| |
PUTIN’S FOREIGN POLICY LEGACY - March 3, 2008
As President Dmitry Medvedev has succeeded Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, there has been considerable speculation about the future directions of Russia’s foreign policy. Some analysts noted that Medvedev’s public pronouncements to date have been less confrontational and more conciliatory than Putin’s harsh anti-western rhetoric. Others, however, emphasized that Medvedev is Putin’s creature. They argue that Putin, as prime minister, will not relinquish control to Medvedev and will dominate the Russian foreign policy. Regardless of what both schools of thought say, the fundamentals of Russia’s modern history and its present place in the world remain the same as they were during Putin’s presidency, and this ensures that Medvedev would not stray away from Putin’s foreign policy line. Therefore, let us look at these underlying fundamentals.
THE PARTITION OF "MOTHER RUSSIA"
By their own confessions, the CIA analysts were convinced that the Soviet Union will not collapse and predicted only limited liberal reforms by Gorbachev in transition to a more decentralized USSR. Nevertheless, on 25 December 1991 Yeltsin lowered the red Soviet flag and raised the Russian tricolor in its place over the Kremlin. On 31 December 1991 the USSR was officially disbanded in disobedience to the 17 March 1991 plebiscite, when 76% of Soviet citizens voted for preservation of the Soviet Union.
Historically, the Russian Empire differed from the rest of colonial empires in several aspects, the most important of which was its geographic continuity: the metropolitan Russia, or “Mother Russia” ( matushka Rossia), was not separated from its colonial possessions by oceans and continents, but only by mountains, steppes and rivers. There were no colonial administrations, and the whole empire consisted of 60 uniform administrative provinces called “gubernia.” Since there was no clearly defined perimeter of Russia proper, there was no psychological boundary either, which would enable one to say, where “Mother Russia” ends and a colony begins.
Another difference was Lenin’s legacy -- his idealistic plan of creating a Union of equal Soviet Socialist Republics, most of which never had a statehood before. In December 1922 he overrode Stalin’s proposal for “autonomization” of ethnic minorities within a single Russian Federation and formed instead the Soviet Union, in which Russia became only one of the constituent republics. This was Lenin’s greatest mistake, which has eventually led to Russia’s disintegration. Had he endorsed Stalin’s proposition, Russia could have avoided the grave consequences of the USSR disbandment.
The partition of “Mother Russia” was continued by Lenin’s followers in the Kremlin: almost every Soviet leader after him (most of them being not ethnic Russians) had generously apportioned large chunks of historic Russian lands to adjacent Soviet republics in the name of “proletarian internationalism.” Consequently, these ceded territories, together with their Russian inhabitants, were detached from Russia in 1991 as parts of the “newly independent states.”
It took 500 years to “gather” (as the czars termed the process) in numberless wars the Russian Empire, which Lenin later transformed into the Soviet Union. And it took only one stroke of Yeltsin’s pen to tear it down. In 1991 Russia was squeezed to its 1650 boundaries and 30 million Russians suddenly found themselves living outside the Russian Federation. Every fifth Russian is now a foreigner. These “foreign Russians” loom today much as the 10 million Germans, detached in 1919 from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, did in the German revanchist ideology between the two world wars.
One of Medvedev’s most difficult tasks now is to protect the Russians living abroad and try to gradually “regather” the lost parts of “Mother Russia.” In 2006 Putin issued a decree to facilitate the voluntary “repatriation” of the Russians living abroad. Putin’s plan has failed to attract significant numbers of “foreign Russians” simply because they are not “foreigners” in the historic Russian lands, where they have lived for centuries, and, naturally, are not eager to abandon their homeland, which has been ceded to the “newly independent states.”
THE "RUSSIAN QUESTION"
This problem has been labeled the “Russian Question” by revanchist politicians, led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky in the State Duma, and national-socialists led by Eduard Limonov outside the Duma. They contend that ceding to the “newly independent” neighbors the historically Russian territories is not the last word of history. Their program of “regathering Russia” calls for revision of the titular boundaries inherited by ex-Soviet republics from the disbanded USSR.
Even Gorbachev, in one of his last gasps as the Soviet leader, tried to preserve the core Russian homeland when the USSR was rapidly disintegrating. On 3 April 1990 the Supreme Court of the USSR passed the law: “Regulation of the Secession of Union Republics from the Soviet Union.” Under that law, if a Union's republic wished to withdraw from the USSR, its national minorities, including the local Russians, were granted the right to decide on their own whether to remain in the Soviet Union or to leave it within the separating republic -- much like the province of Ulster, which opted out of the Republic of Ireland as soon as the latter separated from Great Britain in 1921, and remained in the United Kingdom.
Yeltsin, however, in his usual impetuous manner, hastily withdrew the Russian Federation itself from the Soviet Union only to deprive Gorbachev of the country he was governing, but simultaneously he deprived Russia of her historic parts left within the severed Soviet republics. So far, territorial claims have not officially been pronounced on the government level, but many of Putin’s initiatives in defense, foreign, cultural, trade and energy policies can only be explained from this revanchist perspective, and I am convinced that these claims are biding their time.
In his annual state-of-the-nation address to the State Duma on 25 April 2005, Putin declared: “First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century. As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory. The epidemic of collapse has spilled over to Russia itself.”
As I foresaw 8 years ago in an opinion piece ( “Putin plans his Russian counterrevolution,” Washington Times, 30 March 2000), it has been only a matter of time before the resurgent Russia began the pursuit of “regathering” the lost Russian lands, thus rectifying Lenin’s mistakes and Yeltsin’s unconditional capitulation, for virtually any event in ex-Soviet republics may validate Russia’s interference, military intervention and the subsequent resolution of the “Russian Question.”
THE RUSSIAN REVANCHISM
If, instead of forming an equal “union” with its national minorities, Russia had, according to Stalin’s “autonomization” concept, simply granted them autonomous status within the unitary Russian Federation, the international law would have interpreted now the separation of those autonomous republics as separatist movements, just as the Chechen separatism (as well as the secession of ethnic autonomies from Azerbaijan, Georgia and Moldova) is being perceived. Hence, the dissolution of the USSR would not have been comprehended as a divorce of equal partners, but as a separation of Russia’s ethnic minorities. In such a case, the Russian parts of separating autonomous republics would have legitimately voted to remain in “Mother Russia,” and the “newly independent states” would have quitted the Russian Federation without the Russian lands.
These territories with an overwhelming Russian majority include, in particular, the vast northern expanses of what is now Kazakhstan, inhabited for 400 years by Russian settlers and known to them as Southern Siberia and South Urals; the Black Sea coast and eastern part of Ukraine, historically known as Malorossia (Little Russia), including the Crimean Peninsula, which was handed over by Nikita Khrushchev (ethnic Ukrainian) in 1954 from the Russian Federation to the Ukrainian SSR in commemoration of the 300th anniversary of reunification of Russia and Ukraine; and the Republic of Trans-Dnestr (Pridnestrovie), which has separated from Moldova in 1990.
In addition, two more non-Russian indigenous enclaves in Transcaucasia, such as Abkhazia and South Ossetia, after gaining in bloody conflicts a de facto independence from Georgia, have promulgated their eagerness to join the Russian Federation as a protector of their national identity. Putin has repeatedly said that the international recognition of Albanian Kosovo as an independent state shall serve as an analogy for Russia to recognize the independence of Pridnestrovie, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia and South Ossetia: “We need common principles to find a fair solution to these problems. If Kosovo can be granted full independence from Serbia, why then should we deny it to Abkhazia? We know that Turkey, for instance, has recognized the Republic of Northern Cyprus,” said Putin at his 1 June 2007 press conference.
Putin has already begun to reassert Russian influence throughout the former USSR territory, including a possible “correction” of borders along the Russian ethnic lines, but without reverting to a unitary state. He understands that Yeltsin’s rationale in getting rid of peripheral parasitical republics is irreversible. Russia does not need a new empire with all its mounting social problems of fast growing jobless non-Russian population, institutionalized corruption, cultural diversity, environmental disasters, such as the disappearing Aral Sea, implacable ethnic rivalries in Transcaucasia and Islamic insurgencies in Central Asia.
In his 1995 pamphlet, “How Can We Rebuild Russia,” Solzhenitsyn suggested a solution to the “Russian Question” through reunification of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, all of which, in his conviction, had a common culture and a consolidated economy, to replace the former USSR. On the rest of former Soviet republics, he wrote: “let them go their own way, which is different from Russia’s.”
So far, only Russia and Belarus have signed the “Treaty on the Formation of the Belarusian-Russian Union State” on 8 December 1999. Lukashenka, who harbors an ambition to head the proposed confederation, envisions the restoration of a Leninist union consisting of two equal partners. But his 2006 meeting with Putin revealed their principal differences in understanding the form of reunification. Putin suddenly asserted that he was talking about the incorporation of Belarus into the Russian Federation in the capacity of an autonomous republic. Putin is keen to avoid Lenin’s mistake in creating a “union” of equal republics and has prudently denied such an “equal partnership” to Belarus or any other new member of the Russian Federation.
THE "ENERGY DIPLOMACY"
Another component of Russia’s foreign policy is the so-called “energy diplomacy” -- the use of natural resources to exert power in Europe, which could be described as an implement in compelling the countries dependent on the Russian energy supplies to an agreeable demeanor. Let us put aside Putin’s ire about the anti-Russian 2003 “Rose Revolution” in Georgia and the 2004 “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine. Instead, let us consider the fact that Ukraine alone consumes more natural gas (74 billion cubic meters) than Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic combined. The huge German economy consumes only 100 billion cubic meters of gas.
As any reasonable capitalist, Putin wants to sell his energy to the maximum profit in the world market, and it is easy to understand why he became exasperated by Ukraine and other ex-Soviet neighbors, who paid in 2005 only $50 per 1000 cubic meters of Russian natural gas, while the European Union was paying $240. The United States and European Union both granted in 2005 a “market economy” status to Ukraine, prompting Sergey Ivanov, then Russia’s defense minister, to wonder: “If Ukraine has now a market economy, why it cannot pay the market price for our gas?”
Russia has the largest natural gas reserves in the world, produces 600 billion cubic meters of gas a year and sells 160 billion cubic meters to Europe. The annual production of Russian oil vacillates around 500 million metric tons (compared to Kazakhstan’s 80 million and Azerbaijan’s 40 million tons), of which half is exported. But, while Russia produces a huge amount of oil and natural gas relative to other countries, it also has a much greater territory with colder climate and larger population. Russia produces only 3 tons of oil per capita, while Norway produces 20 tons. This fact has led the Russian economist Andrey Parshev in his book, “Why Russia is not America,” to the conclusion that, due to its cold climate, enormous distances and high wages, Russia is simply unattractive for foreign investment, as opposed to China, Latin America, India and South-East Asia.
Therefore, despite its abundant energy reserves, Russia is unable to subsidize the neighbors and “friends,” as said Putin in January 2006: “Russia has been in fact subsidizing the former Soviet republics at the expense of Russian citizens for 15 years. Subsidies to Ukraine alone cost us $3.5 billion annually. For comparison, the USA provided only $174 million worth of aid to Ukraine last year. We have our own economy, our own country, our own citizens, our own pensioners, our own military servicemen, health workers, teachers and other government-employed workers.”
On 1 January 2006 the Russian state gas monopoly Gazprom stopped pumping natural gas to Ukraine and Georgia after their refusal to pay more. The Georgian energy crisis has demonstrated the fundamental handicap of former Soviet republics in the face of Russian revanchism. As soon as Georgia’s anti-Russian president Saakashvili threatened with a military solution to the problem of the breakaway South Ossetia, Russia shut down its gas pipeline. Georgian population struggled to endure the record cold temperatures and heavy snowfalls. After a dramatic arm-wringing, Georgia agreed to pay $235 per 1000 cubic meters of Russian gas.
Another evidence of Russia’s resurging influence in the post-Soviet space is the agreement signed by Putin on 20 December 2007 in Moscow with presidents of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan on building a new gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Russia via Kazakhstan, circumventing the Caspian Sea. This project deals a blow to the plan of the European Union, supported by Washington, to bring Central Asian gas directly to Europe, without traversing the Russian territory, via a pipeline under the Caspian that would link up with the existing Baku-Tiflis-Erzerum line.
Therefore, self-reliance is the only practical direction in which Russia can move, as asserted Putin at his meeting in Moscow with the Italian prime minister Romano Prodi on 24 January 2007: “In the past, in the era of colonialism, colonialist countries talked about their civilizing role. Today, some countries use slogans of spreading democracy for the same purpose, and that is to gain unilateral advantages and ensure their own interests. However, as Russia’s economic, political, and military capabilities grow in the world, it is emerging as a competitor -- a competitor that has already been written off. The West wants to put Russia in some pre-defined place, but Russia will find its place in the world all by itself.”
In conclusion, I would quote here Putin’s laconic manifesto, as he stressed in his speech at the 2007 annual Munich Conference on Security Policy: “Russia is a country with a history that spans more than a thousand years and has practically always used the privilege to carry out an independent foreign policy. We are not going to change this tradition today.” This is the fundamental foundation of Russia’s foreign policy and this basic principle should be remembered by any serious analyst who intends to understand the politics of this great nation, which do not change contemporaneously with shifts in the Kremlin.
Dr. Alec Rasizade
-----------------------
Dr. Alec Rasizade holds Ph.D. degree in Modern History from Moscow State University and M.A. degree from Azerbaijan State University. He is presently a Senior Associate at the Historical Research Center in Washington, D.C. Dr. Rasizade used to be a lecturer at many universities, including Stanford University and Columbia University. Prior to that he worked at Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C.
----------------------- |
|
