Misreading Russia

As Ivan Krastev notes ("What Russia Wants," May/June 2008), there is a growing nostalgia among Europeans for the Soviet Union, or rather for the simple certainty it once exuded. But nostalgia for the ussr is perverse. The Cold War was not a gentleman’s game. The true fountain of discomfort for those who miss Leonid Brezhnev or Nikita Khrushchev springs from the fact that Russia, unlike the Soviet Union, will not be contained within its sphere of control; it can act in ways more difficult to neutralize than communist plots and Soviet propaganda.

The sources of this behavior are not a secret wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Russia is ruled by the people who own it. The Kremlin elites may often favor the corporate interests of Gazprom and Rosneft, but Russia is also a post-imperial actor and a former superpower. Krastev is right — the worldview of these elites is shaped by growing nationalism and residual resentment over real or perceived humiliations.

Paradoxically, the more Westernized Russia’s economy and society become, the less pro-Western its policies are. The problem for the West is that Russia now rejects a junior position vis-à-vis the United States and the European Union.

Russia appears to have left the 20th century walking through both doors at once: the front one, which leads on to the 21st century, and the back one, which winds back to the 19th. It will be some time before it settles on the direction it truly wants to go.

–Dmitri Trenin
Deputy Director
Carnegie Moscow Center
Moscow, Russia

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Krastev offers a biased presentation of Moscow’s positions on several issues. Yet, it is his overall approach to analyzing Russia that raises the biggest objection. Krastev calls Russia a "spoiler at large." In other words, there is the "right" Western policy for solving global problems, and then there is the Kremlin, which works to prevent progress.

Until the mid-2000s, Russia did not play an important role in global politics, and the West had the opportunity to transform the world according to its own views. What do we now have as a result? The international system is out of balance. Not a single international institution works as it should. The number of explosive regional conflicts has risen, while the West’s leadership has declined.

These developments took place without Moscow’s participation. Decisions that have had a particularly negative impact — namely, the war in Iraq and the dismantling of the arms-control system — were made without Russia. So Moscow took advantage of the mistakes and miscalculations of the West to restore its own position. It would be strange if it did not.

Sovereignty is a pivotal notion for the Kremlin. In this respect, Russia isn’t unlike the United States. The United States pays almost no heed to other countries’ views and is guided by its own interests. It ignores norms of international law that run counter to these interests.

Russia’s policy deserves criticism and a harsh analysis. But before asking what Russia wants, Western analysts should ask what they wanted and why they failed to get it.

–Fyodor Lukyanov
Editor in Chief
Russia in Global Affairs
Moscow, Russia

Ivan Krastev replies:

As Will Rogers observed many years ago, "Russia is a country that no matter what you say about it, it’s true." So, when I wrote "What Russia Wants," my ambition was not so much to get Russia right but to get the West’s debate on Russia right. Therefore, I am grateful that two of Russia’s most distinguished and insightful foreign-policy analysts, Dmitri Trenin and Fyodor Lukyanov, decided to devote time to comment on my piece.

Unsurprisingly, most of their arguments are legitimate and reasonable. Trenin is right to insist that it is high time for Westerners to take Russia for what it is, not what they want it to be. Lukyanov is also correct in criticizing the West for not taking Russia’s point of view into account.

But to bolster his argument, Lukyanov decided to misread the major point of my article. In his letter, he insists that I call Russia a "spoiler at large." I do not make any such claim. In fact, that is the very perception I argue against. If Lukyanov were to reread my piece, he would discover that I wrote, "Russia is not a spoiler so much as it likes to be viewed as one." I argue that what is perceived as Russia’s imperial aggressiveness often merely masks its feelings of vulnerability. I also believe that despite its suspicions, Russia is — and will remain — more integrated with the outside world than ever before.