What's Going on in Russia?

What’s Going on in Russia?

There are two things you have to understand if you want to understand what’s going on in Russia today, Russia itself  and Vladimir Putin. Few Americans understand either Russia or Putin well at all. We will never deal effectively with Russia on the international stage unless we understand both of them much better than most of us do.

I’ll start with Russia. Russia is not a western country. It is different from typical western countries in at least these ways:

It sits between Europe and Asia, and it has both European and Asian characteristics.

It has no tradition of democracy.

It has no tradition of respect for individual rights.

It has a centuries old tradition of government that is authoritarian at best and totalitarian at worst.

It has a centuries-old history of repeated foreign invasions. Over the centuries Russia has been invaded at least by Tatars, Lithuanians, Poles, Swedes, the French under Napoleon, and the Germans under Hitler. That history affects how Russians as a people think of issues like order, security, and individual freedom.

Except for the relatively short period of Communist rule (1917-1991), it has a centuries old tradition of unity between the government and the very conservative Russian Orthodox Church.[1]

Russia did not experience the Renaissance with its emphasis on the primacy of the human.

Most of Russia, except for a very small social and political elite, did not experience the Enlightenment with its emphasis on human reason as the primary source of knowledge.

Most recently Russia experience totalitarian terror and oppression at the hands of the Communist Party, worse under Stalin than after him but never entirely overcome.

Under the Soviet Communists Russia became for the first time a first rank world power. Not long after the US did the USSR created nuclear weapons.

Russia lost its status as a major world power when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia was no longer Communist. The Soviet Union consisted of most of the territory and peoples of the Russian Empire (absent Finland and part of Poland). It controlled territory from the border of Poland in the west to the border with North Korea in the east and from the Artic Sea in the north to the border with Iran in the south. It was huge. Today Russia is still huge, but it’s nowhere near as big as it was as the Russian Empire or as the dominant element of the Soviet Union.

It still has the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal.

Many if not most Russians feel diminished by Russia’s loss of global status.

Despite the country’s basically non-western character the Russian people have made enormous contributions to western culture. Think of Lomonosov (a scientist after whom Moscow State University is named), Pushkin, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Pasternak, Oistrakh, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and so many others. The Russian people are as talented and creative as any other and could be as productive given improved circumstances.

Few Americans understand Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Here are some pertinent facts about him.

He was born October 7, 1952, in what was then Leningrad, now again St. Petersburg. His parents barely survived the Nazi siege of Leningrad in which well over one million people died.

He studied law at Leningrad State University (where I lived for a time while doing dissertation research in Leningrad in 1976).

He was a low level KGB agent who worked in Dresden, Germany, from 1985 to 1990

After the collapse of the Soviet Union he left the KGB to enter politics in St. Petersburg, where he served under a reform minded mayor named Sobchak. He worked mostly in the city’s foreign relations and was accused of significant corruption.

He returned to the successor to the KGB, the FSB, and eventually became its head.

Boris Yeltsin, then President of the Russian Federation, made him a deputy prime minister, after which he became prime minister and Yeltsin’s chosen successor.

On Dec. 31, 1999, Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned, and Putin became Acting President. He was later elected President and has served as either President (the office with all the power) or the power behind the president as Prime Minister ever since.

In his many years in power he has done many things, few of them good.

He has cozied up to the Russian Orthodox Church and adopted its ultraconservative social agenda.

He has turned Russia into a kleptocracy, ruling in alliance with massively wealthy, mostly corrupt Russian oligarchs who are exporting much of Russia’s wealth for their own benefit rather than reinvesting it in the country.

He has seized control of most of the media outlets including all of the major television networks.

He has killed journalists, oligarchs, and politicians who opposed him, and he’s done it both in Russia and abroad.

He has had political opponents arrested on trumped up charges to keep them from becoming significant political figures.

He has said that the dissolution of the USSR is the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century, never mind the Holocaust or the Stalinist terror I guess.

He has identified opposition to western liberalism as his principal ideology.

He has to some extent restored many Russians’ pride in their nation after the humiliation of the disintegration of the USSR.

He wants as much as anything else for Russia once again to be a major, respected force in the world.[2]

He is both intrinsically Russian and Soviet, and it is unrealistic to expect him to act as anything else.

By American standards he is bad guy. He is anti-democratic, anti-civil rights, anti-personal freedom, and in bed with organized crime and oligarchs who are exploiting Russia’s immense natural resources and exporting most of their wealth.

By Russian standards however he’s rather predictable and unsurprising. It was probably inevitable that after the collapse of the USSR Russia’s history of authoritarianism combined with what Russia doesn’t have—traditions of democracy and individual freedom—would produce someone like Putin.

What’s surprising is that it produced Putin in particular. He came to power almost by accident. Nothing I’ve read suggests that he was ever particularly ambitious or plotted a path to power. He’s where he is because Yeltsin chose him. Yeltsin chose him probably for two reasons. First, he was a blank slate. He didn’t seem to have an agenda of his own, so Yeltsin didn’t have to choose between representatives of competing political camps vying for power. Second, because of his influence in the FSB he could (and did) protect Yeltsin and his cronies from prosecution for their multiple violations of law.

His future isn’t entirely clear. Russia’s constitution limits the president to two consecutive six year terms.[3] He is 66 years old and as far as we knowd in good health. A significant majority of Russian voters support him and his policies. He won a fourth overall term as president and a second consecutive six year term in 2018 with 76% of the vote. That figure is probably inflated by electoral fraud, but it is certainly still true that he has the support of a majority of his people. In 2024, when he will have to relinquish the presidency (unless he changes the constitution, which so far he has not done except to change the term of the president) he could do what he did at the end of his first second consecutive term—make an underling a more or less subservient president while he again assumes the post of prime minister.[4] Just what he will do remains to be seen.

So how should the US relate to Putin? We don’t have to like him, but he is a reality with whom we must deal. Russia may still be what it was when I was there more than forty years ago, a third-world country with nukes, but it has a lot of nukes. It also has massive reserves of natural resources, oil and natural gas among them. It has enormous human resources as well.

For Putin and for a great many Russians “Russia” includes all of the territory Russia lost when the USSR dissolved and all of its constituent “republics,” including Russia, became independent nations. In particular, for Putin and a great many Russians Ukraine is not something separate from Russia but a constituent part of it.[5] That’s why Putin occupied Crimea and incorporated it into Russia and why Russia has been meddling militarily in eastern Ukraine, where much of the population is Russian not Ukrainian.[6]

There is a circumstance as a result of the history of the Russian Empire/USSR that has a troubling historical parallel. There are significant numbers of Russians living in all of the nations that used to be Soviet republics, not just in Ukraine. The issue is particularly acute in the Baltic republics of Estonia and Latvia. Those places had been part of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century. If you see photographs of cities like Riga and Tallinn in those nations you’ll see that there are Russian Orthodox churches as well as churches of other denominations there. That’s because there are and have been lots of Russians in those nations. That circumstance has unsettling parallels to the situation in what was Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Significant numbers of Germans lived in the Sudetenland, the western regions of Czechoslovakia that bordered Germany. Hitler used the presence of those Germans under Czechoslovak rule as an excuse to occupy the Sudetenland, one of the steps that led in short order to World War II.

Putin makes noises about Russians in Estonia and Latvia that sound a bit like the noises Hitler made about Germans in the Sudetenland. Will Russia invade Latvia or Estonia the way it has already invaded Ukraine and Georgia? Latvia and Estonia are now members of NATO. Russia invading them could well ignite a full-scale war between Russia and NATO, both of which have enormous numbers of nuclear weapons. I hope that the fact that Latvia and Estonia are members of NATO will stop that from happening, but time will tell.

So what are we to make of Russia under Putin? As it has been since at least the eighteenth century, Russia is an essentially non-western nation with a veneer of western culture superimposed upon it. Russia has a constitution that provides for elected governmental leaders, and so far Putin has complied with the constitution—at least superficially. Yet Putin is not a western democrat because Russia has no traditions anything like the western democratic ones. Putin is positioning Russia as the champion of conservative social beliefs including, among other things, denial of rights to LGBTQ people. He is doing that in close cooperation with the very, very conservative Russian Orthodox Church.[7] In the major cities life may be better for most people than it was under the Communists, or it may not. Moscow looks a lot more western today than it did when I was there in 1975 and 1976. It has western-style skyscrapers that weren’t there in Soviet times. There are neon signs for western brands like Mercedes Benz and many others. Yet Russia is still Russia. It is not a western country. Its political traditions are authoritarian and even totalitarian not democratic. Because of that history and because of Russia’s centuries-long history of repeated foreign invasions Russians as a people prefer order and security to western-style freedoms. It is unrealistic to expect Russia to look or act like a western country anytime soon. We must understand Russia better than most Americans do, which doesn’t mean we must kowtow to it the way Trump does. We must be realistic, recognize Russia as a significant nuclear power with enormous natural and human resources, and not expect Russia to be what it is not.

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[1] Even under the Communists the Russian Orthodox Church was subservient to the government and was thoroughly infiltrated by agents of the KGB.

[2] President Obama once referred to Russia as a “regional power.” I don’t know if Obama intended that phrase as an intentional insult to Putin, but I’m sure Putin took it in bad form.

[3] It was originally two consecutive four year terms, but one change to the constitution that Putin got through was to change the term of the president to six year.

[4] The first time around that person was Dmitrii Medvedev. Medvedev tried on occasion to act independently. Putin quickly put an end to those efforts.

[5] The tsarist government never recognized Ukrainians as a separate people or Ukrainian as a separate language. They said it was merely a dialect of Russian.

[6] Crimea was also important to Russia because the port of Sevastopol has long been the home port of first the Russian then the Soviet Black Sea Fleet.

[7] Western Christians sometimes criticize Orthodox Christianity by saying that it hasn’t had an original thought since the eighth century. Orthodox Christians reply in effect “Yeah, ain’t that great?” To a considerable extent today’s Russia has reverted to the relationship between the government and the Russian Orthodox Church that existed before 1917 (except that the Church still has a Patriarch, which it didn’t have between 1721 and 1918). The government has enacted laws giving the Orthodox Church a privileged position compared to other churches that could have been written by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the ultraconservative Over Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church (the institution that replaced the Patriarch in those years I listed above) who was the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation. Given my experience in the USSR I was shocked some time ago when I saw film of a Russian Orthodox priest blessing a Russian rocket before it took off taking astronauts to the International Space Station. You’d never have seen that under the Soviets.