Russia's Dead End: An Insider's Testimony from Gorbachev to Putin

by Andrei A. Kovalev

  Another chronic, acute disarmament problem was the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, signed by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1972, that provided one of the main foundations of strategic stability. After the Republicans came to power in 2001, Washington declared its intention to withdraw from this treaty, calling it obsolete. At the end of 2001 the United States officially announced its withdrawal from the treaty, which lapsed in the summer of 2002. In December Washington began to create a national ABM system. Moscow viewed Washington’s actions as intentionally aimed against Russia, ignoring the fact that nuclear missile weapons had proliferated to additional countries since the treaty had been signed thirty years earlier. Russia was especially perturbed by the U.S. intention to deploy elements of the ABM system in Europe. The Kremlin declared that if the American ABM system was implemented, then Moscow would prepare an “asymmetrical response.” This streamlined formula masked the utter mental vacuity of Russia’s politicians and military on this question. The asymmetrical Russian reaction was taken to the point that, in the words of Lt. Gen. Vladimir Popovkin, commander of the space forces, the Russians were studying the question of placing on Russian Embassy grounds in various countries radio-location surveillance stations to monitor outer space. Popovkin asserted that this would enable them to pinpoint the launch point of missiles that could not be seen from Russian territory and to target the Russian ABMs on them. Rattling its weapons, Moscow publicly announced its intention of targeting its missiles on countries that agreed to take part in implementing the Americans’ plans.

  Some countries are fortunate. Russia, for example, is extremely fortunate to possess an abundance of useful minerals, especially oil and gas; a large population; and a favorable geographical location. Yet combined with the mentality of the vertical of power that emerged right after the Bolshevik coup of 1917, these natural riches, a veritable “gift of the gods,” turned into a curse.

  During Putin’s first term, a flood of petrodollars inundated Russia. Unfortunately, the authorities were absolutely irresponsible with regard to this bonanza. Obviously, the funds should have been invested in modernizing the country, above all in revitalizing the collapsing economy, in diversifying it, in improving the catastrophic social safety net—in sum, in what Alexander Solzhenitsyn called “preserving the nation.” Instead, Russia became merely a supplier of energy and other useful minerals to other countries. Russia’s rulers were pumping Russia’s natural resources abroad, like a primitive pump, and were unable even to consider the possibility of using the revenues to address long-festering internal problems.

  But it was not simply that nothing was done. Paradoxically, the increase in revenues even worsened the situation in Russia. The aggressiveness of the hawks, until then restrained by their penury, was unleashed by the influx of petrodollars, which facilitated the remilitarization of the country or, more accurately, enabled the hawks to flex the remnants of their atrophied military muscles. (Moreover, given the universal corruption, the funds allocated to this sector could be used for purposes other than those intended and, with varying degrees of cynicism, diverted into the pockets of those in power.) In addition, the rise in oil and gas prices stimulated a division of property that made free enterprise in Russia completely impossible. Finally, the rulers in Moscow now had additional opportunities to blackmail Western and post-Soviet countries that the Kremlin disliked and had a heightened interest in doing so. Putin immediately placed his bets on gas as Russia’s main instrument in international politics, for the post-Soviet states depend upon Russian liquid fuel for 60–80 percent of their needs. Moreover, Russia supplies about 25 percent of the EU’s needs.

  The year 2006 could have been a banner year for Russian diplomacy as for the first time Russia was chairing the Group of Eight (G8). And though 2006 did become such a year, Russian politicians and Russian businesspersons, who by this time had become synonymous, began to saw off the branch on which they were sitting. On January 1, Russia cut off supplies of natural gas to Ukraine and reduced the amount of fuel it was pumping into the European pipeline system. Thus, from the very beginning of its chairmanship of the G8, Russia did everything possible to ensure its failure in that role and to undermine the trust that is the basis of political and economic cooperation. By this action Russia was seeking to punish Yushchenko’s Ukrainian government, which it disliked, and to intimidate the West or, at least, to keep it on starvation rations. Moscow also wanted to gain control of Ukraine’s gas pipeline system by obtaining for Russia’s own Gazprom a 51 percent share of the company that operated it. Starting with this conflict, the Putinocracy probably took a final decision to construct a vertical of power in its relations with adjacent countries. It would be able “to rise from its knees” again by administering blows to Georgia and Ukraine and by emphasizing Western Europe’s dependency on Russian gas and, consequently, on the Kremlin’s beneficence.

  Russia inherited from the USSR not only gas, oil, and other useful minerals but also an enormous, collapsing military establishment that resisted essential reforms. It exhibited all of the defects that had proved fatal to the Soviet empire, including stereotypical modes of thinking and an acute inferiority complex, as well as old and newly acquired weaknesses. The enormous size of Russia’s military establishment greatly increased the likelihood of its being deployed, and that is precisely what happened: first in Chechnya, then in Georgia, and most recently in eastern Ukraine.

  An obvious stimulus for hardening Moscow’s policy toward the post-Soviet republics were the “color revolutions.” But if, as a result of the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003, one leader whom Putin disliked was replaced by another whom he liked no better, then it was quite another thing with regard to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine the next year; that really frightened him. Moscow asserted that the Orange Revolution was a Western, basically American, creation that had been engineered by Western-financed NGOs.

  The Kremlin had decided to bet on its favorite, the incumbent, acting Ukrainian prime minister Viktor Yanukovich. No one in the Kremlin realized that openly supporting one of the candidates on the eve of the elections would be seen as anything other than gross intervention into the domestic affairs of a sovereign nation. But that wasn’t enough. The Kremlin launched a campaign against presidential candidates Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Timoshenko, apparently blithely ignoring the high probability that they would wind up as the leaders of Ukraine.

  Of course, many governments try, with varying success, to exert influence not only on foreign governments but also on foreign public opinion, including with respect to elections. However, they try to act without publicity so as not to spoil relations with other candidates. Moscow did everything crudely and openly.

  As noted earlier, Russian diplomacy ceased being a science and an art, the application of mind and tact. None of these components could be observed in the Kremlin, in the Russian government, in the Foreign Ministry, or in Russia’s overseas embassies. The leaders and officials stopped trying to identify and study problems of international relations and to look for possible, mutually beneficial solutions. Instead, they endlessly repeated the same prefabricated positions without any preliminary probing or even genuine, deep analysis. These positions, moreover, were hastily slapped together when it was already too late to do anything.

  After Yushchenko’s victory, Moscow’s irritation with Ukraine, and toward him personally, escalated. Yushchenko did not hide his sympathies with Georgia. His effort to free Ukraine from the obtrusive and menacing presence of Russia’s Black Sea fleet in Crimea and to place limits on its activities and his desire for Ukraine to join NATO infuriated Moscow.

  Russian diplomacy actively and cynically exploits the existence of so-called overseas compatriots and the Russian-speaking population of post-Soviet republics to pursue its foreign policy objectives. This conjures up distressing allusions to the transfer to Hitler’s Germany of the Sudeten district of Czechoslovakia on the supposed grounds that the Czechoslovak authorities we
re constantly violating the rights of the solid bloc of ethnic Germans living there. The project of employing “overseas compatriots” for geopolitical objectives began almost immediately after the breakup of the USSR when the Russian Foreign Ministry, acting on orders from on high, raised the question of defending Russian-speaking populations in post-Soviet states. Here I must emphasize the international legal and political impropriety of posing the question, not as a matter of protecting Russian citizens, but as one of protecting “Russian-speaking” persons and “ethnic Russians.” This was particularly strange since the Russian authorities were unwilling to offer Russian citizenship to those they were supposedly defending. Moreover, Moscow did not pursue routine diplomatic work to secure human rights in post-Soviet countries. Instead, it engaged in patently ineffective, provocative, loud-mouthed démarches. Thus, from the beginning, the defense of compatriots abroad was marked by virtually undisguised double standards and blatant hypocrisy.

  Yet there really were human rights problems in post-Soviet countries. According to estimates used by the Russian authorities, more than twenty million Russian compatriots were living in the post-Soviet states.5 Moscow asserted that in the majority of post-Soviet states, with the exception of Belarus—despite their formal proclamation of the equality of citizens irrespective of ethnicity, faith, and language—ethnic Russians were inadequately represented in the organs of power at all levels. By this statement Moscow, in effect, made perfectly clear that its main concern was power.

  Veiled discrimination existing in the sphere of work and employment and limitations on rights in the fields of education, culture, and language took a variety of forms. The problem was that these Russian-speaking former citizens of the USSR, who had remained in place after the collapse of the Soviet Union and had done nothing to provoke hostility, had suddenly come to be viewed as a dubious and undesirable element even though Russian remained one of the official languages in these former Soviet republics. Naturally, elementary courtesy requires at least a modest knowledge of the national language of the country in which those who speak another official, but non-native, language are living. In Soviet times, however, this was not encouraged. On the contrary, attempts were made to suppress the national languages in favor of Russian. This effort was accompanied by a deliberate policy of settling Russians in the union republics, often at the initiative of the local authorities.

  It was natural for the new authorities to take every possible advantage of a situation where the former Soviet republics were acquiring sovereignty. Among the steps they took were establishing their national languages as the official languages; sharply constricting Russian-language cultural, informational, and educational spaces; and squeezing the Russian language out of official records and daily use. These actions were consistent with the introduction of the languages of the indigenous-majority peoples as the official languages. For example, the language problem and the policy of compulsory “Kazakhification” were some of the main reasons for the exodus of Russian speakers from Kazakhstan that was dubbed the Great Flight. (Over two million Russians left Kazakhstan after its independence.)

  By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the process of reducing the Russian component from the cultural life of Ukraine had led to a decline in the number of Russian theaters from forty to nine, the removal of Russian cultural monuments, and the renaming of Russian street names. In Russian-speaking Kiev, the number of schools teaching in the Russian language was reduced by a factor of ten. In the Ternopol, Rovno, and Kiev regions, Russian-language schools were closed, and only three remained open in eight other regions.

  In Latvia and Estonia, which the USSR annexed in 1940 as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the situation was exacerbated by mass deprivation of citizenship. Moscow rejected the option of bringing these problems up directly with the member states of the CIS, fearing, in the language of the Russian Foreign Ministry, their “unhealthy and sometimes even inadequate reaction.” It chose to pursue “quiet diplomacy” (as it was referred to in Foreign Ministry documents), but that turned out to be quite ineffective in this case. Meanwhile, Moscow “took everything out on Latvia and Estonia.” This occurred because of the orientation of the Baltic states, which joined NATO and the European Union. However, even here Moscow’s words—even the harshest words—were not backed up by any measures aimed at actually supporting the ethnic Russians. Clearly they were merely being used as a political card.

  Russians in the Baltic states repeatedly asked the ministry (including me, personally) not to defend them since such expressions of “concern” only made things worse for them. But the Kremlin and the Foreign Ministry ignored these requests. Nothing was done for the people who really needed help. Apart from their propaganda value, the authorities had no use for them and, therefore, were uninterested.

  At the very least, the Kremlin’s efforts to establish its dominion over the Slavic part of the former USSR, Russia’s dependence on happenings in the CIS, and the clumsiness of Moscow’s pseudo diplomacy inevitably alienated the post-Soviet states. Nowhere did Moscow’s attempts to transform this interstate quasi union of the CIS into a decent cloak for the increasing contradictions evoke any understanding. By the time Putin came to power, considerable efforts had already been made to whip up hysteria among the Russian public over their so-called compatriots.

  Moscow had an opportunity in the spring of 2007 to confront Estonia in the spirit of the Kremlin’s xenophobic imperial policy. The authorities in Tallinn decided to move the Bronze Soldier, a monument to Soviet servicemen who had died in Estonia during the Second World War, as well as their graves while fully observing all military honors and traditions. A majority of Estonians viewed this monument, which stood in the center of their capital, as a symbol of the Soviet occupation. On September 22, 1944, the Soviet army had “liberated” Tallinn from the lawful authorities of Estonia since by then almost no German troops remained there. Estonian flags were removed from government buildings, and members of the Estonian government were arrested, with later some being shot and others sent to the GULAG. Therefore, the monument to the “soldier-liberator” was known to Estonians as the “monument to an unknown aggressor.”

  Behaving in an openly provocative manner, Russia declared that it had received no information about the transfer of the monument and the graves, and it organized pro-Russian demonstrations in Estonia that escalated into riots. In Moscow a “shock brigade” literally besieged the Estonian Embassy, while representatives of the pro-Putin youth organizations Nashi and Molodaia Gvardiia held demonstrations both in Moscow and in Estonia. The Russian ambassador to Estonia refused to attend the solemn ceremony of reinterring the remains. The mayor of Moscow called upon Russian consumers to boycott Estonian goods, and activists set up a camp on the Estonian border in an attempt to block automobile traffic between the two countries. Russian deliveries of oil, which were usually shipped to Estonian ports by rail, abruptly stopped supposedly because of repairs to the railbed. Passenger rail service between Moscow and Tallinn suddenly became unprofitable and likewise ceased. On May 9, the day when Russia marks its victory over the Nazis, the Russian side unexpectedly closed the main highway linking the two countries to heavy truck traffic.

  Russian mass media also misinformed the Russian people. It alleged that hundreds of ethnic Russian arrestees had been savagely beaten in the terminal of Tallinn’s port and that a Russian who died in the course of the disturbances was supposedly beaten to death by police when he actually was the victim of an ordinary knife fight. Additional disinformation was thrown in for good measure that the Bronze Soldier had been sawed into pieces. These false reports accompanied provocative calls for a Bronze Revolution in Estonia and for an insurrection on May 9, in which the entire Russian-speaking community of Estonia should take part.

  At the same time this hysteria was mounting, in the suburban Moscow town of Khimki a monument to fallen warriors was quietly moved, and other military graves were cynically destroyed. Not a peep
was heard about this from either the authorities or the public. There is no doubt that Moscow, counting on the support of a large number of Russian-speaking people in Estonia, was trying to escalate the situation there from within while assisting this effort in every way possible by actions in Russia as well.

  The imperial syndrome, combined with political incompetence and irresponsibility, led to obscene Russian behavior with respect to the principle of the inviolability of borders. While verbally declaring its adherence to this principle, in the post-Soviet period and as early as the presidency of Yeltsin, the Kremlin pursued a policy aimed at supporting separatists who wanted to split Trans-Dniestr from Moldova and to break up Georgia by splitting off South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The majority of the area’s people, contrary to international law, were given Russian passports.

  Russian policy on these questions became particularly vociferous after the proclamation of Kosovo’s independence and its recognition by a number of Western countries. Russian diplomacy outwardly opposed such recognition. Meanwhile, with poorly disguised satisfaction, Russia embraced it as a precedent that untied its hands with regard to recognizing the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

  There is no doubt that extremely serious problems exist in Georgia, among them Abkhazia. The problem of Abkhazia was created in the first years of Bolshevik rule. Ever since then the Abkhazy have sought independence from Georgia; however, the region’s status in international law is unambiguous. From the time the USSR broke up, Abkhazia has been considered part of Georgia, but Abkhazian separatists have received military as well as moral and political support from Moscow.

  Georgia’s other sore point—South Ossetia—is also a legacy of the Soviet era. After the demise of the USSR, Ossetia, like the Ossetian people, found itself divided between different states. South Ossetia became part of Georgia, while North Ossetia remained part of Russia. In the Soviet period this hardly mattered since the internal boundaries of the USSR were purely administrative and did not affect people. The situation changed drastically after the collapse of the USSR. The third, subjective, problem was the personality of Georgian leader Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who came to power in 1991 and brought his country to the edge of catastrophe.