter how unrealistic this idea is in today’s conditions. And we must create conditions to result in the environment with which Germany dealt for forty years coming out united in the end.” ⁸

Rogozin has spent the years since putting this idea into practice. Since the early 2000s, he has served as the Kremlin’s special envoy to a number of enclaves held or coveted by the Russian state, including Kaliningrad and Moldova’s Transdniester region. ⁹Between 2008 and 2011, Rogozin was Russia’s ambassador to NATO, where he championed an increasingly assertive foreign policy line toward the post-Soviet space—one at odds with the objectives of the Atlantic Alliance. ¹⁰Rogozin has risen to the rank of deputy prime minister in Putin’s government, as well as to the head of the Military-Industrial Commission of the Russian Federation, which aims to “revive the country’s military-industrial complex” and “strengthen the defense of our country.” ¹¹

Rogozin’s political prospects look even brighter. In Moscow, his name—like Kudrin’s—is discussed as a potential successor to Putin should Russia’s president decide to bow out of national politics several years hence and leave the Kremlin to someone cut from the same cloth. ¹²

Such sentiments about Russia’s future are not held exclusively on Russia’s Right, however. Across the Russian political spectrum, thinkers have long been contemplating ways to reconstitute their country’s international greatness.

Their ranks include the late, great literary giant and anti-Communist icon Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who in the 1990s argued in favor of the reconstitution of the Slavic nation. “The trouble is not that the USSR broke up—that was inevitable,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in his 1995 book The Russian Question. “The real trouble, and a tangle for a long time to come, is that the breakup occurred mechanically along false Leninist borders, usurping from us entire Russian provinces. In several days, we lost 25 million ethnic Russians—18 percent of our entire nation. . . .” ¹³The optimal solution, according to Solzhenitsyn, was the reconstitution of a greater Slavic state encompassing “a Union of the three Slavic Republics and Kazakhstan.” ¹⁴Solzhenitsyn’s ideas found a lot of resonance in the Kremlin—so much, in fact, that despite his dissident status the civic crusader was invited in 1995 to repeat his call for Slavic unity on the floor of the State Duma. ¹⁵

This sort of thinking is also pervasive on Russia’s Left. Even Anatoly Chubais, the liberal architect of Russia’s pro-Western economic reforms during the 1990s, has weighed in in favor of Russia’s imperial expansion. “It’s high time to call a spade a spade,” Chubais wrote in Nezavisimaya Gazetain October 2003. “Liberal imperialism should become Russia’s ideology and building up liberal empire Russia’s mission.” ¹⁶

The implications are clear. Irrespective of political outlook, the allure of “greater Russia” continues to fire the imaginations of Russia’s elites. Indeed, more than a few politicians seem to believe that their country, in the words of Dugin, “can be either great or nothing at all.” ¹⁷

So do ordinary Russians. The collapse of the Soviet Union—and the loss of the constituent republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as satellites in the Baltics and Eastern Europe—was deeply traumatic to Russia’s citizens, who had grown accustomed to their country’s status as a superpower (even if a deeply repressive one). The political and economic upheaval that followed during the 1990s only intensified that trauma.

The numbers reflect this thinking. For example, more than 70 percent of respondents in a 2005 poll by the Moscow-based Levada Center said that the unification of Russia with Ukraine would be a positive move. ¹⁸Roughly 40 percent of those polled said that they approved of a union with Belarus—an idea that has been advocated by the Kremlin for some time. ¹⁹What’s more, people in at least some of the territory of the former USSR (including Belarus and eastern Ukraine) are still sympathetic to—and see themselves as a part of—Russia, in both ethnic and political terms. ²⁰

AN ENDURING IMPULSE

The Kremlin has set about making such a union a reality. In 2001, in a move that went largely unnoticed by the international community, it passed a law formally codifying the procedures and protocols by which the Russian Federation could be expanded. ²¹That new law provides a legal framework outlining how new subjects could be formed within Russia and how others could be annexed to it. ²²

Two years later, Russia’s Defence Ministry issued a new defense concept outlining a more aggressive posture toward Russia’s “near abroad.” That document, known colloquially as the “Ivanov Doctrine” for its principal architect, then Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, instituted major changes to Russian military structure and force posture in order to better “protect and further Russian interests” in its zone of strategic influence. ²³It was a not-so-subtle signal that, after a period of retrenchment, Moscow’s territorial appetite had again been whetted.

In this effort, Belarus, Russia’s closest economic and geopolitical ally, has received the lion’s share of attention. The idea of a formal union has been a fixture in relations between the two countries since Alexander Lukashenko rose to power in Minsk in 1994 on a platform of neo-Soviet nostalgia. His appeal was understandable; Belarus’s ten million citizens are all Slavs, mostly Russian Orthodox in religious belief and generally oriented toward Moscow in their political outlook. This viewpoint was formally codified in a 1995 Treaty of Friendship, Good Neighborliness and Cooperation, which emphasized the “common historical experience” of the two countries, as well as their joint desire for “deeper integration.” ²⁴

The years since have seen more than a dozen bilateral agreements on everything from military cooperation to easing customs barriers and even a formal union declaration in the late 1990s. But a real unification of the Russian and Belarusian systems has not taken place due to various disagreements over trade and energy issues and because Lukashenko himself likely understands that such a step would make him dispensable. ²⁵Nevertheless, relations between the two countries remain close, and pro-unification sentiments abound on both sides of the border. ²⁶So does the idea that Belarus’s integration into the Russian Federation remains simply a matter of time, since, as the prominent political scientist Samuel Huntington once noted, the country is “part of Russia in all but name.” ²⁷

Russia’s relations with the other main territory that it covets are considerably more acrimonious. Ukraine holds a prominent place in Russian policy because of its historic role as an ancient seat of Russian power (and, more recently, as a Soviet holding), and because it continues to serve as a key transit point for Russia’s energy exports to Europe. Although the common border between the two countries was settled in the late 1990s, many in Russia still cannot bear the idea of an independent Ukraine. ²⁸

As a result, the Kremlin has systematically worked to subvert democratic institutions, cultivate compliant political candidates, and resurrect a pro-Moscow political order in Kiev. This has proved to be complicated, however, because Ukraine is a country divided: the country’s eastern provinces are dominated by a Russian Orthodox population sympathetic to Russia, while its Western oblasts overwhelmingly look to Europe and the United States. This divide played out in the 2004 “Orange Revolution,” which saw a democratic outpouring—supported and sustained in the country’s west—upset the traditional pro-Russian status quo in Kiev with the election of pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko to the country’s presidency. (Ukraine’s eastern oblasts, by contrast, protested against the move, even unsuccessfully floating the idea of becoming an autonomous region.) ²⁹

The revolt was a concrete challenge to Moscow, which responded with a campaign to undermine the fledgling Yushchenko government. Within less than five years, Ukraine’s pro-Western consensus had collapsed, torn apart by competing domestic political factions. What followed was a political reversal that ended in the restoration of Ukraine’s pro-Moscow orientation. ³⁰

So the situation remains. Kiev’s current government, headed by pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych, has once again adopted a friendly line toward Moscow, extending Russia’s lease to the strategic naval base at Stevastopol and codifying a close energy association that posits Russia as the senior partner. And while a strong sense of nationalism continues to predominate throughout Ukraine, sympathetic attitudes toward the idea of reintegration are not absent; one-fifth of Ukrainians now favor the unification of their country and Russia into one state. ³¹

PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES

Elsewhere, Russia took a major step in this general direction when it invaded neighboring Georgia in August 2008. The weeklong conflict was precipitated by the Georgian government’s increasingly assertive policies toward two autonomous territories in the country’s north, the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In Soviet times, both had enjoyed the anonymous status within the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. When Georgia declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, it took the two areas along with it despite strong pro-independence sentiments in both. A series of skirmishes followed, culminating in the creation of an uneasy status quo whereby both South Ossetia and Abkhazia maintained functional independence but de jurewere part of the larger Georgian state.

That balance held until Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” of November 2003, which ousted long-serving pro-Moscow strongman Eduard Shevardnadze in favor of opposition leader Mikheil Saakashvili. In the years that followed, Saakashvili’s government tacked west, improving relations with the United States and Europe while simultaneously distancing itself from Moscow. ³²Relations with Russia deteriorated precipitously, culminating in Moscow’s decision to use force to protect South Ossetia when the Saakashvili government attempted to take over the region during the summer of 2008. ³³

From the start, the conflict had a strong territorial character. Prior to Russia’s invasion, more than half of South Ossetia’s population of seventy thousand had accepted Moscow’s offer of Russian citizenship. Thereafter, the Kremlin argued that it was acting to protect the rights of those citizens. ³⁴It did so; over the course of five days, Russia launched a large-scale ground offensive against Georgia, decisively defeating the Georgian military in numerous battles in the breakaway region and thereafter occupying multiple cities in the former Soviet Republic. ³⁵

Mediation by the European Union ended the conflict, but Russia’s shadow continues to loom over Georgia. Under a 2010 agreement grudgingly agreed to by Tbilisi, Moscow is permitted to maintain two thousand troops at a base in South Ossetia—making the region a de facto military protectorate of the Russian Federation. ³⁶Russia likewise has laid plans to build a permanent naval base in Abkhazia for its Black Sea fleet, cementing its long-term strategic presence there as well. ³⁷As of September 2012, a part of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet had been deployed to Ochamshire, Abkhazia as part of this effort. ³⁸

For their part, South Ossetia and Abkhazia have firmly ensconced themselves in Moscow’s orbit. In the wake of the 2008 conflict, both regions declared their independence from Georgia—a declaration that Russia promptly recognized. ³⁹(Most of the rest of the world, by contrast, has not; today, South Ossetia and Abkhazia are recognized by just six and five member states of the United Nations, respectively.) ⁴⁰

The reverberations have been felt in Tbilisi. Although Saakashvili handily won reelection in 2008, his popularity plummeted thereafter, at least in part because Georgians grew increasingly weary—and wary—of their country’s deeply acrimonious relationship with Russia. This internal discontent culminated in the ouster of Saakashvili’s government by a pro-Kremlin bloc in late 2012—and real movement toward a strengthening of ties between Tbilisi and Moscow since. ⁴¹

However brief, the incident represents more than a mere territorial skirmish. It was the first time that Moscow has attempted to use force to reclaim former territories (albeit indirectly) since the end of the Soviet era. And the outcome of the conflict has served to reward Russia’s urge for territorial expansion—and whet its appetite for still more.

THE LOGIC OF “GREATER RUSSIA”

Moscow’s interest in its former holdings is animated by more than imperial nostalgia. The historic yearning for forfeited territory is also bolstered by concrete socioeconomic calculations. To wit, policymakers in Moscow recognize that the addition of Belarus’s ten million citizens to the Russian Federation would increase Russia’s overall population by some 7 percent. The addition of Ukraine would do even more; ethnic Russians make up nearly 20 percent of Ukraine’s forty-five-million-person population, and if even part of the country were to formally vote in favor of annexation, the number of Russian citizens would swell significantly. If additional territories that are currently coveted by Moscow—including parts of neighboring Georgia and Kazakhstan—were added, that number would be higher still, significantly bolstering the Russian Federation’s flagging demographics in the process.

Today, in light of the decline of Russia’s Slavic population and the rise of its Muslim minority, the reclamation of lost lands has evolved from an aspiration to something resembling a strategic imperative. A recent article in the influential Literaturnaya Gazetaexplained it this way: “Russia as a sovereign unitary state can exist only as long as the state-forming Russian people, which support the unity of Russia, maintain an absolute majority in the population. The fewer the number of Russians, the lower their share in the population, the greater the chances of Russia breaking up into petty ‘independent’ [states].” ⁴²

In other words, if Russia hopes to survive, it will need to assume an increasingly aggressive posture toward its former holdings in the years ahead.