EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The Soviet “deep state” survived the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It is back with a vengeance.
The Soviet Union was not vanquished by the West in the Cold War. It simply disintegrated in the late 1980s, the result of cumulative failures. A military defeat or a popular insurrection might have resulted in the elimination of its seventy-year-old totalitarian infrastructure and superstructure (the Soviet “deep state”). A mere collapse, however, had very different consequences.
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Beyond the abandonment of the Eastern European glacis and the formal independence of the fifteen Soviet Republics, the ruling Soviet elite stayed largely in place. This was especially true in the very heart of the Empire, the former Federative Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia, rebranded as the Russian Federation. The army and secret police stayed intact, the planned economy was turned into a state-controlled oligarchy, and nationalism was substituted for communism. Soon, Russia began to engage in systematic rebuilding and reconquest.
This process started under Boris Yeltsin, the allegedly liberal first president of post-Soviet Russia. Just a few weeks after the USSR’s dismantlement, Yeltsin’s army seized Transnistria as a Russian outpost between the now formally independent former Soviet Republics of Ukraine and Moldavia. It was the Yeltsin bureaucracy in the early 1990s that issued 1) the Near Abroad doctrine, according to which Russia retained “vital interests” in neighboring post-Soviet countries; and 2) the parallel doctrine of “the Russian World”, which envisioned the “reunification” of all Russian-speaking communities into a single nation-state.
Vladimir Putin, who was chief of the secret police in 1998, became prime minister in 1999 and then Yeltsin’s successor in 2000.
The primary strategic goal of a restored Russia is to bring together all the Russian-speaking peoples into a single nation-state. In 2014, after the forced incorporation into Russia of Crimea, a province of Ukraine under international law, Putin elaborated that, after the dissolution of the USSR, “millions of people went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones, overnight becoming ethnic minorities in former Union republics, while the Russian nation became one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders.” What is at stake is not just Transnistria or Crimea or eastern Ukraine, but the Russian-speaking communities in the Baltic States and in Central Asia. This contention resembles that of Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1939, when he carved an ethnically defined Greater Germany into the heart of Europe.
A second Russian goal is to reestablish the former Soviet Union as a single geopolitical unit if not a single state: a “Eurasian community” with Russia as first among equals. This goal has been largely achieved. Most post-Soviet countries, with the glaring exceptions of the Baltic states, which joined both NATO and the EU, and of Ukraine, which strives to do the same, have reverted into a Russian sphere of influence. The only countervailing power so far, at least in Central Asia, has been China.
A third Russian goal is to weaken or eliminate any rival power in Europe: be it the US and NATO, its military arm, or the EU, at least as long as it has close ties with the US. A fourth is to resume a world power role by reactivating support for former Soviet client regimes like Baathist Syria or Cuba, or striking new strategic alliances with emerging powers like Iran.
Sadly, most Western countries either failed to understand what was going on or decided to ignore it, even in the face of hard evidence. In his recently published book, The End of Europe, James Kirchick writes: “As early as 1987,” when the Soviet Union still existed, “Mikhaïl Gorbachev advocated Soviet entry into what he called ‘the common European home’.” Ten years later, after the demise of the Soviet Union, “Boris Yeltsin hoped that Russia would one day join ‘greater Europe’.” In both cases, Western politicians and strategists responded enthusiastically: many insisted that “a whole raft of institutions, strategic theorems and intellectual currents born out of the struggle against Soviet communism” were now passé, and “it was time to supplant the bipolar order with more inclusive and ‘equitable’ arrangements.”
Eight years later, in 2005, the Gaullist president of France, Jacques Chirac, and the social-democratic Chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schröder, planned for “a European Security and Defense Union,” a “triangular” military alliance with Russia “that would exclude Washington, to parallel and perhaps one day replace NATO.” It did not appear to concern these analysts that “as the West slashed defense budgets and relocated resources to Asia and the Middle East,” Russia was undergoing “a massive conventional arms buildup to the point there exists now a perilous imbalance on NATO’s Eastern flank.”
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Even more intriguing was the attitude of Barack Obama’s administration from 2009 to 2017. It did not do much to deter Russian inroads into the Caucasus and Ukraine, and opted from 2015 on for complete passivity in the Middle East and even active cooperation with Iran, the new Russian protégé.
Much was achieved, in this respect, by soft power. The old Soviet Union cultivated all kinds of networks in order to spy on foreign countries, or to influence them: from communist parties to front communist organizations, from fellow travelers to peace activists, from businessmen or companies interested in East-West trade to illiberal right-wingers. These networks accounted for perhaps one-half of Soviet global power. As Cold Warriors used to say, “East minus West equals zero”. Putin’s Russia is resorting to the same means and could have equal or perhaps even greater success.
Michel Gurfinkiel, a French public intellectual and the editor at large of Valeurs Actuelles, is the Founder and President of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute and a Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at Middle East Forum.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
This text provides an excellent summary of past events and an accurate overview of the current situation. I disagree with the causes of the downfall of the USSR though, at least the way they have been described in this article. One way or another, Russia has always been an imperialist nation whose priorities have systematically been unconditonal domination and leadership. Russia would be ready to pay any price for this conquest. Communist Russia was no exception and communism was instrumental in trying to lure the West, starting with socialist Western Europe, into its net. The system failed miserably. It was a failure from the start, but the Soviets thought that Europeans would follow them into this fake paradise. The Reagan-Thatcher-Kohl-JPII axis eventually dealt the final blow to Soviet power politically, economically, financially and morally. This informal alliance strongly contributed to accelerating the demise of the USSR. But, yes, the author is right in stating that the new regime then tried to restore Russian influence and power via other means, which have often been quite similar to those used by the Soviet Empire: disinformation and propaganda, which is, by far, the best way to win the hearts and minds of people while destabilising entire societies, as Russia cannot afford to conquer the West militarily. And make no mistake: the fact that so many Russian oligarchs have flocked to London over the past two-three decades is no coincidence ! Although it’s simply the top of the iceberg it’s also part of Russia’s strategy now implemented by Putin.
Thank you, mister Gurfinkiel, for this analysis of this so difficult subject. I learned more about it.
(en français… désolé)
Article effectivement intéressant, qui expose bien les mécanismes de la politique internationale de la Russie depuis la fin de l’URSS.
Pour avoir lu un peu sur l’histoire de ce pays, j’ai été étonné de voir que la Russie est un pays relativement récent, comparé à la France par exemple. Moscou a environ 900 ans d’âge… seulement ! Et ne parlons pas de Saint-Petersbourg.
Ce qui me frappe dans cette histoire de la Russie, c’est cette “bougeotte” des Russes : venus d’Ukraine au départ, on croirait que l’immense territoire russe ne leur suffit pas. Ils ne cessent de fonder des colonies – de peuplement – un peu partout : à l’est bien sûr, jusqu’à l’Océan Pacifique, mais aussi en Asie centrale, dans les pays baltes… pourquoi vouloir s’étendre toujours plus ?
Alors aujourd’hui, il leur est facile d’invoquer une grande Russie, qui unirait tous les russophones (“objectif numéro un” selon le présent article). On ne peut pas ne pas penser, effectivement, à la rhétorique des nazis, dans les années 30 : espace vital, solidarité avec les “Allemands” de Dantzig, des Sudètes, avec les Autrichiens, les Alsaciens, “grande Allemagne”…
Bien sûr certains pourraient rétorquer que la France, le Royaume-Uni, l’Espagne… ont aussi été expansionnistes. La grande différence, c’est que c’est du passé.
Certains justifieront évidemment cette attitude de la Russie par ce qu’ils appellent “l’impérialisme américain” ; c’est oublier que si les USA soutiennent des gouvernements de par le monde, ils n’établissent pas dans ces pays des colonies de peuplement. Sans parler du fait que les USA sont une démocratie – imparfaite comme toutes les démocraties, mais quand même – et sont la locomotive du monde, aux plans économique, scientifique, technique, médical ; ce qu’est tout de même loin d’être la Russie.
Pourtant, ce pays a des qualités, et un côté fascinant : ses artistes (écrivains, musiciens – parmi les “modernes” et en même temps traditionnels, j’aime bien Elena Frolova par exemple), certains de ses scientifiques… une intéressante résistance au relativisme si courant en Europe de l’Ouest et dans une partie de l’Amérique, également.
Il faut croire que chaque médaille a son revers… c’est vrai que les Russes sont quand même, selon mes informations, à peu près toujours aussi portés sur la vodka, et que c’est de chez eux que sort une des plus puissantes (sinon la plus puissante) mafias du monde – dont on se passerait bien.
@Jacques Ady
Bon commentaire.
Des mafias, il y en a partout et à toutes les sauces mais il faut reconnaître que la russe est particulièrement grossière, j’en conviens.