Putin's Wars (45 page)

Despite empire’s long and venerable track record . . . , there are strong reasons
to think that empire building is no longer a viable political project. Imperial states
have acquired territory in three ways: by marriage, by purchase, and by conquest.
Marriage no longer works, as no contemporary ruler (not even a dictator) claims to
own the territory he rules. Purchase is a dead end, as all the world’s land is divided
among jealous states and oftentimes empowered populations. Conquest is still possible
in principle, and the twentieth century is full of instances in which it was attempted
in practice. But the limits of conquest are clear, in the aftermath of Iraq if not
before. International and most national norms, for example, now hold that the conquest
of foreign nations and states almost certainly involves violations of human rights
and the principles of self-determination and cultural autonomy, and is therefore illegitimate.
Moreover, nation-states are unusually effective vehicles of mass mobilization and
resistance, making sustained conquest harder now than in the past . . . . In sum,
while history suggests that being or having an empire is a guarantee of longevity,
it also shows that acquiring an empire is probably no longer possible.
^[2]

Motyl wrote these words in 2006, two years before the Russian invasion of Georgia
and the dismemberment of this small neighboring country. Another author, who explicitly
considered the demise of the Russian empire as definitive, was Manuel Castells. According
to Castells,

[T]here will be no reconstruction of the Soviet Union, regardless of who is in power
in Russia . . . . I propose, as the most likely, and indeed promising future, the
notion of the Commonwealth of Inseparable States (
Sojuz Nerazdelimykh Gosudarstv
); that is, of a web of institutions flexible and dynamic enough to articulate the
autonomy of national identity and the sharing of political instrumentality in the
context of the global economy. Otherwise, the affirmation of sheer state power over
a fragmented map of historical identities will be a caricature of nineteenth century
European nationalism: it will lead in fact to a Commonwealth of Impossible States
(
Sojuz Nevozmozhnykh Gosudarstv
).
^[3]

Castells wrote these words in 1997, a year in which Russia seemed to have accepted
definitively the loss of empire. Moreover, Castells was certainly right that there
would be no reconstruction of the Soviet Union, which had disappeared, forever, with
its ideological glue: communism. But empires do not need to be communist, as history
teaches us. And empires need not be built only in a nineteenth
^-
century way: relying almost exclusively on military power. They can also be built—or
rebuilt—in a postmodern way, making use of a smart mix, which not only includes blackmail,
pressure, and naked military power, but also financial instruments, economic leverage,
and soft power.

We already cited in the introduction Dmitry Trenin, who, in the same vein as the two
aforementioned authors, wrote: “The Russian empire is over, never to return. The enterprise
that had lasted for hundreds of years simply lost the drive. The élan has gone.”
^[4]
Unlike the other authors, who gave their optimistic assessments
before
the Russian invasion of Georgia, Trenin’s book was published
after
the invasion of Georgia and after the gas wars with Ukraine in 2006 and 2009. Trenin,
who gave his book the title
Post-Imperium
, added the subtitle
A Eurasian Story.
He probably did so without any prior knowledge of Putin’s latest geopolitical project:
his book was published before Putin wrote his famous
Izvestia
article in which he announced the formation of a Eurasian Union
^[5]
and also before the summit on December 19, 2011, during which the presidents of
Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, officially launched the project of the Eurasian Union.
Paradoxically—and ironically—Trenin added Putin’s latest, and most important imperial
project as a subtitle to a book in which he argued that Russia had definitively lost
its imperial drive.

Looking back however, it was not the year 2011—the year in which Putin launched his
project of the Eurasian Union—which was crucial to Russia’s new course, nor was it
the year 1999, when Putin became acting president. In retrospect, the crucial year
was 1997. In this year Russia stood at a crossroads. On May 27, 1997, after long hesitation,
President Yeltsin signed the “Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security
between NATO and the Russian Federation.” In this act the Russian Federation committed
itself to a set of common principles. Among these principles was featured the “respect
for sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of all states and their inherent
right to choose the means to ensure their own security.”
^[6]
The Kremlin’s recognition of the inherent right of all states “to choose the means
to ensure their own security” was a major step forward on the road to a post-imperial
state. It was the recognition of the sovereign right of both the post-Soviet states
and the former Soviet bloc countries of Eastern Europe to choose their own alliances,
including the right to become a member of NATO. In the same year—in July 1997—at the
Madrid NATO summit, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were invited to join the
Alliance.

Reactions in the West were more than positive. In an article with the title “From
Empire to Nation State,” Chrystia Freeland wrote in the
Financial Times
: “After devoting five centuries to imperial expansion, Russia seems abruptly to have
reconciled itself to a diminished global role.”
^[7]
She quoted Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the Moscow-based Center for Strategic
Studies, who said: “This spring was a turning point in Russia’s choice between being
an imperial power and a nation state. It marked a strong decision to reject empire.”
^[8]
And he added: “The really surprising thing is that the negative reaction to the
loss has not been stronger.”
^[9]
However, the Russian advance toward a democratic, post-imperial state during Boris
Yeltsin’s second presidential term was not as straightforward as these enthusiastic
comments seemed to suggest. Russia’s progress resembled rather the dancing procession
of Echternach, in which three steps forward are preceded and followed by two steps
backward. This is because, in the same year—on April 2, 1997—Yeltsin signed with the
Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko a Union Treaty leading to a Union State of
Russia and Belarus. The signing of the treaty, wrote the
Financial Times
, “drew rare praise for Mr. Yeltsin from his Communist and nationalist opponents.”
^[10]
This praise was no surprise, because the initiative put Russia on a quite different
track: that of a neoimperial state. The French paper
Le Monde
referred to a debate in the Russian government between “occidentalists,” wanting
to join the European democratic mainstream, and “Slavophiles,” wanting to build a
Slavic Union under the aegis of Russia. The first group included two deputy prime
ministers: Boris Nemtsov and Anatoly Chubais, and the leader of the liberal Yabloko
fraction, Grigory Yavlinsky.
^[11]
The second group included not only ultranationalists, such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky
and the communist Gennady Zyuganov, but also Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and
Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov.
^[12]
Primakov, who would shortly afterward become prime minister, was the former head
of the SVR, the external intelligence service, a follow-up organization to the First
Chief Directorate of the KGB. Primakov was described by Ronald Asmus as someone, who
“had made his career by standing up to the West—‘the man who could say
Nyet
.’”
^[13]
He “saw his job as masking Russian weakness while rebuilding Moscow’s strength.
By his desk, he kept a small bust of Prince Alexandr Gorchakov, a 19th-century Russian
Foreign Minister under Czar Alexander II who had presided over Russia’s recovery from
its total defeat in the Crimean war. Partnership with the U.S. was not part of his
lexicon.”
^[14]

In an editorial
Le Monde
wrote at that time that the treaty on the Union State between Yeltsin and Lukashenko
“emphasizes in the first place the permanent desire of the Kremlin to gather around
it the former Soviet republics, at least the Slavic ones. Everything suggests that
Ukraine will be next to bear the brunt of the Russian pressure: already dependent
of her ‘big brother’ for her energy, she finds herself surrounded on three sides by
Russian garrisons.”
^[15]
This commentary was, indeed, farsighted. The objective to bring Ukraine back in
its orbit would become the overriding motive behind the Kremlin’s policies in the
next decade. The choice facing Russia in 1997 was the choice between becoming a “normal,”
democratic nation state, living in peace with its neighbors, or becoming—again—an
empire. In the crucial year, 1997, the Founding Act with NATO pointed in the direction
of the former, the Union Treaty with Belarus toward the latter. It was as though both
initiatives mimicked the Russian coat of arms: the double-headed eagle whose heads
face in two opposite directions. It was clear from the beginning that these two strategies
could not be reconciled. As soon as 1994 Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote: “In not being
an empire, Russia stands a chance of becoming, like France or Britain or earlier post-Ottoman
Turkey, a normal state.”
^[16]
He added the warning: “If not openly imperial, the current objectives of Russian
policy are at the very least proto-imperial. That policy may not yet be aiming explicitly
at a formal imperial restoration, but it does little to restrain the strong imperial
impulse that continues to motivate large segments of the state bureaucracy, especially
the military, as well as the public.”
^[17]
Brzezinski’s caution was certainly justified. It was shared by the Russian liberal
politician Yegor Gaidar, who was Yeltsin’s prime minister from June 15, 1992, to December
14, 1992. Referring to the years 1918–1922—when the Red Army, in only four years,
reconquered most of the lost tsarist territories—he wrote: “Russia is unique in restoring
a failed empire.”
^[18]

Putin’s project for a Eurasian Union is the Kremlin’s latest attempt to reintegrate
the post-Soviet space. According to Jeremy Smith, a professor of Russian history at
the University of Eastern Finland, “It is less clear what economic advantages Russia
gains from the Union, given that so much of its trade is orientated to Europe, China,
and elsewhere.”
^[19]
According to Smith, “this has fuelled the suspicion that the whole project is a
way of enhancing Russian regional hegemony and, in the most alarmist interpretations,
moving toward the recreation of some form of the USSR. . . . Critics of the project
maintain that, like the European Union, pressures for political integration will follow
close upon the heels of economic integration, with the major difference that there
will be a clear hegemonic power, Russia, dominating the Union.”
^[20]
One must add here one important reservation: the project of the Eurasian Union
was not launched to recreate the Soviet Union, and the objective is not to reintegrate
the Central Asian states into Russia proper. Its real and overriding objective is
preventing Ukraine from establishing closer relations with the European Union and
NATO, bringing this country definitively and irreversibly back into the orbit of its
Slavic “brother country” Russia. This objective is openly admitted. Fyodor Lukyanov,
for instance, a prominent Russian political scientist, wrote in a comment on Putin’s
Eurasia article: “The paradox of the Eurasian Union is that its primary goal is not
Eurasia. Its most desired object is Ukraine.”
^[21]
Lukyanov considered membership of Ukraine—a country of 45 million—an economic necessity
to make the Eurasian Union work. He also mentioned that “the growth of xenophobia
[in Russia] . . . means that building an integrationist unification with the Central
Asian countries will be accompanied by increased tensions. Ukraine is, in this sense,
the ideal partner, together with Belarus, in as much as it immediately brings a sense
of ‘Slavicness’ to the created structure.”
^[22]
Lukyanov spoke further, tellingly, of an “attempt to bring together what is profitable
[the Slavic countries] and dissociate oneself from ‘ballast’ [i.e., the Central Asian
countries].”
^[23]

During the Russia-NATO Council session in Bucharest in April 2008, Putin called Ukraine
“a complex state formation. If the NATO issue is added there,” he said, “along with
other problems, this may bring Ukraine to the verge of existence as a sovereign state.”
^[24]
Later during the same summit, in a discussion with U.S. President George Bush,
Putin said that Ukraine was “not a real country.” This is clearly light-years away
from the “common principles” laid down in the Founding Act, signed by Russia and the
members of NATO in 1997, in which Russia had recognized the inherent right of all
countries “to choose the means to ensure their own security.” Putin’s declaration
was a scarcely veiled threat that Russia would intervene if Ukraine decided to join
NATO. Doubts on Ukraine’s viability as a sovereign state were expressed on many occasions
by leading Russians. On March 16, 2009, the Kremlin ideologue Gleb Pavlovsky wrote
in the
Russkiy Zhurnal
, a Russian online magazine of which he is the owner, an article titled: “Will Ukraine
Lose Its Sovereignty?”
^[25]
This article was followed four days later by an interview with Sergey Karaganov,
the
éminence grise
of the Russian foreign policy community and head of the Presidium of the Council on
Foreign and Defense Policy. This article had the title: “No One Needs Monsters. Desovereignization
of Ukraine.”
^[26]
Karaganov depicted Ukraine as a failed state that was in a process of “passive
desovereignization.” The process was, however, not only “passive.” Karaganov warned
that “Russia will not want to see absolutely ungovernable territories close by.”
^[27]
Yuriy Shcherbak, former Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, wrote in response:
“In military language it is called the ideological-propagandistic support of the future
operation on capturing the territory of a sovereign state.”
^[28]
In fact, Russian politicians continued to denounce Ukraine as an “artificial” country
that had no right to exist. At the height of the financial crisis Valery Fadeyev,
editor of the political journal
Ekspert
, wrote: “Ukraine is cheap, we can buy it.”
^[29]
It sounded less aggressive, almost as a joke, but it expressed the same contempt
for Russia’s neighbor and its status as an independent, sovereign state.