Russia, NATO and Cooperative Security: Bridging the Gap

RUSSIA, NATO AND COOPERATIVE SECURITY

Russia, NATO and Cooperative Security explores the common ground between Russia and NATO and the potential to move beyond cultural differences. Lionel Ponsard clearly demonstrates how cooperative security could serve as a means to bridge the gap between two supposedly antagonistic entities: NATO and Russia. He skilfully shows that by building confidence between the two parties about each other’s intentions, cooperative security can regulate attitudes that might otherwise lead to misperception. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of Russia, the author focuses on the peculiarity of NATO–Russia relations and emphasises the Russian approach to analyse them. Three parts articulate his work: the definition of the Russian identity, Russia’s attitude to NATO, and the question of cooperation in Russia–NATO relations. The analysis of the Russian identity sheds some light on what happened to this relationship in the past several years and offers some appropriate lessons for consideration. Difficulties that arose after the demise of the Soviet Union up until the creation of the NATO–Russia Council in 2002 are also stressed and interpreted. Last but not least, the importance of cooperation between Russia and NATO is highlighted and the author puts forward some ideas for easing major points of friction between the two parties. This book will be of great interest to all students of NATO, Security Studies, Russian studies and International Relations in general. Lionel Ponsard is currently Deputy Chief of the Academic Research Branch with the NATO Defense College in Rome. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Leiden University.

CONTEMPORARY SECURITY STUDIES

NATO’S SECRET ARMIES Operation Gladio and terrorism in Western Europe Daniele Ganser

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PEACEBUILDING IN POST-DAYTON BOSNIA Tim Donais

THE US, NATO AND MILITARY BURDEN-SHARING Peter Kent Forster and Stephen J. Cimbala

THE DISTRACTED EAGLE The rift between America and old Europe Peter H. Merkl

RUSSIAN GOVERNANCE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Geo-strategy, geopolitics and new governance Irina Isakova

THE IRAQ WAR European perspectives on politics, strategy, and operations Jan Hallenberg and Håkan Karlsson (eds)

THE FOREIGN OFFICE AND FINLAND 1938–1940 Diplomatic sideshow Craig Gerrard

STRATEGIC CONTEST Weapons proliferation and war in the Greater Middle East Richard L. Russell

RETHINKING THE NATURE OF WAR Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Jan Angstrom (eds) PERCEPTION AND REALITY IN THE MODERN YUGOSLAV CONFLICT Myth, falsehood, and deceit 1991–1995 Brendan O’Shea

PROPAGANDA, THE PRESS AND CONFLICT The Gulf War and Kosovo David R. Willcox MISSILE DEFENCE International, regional and national implications Bertel Heurlin and Sten Rynning (eds)

GLOBALISING JUSTICE FOR MASS ATROCITIES A revolution in accountability Chandra Lekha Sriram ETHNIC CONFLICT AND TERRORISM The origins and dynamics of civil wars Joseph L. Soeters GLOBALISATION AND THE FUTURE OF TERRORISM Patterns and predictions Brynjar Lia NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND STRATEGY The evolution of American nuclear policy Stephen J. Cimbala NASSER AND THE MISSILE AGE IN THE MIDDLE EAST Owen L. Sirrs WAR AS RISK MANAGEMENT Strategy and conflict in an age of globalised risks Yee-Kuang Heng

EUROPEANISATION OF NATIONAL SECURITY IDENTITY The EU and the changing security identities of the Nordic states Pernille Rieker INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT PREVENTION AND PEACE-BUILDING Sustaining the peace in post conflict societies T. David Mason and James D. Meernik (eds) CONTROLLING THE WEAPONS OF WAR Politics, persuasion, and the prohibition of inhumanity Brian Rappert CHANGING TRANSATLANTIC SECURITY RELATIONS Do the US, the EU and Russia form a new strategic triangle? Jan Hallenberg and Håkan Karlsson (eds) THEORETICAL ROOTS OF US FOREIGN POLICY Machiavelli and American unilateralism Thomas M. Kane

MILITARY NANOTECHNOLOGY Potential applications and preventive arms control Jurgen Altmann

CORPORATE SOLDIERS AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY The rise of private military companies Christopher Kinsey

NATO AND WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION Regional alliance, global threats Eric R. Terzuolo

TRANSFORMING EUROPEAN MILITARIES Coalition operations and the technology gap Gordon Adams and Guy Ben-Ari

GLOBALISATION, CONFLICT AND THE SECURITY STATE National security in a ‘new’ strategic new era Robert G. Patman (ed.)

KENNEDY, JOHNSON AND NATO Britain, America and the dynamics of alliance, 1962–68 Andrew Priest

MILITARY FORCES IN 21 ST CENTURY PEACE OPERATIONS No job for a soldier? James V. Arbuckle

SMALL ARMS AND SECURITY New emerging international norms Denise Garcia

THE POLITICAL ROAD TO WAR WITH IRAQ Bush, 9/11 and the drive to overthrow Saddam Nick Ritchie and Paul Rogers

THE UNITED STATES AND EUROPE Beyond the neo-conservative divide? John Baylis and Jon Roper (eds)

BOSNIAN SECURITY AFTER DAYTON New perspectives Michael A. Innes (ed.)

RUSSIA, NATO AND COOPERATIVE SECURITY Bridging the gap Lionel Ponsard

RUSSIA, NATO AND COOPERATIVE SECURITY Bridging the gap

Lionel Ponsard

First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2007 Lionel Ponsard All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-203-96924-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–40723–0 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–96924–3 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–40723–6 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–96924–3 (ebk)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

ix

1

Introduction

1

2

Russian identity

6

Introduction 6 Geographic and historical components of Russian identity 7 Russian national identity, the search for the Russian idea 18 Russian schools of thought 23 Conclusion 31 3

Russian orthodoxy

33

Introduction 33 Orthodox components of Russian national identity 34 The Russian Orthodox Church: a national and a State Church 36 Conclusion 42 4

Russian political culture

44

Introduction 44 Definition and concept 45 Russian political–cultural heritage: from the Mongol yoke to the dissolution of the Soviet Union 47 A political culture for Russia 54 Conclusion 58

vii

CONTENTS

5

The evolution of the Russian attitude to NATO

60

Introduction 60 From the end of the Cold War to the Founding Act 61 The Kosovo crisis 72 Russia–NATO after 9/11 77 Conclusion 85 6

Russia’s perception of NATO enlargement: a case study

87

Introduction 87 Evolution of the Russian perception of NATO enlargement 88 Why Russia opposed NATO’s enlargement 91 Russia’s countermeasures 99 Opting for cooperation 107 Conclusion 108 7

Theories of cooperation

111

Introduction 111 Realism and cooperation 112 Theories of international regimes 120 Multilateral approaches to security 123 Conclusion 127 8

The Russian approach to cooperative security

130

Introduction 130 Russian cooperative security initiatives 131 Gorbachev and the ‘Common European Home’: case study 137 Conclusion 144 9

Conclusion

147

Notes Bibliography Index

158 190 208

viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A number of people have given considerable time and effort in support of my research for this book. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Professor Dr Rob de Wijk whose criticism and suggestions played a key role in helping me to bring this work to completion. I am also deeply grateful to Professor Dr Bruno Colson, Dr Dmitri V. Trenin and Mr Chris Donnelly who have given me the benefit of their judgement and expertise. As it was impossible to rely simply on printed sources, I have also depended to a large degree on face-to-face contacts with officials and specialists. In particular, I am glad to acknowledge the help that I have received from Russian academics. There are too many to list all by name, but special thanks are due to those who submitted themselves to interviews: especially Dr Tatyana G. Parkhalina, Dr Nadia K. Arbatova, Dr Lena Nemirovskaya, Dr Irina Kobrinskaya, Dr Lilia F. Shevtsova, Dr Dmitri A. Danilov, Professor Viktor B. Kuvaldin. Many senior NATO officials also provided key off-the-record interviews. I am particularly appreciative to Colonel Richard Williams, retired US Army Colonel, for his personal friendship and professional support. Our thanks go also to the NATO Information Office and the NATO Liaison Mission in Moscow, especially Dr Rolf Welberts and Major General Peter Williams. The Research and Technology Department of the Belgian Ministry of Defence and its staff also deserve our deepest appreciation for their financial assistance. I particularly wish to thank the staff of the George Marshall Centre Library, one of the great libraries in the world for Russian issues, to which I was allowed access; the Peace Palace Library in The Hague; the King’s College Library in London; the Lenin Library in Moscow; and the Belgian Ministry of Defence Library. Last but not least, I am especially in debt to my dearest Peggy who has been my bedrock of support and inspiration. The views expressed in this book are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

ix

1 INTRODUCTION

How could yesterday’s enemies become tomorrow’s friends? This is, in a nutshell, the challenge that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and Russia have been facing since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, from 1949 until the early 90s, NATO–Russia relations have been built on a conflicting basis only. There is no need to recall that one of the fundamentals of the North Atlantic Alliance was the protection of the West against the emergence of a threat posed by communism, then embodied by the Soviet Union. Almost simultaneously, the newly created Euro-Atlantic organisation found its immediate rival in the emerging bloc of the Warsaw Pact. By the same token, one of the justifications of the Soviet Union’s status as one of the two major powers in the aftermath of Second World War was based on the existence of a threatening military organisation at its borders. In these conditions, for over 50 years, the existence of NATO and of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in their respective capacity had become mutually justifying. From 1989 to late 1991, the well-structured post-Second World War order was fundamentally disrupted. The demise of the Warsaw Pact and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union put a sudden end to the bipolar world. The idea that the Russian Federation was recognised as the official heir of the USSR was only true on paper. In reality, Russia had definitely lost the power status of its predecessor. In the same period NATO also lost its initial raison d’être. After the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact and the communist threat, many wondered what could still justify the existence of a defensive alliance in the Euro-Atlantic area. NATO’s future not only depended on its ability to adapt to the new international environment, but it was also closely related to the turn of its future relations with the Russian Federation. What future was there for NATO and Russia in the new international environment, and above all, was there a common future for the former enemies? Could they wipe the slate clean of their past and emerge together as a new security force? When these questions first came to the fore, they gave rise to a great debate. There were those calling for full integration of Russia into NATO since the Russian threat had been eradicated. There were on the contrary, those who objected to that option on the grounds that it would give Russia an opportunity to 1

INTRODUCTION

dismantle the Alliance from the inside. However, in their views, the perspective of a Russia remaining at the borders of the Euro-Atlantic zone was not very attractive either. A number of obstacles seemed to be in the way of any constructive relations between the two parties. Among other things, the identity gap between Russia and NATO countries, and the belief in Russia’s inability to truly cooperate were very often mentioned. In other words, NATO and Russia were deemed too antagonistic to forge lasting relations. And yet, while these relations were first shrouded in paradox, today they are a tangible reality. Indeed, against all expectations, NATO and Russia have recently embarked on relations that are no longer antagonistic. Of course, building such rapport has not been an easy task. From the inauguration of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) in 1991 to the creation of the NATO–Russia Council in 2002, NATO–Russia relations have been punctuated with a succession of historic achievements and resounding failures. Even today, some 10 years after the debut of closer interaction between NATO and Russia, the feeling persists that nothing has been won for good. There is still a long way to go before these relations will be fully normalised. However, this past decade of oscillating relations is very instructive in many respects. As mentioned earlier, the primary interest in analysing NATO–Russia relations rests on the fact that it places two antagonistic entities in a context of cooperation. This point is all the more relevant in that these entities have to evolve in a new international security environment. Throughout the Cold War, the traditional menaces, like that of the USSR for NATO, were identifiable geographically; and the capabilities of their originators were known and could be deterred. This postulate went up in smoke in light of the developments of the last few years. As this work is being completed, the new threats to world security are defined as unpredictable, transnational, asymmetric and non-conventional. How do Russia and NATO perceive this new security environment? How could they approach it together? Could this new security environment serve as a basis for new relations between the two parties and eventually lead to true cooperation? Focusing now on the peculiarity of NATO–Russia relations, another interest is to adopt the Russian approach to these relations. Indeed, extensive analyses have already been produced on NATO’s perception of Russia and its expectations with regard to its relations with this country. However, very few experts in and around NATO are sufficiently familiar with Russia to understand, explain and even anticipate any of its actions/reactions. This is even more surprising since, as the saying goes, knowing your enemy is already part of the victory. Without placing NATO–Russia relations in a conflicting context, the idea is that the better your understanding of the other’s approach is, the more successful your common undertaking will be. Going then into the substance of NATO–Russia relations, it seems worth looking at what type of relations best suits NATO and Russia. Are these relations only foreseeable in the framework of an integrated Russia? Or is there a solution, halfway between full integration and mere coexistence, that can best apply to 2

INTRODUCTION

NATO–Russia relations? Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has been developing a policy of cooperative security with the former Warsaw Pact members. This policy was first introduced as a ‘hand of friendship’ between the Allies and their Central and Eastern European neighbours. Opting for this approach of NATO, is it possible to say, from a Russian point of view, that cooperative security is indeed the most suitable answer to NATO–Russia relations? At this stage, the question is thus whether cooperative security could serve as a means to bridge the gap between two supposedly antagonistic entities: NATO and Russia. This study explores mutual common ground and the potential to move beyond cultural differences, particularly in political culture. By building confidence between the two parties about each other’s intentions, cooperative security regulates attitudes that might otherwise lead to misperception. In addition, the closer the interaction between NATO and Russia, the more they will find ways to further their security cooperatively. True interaction implies indeed a constant knowledge, respect and understanding of one another. We also have the methodology that will be used to bring this research to its achievement. As mentioned earlier, the approach that will be taken throughout the study will be the Russian one. Again this is mainly motivated by the fact that the Russian approach to its relations with NATO is often ignored or misunderstood. This is usually due to either the difficulty of acceding to Russian expertise on the issue or to the lack of Western work from that angle. Our work will be articulated in three parts: the definition of the Russian identity, Russia’s attitude to NATO and the question of cooperation in NATO–Russia relations. The first part will aim at answering the following questions: how do the Russians define themselves? What is it to be a Russian? Are Russian traditions, culture and history closer to Europe or Asia? In this way, we will try to arrive at a definition of the Russian identity that is as precisely as possible as to what the Russians themselves would say to define their identity. This first implies looking at the Russian identity based on some of the fundamental elements of any national identity namely: history, geography, religion and culture. Indeed, outside observers have long encountered difficulties in defining the Russian identity as anything but what Churchill once described as ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’. In order to reach the most accurate definition possible, we will have to underpin our work on an analysis of the Russian approach to the notion of national identity. In so doing, we will have to focus on the role of religion in the determination of the Russian identity. Orthodoxy and the Russian Orthodox Church indeed provide both a background and a framework for understanding many of the issues pertaining to the Russian identity. With regard to NATO–Russia relations, it is important to assess, from an identity point of view whether or not Orthodoxy can hamper relations with countries of mainly Western Christian faith. We will also try to see to what extent Orthodoxy, as a dominant element of Russian culture, has an influence on the shaping of Russian domestic and foreign policies. All this 3

INTRODUCTION

information will notably be instrumental in assessing the identity gap between Russia and the countries of the North Atlantic Alliance. We will conclude this part of our research with a study of the Russian political culture as one of the factors framing today’s Russian policies. In this context, we will use the 1993 Russian Constitution as a case study and a possible illustration of our conclusions on the Russian political culture. The work on the Russian identity will help us view NATO–Russia relations in a new light. In order to develop a positive, lasting relationship between NATO and Russia, it is first necessary to make a clean sweep of mutual mistrust remaining from the Cold War. It is also important to understand what has happened to this relationship in the past several years, and to draw the appropriate lessons. This analysis will review and explain the difficulties that have arisen in that quest. It will also assess the relative importance of cooperation between NATO and Russia and set forth some ideas for easing major points of friction between the two. To this purpose, we divided up the 10 years of NATO–Russia relations into three main phases: from the end of the Cold War to the Founding Act; the Kosovo crisis; and Russia–NATO after September 11. Not only will this aim at reviewing the evolution of Russia–NATO relations up to this day, focusing on the structure used to formalise these relations and looking at how NATO and Russia dealt with difficulties, but this work will also permit us to assess whether the peculiar Russian identity is indeed a stumbling block to Russia–NATO relations. At a later stage, we will look into the question of NATO’s first wave of enlargement as the policy that was long presented as the major conflicting issue of NATO–Russia relations. The question of what kind of cooperation would best suit both NATO and Russia is paramount. Exploring cooperation first entails defining a theoretical model that encompasses various strands of International Relations theory: Realism, Neorealism and International Regimes; but also traditional international security arrangements such as Cooperative Security, Collective Security and Collective Defence. A number of specific arguments will be developed to permit the application of the different strands of International Relations theories to the security realm and to integrate them into a cooperation theory. The purpose of this discussion will be to explore, both theoretically and pragmatically, the proposition that cooperative engagement may be the appropriate principle for security relations under the new international circumstances that have emerged. In evaluating the prospects for cooperative security to become an accepted framework for security relations between Russia and NATO, we will consider some explicit examples of Russian cooperative security initiatives throughout history: the Holy Alliance, Brezhnev’s détente, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Gorbachev’s New Political Thinking and Common European Home will serve as a case study for this part. Based on this analysis, we will try to draw the main conclusions necessary for cooperative security to be applied successfully to NATO–Russia relations. 4

INTRODUCTION

It should also be noted that this whole endeavour implies a certain degree of humility on the part of the researcher, as well as a certain degree of indulgence on the part of the Russians who might consult the study. Indeed, describing the view of a society without being a native member of that society must be based on the assumption of a highly self-conscious ignorance. Such a mindset is all the more important when the work mainly relies on theoretical sources. There are no shortcuts to understanding the Russians. It takes time, and Western officials often seek quick fixes for complex issues. Obviously, frequent visits to Russia and discussions with eminent scholars and experts of Russian society are instrumental in developing a better knowledge of this fascinating country.1 Mastery of the Russian language is also a critical asset to fine-tune the understanding of the Russian mind. Russian speakers, be they diplomats, business people or scholars, all have a significant advantage. The ability to carry on a conversation in Russian raises the relationship to a more meaningful level. Together with it comes mutual trust and understanding.

5

2 RUSSIAN IDENTITY

The notion of ‘Russia’ is already tattered and torn; everyone uses this notion, whether appropriately or not. When the monstrous USSR went to grab slices of Asia or Africa, the entire world repeated: ‘Russia, the Russians . . . ’ What exactly is Russia? Today, and tomorrow (even more importantly). Who sees himself as part of the future Russia? Where do the Russians themselves envisage the borders of Russia?1

Introduction If the notion of Russia appears as a real challenge to the most renowned of its national intellectuals, it is easy to imagine what challenge it could represent to those non-natives having to deal with it. Many came up against this ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, as Sir Winston Churchill once said. To many, this very challenge of understanding the workings of the Russian identity2 acted and still acts as a deterring factor. When NATO embarked on closer relations with Russia, many experts had produced the Russian identity argument as the main impediment to the success of this endeavour. Therefore, whoever wishes to analyse NATO–Russia relations, especially with the aim of confirming the feasibility and utility of these relations, has no choice but to start grappling with this tortuous issue and to try lifting all the fears that are linked to it. How can we define what Russia is and what the Russian identity means if Russians themselves come up with more questions than answers when addressing this matter? As mentioned earlier, the question of Russian identity is indeed a long-standing one.3 Despite the incessant efforts of numerous Russian experts, writers, historians and political leaders throughout history, the notion of Russian identity still lacks any commonly agreed definition. Famous figures like Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Blok and Herzen have nevertheless tried to formulate what the Russian self-image embodied. Even President Yeltsin initiated a public debate aimed at developing a definition of the Russian identity that would be in line with the then new democratic government.4

6

RUSSIAN IDENTITY

All these unfruitful attempts have led many Russians to believe that it is actually impossible to come to a definition of their identity. And yet, these same Russians would agree that they are different, unique, that they can on no account be assimilated to any other existing identity, be it Western, European, or Asian. This very observation confirms that a Russian identity does exist, and that it is possible to define Russians based on the basis of unique characteristics that make them distinct from the other people. Our attempt to define the Russian identity will be based on what are traditionally considered to be the fundamental components of the identity concept, namely history, geography, ethnicity, culture and religion.5 Consequently, when looking at Russian history, geography, religion and culture, we will try to determine to what extent these contribute to defining the Russian identity, in the same way as the French revolution and the peculiar geographic situation of France help compose the French identity. In so doing, we will notably focus on the notion of diversity and multiplicity of the Russian history and geography in the hope that this will prove useful in understanding why no one has ever come to terms with a unique definition of the Russian identity. Understanding the nuances and the importance of the dual signification of ‘Russian’ in the Russian language meaning – rossiskii (of the Land of Rus’) or russkii (ethnic Russian) – will be the first step of our approach. We will then dwell on the notion of international messianism, a self-perceived vocation to carry out a universalist Christian mission. These two considerations will be instrumental in addressing the issue of whether or not the Russian identity has a national dimension.6 We will then confront the results of our research to three paramount – and yet radically opposed – political phases: the tentative Europeanisation of Russia by Peter the Great; the negation of the Russian identity and its internationalisation under the Soviet rule; and the consequent identity crisis that emerged in post-communist Russia. At the theoretical level, several schools of thought have tried to develop a definition of the Russian identity. We will first distinguish the Westernisers and the Slavophiles who, while both denying the significance of the Mongol yoke in shaping the Russian identity, argue that either the Slav origins or the Western influence is the primary determinant of the Russian identity. We will then tackle the theories of the Asianists, Scythians and Eurasianists, whose main common ground is to place the Mongol yoke to the fore in their defining of the Russian identity.

Geographic and historical components of Russian identity Like other people, Russians soon agreed on the fact that there must be a significant link between their geographical position in the world and their national identity. Writers from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Alexander Solzhenitsyn have elevated the Russian land to the status of a symbol of the essence of Russia

7

RUSSIAN IDENTITY

and Russian identity. According to them, the Russian steppe, the Siberian taiga and the peasant villages are all inherent features of this identity. Russia’s land stretches across both Europe and Asia. Its immensity provides the country with natural strategic interests throughout Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and the Far East. However, this immensity is also the cause of scores of invasions of the Russian territory, from the Mongols to Napoleon to the Nazis. At the same time, it is a country the brutal weather of which has often repelled these same foes with equal power. According to George Vernadsky, ‘the Russian land was, because of its flat topography, the meeting place for European and Asian peoples’.7 The nomads who periodically swept westward from the depths of inner Asia, such as the Scythians, the Huns, and the Mongols, had intermarried with the more sedentary eastern Slavs. He further explained that ‘each of these invasions brought new cultural patterns and each, when it retreated years or centuries after, left its imprint indelibly on the land that was to become Russia’.8 A continuous sense of occupying some kind of critical middle ground between highly differentiated zones of global civilisation has been pervasive in Russia, since the reforms of Peter the Great (the so-called Petrine reforms) at least. This feeling must be understood in terms of ‘a sort of existential indeterminacy between East and West a veritable geo-schizophrenia which for nearly three centuries has penetrated irresistibly and tormentingly to the very core of the society’s self consciousness’.9 In this context, Russia’s geographical position is a fundamental factor in the Russians’ sense that they are different – not part of the European family or the West, but surely not part of Asia either. In this respect, Russian history is also very explicit indeed.10 Russian identity today is in many ways the product of historical determinants as much as it is the victim of those determinants. Distinctions were already being drawn in the earliest origins of Russian civilisation, that is to say in Kievan Rus’.11 Ancient Russians were different from their eastern neighbours in most aspects of their social, political, religious and economic life. These firstly included their Christian faith – from the second half of the tenth century –, but also political institutions of monarchy and the economic foundations of Kievan Rus’ in commerce. By contrast, Russia’s neighbours were at that time nomads practicing a variety of shamanistic–pagan religions. Despite few social contacts and commercial intercourse, relations between these two communities were most often antagonistic. The Mongol yoke At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Mongolian armies of Ghengis Khan launched a devastating campaign against Kievan Rus’. In front of the weak resistance of disunited and militarily unprepared Russian princes, the Mongol victory was rapid and almost absolute. By 1241, all of Kievan Rus’ had been conquered and as Nicolas Riasanovsky noted, it was ‘the only instance of total subjugation to a foreign invader throughout Russia’s long history’.12 The Mongols maintained effective control over the remnants of Kievan Rus’ for about a century 8

RUSSIAN IDENTITY

and a half. This rule, however, was not imposed by direct physical occupation, but ensured by regular payment of tributes to Russian princes on the condition that these acknowledge Mongol rule. Towards the end of the fourteenth century, Russians began to rebel against Mongol domination. In 1380, one of the most famous battles in Russian military history was fought at the fields of Kulikovo, south of Moscow, where the Muscovite prince Dmitry defeated Mongol armies. Mongol authority had been radically undermined, and it continued to decrease over the following century. Russian allegiance to the Mongols was officially revoked by Ivan III in 1480. The whole legacy of the steppe nomads, and most important of the Mongol domination, has, since the eighteenth century, been the subject of controversial interpretations and continuous debate. To certain experts, the relevance of the ‘experience of nomadic Asiatic domination’ is considered to be either negligible or inexistent. The famous leading Russian historian Solovyev considered the long Mongol subjugation as merely an episode, albeit an important one, in Russian history. This attitude is not very different from that of the British people vis-à-vis the Norman Conquest, or the Spanish people vis-à-vis the Moorish domination. It stems from a systematic tendency of nations to reduce the impact of foreign interference in their history, especially when it is assimilated with conquest. Other experts, however, consider the Mongol rule as highly influential and decisive for Russian history. Several scholars, amongst whom was the famous Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, perceived it as entirely deleterious. According to this historian, the ‘Tatar Yoke’ could be defined as follows: The Mongol invasion was not merely to put back the hand of Russia’s timepiece 300 years, it was to turn her from the European road on which she was travelling, bend her to alien manners, and, in a measure, twist her out of shape. It was in the early years of the thirteenth century, at the very dawn of Western civilisation, when mediaeval Europe was on the point of blossoming out on all sides – in poetry, in architecture, in scholasticism, that the hordes of Djinghiz-Khan cut away from Europe Russia’s cooperation.13 Nikolai Berdyaev, one of the main exponents of the Russian Idea14 shared quite the same view: ‘It is the generally accepted opinion that the Tatar domination had a fatal influence upon Russian history and threw the Russian people back’.15 By the same token, Nikolai Karamzin stressed the very negative impact of Mongol rule of Russia in his famous ‘History of the Russian State’.16 Russia’s historical experience since the Mongol conquest and domination perpetuated those prejudices among Russian writers. During the imperial period, Russia was constantly at war with Asiatics like the Ottoman Turks, the central Asian Muslims, and the Japanese, whom Russians tended to regard with hatred and mistrust. The alternative perception, while admitting Russia’s basic differentiation from Europe that was the result of Mongol rule, nevertheless underscores the positive aspects of this experience. It notably considers that the Mongols helped to politically unify the vast steppes of Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. Renowned members of the Eurasian school like Nicholas Trubetskoi, George Vernadsky and 9

RUSSIAN IDENTITY

Charles Halperin advocated this interpretation by considering Russia as the natural heir of the Mongol empire.17 According to them, the Muscovite Russia is the successor of the Tatar-Mongolian Empire and not of Kievan Rus’.18 More recent research on the Mongol rule tends to confirm this last approach, along with the lines of the famous French epigram attributed to Napoleon: ‘Grattez le Russe et vous trouverez le Tatare!’ (Scratch a Russian, find a Tatar!). Tsarist Russia between change and stability Russia’s first rapprochement with Western Europe dates back to the sixteenth century, when Tsar Ivan IV called for England’s, Germany’s and Denmark’s expertise in the commercial and military fields, anticipating Peter the Great by more than a century. However, Ivan IV’s only objective was to gain the practical advantages from such cooperation, as he did nothing to further facilitate cultural links and political rapprochement.19 As Europe’s Renaissance progressed toward the Enlightenment, Russia still remained a realm isolated from the West. It was only at the end of the seventeenth century that so far xenophobic Russians really began to be concerned with defining themselves in terms of geopolitical location. This is not to say that they had previously been ignorant of their geographical distinction between Europe and Asia, but that this distinction was not particularly relevant to them. This condition of mind was about to change fundamentally as a result of the revolution in Russian society initiated by Peter the Great during his long reign. Petrine reforms were driven by the strong belief that Russia was, or at least ought to become, a European country.20 In the space of two decades, Peter I forcibly opened his country to Western ways. He intended to ‘wake his people from what he understood to be a sleep of lethargy and barbarism, to make entrepreneurs of the traditionalist merchantry, to make statesmen, administrators, generals, admirals and scientists of the gentry’.21 He therefore launched far-reaching economic, political and cultural reforms for the purpose of Europeanising the Russian society.22 At a first stage, Peter’s rapprochement with the West generated in Russia an enthusiastic emulation of the West European model (mainly French), but by the end of the eighteenth century a process of resentment had emerged.23 In this respect, Petrine Russia stands as a striking example in the controversy about the Westernisation of the country. Russian intelligentsia, in particular, argued that the Western model could not be easily transplanted in Russia.24 And yet, Peter the Great’s purpose was not to create slaves but rather to transform the old backward nobility into a modern, cultured and active ruling class.25 While his major concern was the elite, a by-product of these reforms was a growing cleavage between this increasingly ‘European’ elite and the traditional, xenophobic peasant masses. As the former changed, the latter increasingly regarded them as an ‘alien race of foreigners in their own land’.26 If it is true that Peter’s achievement was significant among the aristocracy, which a century later 10

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would push itself toward further Europeanisation, his efforts were nevertheless the source of one of the great schisms to afflict Russian history. Adherents to the old and new systems, educated classes and the peasantry state and people: these were some of the gaps opened up by Peter’s reform. Montesquieu was very explicit in this respect: Thus, when a prince wants to make great changes in his nation, he must reform by laws what is established by laws and changes by manners what is established by manners, and it is a very bad policy to change by laws what should be changed by manners. The law that obliged the Muscovites to shorten their beards and their clothing and the violence of Peter I in trimming up to the knees the long robes of those who entered the towns were both tyrannical.27 The lack of conviction among Russians about the possibility to actually implement a Western model in Russia consequently led to a relatively brief flirtation with the West. Petrine reforms soon gave rise to vehement resistance among Russians forced to change in dress, manners and customs. Opposition also arose among those required to accompany the tsar’s court from Moscow to St Petersburg, Russia’s new ‘window on Europe’. Even the well known Marquis de Custine expressed his pessimism about Petrine upheaval: It was Peter the Great, who, with all the imprudence of an untaught genius, all the temerity of a man the more impatient because deemed omnipotent, with all perseverance of an iron character, sought to snatch from Europe the plants of an already ripened civilization, instead of resigning himself to the slow progress of sowing the seeds in his own soil. That too highly lauded man produced a merely artificial work: it may be astonishing, but the good done by his barbarous genius was transient, the evil is irreparable.28 However, the importance of Peter the Great’s reforms are now commonly admitted, albeit to various extent. Indeed, without these forceful and painful reforms, the Russian State would have been incapable of ensuring its sovereignty and its future development.29 Peter I had sought to transform the Russian society on the basis of some set of goals foreign to and not understood by the people. His was the first cultural revolution from above in modern history, but the absence of transmission belts for modernisation as well as Russia’s underdeveloped social structures hampered Russia’s Westernisation. If Russians were still passive and apolitical, while accepting that their rulers represented some higher values that gave them legitimacy, they were now confronted with the problem of finding their own place in Europe. When Catherine II came to power in 1762, many of Peter’s reforms had at least been launched or even completed. She had modern European views and had been 11

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schooled in Peter the Great’s ideas which she drew upon for her own reforms. Most important was Catherine’s following advantage over Peter I: she was born in and part of the civilisation she wanted to introduce within her people.30 Her own personal objective was to see Russia becoming a fully accepted member of the French–international court culture of the eighteenth century. In this context, St Petersburg continued to be the centre from which Western influence illuminated Russia. Catherine herself had acquired some kind of ‘French taste’ during her education in Germany and enabled the Russian aristocracy to use French culture to establish a common identity.31 By and large, the results of Peter’s, and to a lesser extent, of Catherine’s reforms appeared to be far more tangible in the cultural sphere than in socio-economic and political spheres. There was no more cultural isolation, and Russia found itself compatible with Western values. At its early stage of development, there were merely powdered wigs and French aristocratic culture, but then came new books, new ideas, universities and academies; a new layer of society with European education had emerged. This layer was far from being dominant, but nevertheless it represented a new material and spiritual culture within Russia’s traditional society. Not only the noble estate, but Russia’s general population became acquainted with Western values, especially in the period of the Napoleonic wars (1812–15), when Russian soldiers crossed Europe.32 The advance of the Russian armies through Germany and into France after 1812–13 exposed officers and soldiers to the views of the French Revolution and German liberals. These wars thus brought more Russians into prolonged, closer contact with Europe than ever before and inspired them to compare Russian and Western social and cultural patterns. As Anatole Mazour noted, ‘Russian nationalism came as an answer to the fiasco of Napoleon to bring Europe to a federation of states and bend Russia to that scheme’.33 For the foot soldiers, the main consequence was increased xenophobia. Russian officers, however, experienced Western freedoms and prosperity after Napoleon’s defeat and the majority became convinced of the benefits of a relatively open society. Returning home, many of these ideas were developed in discussion groups and secret societies, which hoped for liberal changes, but the reactionary and mystical views of the tsar left them disappointed. It is instructive to trace these movements, especially because they formed the basis of the changes of the early twentieth century which influenced the reactions of liberals, reactionaries and Bolsheviks in the turbulent revolutionary period 1905–18. These ideas, events and structures provided the inheritance of the leadership of the communist party and set the structures of the Soviet regime which in turn provided the present post-Soviet regime with modes of its thought and administrative structures. In 1825, some of those Russian officers, the so-called Decembrists, attempted a revolt, staged in St Petersburg’s Senate Square, in the city that symbolised Russia’s receptivity to Western ideas. Their objective was to pre-empt Nicholas I to the throne and call for a new constitution.34 This Decembrist uprising 12

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aborted and resulted in death and exile for these advocates of reforms. In the near term, their revolt only brought more repression under the ‘Iron Tsar’, Nicholas I.35 Nicholas I ensured social order by declaring Pravoslaviye, Samoderzhaviye, Narodnost (Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationalism)36 as the three principles of his governing doctrine. As it turned out, this doctrine was able to hold the Decembrists’ heirs at bay,37 and order was restored for nearly a century. Nicholas I’s doctrine was not suited for reform and economic development, which required local initiative and freedom of movement.38 As a logical consequence, Russia fell further behind the West. Nevertheless, the Decembrist movement had heralded a growing opinion for change and an important shift in the evolution of national and self-identification psychology. The Iron Tsar’s autocracy had not been strong enough to bury Peter’s legacy. With the death of Nicholas I, these pressures had grown so overwhelming that his successor, Alexander II, launched a series of indispensable reforms.39 These so-called ‘Great reforms’, would finally include the abolition of serfdom and move the country closer to Europe.40 Despite the formal emancipation of the serfs in 1861, not until 1907 were the peasants entirely freed from their servitude. In any case, great though these reforms were, they did not solve all Russia’s problems and led to other troubles and difficulties. These finally resulted in the murdering of the ‘Liberator Tsar’. As long as Alexander II was on the throne, reforms and progress were on the right track, at least for the first part of his reign.41 This was no longer true with Alexander III whose xenophobia led him to push for so-called ‘counter-reforms’.42 The evolution of nineteenth-century Russian thought appears to have been excessively rapid. This was perhaps because Russia had somehow to catch up with the whole history of Western thought in the course of a single century. Very explicit is the rapidity with which the Russian thinkers put on and then cast aside the mantles of Shelling, Saint-Simon, even Schopenhauer, and finally turned to Marx and the Hegelians of the Left with an enthusiasm which left Western philosophers aghast.43 As at the turn of the twenty-first century, the late nineteenth century was a time of profound unease in Russia about the relationship with the West, and Russian nationalism did rear its head several times. Still, Western influence was felt in powerful, though indirect, ways. At the end of the nineteenth century, when nationalism became a potent global force shaking the foundations of all existing empires, the Russian people were ill-prepared to separate their own identity from that of the empire in general and its Slavic core in particular. Despite the vast empire created in the name of Russia, the national identity of its masses remained very weak. This topical question was intellectually vital for both the Westernisers and the Slavophiles who dominated the Russian intellectual debate throughout the nineteenth century. Nicholas II was equally opposed to any reform. He wanted to maintain autocracy at any cost and like his father initiated a reign of reaction. He lacked the indispensable qualities to face a situation where determination, strength of will 13

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and flexibility were urgently needed. If Nicholas II had been a wiser ruler willing to accept the reforms necessary for the survival of his regime, the Bolsheviks might never have taken power.44 The Russian historian Nicholas Riasanovsky shared the same opinion: Another Peter the Great could have saved the Romanovs and imperial Russia. There can be no doubt that Nicholas II did not. In fact, he proved to be both narrow-minded and weak, unable to remove reactionary blinders even when circumstances forced him into entirely new situations with great potentialities, and at the same time unable to manage even reaction effectively.45 The failure to provide a civilised future to the peasantry forced Tsar Nicholas II to concede a form of parliament whilst retaining the powers of autocracy. Count Witte, probably one of the most liberal and intelligent ministers in Russia, became Prime Minister but was powerless to prevent the Duma raising issues of agricultural and social reforms.46 Other practical statesmen like Peter Stolypin47 who strove to bring order back to Russia after the events of 1905,48 thus had an extremely constricted arena in which to work. This period was merely dominated by social unrest, armed repression, illiberal acts49 by the tsar and some reactionary ministers. The regime entered the world war and perished with it. The Soviet period After the October Revolution, Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders tried to eradicate national values and to replace them with ideas of international proletarian brotherhood. As a consequence, during the first two decades of the new regime, every single link to Russian national culture was suppressed. Thousands of churches were razed, and the few that remained had their bells removed ‘so that their ringing would not disturb the workers’.50 The establishment of a global communist ideology by the late 1920s resulted in a Manichaean conception of the world divided into Marxist workers and capitalist Westerners.51 The regime’s monopoly on information had created a view of America (and the capitalist West in general) as aggressive and bent on world domination.52 Shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power, Moscow became the Soviet capital. In 1924, St Petersburg completely lost its symbolic ties to Europe when it was renamed Leningrad in honour of the Bolshevik leader. This name would remain until the final collapse of communism, when the city’s original designation was restored. Another important aspect to note is that in reproving the reactionary capitalist world, the communist regime was merely following the path of the tsarist regime, which was also distrustful of market forces and the bourgeoisie. Soviet Russia soon transformed critical attitudes towards the West into ‘proletarian irreconcilability’ with the ‘bourgeois democracy’. Though urgently needed for the country’s development, so-called capitalist industrialisation was viewed with suspicion 14

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and considerable hostility.53 In seeking to build a new society, the Soviet elite had slid back into totalitarian rule, which could be envied by almost all despots in the world’s history.54 In the 1920–30s, ‘revolutionary expediency’ helped justify general human rights violations. The new Soviet Russia soon became isolated from the outer world.55 In the 1930s, Stalin became more and more aware of the fact that the Soviet regime would be easier to defend by appealing to certain popular symbols. Obviously, clearly defined limits to this renewed national symbolism were imposed. Nevertheless, the works of Russian literary classics, such as Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoevsky, initially banned as ideologists of the Russian nobility, reappeared in new editions stressing their revolutionary content.56 The same happened with pre-1917 Russian art, music, painting and ballet.57 Revolutionary internationalism, though conserved in official parlance, was thus progressively giving way to great-power nationalism. Ideologically, it was nurtured by a slogan of advantages of socialism over hostile Western capitalism. Marxist internationalism was consequently supplanted by an increasing anti-Western Russian nationalism. After the Second World War, the Stalinist regime became endangered by the comments of Soviet soldiers58 whom the war had brought to Europe. They were ‘amazed to learn that, over there, it was nothing like what we’d been told for so many years before the war. They lived more dignified, richer and freer lives than we did’.59 The majority came out of the war with new, more positive than negative, impressions of the West, together with hope that alliance could continue and contribute to a better life at home.60 This reminds us of the Decembrist officers who had rebelled against the autocracy after experiencing European liberties in the post-Napoleonic occupation of Paris. Stalin too was mindful of history. He rapidly discouraged any expectation of rapprochement with the West by returning to rigid isolation. Anti-Western propaganda, investigations and arrests were also part of Stalin’s successful post-war campaign to undermine any positive image of the West. Even among well-informed people, a ‘majority were deformed by pervasive ideology, propaganda and fear’.61 After the Second World War, the division of the world into camps of ‘bourgeois democracies’ and ‘people’s democracies’ also resulted in conflicts with the outer world, including the 1956 and 1968 invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. A counter-example could be found in the Khrushchev thaw which opened a period of exchanges with the West, thus undermining Soviet isolation. Every crack in isolation could be seen as an indirect step forward in the promotion of Western values. We may put this in another way: any promotion of Western values was also a heavy blow at self-isolation. As a consequence, a ‘window of opportunities’ opened, and Western mass culture began to penetrate through the ‘iron curtain’. Comparison of the Soviet and Western structures of consumption was a mortal blow to anti-Western stereotypes of Soviet official ideology. Stagnation of economy and degradation of ideological norms in the 1960s led to a sort of cultural pluralism, though it failed to result in the Western-type ideological or political 15

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pluralism. Multiple West-oriented trends emerged together with dissidents persecuted by official propaganda. The improvement of East–West relations in the early 1970s, known as détente, was also the result of the military parity achieved by the Soviet Union with the United States. New thinking and pro-Western orientation In the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of the most influential factors at work was an ideological turmoil within the Russian political and intellectual elite. It derived from drastic re-orientation of the country’s leadership to a rapprochement with the West, borrowing Western patterns in modernisation of Russia’s political and economic system. It was Gorbachev who initiated this shift as he tried to combine socialist and ‘universal’ values in the framework of his ‘New Thinking’. This ‘New Thinking’ first emerged in 1985 with the beginning of Gorbachev’s reforms and would last until the end of 1992. This new approach in Russian foreign policy was mainly characterised by a new direction in East–West relations. The Brezhnev doctrine62 had become irrelevant, and the main objective was then the improvement of relations with the West. Very explicit examples include the consent to German unification and its integration as such into NATO in 1990, the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE) and the support for UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions against Iraq during the Gulf crisis, but also the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and the non-intervention in the upheavals in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. During the first phase of Yeltsin’s rule, this line in ideology and politics was considerably reinforced as the main driving forces of Yeltsin’s revolution were anti-communist and liberal values. The failed coup attempt of the communists in 1991 even reinforced the New Thinking trend and popularly elected President Yeltsin adopted an even more democratic, market-oriented and European–Atlanticist policy. His declared goals were full participation in international economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), integration into the democratic community of states and even NATO membership. The pro-Western and liberal orientation of the new elite immediately faced growing resistance from hard-line communists, the military and special services, ‘red directors’, especially in the military-industrial complex. Non-communist nationalist and anti-communist intellectual and political forces that had emerged even before the perestroika, also challenged Western Liberalism. Since the opponents of liberal reforms proved incapable to counter them in the field of economic rationalism and efficiency, they preferred a metaphysical sphere of nationalist myths and emotions. Communists benefited therefore from the nostalgic mood of the general population referring to a happy life under communist rule. There were some reasons for such a choice: first, the liberal orientation towards an alien Western model was painful for national pride and self-esteem, and this made a liberal paradigm vulnerable; second, the bulk of Russian society suffered from the syndrome of dismemberment stemming from the break-up of the Soviet Union 16

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and the collapse of its status as a great power; finally, Moscow’s euphoria regarding prospects of its political rapprochement with the West and its joining the club of Western powers was replaced by disillusionment. After the collapse of the Soviet empire, Russia engaged in a transition from imperial power to a much more modest status and continuously tried to overcome some ‘lost empire syndrome’63 by finding a new Russian identity. Undoubtedly, even though the disintegration of the Soviet Union was in a certain way rather peaceful, no one could expect such a tremendous transformation to proceed smoothly. Russian society then tried to find explanatory reasons for the widespread annihilation of its national culture under the communist regime. This appealed to an inner-soul examination of the original cause of this situation and a reappraisal of old values. This quite ambivalent legacy is well described by the French Sovietologist Alain Besançon: The alliance with Bolshevism that brought so much satisfaction to Russian nationalism – the pleasure of domination, the accomplishment of Slavophile messianic prophecies, the extension of the language, and so on – has also produced an extraordinary diminution of the Russian nation.64 Moreover, the Russians’ sentiment of humiliation was exacerbated by their elite’s foreign policy, considered as pro-Americanism,65 contradicting Russian national interests. If in 1991–2, the Russian leadership had been quite open to the world and offered many opportunities for intensified cooperation, it thus soon came under internal pressure. In 1993, Yeltsin initiated a greater assertiveness in foreign policy by introducing his own ‘Monroe doctrine’,66 namely a neo-imperialistic policy towards the former Soviet republics, the so-called near abroad. Obviously, by putting on the opposition’s political clothes, Yeltsin played the card of pragmatic nationalism, but he also sacrificed the principles of liberal democracy. Some explicit examples include bilateral treaties for continued Russian military presence in most states of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS): Georgia was practically compelled to accept CIS membership; and Azerbaijan was forced to reduce its ties with Turkey, as well as oil and gas exploitation rights.67 Already confronted with a general loss of influence in world affairs, the Russian leadership simply refused to abandon the great power status left by the Soviet empire. As a result, it attempted to establish its predominance in the entire area of the former Soviet Union. The near abroad thus represented a sphere of vital interests for Russia and we may even say that Russia’s own current reforms depended for a great deal on progress in the newly independent states. It is an established fact that Russia has special interests in its near abroad. We should not forget that about 25 million ethnic Russians are still living in the former Soviet republics and suddenly find themselves beyond Moscow’s direct protection. In the present case, Russian peacekeeping in the near abroad seems to 17

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take the form of attempts to restore a former empire and to establish the former Soviet Union as a Russian sphere of influence. Nevertheless, Yeltsin’s new foreign policy preserved its underlying orientation towards partnership with the West, yet with more emphasis placed on the ‘Great Power’ rhetoric in the sense of some Russian-led re-integration of former Soviet republics. It is also important to note that in the 1990s, the major goal of the society was to get out of the economic crisis, a problem that overshadowed all others. In this context, the Westernising ideology assumed features characteristic of technocratism and economic determinism. Ideological and political opponents of this Westernising liberalism failed to challenge it with the same type of rational argumentation. The ideology of the anti-liberal forces was primarily nurtured by nostalgic expectations of the former Soviet nomenklatura that has become an integral part of the new post-Soviet elite. However, the main anti-Western political force, the communist party, having proclaimed its adherence to national patriotic values, at the same time, failed to soften Egalitarianism and anti-capitalist Populism nurtured by virulent Stalinism and its supporters and activists. The communist leaders could not stop praising the ideals of the recent communist past. The communist mythology was based on people’s memory of the lost paradise (i.e. grandeur of the Soviet empire) and of their very modest and restrained, but nevertheless quiet and stable existence under communism. As for the modern ‘social Capitalism’ of Gaidar, reforms resulted in a substitution of civil–political for socio-economic rights. Under communism, the general population, lacking political freedom, nevertheless benefited from social welfare. The reform era brought in political freedom but almost demolished the old system of social guarantees. Devoid of socio-economic rights, the general population was in a poor position to benefit from political freedoms. Russians had thus to come to terms with the loss of empire in December 1991, and to clarify the new role and status of their country in the international system. As Margot Light described it: From the point of view of geopolitics, for example, the establishment of new, independent states to the west of Russia reinvoked an old identity problem: was Russia part of Europe, or had the loss of empire turned it into an Asian or Eurasian power? It was certainly geographically further from Europe than it had been for 300 years. Westernizers, who equated progress and prosperity with Europe, argued that Russia must be European no matter how many miles or states separate the country from the rest of the continent. Others, however, claimed a unique Eurasian role for Russia, bridging Europe and Asia.68

Russian national identity, the search for the Russian idea69 Russian historic experience is full of ambiguities and paradoxes. Undoubtedly, Russians have no difficulty in believing in a Russian civilisation when this is 18

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associated with the concept of empire. However, when referring to a distinct Russian national identity, the notion of ‘Russianness’ is often imbued with vagueness and confusion. Debates over Russia’s national identity since the eighteenth century did not preclude the persistent view of Russia as a superior civilisation and a timeless empire with a universal mission. Obviously, a Russian national identity without this perception has yet to appear. The implementation of such a concept of national identity would enable Russia to make peace with itself and the international system. Various factors have made Russia’s search for a new national identity particularly complex. Rossiskii or Russkii:70 imperial identity and national identity Russia became an empire under Ivan IV who for the first time incorporated large numbers of people who were neither Orthodox nor Russian speaking.71 The early imperial expansion resulted in Russia acquiring an imperial identity before it developed a national identity. Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrot even noted that because the formation of the Russian nation did not precede the process of tsarist colonial expansion, Russian nationality could hardly be defined and Russia’s political identity became dependent on the tsarist state’s imperial exploits.72 During most of the twentieth century, Russian identity continued to be based on the international power of the state.73 It is also often mentioned that Russian tsars rarely appealed to the notion of a Russian people to legitimate their rule. Alexander III,74 and after him Nicholas II, were the first tsars to promote Russian nationalism for their legitimisation. Even then contradictions were plentiful. Both tsarist and Soviet empires resorted to nationalism when they eventually faced their decline. However, this was nothing more than the last gasp of a decadent regime. The incapacity of tsardom to address either Russian or minority national aspirations left the Russian nation, despite the wealth of its language, arts and history, the ethnic group least prepared to develop a post-imperial identity. The lack of evolutionary features in Russian historic development also contributed to the conflicting and uncertain character of the Russian national identity. Short periods of radical reforms (under Peter I, Catherine II, Alexander II, communism, perestroika and liberalisation), often gave place to periods of conservatism and stagnation. Moreover, changes often did not derive from natural evolution of the society, but were planned and arranged by the top echelons of power. As a result, every stage of social transformation remained unfinished: new norms, values and orientations proved capable of only shattering the old ones but failed to replace them. One of the ambiguities of Russian national identity was that though the empire was incapable of satisfying Russia’s national feelings, the Russian national consciousness remained fused to the empire. Undoubtedly, the link between Russia’s national development and this empire-consciousness remains a fundamental characteristic of Russian national psychology. 19

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A very explicit example of the regime’s ambiguity regarding a distinct Russian identity can be found in the Russian language. The tsar and all imperial institutions traditionally referred to themselves as rossiskii (of the land of Rus), rather than russkii (ethnic Russian). This helped to create a supranational imperial identity, distinct from an ethnic identity.75 The equation of the term narod76 (the people) with gosudarstvo (the state) also reflects this ambiguity. The use of rossiskii persisted among the ruling classes until the very end of the Romanov dynasty. As David Laitin explained: Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century state development in Russia compelled a distinction between a Russian as a subject of a political entity (Rossiia), which was itself a vast multinational state, and as a person of the nationality (russkii) that was at the core of the Russian State, but not the sole nationality of that state. A dual or ambiguous national identity emerged: Russians were both ethnic Russians and subjects of a state that was Russia, in which Russians were ‘elder brothers’ to a wide variety of nationality groups that were not russkie, but only rossiskie.77 Even today, the question whether Russians are russkie or rossiskie78 is still a topical question in Russia.79 The rather diffuse state of Russian identity had several long-lasting effects on the formation of the Russian consciousness and its ability to create an identity separate from the empire.80 Throughout their history, ethnic Russians have identified themselves mainly with the state – the Russian empire or the Soviet Union. Thus they acquired what is often described as an ‘imperial mentality’. The merit of the tsarist and Soviet empires, if any, was that they presented the country’s development as a common cause of all their constituent peoples. A degree of ethnic tolerance was an indispensable part of the Russian imperial mentality – a feature that is also vital for maintaining stability in the Russia of today. Regardless of their specific orientation, Russian thinkers across the spectrum remained attached to the belief that Russia is a civilisation, rather than a nation, into which all peoples of the empire should be brought. In contrast to nineteenthcentury Western and Central European nationalist historians, who increasingly asserted an integralist nationalism, Russian historians continued to follow Karamzin’s line praising Russia’s ability to absorb and Russify other peoples. Russia was to consolidate itself as a multinational state.81 Russian cultural superiority over the collective nations of the East has always been a common belief. This provides explanation for Russia’s perceived mission to bring enlightenment and civilisation to those benighted zones of the empire like Siberia. Russia’s mission of civilisation and spiritual salvation was to be realised not only through a programme of enlightened internal imperial administration, but through one of active political expansion as well. This aspect is closely related to Russia’s messianic policy. 20

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Russian international messianism The absence of any clear definition of their national identity left the Russian people without national egotism and thus made them particularly fit to carry out a universalist Christian mission.82 A common sense of Russia’s old religious past, contributed to the development of the idea that Russians as a people were distinguished by a particular religiosity or a particular spiritual vocation. The Russian people admirably integrated this messianic idea, as did the Hebrew people. Russian messianism is present throughout the whole of Russian history, including the communist period. As Kartashev aptly observed, ‘the Russian has chosen a very explicit name to designate his people, his land, his government and his Church: Holy Russia’.83 But this religious idea, while exerting a strong influence on Russians, soon became a justification for imperial expansion.84 Moscow, the Third Rome,85 the last bastion of Christianity, had the unique mission of teaching the world some great lesson. Unfortunately, the doctrine of the Third Rome further complicated Russia’s national development and sacrificed a distinct Russian national identity to a universalist mission cum imperialism. While some may find this debate an exercise in hair splitting, its impact on the formation of Russian national identity should not be underestimated. The messianic idea was to some extent the spiritus moves of the stardom.86 This messianic conception of national origins is also shared by such eminent figures of Russian literature as Pushkin and Dostoyevsky. This latter, despite his declared pacifism, exempted Russia’s military expansion from charges of aggression. For him, wars were fought in the pursuit of a sacred idea, due to Russia’s universalist mission, that would ultimately lead to perpetual peace. Some giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy disagreed. Nikolai Berdyaev criticised this linking of the Church with imperialism, observing that: The whole idea of Moscow as the Third Rome contributed indeed to the power and the might of the Moscow State and the autocracy of the Tsar, but not to the well-being of the Church and not to the growth of spiritual life. The vocation of the Russian people was distorted and despoiled.87 However, authors who openly challenged the notion of mission civilisatrice were a minority. Russian messianism did not disappear with the end of tsardom. During the Second World War especially there was a revival of the Russian messianic idea. According to Fred Barghoorn: The Russian component of Soviet messianism placed particular emphasis upon the claim that a Russian, Lenin, rendered unique service to humanity by his application of Marxism. Russia was the chosen nation charged to bring light and truth to the toilers of those parts of the world who have not yet been saved from capitalist slavery.88 21

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Peter’s tortuous legacy and anti-national post-Petrine Monarchy Several factors hampered the success of Peter’s project to ‘Europeanise’ Russian society, contributing to an even more conflicting status of Russian national development. Among the most relevant of these was the final resentment generated by Petrine reforms. If in a first stage, Russian nobles copied the Western model with admiration, this attitude soon led to a shamed feeling of inferiority. This feeling then gave way to resentment and to the rejection of the West.89 In addition, Peter’s reforms were principally meant for the nobility and not for the peasantry. As a result, the rural masses were almost completely ignored and kept away from progress and enlightenment.90 This moral and social unease was also present in politics, since the new legislation looked entirely alien to Russian people. Additionally, Europeans were relatively skeptical about whether the immense and almost unknown Russian empire had really come so suddenly to possess those indispensable qualities necessary to be admitted into Western civilisation. These reservations of Europe itself to welcome and to recognise the validity of Russia’s Westernising endeavour inevitably undermined the Russians’ own conviction about this new trend in their national development. And, indeed, how could they possibly feel themselves an inalterable part of Europe without the official and unconditional acceptance of Europe itself?91 As Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu observed: To Peter’s reforms are traceable many of the oppositions, or rather anomalies, which, in Russia, caused contrast to become law. Institutions and customs, ideas and facts find it hard work to get attuned together. In the nation as in the individual, dissonances of all kinds abound. The Russian is divided against himself, he feels double; at times he does not know what he believes, what he thinks, what he is.92 The post-Petrine Monarchy would have to live with this tormented legacy. In the nineteenth century, both tsars and people tended to oscillate between antipathy and sympathy for the Western model. Under Alexander I, Western influence was predominant. Nicholas I then distanced himself from any further Europeanisation. Alexander II began his reign with reforms that were later abandoned. Alexander III and Nicholas II followed this last path. In any case, the tsardom’s misleading position resulted from the forced implementation of an alien model in Russia. The communist regime made the same mistake.93 Russia still awaits a new concept of national identity that will heal the rift between Petrine and Muscovite traditions in Russian political culture. The Soviet regime’s nihilism and post-communist Russia Neither the late tsarist system, nor the communist regime was able to generate a viable alternative society, one with a new social logic and potentially authoritative 22

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new leaders, to replace the old system. In both cases, the replacement of the old regime has been twisted and painful beyond expectation. The official ideology (both tsarist and Soviet) adhered to an instrumental view of nationalism, one that served the needs of the state and its ruling elite. After the collapse of the Romanov dynasty, Bolsheviks embarked upon a policy discrediting most Russian national traditions. The fact that Bolsheviks had a very limited and simplified understanding of Russia’s particularities and national tasks resulted in a nihilistic attitude towards the country’s past. When the USSR disintegrated, the myth of the Soviet state fell apart as material flowed from the archives illustrating the atrocities and tragedies of this period. The wave of revelations about the Soviet past had the most damaging effect on the Russian identity. Not only had the framework of Russian national identity been ruined, but the responsibility for the creation of this framework was also undeniable. It was no longer possible to avoid the complicity of the Russian population in the great Soviet experiment. In the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, the ever thorny problems of Russia’s national identity and destiny re-emerged with undiminished vigour, and as before, these problems were linked to a debate over how to define Russia and to establish its statehood. While Russians could hardly accept responsibility for the policy of the Soviet Union, or for the conduct of imperial Russia, they made claims for the international status of the Soviet Union. The search for a Russian identity took place within an external environment that proved less sympathetic than liberal Westernisers had expected, since the results of their early pro-Western policies were disappointing. Delays and difficulties contributed to the perception that Western politicians patronised Russians and treated them as if Russia had been vanquished in the Cold War. After 300 years as a great power, or as part of a great power, Russia was now looking for financial aid and humanitarian assistance. Much of today’s Russian nationalist movement can be seen as a direct response to this loss of pride and national self-confidence. Russians are currently putting an end to their self-depreciation and beginning to search for their new identity in the post-Soviet world.

Russian schools of thought In the last third of the eighteenth century, a growing number of Russian intellectuals tried to define who they were and what they believed in, independently of the court-sponsored Westernisation which had increasingly dominated Russian life since the reign of Peter the Great. This phenomenon was not exclusively Russian and could be observed elsewhere in Europe. However, it was particularly relevant in Russia since questions of national identity were so acute. In contrast with most Western European nations, these intellectuals merely represented a small and isolated group. Nevertheless, out of their sense of Russia’s traditions and customs, they began to promote a much more modern idea that Russians as a people were distinguished by a particular religiosity or a specific spiritual vocation. 23

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The Slavophiles–Westernisers debate The Slavophiles–Westernisers debate, that commenced in the nineteenth century, was but one episode in this struggle for the Russian consciousness that had been continuing for centuries.94 The long and tormented nature of Russian history had contributed to the emergence of the sentiment that there ought to be a Russian path belonging exclusively to Russia itself. Ultimately, of course, this debate cannot be resolved, it can only be moderated by democratic institutions and a culture of civic discourse. Its origins lie in vastly differing conceptions of Russia’s national ideal that will no doubt persist and even gather strength in democratic Russia.

The Slavophiles The decades of the 1820s and 1830s saw the creation of the first really visible current of thinkers to develop a fairly consistent version of the Russian Idea. Scholars like Ivan Kireevsky, Aleksei Khomiakov, Iurii Samarin and especially Ivan Aksakov emphasised the specific values of Russia’s past and traditions and projected an ideal Russia distinct from and superior to the West. Interesting to note is that the original fundamentals of Slavophilism were drawn on European, and especially German, romantic conservatism. The fact is that some of the leading figures of the first generation of Slavophiles had studied in Europe with some eminent German philosophers, such as Hegel and Schelling, from whom they absorbed many of their ideas. As Nicholas Riasanovsky noted: The Slavophiles were affected by numerous currents of Western thought which composed the cultural climate of the Romantic age. The period immediately preceding the development of Slavophilism was characterized in Russia by the influence of Schelling [. . .]; but the growth of Slavophilism itself corresponded with the spread of Hegelianism in Russia.95 The Slavophiles idealised and exalted certain institutions like Russian Orthodoxy. Their conception of the existing Church institution mostly relied on the Russian concept of sobornost usually translated as ‘conciliarism’ or ‘communalism’. This major aspect of Slavophile thought was first formulated by Alexis Khomiakov.96 As James Edie wrote: Sobornost was primarily a theological conception: an organic conception of ecclesiastical consciousness which, externally, placed the Russian conciliar or synodal system above the papal absolutism and Protestant individualism of the West, and which, internally, defined the Church not as a centre of teaching or authority, but as a ‘congregation of lovers in Christ’. The Church is ‘polyhypostatic’; its members are 24

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united ‘organically’ rather than ‘organizationally’. The Church is not an authority which can force obedience but a free union of believers who love one another. The only source of faith (the highest and truest kind of knowledge) is the consciousness of believers in their collectivity. No Council or Church pronouncement has any force unless it is ratified by the community of believers.97 In other words, the Russian sobornost differed from the religious autarchy of the papal government, on one side, and from the anarchic and subjective individualism of the Protestant response on the other.98 Likewise, the Slavophiles advocated other Russian institutions that they viewed as being endangered by the Petrine reforms. One of the most striking examples is probably the village/peasant-commune (obshchina)99 perceived as ‘the highest form of social, moral and political organisation because it emphasises the primacy of the social over the individual, and yet guarantees the freedom of the individual as a part of, not apart from, the community’.100 Some eminent figures of Slavophilism, like Dostoevsky, to some extent reworked and widened this Slavophile point of view and came to think that the Russian people was a ‘God-bearing people’. This revealed the potential messianism within Slavophilism and contributed to its further development. Nicholas Riasanovsky described the Slavophiles’ messianism as follows: The Russian future lays in a return to native principles, in overcoming the Western disease. After being cured, Russia would take its message of harmony and salvation to the discordant and dying West.101 Slavophiles also favoured individuals’ capacity for personal judgement and accountability, so essential to civic responsibility in their conception of a system of government. They strongly opposed Petrine absolutism where the emperor ruled over his subjects, rather than by their consent. They preferred a Muscovite system of government customs rather than constitutions or legal rules restraining an autocratical monarchy. If Slavophiles usually considered monarchy as a desirable form of government, they truly believed in the need for reform. Some Slavophiles even argued that ‘the state, not the people, would lead Russia to universal glory’.102 The distinctive character of Russian history and development was also very explicit in the Slavophiles’ conception of ‘Nationalism’.103 For them, further Europeanisation could only harm Russia’s civilisation. And yet, they did not oppose the Europeanisation of Russia because they wanted their country to remain backward. Their concern was more linked to a fear of Russians becoming overly pragmatic and materialistic, as they thought Europeans were. Generation after generation, various circles of Russian intelligentsia have expressed an apprehension that modernisation would entail the imposition on 25

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Russian society of an alien socio-economic model – namely, that of the West. In their perception: The individualism, secularism, and rationalism of Europe – the aggregate mythologies of Faust and Prometheus – were leading the European world in the direction of an Armageddon of national and class conflict, fuelled by rapacious industrialization. Beneath the overweening and prideful façade of secular European culture were blight and decay, already far advanced.104 This Slavophile Manichaean view can also be described as follows: ‘In the foundation of the Western state: violence, slavery and hostility. In the foundation of the Russian State: free will, liberty and peace’.105 While many nineteenth century Russian intellectuals were educated in Germany, they opposed some basic concepts like the Eurocentric premise of the Hegelians. In this respect, they eventually replaced the generated German hegemony with a Russian-centred world.106 Nevertheless, the Hegelian influence proved to be powerful and contributed to the assertive nature of Russian nationalism. Since a parallel between Nicholas I’s Official Nationality107 and the Slavophiles’ own characteristics can easily be drawn, it is hardly surprising that some scholars tried to link them. However, perspicacious critics soon noticed that, in contrast to ‘official nationalists’ who endlessly celebrated the dynasty and the government, the Slavophile ideologues were far from glorifying the achievements of the Romanov dynasty.108 In fact, the Slavophile view that proper balance in the Russian political and social system had been terribly damaged by Peter the Great,109 contained a barely concealed subtext, critical of the autocracy of Nicholas I. It suggested that the dynasty’s frequently coercive sponsorship of Westernisation had been a mistake and an affront to Russia’s past; despite the regime’s ostensible glorification of Orthodoxy, it had humiliated and damaged the Church. This attitude may provide an explanation for the fact that Slavophiles were nearly as bitterly persecuted as the Westernisers during Nicholas’ reign. Slavophiles were not just a group of utopian ideologues emulating European romantic conservatism. They extensively referred to pre-Petrine Russia’s unique qualities and stressed what the reforms of Peter, in this respect, had cost. As the first ideological structure in Russia, Slavophilism would resonate well into the twentieth century. The reasons for its persistence lay not in the accuracy of its political prescriptions or its historical analysis, but in the powerful attraction of ideals of an alternative political culture at the turn of the century.110 The Westernisers At the outset, the Westernising movement was only a feeling or a tendency among some Russian intellectuals who were turning away from Russia and towards

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Western Europe for new rationales. The Westernisers111 (Zapadniki)112 believed that Russia was a European nation and an integral part of the Western cultural mainstream. In their view, the long Mongol subjugation had separated them from the West and Russia should now mature as a nation, transform itself and return to the European orbit.113 In this respect, Westernism followed the path of the Russian thought initiated at the time of Peter the Great and Catherine II. Westernisers logically considered the Petrine reforms as part of a natural evolution and a useful guide for the future.114 As soon as they became fully conscious of their existence and influence as an organised current of thought in Russia,115 the Westernisers immediately opposed the Slavophiles. Although Westernisers and Slavophiles both originally relied on the same philosophical inspiration,116 their perceptions of Russian identity were completely different. Westernisers, just like Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky and others, were very critical about the Slavophile romance with Russia’s past. Their respective judgements of the value of Russian culture and its place in history were also antagonistic. In contrast with the Slavophiles, Westernisers were either atheistic or at least felt no interest in religion. Bakunin, one of the leading figures of Westernism, considered it necessary to choose between the existence of God and the freedom of man: if God exists, man is a slave.117 Less extreme was Herzen’s atheism, closer to eighteenth-century Voltairism. This focus on the study of man was shared by all Westernisers and therefore constituted a common front against the Slavophiles. The Westernisers’ attitude toward the monarchy was also entirely different as they were requesting the destruction of the political and social system. Since the monarchy was impeding reforms, they came to view the tsarist regime as the root cause of Russia’s evils. For them, it was better to renounce Russia’s historical traditions on the way to a brighter future based on the liberal or socialist inheritance of the French Enlightenment. The Westernisers wanted to save Russia from a dramatic backwardness by helping it to assimilate the Western civilisation in order finally to take its place in Europe. However, they soon realised the quasi-impossibility of transplanting a Western model to Russia. In addition, their perception of the West was more idealistic than realistic. They soon came to deal with a disillusioning image of European materialism and individualism. As a consequence, Westernisers progressively abandoned their infatuation and took a large step towards the Slavophile orientation. As a result, ‘a succession of Westernisers from Karamzin (who reversed his positive attitude toward Peter’s domestic policies) to Herzen (the doyen of Russian Westernisers) migrated from unabashed admiration of the West to enthusiasm for the purity of the Russian village and rejection of the decadent West’.118 This might provide some explanation for the stated fact that the Westernising tradition has almost always been weaker than that of the Slavophiles.

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Asianists, Scythians and Eurasianists In Europe we are hangers-on and slaves, but in Asia we are masters. In Europe, we are Tatars, but in Asia we too are Europeans.119

In the twilight years of imperial Russia, much of the intelligentsia was sceptical about Occidentalism.120 The implementation of European models was a matter of concern, not just in the way it challenged the old order, but also because it seemed to emphasise Russia’s inherent inferiority vis-à-vis such modern industrial rivals as Great Britain and Germany. However, if Russia looked to the West from a position of relative weakness, it could still face the East with confidence and strength. If enthusiastic Westernisers were still a minority, even the Slavophiles, who stressed Russia’s apartness from the West, had never considered themselves to be part of Asia. During the Great War, educated Russians generally viewed their country as equal to the other powers in the Triple Entente: France and Britain. Like their allies, most Russians saw their racial roots as firmly planted in European soil. Yet there were Russians who were more doubtful about their continental allegiance. As we shall see, the Orient did at a certain period fascinate a small but influential minority. By the fin-de-siècle, for some Russians the term ‘Asiatic’ was not an insult and the Orient appealed to many poets in St Petersburg and Moscow. Russia’s intellectual flirtation with the Orient coincided with a redirection eastward of its imperial objectives. In the early 1890s, tsarist diplomats had negotiated a secret treaty of alliance with China, in addition to a leasehold and extensive economic privileges in Manchuria. As the twentieth century dawned, it appeared to many influential political writers that Russia was fundamentally Eastern rather than Western in character. The tumult of revolution and war together with the mistakes, compromises and ambitions of the country’s new leaders would bring Russia’s ‘Asiatic’ heritage to the fore and sweep away a still-fragile Westernism.121 From Asianism to Scythianism At the turn of the century, those intellectuals who had begun to stress their nation’s affinity with the East rather than the West were identified as vostochniki or Asianists. Like Slavophilism, Asianism122 reflected a profound unease with Russia’s sense of itself and its place in the world. But whereas the Slavophiles usually claimed their heritage from the more peaceful European Slavs, the Asianists ‘cast their gaze further east’. This Asian identity was also now cast in a positive rather than a negative light. Some of Russia’s extreme attempts to redefine its national identity through the Asian lens resulted in a ‘cultural apotheosis’ known as Scythianism. Playing upon the image of an aggressive inner Asian nomadic tribe that had roamed the southern steppes and the Black Sea coasts in pre-Slavic times, a group of leading writers and poets at the turn of the century began to refer to themselves and to Russians in general emphatically as ‘Scythians’. By claiming their Asian identity, these 28

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intellectuals were at long last acknowledging that they actually were the very ‘Tatars’ who, as Dostoevsky insisted, Europe had always believed them to be.123 These active nationalists thus believed in the absolute necessity of separating their native Russia from the all-too-civilised West. Russia’s emerging Scythian identity was in consequence affirmed with passion and even hostility. Alexander Blok portrayed with brio the rebellious face of Russia’s Scythian identity: Of you, there are millions. We – are numberless, numberless, numberless. Just try to fight with us! Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, we are Asiatics! With slanting and greedy eyes!124 Eurasianism125 Asianists and Scythians were among the first to suggest that the origins of Russia’s differentiation from Europe were to be found in Asia. Yet their group was not prepared to press this insight very far since they were confronted with a great deal of antagonistic pressure and tension. If part of the Asianist convictions had already ‘foundered, along with the Baltic Fleet, in the Straits of Tsushima’,126 their advocates soon appeared to be entirely at a loss when facing the pervasive Eurocentric influences of the Petrine legacy. It therefore was left to others to restore some of the deeper implications of Asianism and to perpetuate its legacy. In the chaotic aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, a group of Russian émigré intellectuals in Prague set forth a new perspective on Russia’s relationship to the Europe–Asia juxtaposition, and with it declared the creation of a new current of thought, Evraziistvo or Eurasianism.127 Whereas the Asianists focused on Russia’s fundamentally oriental nature, to underline its apartness from the Occident, the Eurasianists argued that their nation was an autonomous cultural–ethnographic complex, a sixth great continent called Eurasia. Indeed, for Eurasianists, Russia was thus neither Asian nor European, but combined elements of both. Nevertheless, most of Eurasia’s basic aspects were explicitly in opposition with the West. The Eurasian autocratic political nature, its spirituality and its rejection of materialism predominantly referred to the same Asianist Europhobia. If the geographical emphasis of the post-revolutionary Eurasianists was a little different from that of the pre-revolutionary Asianists, they both shared a strong antipathy to the West. Eurasianists also referred to some elements of the Slavophile thinking: very explicit was their perception of the Russian form of government which, they argued, was superior to Western forms of rule. As Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu wrote: The modern Scythian fancied he had found out the emptiness of that Graeco-Latin culture whose splendour had dazzled him, and, with his race’s versatility and proneness to rush from one to the other extreme, with the bitter wrath of a believer undeceived and ashamed of his long credulity, he blasphemed what he had worshipped yesterday.128 29

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Obviously, the discourse about Russia and Asia was moved to a completely new level. Eurasian Russia was irrevocably disengaged from the West and firmly fixed instead in a kind of integration with the East. It was neither European, nor even Slavic, but rather a complex amalgam characterised as Eurasian civilisation. The defining moment in the formation of this complex was the conquest of ancient Russia by the steppe nomads that had so fatefully ruptured the country’s early evolution, and the Eurasians focused upon the protracted experience of Mongol domination as the essential crucible in the history of the Russian people and the Russian State. Eminent Eurasianists such as Nicholas Trubetskoi even presented linguistic arguments to provide evidence of a Eurasian linguistic alliance.129 According to Trubetskoi’s analysis, the Russian verb verit (‘to believe’) was formed on the Zoroastrian verb varayaiti (‘to choose’). The first Slavs viewed accordingly the religious act as a ‘choice’ between good and evil, just like the Zoroastrians. Another very explicit example can be found in the origins of the Russian word bog (‘God’), linked to the Russian baga (‘rich’), as in old-Persian languages.130 Despite the committed support it attracted during the interwar period from some of the Russian intelligentsia’s most illustrious representatives, Eurasianism failed to receive broad support, and was accepted neither in the international émigré community nor indeed within the Soviet Union itself. Nevertheless, while the movement did not survive the Second World War in its original form, Eurasian ideas have found contemporary adherents. In the last few years, a current of thought has emerged which promotes the lasting importance of Russia’s connections to Asia. Strongly opposed to Atlanticism, this new current of opinion claimed that Russia’s path to the future could only be constructed on the basis of these connections and on their absolute prioritisation above relations with the European and transatlantic West. In order to bolster this position ideologically, the doctrines of the original Eurasians were resurrected and freshly embraced, and the term Evraziistvo became one of the most important political keywords of the day.131 The contemporary revival of Eurasianism is an unmistakable indication of the persistence and enduring vitality in today’s Russia of that ideological process which we have attempted to trace in this section, namely the attempt to articulate a vision of Russia’s own character and national identity in terms of its juxtaposition and relationship to Asia. Russia’s Asian–Byzantine orientation resulted in a conservative and xenophobic world conception that contributes to the permanence of the East–West division in post-Cold War Russia. Many still believe that Russians are constitutionally incapable of participating in Western culture. In this scheme, there is also a widespread opinion that the fundamental incompatibility of views between Russia and the West derives from the idea that Russia’s conversion to Orthodoxy contributed to its isolation from the mainstream of European history for a number of centuries. In forming attitudes towards the West and by symbolising a specifically East Slavic worldview, the Russian Orthodox Church provides both a background 30

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and a framework for understanding many of the issues in the present search for a new Russian identity.

Conclusion Two main objectives motivated our analysis of the Russian identity. The first aimed at providing, if not a perfect definition, at least sound features of this identity. As mentioned in the main introduction, this would permit us to assess whether or not the particularities of this identity were incompatible with those of the countries of the Euro-Atlantic alliance, and could thus constitute an obstacle to enhanced relations. This also required our looking into whether or not the Russian identity was of national nature, all the more as ‘national identity’ is usually the concept used to define the identity of the Allied member states. To reach these objectives, we followed a progressive approach consisting in first considering the historical and geographical components of the Russian identity; second, weighing the existence of a national dimension of that identity through the Russian thinking, culture and historic-political legacy; and third, taking into account the Russian theoretical approach to that subject. What Russian geography has taught us is that the immensity of the Russian territory, stretching from Europe to Asia, and the consequent heterogeneity of that territory and the people living there, has been the ground for an identity that includes the consciousness of plurality and the acceptance of differences. In other words, the Russian identity cannot be that of the Russian people in its ethnic sense only; it must embrace a dimension that is broad enough for all the inhabitants of the Russian territory to identify themselves with. This conclusion was later supported by our analysis of the meaning of ‘Russian’ in the Russian language context. The co-existence of two different terms to refer to ‘Russian’, one – russkii – relating to the ethnic characteristic of the idea of being Russian, the other – rossiskii – pertaining to the rather territorial aspect of it, proved that the Russian identity was more inclusive than exclusive. In this context, one can even say that rossiskii prevails over russkii: a Russian is first and foremost an individual that was born on Russian territory; being of Russian ethnic origin is only of secondary importance. This proves that it would have been wrong to assume that the Russian identity was of national nature, as this would have meant giving more importance to russkii than to rossiskii. Our study of the different approaches to the question of Russian identity later proved that any attempt to define the Russian identity based on fixed references, should they refer to the belonging to the Slav people and culture or to the proximity with the Western or the Asian world, did not meet with success. In the end, none of the Westernisers, Slavophiles, Asianists, Scythians and Eurasianists managed to take real precedence over the others. Each of these trends only gathered the support of a minority, for the very reason that they were exclusive, focusing on only one aspect of the Russian identity. 31

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At the historic–political level, we also realised that the successive attempts to shape the Russian identity according to external identity references ended in sound failures. Peter the Great’s tentative Europeanisation of Russia or the imposed Sovietisation of the Russian people failed because: (a) they implied the destruction of all the existing identity references; (b) they consisted in the forced introduction of alien identities, one cultural and the other ideological; and (c) because these unilateral policies were not welcomed by the outside world. The consequences of these experiences were not felt immediately but re-emerged after the demise of the Soviet Union. Then the Russians were faced with a profound identity crisis, having either to resurrect identity references long annihilated or to find their way in the midst of multiple and often contradictory alternatives. At this stage of our research, several points can be made. First, we are now in a position to ascertain that the Russian identity is not one but plural, that it is not exclusive but inclusive, and that the prime nature of what we may call the Russian national identity is not ‘national’ stricto sensu but multinational. Since it lies on inalterable factors and stands as the precondition to the existence of the Russian State in its present form, rossiskii prevails and will continue to prevail over russkii in the Russian mind. Second, we can say that because the alien identity references that were deliberately imported to Russia were of Western origin, the Russian identity today does have a greater Western connotation than the Asian one. The other feature that survived the tortured path of the Russian identity is the strongly anchored conviction within the Russian mind that it is a ‘chosen people’ with a universal spiritual mission. What we started to study under international messianism finds its roots in the dominant religion in Russia, Orthodoxy. Our understanding of the Russian identity cannot be complete without exploring the fundamentals and the powers of Orthodoxy in Russia.

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In the modern world, religion is central, perhaps the central, force that motivates and mobilizes people . . . What ultimately counts for people is not political ideology or economic interest. Faith and family, blood and belief, are what people identify with and what they will fight and die for.1

Introduction It is now common knowledge that the history of Russia is a long succession of extreme events, throughout which the very identity of the Russian people was put in danger. In such turbulent times, there was an imperative need for some kind of force that would be able to keep the Russian people united and to protect them from these ordeals. Only a force beyond down-to-earth considerations could play that role. For this reason, religion can be seen as that central force ‘that motivates and mobilizes people’. Religion is thus not only another component of a given identity, it can also become the one reference people think of when trying to define themselves. The latter formula applies perfectly to the Russian case. Orthodoxy, as the main religion in Russia, not only stands as a component of the Russian identity; it has also become, throughout this long and tortuous history, the primary reference used by the Russian people to define themselves. As Robert C. Tucker wrote: Until as late as the early twentieth century a peasant – and the vast majority of Russians were peasants then – would speak of himself not as a ‘Russian’ but as ‘Orthodox’ ( pravoslavnyi). Russian was his language; Orthodoxy his identity.2 It is thus imperative for our understanding of the Russian identity to pay due attention to Orthodoxy. First, our work will consist of determining the various Orthodox components of the Russian identity, with special emphasis on the Orthodox impact on the Russian approach to foreign countries, more particularly the West. Our goal will be to assess whether Orthodoxy’s place in the Russian 33

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identity is so important that it has to be taken into account when building up relations with Russia. We will also try to evaluate whether Orthodoxy has a favourable/unfavourable influence on Russia’s interaction with the West. Second, we will focus on the Russian Orthodox Church3 as an institution, and its position in the Russian State system. Our objective there will be to determine whether the State/Church relationship in Russia is of a secular nature or if the Church should still be regarded as a State actor. Again, the answer to that question will have an impact on what importance is worth giving to Orthodoxy when considering relations with Russia.

Orthodox components of Russian national identity Russia’s historical faith is Orthodoxy, which is deeply embedded in the Russian soul. Aside from being the claimed religion of 60 per cent of Russia’s population,4 Orthodoxy also embodies a Russian sense of nation, history and identity, even when the individual is not devout. Many Russians say that they are not believers, but they do know which the true faith is. As Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu underlined: This bond between religion and nationality was tied by history and made fast and faster by time. In this respect Russia puts us in mind of Spain, with the difference that all her national struggles, all her political wars, be it in West or East, have been looked upon by people as religious wars. Whether Asia or Europe was to be dealt with, the North or the South, the Mongol or the Turk, the Swede or the Pole, the German or even the French, the enemy was, first and foremost, the infidel, the heretic, the schismatic, the foe and contemner of God himself.5 In the new Russia, the Church stepped in to solidify the ideological definitions of ‘Russia’ and degrees of ‘Russianness’. In August 2000, the ‘Social Conception’ of the Russian Orthodox Church6 placed Orthodoxy at the top of this hierarchy, and Western ideals, especially American, at the bottom. Orthodoxy as an element of Russianness Orthodoxy and Russian national identity remain as closely interconnected today as in the past.7 At the end of the tenth century, the need for a single religion to bring together the Russian tribes was fully recognised by Prince Vladimir. Paganism was inadequate for centralisation and Christianity was therefore adopted from Byzantium. The Church then preserved the Russian nation during the Mongol yoke. During this critical period, ‘the Russian Orthodox Church became the symbolic repository of national identity’.8 The importance of the Church as a symbol of national unity again was very clear during the ‘Time of Troubles’ (1598–1613), when Moscow was occupied by the Poles. The Church 34

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also mobilised Russian bravery against Teutonic Knights, Lithuanians, Frenchmen, Swedes and many others. Nikolai Petro exemplified Russian national resistance as follows: It was Patriarch Ghermogen who kindled the spirit of national resistance by refusing to surrender the monastery fortress of Smolensk to the Poles. Meanwhile, the stewards of St. Sergey Trinity Monastery, and the Kirillov and Beloe Ozero Monasteries, initiated a letter-writing campaign to Russian cities, calling upon all citizens to take up arms and march for country and faith.9 During the Soviet period, the communist regime failed to erase the links between Russian national and religious identity. It appears that the regime was only successful in closing churches and in forbidding religious rituals. If it is true that the Church hierarchy submitted to the regime under constraint, many Orthodox clergymen rebelled. The spiritual vacuum left by communism also explains the Church’s persistence during the Soviet regime. Indeed, the Party had no choice but to admit that religion could act as a stimulus for people, inciting them to do things, which otherwise they would not choose to do, and as such it was an indisputable aspect of the country’s development.10 In the words of Jane Ellis: As thinking people in the Soviet Union attempt to rediscover and resurrect the culture in their past (in its pure, as opposed to its ideologically distorted form), they encounter Orthodoxy at every turn – in art, architecture, music, literature, poetry.11 By granting the Church greater predominance, glasnost and perestroika also served to magnify Russian Orthodoxy as an instrument for ‘Russification, discipline, control, and order’.12 Soon thereafter, the resurgence of Russian nationalist thought became more apparent, together with various nationalist movements identifying themselves with Orthodoxy.13 Today, the Patriarchate seems to favour a modified version of the tsarist ideal (Orthodoxy, Unity, National Spirit), while Pan-Slavism and Russian nationalism are very convenient ideologies for finding allies within the Duma. Tsarist Holy Russia, Soviet Russia and Democratic Russia, become a confusing blend for national identity and standardised values. However, it is this very confusion that brings the Church much of the respect it enjoys. The lack of a standardised national identity in Russian society often finds security in the traditions and values of the Church.

Orthodoxy, conservatism and xenophobia In the words of the great Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyev, the central characteristic of Byzantine Orthodoxy was – and continues to be – its vigorous 35

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adherence to the traditions of the past. As he pointed out: In the East, the Church was understood and defended mainly as a sanctuary, steeped in tradition – in its immobile static elements. This tendency to preserve tradition corresponded to the general spiritual disposition of the East.14 It was precisely this characteristic that helped the Church to survive the Mongol yoke, to endure the reign of Peter I, and to live through 70 years of the Soviet government’s stubborn atheism. This also contributed to the preservation of values partly neglected by other Christians. Most striking is Orthodoxy’s opposition to the revision of holy writings. Bitter accusations of betrayal15 thus accompanied attempts to correct mistakes in the Russian translations of the Greek sacred texts, sanctified by the Russian Church Council of 1551. This Council, called the Sto glav Council,16 was held in Moscow during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. It introduced reforms designed to fight against sects and Western interference in religious thought. More recently, in 1993, the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation passed a new law aimed at changing particular aspects of the 1990 law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Belief, finally granting privileges of government support to Russia’s traditional religions. Moreover, in 1997, a new legislation on Freedom of Conscience and Religion, consolidating and legitimising the Russian Orthodox Church itself, was adopted. In this manner, Alexis II confirmed the Orthodox Church’s place in Russia and neutralised home-grown competitors. This law is also very representative of the Russian xenophobic attitude that, together with an irremovable attachment to the past, to traditions, and a pronounced anti-Western feeling, characterises the Orthodox religion. All this notably explains why the Russians encounter so many difficulties in accepting any novelty or change, be it a new world order, the supremacy of the United States, or a new world status for their country. Instead of striving to adjust to an ever changing international environment, the Russians will tend to focus all their efforts on the re-establishment of the reality that would reflect their inalterable values. In other words, in the Russian eye, Russia remains and ought to remain an empire and a superpower. The fact that these religious values, and, to a greater extent, the Orthodox Church itself, benefit from a legal and political recognition since the early 1990s is also illustrative of a unique relationship between the Church and the State.

The Russian Orthodox Church: a national and a State Church According to the Western accepted concept of secularity, the Church, in international relations, is considered as a non-State actor. Such a title is a false assumption in Russia for two reasons. First, the ambiguous state of democracy in Russia 36

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today complicates the definition of what is part of the State and what is not. Second, the pre-Soviet tradition of joint Church-State leadership as well as the Soviet infiltration of the Church both make the Church much more a State actor than a non-State actor. In principle, the Russian Orthodox Church has never truly been free or separate from the State in Russia. Today, while enjoying religious freedom, its governmental ties and even partnership with the State makes it closer to the status of a semi-governmental institution. Nationalisation of a faith From the ninth to the sixteenth century, pagan Russia was being transformed, little by little, into Holy Russia,17 ‘the country of innumerable churches, incessant chiming of bells, long night services, strict periods of fasting, and zealous genuflections, as pictured by foreign visitors’.18 Russian piety acquired a quality differing as much from the West as from the East, and in its substance the Russian faith became characteristically national. As religion was being nationalised, the Russian Church also became national in its form. In so doing, it found valuable and fully reliable support in the universal theory of Moscow, the Third Rome. At the end of the fifteenth century, this famous theory was fully developed in Pholotheus’ letters,19 who wrote to Ivan III: The church of ancient Rome fell because of Apollinarian heresy; as to the second Rome – the Church of Constantinople – it had been hewn by the axes of Ishmaelites, but this third Rome – the Holy Apostolic church, under thy mighty rule, shines throughout the entire world more brightly than the sun. All the Orthodox Christian realms have converged in thine own. Thou art the sole Autocrat of the universe, the only Tsar of the Christians . . . Observe and hearken, O pious Tsar, [. . .] Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and no fourth can ever be. Thy Christian Empire shall fall to no one’s lot.20 The Russian tsar had thus to preserve the only remaining fragment of true Orthodoxy unscathed until the second advent of Christ. By the end of the sixteenth century, the theory of Moscow’s world importance was officially adopted. In the meantime, the Moscow authorities had finally obtained the Russian Church’s formal independence from Byzantium and its own Patriarch. In the charter confirming the Moscow Patriarchate, the theory of ‘Moscow, the Third Rome’ was once more proclaimed. According to this theory, Christianity finds its true haven in Russia, after escaping the degeneration of Rome and Constantinople. This placed the Russian Orthodox Church in an even more nationalistic context, pushing the Moscow Patriarchate towards a heavier reliance on Russia, and away from its alleged multi-cultural version of Orthodoxy. Until now, the feuds of inter-church politics have furthered the split with the rest of the Orthodox world. 37

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Historical components of the State Church As mentioned earlier, relations between the Church and the State have always been closely interconnected.21 In the ninth century, the Russian Orthodox Church had much more influence than the State since the Church was both the critic and the moral judge of secular power.22 One of the reasons for this can be found in the limited political authority of Kievan princes. Another reason is that the Church and the regional princes shared a common sense of responsibility for the Russian land and the well-being of the nation.23 Logically enough, many civil, legal and administrative privileges were granted to the Church hierarchy. Orthodoxy had thus no autonomy from the government: the Church diligently served the State, and the State protected the Church. During the Mongol domination, the unity of the Church was not shattered and it even remained the only functioning national institution. It is well known that, even though the Tatars destroyed the remains of the political cohesion of ancient Rus’, these believers in ‘multi-gods’ were tolerant to the Church and granted it certain privileges.24 The Tatars had also understood that they could gain some benefits in reinforcing the influence of the Moscow princes on the clergy since most of them submitted to the Khans’ will. The tradition of Church obedience to the State was thus progressively established and the symphonic ideal of dyarchy25 was reaffirmed. With its prestige and influence strengthened, the Church was able to influence the tsar on both domestic and foreign policy, although their relations were often conflicting. While the principle of dyarchy was never seriously challenged, the primacy of secular power was immovable. This was dramatically demonstrated both in practice and in theory by Ivan the Terrible who treated the Church as the inferior it simply was.26 His successor, Boris Godunov, was also aware of the usefulness of the Church as an instrument of the State. The decade of turmoil, known in Russian history as the ‘Time of Troubles’ (1598–1613), that followed Boris’s death exposed the State to peril, and endangered the Church as well. In these times of crisis, both partners of the dyarchy helped each other. The Church provided assistance to the State and, in return, the tsar recognised the moral authority of the Church and transferred many administrative and political functions to it. The tsar’s sovereignty in political affairs was balanced by the patriarch’s sovereignty in religious matters and the fact that the Church could benefit from an unlimited autonomy in its internal affairs. Peter the Great would eradicate the symbols of symphonia by introducing absolutism to Russia. The patriarchate was replaced by a Holy Synod submitted to the tsar. The Church became merely another branch State and its authority weakened over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Peter and his successors, however, never succeeded in fully eliminating the symphonic doctrine. As Nikolai Petro noted: By stressing that the monarch is ultimately accountable to God, and that only the Church reliably interprets God’s will, this doctrine implicitly 38

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limited the tsar’s authority [. . .] Still, this was meager consolation to a Church that had traditionally seen itself as a sovereign power in society.27 For almost two centuries after Peter’s reign, the Church remained an obedient executor of the State’s will.28 This recalled the Byzantine era when the emperor was considered the protector of all the Orthodox Churches. By and large, the Church hierarchy was satisfied with this tacit agreement. Not only did the tsars refrain from interfering in the Church’s doctrine and dogma, they also ensured it their protection and imposed limits on the Catholics and the Protestants, as well as on foreign and domestic sects. Not surprisingly, conservative statesmen such as Count Uvarov proposed the tripartite formula of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality’ as a barrier against the spread of Western ideas. Uvarov’s formula was rapidly adopted by the tsars and became a central element of the Russian official ideology until at least 1905.29 Although quite content with this state of affairs, the Russian Orthodox Church did not hesitate to try to restore a symphonic type of relationship with the State once the autocracy’s strength started to decline. In 1917, in an attempt to restore its own sovereignty, the Church convened the first National Council30 since the times of Peter the Great. Bolshevik leaders rapidly came to consider the possible re-emergence of the symphonic ideal as a threat. According to them, this would reassert the Church’s position as a moral authority in the public arena and a restraint upon the government. Although the Church avoided opposing the regime directly, the Bolsheviks could not accept being held accountable for their actions by an independent voice of moral criticism. As Nathaniel Davis pointed out: From the start, the communist state grasped the reality of the church as a refuge for independent thought and a fortress for those who believed in a philosophy incompatible with the communists’ creed.31 While it is possible to draw correlations between the Bolshevik attitude towards religion and Church–State relations during Peter’s rule, the situation was nevertheless different in many respects. Peter preserved the Church as an instrument of the State, whereas the Bolsheviks wished to annihilate it completely.32 Lenin’s abhorrence to religion is well known: he used to call it ‘spiritual booze’, an even sharper term than Marx’s ‘opium of the people’.33 In order to achieve this destruction, the Bolsheviks launched a massive anti-religious campaign aimed at discrediting the Church. After this attempt failed, they terrorised and isolated both the population and the clergy. In reaction, the Russian Church tried to resist and proclaimed an anathema on the Bolshevik government. However, in 1925, the new patriarch Sergii swore allegiance to the new regime ‘whose joys and successes are our successes, and whose setbacks are our setbacks’.34 The new Church hierarchy thought that this obedient attitude would stop Stalin’s persecution. Unfortunately, this proved to be false. The years 1927–43 were characterised by the Soviet regime’s attempt to 39

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destroy the Church and all traces of religion. By the end of the first Five-Year plan nearly 95 per cent of Orthodox churches had been closed.35 The situation changed completely in 1941 when Hitler invaded the USSR. Stalin could not afford to further alienate the Church since he needed its support to mobilise patriotic courage. Anti-religious propaganda ceased and churches reopened under the Nazi occupation. Most of the people, brought up for centuries to respect traditions, had preserved their faith in Orthodoxy. Recognising that his pre-war policy of eliminating religion had failed, Stalin decided to desist from anti-religious activity. The Church, which had helped win the war, then experienced a more settled period. Stalin’s successors, however, renewed atheist propaganda, closing nearly twothirds of all Orthodox Churches. From 1959–64, Khrushchev launched an anti-religion campaign aimed at undermining the institutional strength of the Russian Church. Soviet authorities also employed the State Security Committee (KGB) to infiltrate religious institutions and forced priests and seminarists to collaborate with the communist government. Krushchev’s fall from power in October 1964 constituted another breathing space for the clergy. While the number of functioning Churches remained extremely low during the stagnant eras of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, the first steps were taken to restore religion in both rhetoric and policy. The regime had clearly failed in its attempt to suppress the links between Russian national and religious identity. Moreover, although the Church hierarchy submitted to the regime under duress, many individual members of the Orthodox clergy rebelled and several organisations, generally known as the ‘Catacombal Church’, continued their religious life underground. The millennial celebration of the baptism of Rus’ in 1988 was a turning point in Church–State relations. Many used this event to press the State for concessions by underlining Orthodoxy’s importance to Russian national consciousness and to its formation as a nation. In this context, Gorbachev36 progressively relaxed restrictions on religion. The Russian president also believed that an easing of religious persecution might help to restore the popularity of socialism. From this moment on, the State stopped publicly declaring its enmity towards the Church. As Nikolai Petro pointed out: In granting the Church greater opportunity to enter into the public dialog over the country’s future, the regime thus got far more than it bargained for. An emboldened civil society took advantage of perestroika to argue that the Church was indispensable to the spiritual well-being of the country. It bolstered this claim by repeatedly bringing to public attention the role that the Church played during critical times in Russian history.37 The Russian Orthodox Church regained lost ground precisely while the Soviet Union was crumbling.38 Indeed, the disintegration of the Soviet State ‘set the stage for radical changes in the challenges and opportunities confronting the Russian Orthodox Church after 1991’.39 The Church could now hope for a return to the 40

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symphonic relationship that had served Church and State so well throughout Russian history. By restoring such a ‘partnership’, the Church could not only expect State protection against religious rivals, but also a privileged position in the country. The Church’s increasing presence in public life was emphasised by the attention given to its official statements during the failed coup of August 1991 and by its role of mediator during the armed conflict between President Yeltsin and the Russian parliament in September–October 1993. By the mid-1990s, no politician could afford to ignore the Church and this generated scepticism over the appearance of political leaders at Church services. Yet, resentment towards the Church leadership’s cooperation with the Soviet regime persisted. Indeed, the Russian Orthodox Church was the only major institution in the former Soviet Union which had not experienced total changes in the clergy hierarchy. This was compounded by revelations of documents of collaboration between Church leaders and the KGB.40 Since then, the Church finds in the Duma its most reliable collaborator in pushing shared agendas into legislative action. As a lobby, the Church was successful in bringing its will into federal legislation in 1997. As an external affairs lobby, the Church works through the promotion of ideas and values, particularly in the media. Leaders of the Church, such as Patriarch Alexis II and Metropolitan Kirill actively meet with government officials, communicate Church interest and even draft legislation. The undisclosed connections between the Church and the government are an important, yet enigmatic source of influence for the Church. The crucial feature of the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the State is surely one of opportunistic mutual assistance, where each party can use the other to act outside of their respective organisational limits. In terms of influence, the Church uses the State to override its own problems, and the State uses the Church to fight anti-Russian nationalism. The State also benefits from the capacity of the Church to assert Russian interests when normal diplomatic channels are inefficient due to international political tensions. The Russian Orthodox Church thus benefits in many ways from the final removal of communism. It has enjoyed new freedom and prerogatives. From the standpoint of the Church, it seems, there is nothing wrong with Church–State symbiosis as long as the Church is in the driver’s seat. A totalitarian Church In tsarist Russia, religious consecration was given to the ‘one Orthodox Tsar of the Universe’, who could then easily establish autocracy.41 As Anatole LeroyBeaulieu stressed it: To the peasant, the tsar is the representative of God, delegated by Heaven to rule the nation. That is the source of the devout feeling with which the peasant regards the anointed of the Lord. This is why he renders to the sovereign an homage almost superstitious, why he bows to the earth 41

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before him and sometimes crosses himself as he passes by, just as at the passage of holy eïkons. This also accounts for the extreme docility which abides in the masses, for the distaste which a large portion of the nation manifests for political liberties. If the tsar rules in the name of God, is not resistance against him impiety? And does not the Church, each year, anathematise those who dare to doubt the divine mission of the tsar and to rebel against his authority?42 The Russian Orthodox Church is not democratically oriented at all and has no tradition of democratic thinking to which it can refer. It is not inclined to democratic ideals and subscribes instead to ‘reactionary–romantic authoritarian’ notions.43 The attitudes of the Russian Church are thus fundamentally totalitarian, a tendency from which it has to free itself. When communism collapsed, many people in both Russia and the West thought that Russia would adopt at once all democratic values. Freedom and liberty had been prime aspirations of the Russian Orthodox Church during the Soviet era. Freedom of religion was welcomed, along with the ideals of a democratic society in Russia. However, liberalisation was a mixed blessing. Although the Church celebrated its restored freedom, it had to play in the tides of a free society and in the midst of globalisation. In other words, this new freedom of religion also meant all opposition could reign freely in society. Jane Ellis described this challenge to the Church in her most recent book, The Russian Orthodox Church: Triumphalism and Defensiveness,44 in which she concluded that the key question in the new Russian society was ‘whether or not the Russian Orthodox Church will tolerate the equality of all religions before the law’. Thus, while tolerance is preached, the Church is more concerned with the amount of freedom to be granted to ‘other’ religions. In the Russian Church–State culture, it becomes clear that the religiouspolitical system is a unified web where the elements in the religious sphere and those in the political sphere interact and tend to be mutually reinforcing. As a consequence, Orthodoxy radically determined the Russian political culture, rooted in the same historical experience of autocracy and a paternal conception of State authority.

Conclusion This chapter on the Orthodox religion and the Russian Orthodox Church has given us further insight into what the Russian identity is about, but it also provided us with valuable information as to how the Russians perceive the West and how Western countries – and, in the present case, the Allied member states – should approach their relationship with Russia. A historical overview of Orthodoxy first showed us that since the end of the tenth century, be it officially or in secret, Orthodoxy has always stood out as the living force of Russianness. Throughout the successive invasions and occupations of Russia, Orthodoxy kept the Russian people together and became the stimulus 42

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of Russian resistance. In these circumstances, Orthodoxy went beyond its pure religious nature; it was also the guardian of Russian traditions and culture. No authoritarian rule, not even communism ever managed to deprive the Russian identity of its Orthodox references. This firm connection between religion and identity has remained unchanged up to this day. Since 1991, one can notice that the Russian Orthodox Church has increasingly acted as a leading exponent of the ‘Russian National Idea’.45 As Michael Bourdeaux stressed: Events of the last decade prove that the systematic attempt to deprive human nature of its inclination to the divine failed abjectly. Religion is destined to be an important factor in the new societies that are emerging. [. . .] Religion, at this time, faces the challenge of either contributing to the process of destabilization or of fulfilling its potential as an agent of reconciliation. Meanwhile, the well-being of hundreds of millions of people hangs in the balance.46 On that basis, no country willing to build up relations with Russia can ignore the Orthodox element. This is all the more impossible as the values that characterise Orthodoxy are very assertive, indeed even radical when it comes to its perception of the West. Our study first revealed Orthodoxy’s extreme attachment to the past and its consequent extreme reluctance to accept modernity. This is what generates an almost systematic resistance to change amongst the Russians. Such a closed attitude can only make Russia’s relations with the outside world more difficult. This is aggravated by the fact that Orthodoxy also bears strong anti-Western feelings. Since the fifteenth century and the emergence of ‘Moscow Third Rome’, Rome and Constantinople embody, in the Russian perspective, the degeneration of Christianity. And the association ‘Western world–modern world’ gains no credit in their perspective either. Turning to the Russian Orthodox Church, we learnt that this institution, because it represents one of the most – if not the most – important identity reference for the Russian, still enjoys privileged relations with the Russian State. On no account is it possible to say that Russia is a secular state. The separation of power between the State and the Church in Russia has never been made clear, for the very reason that it is in the interest of the former to be assured of the Church support, and in the interest of the latter to benefit from the protection of the State. It comes as no surprise that the Church and State pursue the same grand objectives: the imperialistic aspirations of the Russian political system echoes the international messianism that we studied in Chapter 2. Last but not least, we discovered that the Russian Orthodox Church is not a democratic institution. On the contrary, it proves to be somewhat totalitarian in the policies that it conducts and the values that it defends. In this context of intimate relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian State, one can easily imagine how influential the Church has been in Russian politics and in forging the Russian political culture. 43

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The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided exertions and common sense of the citizens; the Russian centres all the authority of society in a single arm: the principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter servitude. Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of the globe.1

Introduction The study of political culture is not new. The analysis of a particular political system in terms of its socio-cultural peculiarities is as old as the study of politics itself. Eminent writers on political science found concern with such issues and tried to link their study of politics to sociological and anthropological works on culture. Montesquieu focused attention on the ‘general spirit’ or ‘morals and customs of a nation’ in his De l’esprit des Lois; Tocqueville in his Democracy in America considered the habits, opinions and manners as factors determining any political inclination; Bagehot’s English Constitution contributed likewise to the study of political culture. The political culture of a society consists of fundamental beliefs and values determining the context of a political action. Political culture is of course merely one aspect of politics, but it is a highly significant one. Emerging from the specific historical experience of nations and groups, it provides a subjective perception of history and politics. As Robert Daniels wrote: Political culture should be approached as a system that is both continuous and changeable, that steadily absorbs new infusions from its historical experiences and contacts, while older elements are eroded, metamorphosed, or sloughed off.2 Despite its failings, political culture still offers the best approach for understanding the collapse of communism and the prospects for Russian democracy. It remains therefore a unique tool for understanding the future of Russian politics. 44

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Our first task will be to look at the existing definitions and concepts for the notion of ‘political culture’. Our objective will not only be to confront these existing definitions and concepts and determine which one best suits the Russian case, but also to understand the rationale behind this unusual association of culture and politics. Once this first step is achieved, we will be able to test our findings with Russian history. Our goal is to draw on Russian history, from the Mongol yoke to the demise of the USSR, to identify the main features of Russian political culture. This analysis will notably include an approach to the autocratic and democratic tendencies of Russian political culture, and to the reaction of local civil society to these opposing variants. Based on this study, we should be in a position to assess what remains from these historical experiences, and what characterises today’s Russian political culture. We will inter alia have to answer to the question of whether or not this culture is of dominant autocratic or democratic nature. In doing so, we will make sure that our conclusions are underpinned by concrete examples, especially by applying them to the case of the 1993 Russian constitution.

Definition and concept Before taking the discussion any further, it is essential to make clear which meaning is to be attributed to ‘political culture’ in the present work, since this term has been defined in all too great a variety of ways. According to Sidney Verba, as we use the term ‘political culture’, it refers to the system of beliefs about patterns of political interaction and political institutions. It refers not to what is happening in the world of politics, but how people perceive these happenings. And these beliefs can be of manifold kinds: they can be empirical beliefs about what the current state of political life is; they can be beliefs as to the goals that should be pursued in political life; and these beliefs may have an important expressive or emotional dimension.3 Lucian Pye argued similarly that political culture is a ‘set of attitudes, beliefs and sentiments which give order and meaning to the political process and which provide the underlying assumptions and rules that govern behaviour in the political system’, or to put it succinctly the ‘manifestation in aggregate form of the psychological and subjective dimensions of politics’.4 By the same token, Gabriel Almond sees political culture as: ‘the particular pattern of orientations to political action’. Every political system, he suggested, is embedded within a particular pattern and therefore constrained by it. Through the understanding of these constraints, analysts might eventually learn to foresee the development of political systems.5 Stephen White also viewed political culture as a behavioural as well as a psychological concept. According to this author, political culture may be defined as: the attitudinal and behavioural matrix within which the political system is located. The political culture both expresses and influences the 45

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patterns of political belief and behaviour within a given political system: it informs the actions of political actors; comprehends political symbols, foci of identification and fundamental beliefs and values; and generally both reflects and influences popular orientations towards the institutions and practices of government.6 According to White: Political culture must be regarded as both ‘causing’ and ‘caused’: as a variable which mediates between the political system and its environment, providing a framework within which patterns of political belief and behaviour historically considered, can be located, and as a factor which will influence and constrain – though not determine – future patterns of development in a political system.7 Robert C. Tucker equally assumed that patterns of action and state of mind mutually influence one another and that both must form part of the definition of political culture.8 According to Tucker, ‘a culture is a society’s customary way of life, comprising both accepted modes of thought and belief and accepted patterns of conduct. Political culture is everything in a culture that pertains to government and politics’.9 In so defining political culture, political scientists have parted company with many anthropologists. The term ‘political culture’ links the study of politics to sociological and anthropological works on culture.10 It was Voltaire who first put aside dynasties, kings and battles, and sought what is fundamental in history, namely culture, as it is present in beliefs, in customs and in forms of government.11 ‘Political culture’ is not unconnected with ‘culture’ in the widest social sense. On the contrary, it is closely related to cultural values and more general orientations. It focuses attention, however, on that part of a culture which bears relevance to politics.12 By ‘culture’, we mean that historically created definition of the situation which individuals acquire by virtue of participation in or contact with groups that tend to share ways of life that are in particular respects and in their total configuration distinctive.13 Cultures being matters of habit and its transmission through a society’s agencies of acculturation, they are relatively persistent through time although they do undergo changes, especially in the modern age. In no instance of a revolution is the break with the past culture total. No matter how culturally innovative a revolution may be – in the sense of creating new institutions, beliefs, rituals, ideals and symbols – the national cultural ethos lingers on in many ways, and more persistently in some areas of life than in others. As a process of adaptation occurs, elements of the nation’s pre-revolutionary cultural past are assimilated into the revolutionary new culture, which thus take shape as an amalgam of the old and new. Fundamental political beliefs are particularly relevant to the study of change. 46

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The study of political culture leads invariably to the study of political socialisation, to the learning experiences by which a political culture is passed on from generation to generation and to the situations under which political cultures change. The study of political culture may also lead to a new perspective on the political history of a nation by which one focuses on the ways in which basic political beliefs are affected by the memories of political events. From the cultural point of view, we would look at political history not so much as a series of objective events, but as a series of events that may be interpreted quite differently by different people and whose effects on future events depend upon this interpretation. An event will thus be interpreted in terms of previously held beliefs.

Russian political–cultural heritage: from the Mongol yoke to the dissolution of the Soviet Union But in seeking the roots of political culture one must look beyond the direct political experiences of the individual. The political memories passed from generation to generation and the ways these memories are formed are crucial. One is forced to consider the historical experiences of a nation from the point of view of their impact on political beliefs.14 The importance of not neglecting previous political experiences lies in the fact that historical accounts are necessary for an understanding of how a particular culture has evolved. In this regard, Gabriel Almond suggested that ‘political culture can result from powerful historical experiences such as military collapse, occupation, forced migration, imaginative constitutional engineering, and economic reconstruction’.15 The often long and complicated historical events by which a nation was formed are thus likely to have a significant impact on subsequent political behaviour.16 Autocracy Oh yes, we must have a Republic, but we must have a good Tsar at its head.17

Russian political culture is primarily rooted in the historical experience of centuries of autocracy. Since at least medieval times, Russia has been successively ruled by a series of powerful autocratic monarchs. Parliamentary and legal institutions remained weak and undeveloped. Stephen White even sees autocracy as the defining principle in Russia’s history: Russians have viewed citizenship not as a legal expression of independent spheres but as submission to a patrimonial authority. Political institutions, especially those which might aggregate popular demands and constrain the exercise of monarchical power were always weak and poorly articulated. The Russian government, by contrast, was highly centralised and extensive in scope. Hence the political attachments of the majority of the citizen body were predominantly to the tsar himself, rather than to institutions 47

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within which popular sovereignty might have reposed or to parties which might have competed for representation within them.18 Autocracy was also, to some extent, the price the Russian people had to pay for their self-preservation. The country’s geography undoubtedly favoured a development process of this kind: Russia is situated on an immense plain with no physical barriers to foreign invasions or cultural influences from East and West. Mongols, Poles, Germans and others have taken advantage of this geographical vulnerability to conquer and despoil the Russian land. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Russian opposition to the Tartar yoke contributed to the consolidation of power by the Moscow princes. Their struggle against foreign domination and internal dissent truly represents a predominant theme of Russian political culture: the interplay between centralised power symbolising stability and security against anarchy. The danger of chaos and disorder provided all necessary justifications for further concentration of power in the hands of the State, with the explicit support of the people.19 Russia’s historical experience is full of examples when eventual democratic maturation was sacrificed to order and stability. In this respect, we should bear in mind that most of the Russian people are not really concerned about who establishes order, how it is to be achieved and what it implies. The Russian mass consciousness tends to associate this kind of regime with implicit notions of order rather than obvious dictatorship. As Russell Bova aptly suggested: Authoritarianism is best viewed not as a fundamental but as an instrumental value of the political culture, and non-democratic, hierarchical patterns of authority might be said to be the empirical manifestation of the primary importance attached to order.20 By the late fifteenth century, the Tartar power had collapsed and the political and cultural subordination of the Russians to the Mongols and to Byzantium came to an end. The Moscow princes, beginning with Ivan III, proclaimed themselves tsars and their autocratic power created the elementary requirements for a huge expansion of the Russian State in the next centuries.21 The principle of autocratic rule became identified with legitimate government for most Russians. In this respect, the famous historian Richard Pipes described the Muscovite system of government as patrimonial: The tsar’s absolute and unconstrained authority rested upon his ownership of the country’s resources, down to his individual subjects. As a result of this concept of patrimonial ownership, a tsar could demand unlimited service from his subjects, who, for their part, lacked any collective or individual rights.22 During the sixteenth century, Ivan IV completed the unification of Russia from the Caspian to the White Sea. The tsar already symbolised the unique source 48

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of authority and power. Under Ivan the Terrible the autocracy reached its paroxysm.23 In the beginning of the eighteenth century, Peter the Great introduced a number of innovations designed to consolidate his view of an unconstrained monarchy.24 The main countervailing institution Peter rejected was the Orthodox Church which lost its traditional function of acting as a moral restraint upon the monarch. The Russian Church became an instrument of the State purely designed to support the policies of the monarch. Nevertheless, in times of relative governmental weakness, the autocratic power could soon be endangered by the natural restoration of the traditional principles of Russian political culture: an autocracy constrained by popular will and by religious tradition. In the nineteenth century, Nicholas I faced this same dilemma: how to combine autocracy and a civil society indispensable to the State’s own purposes. In order to rejoin State and society, he provided an ideological justification for the regime based on the ideas of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality. The Iron Tsar’s attempt to impose a narrow view of autocratic privilege only exacerbated public discontent, and led to an explosion of journals and societies that openly challenged the very premises of the autocracy and asked what form of government best suited Russia’s needs. His conservative approach also failed because of the more complex and independent nature of the Russian society than in Petrine times. Profound changes in Russian culture culminated in the Decembrist movement of young officers who returned from the Napoleonic campaigns. The continuing development of the civil society also included the emergence of an educated public and the birth of an intelligentsia. Russian intellectuals divided into Westernisers and Slavophiles, and both recognised the need to constrain absolute autocracy, though they disagreed on what forms restriction should take. If Nicholas I seemed to favour the Petrine solution to the dilemma, Alexander II (1855–81) tended to promote the ‘Catherine’ pole. The tsar ‘Liberator’, was more aware of the urgent need to reform civil society, starting with the emancipation of the serfs. His far-reaching ‘Great Reforms’ also affected the military, the justice system, urban and rural administration and education. And yet, here again, the tsar’s enlightened autocracy was unable to define and control the reform process of the civil society from above.25 This inability to provide a model of autocratic rule for a rapidly developing civil society further undermined Nicholas II’s reign. The last Romanov obstinately refused to acknowledge Russia’s civil society. In Nicholas II’s view, Russian society was to be guided by the immutable rule of autocracy. As a Russian historian has written of tsar Nicholas: He believed that he alone was responsible for the destiny of Russia and that he would answer for this trust before the throne of the Almighty. Some might assist and others might obstruct him, but God would judge him alone for his custodianship of Russia. As the responsibility was solely his, so was the power.26 49

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One consequence of the weak articulation of representative institutions was a highly personalised attachment to political authority, and in particular to the person of the tsar. It is not surprising therefore that the dramatic events of January 1905 brought confusion into people’s minds. Indeed, popular uprisings which periodically convulsed Russian society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were almost never directed against the tsar himself. Their target was far more frequently the boyar aristocracy, which was typically supposed to have removed the tsar from effective control of the nation’s affairs and from whose maleficent attentions the rebels generally proposed to deliver him. This tendency to conceive political authority in personalised terms was reflected also in the widely used term ‘Batyushka Tsar’ (or ‘little father Tsar’), emphasising the personal nature of the bond between the tsar and his subjects, and in popular proverb and folklore. Some proverbs of the nineteenth century ran as follows: ‘Without the Tsar, the country is widowed’; ‘God in the sky, the Tsar on earth’: ‘The people are the body, and the Tsar its head’.27 The personified nature of political authority is apparent also in the words used to refer to entities such as ‘the State’ and ‘government’. The Russian word for ‘state’, gosudarstvo, for instance, is simply a derivation from the word for ‘lord’ or ‘ruler’, gosudar. Gosudar is in turn a word of ancient origin, the original meaning of which was that of a lord or master (dominus) whose powers extended over both people and things (occasionally it could even mean ‘slave-owner’). From the mid-fourteenth century it came to be used, in much the same sense, to connote political authority. The closest English equivalent of the word gosudarstvo might be ‘dominion’ or ‘patrimony’; either term, at least, would better convey the notion that the State was not simply a legal expression but essentially the private property of its ruler. Unfortunately, the Russians ‘had favoured a paternalistic state, with extremely wide powers which it vigorously exercised to guide and control the nation’s destiny, but which yet served the interests of the citizen benignly’.28 This paternalistic model, which likened social groups to wilful children, remained the implicit ideological foundation of Nicholas II’s regime. In its lack of vision and inability to provide a model of autocratic rule for a rapidly modernising society, it provided no adequate rationale for the regime’s own policy of rapid change. Nicholas II had a wealth of possible historical models of autocracy upon which to rely but his image of autocracy harkened back to the Muscovite period, shutting him off from the realities of the society he sought to rule.29 In the years leading up to the 1917 Revolution, the old assumptions about the divine right to rule of tsar Nicholas II were challenged in people’s minds by the perceived incompetence of the ruling authorities as well as by the increasing influence of Western liberal ideas and Marxist ideas. Nevertheless, the events of October 1917 took everyone by surprise, not least of all the Bolsheviks. The inept handling of the war, of food distribution in the cities, the collapse of the monarchy and the internecine fighting within the ranks of the Provisional Government were testimony of the weakness of the declining institutions. However, the autocratic–paternalistic ideal survived. This persistence can partly be explained by the social chaos and vulnerability that engulfed Russia 50

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during the civil war. Many hoped to bring an end to this second ‘Time of Troubles’ by supporting a strong central authority, since the monarchy had always symbolised stability and continuity in times of crisis. Bolshevism subtly replaced the monarchical principle with the notion of a guiding force represented by the communist party and thus succeeded in combining traditional conceptions of legitimate autocratic authority with Soviet institutions. The political culture of the USSR was thus naturally shaped by the patterns of orientations to government which were inherited from the pre-revolutionary period.30 Very explicit is Stalin’s highly selective embrace of tsarist symbolism and emphasis on Russian leadership that seemed to confirm that the communist regime now embraced the very same values that it had been trying so hard to eliminate. Any account of Soviet political culture must thus largely rest upon an assessment of the extent to which distinctively communist values and beliefs have absorbed and superseded preexisting traditional patterns. Although the world of politics and political science are both in periods of rapid change, in both there is continuity with the past. As Stephen White aptly described: The new Soviet regime inherited a large, heterogeneous and backward empire from its tsarist predecessors. It also inherited a distinctive and deeply-rooted pattern of orientation to government which we shall term the traditional Russian political culture. It may be helpful at this point briefly to recall some of its essential features. Representative institutions, as we have noted, were weakly articulated and ineffective; levels of popular participation and representation were low; and governing style was centralised, bureaucratic and highly authoritarian. Popular political attachments, in consequence, were highly personalised; and political knowledge and experience, outside an extremely limited circle, was virtually non-existent. The scope of government was unusually broad: it extended not only to those spheres of life in which other governments of the time were active, but also into economic entrepreneurship and control, religion and morals, and the administration of justice.31 The famous historian Richard Pipes shared quite the same opinion. According to him, patrimonial institutions have survived for so long that they are now accepted as legitimate by the Russian people. It is this legitimacy that explains the continuity of Russian political–cultural heritage. As Richard Pipes wrote in 1987: A seventeenth-century Russian resuscitated today in Moscow . . . would not find the system all that different or hard to understand. There is a tsar, only he is called the general secretary, there are his boyars – the Politburo, indeed the whole nomenklatura – and there is no private property, naturally; law is what the authorities state they want to do and, if they can enforce it, you do it. Moreover, you can no more think of changing the government than you can of changing the climate.32 51

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Democracy The voice of the people is the voice of God.33

Although the concept ‘autocracy’ in Russia embraces a rich historical experience, it did not go unchallenged. Confronted with the tsarist overall power, the Russian civil society soon questioned autocratic claims. The seeds of liberal freedom already emerged in feudal Novgorod and Pskov (1136–1478) with town–assembly (veche) democracy. Later, in pre-Petrine Russia with its strong peasant community (mir), then in post-reform Russia with the democratic apparatus of the local authorities (zemstvos), and finally with the State Duma. We cannot therefore consider democracy in Russia as a pure Western invention.34 The country’s early political development saw the emergence of popular assemblies (veche) which were quite similar to those which existed in the same period in the West, and which also placed important constraints upon the exercise of princely rule.35 These veche, which existed in the major Russian towns of the twelfth century and later, were deliberative assemblies of towns’ populations. They contributed to the development of a reasonably stable political order and Russian towns avoided the degeneration into tyranny that befell so many Italian city-states at the same time. The Tartar invasion of the thirteenth century, however, brought this pattern of development to an end in most Russian towns. In the early tsarist period, a few popular institutions such as the mir (selfregulating peasant communities, increasingly common after the sixteenth century, responsible for preserving public order, regulating land use and collecting taxes)36 sought independence from the state. But their autonomy was ultimately frustrated by widespread ignorance, conservatism and a respect for patriarchal authority. The mir endured in various forms until the early 1930s when it was replaced by yet another form of communal life, the Soviet collective farm. The Muscovite autocracy was also limited by the tsar’s constant need to listen to the Boyar Duma, a council of senior noblemen. These acted as advisers to the tsar and discussed matters of state with him. Early tsars felt thus morally bound by the established tradition to listen to the boyars. Although the Boyar Duma survived until the end of the seventeenth century, it was an institution of little significance.37 In times of crisis, the tsar was also expected to consult a ‘Council of All the Land’ to advise him on important issues. This council, known as zemskii sobor (sometimes referred to in English as ‘popular council’),38 was an assembly chosen by the people to advise the tsar on matters of domestic and foreign policy. Although the zemskii sobor had no formal authority, ‘it is only for such assemblies in the seventeenth century that any serious comparison with the parliaments of the West can be attempted’.39 As for Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, they exceeded their authority in many ways and all institutions of democratic character were used as instruments of State power. Catherine II re-established the collective contract between the gentry and the monarch and Russian absolutism was restored in its pre-Petrine

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shape.40 Fully aware of the possibility of social unrest, Catherine II recognised the necessity to give the gentry, townspeople and peasants some sense of involvement in politics. She therefore established social institutions to provide a connecting link with and lever over society. In the nineteenth century, Alexander II initially praised a certain democratic orientation and abolished serfdom. The emancipation of the serfs led to the inevitable expansion of the local self-government. The first step in this direction came in 1864, with the creation of local organs of government known in English as the zemstvo movement.41 Different segments of the population and social classes were now participating in local government and could have an influence in the political life distinct from, and often opposed to, the government. Facing a newly born civil society with a threatening aspect, the government began to curb the zemstvos’ autonomy through various decrees. And yet, most zemstvo leaders advocated the monarchy and saw in it a source of stability and continuity for Russia. Their intention was to cooperate with the government in order to ease society’s transition from absolutism to constitutionalism.42 However, the government maintained its policy of regarding the zemstvo as its ideological enemy, delayed the institutionalisation of popular aspirations, and so did much to bring about the monarch’s demise. The case of the zemstvos is a very explicit illustration of the dilemma of the Russian autocracy with respect to independent social institutions. Although it initiated important reforms, the State proved unable to cope with the numerous tasks that fell upon it. As for the zemstvos, they were simply ill-prepared to create new bonds between State and society. Had the reform process begun earlier, the zemstvo movement might have had more time to deepen the role of local government, and it might have been capable of providing the necessary support that the autocracy desperately needed in a period of modernisation and economic growth. By the end of 1905, the monarchical principle could no longer pretend to be absolute. The events surrounding the massacre of January 1905, remembered in history as Bloody Sunday, finally led to the transformation of the autocracy into a constitutional monarchy.43 Surprisingly, the establishment of a representative, popularly elected assembly (the State Duma) was not perceived by the Russian people as a radical break with the past, but more as a restoration of the balance between autocratic and popular sovereignty. And yet, Russians had very little knowledge of or attachment to the political institutions by which that central state authority was mediated. Comprehension of party programmes and political institutions, in consequence, appeared to be fairly rudimentary. In the elections to the Third Duma in 1907, for instance, employers sent their clerks and husbands their wives to vote for them, and some voters left in indignation when the polling clerks refused to tell them for whom to cast their vote.44 It was thus not until the early twentieth century that institutions of an embryonically parliamentary character finally matured in Russia. Although the State Duma was still a vulnerable body whose powers were constantly in danger of curtailment by a frustrated autocrat, its powers were very extensive indeed. In 1917, civil society45 finally replaced the tsarist regime with a republic 53

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committed to duly elected popular representation. Obviously, Russia’s political culture cannot be considered within the confined framework of a single autocratic tradition. As the antithesis of the statist tradition in Russian political thought, democratic claims contradicted the political beliefs of the official ideology, whether it be tsarist or Soviet. More recent examples are also very explicit. In the mid-1980s, before the start of political reform, most experts regarded Russians as having a distinctive set of political cultural attitudes which were exclusively supportive of a strong State which restricted individual freedom. Perestroika, however, provided sufficient evidence of the inadequacy of this received wisdom. Civic activism after 1987 demonstrated a strong pull from past authoritarian practices and was clearly inconsistent with the image of a politically passive population. Undoubtedly, it is possible to find democratic trends in Russian history and the struggle for Russian civil society can be traced from Muscovite times through to the collapse of communism and beyond.46

A political culture for Russia When legislative power is united with executive power in a single person or in a single body of the magistracy, there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch or senate that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyrannically. Nor is there liberty if the power of judging is not separate from legislative power and from executive power. If it were joined to legislative power, the power over the life and liberty of the citizens would be arbitrary, for the judge would be the legislator. If it were joined to executive power, the judge could have the force of an oppressor. All would be lost if the same man or the same body of principal men, either of nobles, or of the people, exercised these three powers: that of making the laws, that of executing public resolutions, and that of judging the crimes of the disputes of individuals.47

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev’s view was that Russia would never return to authoritarian forms of government.48 He truly believed that the Russian society was now more inclined to political freedoms it had inherited during the years of glasnost and perestroika. The experience of the early postcommunist years imposes though a more cautious approach. It soon appeared that the same people were still in power, even if they no longer called themselves communists. They had very comparable privileges, and often the same buildings and offices. Although democratic elections were held, the people could hardly exercise any control over the actions of the government. The rule of law was steadily ignored, political parties of all kinds were vulnerable and inefficiently sustained, the State itself was ruled by personal interests and appeared to be incompetent to provide stability. In spite of many similarities, this was no longer communism, but neither was it democracy, at least in its conventional form. 54

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Russia’s competing political cultures Two political cultures have existed side by side in Russia for centuries: an authoritarian variant and a democratic variant. Most political attitudes were supportive of a strong State with little societal input and almost no mass participation. Historical vulnerability to invasion and the recurrent outbreak of civil unrest had progressively led to an autocratic form of government. To this standard interpretation of Russia’s historic political culture, some scholars opposed the existence of a counterculture based on democratic premises. Nevertheless, it would be hard to think of a worst case for successful democratisation than Russia. It is well known that the Russian democratic tradition is weak and democratic claims have never had strong roots in the central political culture. There had been no radical break, not just between Soviet and post-communist Russia, but between both of them and their tsarist predecessor. The consensus of opinion in the Soviet period was that this political culture had largely persisted, with the only important difference, once the fundamentals of the Soviet system had been incorporated in the 1920s and 1930s, being that the rulers were the communist party elites rather than the tsar and his entourage.49 Support for democracy on this basis is thus shallow even if it stems from a long enduring culture of Russia’s. Russia has thus a dominant political culture, the culture of autocracy and a subordinate democratic culture. As Harry Eckstein wrote, ‘the latter emerges periodically, but only in relatively short-lived reactions against failures of the dominant culture. It is neither deeply rooted nor generally shared, its lack of depth being indicated by the fact that it has always been difficult to institutionalise’.50 He also added that this democratic culture was more some kind of ‘periodic protest by the disaffected rather than a genuine alternative set of liberal orientations throughout either the elite or the public’.51 Obviously, while historians debate the relative importance of subcultural variations from this dominant theme, it is simply impossible to get away from the predominantly authoritarian political nature of the Soviet and Russian political experience.

Russia’s political culture: between Charybdis and Scylla Russia’s democratic institutions are not rooted in long democratic practice and coexist with centuries-old traditions of authoritarian rule. There is no doubt that Russia has developed a multi-party system, free press and has held democratic elections. However, paradoxically, while the elections were a triumph for the process of democratisation, the results threatened to undermine democracy itself: never in Russian history have the communists been as legitimate as during that period. Their victory could symbolise the end of Western-type institutions and a return to authoritarianism. Therefore, the emergence of Western-type democratic institutions is a crucial but not sufficient prerequisite for Russia’s transition to democracy. Attitudes of the old period coexist with new values, in ways which are 55

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often contradictory. It follows logically that Russian politics in the immediate future is likely to continue to be dominated by this process of settling new ways of doing things, and it may be some time before Russia is governed by leaders who articulate a new set of values which can motivate and inspire her citizens. It should be seen as something which is in a process of transformation, where we have some idea of the starting point, but cannot know the final destination. What it is possible to do, however, is to identify some of the elements out of which it is made, elements which might in some possible futures grow and become dominant. The December 1993 Russian constitution is very explicit in this regard. It consolidates indeed some of the major democratic gains of the perestroika in Russia – freedom of speech, basic human rights, public elections and popular assemblies – but strongly reduces their influence upon the super presidential power.52 In this respect, the constitutional order of 1993 seems to have some potential for being well adapted to the Russian authority culture. It is based on the conduct of elections but also locates extraordinarily strong, virtually autocratic, central powers in the president who is accountable and subordinate to no one. Russia’s 1993 constitution: a case study for autocratic rule When Boris Yeltsin’s constitution was presented to the Russian people in December 1993, there was no real alternative – it was either Yeltsin’s constitution or political chaos. In the absence of any turnout, voters approved a constitution, tailor-made for Yeltsin, granting him broad powers reminiscent of those exercised by Russian tsars such as Peter the Great. A system with a powerful president fitted well into Russia’s history, replete with autocrats beginning with the tsars and ending up in the dictatorships of Lenin and Stalin. In this regard, the new constitution was merely restoring the autocratic rule of the past. And yet, this new constitutional design was a real achievement in comparison with the 1978 Soviet Constitution.53 It referred to ‘ideological pluralism’, ‘political diversity’ and a multiparty system; and there could be no ‘compulsory ideology’.54 At the same time, there were also serious flaws in the new constitution. First, it was not a document based on a broad consensus among the various Russian political forces but a document unilaterally imposed by Yeltsin. Second, the huge amount of power granted to the president as the guarantor of the constitution and the absence of any counterweight to executive power violated the principles of the separation of powers.55 This aspect was very explicit in the work of the Constitutional Court, designed so as to regulate the behaviour of the president as well as the highest levels of government. Its judges were independent and inviolable,56 but appointed via nomination by the president himself.57 Yeltsin’s 1993 constitution proclaims itself to be a document committed to the rule of law and the separation of powers. In reality, it essentially legitimises the autocratic power of a president who ‘may act outside the written law and may, 56

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without any real possibility of reproach, disregard duly enacted laws’.58 The possibility for the president to rule the country as an autocrat also stems from other various constitutional provisions. Besides his capacity to govern by decree, his power to dissolve the Duma without referring to public or parliamentary opinion59 deprives the deputies of any autonomy, freedom or independence. As a consequence, the only way for the Duma to avoid dismissal is to acquiesce to the president on a permanent basis. Under the 1993 Constitution, the president can hardly be impeached.60 As Christina McPherson wrote: The Duma would have to accuse the president of treason or other serious crime, and the Supreme Court must confirm the crime. Since treason is defined as advocating the overthrow of the government, and the president is the head of the government under the constitution, it is questionable whether the Duma could in fact bring treason charges against a Russian president, since the president may not commit treason against himself.61 The formal separation of powers thus appears to be almost completely fictive. During his presidential reign, Yeltsin governed as a tsar, rather than as a president. The emperor, the father of the nation is not supposed to share power with any other institution. Moreover, Russia’s previous parliament had not responded to the nation’s needs and many people thought that a strong president was the only viable system. The autocratic political tradition of leadership unconstrained by institutional arrangements seemed to appeal to Yeltsin’s temperament, evident from his repeated references to himself as a ‘Tsar’. This was a rhetorical affirmation of his preference for bypassing institutions, his personalisation of power and the creation of a type of Byzantine court politics around his presidency. Criticism of Yeltsin’s constitution came from all sides. Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the communist party in Russia, stated that ‘the pharaoh, the tsar, and the general secretary did not have such powers as the president in the constitution’.62 A political commentator of the Russian newspaper Izvestia said that the only real checks and balances in Russia are Yeltsin’s personal qualities and inclinations. Critics claimed that the composition of the Parliament after the elections would matter little if the constitution passed, since Yeltsin could overcome any objections to his policies. It is commonly accepted that these broad powers given to the Russian president63 are most appropriate for a country still immature when dealing with democracy. A country that had elections but lacked the rule of law could only be a ‘pseudodemocracy’64 or to be more precise an ‘illiberal democracy’.65 This is not to say that Russians are not supportive of democratic values, in that for example they reply to pollsters that they approve of regular elections, of a range of civil and political rights, of a multi-party system and so forth.66 However, as Margaret Mead aptly described, long-standing psychological attitudes of the Russian 57

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people are ‘prone to extreme swings in mood from exhilaration to depression, hating confinement and authority and yet feeling that a strong central authority was necessary to keep their own violent impulses in check’.67 Support for democracy has no real roots in an accustomed central political culture and the social context is inhospitable to it in almost all respects.

Conclusion Analysing NATO–Russia relations from a Russian perspective does not only require a fair understanding of the Russian identity solely. It also implies getting a clearer picture of what the Russian political identity is about. The purpose of this chapter was to look at political culture as the manifestation of a country’s political identity, and to apply it to the Russian case. We first based our study on the existing academic work that has so far been produced on the very question of political culture. Only by looking at the theoretical and conceptual dimensions of political culture, would we be able to apply these generics to Russia’s special case. Our study permitted us to acknowledge the close links that bind political science with the sociological and anthropological approaches to culture. In other words, we proved that cultural factors did intervene in the determination of politics. In this context, given that culture is composed of permanent features, we can deduct that politics is also made of permanent elements, some of which are derived from culture itself. This, however, on no account deprives either politics or culture and, to a greater extent, political culture, from its evolutionary nature. Against this background, it became imperative for us to determine these permanent components of Russian political culture. Our previous work already led us to the identification of one of these components. Indeed, Orthodoxy, as a key element of culture in general, and a major determinant of Russian culture in particular, gave us some insights as to what some of these components may be. In this way, we can say that conservatism, totalitarianism and anti-Western feelings, which are characteristics of Orthodox values, will also mark Russian political culture. Of course, this will not appear in Russian political culture as such; it will inevitably evolve through interaction with the other defining parameters of this culture. History was instrumental in helping us to identify these other parameters. It soon became apparent that autocracy was one of the main characteristics of Russian political culture. Indeed, successive reigns and rules in Russia were all of autocratic nature. This became so common throughout history that, in the eyes of the average Russian citizen, autocracy is inseparable from the notion of legitimate government. Added to the fact that paternalism is also a common way of perceiving political power in Russia and its relations with the people, autocracy will be all the more accepted by the Russians as it is paternalist. Turning to democracy and to Russia’s historical experience of that concept, we realised that the relative democratisation of the Russian political system throughout centuries did not result from a genuine desire to apply such a Western value, 58

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but rather derived from a slow and progressive internal evolution of Russian civil society, consisting at the same time in the questioning of the extent of autocracy and in a social inclination for ‘communalism’. What then motivated the Russian people was more of a practical/pragmatic nature than ‘confessional’. In other words, one cannot say that the Russians ever truly believed in democracy for their country. They, however, managed to take from democracy what could be useful to the conduct of politics. As a Russian soldier said in 1917: ‘We must have a Republic, but we must have a good Tsar at its head’. On no account did this show of democracy ever threaten autocracy. This remains valid in the aftermath of the end of the Soviet Union. At that time, Russian governments opted for democracy only to gain Western support. Showing an acceptable appearance of democracy was thus a way of avoiding Russia’s isolation from the Western club. Again, pragmatism prevailed; and Russian political culture remains today one of dominant autocratic and subordinate democratic nature. The 1993 constitution is very explicit in this respect. Indeed, several democratic values were reaffirmed in the wording of the new constitution. Freedom of speech, human rights, public pluralist elections and popular assemblies composed that democratic touch of the Russian constitution. However, this democratic connotation was always subordinated to numerous conditions; its influence was significantly weakened. At the same time, autocracy remained the rule for the functioning of the Russian State. Political power remained ultra-centralised, subordinated to no one, accountable to no one. The president retains the last word in all events; one can hardly impeach him. In other words, he can decide on any action without referring to public opinion or the Parliament. The Russian State under the 1993 constitution is thus one where separation and sharing of powers are only fictitious. In conclusion, ‘illiberal democracy’ is probably the notion that best defines Russian political culture. Russia appears democratic from the outside but, in depth, it lacks some essential characteristics of other liberal democracies. In order to assess to what extent the uniqueness of Russian identity affects its relations with the West, we will now look at NATO–Russia relations from December 1991 to May 2002.

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5 THE EVOLUTION OF THE RUSSIAN ATTITUDE TO NATO

Treat your friend as if he will one day be your enemy, and your enemy as if he will one day be your friend. (Decimus Laberius, First Century BC)

Introduction In the case of NATO and Russia, the greatest challenge in the aftermath of the Cold War, was that of putting aside more than 50 years of confrontation and adversarial relations, and embarking on new relations of a cooperative nature. Let’s not forget that NATO’s initial raison d’être was the protection of its members against the expansion of the Soviet Union; and that the grounds for Russia’s supremacy in the Soviet time throughout the Cold War rested largely on its opposition to NATO. Yet, the imperatives of the new international order gave no other choice to the two former enemies but to work together on a new type of relationship. It was simply impossible that, in a world ruled by globalisation, Russia could be excluded from the international scene, and from the different arrangements that bound its Western neighbours together. When it became obvious to both NATO and Russia that they would have to build some kind of cooperative relationship, the identity gap between Russia and the countries composing the North Atlantic Alliance came suddenly to the fore. At that time, many experts advocated that this identity gap would always be an impediment to a true rapprochement between the two parties. In our first part, we identified the main features of Russian identity, and determined the extent to which these features differed from what we can present as the common identity aspects of the Allied countries. We concluded that Russia could be defined as an illiberal democracy as opposed to the liberal democracies that characterise the Euro-Atlantic countries. We also learnt that Russia is by nature rather anti-West. In this context, the perspective of cooperative relations between NATO and Russia indeed seems full of pitfalls. It is therefore crucial at this stage to assess the impact of this identity gap between Russia and the NATO countries on their relations. Not only will we try to see how this identity gap has manifested itself in NATO–Russia relations since 60

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the end of the Cold War, but we will also try to determine whether or not this undeniable identity gap stands as the major obstacle to cooperation between the two parties. The approach that we will follow in this chapter will be a chronological one, spanning a period from the end of the Cold War to the creation of the NATO– Russia Council (NRC) in May 2002. First, we will focus on the immediate aftermath of the Cold War and the subsequent transition through which Russia on the one hand, and NATO on the other, had to go through until the final signature of the Founding Act in May 1997. Our objective will be to demonstrate how Russia and NATO finally came to the conclusion that cooperation was inevitable. Second, we will look at the Kosovo conflict as the first event that challenged the very existence of this newly born relationship of not yet true cooperative nature. We will see how fundamental differences between Russia and the EuroAtlantic countries re-emerged suddenly in the face of difficulties. Third, we will analyse what impact the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States had on NATO–Russia relations, and how this event changed radically the turn of these relations. More specifically, we will try to understand why the Kosovo conflict was detrimental to NATO–Russia relations and why, on the other hand, the 11 September 2001 events gave a real impetus to enhanced cooperation between the two parties. In that context, we will ask ourselves whether the peculiar Russian identity was really the stumbling block, or whether other reasons may better explain the difficulty of building cooperation between NATO and Russia.

From the end of the Cold War to the Founding Act Russia in transition and evolution of Russian foreign policy On 12 June 1990 the parliament of the RSFR (Russian Soviet Federative Republic) proclaimed the sovereignty of Russia, which, though as a separate entity, continued to be part of the Soviet Union. By the end of 1991, the USSR had ceased to exist and was replaced by the CIS.1 Russia progressively received diplomatic recognition from about 160 states and inherited the international rights and obligations of the former Soviet Union, including permanent membership of the UNSC as well as the seat of the USSR in other international organisations.2 Russia also declared itself responsible for the Soviet Union’s nuclear legacy and had therefore to ensure the observance of nuclear non-proliferation by the other members of the CIS. Russia was both psychologically and politically ready to integrate the emerging European security architecture that was to replace the bipolar organisation of the continent. In the words of the Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, NATO was not an aggressive military bloc but a force for stability in Europe and the world, which should continue its role as the only defence organisation capable of contending with threats to peace.3 For him and those of similar attitude, new 61

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Russian foreign policy was to be oriented mainly towards the West because Western states were Russia’s natural partners and allies. In presenting his arguments, Kozyrev explicitly made reference to the historical legacy of Peter the Great’s diplomacy towards the West. The ideas of Russian messianism and the pursuit of an independent role in line with its great power heritage were either understated or even denied.4 Kozyrev was actually following Mikhail Gorbachev’s New Thinking as expressed in the optimistic concept of the ‘Common European Home’.5 Like Gorbachev, Kozyrev understood that the improvement of relations with the West would require certain sacrifices from Russia. These were along the lines of Russia’s past consent to German unification and to united Germany’s NATO membership in 1990, the support for UNSC resolutions against Iraq during the Gulf Crisis, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan.6 The failed coup attempt of the Communists in 1991 also reinforced the New Thinking trend and the popularly elected president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, adopted an even more democratic, market-oriented and European–Atlanticist policy. His declared goals were full participation in international economic institutions like the IMF, integration into the democratic community of states and even NATO membership. All these concessions were based on the assumption that Russia would be fully integrated into the club of great powers with equal rights. This, however, had neglected the fact that such integration would follow the Western terms because of the ‘asymmetry which existed in the West’s favour; the pillars of all-European security were, and could only be, based on Western structures’.7 On most issues, Russia merely followed the Western lead. As Nadia Arbatova stressed it, ‘this policy became a vulnerable target of right-wing opposition, attacking Ministerstvo Inostrannykh Del [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] (MID) for selling out Russian interests to the West’.8 Any condescending action toward Russia was brought to the fore and exploited by the opponents of a pro-Western policy. These antagonist forces sought to provoke a crisis in Russia’s relations with the West, so that the country would once again find itself in a malign encirclement, tormented by the ‘complex of the besieged’. The Russian leadership, but also society as a whole, could tolerate no longer ‘the millenarian omniscience and cultural insensitivity of many Westerners proffering democracy, coupled with the self-congratulatory rhetoric of victory in the West and the Western tendency to dictate to Russia on foreign policy matters’.9 We should not forget that losing the Cold War had generated a feeling of national humiliation. After the collapse of the Soviet empire, Russia had engaged in a transition from imperial power to a much more modest status and continuously tried to overcome a sort of ‘lost empire syndrome’ through the definition of a new Russian national identity. In this respect, Russia had difficulty in deciding whether it was part of, or in contradistinction to the West.10 Considering their country’s long and close relationship with Asia, Russians were unclear on whether their identity was irreducible to the Western community or a combination of, and bridge between, Western and non-Western identities. Russia was also 62

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affected by the actual loss of lands and the fact of being relegated to the status of a poor state as opposed to the wealthy United States and Western Europe. The Russian Federation appeared to be a pale shadow of the former powerful Soviet Union and despite vast military capabilities, its negotiating position on the international scene was fundamentally affected by internal instability and economic troubles.11 Moscow lost its former predominant influence in the Middle East. Likewise, in Angola, the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) preferred to sign an agreement with the United States; and in Nicaragua, the defeat of the Sandinistas affected Russia’s position in Latin America. In Asia, while the dispute over the Kuril Islands still hampered the normalisation of relations with Japan, former close ties with Vietnam and North Korea had become little more than memories. This loss of influence would soon translate into a revived imperialist foreign policy. From the Second World War until the early 1980s, this course had guided Soviet foreign policy and was based on a close relationship between power and ideology. In the pure realist tradition, the State had to enhance its own power constantly, while at the same time diminishing that of its competitors. Military and geopolitical aspects were more important than economic considerations and ideology was used to justify this yearning for power. But the proportion of military costs in the gross national product cannot rise ad infinitum. In the 1980s, the economic decline could no longer ensure the necessary modernity of the armed forces and thus their effectiveness. For example, the Soviet Union proved incapable of responding to the high technological level of US president Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative and the so-called ‘Star Wars’ programme. Already confronted with a general loss of influence in world affairs, the Russian leadership refused to simply abandon the Great Power status left by the Soviet empire. As a result, it attempted to re-establish its predominance in the entire area of the former Soviet Union. In 1993, Russian President Yeltsin initiated a greater assertiveness in foreign policy by introducing his own ‘Monroe Doctrine’, namely a neo-imperialist policy towards the former Soviet republics, the so-called ‘near abroad’. By putting on the opposition’s political clothes, Yeltsin played the card of pragmatic nationalism, but he also sacrificed the principles of liberal democracy.12 Very explicit were bilateral treaties for continued Russian military presence in most states of the CIS,13 increasing tensions with Ukraine over the Black Sea Fleet14 and Crimea,15 Georgia almost compelled to accept CIS membership and Azerbaijan forced to reduce its ties with Turkey. Greater activism in the near abroad could be perceived as the first signs of ‘military adventurism’, which might lead to confrontation. An unpopular isolated leadership coupled with anti-Western feelings could push it further down that road. Nevertheless, Yeltsin’s new foreign policy preserved its underlying orientation towards partnership with the West. The fact that this policy change was particularly manifest in Russia’s attitude towards the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union resulted from the historical links that bound these states to Russia. It was also caused by the c.25 million ethnic Russians living in the 63

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former Soviet republics and suddenly finding themselves deprived of Moscow’s direct protection.16 Like any country, Russia had the legitimate right to defend its national interests – including the protection of Russian minorities in neighbouring countries – by non-military means. In Georgia, Moldova and Tajikistan, however, these interventions were justified on the ground that Russia had traditional geopolitical interests in the region and therefore had a legitimate right to intervene in its own ‘back yard’. It is commonly accepted that a peacekeeping force must be neutral, requires the consent of the parties and normally forbids immediate neighbours to take any part at all in peacekeeping operations. Russia’s peacekeeping in its near abroad could thus hardly be considered as neutral since it clearly served Russian interests. In 1993, the Russian political leadership adopted a more assertive nationalist attitude based on neo-imperialist convictions, and aimed at restoring the Soviet empire in one form or another. At that time, the new advocates of Russian ‘greatness’ argued that a strategic partnership with the West was pure fiction17 and stressed the Russian legitimate use of force in the ‘near abroad’ and potentially in the ‘far abroad’. These developments were associated with the intensification of an anti-Western sentiment among the Russian elite and the Russian populace. They took place at the very moment when the West struggled to integrate Russia into a comprehensive European order.18 NATO in transition and Russia’s perception of NATO’s initiatives The break up of the Warsaw Pact19 and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union were bound to lead to the self-dissolution of NATO as a military alliance that had completed its initial tasks. However, the Atlantic Alliance did not see any reason why it should share the fate of the Warsaw Pact as an act of fair play. Western countries suggested that NATO should be preserved as a stabilising factor on the international scene. At odds with many theoretical assumptions about alliances dissolving in the absence of a threat, NATO moved to the core of an emerging European cooperative security system. At the London Summit in 1990, the NATO Heads of State and Government acknowledged the recent revolutionary changes in Europe and extended ‘the hand of friendship to former Warsaw Pact adversaries’.20 They invited Gorbachev and other political leaders from Eastern Europe to establish diplomatic liaison and military contacts with NATO. Regrettably, there was at the time no real accord within the Atlantic Alliance over how broad such contacts would be. In December 1990, the North Atlantic Council also recognised the necessity of ‘interlocking institutions’ including NATO, the European Union (EU), the Western European Union (WEU) and the CSCE, which ‘in accordance to their respective responsibilities and purposes could effectively contribute to the creation of a new European security framework’.21 In November 1991, the Rome meeting of the North Atlantic Council adopted a ‘new Strategic Concept’ defining a broader 64

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approach to security based on the ‘unlikely possibility of a major conflict’.22 Post-Cold War threats were less likely to result from ‘calculated aggression against the territory of the Allies’ than from ‘the adverse consequences of instabilities that might arise from the serious economic, social and political difficulties, including ethnic rivalries and territorial disputes, which were faced by many countries in Central and Eastern Europe’.23 Consequently, NATO decided to reduce its reliance on nuclear weapons and to streamline and reorganise its armed forces.24 In this sense, the Alliance’s 1991 Strategic Concept underlined the importance of effective ‘interoperability’ towards ‘smaller but more flexible and mobile forces’.25 Nevertheless, NATO retained Article 5 on collective selfdefence26 and stressed that ‘the Alliance would maintain an adequate military capability and a clear preparedness to act collectively in the common defence’.27 The Alliance also considered new opportunities for a cooperative dialogue with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and by December 1991, created the NACC.28 The NACC brought together NATO members, the former Warsaw Pact states, and after the demise of the Soviet Union, the members of the CIS. NATO’s decision to create the NACC was connected, not least, to the necessity of preserving the CFE Treaty which suffered from a radical change in the military balance on which it was founded. At that time, satisfying the aspirations of Central and Eastern European countries for NATO membership was apparently only of secondary importance.29 As the then permanent representative to NATO, Ambassador William Taft, described it, the NACC was ‘a temporary mechanism to deal with former adversaries’. The objective was rather to ‘promote extended security based on assessments of self-interest by the NATO members’.30 The NACC was a step toward the inclusion of Central and Eastern European countries in NATO, but it was also a way of putting them off when they asked for membership in NATO. It is interesting to note that in December 1991, in a letter to the first meeting of the NACC, Yeltsin declared that Russia, too, had the goal of joining NATO. This letter got no real answer, except for a few comments which stated that inviting new members would make things more complicated for NATO. We cannot but acknowledge that this response was not up to the measure of the historic opportunities and responsibilities at stake.31 From the Russian perspective, although potentially useful as a consultative forum, the NACC presented three major disadvantages. First, its role and objectives were not well defined. Second, it had no decision-making power. Finally, it missed the opportunity of granting Russia the special status that it thought it could claim. Indeed, Russia still believed in its great power status. As this could not be justified economically, Russia was trying to gain, in a rather erratic manner, a distinctive role in the post-Cold War security institutions.32 Furthermore, in the Russian view, Western leaders, although seeking cooperative arrangements with Russia, had de facto decided to reduce the power of any security institution in which Russia had equal status, while at the same time strengthening NATO and the EU in which Russia did not enjoy full equity and was unlikely to do so. This explained Russia’s persistent reproof of NATO’s 65

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decision to remain a ‘defensive alliance’ rather than to initiate the ‘creation of a mechanism for the support of international security’33 to be integrated in the OSCE – where Moscow had substantial decision-making power.34 In the words of Vladimir Baranovsky: The OSCE is by far the most attractive multilateral institution for Russia. It corresponds to many of Russia’s concerns regarding the organisation of the continental political space, and one would expect Russia to make consistent efforts to promote this institution. However, Russia’s attempts to increase the role of the OSCE are often perceived as motivated by the intention to oppose it to NATO – an effort which cannot but discredit any pro-OSCE design.35 It is indeed commonly recognised that ‘the CSCE/OSCE resulted from a Soviet initiative, while NATO has been the main vehicle for US influence in Europe’.36 However, promoting the CSCE/OSCE as the superstructure of the post-Cold War European security system was rather utopian and had no immediate perspective. No major country would have agreed to fully confide its security to such a loose arrangement. Moreover, the CSCE/OSCE requirement for consensus severely inhibits its capacity of action and could render it as ineffective as the former League of Nations in the interwar period.37 Nevertheless, a strengthened OSCE vested with additional mechanisms and the capacity to take practical measures would be more effective in matters like conflict prevention,38 disarmament and minority rights. In addition, there is no doubt that the OSCE has a key role to play in avoiding Russian isolation and in integrating Russia as an equal partner in the European security framework. Most of NATO and Central and Eastern European countries had actually lost interest in the CSCE/OSCE and were unwilling to support this project. The Russian leadership therefore concluded that it had no choice but to enhance formal relations with NATO in order both to influence the Alliance’s transformation and to generate its support for a pan-European security system more appealing to Moscow. On the Western side, the challenge was to find a creative way to keep Russia facing West, without granting too much authority to the CSCE/OSCE. The solution was found in the Partnership for Peace (PfP). The Partnership for Peace The PfP was probably the first real far-reaching NATO initiative towards former Warsaw Pact and other CSCE/OSCE countries since the NACC in 1991. Les Aspin, former US Secretary of State for Defence and chief of the Pentagon, enumerated the different advantages of the PfP as follows: ‘Firstly, it does not redivide Europe. Secondly, it sets up the right incentives for those wishing to join. Thirdly, the PfP requires partners to make a real contribution (financial resources, personnel, equipment). Fourthly, it keeps NATO at the centre of European 66

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security concerns, and thereby keeps American involvement at the centre of Europe. Fifthly, possible NATO membership comes where it belongs, at the end of the process rather at the beginning’. The PfP had the required flexibility to cope with an uncertain strategic environment without ‘leaving Russia in the cold’. The programme also offered a ‘differentiated approach’ for each Participant, which in practice resulted in several different levels of cooperation. This principle of ‘self-differentiation’ was one of the central elements of the PfP. Through the Individual Partnership Programme (IPP)39 to be agreed between the Partner and NATO, cooperation was tailor-made to suit each country’s needs and wishes. The PfP had to be put into the perspective of NATO’s response to deal with the new European security landscape. The Alliance had to consider claims from states seeking NATO membership (e.g. the Visegrad Four);40 those that were unlikely to be part of any enlargement, but feared isolation (Russia); and finally NATO members themselves who did not share the same views on very important issues. Russia had first cancelled the signing of the agreement, which should have taken place on 21 April 1994. These delays over signing the Partnership for Peace were clearly motivated by Yeltsin’s need to get domestic political cooperation from the opposition.41 Furthermore, even those advocating Russia’s participation in PfP were not completely satisfied with the programme. They suggested that Russia should clarify some points and set some conditions before joining PfP. The most important of these conditions was Russia’s special status within the programme. It was widely accepted that a nuclear power like Russia should be a special partner of the Alliance in promoting security and stability in Europe.42 In addition, Russian policymakers were increasingly anxious about the participation of members of the CIS in PfP, seen as a challenge to Russian interests in its near abroad. The PfP arrangement was clearly perceived by Russia as ‘an infringement on its sphere of influence, one sign of which was the Russian refusal in November to sign documents creating military links between it and NATO’.43 Russia’s reluctance was also due to NATO’s intention to expand the Alliance by admitting Central and East European countries. Although officially presented as a compromise over enlargement, the PfP would rapidly become the first step in progressively gaining full consensus within NATO towards enlargement.44 Indeed, PfP had been initially launched as a compensation for NATO membership but ‘just as partners in Central Europe felt that PfP was not sufficient to assure their security and ties to the West, so did Russia believe that PfP was a subterfuge to paper over the dividing line between East and West’.45 It was clear enough that, for some partners, PfP was merely a path to membership. Indeed, by 1993 major Central and Eastern European states felt that ‘only full NATO membership would resolve their perceived security dilemmas, promote stability to attract economic investment and membership in the EU and provide reassurance for democratic and market reform-oriented political leaders’.46 This connection between PfP and NATO enlargement – strongly opposed by the Russian leadership for both domestic and foreign political reasons – hampered to a significant extent Russian participation within the PfP programme. 67

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After new negotiations, in which it accepted that it would not have a right of veto, Russia finally signed the PfP document on 22 June 1994. The main idea was that through its participation in the programme, Russia would be able to influence the process of NATO enlargement. As Oksana Antonenko, a Russian scholar, underlined: Russia finally joined PfP in June 1994, hoping to transform it into a substitute for NATO membership for Central and East European states, rather than a mechanism to prepare them for membership. PfP was above all a political instrument: in effect, Russia wanted to raise the cost of enlargement by threatening to pull out of the partnership. Even at the time, Russia saw its main leverage not in active partnership but in the threat of complete disengagement.47 From the Russian perspective, although PfP was potentially a useful channel for promoting military cooperation with various countries, cooperation in preparations for peacekeeping operations and reciprocal confidence, it was still too limited and technical a programme to serve as a basis for NATO–Russia relations.48 The PfP initiative actually originates from suggestions by the then SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander in Europe) General John Shalikashvili in 1993, to establish military cooperation with partner states for peacekeeping operations.49 Numerous peacekeeping exercises with NATO’s Allies and partners have since then been organised and Russia has also participated in several of these. On 28 April 1994, a Partnership Coordination Cell (PCC) was inaugurated at the Supreme Allied Command in Europe (SHAPE) headquarter in Mons. The PCC is responsible for coordinating joint military activities within the PfP and for carrying out the military planning necessary to implement partnership programmes between NATO and individual PfP partners. The partnership between NATO and Russia must also be viewed in the context of Russian and Western policy towards the conflict in the former Yugoslavia and their collaboration within the Implementation Force (IFOR) and the Stabilisation Force (SFOR). The peacekeeping operations in Bosnia were NATO’s first joint operations with PfP partners as well as being NATO’s first land operations.50 It was composed of the UN Peace Forces already in place51 and troops of NATO countries and PfP members. The deployment of the IFOR began in December 1995 with the signature of the Dayton accords. The IFOR was to ensure compliance with the implementation of the military aspects of the Bosnian Peace Agreement.52 In practice, it had to create enough stability in Bosnia to allow the peace force to withdraw without the Bosnian government being left vulnerable to the Serbs and the Croats. NATO–Russia military cooperation really began on 15 October 1995 when Russian General Shevtsov and his staff arrived in Belgium to work with General Joulwan, the then NATO SACEUR. Their mission was to define the conditions of the participation of Russian troops in IFOR. On 8 November 1995, the Russian 68

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and the US Defence Ministers agreed to a special command and control mechanism for the Russian troops involved in IFOR missions.53 Russian troops were to be put under the command of the IFOR Supreme Commander through the Deputy for Russian Forces. The unity of command was consequently preserved without Russian troops being directly subordinate to NATO and the Commander of Multinational Division North (MDN).54 Following these special agreements, about 1,500 Russian soldiers were deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina on 13 January 1996. The Russian troop contingent was involved as part of the US Division in Sector North. The first battalion was situated on the territory of the Muslim–Croat Federation, while the other was on the Bosnian Serb side. The location of the two Russian battalions headquarters indubitably provided evidence of Russia’s impartiality. An operational group under the control of General Shevtsov was also established at SHAPE for communication, liaison and decision-making, and was charged with the task of guiding the Russian contingent in theatre. With the termination of IFOR’s mandate in December 1996, Russia continued to contribute to the follow-up SFOR.55 While the NATO–Russia experience in Bosnia was taken as an example in the West as the model for future cooperation, few in Russia considered the IFOR/SFOR joint peacekeeping operations as a political success. Despite the practical experience of effective cooperation between troops on the ground, Russia’s participation in the NATO-led peacekeeping operation in Bosnia was widely criticised. Nadia Arbatova accurately listed two major points of friction: First, having accepted NATO’s invitation to IFOR, Russia committed itself to the Dayton Peace Agreement and the process of its implementation, regardless of all visible shortfalls. More hard-nosed opponents asserted that Russia’s presence in the NATO-led operation was nothing more than recognition of the emerging NATO-centred status quo in Europe, which undermined all arguments against NATO’s expansion eastward. Therefore, they claimed, Russia should leave Bosnia. Second, Russia’s participation was regarded by Moscow as unequal and humiliating, since Russia did not have any say in NATO.56 In spite of the practical experience gained on the ground, no real strategy for developing interoperability with NATO was truly envisaged.57 The failure to realise a genuine partnership left Russia profoundly disillusioned and gave the impression that the concessions made had only further contributed to Russia’s weakness. The publication of the NATO enlargement study in September 1995 also contributed to the intensification of anti-NATO rhetoric. The study appeared to completely ignore Russia’s interests and concerns.58 In order to satisfy, to some extent, the demands of the opposition in the Duma and of the Russian media, Yevgeny Primakov was appointed as the new Russian Foreign Minister, replacing the pro-Western Andrei Kozyrev. Primakov’s doctrine of multipolarity saw the international situation through the prism of conflicting interests with NATO. 69

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His first decision was thus to reverse Russia’s excessive orientation towards the West. In reaction to this political shift and in view of the reluctance of certain European countries to antagonise Russia, NATO members finally conceded a ‘special status’ to Russia that would nevertheless avoid granting the country a sphere of influence in the East and a veto within the Alliance. On the Russian side, as Vladimir Baranovsky noted, ‘a special relationship with NATO was considered a more practical strategy than promoting the re-emergence of the confrontational model’.59 The Founding Act and the PJC In order to establish a basis for the new relationship, NATO suggested an agreement that would assure Russia’s participation in European affairs through a mechanism of regular consultations. Negotiations were long and difficult but ultimately produced the NATO–Russia Founding Act, creating a separate forum, the Permanent Joint Council (PJC),60 for bilateral NATO–Russia discussions. The Founding Act on mutual relations, cooperation and security between the NATO and the Russian Federation represented an institutionalised framework on which to seek common approaches and solutions to common concerns. Initially, ‘the signing of the Founding Act in May 1997 was interpreted by Russia as an indication that NATO was ready to grant Moscow a new mechanism to influence Alliance policies’.61 In addressing the Duma, Primakov even presented the agreement as the best example of successful Russian diplomacy.62 Since this second generation of efforts to enhance NATO–Russia cooperation also coincided with the formal decision to enlarge the Alliance to Central Europe, this participation in NATO institutions and structures was primarily viewed by the Kremlin as a way of minimising the effects of NATO expansion. In this respect, the Russian political elite was notably motivated by ‘its wish to prevent the central security role in Europe being played by a structure to which Russia would not have direct access’.63 On the Western side, one way of securing Russia’s non-opposition to enlargement was for the Atlantic Alliance to reaffirm in the Founding Act that it had ‘no intention, no plan and no reason’ to station nuclear weapons on the territory of new member states. In short, the ultimate aim of the Act was to reassure Russia that it could have a partnership with NATO regardless of the enlargement process. The Act, however, fell far short of Russian expectations. First, it was a document that was binding in a mere political sense, and not in the juridical sense that Russia had wanted.64 As for the NATO–Russia PJC,65 it was established separately from the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s own decision-making body.66 In other words, Russia had no say in NATO’s internal affairs, this new consultation forum gave it ‘a voice, not a veto’.67 In addition, the fact that all the terms of the Founding Act had been dictated by NATO was interpreted by many Russians as a failure by the Kremlin to achieve its objectives.68 Russia would not be able to block the NATO actions it opposed. 70

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It would not even have a say on the operations where its own interests were engaged, as in the former Yugoslavia. Obviously, these elements did not allay the country’s opposition to enlargement. As Irina Isakova, a Russian scholar, stated: The Founding Act was a painful compromise that has not changed Russia’s negative view of NATO enlargement plans or of NATO itself. Russia regards as its main task the implementation of the provisions of the NATO–Russia Founding act that would guarantee the nonadvancement of NATO forces into the territory of non-member states. Russian tactics tend to focus increasingly on criticism of specific integrative efforts by the established NATO states, newcomers and prospective members, particularly with regard to the extension of military multi-national groups and joint command centres to the Central European states and the Baltic region.69 Nationalists and communists within the extremist anti-NATO block in the Duma considered the Founding Act as a betrayal, holding NATO and its advocates responsible for Russia’s problems. Most Russian officers also shared quite the same opinion. They could not see NATO but as an adversary and a potential threat. Furthermore, the Founding Act had formalised the end of NATO as the ‘enemy’ and thus made it difficult for the military to find a new rationale for their job. In addition, the Yeltsin government was openly criticised for accepting this vague charter in exchange for financial and economic rewards from the West, including Russia’s entry into the Group of Seven (G7) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and support from the IMF.70 As provided for in the Founding Act, Russia’s Permanent Mission to NATO was set up in Brussels, including the office of Russia’s Chief Military Representative to NATO to be responsible for coordination with NATO military structures. Cooperation was initiated on issues like ‘preventing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, exchanging information on security and defence policies and forces, as well as conversion of defence industries, defence-related environmental issues and civil emergency preparedness’.71 With regard to the enhancement of information exchange between the two parties, a NATO European Security Documentation Centre72 was opened in Moscow, within the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences (INION) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Centre was opened on NATO’s initiative and was designed to promote a better public understanding of NATO’s role in the European security system, and provide information about the Alliance’s activities and the new partnership with Russia. Some of the opportunities for cooperation, contained in the Founding Act were beyond imagination. This notably concerned the ‘joint decisions and joint actions with respect to security issues of common concern to NATO and Russia’73 which could include peacekeeping operations under the authority of the UNSC or the responsibility of the OSCE. 71

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Other promising suggestions from the Founding Act, ‘where the two parties will consult and strive to cooperate to the broadest possible degree’74 including: conflict prevention (preventive diplomacy, crisis management and conflict resolution and other activities); combating terrorism; exchange of information and consultation on strategy, defence policy, the military doctrines of NATO and Russia; preventing the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and their means of delivery, combating nuclear trafficking and strengthening cooperation in specific arms control areas, including political and defence aspects of proliferation; cooperation in Theatre Missile Defence; association of Russia with NATO’s Conference of National Armaments Directors (CNAD), conversion of defence industries and cooperative projects in defence-related economic, environmental and scientific fields; combating drug trafficking; and civil emergency preparedness and disaster relief. Unfortunately, despite these novelties, the Founding Act soon proved to be merely an empty basket.75 The political obligations of the parties – not secured from a juridical point of view – stated in the document often had general formulations creating the possibility of different interpretations. In other words, the Founding Act could serve as a good basis for Russia–NATO cooperation as long as it was strategically and politically beneficial for both parties and as long as relations remained friendly. In contrary circumstances, the Founding Act would fall into oblivion. The vulnerability of these political arrangements were illustrated when NATO decided to bomb Serbia despite Russia’s strong opposition and – in the Russian view at least – without any attempt to accommodate Russia’s legitimate concern.

The Kosovo crisis From the outset, Russia did not share the Allies’ view on the possible use of military force to end the conflict and to enforce the international community’s demands reflected in the relevant UNSC Resolutions. Nevertheless, in February 1999, both NATO and Russia emphasised their full support for the Rambouillet peace talks. On 23 March 1999, after the talks had failed and all diplomatic avenues to end the conflict had been exhausted, NATO decided that there was no alternative to the use of force.76 NATO’s military intervention in the former Yugoslavia, as from 24 March 1999, indubitably opened a new period in Russia’s relations with NATO.77 It put an end to Russia’s ‘great expectations’ and tarnished the very idea of cooperation with the West.78 The Russian government unanimously condemned NATO air strikes, requested their suspension and asked for a political solution. Its disapproval was first based on the inadmissibility of the use of force against a sovereign state without the consent of the UNSC. According to Moscow, UNSC Resolution 1199 contained nothing which gave authorisation for military attacks. Despite humanitarian arguments provided by NATO, the Alliance’s military adventure in the Balkans was perceived as an act of aggression and a rude violation of the UN Charter, the 72

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Helsinki Final Act of 1975, as well as the 1997 NATO–Russia Founding Act. In addition, NATO military action unsanctioned by the UN created precedents for subjective intervention in ethnic disputes elsewhere, as in conflicts in Russia’s Northern Caucasus Republics. Moreover, the April 1999 revision of NATO’s Strategic Concept to enable the Alliance to intervene in out-of-area situations beyond the borders of member states, such as in Kosovo, heightened Moscow’s concern that this new strategic focus would establish the basis for possible intervention in Russia’s near abroad or even in Russian territory.79 In the Russian view, NATO was giving a bad example of illegal action, allowing expediency and idealism to override the rule of law. The West had demonstrated that it was willing to follow international agreements only as long as countries like Russia or China in the UNSC did not oppose its goals. Otherwise, the West was ready to go it alone, ignoring the rules of international law and the UN Charter. As Dmitri Trenin underscored: The use of force without the express sanction of the United Nation’s Security Council resolution dramatically devalued not only the Russian veto right but also the former superpower’s actual international weight. Moscow was shown to be impotent to prevent major international military operation in an area, which it traditionally regards as crucial to its entire position in Europe.80 While principally supporting Belgrade, Russia had its own self-imposed limits. Milosevic attempted to drag Moscow into his war with NATO, but Russia overlooked the traditional Slav and Orthodox ties to pursue its own interests. In reality, Russian historic sympathy towards Serbs, as Slavic Orthodox brothers,81 was groundless and proved to be an empty and facile explanation for Russia’s apparent support.82 Moscow essentially tried to protect the interests of Yugoslavia by peaceful diplomatic means. Its support finally ruled out sanctioning arms sales to Belgrade.83 Major arguments that worked against any direct military aid to Milosevic included the danger of a global confrontation between Russia and the West – with consequences far outreaching the initial stakes in the Balkan conflict – but also basically the practical unfeasibility of such support.84 Furthermore, despite its strong rhetoric, the Russian political elite did not have much sympathy for Milosevic and did not trust him. As for the Russian people, they were, as a rule, more concerned about their daily lives than about Kosovo and the humanitarian aspects of the problem. Nevertheless, the Russian leadership could not accept a situation in which NATO was acting as the global policeman, a situation which was also potentially demonstrating Russia’s impotence in international politics and challenging its claim to power status. In an atmosphere of anti-Western nationalist hysteria, the Kremlin faced a difficult situation: it could neither ignore hard liners calling for tough response – thus increasing the chances of Yeltsin’s impeachment in the Parliament – nor start a new confrontation with the West. 73

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Nevertheless, since Yeltsin’s political survival and Russia’s prestige were at stake, the Russian political leadership had to take decisive measures. Immediately after the beginning of NATO air strikes, Yeltsin endorsed Milosevic’s proposal of Yugoslavia joining the Russia–Belarus Slavic Union – based on shared Slavic Eastern Orthodox ties and geopolitical interests as a response to the perceived threat from the West – and announced the retargeting of Russia’s nuclear weapons at the NATO members taking part in the air strikes. In addition, Russia suspended its military contacts (inter alia the withdrawal of the Russian Senior Military Representatives and the Russian officers at SHAPE responsible for the Russian SFOR contingent,85 as well as the abeyance of PfP activities) and its civilian contacts (inter alia expulsion of the two NATO information officers in Moscow, request to discontinue NATO information work in Russia in general and the closure of the NATO Documentation Centre in Moscow) with the Alliance. All forms of Russia–NATO cooperation supposedly institutionalised by the Founding Act were terminated. NATO operations also aggravated the problems resulting from NATO’s expansion eastwards.86 It was indeed: hardly reassuring that NATO action came just a few weeks after the first wave of enlargement, a circumstance that only reinforced the view of those in Russia who from the beginning expected enlargement to be a stage in the creation of a more aggressive Alliance.87 Last but not least, the Kosovo operation precipitated a revision of Russia’s military doctrine and its related defence policies. A new draft, published on 9 October 1999, reflected important changes in the assessment of threats to Russian security. The blueprint pointed to external concerns and especially a potential threat of direct military aggression against Russia and its allies; this threat was to be deterred by all means, including the use of nuclear forces.88 Other official documents such as Russia’s new National Security Concept (January 2000)89 and Foreign Policy Concept (June 2000),90 both issued in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, incorporated significant changes reflecting the evaluations that Moscow’s foreign/military defence establishment conducted in relation with the Kosovo campaign.91 The enhanced strategic threat perception after Kosovo was reflected almost immediately with the holding in June 1999 of the military exercise – codenamed ‘Zapad 99’ – involving preparation for a hypothetical NATO attack. Internal power struggles were another determinant factor influencing Russia’s policy on Kosovo. Hostility to the West in general, and NATO in particular, intensified and as a consequence strengthened support for the Communists and the Nationalists. Even pro-Western Liberals found themselves disillusioned and adopted a more diffident stance. The virulent internal press campaign on Kosovo in Russia also contributed to this increased anti-NATO feeling. The Russian media actually made little effort to 74

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present objective reports of Serb ethnic cleansing and persistently described NATO as an aggressive, predatory grouping.92 Despite the fact that many had access to Western media, the press in Russia was quite effective: all the principal political parties (including the Democrats), public opinion (including the intelligentsia and university students) and all branches of the government rallied to this reaction of indignation and hostility towards NATO and sympathy towards the Serbs. In this regard, support for Yugoslavia was the Russians’ response to the US and NATO’s arrogant policy vis-à-vis Belgrade and to the Western disregard of views and interests of other states, above all Russia. A prolonged inability to reach a settlement in the crisis could have generated illiberal political change in Russia. Indeed, the communists and the Nationalists were more and more successful in mobilising popular support for a stronger defence policy and the reassertion of Russia’s great power status. As the political balance was shifting in favour of those hostile to NATO, Russia’s constructive political engagement in the crisis proved to be essential in ending the war. The Russian government decided that it was in Russia’s national interest to constrain the Serbs to accept the NATO demands but did so after considerable internal struggle.93 The dispatch of former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin as a key interlocutor with Milosevic was indeed more than helpful.94 As a rule, it was better to have Russia as part of the solution than part of the problem in this time of international crisis. As Alton Frye, a British expert, pointed out: Having catered to Serbian sensibilities in many ways, the Russians were in the best position to make clear to the Serbian demagogue that he [Milosevic] was completely isolated and could not rely on Moscow to intervene further in his behalf. No one can say what course the war would have followed without the multilateral diplomacy to which Chernomyrdin contributed.95 If there was a degree of pride in the Russian mediation being determinant in resolving the crisis, there was a more glorious moment of widespread jubilation on 11 June 1999 when Russian troops, originally from SFOR, moved pre-emptively to establish themselves at Pristina Airfield (named Slatina). This surprise march ‘underscored the disenchantment of the Russian military with what they perceive as NATO aggressiveness, offensiveness as opposed to defensiveness, outright bullying and arrogance toward Russia’.96 Although the manoeuvre involved only 200 men, and was largely symbolic in nature, it ‘guaranteed Russia its place in the NATO-led force even before the actual rules of participation were worked out’97 and ‘speeded up negotiations between Moscow and NATO commanders on Russia’s role in Kosovo force (KFOR)’.98 However, this sensational gesture did not change the principal guidelines of the final agreement. The UNSC resolution 1244 of 12 June 1999 was based on Chapter VII of the UN Charter, implying an action enforced against the will of one of the parties, and the peacekeeping operation was not a UN action but a NATO mission by authorisation of the UN. 75

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Russia’s participation in KFOR was made possible by the signing of a separate agreement worked out in Helsinki. Under this agreement, Russian peacekeepers were deployed in three sectors: the US-led Multinational Brigade East, the French-led Multinational Brigade North and the German-led Multinational Brigade South. Russia also shared the responsibilities for Pristina airport, together with NATO forces. The Russian General at SHAPE was, at the same time, the deputy to SACEUR responsible for the Russian participation in SFOR and the representative of the Russian Ministry of Defence for Russian KFOR matters.99 The integrated force became operational as Serb forces withdrew from the province and the work of restoring peace and stability began. Russia contributed about 3,250 troops to the 43,000-strong KFOR. For Russian political leaders and military commanders, the costly participation in KFOR was justified for several reasons. First, it demonstrated that Russia was still a world power with force projection capabilities which must be involved in peacekeeping planning and operations in the Balkans. In this respect, Moscow wanted to play a key role within KFOR from the outset in order to retain political influence in the region and to prevent NATO from unilaterally establishing a permanent military presence. Second, it showed its support to Serbia after Russia’s perceived loss of credibility following the failure to provide tangible support to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) during the bombing campaign. In this regard, Moscow intended to obtain a defined Russian sector within KFOR in an area where it would be able to give credible protection to remaining Serb minorities against the Albanian ‘terrorists’. Third, it permitted monitoring the implementation of the UN resolution on Kosovo Liberation Agency (KLA) disarmament and the preservation of Yugoslavia’s territorial integrity. However, Moscow was quite frustrated about Russia’s participation in KFOR. During June–July 1999, as about 40,000 NATO peacekeeping troops entered Kosovo, the arrival of the Russian contingent – beside the unit in Slatina – was held up because of delays by Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria in providing air corridors. Unlike SFOR, KFOR posed a much greater problem for both parties, given the conditions of renewed mistrust and likely clash of important strategic interests in the Balkans. The 3,000-strong Russian contingent did not actually provide any leverage over NATO policies in the region. Russia had to renounce to a special sector in Kosovo, independent of NATO’s chain of command. Furthermore, Russian troops were not granted control over heavily Serb-populated areas. Besides, Russian contingents were separated from each other and, except for one unit, they were not near the border with the rest of Serbia, and located in areas mainly populated by Albanians. Likewise, keeping control over Slatina airport had poor significance since all air traffic, as well as ground communications in all sectors, was commanded by NATO. In the words of Vladimir Baranovsky: Russia’s peacekeepers are welcomed to participate in KFOR – but, unlike leading Western countries, they do not get their own sector of responsibility. By and large the Cold War logic of ‘keeping Russians out’ 76

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seems to many of them to have mutated into a double-track task: how to prevent Russians from becoming disengaged, without however actually letting them in.100 Nevertheless, the KFOR experience finally helped restore relations between NATO and Russia101 with the latter resuming its official contacts on a limited basis. By mid-2000, the Russian representatives had returned to NATO Headquarters. Russian Foreign Ministry statements concerning PJC consultations102 took on an increasingly positive tone as the Kosovo affair receded.103 In February 2001, NATO’s Secretary General Lord Robertson presided over the re-opening of NATO’s representation in Moscow. A NATO Information Office was established under the aegis of the Belgian embassy and fully staffed in December 2001. Its main missions include inter alia: liaising with Russian media; organising visits by Russian delegations to NATO HQ and SHAPE; supporting initiatives of other NATO Directorates (Scientific Affairs, Economic); and facilitating the political link between NATO and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As for the NATO Military Liaison Mission, it was only opened in May 2002. Its main missions include inter alia: liaising with the Russian Ministry of Defence on issues covered by the NRC’s Military Work Plan and by PfP programmes; assisting the NATO Information Office in explaining NATO policies; and helping to implement decisions taken by the NRC.104

Russia–NATO after 9/11 The 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States brought about a shift in both Russian and Western policies, which were both conducive to greater rapprochement and interaction in the struggle against international terrorism.105 From the outset, Russia actively and positively participated in the anti-terrorist coalition, not only providing diplomatic support to the campaign, but also sharing intelligence on sources and methods used to finance terrorist groups, and applying sanctions against the countries harbouring terrorists. This cooperation gave rise to frank exchanges on the entire spectrum of the terrorist threat – including the risk of nuclear, biological and chemical proliferation, and included joint exercises addressing the consequences for the civilian population of a large-scale terrorist attack. When the United States initiated a campaign against the Taliban and Al-Qaida in Afghanistan,106 Moscow opened Russian airspace to US planes and enhanced military assistance to the Northern Alliance.107 Considering Russia’s key role and military experience in Central Asia and Afghanistan, its participation was paramount to the success of the coalition against terrorism and the post-11 September international order.108 Indeed, Russia’s endorsement of US Operation Enduring Freedom facilitated the provision of practical support by the former Soviet Central Asian states. Furthermore, reluctant states like China, India and Iran finally decided to follow the Russian stance and to grant political support. 77

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It is fairly easy to misinterpret the changes of the Russian position by disregarding crucial nuances. Indeed, it should be observed that, regardless of what has been the real motivation of President Putin and his team, the main trend in the wider discourse has been not towards greater solidarity with the United States and the West as a whole, but about a reassertion of the Russian position on the international stage. In that sense, the Russian attitude has not changed an iota. It is rather the West that has adopted a new attitude towards Russia. From the Russian perspective, it looks as if the West, as it were, has become ‘more Russian’ and not vice-versa. Internally, this support and Putin’s strongly pro-Western rhetoric soon faced criticism amongst Russian political and military representatives,109 as well as within large sections of the public. Apparently, many did not share his ‘confidence in the American and European commitment to reward Moscow for its support’.110 In their perception, the US still viewed Russia as an obstacle to its interests in a number of issues: missile defence;111 NATO enlargement; spread of US influence in central Asia; relations with rogue states like Iraq, Iran, North Korea, etc. They also wanted Putin to avoid repeating the mistakes of figures such as Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who had made concessions to the West and received very little in return.112 Their position was further reinforced by severe US blows to Russian interests on issues of vital strategic concern: US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and NATO’s expansion to the East. In addition, the prospect of a long term US military presence in the near abroad Central Asia was strongly opposed, not least by the Russian military. President Putin’s policy was not without risks to his political career, especially in the event of an economic slowdown. Yet, he was able to pursue his strategy.113 Huge popularity, strong determination and personal authority gave him an unquestionable legitimacy for his undertakings. Unlike Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin is not only seen by the public as a firm leader with no credible rival, but also as a man of action flexible enough to overcome political setbacks.114 He is swift in explaining his stance to the average Russians, and less concerned about the confused and grudging elite, which has finally no other choice than going along when confronted with the opinion polls. Many reasons justify Putin’s decision to maintain a pro-Western line.115 The 11 September events came about at a time when Putin’s dual-track strategy – relations with the West and at the same time attempts to counterbalance US hegemony by developing relations with the European Union – was not meeting its expectations. This tragedy appeared as a unique opportunity for Russia to convince the West, but especially the United States, of the necessity of a strategic partnership. Putin’s decision to call George Bush on 11 September was thus not merely a political statement, but also a way of showing that Russia belonged to the same security community. In other words, the attacks on the United States helped Russia to complete the building of what is now named the ‘threat bridge to the West’.116 By embarking on the campaign, Russia succeeded in imposing itself on the post-11 September world order. 78

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This very recognition of common security concerns with the West, and shared vulnerability to threats such as global terrorism – and more particularly Sunni Islamist extremism – constituted another reason that comforted Putin in his decision. The fact that the United States was so preoccupied with building an international anti-terror coalition, with Russia playing a central role, seemingly improved Russia’s chances of regaining some influence in international politics and of being treated as an almost equal partner by the US administration. Indeed, the success of the US operation against the Taliban in Afghanistan largely depended on the position of Russia, both in terms of its possible participation in the coalition and with regard to its influence on such neighbouring countries as Tajikistan, Kyrgistan and Iran. Not only does Russia possess military bases and units in the area close to the Afghan theatre, and exert strong influence on at least some of the local Central Asian regimes (Tajikistan), it also has strong personal interest in containing the Taliban threat.117 Given its tense relations with Iran and Pakistan, Washington could hardly dispense with Russian facilities in the region. For its part, Russia’s strategy was dictated by the perspective of short and long term benefits. Should its troops be forced to stay in Central Asia, the United States would find itself in a situation where, like the Soviet Army in the 1980s, it could be defeated. This could eventually lead to an erosion of American hegemony, its withdrawal from the region and the consequent strengthening of Russia’s position in Central Asia as the sole guarantor of security in a region still facing a growing Islamic threat. However, should the United States manage to defeat the Taliban regime, it would help Russia to eradicate the Islamic threat along its southern border. In this scenario, the US troops would then withdraw and Russia’s strategic interests in the region could be preserved. Russia’s calculations thus aimed at strengthening its position in Central Asia and making it safer with limited resources and without directly engaging its forces.118 Had Russia decided not to grant the US access to its military facilities in Central Asia, certain local leaders (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgizstan) might have seized this opportunity to use the US position on their ground as a leverage with Russia.119 Such a situation would have set the limits of Russia’s real influence in Central Asia and of its ability to control developments in the region. Russia would also miss out on the opportunity to influence the United States and – to a greater extent – Western policy in the region, and lose credibility as a strategic partner. Third, and for Russia a related point, was the Western endorsement of Russia’s war in Chechnya120 and the recognised legitimacy of this official anti-terrorist campaign.121 Many Western political representatives soon put the Chechen rebels on a par with the organisers of the 11 September attacks.122 In this context, the West adopted a new attitude towards Russia, and this change has confirmed, in the eyes of the Russian public, that the Russian policy in Chechnya, for example, has been the right one. Of course, Western human rights campaigners had expressed their concern about a softening of criticism towards the conduct of Russia’s military operations in Chechnya.123 79

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Another important element was Russia’s desperate need for Western investment. Although the Russian economy recovered rapidly from the massive rouble devaluation of August 1998 – largely due to high oil and gas prices – there was still a strong need for further economic reform and restoring international investors’ confidence in the Russian market. In return for its cooperation in the fight against terrorism, Putin expected US and European support for Russia’s economy. In this context, the importance of oil and energy resources did not go unnoticed in Russia’s decision to join the anti-terrorist coalition. Indeed, the campaign against terrorism in Central Asia risked placing Russia as an alternative and a more reliable source of energy to the West. In other words, while not expecting short term economic or political benefits from its cooperation with the West, Russia could expect future Western investments and gains from the sale of oil and gas to the West, and could then potentially dominate its main Arab competitors – who were definitely more reluctant than Russia to join the anti-terror coalition – on the global energy market. Among the Russian people, however, there was widespread resignation and disillusionment regarding any Western support for Russia’s economic difficulties. We should bear in mind that, in acting in this way, Russia did not look at democracy and market economy as goals per se, but the best available instruments in making the Russian State stronger and more efficient. By becoming a member of the Western community, Russia would be able to save money the country would otherwise have spent on building a strategic parity or at least a credible and sufficient anti-Western defence. Russia’s choice meant a significant departure from traditional Soviet and – to a very large extent – post-Soviet thinking on Russia’s place in the international system. In other words, it would mean departing from Primakov’s policy of counterbalancing the Western influence by building strategic anti-Western alliances with alternative centres of power of a wishful multipolar world. The Russian leadership was also aware of the fact that Russia was too weak to counter all these threats on its own and to achieve its long term goals by openly confronting the West. Joining the West in this campaign was therefore not a manifestation of an identity choice, but rather a sort of survival strategy at a time when the country had to concentrate on its domestic economic revival. Russia had neither the means nor interest to undertake the very costly foreign and security policy that direct rivalry with the West would entail. Only a sound economy would permit Russia to rebuild its military power necessary to the conduct of a realistic policy aimed at rehabilitating the country’s status on the international scene. Finally, the Russian elite watched with extreme interest NATO’s transformation into a wide-spectrum security organisation focusing increasingly on asymmetric threats like terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. According to Russian experts, if NATO’s destiny was to ‘go global’, it would have to be reformed in the direction of greater emphasis on political functions.124 This could lead to NATO’s marginalisation as a military alliance, as exemplified by the US operations in Afghanistan. Indeed, NATO did not lead the campaign and 80

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the collective defence provision of the Washington Treaty – the famous Article 5125 – was invoked for pure symbolic reasons. Whatever changes NATO went through, Russia hoped that its participation in the international fight against terrorism would help further its integration into NATO’s structures. Relations with NATO also improved significantly as a result of Putin’s strategic choice. This confirms that the nature of Russia’s relations with the Atlantic Alliance is closely dependant on the degree of interaction with the United States, the latter still being viewed as using NATO as a personalised foreign policy tool. Only two days after the attack on the United States, the PJC met and issued a statement on the event, calling for closer and more intensive cooperation between NATO and Russia in defeating the terrorist scourge.126 A number of Russian politicians called for a boost in Russian–NATO relations and suggested that expanding Russian cooperation with the United States in the fight against terrorism would require a redefinition of Russia’s relationship with NATO. The PJC met again on 19 September and reconfirmed the need for intensification of Russia–NATO cooperation in the fight against international terrorism. Putin’s visit to Brussels on 3 October and his talks with Secretary-General Lord Robertson marked a new beginning in Russian–NATO relations. The dilemma that NATO was facing when discussing closer cooperation with Russia can be summed up as follows: NATO had to be convinced that Russia was really interested in developing constructive cooperation. NATO nations still feared that Russia might block the Alliance’s decision-making process and thus make it powerless, should it be given access to it. By undermining NATO’s credibility as an efficient security provider and turning it into a new version of the inefficient OSCE, Russia could also distract certain countries from NATO membership as the best protection against the revival of Russia’s great power ambitions in the region. As for Russia, it fears that under the formula of a ‘voice but not a veto’, it does not have enough influence to make a difference and that NATO will never give it any real influence. Details on the further deepening of cooperation between Russia and NATO were discussed at a series of meeting that took place in December 2001 in Brussels. On 6 December, the NATO Defence Ministers decided to explore and develop ‘new effective mechanisms for consultation, cooperation, joint decision, and coordinated/joint action’ between Russia and NATO. The final communiqué issued after the 6 December NAC meeting listed areas in which NATO was to deepen its cooperation with Russia. It was decided that the results of this work would be presented at the Foreign Ministerial meeting in Reykjavik in May 2002. The same issues were also discussed with Russian representation at a PJC meeting at the level of foreign ministers that took place in Brussels on 7 December, as well as at the PJC meeting at the level of defence ministers on 18 December. In the communiqué issued after this last meeting, the ministers committed themselves to forging a new relationship between NATO and Russia and to enhancing their ability to work together in areas of common interest and to stand up to new threats and risks to security. They also agreed to the holding of 81

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a NATO–Russia conference on the military role in combating terrorism in February 2002, and recognised the importance of defence reform as a key instrument to ensure adequate military capabilities. In Reykjavik on 14 May 2002, PJC Foreign Ministers thus approved the draft declaration on ‘NATO-Russia Relations: A New Quality’, including a work programme and the rules of procedure for a NRC. The Declaration was subsequently adopted and signed at the inaugural session of the NRC, which took place at the level of Heads of State and Government in Rome on 28 May 2002. The objective behind the replacement of the PJC by the NRC was quite clear: to provide a fresh stimulus to NATO–Russia relations, drawing on the positive cooperation generated by the post-11 September fight against terrorism. It was the British Prime Minister, Blair, who first suggested the establishment of a new mechanism of cooperation. At that time, the Pentagon was quite reluctant to support this idea. The United States’ main concern, shared by NATO’s Central European members, was that the new council would allow Russia to ‘sneak in by NATO’s back door, split the allies and veto military decisions’.127 Although Putin surely did not have an easy time selling the NRC either, he finally supported the idea, proposing that it could replace the existing PJC. Its main goals included a determination to further intensify the common struggle against the terrorist threat; strengthening of cooperation by way of a multi-faceted approach, including joint assessment of the terrorist threat to the Euro-Atlantic area, focusing on specific threats, for example, to Russian and NATO forces, to civilian aircraft and to critical infrastructures.128 The NRC operates on the principle of consensus; members take joint decisions and bear equal responsibility, individually and jointly, for their implementation; the Council is chaired by the Secretary General of NATO;129 meetings are held at various levels: Foreign and Defence Ministers (twice annually), Heads of State and Government (as appropriate), Ambassadors (at least once a month with the possibility of more frequent meetings, at the request of any Member or the NATO Secretary General); establishment of a Preparatory Committee, at the level of the NATO Political Committee, with Russian representation (meeting twice monthly, or more often if necessary); the possibility of establishing committees or working groups for individual subjects or areas of cooperation (ad hoc or permanent basis), drawing upon the resources of existing NATO committees; meetings of military representatives and Chiefs of Staff, taking place no less than twice a year, meetings at military representative level at least once a month (with the possibility of more frequent meetings if needed), meetings of military experts may be convened as appropriate. In fact, the NRC does resemble the PJC in many ways. All the 19 areas – from peacekeeping and monitoring weapons of mass destruction to combating international terrorism – for possible cooperation, as listed under Section III of the Founding Act, remain valid in the framework of the NRC. In addition, the work programmes for 2002 agreed on in December 2001 in the framework of the PJC continued to be implemented under the auspices and the rules of the NRC. 82

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Furthermore, except for the principle of consensus (actually the essential feature of the NRC differing from the PJC’s 19 ⫹ 1 format), the NATO Secretary General’s chairmanship, and the Preparatory Committee at the level of the NATO Political Committee, the functioning of respectively the NRC and the PJC is quite identical. This parallelism apparently does not bode well, since the PJC has had a troubled life. From the Russian perspective, meetings of the former PJC have tended to be pro forma, not taking the Russian views seriously. Nevertheless, the different new features introduced in the new Council exemplify an important step forward. First, meetings at ‘20’ would supplant the earlier ‘19 ⫹ 1’ dialogue between NATO and Russia. Joint political debates at 20 on equal footing would defeat the charge posed sometimes against the PJC forum that it was not a debate of 19 ⫹ 1 but of 19 against 1. Unlike the PJC, the NRC gives Moscow an equal voice on decisions concerning counter-terrorism, arms control, civil emergencies, crisis management, peacekeeping, maritime safety and the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological arms. However, it continues to deprive Russia of a veto on security issues. Indeed, in case of disagreement, full NATO members can decide to remove the issue from the NRC and to discuss it ‘at 19’. Likewise, they retain veto rights on subjects, on which they may consider that a debate with Russia may act against their interests. Second, joint political decisions should be eventually implemented in order to stress joint action and finally, the agenda of the new NRC formula should be broadened. A greater focus would be put on threats such as international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. It should also be noted that, although the creation of the NRC represented a fundamental change in Western dealings with Russia and a move in the direction of a genuine cooperation, the key issue is still Russia’s relationship with NATO, and not – at least for the time being – Russia’s role fully integrated within NATO. This new NRC is again all about trust and confidence. The new partnership may evolve into a sort of associate membership in which Russia, along with other concerned non-NATO countries, is increasingly involved in NATO decisions and actions, short of Article 5 commitment. Though the new body was only granting Russia with relative decision-making power within the Alliance, this was compensated, in the Russian perspective, by the possibility of operating inside the NATO decision-making framework. Indeed, the joint decision-making process without adequate prior consultations within the Alliance itself would give Russia the possibility to make use of eventual differences among NATO Allies for its own benefit. Moscow also hoped to link the new NRC to other matters like, for example, NATO enlargement.130 On the NATO side, the agenda for joint debates within the NRC had thus to be specified with extreme clarity in order to avoid any faux pas. Putin’s view of the necessity of a renewed cooperation with NATO faced critics, coming, as usual, from the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. These were concerned that the development of new forms of formal cooperation, such as the NRC, would be seen in the West as primarily 83

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‘compensation’ to Russia’s acquiescence for NATO enlargement, as occurred in the past with the Founding Act and the PJC. NATO–Russia renewed partnership could thus be used as a weapon against Putin in the domestic battle, if he was unable to provide evidence of concrete benefits and advantages. The situation would be different if Russia became a full member of NATO. At first sight, numerous factors seem to justify the full integration of Russia into Atlantic structures. As a NATO member, Russia would no longer regard its own security as being under threat and as a consequence it would also view NATO’s eastward expansion as a positive development. Moreover, this would symbolise the ultimate stage of NATO’s transformation and the effective end of the Cold War. In addition, it could eventually result in the end of the dominant role of the United States within the Alliance and the situation in Europe would be stabilised, Russia providing the counterbalance to the growing weight of a united Germany.131 However, a realistic assessment of this possibility attests to its low feasibility. To begin with, NATO countries are not interested in such a perspective, at least until the situation in Russia becomes more stable, and especially more predictable. The problem is also that, in many instances, Russia is viewed as a Partner, not an Ally.132 Furthermore, Russia simply cannot be compared to most Central and Eastern European states which have rapidly acquired a certain stability and are already familiar with democratic institutions. These countries have clearly identifiable problems while Russia’s problems are considerable and too diffuse. Russia has been the heart of an immense empire for centuries, it has a long history and a cultural heritage. It has huge potential and a geostrategic position and cannot become a member of the European family overnight. Russia remains in transition, and while it increasingly shares many values with Western democracies, democratisation is far from complete. Furthermore, the political elite and public opinion of Central and Eastern Europe countries, unwilling to find themselves once again in Russia’s shadow even within NATO, would oppose the attribution of NATO membership to Russia. Finally, many sections of the Russian society – primarily the Russian Ministry of Defence and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs – are still against such a development. Nevertheless, as Philip Gordon noted: Being unready for membership today is very different from being rejected as a potential candidate for all time. The symbolic message of a NATO open to Russia would, at a minimum, underscore the point that NATO has been trying to make for a long time, and that in the wake of the terrorist attacks may finally be sinking in – that NATO and Russia both need to get beyond the Cold War mindset and work together for peace across the continent.133 The key issue is thus Russia’s relationship with NATO, not – at least for now – Russia’s role fully integrated within NATO.134 Nevertheless, the 11 September 2001 84

RUSSIAN ATTITUDE TO NATO

terrorist attacks on the United States led to a turning point in relations between Russia and NATO.

Conclusion To those who may argue that 10 years are not enough to draw firm conclusions on what a relationship entails and what it is leading to, our study of the 10-year-relationship between NATO and Russia shows, on the contrary, that much can be learnt from it. Of course, we may be lacking a bit of that distance that is normally necessary to analyse events in the most objective manner. However, the lessons learnt from even the most recent developments in NATO–Russia relations following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, if maybe not exhaustive, are already very enlightening as to what these relations are made of, and how they may develop in the future. At the end of the Cold War, very few could predict what direction NATO–Russia relations would take, or if there would be any relations at all. At that time, both NATO and Russia were faced with a matter of survival. Russia, as the main heir of the Soviet Union, had to ensure itself what could be regarded as a decent status on the international scene. This task was complicated by the fact that Russia no longer had the means to live up to its imperialistic/superpower standards, and that the acknowledgement of this weakened status implied that Russia, just like any average power, associate itself with others. NATO, on the other hand, had to find a raison d’être after the demise of its enemy number one. This endeavour was complicated by the fact that NATO would have to review downwards its collective defence nature and evolve towards a more collective security posture,135 and that this evolution, to be successful in the long term, would have to involve the former members of the Warsaw Pact, including Russia itself. These circumstances served as the basis for the beginning of relations between NATO and Russia, first through the PfP in 1994 until the signature of the Founding Act and the creation of the PJC in 1997. At that time, the reasons advocated to explain the failure of the PJC were the peculiarities of the Russian identity and NATO’s inability to take them into account. Above all, Russia did not accept being pushed into a status where it had no say over NATO’s policies. The Kosovo conflict, and NATO’s neglect of Russia’s standpoint in the resolution of the crisis, brought miscomprehension between NATO and Russia to its paroxysm. Not only did Russia have some difficulties in accepting its loss of power and having to take orders from its