^{CHAPTER 3}

Red Bequests

WITHIN THE WELTER of commentary on Putin’s Russia there is an overwhelming consensus that many, if not most, of the country’s problems hinge on the persistence of the Soviet past. These holdovers can take many forms, from the physical to the psychological. They include the rusting remnants of Soviet industry – Russia has hundreds of ‘monocities’, towns dependent on the survival of a single factory – as well as the authoritarian instincts of the country’s present-day rulers, which are widely held to be a continuation of dark precedents set by the Communist Party. More diffuse than either of these, but more insidiously powerful, is the idea that a Soviet mindset still lingers within society as a whole, a set of assumptions and habits forged by decades of submission to power that supposedly keeps Russians mired in passivity to this day.

The notion is summed up in the term Homo sovieticus, popularized by Soviet dissident writer Aleksandr Zinoviev in the 1980s and taken up energetically by Russian sociologists. It has since become a staple of liberal punditry in Russia and beyond. For the Economist, Putin’s continued grip on power showed that Homo sovieticus was still alive, and that ‘the process of dismantling the Soviet system, which started twenty years ago, is far from over’. Nobel winner Svetlana Alexievich announced in 2015 that ‘the “Red Empire” is gone, but the “Red Man”, Homo sovieticus, remains. He endures.’^{1} Communism, it seems, had produced a whole zombie subspecies whose main trait was an addiction to its toxic past. For Masha Gessen, writing in 2017, the uncanny survival of spectres of the Soviet era was central to the story of ‘how totalitarianism reclaimed Russia’ under Putin.^{2}

How useful is this line of thinking for understanding the contemporary situation? I believe the past does matter – but not in the way most people seem to think it does. Since the 1990s, the conventional wisdom has been that Russia’s transition to capitalism has been slowed or distorted by the dead weight of the past, and that only when the country finally shakes off the remaining vestiges of the Soviet period will it finally be able to join the ranks of ‘normal’ liberal democratic countries. These arguments need to be turned on their head. Rather than being a hindrance, the remnants of the Soviet past have been a massive boon for post-Soviet Russia. We can see this most clearly if we look at Russian society at large, which has undergone a complex set of mutations often neglected in the general run of Western analyses, focused single-mindedly as they are on Putin.

After the collapse of the USSR, the transition to capitalism set in motion a process of sharp social differentiation that gave rise to new social groups and new experiences; yet it did not instantly demolish the previous social order, which persisted in various forms. The coexistence of these two social structures, one under construction within the still crumbling ruins of the other, gave rise to a parallelism of old and new – a kind of combined and uneven social development – which effectively smoothed the path of capitalist transition rather than blocking it.

This parallelism of old and new social structures helps explain some of the enigmas of post-Soviet society that have most puzzled outsiders. Why, given the extreme deprivation most Russians were experiencing, wasn’t there more upheaval during the 1990s? Why did it take so long for opposition to Putin to emerge in the 2000s? Why did so many Russians, during the petro-fuelled boom of that decade, rush to identify as members of a rising middle class, when by most indicators they would be classed as something else?

The usual answers to these questions cite many elements – including, most obviously, the disorientation sown by the 1990s transition and the real improvement in living conditions that many Russians experienced in the 2000s. But most accounts leave out an important part of the picture: the coexistence of old and new social structures provided a stabilizing subsidy to the Yeltsin regime, which Putin then inherited. The tenuous survival of pieces of the Soviet welfare system provided a safety net, however threadbare, that allowed millions of Russians to survive the ‘transition’ of the 1990s. Along with these material continuities, older social structures and categories of thinking persisted even as new ones were emerging. The overlap allowed Russians to perceive themselves as simultaneously inhabiting both old and new social universes. This double vision softened the impact of what was in fact a sudden and traumatic process of social change. To see how this worked, we need to have a clearer idea of what kind of society emerged from the USSR’s wreckage, and what it did and didn’t owe to the past.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Tatyana Tolstaya’s novel The Slynx reimagined Russia’s experience of the 1990s as a post-apocalyptic nightmare. A mysterious disaster, known only as The Blast, had wiped away all traces of the preceding civilization, returning the land to medieval conditions: tyrannical rulers, rudimentary technology, endless mud. The catastrophe had also inflicted on the populace strange mutations known as Consequences. Some had gills, others cockscombs, others still had nostrils in their knees. Consequences could be invisible or all too apparent; they could be a quirk, a handicap or a skill – some old-timers breathed fire, for instance – but they were almost never shared. Everyone, it seemed, was alone in their deformity or new capability.

This was a powerful allegory for the disorientations of everyday post-Soviet experience. People’s fortunes had diverged wildly, and unfamiliar figures proliferated across the landscape, from millionaires to vagrants, petty entrepreneurs to hit men. But in one crucial sense the allegory was misleading: the social world of post-Soviet Russia was not built on a tabula rasa. It emerged, rather, from within the carapace of the USSR – inheriting many of the previous social order’s peculiarities, and transforming them into strange new shapes.

Soviet society itself was differentiated along a number of axes. Officially, the October Revolution was supposed to have abolished class antagonism. The old possessing classes – the aristocracy, landed gentry and mercantile and industrial bourgeoisies – disappeared from the social landscape within a few short years, either killed, exiled, or merged into the wider populace in a kind of group déclassement. The country that emerged from the wreckage of the Civil War was still populated overwhelmingly by peasants, but the New Economic Plan in force during most of the 1920s produced a cluster of entrepreneurs and petty traders in the cities. It was only with the industrial push of the late 1920s that the ranks of industrial workers began to swell. Meanwhile, the growth of the party–state and establishment of the planned economy produced a substantial layer of apparatchiks and bureaucrats, not to mention secret policemen.

The new Soviet constitution of 1936, though, folded all this variety into just two categories: Article I declared the USSR to be ‘a socialist state of workers and peasants’. The same year, Stalin famously characterized Soviet society as ‘two friendly classes and a layer’ – workers and peasants, plus the intelligentsia. The ‘2+1’ formula would remain the USSR’s official sociological self-description for decades to come. It was based on the supposedly Marxist criterion of differences in relation to the means of production – and since private ownership of the latter had been abolished in the USSR, the usual class distinctions didn’t apply. But as Leon Trotsky observed caustically in late 1936, ‘from the point of view of property in the means of production, the differences between a marshal and a servant girl, the head of a trust and a day labourer, the son of a people’s commissar and a homeless child, seem not to exist at all.’^{3} The ‘2+1’ formula, in short, threw a broad blanket over a range of factors that set Soviet citizens apart from one another.

Far from consisting of two homogeneous groups of ‘workers’ and ‘peasants’, the Soviet populace was sorted into many different compartments according to income, skills, education and gender. Labour was rewarded to very different degrees, giving rise to inequalities of income between unskilled manual workers and highly trained engineers, agricultural labourers and administrators of the planned economy. Wages varied significantly by economic sector, too, and were significantly lower in agriculture than in industry. Then there were regional differences: wages tended to be higher in major cities, but there were also significant premiums to be earned from working in very remote areas such as the Arctic or Far East (although much of that gain was eaten up by the higher price of basic goods in such far-flung places).

Income disparities to some extent reflected different skill levels. Yet the division between manual and nonmanual labour did not represent the same kind of hierarchy as in Western industrialized states. This was partly because of the symbolic importance of industrial labour in the Soviet system, which raised the status and pay of factory workers somewhat relative to other social groups. But it was also because the status of nonmanual ‘service personnel’ was generally inferior to that of manual workers as a whole. Though often seen as equivalent to the West’s ‘white-collar’ workers, the Soviet sluzhashchie had far less prestige and much lower pay.

Soviet hierarchies of income and skill were also strongly gendered. The USSR had an unusually high female labour-force participation rate: 86 per cent in 1970, compared with 43 per cent for the US, 49 per cent for Japan and 38 per cent for West Germany.^{4} But Soviet women, with some exceptions, tended to be clustered near the lower end of the wage and skill scale. Like women elsewhere, they were mainly employed in female-dominated sectors where wages were lower: light industry, textiles, education, health care and clerical and administrative work. At the same time, they were held at the bottom of the pay ladder in sectors where women were in the minority: metallurgy, mining, chemicals. Soviet women also had to bear the main burden of housework and child-rearing, not to mention the recurrent, time-consuming task of queuing for food and other basic consumer goods. (Their partners did not offer much assistance. After comparing the time budgets of married and single women, one scholar concluded dryly that ‘the addition of a husband did absolutely nothing to ease the woman’s domestic burden’.)^{5}

To all of these social differences could be added further, less formalized distinctions. In response to the generalized shortages so characteristic of life in the USSR, Soviet citizens developed the range of informal practices known as blat, usually translated as ‘pull’. These personal connections and exchanged favours meant better access to scarce food items, clothing, housing, and so on. Indeed, sometimes connections were more useful than actual money.

But perhaps the most important thing the ‘2+1’ formula omitted was the party–state apparatus itself. Membership in the Communist Party was a mass phenomenon: the total went from 1 million in 1921 to 3.6 million in 1933, and though the Great Terror and the Second World War took a tremendous toll, by the late 1960s the CPSU had some 13 million members.^{6} They were drawn from across society: some two-fifths were manual workers, and 16 per cent were collective-farm peasants.^{7} Those higher up the income and status ladder were more likely to hold a Party card, but the dynamic also worked the other way around: membership tended to make for greater professional success. Belonging to the Party often conferred informal advantages too, smoothing the way in all kinds of transactions or giving access to scarce goods.

This applied especially to the core of the party–state, the nomenklatura, which by the 1980s comprised anywhere between 400,000 and 700,000 people.^{8} For some critics of the Soviet system, the nomenklatura constituted a class in itself – as suggested by the title of Milovan Djilas’s 1957 book The New Class, which painted the top layer of the Soviet bureaucracy as an elite caste floating above the rest of the population. But although it enjoyed distinct advantages relative to everyone else, the nomenklatura was not a closed group – it was recruited, albeit somewhat unevenly, from all sectors of society – and it did not technically own any property that it could transmit to its heirs, in the manner of an aristocracy or even a bourgeoisie. At most, the nomenklatura could have been called a proto-class, dedicated to preserving its collective power – which it would soon seek to convert into property.

Soviet society, then, was marked by a number of social disparities. But the basic principle behind these was not rank, as in feudal societies, or class, as in capitalist ones, but a more ambiguous, sui generis mixture. On the one hand, many of the socio-economic features and cultural markers that distinguish classes from one another were present; but on the other, the political hierarchy of the party–state created peculiar pressures and opportunities of its own. After 1991, this uneven social landscape did not vanish with the system that created it. Rather, it served as the basis for a new and far more drastic differentiation.

After the fall of the USSR, the dismantling of the planned economy and the Yeltsin government’s free-market reforms set in motion a vast machinery for the creation of inequalities. According to World Bank data, in 1988 Russia had a Gini coefficient of 0.24, which placed it in the company of, say, Sweden; by 1993, the figure stood at 0.48, putting it on a par with Peru or the Philippines. These figures only cover officially declared income, so the actual rise in inequality was surely far greater; recent estimates based on a broader set of data show Russia’s Gini coefficient doubling in five years, from 0.32 in 1991 to 0.64 in 1996.^{9}

The trend was especially visible at either end of the scale: even as the oligarchs rapidly acquired their fortunes, poverty was soaring. In 1992 – the year Yeltsin initiated his ‘shock therapy’, including a deregulation of prices that tripled the cost of food virtually overnight – the International Labour Organization classed 85 per cent of the Russian population as poor.^{10} In response, the Yeltsin government adopted a new method for measuring poverty – whereupon the figure fell to 36 per cent. (This solution is reminiscent of Brecht’s advice to the GDR leadership, after the East Berlin rising of 1953, to ‘dissolve the people and elect a new one’.)

What was supposed to be a temporary jolt turned into a prolonged economic slump, as Russia’s GDP contracted by more than a third between 1991 and 1995 – a steeper decline than in the US during the Great Depression. According to World Bank figures from 1996, more than two-fifths of the population – some 60 million people – were living on less than $4 a day, compared with 2 million in 1989.^{11} Symptoms of social breakdown multiplied: unemployment spiked, and crime and murder rates doubled in the early 1990s. Public health deteriorated with incredible speed: male life expectancy, for example, dropped by five years between 1991 and 1994.

Across Russian society, economic differences grew more prominent than ever before. The arrival of the market brought what economists euphemistically call ‘wage decompression’. Soviet incomes had varied, as we have seen, depending on workers’ skills, education, sector, region, gender, and degree of political privilege. In the 1990s, the range of variation became much broader. In Soviet times, for instance, average wages in different sectors of the economy had mostly hovered within a range of 25 per cent either side of the nationwide average. Come the 1990s, wages in the ‘fuel-energy complex’ – oil and gas – rose to more than three times the national average, whereas trade, health care, culture and light industry saw wages tumble to between 55 and 69 per cent of the average. The sector that lost out most dramatically was agriculture, where wages collapsed to barely a third of the national average.^{12}

Sectoral differences tended to translate into regional ones, given the disparities between Russia’s regions in terms of natural resources and economic infrastructure. In the 1990s, the major cities and the hubs for mineral extraction fared best – Moscow above all, but also the oil cities of Western Siberia. Heavily industrial and agricultural regions, meanwhile, suffered severe declines, as did areas where the ‘military-industrial complex’ had dominated: the closure of one-fifth of the country’s military plants between 1991 and 1993 wiped out millions of livelihoods.^{13}

Another major factor driving regional differentiation was the Yeltsin government’s swingeing cuts to health, education, pensions and social welfare budgets. Under instruction from the IMF, it slashed real spending by anywhere between 30 and 50 per cent. This had drastic effects on education and health care everywhere. Starved of the basic funds they needed to operate, schools began to introduce ‘user fees’ many parents couldn’t afford; by the turn of the century, more than a fifth of sixteen- to seventeen-year-olds were not in school. Health care provision deteriorated markedly too. In the first half of the decade, as child vaccination rates tumbled and funding for much adult primary care vanished, mortality from infectious and parasitic diseases doubled, and tuberculosis cases multiplied.^{14}

Cutbacks in central funding effectively dumped onto cash-strapped regional and municipal authorities responsibility for a deepening social crisis they could do little or nothing to mitigate. Again, Moscow and resource-rich regions were exceptions. They could afford to maintain a semblance of welfare provision that was beyond the reach of depressed industrial areas or the poor, non-ethnic Russian fringes of the country – for example the republic of Tuva, on Siberia’s southern edge, where by 1996 poverty rates stood at a staggering 77 per cent, more than three times the national average.^{15}

These wrenching socio-economic shifts ushered in a whole range of unfamiliar social actors, developing out of new kinds of economic relationships. Property ownership played a much lesser role than the neoliberal reformers had intended, however. The privatizations of the early 1990s hadn’t created a nationwide mass of shareholders, but rather an oligarchy that proceeded to pile up wealth on a scale previously unimaginable. For the bulk of the population, ownership of assets remained out of reach. Housing was one partial and substantial exception to this trend, but even here outcomes were ambiguous and uneven. Starting in 1992, the majority of the country’s housing stock was divested to municipalities, who were then supposed to oversee its sale to households. In practice, about half of housing was sold in this way, mainly because legal title to an apartment brought increased costs – maintenance, services – that few were able to take on.[4] While a large number of city-dwellers came to own apartments they could then sell (this was an especially lucrative move in Moscow), across most of Russia there was only the most tentative kind of real estate market.^{16}

Privatization of the land did not unfold as expected, either. The advocates of free-market reform had envisaged a rapid opening of the stagnant Soviet agricultural sector, breaking up state and collective farms in favour of individualized ownership, the goal being to create a layer of stolid post-Soviet yeomen. But farm directors managed to obstruct Yeltsin’s plans for full privatization of land – announced three weeks after the shelling of parliament in 1993 – and only agricultural supply and procurement were privatized. Many large farms remained intact, and well into the 2000s relatively few independent farmers had peeled away from them.^{17}

Outside of the elite, in fact, only a tiny layer of owner-entrepreneurs emerged, amounting to no more than 2 per cent of the population during the 1990s.^{18} Still, the uneven flows of cash and commerce did give rise to a myriad of traders: retailers who ran the kiosks and tiny shops that sprouted along pavements and beneath underpasses; freelance salespeople who made irregular income from deals big or small; shuttle traders (chelnoki), who travelled huge distances, often across international borders, to buy goods for resale.^{19} The vast majority of trade was small-scale, and was often as much an expression of desperation as of entrepreneurism, a survival strategy rather than a vocation. (Moscow’s sidewalks during the 1990s, for example, were scattered with pensioners selling veterans’ medals, silverware and other memorabilia.) A trader who was really successful could become the owner of a small business, rather than carry on selling on someone else’s behalf. But often there was no clear split between proprietors and employees: traders tended to be both at the same time.

The proliferation of commerce also created plentiful opportunities for organized crime, above all through protection and extortion rackets. Nearly all post-Soviet business in the 1990s involved side payments to obtain a krysha, or ‘roof’. Drugs, cars, weapons and prostitution were among the many other new sources of profit. Some of the most visible beneficiaries were charismatic crime lords, but a new layer of smaller-scale crooks also thrived, drawn not only from the Soviet-era criminal fraternity, the vory v zakone (‘thieves by law’), but also from among Afghan War veterans, unemployed athletes and former security-service personnel.^{20}

Meanwhile the sudden impoverishment brought by the transition to capitalism produced a new and distinct layer of the dispossessed. The liberal reformers’ assault on the Soviet welfare system cast invalids and pensioners into penury and starvation, and demobbed soldiers were turned loose into unemployment or a life on the fringes of crime. Many of the millions of ethnic Russians who ‘returned’ to the homeland after the fall of the USSR, lacking papers or places to live, were forced onto the streets. There are no reliable figures on homelessness during the 1990s – estimates for Moscow alone range from 15,000 to 100,000 – but rough sleeping, begging and vagrancy were more visible than ever before.^{21} The ‘corporations of the dying’ that Walter Benjamin had seen in 1920s Moscow had returned.

The making of new social actors – oligarchs and racketeers, vagrants and shuttle traders – took place alongside what the anthropologist Caroline Humphrey has called ‘the unmaking of Soviet life’.^{22} The term applied in particular to three groups. Two of them had been the biggest beneficiaries of the Soviet system’s egalitarian elements: the working class, and women across the social spectrum. The third was the intelligentsia, which under Communism had experienced an ambiguous combination of repressions and advancements.

The Russian working class as a whole was ‘unmade’ in several ways during the 1990s. The sheer weight of industry within the Soviet economy – in 1980, it had accounted for 45 per cent of employment – meant that the post-Communist crisis was bound to have a disproportionate impact.^{23} In effect, what took place repeated on a far larger scale the rust belt decay seen in much of the West. Many factories shed large portions of their workforce, pushing the official unemployment rate to 10 per cent in 1996; in 2000 it stood at 11 per cent.^{24} This was actually not high by post-Communist standards: Poland posted a jobless figure of 13 per cent in 1995, and the unemployment rate in Lithuania in the same year was 18 per cent.^{25}

One reason Russia’s figure was not higher was because miserably low unemployment benefits put many people off registering (especially since they were often not paid out anyway). But more importantly, many state enterprises responded to the recession not by shedding workers but by reducing their hours or wages; in some cases they kept people on the books without paying them at all. Under- or pseudo-employment was a crucial lifeline for millions of Russians, supplying them with at least some income and continued access to the services and welfare that large-scale enterprises still provided. This also meant, though, that millions were obliged to make up the shortfall in income by taking up a whole range of other activities: factory workers moonlighted as cab drivers, engineers sold encyclopaedias, librarians cleaned apartments.

At the same time, the collective identity of the working class was being undone. The USSR had defined itself as a ‘workers’ state’, claiming – however rhetorically – a vanguard role in the global labour movement. The transition to capitalism, among many other things, meant a fundamental rejection of this received idea. Thanks to its association with the Communist regime, the very category ‘worker’ had been delegitimized at a stroke. Interviewing workers from a dozen factories over the course of the 1990s, French sociologist Karine Clément pointed to a process of what she called desubjectivation, as workers lost their sense of themselves and their place in the world. Many now refused any identification with the working class – and, often, with any social group at all; interviewees spoke again and again of their isolation, their lack of a future, their uselessness to society. ‘I am unsure of everything,’ said one; ‘I am a useless screw in a badly built car,’ said another, while others still observed that ‘I am not a man’ or that ‘I am a person on whom nothing depends.’^{26}

Even as the identity of the working class was being undermined, the foundations of the economy were shifting beneath it. The labour that had defined the Russian working class was disappearing. An exodus into the service sector had already begun, bringing with it a marked decline in the skills of the labour force: the share of skilled and highly skilled workers fell from a third to a quarter of all workers between 1994 and 2002.^{27} The industrial workforce remained sizable for much of the 1990s, but the value it produced was concentrated in a handful of sectors staffed by relatively few employees: extraction of oil, gas, metals, coal.

Russian women, meanwhile, felt the full impact of that decade’s ‘restructuring’ along several dimensions. Their historically high labour-force participation had cut both ways during the Soviet era: in many cases it brought greater emancipation, but at the same time meant an expansion of the ‘double burden’. Yet a notional commitment to the idea of women as wage-earners remained in place until perestroika, when ideas about women returning to ‘the work of motherhood’, their ‘purely womanly mission’, began to circulate – in part as a solution to the mass unemployment that would evidently come with large-scale economic reform.^{28}

Presented as a choice in the 1980s, women’s ejection from the workforce became an inescapable fate only a few years later. Women accounted for a disproportionate share of the newly unemployed after 1991, as well as being over-represented among the working poor: in 1993, 70 per cent of those who had jobs and yet were classed as ‘extremely poor’ were women.^{29} In part this was because of shrinking (and often unpaid) wages in the ‘feminized’ sectors of the economy. There also were many more women pensioners than men – a consequence of women’s longer life expectancy and the higher toll taken among men by the Second World War – which again left women disproportionately vulnerable.

The erosion of women’s role as workers coincided with their removal from politics. After the abolition of a Soviet 30 per cent quota, the number of women in key governmental and administrative roles declined rapidly. It seems almost too fitting that Women of Russia, a political party that won twenty-three seats in the 1993 parliamentary elections, disappeared in 1999, merging with a party named ‘Fatherland’. This process went hand in hand with the resurgence of essentialized views of sexual difference. As Labour Minister Gennady Melikian put it in 1993: ‘Why should we employ women when men are unemployed? It is better that men work and women take care of the children and do the housework.’^{30} Such attitudes were nothing new, of course, either in Russia or anywhere else. But though the changes under way in Russia echoed the backlash against second-wave feminism taking place in the West, they were striking in their speed and intensity. Reversing whatever gains women had made under Communism was presented as a return to the ‘natural’ state of affairs.

On top of all this, Russian women were experiencing increasing levels of violence and abuse in the home. The available statistics understate the reality by some distance, but they are appalling enough: in one survey, 40 per cent of wives reported being beaten by their husbands at least once, and 27 per cent said they had been beaten repeatedly; in 1994, female homicide rates peaked at levels twenty times higher than the European average.^{31} In this respect as in others, the first post-Soviet decade pushed existing trends to horrific new levels.

The intelligentsia, for its part, underwent a twofold unmaking in the 1990s. The state institutions and structures that had materially sustained it were dissolving, and the sense of collective social identity that marked it out as a specific group was dwindling. Downgrading and déclassement were the fate of many, especially of those from the ‘mass intelligentsia’ – engineers, technicians, ‘specialists’ – created by Soviet industrialization.

The transition to capitalism had an especially dramatic effect on the vast scientific and technical apparatus. Basic funding for research in all fields dried up, and in many cases disappeared altogether. Spending on science accounted for only 2 per cent of the government budget in 2000, and the total amount was around one-thirtieth of what it had been in 1990. Thousands of academics and technical personnel were thrown into unemployment, or continued their work on minimal or non-existent resources. Many others emigrated: according to one rough estimate, some 8,000 top-level mathematicians and physicists left the country between 1990 and 1999.^{32} The experience of that decade showed that scientific and technical foundations built over generations can be eroded with dramatic speed. Having helped to turn an agrarian empire into a global superpower – complete with nuclear arsenal, space programme, advances in astrophysics and cybernetics – Russia’s scientists found themselves marking time amid its ruins.

The cultural sphere is often better able to function on meagre means, and to spring back from crisis quickly. Even here, though, the impact of ‘transition’ was far-reaching: the withdrawal of state funding did away with thousands of jobs and an entire ecosystem of publishing. Some of the old journals and magazines staggered on, and a motley array of new ones emerged. But the advent of the market meant the disappearance of many of the networks and channels through which cultural products had been diffused.

Institutional atrophy and slumping economic fortunes helped bring on a splintering of the intelligentsia’s collective sense of self. In 1993, the sociologists Lev Gudkov and Boris Dubin argued that the very idea of ‘a shared intelligentsia sentiment, lending rhythm to the existence of the whole social layer’, had already vanished.^{33} What was taking place now was a ‘powerful process of professional differentiation’, as the former intelligentsia was separated out into various roles thrown up by the new market order. The 1990s boom in petty trade generated a host of low-skilled, badly paid, loosely ‘cultural’ jobs in advertising and sales. ‘Professionalization’ was also in large measure a process of deskilling and proletarianization, only partially masked by the glossy patina of the new consumerism.

At the same time, a more profound shift was under way, marking a historic break with the intelligentsia’s social purpose and political orientation. Among much of the cultural and artistic elite, a long-standing identification with the people – always laced with ambiguities, to be sure – gave way to an embrace of the market forces riding roughshod over them. The bulk of the country’s intellectual elite were prominent supporters first of Gorbachev’s perestroika and then of Yeltsin. Many of the key personnel implementing the 1990s reforms – Yegor Gaidar, Chubais and others – were drawn from cultural and academic circles. In their eyes, the demolition of the Soviet system was essential to Russia’s advance toward ‘civilization’, and they vociferously backed ‘shock therapy’ and the free-market reforms against any and all opposition: it was Yeltsin or the abyss.

A crucial moment came in 1993, during the president’s standoff with the Supreme Soviet. The day after the shelling of the parliament building, an open letter appeared in Izvestiia, signed by forty-two writers, stating that ‘these dumb bastards respect only force’, and urging the government to take further ‘decisive measures’, including the banning of Communist and nationalist parties and the closure of their newspapers.^{34} Barely a year later, many of the same intellectuals took a principled stand against the bombing of civilians in Grozny; but as the former dissident Andrei Sinyavsky put it, ‘The intelligentsia has not yet understood that the war in Chechnya is a direct continuation of the firing on the White House.’^{35} Behind the intelligentsia’s political failing, according to Sinyavsky, lay a deeper desertion of their historic popular sympathies: ‘The intelligentsia, which in the past had lived with the people and shared its misfortunes to such an extent that the very term “intellectual”… unequivocally implied a love for the people, was today afraid of those same people.’^{36}

In some cases, that fear was overpowered by contempt: in January 1999, shortly after the rouble crisis, novelist and critic Viktor Erofeev disparaged the mass of the Russian population as ‘medieval creatures’ who were ‘dragging Russia down toward the bottom’:

Such language was unusual only in its vicious directness; couched in other forms and arguments, the sentiments behind it were widespread.

How completely was the Russian intelligentsia ‘unmade’ in the 1990s – was it in fact slated for total disappearance? In 1994, Gudkov and Dubin concluded mournfully that the intelligentsia as currently constituted was unable to address the country’s situation: ‘Other groups and people, it seems, will resolve the problems that have accumulated – people who have been educated differently, with a different understanding of themselves and the world in which they live.’^{38} The philosopher Mikhail Ryklin thought his entire generation had already entered the afterlife, subsisting in a zombie-like state: ‘After the death of the country in which we were born, we have already become dead people, and so the death that awaits us will not be the first.’^{39}

Yet neither these otherworldly metaphors nor the dislocation that had inspired them were unprecedented – as the title of Masha Gessen’s 1997 book on the Russian intelligentsia, Dead Again, wryly attests. Epochal crises had several times threatened the intelligentsia with destruction – the Revolution, Civil War, Stalinist purges and the Second World War – before Brezhnevism all but bored it to death. Each time there had then been a rebirth or refoundation, in a novel form and changed atmosphere. Would it not emerge yet again, blinking, into the new century?

^_____

Despite all the novelties the free-market transition of the 1990s brought, the switchover from the old social structure to the new could never be instantaneous or total. The two continued to exist in parallel, with new social actors coming into being alongside the remnants of the state-socialist system. Often the latter provided a meagre guarantee of income or perhaps some basic, non-monetized services; but the little it offered was never enough, and had to be supplemented with gains from market-oriented work – potentially more sustaining, but always more risky. This meant that millions of Russians found themselves inhabiting multiple social roles. The metamorphic blurring this created was captured in Viktor Pelevin’s 1993 novel The Life of Insects, in which people are suddenly and arbitrarily transformed – a teenager turns into a moth, a widow becomes an ant, a prostitute becomes a mosquito – and all sense of scale or causality dissolves, along with any meaningful boundary between species.

The sheer confusion the process of ‘transition’ generated was one obvious reason for the relative lack of protests in Russia in the 1990s. Most people were struggling to survive, and many opted for individualized solutions amid the collapse of older collectivities. Privatization also made it hard in many cases to identify who exactly should be the target of protest: in much of Russian industry, for example, the actual ownership structure was hidden behind layers of shell companies and investment vehicles. As a result, the vast majority of strikes took place in the state sector rather than the private one (education alone accounted for almost 90 per cent of them between 1992 and 1996).^{40}

But there were two further factors behind the strange quiescence of the Russian population, both of them examples of the persistence of the old lending support to the new. Firstly, the way Soviet industry had been organized made a huge difference. The fundamental unit was the enterprise, and despite the many differences between them, workers and management within an enterprise had tended to present a common front – for instance, against state administrators imposing plan targets. When the planned economy began to fall apart, these basic units remained largely intact, while the fabric that held them together was torn into pieces of varying sizes and shapes. After 1991, the depth of the crisis often gave rise to a defensive solidarity between workers and management, as they strove to keep production going. In many cases this was the only way for workers to keep not only their jobs but also the housing and other basic social guarantees that were, for now, still provided at the enterprise level. Paradoxically, the end of Communism reinforced workers’ dependence on the old paternalistic model.

Secondly, trade unions played an often overlooked but important role. In Soviet times, trade unions had been ‘transmission belts’ for the party–state, their main function being to stimulate production; they were also tasked with administering some social benefits within enterprises. In theory, the end of Communism could have made room for organizations that were more independent of management. But on the whole, the old enterprise-level unions remained in place, as component parts of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR). Many of the personnel and reflexes of Soviet unionism were carried over – and if anything, in the crisis conditions of the 1990s the unions’ dependence on management only deepened. At the national level, union leaders were soon enough made politically docile, particularly by Yeltsin’s 1993 move to strip FNPR affiliates of the right to administer many social benefits.^{41}

Ultimately, the trade unions were a boon to post-Soviet capital and state alike: their dwindling relevance delegitimized the idea of unions in workers’ eyes, and at the same time they took up the space that a more independent, combative labour movement could have occupied. This is a very concrete example of Soviet-era institutions providing a subsidy to their capitalist successors, the maintenance of one smoothing the way for the establishment of the other.

^_____

After 2000, the turbulence of the previous decade – many Russians described the 1990s as likhie, ‘feverish’ – seemed to abate. Now the watchword was ‘stabilization’, embodied in everything from the gathering economic recovery to the 2004 creation of a Stabilization Fund in which to park the steady flow of oil and gas revenues. By this time Russia’s GDP had finally regained its late Soviet level, and many of the most glaring symptoms of social breakdown had begun to fade: crime rates dropped, health indicators improved, life expectancy began to rise. It seemed to sum up the mood when an annual sociology conference, held since 1993 under the title ‘Where Is Russia Going?’, changed its name in 2003 to ‘Where Has Russia Arrived?’

But whatever stability meant, it did not mean a fundamental reversal of the socio-economic mechanisms set in motion after 1991. Much as Putin’s rule was a prolongation of the substance of Yeltsin’s, so in the social realm the 2000s brought a consolidation and extension of the disparities that had appeared in the 1990s. Overall inequalities of income remained sizeable. The debt default and currency crash of 1998 didn’t do much to narrow the gap: few of the super-rich kept their wealth in roubles, or indeed in Russia.[5] This trend continued and even accelerated under Putin: according to one calculation, by 2014 the financial wealth held by a handful of Russians abroad was equal to the total wealth of the entire population within Russia’s borders.^{42} As the number of billionaires continued to grow, the share of national income taken home by the bottom 10 per cent remained tiny, and actually declined after 2000, from 2.2 per cent to 1.9 per cent in 2008.^{43}

In one area after another, imbalances that had emerged during the 1990s solidified in the new century. The sectoral spread of wages was slightly less dramatic, but there was still an unmistakable ladder, with the fuel and energy sector at the top – where workers earned around 2.7 times the 2005 national average – and agriculture at the bottom, paid at a miserly 43 per cent of the average.^{44} Pensioners did better than before: in the 1990s, many never received their tiny monthly sums, but now the state not only paid pensions on time, it even increased them. (This accounted for a substantial part of Putin’s support base early on.) But the gender pay gap remained in place in the 2000s, or even grew. Across the economy as a whole, women on average earned between two-thirds and four-fifths of what men did, but the disparity widened the further up the occupational hierarchy you looked: male managers earned one and a half times as much as female ones.^{45}

Regional imbalances were not reversed by the 2000s oil boom, either: if anything, the boom exacerbated them, since oil revenues flowed either to Moscow or stayed within the production zones. Parts of the country were being propelled into hypermodernity, while large swathes of it remained mired in deep deprivation. There were huge variations within regions as well as between them. In fact, the places that posted the healthiest-looking average wages tended to be those with the most unequal distribution.^{46} Nowhere was this demonstrated more starkly than in Moscow, where an expanding fleet of Mercedes and BMWs whisked the super-rich past struggling pensioners.

The 2000s also brought a new ethnic segmentation of the workforce. Informal labour migration had been a feature of the late Soviet period, drawing workers – mainly men, predominantly from Central Asia or the North Caucasus – to factories, farms and construction sites across the country. This traffic slowed after the breakup of the USSR, when the customary routes were barred by new national borders, but during the economic revival in the new century, it resumed on something like the late Soviet pattern – except that the workers were now ‘foreign’ and also often ‘illegal’, making them much more vulnerable to exploitation. Official data counted 1.7 million labour migrants in 2007, but this didn’t include undocumented workers, who made up the lion’s share of the migrant workforce; according to one estimate, labour migrants all told numbered 7 to 8 million, almost 10 per cent of the working population.^{47}

The new arrivals provided a large pool of unskilled labour, toiling on construction sites, cleaning the streets, working in markets or driving taxis for abysmal wages. Xenophobia against them became widespread, from the poisonous ranting of the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) to the casual racism of TV shows like Nasha Rasha, which poked fun at Tajik labourers through two characters called Ravshan and Jamshud. Known as Gastarbeitery – Russians adopted the German word – migrant workers formed a new layer at the base of the social pyramid.^{48}

One of the most significant social developments of the 2000s was the expanded role and presence of the state. The state payroll grew from 1.1 million in 2000 to 1.7 million in 2010 – a 50 per cent increase over the course of the decade. The bulk of this growth occurred at the federal level, which accounted for about half of all government employees.^{49} Their spatial distribution was crucial: outside the major cities and resource hubs, federal and local government agencies were often the main sources of employment. These functionaries were an important source of support – and of help with electoral rigging – for the regime. But the Putin system drew an even larger portion of its base from among the millions working in state-owned enterprises or in the remnants of the Soviet welfare state. Together with those directly employed in the state apparatus, they formed a category known as biudzhetniki – literally ‘those living off the state budget’, though a less ideologically hostile translation might be ‘public-sector workers’. In some estimates, they amounted to almost a third of the workforce; including their families and dependents, they might even have made up a majority of the population.^{50}

The intelligentsia, too, experienced its version of ‘stabilization’ in the 2000s. Strange as it may seem today, they were initially among Putin’s most enthusiastic backers. In late 1999, when Putin was still prime minister, pollster Yuri Levada pointed out that ‘no Russian leader has had such unified support among the educated, professional and artistic classes since Boris Yeltsin in the late 1980s and early 1990s’.^{51} Putin’s seriousness and sobriety were at this point considered assets, contrasted with the drunken fumblings of Yeltsin. The assertive, macho persona was also a core part of his appeal, especially to those lured by the idea that a ‘strong hand’ was needed to reel in the anarchy of the 1990s. For some, Putin even promised to fulfil the neoliberal fantasy of a ‘Russian Pinochet’ – the idea being that authoritarianism would somehow guarantee economic growth.[6]

The generalized admiration of the president became self-reinforcing, giving rise to a stiflingly conformist climate in which it became outlandish as well as pointless to criticize the authorities. This shift was rendered all the more effective by the postmodern capaciousness of the broader culture: ideas and beliefs were mashed together in wildly incongruous combinations that made their substance hard to pin down, and hence difficult to argue with or oppose. Soviet nostalgia blended with folksy echoes of medieval Muscovy; Western philosophy and critical theory were digested alongside Russian nationalism and religious texts. A ‘sickening aesthetic atmosphere’ had taken hold of the country, according to the leftist poet Kirill Medvedev, who described ‘the average cultural consciousness’ as ‘a putrid swamp – half-Soviet, half-bourgeois – in which Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Josef Stalin, the pop star Alla Pugacheva, and Jesus Christ all lie side by side, dead and decomposing’.^{52}

There was also, of course, a material basis to the cultural consensus behind Putin. The burst of economic growth in the 2000s created a glossy, flashbulb-lit world of consumption, evoked by the borrowed English word ‘glamur’. There was an ever greater need for PR experts, salespeople and advertising gurus, while the arrival of the web created new positions of its own: programmers, webmasters, bloggers. Many of these posts were poorly paid and insecure, and most ‘culture workers’ of the 2000s had to take on other jobs to make ends meet. But it seemed as if the predictions made in the 1990s – that the market would slot people into steadily more specialized, ‘professional’ niches – were being partially realized. As Kirill Medvedev put it, ‘there is no intelligentsia in Russia any more. There are just fragments, moving around Moscow and the other large and smaller cities, remnants, shards’.^{53}

Yet although the intelligentsia seemed to be dissolving as a distinct social category and self-conscious group, traces of its former historical function and identity lingered. A handful of cultural figures and intellectuals became increasingly uneasy with the Putin regime, and in their criticisms they laid claim, in an attenuated form, to the Russian intelligentsia’s oppositional role. Anna Politkovskaia was among the courageous few who objected to the slaughter unleashed in Chechnya. Meanwhile others grew disenchanted with the tightening of Kremlin controls on the media, the rising corruption, and the hostile climate generated by various official campaigns – against ‘terrorism’, against NGOs working as ‘foreign agents’, and so on.^{54}

It is striking, too, that within Russian society as a whole a series of moral-ethical assumptions about the intelligentsia persisted. In a 2008 survey carried out in the provincial city of Voronezh, more than half of respondents named ‘honesty’ and ‘cultured behaviour’ as qualities essential to a member of the intelligentsia – ahead of educational qualifications, and far ahead of professional background. Hardly any, though, questioned the intelligentsia’s existence.^{55} The Russian intelligentsia of the 2000s, in fact, seemed to inhabit parallel realities: in one, it had been replaced by a loose assortment of people holding ‘creative’, academic, technical and service-sector jobs; in the other, it retained some sense of a collective identity and purpose. Like Schrödinger’s cat, it was simultaneously dead and alive. In this, its experience was representative of the broader parallelism evoked earlier: the persistence of older ideas, attitudes and expectations alongside new ones generated by the arrival of the market.

The continued presence of Soviet social structures helped to mute discontent across Russian society during the 1990s. More than an accidental, temporary overlap, the coexistence of old and new played an active role in enabling the post-Soviet order to take shape; the past gave a hidden subsidy to the present. In the 2000s, this parallelism continued to pay out for Putin. Its effects were less obvious than those of Russia’s economic upturn in the new century, which brought millions relief after a decade of deprivation and crisis, and which clearly accounted for much of the regime’s lasting popularity. But the Putin government also benefited from the persistence of the past, in ways that become more apparent when we look at the emergence of a ‘new middle class’.

By the mid-2000s Russia was only one of a number of countries thought to be experiencing a similar ‘rise of the middle class’. The BRICs, for example – Brazil, Russia, India and China – between them supposedly had a ‘burgeoning bourgeoisie’ some 400 million strong.^{56} According to the mainstream press and an extensive political science literature, these middle classes not only drove consumer spending, they would also act as a stabilizing political force in future, blocking the extremes of left and right.[7] The Russian political elite clearly shared these assumptions: United Russia chairman Boris Gryzlov said in 2005 that the party would be ‘relying on the middle class and acting in the interests of this class, of those who need no revolutions – either financial, economic, cultural, political or orange, brown, red, or blue’. Vladislav Surkov hailed the middle class as the country’s ‘silent heroes’, while Putin called for measures that would expand its ranks to between 60 and 70 per cent of the population by 2020.^{57}

Was there any sociological basis to these ideological fantasies? The empirical evidence was puzzling, to say the least. Between 2000 and 2008, several Russian scholars tried to gauge the size of the country’s middle class using various objective criteria – income, occupational status, level of education – and also the purely subjective one of how people chose to define themselves. Measured by income alone, the middle class was thought to comprise a fifth of the population; by education alone, the figure was in the range of 22 to 29 per cent. Based on how respondents defined themselves, the figure rose to between 40 and 80 per cent. But when all the different measures were used together, it dropped to between 7 and 20 per cent. Depending on the criteria used, then, Russia had a middle class consisting of somewhere between 7 and 80 per cent of the population.^{58}

What was going on? Russia, of course, is far from the only place where the ‘middle class’, when subjectively defined, accounts for the majority of the population. In the US, for instance, the term essentially refers to what in other countries would be called the working class. In Russia, there are other factors that produce a similar effect. Firstly, consumption patterns rather than property ownership are held to be most decisively indicative of class status: spending on items like cars, white goods, clothes, imported high-end electronics, or on leisure activities like foreign holidays and restaurant meals. The emphasis on consumption means that the threshold for joining the Russian middle class is relatively low: acquiring a refrigerator or even a car is significantly more affordable than buying an apartment. State entities relying on these kinds of measurements effectively boosted the numbers; for example, the state insurance company, Rosgosstrakh, defined the middle class as those able to buy their own car.^{59} It’s not hard to see why the authorities would do this, given that the size of the middle class was at the time widely seen as a measure of governmental success. But, of course, it wasn’t just the state that saw middle-classness as a desirable status. It was at the heart of the whole ideological climate and culture, which made the middle class the ‘leading class’ of the day, just as the proletariat had been in the Soviet Union.

But I believe that the parallelism of old and new also helps account for the vast size – as defined subjectively – of Russia’s middle class. The country’s citizens lived within multiple, overlapping social identities. Millions were able to interpret their position in the new capitalist system according to the categories of the Soviet one. Skilled manual workers, for example, had been somewhere in the middle of the Soviet status and income ladder; after 1991, manual workers steadily slipped to well below the middle of the various post-Soviet hierarchies. Yet the rise in average incomes after 2000, and the new access to consumer goods it provided, allowed many workers to claim membership in a middle class from which they would have been excluded by many other measures, most notably the criterion of property ownership.

In fact, a substantial portion of those who now described themselves as ‘middle class’ were working-class people of very modest means. Many of them inhabited what journalist Evgeniia Pishchikova dubbed ‘five-storey Russia’, after the Khrushchev-era buildings in which much of the population still lived. Their consumption habits, she observed, involved a patient process of exploration and comparison, making each transaction significant, almost a miniature rite of passage. In a sense, this made them ‘ideal consumers’: ‘much more loyal and informed than people who are better off than they, because for the latter, the interval between wanting to buy and making the purchase is too short’.^{60} Yet at the same time, many of those who might have been defined as middle-class by their occupational status and education were suffering declining wages and even poverty. In one 2010 study, people with higher degrees accounted for a fifth of those deemed ‘poor’ or ‘disadvantaged’.^{61} These sectors of the ‘middle class’ were being proletarianized, even as the onetime proletariat redefined itself as ‘middle class’.

There was, in effect, a mismatch between the social identities Russians claimed and their socioeconomic positions. While the majority might consider themselves members of a single ‘middle class’, the society that emerged in the 2000s – built on the disparities generated in the previous decade – consisted of several groups that differed hugely from one another: oligarchs, petty traders, industrial workers, migrant labourers, professionals, white-collar ‘office plankton’, and so on. Yet the disparities between these groups appeared less stark than they might have, thanks to the persistence of Soviet structures alongside emergent capitalist forms. This was visible to any visitor to Russia as a collision of social epochs, a kind of ‘combined and uneven social development’ – pensioners carrying portraits of Stalin alongside teenagers wielding iPhones; glass-and-steel skyscrapers looming over rickety barracks-style housing. It also had less tangible consequences: the lingering ghosts of Soviet social structures shielded the Putin regime from serious class conflict just as they had Yeltsin’s. Much has been made of Putin’s good fortune in coming to power amid an oil boom. Inheriting the ‘subsidy’ provided by the parallelism of old and new was yet another piece of world-historical luck.

Yet this subsidy could not last indefinitely: by definition it was temporary, the product of the continued survival of previous social structures and identities. By the 2000s what remained of Soviet institutions was becoming increasingly hollow, and the generations who had experienced life in the USSR were dwindling, succeeded by people whose lives had been shaped entirely by capitalism. This, of course, is exactly what the liberal reformers of the 1990s wished for: the final disintegration of the state-socialist system and the emergence of New Russians untainted by the mentality of Homo sovieticus. Sometimes this wish was expressed in decidedly ugly terms: in 1997 the liberal politician Boris Nemtsov declared that Russia must enter the twenty-first century ‘only with young people’. The same year, IMF managing director Michel Camdessus told a press conference that the structural adjustment policies his organization was insisting on might well require Russia to ‘sacrifice a generation’.^{62} But the underlying assumption – that the past was the main obstacle on the path to a better future – has been widely shared ever since, and has remained consistent over time.

Those calling for the Soviet past to be left behind should perhaps be careful what they wish for. That past, far from being a hindrance, has actively facilitated the construction of the new capitalist order – and when the last vestiges of the Soviet world have vanished, the subsidy that first Yeltsin and then Putin enjoyed will run out. The protests that burst onto the national stage in 2011, though widely interpreted as the political coming of age of the ‘new middle class’, are actually better understood as signs that the parallelism is fading. The factors that helped muffle discontent in the 1990s and early 2000s are ceasing to apply; meanwhile new grievances have emerged, as well as new ways of expressing them.

There is a historical irony lurking here. Though liberal critics, in Russia and the West, insist that it is the remnants of the USSR that stand in the way of Russian progress, it may well be that much stronger opposition to the ‘imitation democratic’ system will emerge from the post-Communist generations, and that new forms of collective defiance will be forged not out of nostalgia for socialism but out of their shared experiences of capitalism. The future may prove more radically stubborn than the receding past.

^{CHAPTER 4}

An Opposition Divided

IN THE WINTER OF 2011–12, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest against the rigging of parliamentary elections, and against Putin’s seemingly inevitable return to the presidency. For a time, it looked as if the wave of unrest that had seized dozens of cities across the world that year – from Tunis to Cairo, Madrid to Athens, New York to Oakland – was now reaching some unlikely places. As well as large demonstrations in Moscow and St Petersburg, smaller gatherings took place across the country’s vast breadth, from Kaliningrad in the west to Vladivostok in the far east, from Ekaterinburg in the Urals and Volgograd in the south to Arkhangelsk and Murmansk in the Arctic; at least 3,000 people turned out in Novosibirsk, braving temperatures of −20°C.

These protests were widely hailed as signs of the reawakening of Russia’s civil society, and in particular of the country’s new middle class, which had apparently ‘become sufficiently affluent to assert its yearning for more accountability and less corruption’.^{1} Even if the movement could do little to prevent Putin’s re-election in March 2012, for many commentators the very fact of its existence meant that things could not carry on as before. The Financial Times and Economist concluded that the protests marked ‘the beginning of the end of the Putin era’.^{2} But several years later, the Putin era is apparently still in full swing – and if anything, his personal dominance of the political stage has grown. His crushing victory in the 2018 presidential election secured him another six-year mandate, extending his rule to 2024.

Why has Putin been able to overcome all challenges to his authority with such apparent ease? Why, in particular, was the protest movement of 2011–12 unable to sustain itself and pose a more serious threat to his hold on power? Several factors can help explain this, the most obvious being the sharp repressive turn taken by Putin on his return to the Kremlin in 2012, as he sought to muffle the opposition, locking up many protesters in prison and landing others with ruinous fines. The case of Pussy Riot was only the best-known example: after an absurd show trial, two of the group’s members were sentenced to two years in a penal colony for the briefest of punk provocations in Moscow’s Church of Christ the Saviour. The Kremlin’s adoption of a more aggressively nationalist stance after 2012 also played a role, especially amid the escalating confrontation with the West over Ukraine, Syria and accusations of Russian meddling in the US elections. Broad public support for its foreign policy gave the government some extra breathing room on the domestic front.

These would be significant obstacles for any opposition, let alone one operating in a political system so loaded in favour of the governing regime. Yet they don’t entirely account for the difficulties the broad anti-Putin movement has had in gathering popular support. Why haven’t its slogans and appeals resonated more widely across Russian society as a whole? Once again, much commentary on Russia blames this on the persistence of Soviet legacies – the unshakeable apathy of Homo sovieticus, who still squats in the corners of the Russian mind, putting a damper on civic action. Soviet legacies did help to stabilize the post-Soviet system, muting many forms of discontent through the 1990s and early 2000s. By the mid-2000s, though, that subsidy had begun to evaporate, as the experience of post-Soviet capitalism, rather than the memory of Communism, became the main point of reference for an increasing share of the population.

This was the context in which opposition to Putin started to emerge, and within which it needs to be understood. How and where did it develop, and what forms has it taken over time? What are its strengths and weaknesses, and what are its prospects? The answers to these questions suggest, firstly, that the 2011–12 protests were not so much the sudden coming to consciousness of a ‘new middle class’ as the culmination of several years’ worth of tentative, smaller-scale mobilizations. Secondly, there were also crucial disparities within the anti-Putin opposition, rooted in turn in divergent explanations for Russia’s ills. Thirdly, though much attention has been devoted to Aleksei Navalnyi as the figurehead of anti-Putinism, his views make him an unlikely contender for resolving the opposition’s internal rifts – if anything, he may even exacerbate them. But before addressing the challenges facing the opposition, we need a better sense of where it came from in the first place.

There was remarkably little organized opposition during Putin’s first presidential term, from 2000 to 2004. But after he easily won a second mandate in March 2004, garnering a mammoth 71 per cent of the vote, stirrings of dissent began to emerge. These developed along two distinct fronts: a political opposition, largely metropolitan and dominated to begin with by pro-market-reform liberal parties; and a more diffuse social opposition, arising in response to specific issues and often coalescing at a more local level. Both of these tendencies experienced ups and downs over the following decade, and on some occasions they combined powerfully. But the original gap between them persisted, and continues to pose a number of strategic problems even now.

The liberal parties’ shift into opposition was in large part a result of their gradual expulsion from the official political system. This began in earnest at the end of 2003, when between them the Yabloko party and the Union of Right Forces lost forty seats in the parliamentary elections, slashing their combined representation in the Duma to seven deputies. When the next Duma elections came around in 2007, they ended up with none – partly thanks to a new 7 per cent threshold that whittled the number of parties in the Duma down to four. But the liberal parties’ electoral misfortunes also reflected the tremendous discredit their embrace of the free market in the 1990s had earned them.

From this point on, liberals in Russia were for the most part peripheral to official politics, and increasingly found themselves turning to extra-parliamentary tactics. This made for some strange bedfellows: the few anti-Putin marches held in the mid-2000s were attended by a mixture of free-marketeers, human-rights advocates, and devotees of the National Bolshevik movement – a postmodern, red-brown fusion engineered by the writer Eduard Limonov that acquired a substantial youth following. This patchwork came together in 2006 in an ungainly coalition called The Other Russia, which organized a series of ‘Dissenters’ Marches’ over the next few years. These sometimes drew decent-sized crowds, by Russian standards, but outside the major cities – principally Moscow, St Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod – they had little resonance.

They were also largely disconnected from the scattered outbursts of discontent that were occurring elsewhere in Russian society. The most significant and, to many observers, surprising early instance of this trend came in the winter of 2004–05, when demonstrations took place in more than a dozen cities against the government’s attempt to monetize a series of benefits. Pensioners played a leading role in these, leading some to dub it the ‘grey’ or ‘chintz’ revolt.^{3} But the demonstrations also had very broad public support, which pushed the government to soften the reform’s impact by increasing the compensation offered. Later in 2005, government moves to privatize housing and communal services – dumping the cost of capital repairs onto residents – led to the creation of local action groups in several cities, among them Moscow, St Petersburg and Yaroslavl; Izhevsk and Perm in the Urals; Tomsk, Nefteiugansk and Khanti-Mansiisk in Western Siberia.^{4} Like the monetization protests, these movements did not stop the government’s plans altogether but did slow their implementation. Nonetheless, the concerns of both movements were far removed from those of the liberal opposition, which criticized the Putin administration for not forging ahead more quickly with further privatizations.

At the same time – and equally overlooked by the liberal parties – a new labour movement began to emerge. Much of Russian industry remained in a despondent, demobilized state, still reeling from the rapid deindustrialization of the 1900s. But in an ironic twist, small independent unions were being set up precisely in the new factories established in Russia by Western firms. Faced with Western corporate employers, and free to act without the say-so of the FNPR bureaucracy, these unions were much more militant than their ex-Soviet counterparts: a 2007 strike at the Ford plant in Vsevolozhsk won a significant pay rise. As Simon Pirani has observed, this was a notable development because it was an ‘offensive’ action: workers were demanding a share of the plant’s rising profits rather than struggling to defend meagre or non-existent wages, as in the 1990s. In the words of one union activist Pirani interviewed, ‘people could see: companies are coming here and making a nice profit, and they are not sharing it with their employees’.^{5}

Workers at plants owned by Renault, GM, Volkswagen and Heineken created independent factory committees similar to that at Vsevolozhsk. These developments did not go unnoticed by the authorities, who clamped down harshly on union activists. Valentin Urusov, who had organized 1,000 workers at a diamond mine in Yakutia, was imprisoned for four years on trumped-up drug charges, and Aleksei Etmanov, leader of the Vsevolozhsk Ford union, was twice attacked and heavily beaten.^{6} The new labour movement remained small and largely isolated, and had to operate under severe pressures; but even so, its existence was a noteworthy change.

There were other displays of dissent, often around more specifically local issues. Starting in 2007, for example, cultural and civic activists in St Petersburg came together to oppose Gazprom’s plans for a 400-metre-high glass-and-steel skyscraper, the Okhta Tower, to serve as its new headquarters. Mobilizing a wide range of players – architects, leading cultural figures, politicians, UNESCO – the coalition managed to block construction, forcing Gazprom to move the site for the tower several miles farther from the city.[8] In 2008, at the opposite end of the country, riot police had to be sent in to Vladivostok to quell protests against a government ban on the import of right-hand-drive cars.[9]

Still, it took a sharp economic downturn before discontent became noticeable at the national level. The first tremors from the 2008 economic crisis began to be felt almost as soon as Dmitri Medvedev took office as Putin’s designated successor: oil prices dropped by two-thirds in a matter of months, going from $130 a barrel in July 2008 to $40 that December. Overall, Russia experienced the steepest drop in GDP in the G20, going from a growth rate of 8 per cent in 2007 to a contraction of 8 per cent in 2009. The recession brought a wave of factory closures, and unemployment hit 10 per cent by April 2009. By that time, almost a fifth of the population had incomes below the official subsistence level, a 25 per cent increase compared with the previous year.^{7}

The downturn added new elements to the developing repertoire of protest. One was the tactic of roadblocks, a post-Soviet version of Argentina’s piqueteros. In June 2009, the people of Pikalevo, in Leningrad region, blocked the highway between St Petersburg and Moscow to protest unpaid wages at the local cement plant, on which their livelihoods depended. They succeeded in drawing Putin’s attention: in a piece of political theatre played out on TV screens across the country, the then Prime Minister publicly forced the plant’s owner, metals oligarch Oleg Deripaska, to pay back wages and keep the plant open. (Putin also made a point of taking his pen back once Deripaska had used it to sign the deal.)

Pikalevo is only one of dozens of ‘monocities’ in Russia – towns where a single enterprise accounts for the lion’s share of jobs; the largest is Togliatti, with a population of 700,000, where the government bailed out the stricken car-maker Avtovaz in March 2009. But the rescue of Pikalevo was not widely repeated, and protests in other monocities were not as successful. In Rubtsovsk in southern Siberia, for example, workers from a tractor plant held mass meetings and hunger strikes to protest the non-payment of wages and the threatened closure of the plant; the wages were paid, but the factory finally closed altogether in 2010.^{8}

A second, more significant development was the emergence of movements targeting the United Russia party. In Kaliningrad in late 2009, thousands took to the streets to protest against the party’s misrule, and to demand the resignation of Georgi Boos, the regional governor. As in Vladivostok a year earlier, the protests were partly driven by a government decision to impose higher import duties: cross-border trade is crucial to Kaliningrad’s economy. By August 2010, the protesters had managed to force Governor Boos out – a rare political victory.

At around the same time, a different set of protesters also achieved a win, albeit a temporary one. An alliance of environmental activists and other groups, from Greenpeace Russia to anarchists and antifascists, had gathered in Khimki forest just outside Moscow to prevent the construction of a road. Some demonstrators occupied parts of the proposed route while others stormed local government offices. At one point a neofascist mob was set on the activists – and the police arrested the victims rather than the attackers. That summer, wildfires were tearing through forests across the country, wreathing Moscow itself in acrid smoke, which drew public attention to precisely the kinds of conservation issues the Khimki protesters were raising. Widespread public condemnation of the handling of the protests led Medvedev to decree that construction of the road be suspended.

The Khimki and Kaliningrad movements were signs of things to come: their ideological heterogeneity, their use of space and their focus on United Russia all featured strongly in protests a year later. The main catalysts for the 2011–12 demonstrations were popular anger at United Russia’s electoral fraud, and before that at the announcement of Putin’s pre-agreed job-swap with Medvedev – a ‘castling’ manoeuvre that displayed real contempt for the democratic process. But corruption was a crucial underlying grievance. A pervasive feature of the Putin system, it became increasingly prominent in public discourse – especially in unofficial media outlets and on the internet, where a wide and active network of LiveJournal blogs came to act as an ersatz fourth estate. The number of internet users in Russia grew phenomenally in the 2000s: from 1 per cent of the population in 1999 to 15 per cent in 2005 to 43 per cent in 2010.^{9} In some ways, the web was partially compensating for the cultural infrastructure that had been lost in the 1990s. And as it would do for the Arab Spring in 2011, it provided a readymade platform for organizing media campaigns and protest rallies – its impact all the more striking given the atrophying of independent political parties and the pressure on NGOs and other civic organizations.

Long before 2011, then, scattered revolts had been taking place across Russia. They were numerically small, especially relative to the size of the country; and they were geographically dispersed, which made coordination and practical gestures of solidarity more difficult to pull off. For the moment, they remained politically disarticulated from each other. Yet there was a notable diversity of triggers and themes, from corruption to jobs, from the environment to architecture, which offered more potential points of contact with a wider public. They also had diverse outcomes: many defeats, but also some small and partial victories.

All of these experiences contributed to the breadth and energy of the 2011–12 demonstrations. The different strands of protest were able to converge at a rare moment of vulnerability for the ‘imitation democratic’ system. Elections remained ideologically necessary to the system’s legitimation, and they had given rise to awkward transitions and crises across the post-Soviet space. This time, Russia’s electoral calendar coincided with a gathering tide of discontent, and the 2011–12 parliamentary and presidential votes provided the first test of the system since the post-2008 economic downturn. Yet although this created a slender opening for Russia’s multiform oppositional movements, many of the basic divisions between them not only persisted through the 2011–12 protests; if anything, they deepened.

The demonstrations of late 2011 and early 2012 drew the largest crowds since the mass marches of the glasnost era. The organizers of the Moscow miting on 4 February 2012 were clearly trying to encourage such comparisons: that had also been the date of an enormous march around the capital’s Garden Ring in 1990, to protest the Communist Party’s monopoly on political representation. The city authorities got the reference and refused permission for a march along the same route, insisting it be held instead in Bolotnaya Square, on an island in the Moscow River. The square thereafter became the venue for several subsequent protests, and supplied a catch-all term for the movement, too; though it was hardly an auspicious name: boloto is the Russian word for ‘swamp’.

These protests were greeted as a ‘revolt of the middle class’ – an expression of discontent from those who had done well out of the petro-boom of the 2000s and were now anxious at being squeezed by recession. But the idea of the ‘new middle class’ was a chimera, part ideological fantasy purveyed by the state and the media, part wishful projection by the population itself. And it didn’t tally with the sociological make-up of the participants in the 2012 demonstrations. As one protester revealingly put it when interviewed, ‘I belong to the middle class, but it doesn’t exist.’^{10}

The bulk of the participants do seem to have been urban, educated and broadly liberal in their politics. A survey of a miting held on Moscow’s Sakharov Avenue on 24 December 2011 found that three-fifths of those present held a higher degree, and almost half gave their occupation as ‘specialist’. But this was by no means the prosperous bourgeoisie depicted in many Western accounts: 21 per cent said they could only afford essentials, and 40 per cent said they could not afford a car – which in effect disqualified them from the middle class, even according to one of the modest yardsticks widely used at the time.^{11}

The idea that these were ‘young professionals’ was also belied by their generational profile: a fifth of those at the 24 December gathering were over fifty-five; a quarter were between eighteen and twenty-four. While some of those attending might well have remembered the demonstrations of 1990, many had come of age under Putin and knew nothing but the present system: the Yeltsin era would have been a chaotic blur, and the USSR something akin to Atlantis. Outside Moscow, the protests were small but heterogeneous, and some occurred in places that still lacked any of the boom-time amenities that supposedly marked a rising middle class.^{12} Conversely, large swathes of those who really were members of the ‘middle class’ hailed by Western commentators failed to join the protests – perhaps because many of them would have been state-sector employees, the biudzhetniki who formed a central part of Putin’s support base.

The sociological diversity of the protesters was reflected, too, in their ideological heterogeneity. ‘Russia without Putin’ was the hopeful banner under which many thousands marched. But beyond this basic point in common, they had very different ideas about what that Russia would look like. The protests were a medley that included not only established liberal parties such as Yabloko and Boris Nemtsov’s Solidarity but also leftist groups such as the Russian Socialist Movement and the Left Front, as well as nationalist outfits such as the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) and various groupuscules waving the tricolour of the Romanov dynasty. Alongside all these, there were also a number of social organizations: ecologists protesting the destruction of Khimki forest; the Blue Buckets, campaigning against abuses of authority by traffic police; the local franchise of the e-libertarian Pirate Party; and the avowedly ‘non-political’ League of Voters, which included many prominent intellectuals and cultural figures, such as the TV personality Leonid Parfyonov, ageing rock star Yuri Shevchuk and the writers Dmitrii Bykov, Liudmila Ulitskaia and Grigorii Chkhartishvili (better known as retro-whodunit writer Boris Akunin).

This bewildering political breadth was in part a product of the narrowness of the ‘imitation democratic’ system, which by design excluded most of the political spectrum. Yet within this diversity, the outlines of two camps emerged: a liberal one, focused on the demand ‘For Honest Elections’, and a smaller, leftist one, with a wider social agenda. Though the liberal camp predominated early on, its power quickly waned after it became clear there would be no re-run of the Duma vote, and that Putin would easily canter to victory in the presidential election, rigged or not. By the time protests against Putin’s foreordained inauguration took place in May 2012, it was mainly the leftist groups that were still in the streets – and they bore the brunt of the repression thereafter. It was also an array of leftist groups that inspired the ‘Occupy Abai’ protest that took over a small park in central Moscow in May, before being forcibly expelled by riot police after a couple of weeks.[10]

The differences between the liberal and left wings of the movement were apparent from early on. At the demonstration on 24 December 2011, liberal figurehead Ksenia Sobchak – a TV star and daughter of the former St Petersburg mayor who had been Putin’s boss in the 1990s – told the crowd that ‘the main thing is to exert influence on power, rather than to struggle for power’. She was whistled and booed by sections of the crowd, who no doubt thought precisely the opposite. When the left tried to formulate a list of social demands for the movement to put forward, the liberals rejected the idea as ‘divisive’. Ultimately, ‘For Honest Elections’ – the liberal slogan that became the name of the umbrella organization coordinating the protests – was a demand for the system to function better, rather than for a fundamentally new system.

This disjuncture between a clear but inadequate and easily blocked political goal on the one hand, and a more expansive but largely unarticulated social agenda on the other, was a critical flaw in the anti-Putin movement, and it limited its potential reach across Russian society. But the protesters also faced tremendous obstacles which even a better organized and more widely supported movement would have been hard pressed to surmount. After Putin’s return to the Kremlin, their room for manoeuvre shrank still further.

From 2012 onward, the opposition to Putin was pummelled by a combination of judicial persecution and ideological pressure. Once he had regained the presidency, Putin adopted an increasingly strident nationalistic rhetoric. A new official ideology, which placed ever greater emphasis on ‘civilizational’ differences between East and West, had begun to coalesce before Putin’s re-election as president, hovering in the background of Russia’s confrontations with the US and its allies. Now it moved to the fore – and burst onto the international stage with the annexation of Crimea. But though shaped by external pressures, it was also a strategy for dealing with dissent at home, driving a wedge through Putin’s opponents by framing everything in polarized, friend–enemy terms.

This much became clear even during the 2011–12 protests, which Putin wasted no time in blaming on the US State Department, describing them as another attempt at a ‘Colour Revolution’. In an increasingly tense climate, those criticizing the government risked being tagged as fifth columnists. A similar logic applied to the persecution of Pussy Riot, who were portrayed not only as blasphemers against the Russian Orthodox faith with their ‘Punk Prayer’ but also, given the link commonly made between Orthodoxy and Russian national identity, as traitors to the motherland. Their arrest, trial and incarceration were the opening salvo in a new culture war, pitting pro-Western liberals against ‘patriotic’ defenders of ‘traditional’ Russian values – a modern-day re-run of the nineteenth-century battles between Westernizers and Slavophiles. This time it had an added dose of gender politics, since LGBT rights were presented in the Russian official media as the dividing line between Western ‘decadence’ and an embattled Russian ‘normality’. In this atmosphere, the mere fact of being gay was reframed as an act of subversive foreign propaganda.^{13}

As well as the trial of Pussy Riot, the crackdown on the protest movement brought the beating and detention of demonstrators and the arrest and judicial persecution of its leaders. On the evidence of a murky documentary, Sergei Udaltsov, head of the Left Front, was accused of plotting terrorist acts and placed under house arrest in 2013, before eventually being imprisoned the following year (he was released in August 2017). Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and a leading liberal opposition figure since the mid-2000s, went into exile in 2013. The assassination of Boris Nemtsov yards from the Kremlin in February 2015 raised suspicions that an official investigation and trial have done little to quell. Aleksei Navalnyi was twice tried for fraud, in 2013 and again in 2014. The first trial earned him a five-year prison sentence – which was immediately suspended to allow him to run in the September 2013 mayoral election in Moscow. Up against the Kremlin-backed incumbent, Navalnyi managed to pull in more than a quarter of the vote; this was not enough to prevent his opponent from winning a first-round victory, but significantly more than had been expected.

The Moscow mayoral race confirmed an already developing tendency: Navalnyi had become the focal point of the opposition to Putin. How did he acquire this status, and what did his prominence mean for the movement as a whole? Navalnyi had become a figure of some renown in Russia long before the 2011–12 protests, thanks to his acidly ironic internet presence and his anti-corruption crusade against some of the country’s most powerful companies. His best-known campaigns of that time involved buying shares in a well-connected company, and then demanding, as a minority shareholder, to see the accounts: where had the $300 million the oil company Transneft supposedly donated to charity in 2007 actually gone? Why were the oil-drilling rigs purchased by VTB Bank at a vastly inflated price simply dumped in the snowy wastelands of the Yamal Peninsula? In 2010–11, Navalnyi also set up two sites to crowdsource damning material: RosPil – from the Russian verb pilit’, ‘to saw off’ – encouraged users to scrutinize government tenders, while RosYama allowed them to report excessively large potholes.[11]

Since then, Navalnyi has continued to hammer away at the same theme, setting up an Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) in 2011, which has carried out several investigations into the thievery of key members of the elite. In 2014, it published a report on the unbelievably inflated costs of the Sochi Olympics – many of the funds coming straight out of the state budget – and the following year produced a film centred on General Prosecutor Yuri Chaika and the business empire built by his sons. In March 2017, it released a documentary targeting Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, listing his collection of yachts and his formidable real estate holdings, which include palatial apartments, holiday homes, and vineyards in Russia and Italy.^{14}

It was this report – titled ‘Don’t Call Him Dimon’, after the diminutive nickname many Russians applied to the former president – that prompted a string of anti-corruption protests in dozens of cities in March and June 2017. The second round was larger than the first, bringing at least 50,000 people onto the streets in 150 places, according to one report. As with previous protests, many of the individual gatherings were small, but the geographical spread was impressive: several thousand turned out in cities deep in the interior – Ivanovo, Omsk, Chelyabinsk – as well as in the larger metropolitan centres. On both occasions, more than 1,500 people were arrested in total.^{15} Strikingly, many of them were teenagers – too young to have participated in the 2011–12 protests themselves, but raised in the more embattled atmosphere of Putin’s third term, in which the idea of contesting the system was not only regularly aired by the system’s opponents, but had also come to trouble the imaginations of those in power.

Many of the strategies the Kremlin and its allies adopted to counter Navalnyi backfired. If anything, they heightened his importance, validating the tendency of Western media outlets to centre their coverage of the opposition around him. It’s not hard to see why Navalnyi acquired such visibility. Charismatic, relatively young, he has a combination of no-nonsense directness and mischievous humour that has served him well in conveying his ideas, especially on social media. But his ascent quickly raised concerns within the opposition, both about Navalnyi himself and about the strategic implications of his personal prestige. In promoting this one man as its paramount leader, did the opposition risk creating its own mirror-image Putin – or worse?

Many of these anxieties stemmed from another dimension of Navalnyi’s public persona: a Russian nationalism that often spilled out in chauvinistic outbursts. Having joined the liberal Yabloko party in 2000, Navalnyi was expelled from it in 2007 for helping to organize the ‘Russian March’, a gathering of far-right nationalists whose best-known slogan is ‘Russia for the ethnic Russians!’[12] He was dismissive of liberal squeamishness about the connection, telling one interviewer in 2012 that ‘what is discussed at the Russian March, if we abstract from the people shouting “Sieg Heil”, reflects a real agenda that concerns a great many people’.^{16}

That agenda notably included hostility toward migrants from Central Asia and Russian citizens from the North Caucasus. Central Asian migrant workers came to Russia in increasing numbers during the boom years after 2000; whether they came through official or unofficial channels, they remained vulnerable to extortion at the hands of the police and violence at the hands of the far right. The North Caucasus, meanwhile, had become an object of particular venom among Russian nationalists in the wake of the Chechen wars – fought, it should be recalled, to keep the region as part of the Russian Federation. All the republics of Russia’s mountainous south depend heavily on federal subventions, and after the economic downturn of 2009, ‘Stop Feeding the Caucasus’ became a frequent slogan of far-right marches – directed not only at the lavish lifestyles of the Kremlin’s placemen in the region, but also against the idea that federal revenues should go to non-Russian areas in the first place.

Navalnyi has at different times endorsed expressions of chauvinism against both these groups, and against others too. During the 2008 war with Georgia, for example, he called for cruise missiles to be rained down on that country and referred to its nationals as ‘rodents’ (gryzuny) – a pun on the Russian demonym for Georgians (gruziny). He has, on more than one occasion, voiced objections to migrant workers’ physical presence, complaining to one interviewer about their posture: ‘They should stop sitting on their haunches! It drives me crazy.’ ‘I’m not against people coming here,’ he added, ‘but they need to behave in accordance with the generally agreed norms.’^{17}

Shortly after his 2007 exit from Yabloko, he appeared in a video put out by a nationalist organization he co-founded called ‘Narod’ (‘The People’). Breezily discussing how to deal with cockroaches and flies, he asks: what do you do if the cockroach is too big, or the fly too aggressive? At this point, an image of Shamil Basaev, the Chechen Islamist warlord, appears alongside him on the screen, and then a shadowy, bearded figure emerges from behind the camera and attacks Navalnyi with a knife; he shoots the figure with a pistol, and when the smoke clears, the message of the video appears: carrying firearms should be legalized. Of course, the video is not actually saying we should shoot Chechens; but it is implying they are insects. The combination of macho humour and dehumanizing rhetoric is all too familiar: it reminds you of no one so much as Vladimir Putin, with his vow to ‘wipe out the terrorists in the outhouse’.

These ugly sentiments rightly caused a great deal of unease, even among some of Navalnyi’s supporters in Russia and his boosters in the West – prompting Navalnyi himself to murmur belated apologies for some of them. Critics of Navalnyi, meanwhile, seized on such statements to denounce him from a range of ideological perspectives: Russian officialdom labelled him a fascist demagogue, some liberals condemned him as yet another charismatic leader figure in a sombre tradition, while some on the left identified him as ‘Russia’s Trump’.^{18}

Navalnyi’s mixture of chauvinism and entrepreneurial frustration with the way Russia is governed makes him a peculiar synthesis of post-Soviet trends: an Orthodox Christian, he professes his love for the fatherland while admiring the corporate governance of Western blue chip companies. In the run-up to the 2018 election, many argued that Navalnyi’s status as the opposition’s de facto leader was so incontestable that any alternative to Putin had to be built around him, whether one liked it or not.^{19} But in December 2017, having been convicted of fraud for a third time a few months earlier, Navalnyi was barred by the courts from taking part in the following year’s presidential contest. How well he would have done is open to debate – would he have improved on his 25 per cent–plus in the Moscow mayoral race, or performed in line with the polls, which by late 2017 were putting his rating in the miserable single digits? But either way, he has remained an established feature of the political landscape, and a gathering point for various kinds of discontents.

For the Russian left in particular, Navalnyi has presented an especially acute dilemma. On the one hand, the left could refuse to join forces with the pro-Navalnyi sections of the opposition in protest at his chauvinism. But this would mean forfeiting any chance of influencing the movement in future, and of harnessing its real popular energies for progressive ends. On the other hand, it could ally itself with Navalnyi – with whatever caveats and critical distance. But this would bring the risk of being tainted by association with his reactionary views. The question is at once a tactical and a strategic one – both a matter of manoeuvring to shape the political agenda in the short run, and of framing clearly what kind of country they want to create in the longer run. Given the sheer numerical weakness of the Russian left, it might make sense to forge provisional, temporary alliances in the service of certain goals – in this case, assembling a serious political challenge to Putin. In the meantime, the left could still go about the slow, patient work of building a broader social base for a genuinely progressive movement. This, indeed, seems to be the approach many activists in Russia have taken, including those on the left and in the range of social movements evoked earlier. Given the scale of the tasks confronting these groups, and the very real threats of physical violence and incarceration they face, they could be forgiven for seeing flexibility as a precondition not so much for success as for survival.

Yet the distinction between short-run tactical compromises and long-run perspectives may not be so clear-cut. What one does in the now is interlinked with what kind of future one imagines, current commitments and ideals mutually inflecting and reshaping each other. For the Russian opposition, the problem has been that certain key commitments are already implied by the very fact of Navalnyi’s prominence. The anti-Putin movement hasn’t worked out a programme through a process of negotiation; rather, it has often had to respond to an agenda defined to a large degree by and through Navalnyi. This in turn raises another critical problem: what kind of alternative would Navalnyi represent for Russia?

Throughout his career as a public figure – from LiveJournal entries in the 2000s to his spearheading of the 2017 protests – the core of Navalnyi’s popular appeal has been his relentless opposition to corruption. But this does not in itself amount to a political philosophy, let alone a programme. For that, we need to look beyond Navalnyi’s activism. We can get a good idea of the policies he might put forward from the platform agreed by his Party of Progress in 2014.^{20} Some of its recommendations are aimed at undoing the most autocratic features of Putinism: reductions in the power of the presidency; shortening of presidential terms back to four years; introduction of stricter term limits; lowering of the threshold for parliamentary representation, and easing of restrictions on registering parties.

Elsewhere the document calls for basic political and civil rights – freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, religion and expression – that have been curtailed under Putin. Legal reforms would seek to protect the independence of the judiciary, and to make the police more accountable to the citizenry. Authority should be decentralized, devolving more power to the regional and municipal levels. The current ‘bias’ in federal funding for the North Caucasus should be brought to an end, though the means for doing this remain unspecified. On migration, the document calls for a visa regime and quotas to be introduced, first and foremost for the Central Asian republics, in order to moderate the currently ‘uncontrolled’ flow of migrants.

In the realm of foreign policy, the document calls for a rapprochement with the West, which it sees as sharing basic strategic interests with Russia: a reduction in global tensions, the struggle with terrorism, freedom of trade. Behind these overlapping interests lies a deeper commonality of values: the text describes Russia as ‘part of European civilization, where ever greater significance is given to the freedom, self-respect and responsibility of the individual, and the interference of the state in various spheres of human interaction is less and less necessary’. This is, of course, a highly tendentious reading of what would constitute ‘European’ civilization, if such a thing existed: it refers at most to the dominant ideological tendency of the past thirty years, derived from the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and put into practice by Thatcher, Reagan and their many heirs.

Indeed, the Party of Progress platform firmly places it in this neoliberal lineage in the social and economic spheres, with prescriptions drawn from the standard repertoire of the US and European centre-right. Russia’s ills are held to stem from the overweening power and reach of the state, and should be remedied by deregulation, cutbacks in the number of government functionaries, and privatizations to reduce the weight of the state in the economy. The current flat income tax rate should be supplemented with wealth and property taxes, but there should be no shift to progressive taxation, since this would penalize the middle class. Welfare should be targeted and recipients rigorously means-tested, and whatever social guarantees the state provides should not interfere with economic growth and competitiveness. Pensions should be switched to a defined-contribution basis rather than the current defined-benefit system, and the pension age gradually raised. Private–public partnerships should be encouraged in health care, education and infrastructure.

This is, of course, a familiar set of recipes. In some ways, the Party of Progress platform is a digest of the last three decades of conventional Western social and economic policy. The only real surprise here is seeing these ideas being actively recommended almost a decade after they led the world into a pervasive crisis from which no exit is in sight. If put into practice in Russia, they would likely worsen the situation for millions. As the experience of the West has shown, means-tested benefits and ‘targeted’ welfare have functioned as a way of withdrawing social guarantees, pulling the rug out from under a whole swathe of society while subjecting them to onerous and humiliating bureaucratic burdens. Public–private partnerships would saddle the public with colossal debt while pouring revenues into the pockets of private companies. More privatizations would amplify the already tremendous imbalances in wealth and power. And raising the pension age in Russia without first drastically improving health indicators would stretch most people’s working lives beyond their life expectancy.

But the problem is not simply that these ideas have been found wanting elsewhere. More importantly, many of them either extend or intensify free-market prescriptions that have already been tried in Russia as well, and have sparked multiple protest movements both before and after the 2011–12 cycle. Since Putin’s return to office, in fact, the small-scale mobilizations evoked earlier have continued. Starting in 2013 there were protests against reforms imposing austerity – officials called it ‘optimization’ – in the healthcare system, followed in 2014 by protests against cuts to education funding. More surprising were the nationwide actions that began in November 2015 as long-distance truck drivers, dal’noboishchiki, protested against increased freight taxes. These were to be levied through a new electronic payment system called Platon, which happened to be owned by the son of Putin’s friend Arkady Rotenberg – a connection which for many encapsulated the injustice and crookedness of the whole scheme. The system was introduced all the same, but the truckers renewed their protests in 2017 – having formed a new trade union in the meantime. The independent labour movement remains active, though it has come under severe judicial pressure: since 2017 both the truckers’ union and the Inter-Regional Trade Union ‘Workers Association’ (MPRA), led by former Ford unionist Etmanov, have had to battle against an official designation as ‘foreign agents’. Environmental actions, too, continue: in 2017, a group of ‘guerrilla pensioners’ in Karelia managed to block a mining company’s bid to fell a forest.^{21}

The gap between the policies proposed in the Navalnyi-inspired platform and these wider social realities is only the latest variation on the split that has run through the anti-Putin movement from the outset, and remains unremedied: the disconnection between its political and social components – the one focused on the removal of Putin, the other on the malign consequences of the system over which he presides.

There are many reasons for the persistence of this disparity between the different components of the opposition. But the basic fault line was created by different understandings of the source of contemporary Russia’s ills. For Navalnyi and many others aligned with him, the post-Soviet economy has not thrived as it should because, as Navalnyi himself has put it, ‘The source of money is not entrepreneurial talent… [rather] money is born from power.’ Genuine entrepreneurship is stifled because ‘Komsomol bastards’ have been able to profit from political clout or personal networks.^{22} From this perspective the fundamental problem, of which the Putin system is only a symptom, is that Russia’s transition to capitalism is incomplete; a cleaner, fairer, more transparent market-based order would eliminate the distorting statist legacies that have held it back. The Party of Progress, in its attempts to loosen the Russian state’s hold on the economy, in many respects aims to continue and complete the work of the free-market reforms of the 1990s.

Yet this line of thinking rests on at least two mistaken assumptions. One is a belief in an abstract, idealized capitalism that could incarnate free-market principles in an undistorted fashion. No such model exists: there is no capitalism, no market, no economic activity even, outside of history. The ‘capitalism’ Russian oppositionists aspire to emulate is the product of the specific and diverse histories of Europe and the US, shaped by concrete events and flesh-and-blood people. A related but still more consequential error is the idea that what Russia has now is not – or is not yet – capitalism, and that the failure to establish ‘proper’ capitalism is what accounts for the perversions of the present. But many of the characteristic features of the Putin system are directly descended from the post-Communist order installed in the 1990s, which Putin has consolidated and prolonged. The foundational purpose of this ‘imitation democratic’ system was the establishment of capitalism, and it owes its subsequent shape to the desire of Russia’s rulers to maintain that initial commitment and defend their gains. Capitalism, in short, has predominated in Russia for the past three decades, and what many Russian oppositionists see as symptoms of its absence are, instead, structural features of the kind of capitalism the country has.

An opposition that remains committed to fundamental misunderstandings of this kind risks misdirecting its efforts. In seeing the Putin regime as the sole source of the country’s political, economic and social afflictions, it mistakes symptoms for causes. Unless and until it acknowledges that the ultimate source of these afflictions is the form Russian capitalism itself has taken, even if it changes the faces in the Kremlin it will not change the mechanisms that do the most severe and long-lasting damage to the country. The concerns that observers in Russia and elsewhere have raised about Navalnyi being a dangerous chauvinist are valid enough on their own. But even if he were not, his stated policies would leave so much of the substantive content of the post-Soviet system in place that, for the majority of Russians, it would be hard to say what had changed.

It’s that basic disconnection between the political goals of the Navalnyi-led opposition and the social concerns of the broader array of movements that remains, in my view, the great weakness of the anti-Putin opposition as a whole – and it’s only by bridging that gap that the movement will be able to present a viable challenge to the system in the longer run. For that to take place, Putin’s opponents need to do more than imagine another way for Russia to be governed and for its entrepreneurs to make money: they must address the questions of what kind of lives and livelihoods Russia’s citizens are entitled to, whose needs are to be prioritized and what, in the end, the purposes of economic growth are. They would need, in short, to envision an alternative model for Russian society. This would be an extremely tall order for any opposition movement – and not just in Russia. But there as anywhere else, it’s only by keeping one eye on that horizon that progress toward genuine change can be made. For now, that remains a distant prospect, and whatever small gains a progressive anti-Putin movement might make at home are likely to be overshadowed by events on an increasingly tense and turbulent international stage.

^{CHAPTER 5}

After the Maidan

THE EVENTS OF THE PAST few years have created a glaring divide between Russia and the West. How and why did this happen? In the West, the story of how relations with Russia descended to their current abysmal level is often told as one of an ominous drift, under Putin, back toward a Soviet-style showdown between Moscow and its former adversaries – prompting many to conclude that the two sides found themselves waging a ‘New Cold War’. From this perspective, the clashes of the 2000s, especially the Russo-Georgian war of 2008, were early warning signs of Russia’s steady regression to Communist-era thinking, after the liberal interlude of the 1990s. Everything that has happened since 2014 – the annexation of Crimea, sanctions, clashes over Syria, allegations of Russian meddling in the US presidential election – has merely conformed to a sinister pattern that was already in place.

But there are several things wrong with this story. One is the substantive continuities between Putin’s rule and that of Yeltsin; indeed, both regimes should be seen as successive phases in the life cycle of a single post-Soviet system. Secondly, the idea that Russia has wilfully reverted to hostile Soviet type on the international stage rests on an extraordinarily one-sided view of what has actually happened since 1991 – one that ignores the West’s own actions, which have forcefully shaped Russia’s decisions. Indeed, the fundamental fact that has defined relations between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War is the huge imbalance in power and resources between the two sides. All other geopolitical calculations have flowed from it – including both the West’s impulse to drive home its advantage through the expansion of NATO, and Russia’s growing resentment of that process, as well as its inability to halt or reverse it.

Those who point this out are often depicted as Kremlin stooges, as if to note a disparity in power between the two parties were somehow to take the weaker side. To be sure, Putin has found sympathizers in unlikely places – on the left as well as the right. Some, for example, insisted on seeing Russia’s bombing of civilians in Syria as part of a ‘counter-hegemonic’ design. But there is a huge distance, politically and ethically, between measuring how much power Russia really has and defending what Putin does with it. One of the effects of the escalating rhetoric of the ‘New Cold War’ has been to conflate the two, and thus to prevent any serious discussion of the actual international balance of power. Yet it’s impossible to understand the course of relations between Russia and the West over the past three decades without taking the disparity between the two sides into account.

Once we do, a rather different picture emerges. The events of 2014 and after are indeed highly significant in global terms, not because they confirm any atavistic tendencies on Russia’s part but because they represent a break with the dominant foreign-policy framework of the post-Cold War period. They signal the demise of the idea of Russian integration or alliance with the West. For much of Russia’s modern history, it was relations with Europe and, later, the West more broadly, that shaped the way the country’s leaders imagined its role in the world – whether that meant being engaged in inter-imperial competition, locked in Cold War antagonism, or set on post-Soviet dreams of convergence.^{1} After 1991, the Russian elite tended to see the country’s future as lying either alongside or within the liberal internationalist bloc led by the United States. This commitment first gained ascendancy in the Kremlin under Gorbachev, and reached its peak during the Yeltsin years; but it remained substantially in place under Putin and Medvedev too – lasting much longer than is assumed by the general run of Western media commentary. It was only finally undone in the wake of the Ukraine crisis, to be succeeded by a more combative vision.

The downfall of the pro-Western idea in Russia represents a major geopolitical watershed in its own right. It marks our entry into a period of great uncertainty, in which relationships between the major world powers are likely to be less stable and less predictable than they have been for a lifetime. The consequences of this will resonate far beyond the scandals over Russian influence buying and electoral meddling that have occupied so much attention in the US and Europe over the past few years. Indeed, they will strongly affect how the rest of the twenty-first century unfolds. All the more reason, then, to get a clearer understanding of how and why relations between Russia and the West deteriorated as they did.

The end of the Cold War brought a sudden and dramatic downsizing for Russia, in several respects. The most literal one was territorial: when the red flag was lowered from above the Kremlin at the end of 1991 and replaced with the tricolour of the tsars, the Russian president ruled within borders that roughly matched those of 1700. The fourteen other republics that had composed the Soviet Union became foreign countries overnight, and though Russians until recently referred to the ex-USSR as the ‘near abroad’, these states have moved inexorably out of Moscow’s orbit in the years since the Soviet Union’s fall – a historic reversal of centuries of regional dominance. Outside Russia the break-up of the USSR was often depicted as the resumption of a long process of decolonization, but in Russia itself, the national sovereignty of former Soviet territories often produced a confused post-imperial resentment.

The sense of a reduction in Russia’s stature was also fuelled, of course, by its rapid pullback on the global stage. By the mid-1990s Moscow had withdrawn its troops from Eastern Europe, the Transcaucasus and Mongolia and had all but shut down its bases in Cuba and Vietnam. Over the course of that decade Russia underwent what a former Soviet military analyst described as ‘one of the most stunning demilitarization processes in history’, shedding two-thirds of its armed personnel and slashing defence spending by 95 per cent.^{2} The USSR’s military-industrial complex had notoriously swallowed an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of Soviet GDP; for most of the 1990s, the equivalent figure for Russia was about 4 per cent of a far smaller GDP. But perhaps the true measure of Russia’s military slump came in the First Chechen War, when a poorly equipped, ill-trained army of conscripts – many of them teenagers – was sent to crush separatist militias and was instead fought to a stalemate in the ruins of Grozny. One of the most acute contemporary assessments of that war dubbed it the ‘tombstone of Russian power’.^{3}

Compounding these reductions in geopolitical influence and military weight, the 1990s also saw Russia slide down the global economic hierarchy – a shift made all the more pronounced by the simultaneous rise of China and East Asia, which rapidly overtook Russia as economic powers. At the start of the decade, the GDP of the Russian component of the USSR had been one and a half times that of China and almost double that of South Korea, but by 2000 stood at only 20 per cent and 46 per cent of each respectively. The figures relative to major economies over the same period were even worse: a drop from less than 10 per cent of US GDP to a mere 3 per cent, and from 17 per cent of Japan’s to 5 per cent. At the dawn of the new century, in absolute GDP terms Russia ranked lower than Brazil or India and only slightly higher than Turkey.^{4}

Post-Soviet Russia, then, though it was spared the total disintegration that other fallen empires have suffered – Austria-Hungary, for example – nonetheless lost much of what had made it a force of global stature. Moscow could no longer project power much beyond its borders. Its ideological reach was similarly circumscribed. Meanwhile, its economic position was disastrous and worsening relative to most of the world’s. Yet at the same time, it retained many of the attributes of a state much more powerful than it now was. It still had a UN Security Council seat and a vast nuclear arsenal. It had a large, if increasingly dilapidated, military-industrial complex, and the remains of a significant scientific-technical apparatus. Less tangible but also important were cultural factors: a language used extensively outside its new borders – including by a 20 million-strong ethnic Russian population that was now effectively a diaspora – and a literary and artistic patrimony of global renown.

The disparity between limited resources and lingering pretensions was the source of much confusion and frustration, the foundation for a great-power nostalgia that was often divorced from any real attachment to the Soviet system itself. Subjectively, many Russians – including a good portion of the policymaking elite – retained a superpower worldview, feeling the areas where the country’s strength had diminished as so many geopolitical phantom limbs. They had not yet become accustomed to the world they now inhabited, nor had they adjusted their thinking to the demands of an international system that was being forcefully reshaped by their former adversaries. From the very start of the post-Soviet era, a significant gap opened up between Russian assumptions and Western ambitions.

The diminution of Russia’s significance on the world stage coincided – not by chance – with the period of maximum alignment between the Kremlin and the West. An affinity with the West had begun to take root among the Russian intelligentsia and scattered members of the party–state apparatus as early as the 1960s. But it was only with Gorbachev’s rise to power that the ‘New Thinking’, as it was known, was installed as the guiding principle of Soviet foreign policy.^{5} Gorbachev went much further than détente, speaking in 1989 of building a ‘common European home’. He envisaged an ultimate integration of Russia and the Warsaw Pact countries into a harmonious bloc of broadly social-democratic states, a kind of Greater Scandinavia. Under Yeltsin, however, what had been an impulse toward convergence turned into a project to make Russia into a ‘normal’ liberal democracy, firmly under the tutelage of the US. If Gorbachev and his Politburo had stunned their Cold War interlocutors with the concessions they had been willing to make, Yeltsin’s government went still further, at times seeming to abdicate altogether from having policy goals of its own. In 1992, when asked by a visiting Richard Nixon what his country’s particular interests now were, Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev could not identify any, and even asked Nixon to help him out with some suggestions.^{6}

The lurch toward the West was not only a matter of admiration for capitalism; it was rooted in a deeper set of prejudices and teleologies. Kozyrev spoke of Russia’s desire to join what he called the ‘community of civilized states’ – with the implication that the West itself was what constituted ‘civilization’ and that the non-West was backward, even barbaric.^{7} This attitude was soon reflected in Russia’s policy stance, as Soviet-era ties to China, India and the Arab World were largely neglected. Still more crucially, Russian policymakers began to include in the non-West most of the former USSR – viewing those countries as burdens they fortunately no longer had to carry. In the summer of 1993, Russia unilaterally scuttled the rouble zone that had been agreed during the breakup of the USSR, sending the successor states scrambling to print new currencies even as Russia’s price deregulation made rouble inflation spiral. Moscow also raised new tariff barriers, which frayed still further what had already been a meagre lifeline for the other ex-Soviet territories. In the 1980s, Russia had accounted for around half or more of every other republic’s trade – almost three-quarters in the case of Ukraine.^{8} The planned economy that had disintegrated in 1991 had been an interdependent whole, but now most of the USSR’s components were left with senseless fragments, which helped make the 1990s’ economic slump far deeper in these countries than in Russia.^{9}

The Kremlin’s early turn away from the rest of the former USSR also accelerated a centrifugal dynamic among the ex-Soviet states themselves. For several of the republics, sovereignty had come as a surprise – the Central Asian states barely managing to squeeze in declarations of independence before the USSR fell apart. All the Soviet Union’s former components, apart from the Baltics, soon joined the ‘Commonwealth of Independent States’ created by Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in the 1991 Belovezha agreement that dissolved the Soviet Union. But although the CIS was, in Russian, actually called a soiuz – a ‘union’ as the USSR had been – it was from the outset intended to be a far looser form of association. Indeed, it was widely described even at the time as a mechanism for ‘civilized divorce’, in the words of Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk – a way to preserve appearances, perhaps, while living separate lives.^{10}

Beneath the CIS’s forms, symbols and occasional pacts, what took place over the next few years was a process of regional disintegration, as each of the former Soviet states consolidated itself as a separate sovereign unit, the policy interests and trade links of each pulling in a different direction from the others. This development was all the more striking given the many basic commonalities between them, especially in the political realm. Across most of the post-Soviet space, ‘imitation democratic’ regimes similar to that of Yeltsin came to power – from Lukashenko’s in Belarus to Nazarbaev’s in Kazakhstan – and developed along comparable lines, each experiencing its own version of the conflict between president and parliament that Yeltsin resolved with tanks in 1993.^{11} Yet despite these parallels, the very fact of sovereignty seemed to create widening divergences between the ex-USSR’s parts.

The centrifugal momentum continued even after Kozyrev’s removal in 1996 brought a change of direction in Russian foreign policy. The disasters of ‘shock therapy’ had undermined Yeltsin’s popularity and boosted the electoral fortunes of the Communists and nationalists in the 1993 and 1995 Duma elections. They also drained what little support there had been for the Westernizing line. Kozyrev’s replacement, Evgeny Primakov, a Middle East specialist and former spy chief, represented a rather different school of thought – a statist tendency that aimed not to join the West but to balance against its overweening power. The recalibration of policy meant cultivating ties with East and South Asia and the Middle East, and reconnecting with Russia’s former Soviet neighbours in the hopes of forming a regional support base.^{12} Yet this still did not represent a fundamentally anti-Western orientation: even if the goal was to revise the terms on which Russia engaged with the West, that engagement remained the central focus of policy.

Primakov’s new course certainly proved more popular than Kozyrev’s, and he continued it during his brief stint as prime minister in 1998–99. But its success was premised on the West’s willingness to treat Russia as an equal on the world stage, as something like the great power it no longer was. This was a delusion the US and its allies were not prepared to share. The fundamental fact of the post-Cold War order, after all, was the colossal imbalance between the US and all other powers. With less than 5 per cent of the world’s population, by the mid-1990s the US accounted for a quarter of its total economic output, a fifth of its manufacturing, and two fifths of its military spending – in dollar terms committing more to its armed forces than the next eleven highest-spending countries combined.^{13} Flushed with Cold War victory and now holding uncontested sway over the globe, the lone superpower had a free hand to remake the international order as it saw fit. A crucial component of the strategic design that took shape in the first half of the 1990s was a bid to nail down Washington’s new advantage by extending NATO eastward, to the former Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe. This project shaped the foreign-policy environment in which Russia has had to operate ever since, so it is worth delving further into its origins and the motivations behind it.

The idea of expanding NATO was already in the air even before the Soviet Union fell apart – despite assurances given to Gorbachev by several Western leaders that ‘nothing of the sort will happen’.[13] The organization’s London summit of July 1990, for example, issued an invitation to the Warsaw Pact countries to begin diplomatic exchanges. But the policy only gathered real momentum under the Clinton administration, coalescing as a priority by 1993–94.^{14} Its main proponents within the administration saw it as very much part of a politico-economic project to reshape Eastern Europe along liberal capitalist lines.^{15} In September 1993, Clinton’s national security adviser, Anthony Lake, announced that ‘we have arrived at neither the end of history nor a clash of civilizations, but a moment of immense democratic and entrepreneurial opportunity… The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement – enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies.’^{16} In this neo-Wilsonian vision of an expanding free-market Pax Americana, the prospect of NATO membership was a means of pressuring East European governments to keep up the pace of ‘reform’; indeed, first among the ‘Perry Principles’ laid down for would-be NATO members at the time by US defense secretary William Perry was a commitment to ‘democracy and markets’, with ‘defence of other allies’ much further down the list.^{17}

Though it has often been presented since as a response to a ‘Russian threat’, NATO expansion was entirely premised on Russian weakness. As James Goldgeier put it in his 1999 book on NATO enlargement, Not Whether But When, ‘the possibility that Poland or the Czech Republic would actually need defending seemed remote’.^{18} The USSR’s implosion and the ensuing traumas of transition instead allowed the West to move into the strategic vacuum left in the region. Clinton himself pointed to this logic in December 1994, declaring at the OSCE’s Budapest summit that ‘we must not allow the Iron Curtain to be replaced by a veil of indifference. We must not consign new democracies to a grey zone’.^{19} That May, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had called for ‘the potentially destabilizing geopolitical no man’s land between Russia and the European Union’ to be ‘promptly fill[ed]’.^{20} During the Cold War, the two sides had been separated across much of Europe’s breadth by unaffiliated or neutral countries, from Finland and Sweden through Austria and down to Yugoslavia. After 1991, no such buffer zone was necessary.

The fact that NATO expansion could be disconnected from any actual military risks no doubt smoothed its way among policymaking elites in Washington. There was, to be sure, opposition from prominent figures: George Kennan, the original architect of ‘containment’, called it a ‘fateful error’; Thomas Friedman, holding forth in the pages of the New York Times, worried it would imperil efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation.^{21} There were concerns, too, that overly aggressive moves by the US to benefit from Russia’s weakness now might produce a backlash there later – that a punitive post-Soviet Versailles settlement might produce a revanchist Russian nationalism. Yet these considerations were overpowered by two other motivations. One was precisely the chance to wrest Eastern Europe out of Moscow’s orbit for good. Unlikely to come around again, it was simply too good an opportunity to pass up – especially since many of the new governments in Eastern Europe were themselves keen to join.

The other was a deep suspicion of Russia among Western policy-making elites, dating back through the Cold War all the way to 1917. The Bolshevik Revolution had created a breach in the international state system, a hole in the map that no amount of diplomacy or détente had been able to close. The fall of Communism, although it brought down the capitalist West’s systemic rival, didn’t fully close it either – leaving in place a fundamental mistrust of Moscow in Washington and other Western capitals. (This might be termed a ‘White legacy’, in contrast to the ‘Red bequests’ discussed earlier.) As long as Yeltsin was in power and willing to fall in with Western thinking, these doubts could be assuaged. But the moment things changed, the older ideological reflex would kick in once more, fuelling criticisms of Russia that the West never levelled at far more repressive regimes whose interests were more compatible with Western aims, such as those in Saudi Arabia or Egypt, say. NATO expansion was therefore to some extent an insurance policy against an outcome that, ironically, the expansion would ultimately help to create: the return to the world stage of an independent Russia, with interests distinct from those of the West.

In the early 1990s, though, such a prospect remained distant. The immediate strategic gains from NATO expansion were clear enough that a bipartisan consensus soon developed around the policy in the US. However, the Clinton administration also knew that too rapid an expansion would torpedo Yeltsin’s chances of re-election, so from 1993 to 1996 it pursued a two-track policy, offering Russia and other Eastern European states membership in a ‘Partnership for Peace’ that seemed to be an alternative to an expanded NATO. (Yeltsin was certainly taken in by the ruse: ‘This is a brilliant idea, it is a stroke of genius!’ he exclaimed to US secretary of state Warren Christopher, adding: ‘Tell Bill I am thrilled.’)^{22} Meanwhile the US prepared the ground for a first round of NATO enlargement – starting in 1994 with the NATO Enlargement Facilitation Act, designed to smooth the path of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to join the alliance.

This dual-track approach struck hard-line Cold Warriors as needless pandering to the Russians; Henry Kissinger apparently asked, ‘Whoever heard of a military alliance begging with a weakened adversary?’^{23} But it was in any case abandoned soon enough. Once Yeltsin was safely re-installed in the Kremlin, in the summer of 1996 – in no small measure thanks to covert assistance from the West^{24} – the US could be more blunt. Clinton’s deputy secretary of state (and former college roommate), Strobe Talbott, told Anatoly Chubais, chief of Yeltsin’s presidential administration, ‘that NATO enlargement was going to happen, and… that Russia had to make sure that it did not look like Moscow had lost’.^{25}

In March 1999, when Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland formally joined the alliance, NATO immediately moved ahead with a second wave of expansion, establishing ‘Membership Action Plans’ for nine more countries, including the three Baltic states. Both of these developments took place at the height of the NATO intervention in Kosovo – conducted without UN Security Council authorization, since it was evident that Russia would veto it – underscoring still more deeply Russia’s irrelevance on the world stage. Primakov, then prime minister, was on his way to Washington when the bombing of Yugoslavia started, and ordered his plane to turn around in protest. It was a forceful symbolic gesture – but then, Russia’s means were too limited to do much else.

Washington’s ability to impose its will on the question of NATO enlargement, whatever Moscow’s objections, made plain the fundamental imbalance in power between the two countries. Hard enough in itself for Russia to accept, it was made still worse by the manner in which US diplomats wielded their authority. As early as 1993, Kozyrev – who could scarcely be accused of hostility to the West – was protesting to Talbott, ‘It’s bad enough having you people tell us what you’re going to do whether we like it or not. Don’t add insult to injury by also telling us that it’s in our interests to obey your orders.’ Talbott’s assistant at the time, Victoria Nuland – who later became infamous for her role, captured in an intercepted phone call, in choosing Ukraine’s post-Maidan government – apparently observed that this was ‘what happens when you try to get the Russians to eat their spinach’.^{26} The condescension behind such words – the infantilization of what was, after all, a state with almost half the world’s nuclear weapons – would have been only too apparent to Washington’s Russian interlocutors.

The drive for NATO expansion also made it clear that there was no room for Russia within European institutions or Euro-Atlantic security arrangements. The Yeltsin government several times floated the idea of joining NATO, but Russian membership was never seriously considered. Despite its weakness in the 1990s, Russia was still too large and powerful a state to be easily fitted into the system as it was. According to Brzezinski, ‘the politically decisive fact is that Russia bulks too large, is too backward currently and too powerful potentially to be assimilated as simply yet another member of the European Union or NATO. It would dilute the Western character of the European community and the American preponderance within the alliance.’^{27} As part of NATO or an expanded EU, for example, it would have been on a par with Germany or France in terms of its decision-making influence, capable of banding together with either to block US designs.

The whole course of US policy toward Europe in that decade was precisely geared to averting such a scenario. The ‘Partnership for Peace’, the Permanent Joint Council set up in 1997, and the NATO–Russia Council that replaced the PJC in 2002 may have seemed to provide avenues for co-operation between Moscow and the West. But as the Russians quickly realized, these were substitutes for membership rather than stepping-stones to it. When Putin, installed as president just weeks earlier, asked Clinton at a June 2000 summit how he would respond to Russia’s joining NATO, Clinton apparently looked desperately at the advisers flanking him: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who ‘pretended that she was looking at a fly on the wall’, and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who ‘did not react at all’. Clinton was reduced to saying he would ‘personally’ – a word he repeated three times, to be on the safe side – support it.^{28} But since he would be leaving office a few months later, this assurance was not worth much.

The process of NATO enlargement is crucial to understanding why and how relations between Russia and the West later deteriorated. It demonstrated the basic imbalance that has governed strategic calculations on both sides ever since: the US enjoyed accumulated advantages that enabled it either to attend to or ignore Russian interests as it pleased, while Russia retained enough of its great-power habits of mind to resent this state of affairs, but lacked the capacity fundamentally to alter it. Yet although this resentment increased over the next decade, the underlying thrust of Russian policy remained broadly oriented toward the West. This contradictory dynamic, in which Russia’s aspiration to join the West mingled with rejection of it, underpinned the mounting confrontations between the Kremlin and Western governments from the mid-2000s onward.

Amid the steady worsening of relations between Russia and the West in recent years, Putin has increasingly been depicted in the Western media as their countries’ sworn enemy, steadfastly opposed to liberal democracy and bent on undermining it from without. But it’s worth recalling that for most of the time he has been in power, the West – and in particular Europe – has been the lodestar of Russia’s foreign-policy thinking. To begin with, Putin seemed to represent a return to the ‘Westernizing’ tendency abandoned by Primakov. Shortly before assuming the presidency for the first time in 2000, Putin told David Frost he sought ‘more profound’ integration with NATO, and ‘would not rule out’ Russian membership.^{29} Around the same time, in the biographical interviews that made up First Person, he described Russians as ‘a part of the Western European culture. No matter where our people live, in the far East or in the south, we are Europeans.’^{30}

Putin’s points of reference were European even when they weren’t at all flattering: at the end of 1999, he said that it would take fifteen years of rapid growth for Russia to draw level with Portugal’s current per capita GDP.^{31} (Russia reached that milestone in 2011; but by then Portugal was further ahead, and even amid the deep recession sparked by the eurozone crisis, its GDP per capita was still more than one and a half times that of Russia.) At the start of the twenty-first century, then, the Kremlin still envisaged a future of co-operation and ultimate economic convergence with the West. The sharp disagreements over Kosovo in 1999 were, for the time being, seen as a passing anomaly rather than the basis for a widening breach.

The 11 September attacks prompted a shift in Russia’s policy stance. Putin had insistently framed his war on Chechnya, launched in 1999, as part of a wider struggle against ‘Islamic extremism’.^{32} In the aftermath of the Twin Towers’ destruction, he saw the potential for an alliance with the Bush administration against ‘terrorism’, opening Russian airspace and encouraging Central Asian states to help with the assault on Afghanistan. These were startling geopolitical concessions, and they were applauded by Russia’s liberals, who at the time called for Russia to line up with the West in a joint struggle against ‘barbarism’. Grigory Yavlinsky and Boris Nemtsov backed the assault on Afghanistan, and the deputy leader of the Union of Right Forces’ parliamentary delegation asserted that ‘Russia must participate in the action of retribution’.^{33}

Yet the Kremlin’s hopes for a durable ‘anti-terrorist’ consensus came to nothing, and the co-operation between Washington and Moscow was short-lived. The former’s unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in June 2002 was an early sign that Russian overtures would not be reciprocated. The disparity built into US–Russia relations, meanwhile, became even more glaring now that the US was committed to deploying its power still more aggressively, as the ‘War on Terror’ morphed rapidly into a crusade to remake the Middle East. Russia joined France and Germany in voicing reservations about the US assault on Iraq. But Russia’s concerns didn’t stem from any attachment to international law or sympathy for Iraqi civilians – it had, after all, recently levelled what remained of Grozny, burying thousands of its own citizens under the rubble. It was, rather, alarmed at the US’s unconstrained use of military force around the globe, and its deployment of that force to impose regime change.

The question of regime change became especially significant for the Kremlin in the mid-2000s. Though it had successfully neutralized opposition within the country, the ‘imitation democratic’ regime nonetheless remained vulnerable to pressure or even overthrow from the outside. A year after the invasion of Iraq, the accession of seven more countries to NATO brought the alliance directly to Russia’s border. At the end of 2004, protests over rigged elections in Ukraine sparked the ‘Orange Revolution’, blocking Moscow’s preferred candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, and ultimately bringing his pro-Western opponent, Viktor Yushchenko, to power instead. Greeted in the West as a democratic flowering, but seen in the Kremlin as the product of Western machinations, the Ukraine crisis of 2004–05 was crucially different from the previous ‘Colour Revolutions’ in Serbia (2000) and Georgia (2003). There was much more at stake for Russia than in those previous cases: the Kremlin had poured a great deal of money and effort into securing the presidency for Yanukovych, and the geopolitical outcomes of his defeat were far more serious – potentially opening the way for NATO to emplace itself along almost all of Russia’s western borders.

In the case of Ukraine, moreover, external strategic issues were intertwined with internal political questions. The ‘Orange Revolution’ represented a frontal challenge to Russia’s own ‘imitation democratic’ regime, raising the possibility that popular energies – till now excluded from the business of government across the post-Soviet space – might surge back once more, as in 1989–91, to threaten the existing system. The examples of Georgia and Ukraine proved contagious: Kyrgyzstan’s ‘Tulip Revolution’ followed in early 2005, while comparable though unsuccessful movements emerged elsewhere (Azerbaijan, Belarus, Mongolia). From 2004–05 onward, the defence of what the Kremlin saw as Russia’s interests abroad became inseparable from the impulse for self-preservation at home, tying Russian foreign policy ever more closely to concerns over domestic order.

Yet even amid growing tensions over Iraq, NATO expansion and Ukraine, Moscow’s foreign-policy stance was still founded on a sense of commonalities with the West. In an April 2005 speech to both houses of the Russian parliament, Putin said that ‘Russia was, is and will, of course, be a major European power’, and spoke of shared ‘ideals of freedom, human rights, justice and democracy’.^{34} At the same time, there was a new insistence on the country’s capacity to determine its own future. In the same speech Putin asserted that, ‘as a sovereign nation, Russia can and will decide for itself the timeframe and conditions for its progress’ along the road to ‘freedom and democracy’. In effect, Putin had combined the ‘Westernizing’ and ‘statist’ lines of Russian foreign-policy thinking.

But this synthesis was inherently unstable, expressing a desire for alliance with the West while asserting independence from it. The contradiction was apparent in Putin’s February 2007 address to the Munich Security Conference, where he laid out a litany of complaints about Western behaviour, focusing especially on Iraq and NATO expansion but embracing a great many other themes, from nuclear proliferation to the WTO. Though this was widely interpreted by the mainstream media as an outburst of angry anti-Western sentiment, it makes more sense to see it as a fit of frustration – which had built up precisely because Russia’s attempts to forge a pragmatic alliance with the West, and to develop closer trade and economic ties, kept failing.

The continued failure to gain better access to the EU’s markets was a particular sore point for Russia. From the 1990s until the global economic crisis of 2008, EU states had accounted for around two-thirds of the country’s imports and exports, and even after that, as Russia laboured under a downturn and then the pressure of the 2014 Western sanctions, they still accounted for about half.^{35} But a string of Russia–EU summits – in Samara in 2007, Khanti-Mansiisk in 2008, Khabarovsk in 2009 – did not produce any substantive agreements.

Nonetheless, the ideal of Russian integration into some broader, ‘Greater European’ arrangement persisted. In June 2008, for example, the newly installed President Dmitri Medvedev – much more of a liberal Westernizer than Putin – put forward the concept of a ‘Euro-Atlantic space’ stretching ‘from Vancouver to Vladivostok’.^{36} The idea applied to security questions as well as economic ones: Medvedev also proposed a new ‘all-European’ security architecture, apparently whipping out his iPad to discuss it at the 2010 Moscow session of the Munich Security Conference.^{37} Posited as an alternative to the Atlanticist structures of NATO, the concept would have required European states to voluntarily peel away from the US. There was little interest in the scheme outside Moscow, but just to be sure, NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen pointed out in late 2009 that ‘we do have a framework already’, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reinforced the message early in 2010 by explaining that the US’s and Russia’s ‘common goals are best pursued in the context of existing institutions, such as the OSCE and the NATO–Russia Council, rather than by negotiating new treaties, as Russia has suggested – a very long and cumbersome process’.^{38} NATO would not be dislodged as the sole security bloc in the Euro-Atlantic area, and Russia would remain outside it.

Between the spring and summer of 2008, Russian–Western relations moved swiftly from rhetorical stand-offs to proxy war. In February, Kosovo’s declaration of independence was swiftly recognized by the US and other leading NATO states, setting a precedent Russia deemed alarming. In April, a NATO summit in Bucharest raised the prospect of membership for Georgia and Ukraine – only to defer it until some unspecified future date, in the face of Putin’s strenuous objections. Meanwhile tensions were escalating in the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, de facto Russian protectorates since brief separatist wars in the early 1990s. In early August 2008, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili – seemingly with encouragement from the US – suddenly moved to recapture South Ossetia, providing Russia with a ready pretext for armed intervention.

Militarily, the conflict was a mismatch, and was over after five days of fighting. Politically, it was far more consequential. It was partly a kind of retaliation on the plane of international law for previous Western actions: Medvedev invoked the West’s own doctrines of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the ‘responsibility to protect’ (‘R2P’), as deployed in Kosovo in 1999 and agreed at the UN’s 2005 World Summit, respectively. In the immediate aftermath of the war, moreover, the Kremlin recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, citing the barely six-month-old precedent of Kosovo. The staggering hypocrisy of this gesture, from a government that had fought two wars to prevent Chechen independence, hardly needs emphasizing. But the Georgian operation was more immediately intended to call the West’s bluff on further NATO enlargement, effectively asking if it was willing to start a full-scale global war for the sake of tiny Georgia. The answer, despite much bluster from US Republicans such as John McCain, was no. Behind this confrontation, meanwhile, the issue of Ukraine – strategically far more significant to both Russia and the West – lurked in the background, as an obvious future flashpoint.

In March 2009, Secretary of State Clinton presented her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, with a yellow plastic box featuring a red button marked ‘reset’ in English – a tacky token of the Obama administration’s desire to improve US–Russian relations in the wake of the Russo-Georgian War. But the State Department had made a basic translation error when labelling the button in Russian: instead of perezagruzka it read peregruzka – not ‘reset’, but ‘overload’. The gaffe pointed to an embarrassing lack of either competence or care in Washington; it was also an unbeatably Freudian summary of the whole trajectory of post-Cold War relations between the two countries.

The arrival of the Obama administration was meant to herald a new phase of co-operation, but brought the exact opposite: a period of increasing antagonism and mutual suspicion. In the West, the reasons for this are often sought in Putin’s authoritarian persona, or in a broader Russian nostalgia for superpower status. But while both these factors were certainly present, neither was as important as the underlying dynamic of Western–Russian relations, which remained unaltered by the empty diplomatic gestures of the ‘reset’. Moscow’s aspirations for alliance or integration were repeatedly ignored or rebuffed by the West, which had its own plans and priorities. Foremost among these was the drive by NATO and the EU to bring the former Soviet and Warsaw Pact states of Eastern Europe into the Western orbit, reformatting their political and economic systems along liberal capitalist lines. For much of the 1990s and 2000s, Russia was powerless to prevent the advance of this project. But enforced passivity should not have been mistaken for willing acceptance. What has happened over the past decade, far from being an unforeseen escalation of tensions, is a collision – delayed or masked for a time – of incompatible interests.

Russia’s actions on the world stage over the past few years have been marked by a rising rhetorical aggression, and by an increased adventurism in practice: the annexation of Crimea and support for rebels in the Donbass; intervention in Syria; courting of hard-right candidates and movements campaigning against the established order in major Western states, from Trump in the US to Le Pen in France and the Alternativ für Deutschland party in Germany. These moves have often been interpreted as being all of a piece, as parts of some deliberate Kremlin design for a conservative world order that would overturn the dominance of liberal democratic norms. Russia’s rulers have indeed come to see themselves as fundamentally opposed to the Western liberal-democratic order, and have increasingly embraced a set of geopolitical ideas that emphasize the country’s peculiar ‘Eurasian’ destiny. But we should avoid the temptation to explain these developments as being driven by a coherent, pre-established agenda. Russia’s decisions have been shaped most decisively by the geopolitical environment in which the country has to operate, and this environment is dominated by other powers – the US above all.

Most of Russia’s conduct on the world stage, in fact, has to be seen as a series of responses to this overriding constraint. Since the Ukraine crisis, those responses have been increasingly combative; but they have also been largely improvised, focused on short-term tactical thinking rather than any longer-term project. The apparent aggression stems not from a growing confidence or sense of purpose, but from a pervasive and deepening anxiety about Russian weakness. It is this that fuelled the Putin administration’s attempts to reassert Russia’s global relevance – and, first of all, to reverse the setbacks it suffered in Ukraine.

The Ukraine crisis looms large in any account of recent relations between Russia and the West, for obvious reasons – it was the annexation of Crimea that first prompted the West to institute sanctions against Russia in 2014 – and less immediately apparent ones. Beneath the turmoil of events, the battle for Ukraine also exposed, and at the same time exacerbated, the dynamics that have shaped relations between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War. Firstly, it confirmed Russia’s steady loss of influence over the former states of the USSR. In one realm after another, Moscow’s capacity to secure favourable outcomes in the region has diminished to historic lows. The Orange Revolution of 2004–05 and the toppling of Yanukovych in 2014 were the most humiliating political reversals, but there were others. In tiny Abkhazia, for instance, the very fact of Kremlin support led voters to reject Moscow’s preferred presidential candidate in 2004. And Russian attempts to establish a post-Soviet security architecture have met with uneven success. Four of the CIS states withdrew from its Collective Security Treaty to set up their own organization in 1999, named ‘GUAM’ after their initials (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova). Meanwhile the Collective Security Treaty Organization, founded in 2002 and intended as a kind of Eurasian NATO – its members are Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan – has so far been little more than a pretext for summitry.

Kremlin projects for economic integration – the Eurasian Economic Community and its 2014 successor, the Eurasian Economic Union – have fared little better. This is largely because there has been a rapid diversification of trade patterns across the former USSR: by 2009, barely 15 per cent of Russia’s trade was with CIS countries, and only two of those countries – Belarus and Ukraine – were among Russia’s top ten trading partners. Conversely, only 15 per cent of CIS countries’ imports came from Russia.^{39} For both Russia and its neighbours, the EU was now the main partner, accounting for about half of imports and exports in each case. In effect, the disintegration of the USSR into separate political units had segued into a geopolitical and economic dispersal.

Secondly, the Ukraine crisis made clear once again the enormous disparity in power and resources between Russia and the West. In the 1990s, the prime movers in Western policy toward Eastern Europe and the former USSR had been the US and NATO, but in the 2000s it was more often the EU that drove it. In 2004, Brussels launched its ‘European Neighbourhood Project’, which called for structural reforms in adjoining countries in exchange for improved market access, an easing of visa restrictions, and financial assistance packages totalling $16 billion for 2007–2013.^{40} Initially targeted at the former Soviet states bordering the countries that had just joined the EU, the programme was soon expanded to include countries on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean.

In 2009, the EU launched another initiative, the ‘Eastern Partnership’, which was more specifically designed to pull the former Soviet republics into its domain. The aim, as expressed at the Prague Summit that May, was ‘to create the necessary conditions to accelerate political association and further economic integration between the European Union and interested partner countries’.^{41} ‘Action plans’, specifying concrete measures to be taken and standards to be met across a whole range of economic sectors and areas of government, were developed for Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. At the same time, the EU began negotiations with each of these states over Association Agreements and what the EU called Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Areas (DCFTAs).

Yet there was more to these agreements than just trade: they were also designed to bring about these countries’ alignment – or ‘higher convergence’, as the Association Agreement with Ukraine put it – with the EU’s European Security and Defence Policy, including greater military and technical co-operation with EU states. Though falling far short of actual EU membership, these Agreements were clearly an attempt to lock the former Soviet countries of Eastern Europe into the EU’s sphere of influence – and lock them out of Russia’s.

It was, of course, Yanukovych’s abrupt U-turn on the EU Association Agreement that sparked the Maidan protests in late 2013. Ukraine seemed to be caught in a choice between the EU’s free-trade agreement and the Kremlin’s project for a Eurasian Customs Union – a choice often framed by Maidan supporters in civilizational terms, as being between ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’, between a modernizing European destiny and the backwardness of the Soviet past. Yet there were many other factors behind Yanukovych’s decision – not least a concern over the potential impact of free trade on an economy already reeling under the impact of IMF-decreed budgetary austerity. The manufacturing and extractive industries of Eastern Ukraine stood to lose a great deal from the DCFTA. Conversely, many Western Ukrainians desperately wanted legal paths for labour migration to EU countries, where wages were significantly higher.^{42} These divergent socio-economic interests often mapped onto other kinds of internal difference in Ukraine, generating significant public support for both the ‘Europeanist’ and ‘Russian’ alternatives. But there were huge asymmetries in the power and resources of the two.

Despite the Kremlin’s mounting concern over the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO and becoming more closely integrated with the EU, it was unable to make Kiev a genuinely better offer. Putin’s plan to buy $15 billion of government debt and give Ukraine deep discounts on gas came too late to help Yanukovych, but it wouldn’t have made much difference if it had been offered earlier. Russia simply could not match the West’s combined economic and ideological appeal.

Just as important, Russia also lacked the power to persuade the West not to absorb Ukraine into its sphere of influence. The aggressiveness of the Kremlin’s response to the Maidan protests was in part driven by fear that their example would encourage protesters at home. But Russia’s words and deeds were at the same time very much aimed at the West. Prior to Yanukovych’s fall, Russia sought to delay as long as possible the arrival of an unambiguously pro-Western government in Kiev. After his removal from power in February 2014, the Kremlin lost its political leverage there. Its subsequent moves – annexation of Crimea, support for armed separatists in the Donbass – were first and foremost attempts to shake the West’s tightening grip on Ukraine. If significant portions of the country were turned into either war zones or contested territories, perhaps the EU and NATO would think twice about offering Ukraine membership. But despite the Kremlin’s references at the time to ‘Novorossiia’ – the old tsarist name for the lands along the Black Sea’s northern shore, hinting at a potential claim to more of Ukraine’s territory – these actions were tactical improvisations rather than part of a long-held plan to dismember Ukraine. The Kremlin was in effect frantically drawing one line in the sand after another, lines the West kept blithely ignoring. The rapid escalation of Russia’s response and the very crudity of its methods were in themselves a measure of the asymmetry of power between it and the West.

The same is true of the triumphalist sloganeering that followed the annexation of Crimea. Russian state media depicted it as a patriotic feat, reuniting the motherland with what Putin, in his March 2014 speech requesting the peninsula’s formal admission to the Russian Federation, called ‘an inseparable part of Russia’. (In the same speech, Putin notably reiterated many of his criticisms of Western double standards, and again angrily cited the example of Kosovo.)^{43} Western governments and media, meanwhile, furiously protested the annexation. US secretary of state John Kerry called it ‘an incredible act of aggression’, adding – with the straightest of faces – ‘You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on [a] completely trumped-up pretext.’^{44}

This trading of rhetorical blows cannot obscure the fact that the actual consequences of the Crimean annexation were much to the West’s benefit and to Russia’s disadvantage. It accelerated Ukraine’s flight out of Russia’s sphere of influence: public support for NATO membership increased in Ukraine, and military ties between NATO and the Ukrainian armed forces were strengthened, bringing the alliance still closer to Russia’s heartland; meanwhile, a DCFTA between Ukraine and the EU came into force in 2016, setting the country on a path to economic integration with Europe rather than with Russia. At the same time, the fallout from the Ukraine crisis brought sanctions that damaged Russia’s economy – cutting off much-needed international investment, for example – and deepened its international isolation. By 2017 the Russian economy had begun to recover somewhat, thanks to a rise in global oil prices and the stimulus given to domestic production by the sanctions’ stifling of imports. But there can be no question that events in Ukraine after 2013 added up to a significant geopolitical defeat for Putin.

This is the context in which Russia’s subsequent foreign-policy moves need to be understood. The intervention in Syria, launched in September 2015, was in large measure a response to the disaster of the Kremlin’s policy in Ukraine. There were, to be sure, many motivations behind the decision to deepen Russia’s involvement in the Syrian conflict – a war in which it was already implicated through its support for the Assad regime. But some of the factors most commonly invoked were by 2015 secondary to Russia’s most pressing foreign-policy needs.

Economic and political ties between Moscow and Damascus stretched back to the Cold War, and might suggest an obvious material reason for Russia to prop up Bashar al-Assad’s rule. Under Assad’s father, Syria had been one of the USSR’s few state-level allies in the Middle East, and received substantial economic and military aid in exchange for the lease of a naval base at Tartus.^{45} In the 1990s, these ties languished as Russia’s economy collapsed and its foreign policy turned it away from its former client states. In the 2000s, the Putin government revived the Syrian connection, and in 2006 signed an arms deal worth $4 billion, and in 2010 another worth $20 billion.^{46} But with the Arab Spring and the outbreak of civil war in Syria, whatever material stakes Russia had there rapidly dwindled: bilateral trade slumped from $1.2 billion in 2011 to $376 million two years later – a lower volume of trade than Russia had with Iraq or Libya, and barely a tenth the size of its trade with Israel.^{47}

Domestic considerations certainly played some role. The Syrian intervention gave Putin a brief patriotic ratings boost; unlike Russia’s semi-covert role in eastern Ukraine – where its troops operated at arm’s length as ‘volunteers’ – this one could be loudly claimed, and broadcast on national television, though its popularity dwindled soon enough. The Russian military and its arms manufacturers also stood to gain. The 2008 war with Georgia had, among other things, revealed how far behind Russia was in terms of technology and military organization, prompting a major overhaul and upgrading of weapons. Syria, already devastated by years of war, provided a testing ground – and showroom – for the new-look armed forces and weapons systems. Among the main buyers in the region were Algeria and Egypt, who in 2014 signed arms deals with Russia worth $2.7 billion and $3.5 billion respectively.^{48}

In one important sense, internal concerns overlapped with external ones. Moscow’s bid to ensure Assad’s survival in power was to some degree motivated by its aversion to regime change. A deep legitimism had been built into Russian policy since the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; the Maidan increased the feeling of urgency behind it. The same pro-incumbent logic applied to the Middle East during the Arab Spring: the Kremlin came to view the revolts as another iteration of the ‘Colour Revolutions’, encouraged if not actually sponsored by the US and its allies. It did not immediately see the 2011 revolts in Tunisia and Egypt as conforming to a larger pattern; it was only the fall of Gaddafi that really fixed this interpretation in the Kremlin’s mind. In March 2011, when the UN Security Council voted on a resolution authorizing no-fly zones over Libya, President Medvedev decided to abstain rather than veto it – a gesture that signalled the persistence of the pro-Western current in Russian foreign-policy thinking, and opened the way for a Western intervention that replicated the destruction and turmoil visited on Iraq. When a similar fate threatened Assad, Moscow was determined not to make the same mistakes, and vetoed eleven UNSC resolutions on Syria between October 2011 and April 2018.

Russia’s intervention in Syria, starting in 2015, was initially underpinned by the same anti-regime change logic, which lent its actions a brutal simplicity. The complexity of the conflict – the range of political identities within the rebellion, the country’s regional and sectarian mosaic – was reduced to a struggle between Assad and a monolithic opposition that Moscow, too, labelled ‘terrorists’. On the battlefield, all anti-Assad forces were placed in the same category as ISIS. This may have made Russia’s stance more coherent than that of Western powers, in which different Western allies – or even different agencies of the same government – backed opposing militias.^{49} But it was scarcely less destructive, as the fate of Aleppo demonstrated. The target of ferocious bombing since 2012, the city was subjected to further pounding by Russian airstrikes in 2015 and 2016. At the same time, however, Russia’s defence of Assad was not unreserved or especially entrenched. Only weeks after launching airstrikes to prevent the Syrian government from falling, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson was asserting that Assad’s continuation in power was ‘absolutely not’ a matter of principle for Moscow; its professed concern was that regime change should not be imposed from without, and that Syrian state institutions should remain intact during any political transition.^{50}

But the central aim of the Kremlin’s intervention in Syria was, in my view, neither to protect Assad nor to prevent regime change per se; it was, rather, an attempt to re-establish Russia’s importance on the world stage. A desire for more equal treatment from the West had been a longstanding theme of Russian diplomacy, from Primakov onward, and it recurred in disagreements over Syria. In February 2013, for instance, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a TV interviewer that the US ‘needs to be taught that affairs can only be conducted on the basis of equality, balance of interests and mutual respect’.^{51} After the Maidan, and with the US and its allies bent on a policy of isolating Russia internationally, the urge to claim parity gave way to a more pressing need to reassert Russia’s relevance.

Syria became the critical means for doing so. Already in September 2013, Russia had given notice of its diplomatic capacities, brokering a deal designed to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal and thus avert the airstrikes the Obama administration had threatened against Assad. Further waves of diplomatic activity around Syria followed, including hosting meetings of Syrian opposition groups and the Assad government in Moscow in January 2015. Even when Russia began its own armed intervention in Syria a few months later, the Kremlin was not entirely switching from the diplomatic track – further talks took place in Vienna in October 2015, at the same time as Russian airstrikes were being carried out. Rather, the military action in Syria was evidently calibrated to show that Russia could materially affect the course of the conflict – and was therefore a power whose interests had to be taken into account, rather than a pariah facing ever deeper isolation.

The same aspiration, too, explains the revival, a decade and a half after 11 September 2001, of Putin’s dream of an international anti-terrorist alliance, which he put forward to the UN General Assembly in September 2015. A grand US–Russian coalition of this kind would no doubt have levelled what was left of Syria, jointly creating a desert and calling it peace. The idea was never likely to be endorsed by a Democratic administration, and although it seemed during the 2016 campaign as if Trump might be amenable to the idea, that hope quickly evaporated after November amid the constant stream of allegations of Russian election meddling.

With Trump’s victory, Russia moved to the centre of US public and media debate as never before in the post-Soviet era. Among dismayed Democrats, Russian interference became the default explanation for Clinton’s defeat: it was as if the Kremlin had hacked American democracy itself. Of course, whatever trouble the Russian government may have wanted to cause the Clinton campaign, it made little difference to the actual outcome of the vote. (And all indications are that the Kremlin, like so many other observers, expected Clinton to win anyway.) But ‘Russia’ quickly became a convenient, all-purpose signifier enabling many American liberals to avoid discussing the multiple factors behind Trump’s disastrous success, from the anti-democratic distortions of the electoral college system to the disenfranchisement of voters, especially African-Americans, through voter ID laws and mass incarceration. Rather than confront the deep flaws in the US’s own institutions, political system and society that produced the freak result, for many it was more convenient – more emotionally accurate, too – to blame Trump’s ascent on an outside power, and implicitly to identify Trump himself as a foreign body.

Even before Trump’s inauguration, it became clear that tarring the new president by association with Russia would be the predominant angle of attack for much of the US media and political establishment. In January 2017, several intelligence agencies signed on to an extremely thin and barely literate ‘assessment’ that ‘Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election’.^{52} For months thereafter, one figure in the Trump administration after another was found to have suspicious ties to Russia: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was too cosy with Putin, national security adviser Michael Flynn took money for lobbying efforts, Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied about his meetings with the Russian ambassador to the US, Trump’s son Donald Jr and other members of his campaign team discussed with assorted Russians how to damage Clinton, and so on.

Much of this was undoubtedly murky, though crookedness and lying of this kind are hardly unusual fare in US politics. The difference lay in the brazenness of the Trump campaign, and the fact that it was connected to Russia – now recurrently referred to as a ‘hostile power’. Not just corruption, then, but also treason was in the air. The paranoias of the Cold War seemed to have made a comeback: in November 2016, for example, a mysterious online group called PropOrNot went full McCarthy by releasing ‘The List’, designed to name and shame – or indeed casually smear – websites that it believed ‘reliably echo Russian propaganda’. In September 2017, a new entity called the Committee to Investigate Russia released a video in which Morgan Freeman told viewers, ‘We have been attacked. We are at war.’ More than the 2016 election was at stake: Putin and his army of hackers had made Americans ‘distrust their media, their political processes, even their neighbours’.

‘Russia’ became what Masha Gessen called ‘the universal rhetorical weapon of American politics’.^{53} But what was the connection between ‘Russia’ as deployed within the US political scene and Russia itself? The main concerns of those resorting to ‘Russia’ as a rhetorical weapon were domestic, focused on undermining the Trump presidency and, if possible, levering him out of office. Yet the Russia panic had real consequences on the international stage: it made impossible any easing of the sanctions regime, and blocked off for the foreseeable future any rapprochement with Moscow. The possibility of a new bargain with the West, which the Putin administration evidently hoped to secure under Trump, all but vanished.

The accumulated tensions of the previous decade are unlikely to dissipate any time soon. But does this mean that we do indeed find ourselves living through a ‘New Cold War’? To some extent, the very idea of a cold war is a kind of geopolitical speech act: if enough people in power decide they are in one, it will materialize. Yet there are decisive differences between current frictions and the global contest that followed the Second World War. Most obvious is the lack of remotely comparable ideological stakes: it is not two rival socio-economic systems that now confront each other, but states, or blocs of them, with opposed interests. Then there is the fact that Russia–West tensions have not so far dragged in the same array of allies and clients as before: this time around, China, East and South Asia, Africa and Latin America are all bystanders. For the same reason, the struggle this time is much more geographically circumscribed; with the grim exception of Syria, the zones of contention have been in Eastern Europe. Overall, both Russia and the world have been so transformed over the past generation that none of the Cold War conditions can be said to apply.

Why, then, has the Cold War framework proved so tempting as a means of understanding relations between Russia and the West? For hardened hawks and Beltway pundits it no doubt offers the comfort of familiarity, as well as a ready repertoire of tropes and imagery. But it has gained momentum among a wider public, both in the US and far beyond its borders. The idea of a ‘New Cold War’ seems, more than anything, designed to fill a conceptual vacuum – compensating for the lack, in the minds of many, of ways to grasp the disconcerting novelty of the current geopolitical moment.

Taken together, the developments of the past few years confirmed that the world had entered a new geopolitical era. These events marked both the demise of the fantasy of Russian integration or alliance with the West, and a durable shift to a more confrontational stance. Again, this was not the result of a pre-programmed Russian hostility to Western values, or indeed to Western policy goals more broadly: Russia has, after all, lined up with the US several times on key issues, such as sanctions on North Korea and Iran, and has made sure to coordinate its airstrikes on Syria with the USAF, for example. But where US and Russian interests diverge most sharply, the Kremlin has sought to counteract or forestall Western moves more actively than before.

Still, it should be borne in mind that in the cases of Ukraine, Syria and the 2016 US presidential election, the Kremlin’s actions were tactical improvisations rather than moves in any alternative grand strategy. The suddenness and decisiveness of these actions seemed almost an end in themselves, designed to alter the parameters of the geopolitical situation so radically and abruptly that the West would be compelled to change course. The problem with this approach, however, was that after each dramatic move, the situation began to settle once more into its normal pattern, creating the need for another, still more drastic move; the result was that Russian policy was gradually replaced by a string of increasingly risky fuites en avant.

The Syrian intervention was in other respects a more significant moment than the Kremlin perhaps intended. It was Moscow’s first serious military deployment beyond the former USSR since Afghanistan in the 1980s, other than Kosovo and small contributions to UN peacekeeping contingents; it was also the first time Russia had relied almost exclusively on the use of air power (in that regard, following very much in the US’s footsteps). These were no small additions to Russia’s tactical repertoire, and they set precedents that cannot be ignored or easily revoked. Once used, the methods of war have a way of generating their own reasons, until they become normalized instruments of policy – as the example of the US itself, engaged in multiple unwinnable wars disguised as limited, ‘surgical’ interventions, shows.

We are likely, then, to see more turbulent, unpredictable times ahead where Russia and the West are concerned – something much less stable and well-defined than a ‘New Cold War’. The shift is especially striking because the underlying parameters governing relations between the two sides remain substantively unchanged: there is still, after all, a dramatic imbalance of power. The US enjoys accumulated advantages that allow it to either attend to or ignore Russian interests as it pleases. Russia, meanwhile, retains enough of its great-power habits of mind to resent this state of affairs, but cannot by itself reshape the relation of forces. Unless and until these conditions are altered, under the current logic of confrontation, more clashes are likely.

Yet something has undeniably changed. For much of the post-Soviet period, the problem of Russia’s global position – both in a literal, geographical sense and in strategic terms – was largely bracketed, obscured by the lingering dream of a Westernizing Russia joining with its former adversaries. All through the gradual process of disenchantment that has taken place over the past two decades, that problem remained fundamentally unresolved. Events since the Ukraine crisis have brought us back to it, demanding that we think again about Russia’s place in the world.

^{CHAPTER 6}

Russia in the World

A SEA CHANGE HAS TAKEN place in the international order. Two and a half decades after the end of the Cold War, Russia’s fantasy of integration or alliance with the West has finally been buried. It is, of course, possible that there will be some rapprochement with the West in future, and that relations will improve from their current abysmal state – particularly in Europe, where trade links and physical proximity may ultimately encourage a softening of the sanctions regime. But even then, there will be no return to the integrationist dream on Russia’s part. The ground has fundamentally shifted, and from where everyone is now standing, the world looks very different.

The change in official thinking is clear enough. The Russian government’s official ‘foreign policy concept’ from February 2013 described the country as ‘an integral and inseparable part of European civilization’, and made it clear that priority was to be given ‘to relations with the Euro-Atlantic states which, besides geography, economy and history, have common deep-rooted civilizational ties with Russia’. In the next iteration of that document, in December 2016, these allusions had disappeared. After a long interregnum, Russia once again finds itself part of the non-West.

Yet this development has by no means resolved the much larger question of Russia’s role on the global stage. If anything, it has deepened the dilemmas the country faces. What place will Russia occupy in the twenty-first-century interstate system? Will it slide down the pecking order to become a merely ‘regional power’, as Obama rather disparagingly put it in 2014, or will it regain its Soviet-era status as one of a handful of major global players? Despite the country’s reduced circumstances compared with Soviet times, both its policymakers and much of its population retain the titan’s worldview – yet without the globe-spanning ideology that gave meaning to its position in the twentieth-century world. In some ways, Russia’s geopolitical situation today is an external version of the parallelism of old and new within its borders: no longer a superpower rival to the US, it is still unreconciled to becoming a second-rank regional actor.

Russia’s awkward, intermediate status in itself generates all kinds of contradictions and tensions in the country’s policy outlook. But there are many other constraints, both internal and external, which will work to shape its role in the world to come – limiting or inflecting the choices its leaders make, and putting multiple pressures on its political system. The possibilities for Russia will also greatly depend on what kind of world we are in: one still dominated for the foreseeable future by the US as a single superordinate power; a ‘multipolar’ one in which no one power can dominate; or one on the way to Chinese global hegemony.

In the long run, where is Russia going? Gogol famously ended the first part of Dead Souls with an evocation of the country as a troika racing headlong into the future, its destination unknown: ‘All that exists on earth flies by, and, looking askance, other peoples and nations step aside and make way for her.’^{1} The horizon for today’s Russia seems narrower, the scope for such feverish ambition curtailed. But its role will remain significant, even in a century that promises serious shifts in the global balance of power. All the more reason, then, to think seriously about how the country sees its future self, and what obstacles and opportunities might lie along its path.

In Russia, the widening of the rift with the West was accompanied by a mounting interest in ideas that might allow the country to define a role for itself outside, or even in opposition to, the Western liberal order. The 2000s had already brought increasingly frequent assertions of Russian national pride, a resurgent patriotism that fed off the country’s oil-fuelled return to a measure of economic prosperity. In the 2010s, such sentiments became more widespread and more strident, intensifying drastically after the Ukraine crisis. Politically, the new Russian nationalism was predominantly conservative, if not reactionary. Some variants of it harked back to Soviet-era glories, while others evoked a more distant imperial past. These nostalgias were far from identical in tone and content – there are, after all, differences between remembering victory over fascism and sighing over the good old days of feudalism – but they shared a compensatory impulse, finding some kind of redress for Russia’s relatively reduced status in restorationist fantasies about the past. Yet another strand of nationalism looked to the European fascist and far-right tradition, seeking to impose a contradictory dream of ethno-racial purity on Russia’s multi-ethnic territory. Each of these tendencies gained a certain amount of currency in the 2000s, without any of them becoming dominant ideologically – though some of the far-right’s adherents certainly caused plenty of harm, carrying out dozens of vicious attacks on migrants and foreigners.[14]^{2}

At the same time, the new century brought a revival of interest in a set of ideas that was avowedly supranational, and yet also profoundly nationalistic. ‘Eurasianism’ – the notion that Eurasia is home to a civilization distinct from its European, Asian or North American counterparts, with Russia at its core – has a long pedigree, dating back to the nineteenth century.^{3} But it emerged in its most developed form in the 1920s among a group of Russian émigré intellectuals who, having fled the revolutionary turmoil of 1917, came to see the USSR as the heir to the tradition of Great Russian statehood, rather than as its destroyer. The Soviet Union was simply the new name for a space in which a distinctive fusion of European and Asiatic peoples and cultures would flourish. The Eurasianists included figures such as the linguists Nikolai Trubetskoi and Roman Jakobson, the geographer Pyotr Savitsky, the literary critic D. S. Mirsky, the historian George Vernadsky and others. Overall, they could be described as radical conservatives: they rejected the White exiles’ nostalgia for the tsarist system, and were opposed to the crude ethnic chauvinism of the pan-Slavists.

Many of Eurasianism’s original advocates, having reconciled themselves to the new regime and returned, perished at its hands in the 1930s. Thereafter the flame was kept alive as the preoccupation of a dissident fringe. Its leading proponent was the ethno-historian Lev Gumilev, son of the poets Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova.^{4} His extensive writings gave Eurasianism a new, biological twist: Eurasia was not so much a spatial as an ethno-racial entity, in which several distinct ethnoi lived harmoniously under the rule of a Russian superethnos. The latter was fated to clash, however, with the cosmopolitan universalism of the West. Gumilev’s ideas gave a pseudo-scientific veneer to a Soviet counter-cultural version of race-thinking, repackaging crude prejudices as high-minded doctrine by wrapping them in nebulous terminology of his own devising. Many were drawn to his work because it seemed to square the circle of national and ethnic questions in the USSR: there were supposedly enduring, essential differences between the peoples of the former Russian empire, and yet there was a paradoxical unity in their separateness – and that unity was apparently the benign side effect of Russian dominance. The USSR was simply the latest form taken by a biologically determined destiny.

Amid the disorientations of perestroika and especially during the 1990s, Gumilev’s ideas gained a huge audience. They seemed to offer a non-Communist justification for Russia’s continued sway over its periphery, implicitly allowing readers to see the loss of empire as a temporary bump on a path foreordained as much by genetics as by geopolitics. Long after Gumilev’s death in 1992, his books continued to be issued in enormous print-runs. By some measures, he could be classed as the most influential intellectual of the post-Soviet era, implanting in several million readers a set of deterministic, essentialist ideas about ethnicity and history.

Yet the version of Eurasianism that has come increasingly to the fore in the twenty-first century is a slightly different complex of ideas. Often dubbed ‘neo-Eurasianism’, it shares some features with its predecessors: like the original Eurasianists, its adherents focus on Eurasia as a unit, seeing it as fundamentally opposed to the West along a number of axes; they also share Gumilev’s belief in the distinctive, essentialized characteristics of ethno-national groups. But unlike its precursors, neo-Eurasianism is concerned above all with the contemporary struggle against Western-led globalization, which is imposing a homogenizing liberal cosmopolitanism on the world. Indeed, in terms of its real intellectual lineage this new strand of thinking ironically owes less to Russians than it does to Western reactionary thinkers of the twentieth century: interwar theorists of geopolitics such as Carl Schmitt, figures from the French New Right such as Alain de Benoist, and pundits like Samuel Huntington, with his idea that the new century would be shaped by a ‘clash of civilizations’.

Neo-Eurasianism’s most energetic promoter has been Aleksandr Dugin, who became perhaps the emblematic Russian public intellectual of the 2010s: part media-friendly expert on geopolitics, part bearded Dostoevskian mystagogue.^{5} His career is in its own way a chronicle of Russian nationalism’s development. The son of a military intelligence officer, Dugin was closely involved in the birth of the Russian far right in the 1980s and early 1990s, including the anti-Semitic organization ‘Pamyat’ (Memory) and the National Bolshevik Party. At the same time, he produced assorted ramblings on esoteric philosophy, in which he paid tribute to the Nazis’ obsession with the occult. Up to the mid-1990s, few besides cranks were interested in these ideas. But the deep unpopularity of Yeltsin’s liberal reforms, and the continuing humiliation of Russia’s loss of status on the world stage, opened a way into the mainstream for nationalist themes. Dugin, too, worked his way into the corridors of power, becoming adviser to Duma speaker Gennady Seleznev and writing a primer on the Foundations of Geopolitics (1997) that was well received by the Russian military.

In the new century, Dugin expanded his reach and readership, producing several documentaries and publishing dozens of books with sonorous titles such as The Fourth Political Theory (2009) and In Search of the Dark Logos (2013). He became an increasingly frequent presence on Russia’s TV screens, wheeled out to comment on the deeper reasons for the incompatibility between Russia and the West. With the Ukraine crisis, Dugin shot to international prominence, identified by many Western analysts as the geopolitical brains behind the annexation of Crimea and the most influential voice urging Putin to go still further. In July 2014 he called on the president to step up Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine – Dugin made a point of calling it ‘Novorossiia’ – in order to ‘save Russia’s moral authority’.^{6} This merging of geopolitical designs with quasi-religious language was typical. Fittingly, in 2015, Dugin became chief editor of ‘Tsargrad’, a TV station funded by the Orthodox Christian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev and set up to wage an Orthodox information jihad against Western liberalism.

Dugin’s thinking has all along been an eclectic, thoroughly postmodern mix, but the core of it is geopolitical, deploying various warmed-over concepts to explain Russia’s inevitable confrontation with the West. From British geographer Halford Mackinder he picked up the idea of Eurasia as a ‘world-island’, a zone with Russia at its heart that served as ‘the geographical pivot of history’. From Carl Schmitt he adopted a binary opposition between land powers and sea powers (‘tellurocracies’ and ‘thalassocracies’), which would always ultimately set Russia against the West. These constructs not only offered an alternative to the Westernizing stance of the Yeltsin and early Putin governments, they also made Russia’s continued dominance of the countries surrounding it a matter of geographical and historical necessity. What might have been mere imperial nostalgia was reformatted as deep strategic thinking. Moreover, Dugin seemed to provide an explanation for the frustrations and ultimate failure of the Westernizing policy, and a higher purpose for the independent course Russia would now have to plot. Freed of the delusion that it might join the liberal West, the country could now pursue its Eurasian destiny.

In the 2010s, Dugin’s thinking and that of the Putin government have seemed increasingly aligned – leading some Western pundits to dub Dugin the Kremlin’s éminence grise, or even ‘Putin’s Rasputin’. But how much credence should we give to this? It’s true that Duginite terminology has crept into public discourse and official media. To a large extent, though, this has been part of a wider turn to the right under Putin, who over time has come to see himself as a defender of conservative values. (Not coincidentally, the thinkers and historical figures most commonly cited by the Kremlin in the 2010s have included the White émigré philosopher Ivan Il’in and the hard-line tsarist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin.) The Kremlin’s domestic policies have certainly been informed by a desire to defend Orthodox ‘civilization’, whether through laws against ‘gay propaganda’ or through persecution of non-Orthodox religious minorities; but again, such virulent prejudices are part of the standard repertoire of the right, in Russia as elsewhere.

Even in the realm of geopolitics, where one would expect to see Dugin’s stamp most clearly, the real significance and reach of the Eurasianist idea is far from obvious. During the 1990s and 2000s, Russian foreign policy documents made repeated references to ‘Eurasia’, but in the early 2010s the emphasis on ‘Eurasian integration processes’ became much stronger, thanks to the formation of the Eurasian Customs Union in 2010 and the Eurasian Economic Space in 2012. Two years later, these were combined into the Eurasian Economic Union, a single market and customs union comprising Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.[15] Yet there is no necessary relationship between these state-level trade pacts and the ‘civilizational’ murmurings of Dugin and his ilk. Even though Russia is by far the largest state in the Eurasian Union, the Union itself is nonetheless a deal made by sovereign governments, rather than an imperial Anschluss in the name of Russian ethno-national chauvinism. More to the point, regional trade pacts of this kind have become the global norm, from the EU’s single market to NAFTA, from Mercosur to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The Eurasian Union is in that sense very much a latecomer, and remains distinctly underdeveloped relative to its peers.

There are, moreover, many different routes by which any kind of Russian government – liberal or conservative, far right-influenced or social-democratic – might have arrived at the same idea, none of which would have to involve a deeper commitment to neo-Eurasianist thinking. Indeed, the notion that the former USSR should constitute a privileged sphere of influence for Russia has been a constant in the country’s foreign policy since 1991, and a desire for a kind of post-Soviet Monroe Doctrine to be applied to Eurasia has been shared across the political spectrum. In 2003, for example, Anatoly Chubais – architect of the free-market reforms of the 1990s – called for Russia to establish a ‘liberal empire’ over the former USSR: he argued that the country ‘can and must do all it can to grow, strengthen and consolidate its leading positions in that part of the planet over the next 50 years’.^{7}

The escalating confrontation with the West may have struck some in Russia as proof of Dugin’s ‘civilizational’ diagnoses – the Ukraine crisis and its aftermath finally confirming Russia’s definitive exclusion from, and opposition to, the Western liberal order. But neo-Eurasianist ideas had no role in producing the confrontation itself. As we have seen, from the start of the post-Soviet era there were fundamental mismatches in power and strategic interests between Russia and the West. These generated tensions that steadily rose over time, and notably burst into the open in Ukraine in 2003–04, Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine again in 2013–14, among other places.

Ultimately, the recent prominence of Dugin and neo-Eurasianism should be understood as an attempt to fill the ideological void left by the pro-Western idea, as Russia’s relations with the West have deteriorated, and to give a larger meaning to the country’s geostrategic position and physical location. In that sense, neo-Eurasianism is less a cause of the Kremlin’s policy shifts than a symptom of Russia’s continuing dilemmas, less a coherent ideology than a mindset that seeks to make virtues out of the country’s uncomfortable situation. Its rise has certainly given oxygen to some ugly ideas, and these have made a difference to the tone of Russian policy as well as the rationales offered for it. But neo-Eurasianist fantasies cannot in themselves transform the conditions in which that policy is made.

^_____

Russia’s geopolitical options will, for a considerable time to come, be shaped by a series of constraints. Several of these arise from dynamics internal to Russia, but the most important ones emerge at the global level. The most decisive feature of Russia’s present-day role in the world, which flows into every calculation it makes, is its intermediate status. Too big to be digested by regional blocs such as the EU, too independent of the US to admit into NATO, Russia is nonetheless no longer powerful enough to form a significant geopolitical or economic pole on its own. It occupies a difficult mid-category between the hegemonic US and a rising China on the one hand, and on the other a handful of large states, chiefly Brazil and India, that are rapidly leaving behind their status as ‘developing countries’. It remains the world’s largest country, with a still numerous and well-educated population, not to mention a nuclear arsenal and significant natural resources. But at the same time its economic weight is dwindling: in 2015, its GDP per capita was around a sixth that of the US, a fifth that of Germany and a quarter of the OECD average; it was roughly level with Brazil’s and Turkey’s, and only fractionally higher than China’s.

The tremendous disparity in power and resources between Russia and the West translates directly into their uneven military capacities. Russia is currently the world’s second-largest exporter of weapons, and still has one of the largest armies in the world in terms of personnel, though many of the troops are teenage conscripts. Yet in 2015, for example, Russia devoted about a tenth as much money to its armed forces in absolute terms as the US did, and only slightly more than the UK; in per capita terms, it spent somewhat less than Germany or Greece. All told, its 2015 military budget came to around 8 per cent of the total for NATO as a whole, almost 70 per cent of which was spent by the US alone.^{8} What enables Moscow to pose a military threat to its neighbours at present is not so much the scale or strength of its armies as its readiness to use force quickly and decisively. But this is more a trap than an advantage, a short-term tactical manoeuvre that has significant strategic downsides in the long term. The possibility that Moscow will use force against them has already driven Russia’s neighbours further into NATO’s embrace, and propelled a new round of the arms race for which Russia is still more poorly equipped than in Soviet times.[16]

Russia’s intermediate status is to some extent a residue of the USSR’s role as the core of what used to be called the Second World, and of Moscow’s decades-long effort to construct a systemic alternative to the capitalist West. The possibility of Russia leading such a challenge today seems remote: it lacks both the will and the means to reconstitute anything like the USSR, and has little desire to impose its ideology, its political system or its economic model on states further afield. For all the concern about the tentacular spread of Putin’s influence, its actual capacity to shape political outcomes has proved negligible to non-existent – the 2016 US elections very much included. The Kremlin does indeed seek to convert whatever leverage it possesses into concrete advantages, and this can involve all kinds of tactics, from discreet negotiations to loud threats to covert meddling. But the resources at Russia’s disposal are fewer than in 1917 or 1945, and the forces likely to oppose it are far stronger.

But what does Russia want? The question of what kind of power it will be in future – whether it wants to reconstitute the USSR in new ‘Eurasian’ packaging or not, whether it sees itself as fundamentally opposed to the West or merely distinct from it – cannot be separated from the environment in which it will have to operate. At present, the interstate order is dominated by a single power, the US, which retains a massive military advantage over all other powers; despite the phenomenal rise of China, the US also remains the nerve centre of the global economy, its currency and government bonds the world’s default repositories of value.

Over the past decade, however, the idea of a coming ‘multipolar’ or ‘polycentric’ international order has become widespread among many international-relations theorists, as they try to discern what kind of world might emerge after the ‘unipolar’ moment of US dominance has passed.^{9} The idea has long been popular in Moscow, and over time has been built into the thinking of Kremlin strategists. First mooted under Primakov in the mid-1990s, it remained a wishful fiction for the rest of that decade. But Washington’s expanding aggressions after 9/11 were read as early signs of trouble for the single superpower. The deepening disaster of Western interventions in the Middle East since then, and Russia’s apparent ability to alter the course of the conflict in Syria in 2015–16, were similarly seen in Moscow as further portents of US decline.

It does seem reasonable to assume that US hegemony will eventually come to an end, just as the Pax Britannica did before it, and it makes sense to debate what kind of world order will follow. Will China slide smoothly into the role of next global hegemon? Are we headed for an anarchic system in which no single power takes the place of the US? Or will the world to come do away with the dominance of states altogether, replacing that pattern with a world-market society?^{10}

These alternative scenarios would have very different consequences, for Russia as for everyone else. From Moscow’s perspective, a Chinese-dominated world would be unlike the US-dominated order in one especially crucial respect: Russia would now share an extensive land border with the single superpower. If the PRC became the US of the twenty-first century, would Russia become its Mexico – economically integrated with and strategically subordinated to the giant next door? The world-market scenario poses a different kind of threat: a dilution or even dissolution of state sovereignty that might produce all kinds of socio-economic or even territorial fragmentation, turning existing nation-states into little more than cartographic fictions.

In an anarchic world system, meanwhile, the dilemmas presented by China’s gravitational pull would also apply, but Russia’s strategic options would be more varied – as would the dangers it would potentially confront. In theory, it could act as a kind of ‘swing power’, aligning with Washington, Beijing or another state to tilt the scales against any given opponent. By forming such alliances, it could carry out its own version of nineteenth-century great-power balancing. Or might it function as a kind of global buffer zone between China and the West, its strategic weight deriving from abstention from the great-power conflicts ahead? Either way, this would turn inside out Mackinder’s 1904 description of ‘Euro-Asia’ as the ‘geographical pivot of history’: there, Russia was pivotal by virtue of being the ‘heartland’ of decisive historical events – the zone whose fate, from the Mongols to the Romanovs, determined the fortunes of the landmasses around it.^{11} Here, Russia would be pivotal precisely by standing outside the main centres of global power and wealth.

For now, however, any post-American world seems a long way off. What happens in this long interregnum depends to a large extent on what the West does, since the basic power imbalance between it and Russia still governs strategic calculations on both sides. This leaves Russia hovering in a kind of geopolitical and historical limbo while the world is reconfigured around it. Yet during this interval Russia itself will not be standing still: several different far-reaching transformations will remake it from within.

It is the year 2028, and Russia is ruled by a neo-feudal, Orthodox monarch who has built a vast stone wall around the country, ‘to cut us off from stench and unbelievers’, broken only by the pipelines taking oil to Russia’s clients abroad. Meanwhile an elite state security force terrorizes the population, driving around Moscow’s ten-lane expressways in red ‘Mercedovs’ and checking the rouble’s exchange rate against the yuan on the screens of their ‘news bubbles’. This is the ‘New Russia’ of Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, which combines futurological fantasy with grim reminders of the past. Published in 2006, the book was strikingly prescient in foreseeing the increasingly patriotic direction in which the Putin system was tending, and in imagining a re-run of earlier confrontations with the West. It was also revealing in its geopolitical assumptions and projections: ‘New Russia’ had become little more than a space of transit – a country traversed by, if not reduced to, pipelines and roads ferrying raw materials and goods between China and the West, peripheral to and dependent on both.

One of the things that made Sorokin’s dark satire compelling was that it extrapolated recognizable features of the present – including Russia’s already excessive reliance on natural resources, which today account for three-quarters of the country’s exports.^{12} This structural feature of the Russian economy has been long in the making, and seems destined to linger, imposing powerful limits on the country’s ability to choose its own path in future.

The prolonged economic disaster of the 1990s and then the recovery in the 2000s somewhat obscured the relentless progress of a shift that had been under way since at least the 1960s. Soviet industrial growth, after achieving impressive results at tremendous human cost in the 1930s and 1940s, began to slow in the postwar period, the pace dropping even as equipment began to age. A rash of oil discoveries in Western Siberia allowed the Brezhnev regime and its successors to paper over the problems caused by this slowdown; instead of a deeper recession, the USSR experienced a long period of stagnation. But the relief afforded by energy exports also brought a growing dependency on them: they went from 16 per cent of total exports in 1970 to 47 per cent in 1987.^{13} In the mid-1980s, a drop in oil prices starved the USSR of funds just as Gorbachev was implementing his economic reforms, and the low continued for much of the 1990s, making the post-Soviet slump longer and deeper than it might otherwise have been. Prices only really recovered at the end of the century, in time for Putin to benefit from them. Since then, Russia has become ever more dependent on energy exports: they accounted for half of total exports in 2000, and that share rose steadily each year until Western sanctions began to bite in 2015.^{14} Gas, too, has become an important export product, as have precious metals and ores, with which Russia is also abundantly endowed.

The disproportionate size of the primary-resource sector spells trouble for the rest of the economy, as the experience of many other countries has shown, from the ‘Dutch Disease’ of the 1960s to the impact of oil on Nigeria and Venezuela. The overwhelming weight of lucrative export commodities causes currency appreciation that leaves other industries uncompetitive; this makes it all the more difficult to pursue alternative strategies for growth, deepening the ‘resource trap’. The Russian government has repeatedly affirmed the need to diversify the economy – perhaps the peak expression of this being Medvedev’s 2009 pseudo-manifesto ‘Forward, Russia!’, which bemoaned the country’s ‘primitive resource economy, chronic corruption, our outmoded habit of relying on the government, on foreigners or on some “almighty teachings” to solve our problems – on anything except ourselves’.^{15}

Yet for all that, the ‘modernization’ Medvedev promised never materialized, and Russia’s dependence on natural resources if anything increased, especially under the impact of the 2008 economic crisis and the post-Ukraine sanctions. After tumbling for several years, oil prices stabilized in 2016 and then crept up again, and in the meantime the economy had staged a modest recovery, allowing the Kremlin to balance its budgets once more. But growth estimates for the next few years are sluggish at best – in late 2017, the OECD projected Russian GDP growth of under 2 per cent for 2018–19^{16} – and certainly insufficient to fund a wholesale overhaul of the economy. Based on current trends, it’s hard to imagine Russia’s resource dependency being reduced by much before the 2028 of Sorokin’s fantasy.

What this means in turn is that Russia will struggle to regain its Soviet-era niche as an industrial power. The transition to capitalism brought an accelerated deindustrialization, increasing Russia’s reliance on energy exports without producing any compensating gains in employment. After all, one of the features of what is known as the ‘fuel-energy complex’ is that it requires considerably less labour than manufacturing. Russia’s already diminished industrial sector has thus far been unable to attract the levels of investment, domestic or foreign, that would be required for a new burst of growth, making a Chinese- or East Asian-style ‘miracle’ hard to imagine, even if those earlier successes hadn’t already raised the levels of global competition still higher.[17] Unable to compete with China and the Asian Tigers on wages, Russia similarly lags behind its wealthier Western peers in terms of high-value goods – another instance of the country’s difficult middle position. Having moved up the economic hierarchy over the course of the twentieth century, Russia is likely to find itself stuck several rungs lower down in the twenty-first.

A further constraint on Russia’s ability to manoeuvre – and one that is equally symbolic of its global downsizing – is its dwindling population. It is still the ninth most populous country in the world, with 143 million inhabitants at the time of the last census, in 2010. But that number is set to contract inexorably in the coming years: the UN Population Division envisages a drop to 133 million by 2050, and to 126 million by 2050; by the start of the next century it could be as low as 124 million. This will push Russia down the global demographic hierarchy: the fourth most populous state in the world in 1950, by 2050 it will have fallen to fifteenth place, overtaken by Pakistan, Ethiopia and Egypt, among others.^{17}

This decline represents the continuation of a demographic crisis that first became visible in 1992, when deaths exceeded births in Russia for the first time since the Second World War. Between the collapse of the USSR and the last census, in fact, Russia’s population decreased by an estimated 5.4 million, an annual average drop of 284,000. The traumas of transition played a role in this shrinkage, the post-Soviet years bringing a spike in mortality and a collapse of the public health infrastructure. But its roots are broader and deeper, going back to longer-term processes of demographic change over the course of the twentieth century – declining birth rates linked to urbanization and rising female literacy – as well as the catastrophic losses inflicted by war and Stalinist terror.^{18} Though the Kremlin has enacted some pro-natalist policies, offering monetary incentives for women to have more children, these efforts will not be enough to offset the decline, much less reverse it.

The shrinking of the population is taking place at the same time as a marked ‘greying’ of Russian society: an increase in the proportion of middle-aged and elderly citizens. In 2010, 18 per cent of the total population was over sixty – the same proportion as in the US, and considerably less than in Germany or Japan. The UNPD’s projections show the percentage rising over the coming decades, to 29 per cent by 2050, levelling off thereafter until 2100 – an estimated 36 million people. This would again be a share similar to the US’s, but less than Germany’s or Japan’s.

In Russia as elsewhere, such trends imply a formidable rise in the ‘dependency ratio’, requiring more and more of the resources generated by a shrinking workforce to be deployed in caring for pensioners. In much of the developed world, these looming pension obligations – the term ‘overhang’ is frequently used – have been used to justify increases in the retirement age. But in Russia there are powerful moral arguments against such moves: shorter life expectancy and higher mortality rates than in the West or Japan, say, mean that the Russian pension system is already heavily subsidized by men and women who do not survive to retirement age. Shifting back the date at which they can claim their pensions would compound the injustice of working lives already too harsh to last as long as they should. While Russian demographic trends in many ways echo those of the industrialized world, then, there are differences that seem likely to make the politics of the ageing society particularly sharp-edged there – perhaps demanding an even more thorough rethinking of the country’s economic model.

The only thing that can mitigate the effects of a contracting and ageing population is a substantial inflow of migrants. According to a 2006 study led by Anatoly Vishnevsky, Russia’s leading demographer, in order simply to maintain Russia’s population at its present level, an annual net migration of around 900,000 people would be required until 2024, rising to an average of more than 1.2 million migrants a year until 2050. Accurate figures are hard to come by, but at present migrants in Russia probably number around 12 million, something like 8 or 9 per cent of the total population. Given Russia’s low birth rates, if the population does stay steady, an increasing proportion of it will be recent immigrants: according to Vishnevsky’s team, as much as 15 per cent by 2025, and 35 per cent by 2050.^{19}

At present, most migrants to Russia come from former Soviet republics – the lion’s share from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. If anything like the influx required to offset natural population decline materializes, it will rapidly alter Russia’s demographic make-up. Migrant workers have already been subjected to chauvinist harassment and violence, and one could be forgiven for fearing there is worse to come, given the tide of empowerment and impunity the far-right has been riding in recent years. It is likely, too, that what is already an ethnically segmented workforce will settle into a more permanent ethnicized social hierarchy, like those of other post-imperial societies such as France or Britain. But at the same time, the very processes and experiences of migration might just propel a rethinking – however halting or partial – of the idea of Russianness itself, giving a stronger emphasis to civic components over ethnic ones, and allowing that idea to inhabit a wider range of forms and meanings.

Of course, Russia’s ethnic composition is already hugely varied: the country is home to more than 150 different officially recognized groups, from the 5 million-strong Tatars, descendants of the Mongol armies, to the Nganasans of the Arctic, who number barely 900, and from the myriad mountain peoples of the North Caucasus, predominantly Muslims, to the shamanic Udege of the Amur River basin, among scores of others. But taken together, these groups comprise only a small part of the total: Russians have always been the dominant group within their multi-ethnic empire, and today account for 80 per cent of the population. Even with substantial immigration, it will be some time before ethnic Russians lose their overall majority status. But since fertility rates among non-ethnic Russians are at present higher than among ethnic Russians, the demographic preponderance of ethnic Russians will visibly be eroded soon enough, regardless of migratory flows. The social consequences of this demographic tilt are hard to predict. Politically, its effects bleed into those of another critical matter that will confront Russia in the years to come: the ‘national question’, which beset the USSR in its final days, and which reared its head once more during the Ukraine crisis.

Nominally, Russia today is a federation, comprising eighty-three territorial ‘subjects’ – plus two more since 2014, with the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol – each of which possesses its own constitution, government, parliament and flag. On paper, these entities have many of the attributes of statehood, and only delegate certain powers to the federal centre in Moscow. But the reality is very different: in practice, Russia is a highly centralized polity, and the country’s supposedly federal subunits are little more than administrative divisions within a clear hierarchy – what Putin himself famously called a ‘vertical of power’.

This gap between federal form and centralizing substance was present during the Soviet period: the USSR was constitutionally a federation of equally sovereign components, but in reality all major decisions and even many minor ones were made in Moscow. In the early 1990s, however, many of Russia’s own subunits gained effective sovereignty, having been encouraged by Yeltsin to ‘take as much as they could swallow’. This led to prolonged tussles between the federal centre and regional elites. By 1994, Yeltsin managed to claw back the advantages Moscow had yielded (with the single exception of Chechnya, which refused to sign a new Federal Treaty, having already declared full independence).

Putin carried on and completed the centralization Yeltsin had begun, imposing his ‘vertical of power’ through administrative reorganization – adding a layer of federal plenipotentiaries and eliminating elections for regional governors – and by tightening the purse strings: in 2001, tax revenues were split roughly fifty-fifty between Moscow and the regional governments, but by 2008 the federal government’s share had risen to 70 per cent. The effect of this was to reinforce and widen the gap between federal form and content. In the words of political scientist Brian Taylor, Putin ‘saved Russian federalism by killing it’.^{20}

Chechnya’s bid for independence marked a critical turning point in this process: the war Yeltsin unleashed in that republic in 1994–96 was supposed to ‘restore constitutional order’ by bombing the Chechens back into line. The deaths of tens of thousands of Chechnya’s civilians and the flattening of its cities were intended as an example, showing the rest of Russia’s federal subunits what would happen to those who made further breakaway attempts. Here again Putin completed Yeltsin’s work, bringing Chechnya back into the federal fold by imposing on its beaten population a dictatorship loyal to the Kremlin, and in particular to Putin personally.

Yet the force of the example was undermined only a few years later, when after the 2008 war with Georgia, Russia recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Whatever was left of Russia’s commitment to the idea of territorial integrity vanished completely during the Ukraine crisis, when it first annexed Crimea after a hasty referendum supervised by 20,000 Russian troops, and then backed secessionist rebels in the Donbass, while making intermittent noises about absorbing eastern Ukraine’s Russian-speaking territories. It seems unlikely that this second annexation was ever seriously considered: the Kremlin was instead floating the idea of reconstituting ‘Novorossiia’ in order to push the West to back down. The attempt clearly failed; but at the same time, it opened up once more the Pandora’s box of separatisms Russia had apparently fought so hard to keep shut since the early 1990s.

Could Russia itself go the way of the USSR? The Soviet Union had separated into fifteen pieces that were already distinct, like the drifting apart of shards from an ice sheet that was already cracked. By a historical irony, the hollow constitutional structures of the USSR came to be filled with national content that helped pull the Union apart. But the equivalent scenario for Russia would mean a much more dramatic reconfiguration of the map: several of the country’s non-Russian components – the likeliest candidates for secession – are not located at its edges, but embedded within a huge landmass with a predominantly Russian population. Another wave of secessions would mean balkanization on a continental scale, turning much of Eurasia into a territorial jigsaw. This, of course, was the nightmare that had haunted Russia in the early 1990s, only to melt away in the wreckage of Grozny. Among many Russians and Westerners alike, the conventional assumption is that this devastation was the price of maintaining the country’s territorial integrity. The same reasoning has been used to legitimate the strangulation of federalism ever since: any power Moscow surrenders to the regions, the argument goes, will ultimately encourage them to peel away entirely.

Yet this logic rests on false premises. The first is that Chechnya’s example would have been emulated by other regions. Though there were certainly nationalist currents among a number of Russia’s ethnic minorities, the struggles between Moscow and the regions mostly revolved around the distribution of resources; only in Chechnya did a serious and sustained push for sovereignty develop.^{21} The second false premise is that since ethno-nationalism killed the USSR, any further manifestations of it would spell the same outcome for Russia. Again, nationalism framed in ethnic terms certainly did play a role in the unravelling of the Soviet system, but to attribute an entire, epoch-making set of events to this single cause makes little sense. Moreover, it neglects the critical contribution of Soviet elites, who deserted the system in droves, helping themselves to pieces of the planned economy on the way, and thus accelerated its disintegration. The important point here is that the existence of the USSR’s formally sovereign republics provided those elites with plenty of other states to desert to. From this self-interested point of view, the subunits of Russia itself – especially the landlocked ones, far removed from borders with other countries and hence from alternatives to alliance with or dependency on Moscow – are nowhere near as attractive a proposition.

But more telling still is the assumption of a necessary connection between federalism and ethno-national separatism. More than a quarter of Russia’s subunits are ‘republics’ or ‘autonomous regions’ named after ethno-linguistic groups indigenous to them. Russian nationalists see the very existence of these federal forms as a threat – Dugin, for example, has proposed their elimination.^{22} Yet in many of these ‘ethnic’ republics, the majority of the population are ethnic Russians. In these cases, ‘national’ names and symbols are a historical residue of conquest and assimilation, rather than a draft project for independence. Elsewhere, to be sure, the titular nationalities are numerically dominant: in the Sakha Republic in the Far East, in Tatarstan, in much of the North Caucasus. But as a whole, the non-Russian peripheries are far outweighed by the country’s enormous ethnic Russian core: 60 per cent of the territory, containing 80 per cent of the population. This raises an important, largely unspoken question: if the reason for killing federalism is to suppress ethno-national separatism, why does this in practice overwhelmingly apply to territories that are inhabited by ethnic Russians?

One answer is that the actual purpose of Russia’s anti-federal federalism is to maintain centralized political control over a vast territory, while shielding that power from democratic scrutiny at all levels. It is telling, from this point of view, that Putin’s response to the Beslan atrocity of 2004, when Chechen Islamist militants seized a school and took hundreds of children hostage – only for the vast majority of those present to be killed when Russian security services stormed the building – was to do away with elections for regional governments nationwide. If there were any connection between state security and degrees of local democracy, Putin should have done the opposite. In 2014, though Moscow furnished the rebellion in the Donbass with arms and troops, and to begin with noisily promoted the rebels in official media, its enthusiasm had limits: besides being pro-Russian, the Donbass militias were strongly anti-oligarchic, a stance that might potentially have popular appeal well beyond eastern Ukraine. When it came to it, the Kremlin knew which side of the barricades it would rather be on.

These reflexive moves to defend the system of ‘imitation democracy’ demonstrated that the real threat posed by federalism was not ethnic rebellions but political ones. Annexing the Donbass would have set an especially dangerous precedent, and not only in terms of international law: it would also have shown Russia’s own majority Russian-speaking regions that rebellion paid off, and that they could seize control of their own destinies through acts of political will. This was a potential chain reaction the Kremlin had to avoid setting off at all costs. The underlying risk here was not territorial fragmentation, but democratization.

At bottom, the main points of contention in Russia’s federal system derive not so much from dynamics of ethnic difference as from disagreements over the distribution of power and resources, and over the forms and character of government itself. The federal structure provides an arena in which those questions can be raised and contested, which is why the Kremlin must keep it under tight control. But as long as the federal forms exist, the possibility of such an opening remains. Political scientist Andrei Zakharov has called Russian federalism a ‘dormant institution’.^{23} What would happen if it were someday to awaken?

The guiding assumption of Kremlin policy for the past three decades has been that real federalism leads to national disintegration. But this purposely ignores the potentially democratizing aspect of federalism: its capacity to make government reflect and cater to the specificities of each territory, and to bring power closer to its popular sources. In other words, though it is often seen as a challenge to the existence of Russia itself, federalism could be the site of a struggle between different kinds of Russia. It may be that the possibilities for a more democratic polity there will demand a revival and deepening of federalism, rather than its continued sedation. This might not redraw the map of Russia, as is commonly feared, but instead open up new roads for the country to travel.

The place where all of the forces and factors laid out here converge – where geopolitical pressures meet demographic trends, where economic constraints collide with questions of federal form – is in the political system. What kind of country Russia will be depends partly on who rules it, and for whose benefit. Although its options are limited in various ways, much nonetheless hangs on how the current system of government in Russia, whether under Putin or his eventual successors, responds to changing circumstances. The spike in tensions with the West has for the moment given the Putin-led system a certain amount of leeway, since it can ascribe many of the problems the country experiences to foreign enemies. It helps that this is not, factually speaking, incorrect: the sanctions regime imposed in 2014 prolonged Russia’s economic difficulties, and in the wake of Crimea and especially the 2016 US elections, Western media, pundits and politicians eagerly fanned a hostility to Russia that mirrored the hysteria of Russia’s own pro-Kremlin outlets.

But how long can this state of affairs continue? In the immediate future we are unlikely to see a dramatic improvement in relations between Russia and the West. Again, some kind of rapprochement is certainly possible. But beneath the mutual suspicions of the present, and beyond any potential pragmatism in future, the interests of the two parties remain fundamentally incompatible, and the West has no reason to alter its course. Ironically, its very hostility to Russia, and to Putin in particular, is the best insurance policy for the ‘imitation democratic’ regime. For now, the entwinement of the Kremlin’s domestic fortunes with its foreign policy choices is a bonus for the system rather than a liability. But although the Kremlin’s appeals to patriotism have enjoyed a certain success among the Russian public, they have also been largely defensive in nature, producing reflex responses rather than generating positive attachments or ideals. For the Putin-led system, nationalism is a default ideology, a means of legitimizing the continuation of its power, rather than an active political project. This is what has made its propaganda ultimately so hollow: the frenzied imaginings of state media are a sign of the weakness of their grip on the popular imagination, rather than its strength.

Yet the very character of the system – a predatory, authoritarian elite presiding over a vastly unequal society – will inevitably generate further social tensions, sparking recurrent crises which cannot all be resolved by patriotic mobilizations or military adventures abroad. ‘Imitation democracy’, and the post-Soviet capitalism it was built to defend, will no doubt be able to survive many upheavals. But it seems unwise to bet on its indefinite continuation, given the speed with which the USSR unravelled over the course of 1991, and the Romanov empire before it a century ago. These twin spectres of disintegration have haunted the imagination of Russia’s rulers since the fall of Communism, and they stalk the corridors of the Kremlin still, waiting for another of those rare, history-shattering moments when they can take on solid form.

Epilogue

TO SAY THE RUSSIAN presidential election of 18 March 2018 was not a contest would be a gross understatement. Everything unfolded according to the Kremlin’s script. Not only was Putin re-elected by a crushing majority – he won 77 per cent of the vote, compared with a mere 12 per cent for his nearest rival, the Communist Party’s Pavel Grudinin – there was also a satisfactory 68 per cent turnout, dispelling Russian officialdom’s fears that voter apathy would undermine the legitimacy of the poll. Independent observers reported hundreds of instances of ballot-stuffing and other irregularities, but these were breezily dismissed by the Central Election Commission.^{1} To no one’s surprise, Putin effortlessly secured another six-year term, extending his hold on power to 2024.

This was a textbook demonstration of the ‘imitation-democratic’ system in action: all the appearances of electoral democracy with none of the uncertainty. But while the vote posed no problems for the regime internally, it took place at a moment of dramatically heightened external tensions. Two weeks beforehand, on 4 March, the attempted murder of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the quiet English town of Salisbury had immediately been blamed on his former paymasters in the Kremlin. The weapon apparently used, a nerve agent based on the Novichok series developed in the USSR in the 1970s and ’80s, made Russian involvement somewhere along the line – whether by the state or by non-state actors – seem likely. Amid the uproar and conspiracy-mongering the incident unleashed, no convincing explanations were advanced as to why the Russian state would make an already bad situation so much worse for itself. But the mysterious facts of the case were soon enough overshadowed by its consequences: sanctions, tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats, closures of consulates. The incident drove already dismal relations between Russia and the West to new lows, making it even harder to imagine a normalization in the near future.

This combination of domestic stability and turmoil on the international front set the parameters for the immediate future of Russia’s imitation-democratic system. But behind the events of early 2018 lay a larger question concerning the system’s long-term prospects. It had been prompted, ironically, by the very ease and inevitability of Putin’s victory. Since it had long been obvious what the outcome of the 2018 elections would be, in the run-up to the vote many minds in Russia turned to the end of Putin’s forthcoming term, when he would be constitutionally ineligible to run again. Who or what would succeed him in 2024? An eerie temporal displacement seemed to have taken place, in which confirmation of Putin’s domestic political dominance was shadowed by thoughts of its eventual end, his success in the present trailed by his future departure from the scene.

What had appeared on the horizon – still distant for now, but visible – would be the end of an era. By early 2018 Putin had effectively outdone Brezhnev’s eighteen years as Soviet leader. Assuming he makes it through to the end of his new mandate, Putin will have ruled his country for a quarter of a century. Perhaps a fifth of the Russian population has never known any other leader. In that sense, the very length of Putin’s hold on power has amplified the problem of succession common to many political systems – how to manage the transition from one leader to the next without massive instability or infighting? Putin’s age and apparent good health seemed to add another layer to the problem: what is a figure who has held such power supposed to do in his retirement? Will Putin be content to retreat gracefully to the wings, leaving the stage clear for a new imitation-democratic figurehead? And – very much related – will his successor be able to shield him from prosecution as Putin himself protected Yeltsin?

But while the urge to speculate about Putin’s personal fate is understandable, it is ultimately misguided. It prolongs the tendency to focus excessively on this single individual in order to understand Russia. The imitation-democratic system has indeed functioned much to the satisfaction of Russia’s elite with Putin in charge. But it is fundamentally a system – that is, a set of power structures and political practices that has enabled Russia’s particular, post-Soviet form of capitalism to thrive. That system can certainly continue with another person at its summit – perhaps less smoothly, or perhaps better. The question we should really be asking, in fact, is not whether the system can function without Putin, but how long it can keep functioning in the same way, regardless of who is in charge.

On the one hand, the outlook for the regime is not especially positive. In addition to a tense international climate and unfavourable economic winds, it must struggle against its own internal exhaustion. The centralizing, neoliberal energies of Putin’s first presidential term have been left behind, and while the patriotic turn after 2012 and the confrontation with the West have certainly helped firm up the regime’s domestic support, they can’t fully compensate for a lack of other motivating ideas or projects. On 1 March 2018 Putin made a speech laying out his governing agenda for the next six years. The part that drew the most attention in the West, inevitably, was his announcement – complete with video animations – of shiny new hypersonic missiles that could get around Western defence systems. The speech also promised increased spending on infrastructure, health care and education, as developmental priorities for the coming decade. But promises of this kind have been made before and proven hollow. The 2018–2020 budget, approved in December 2017, certainly envisaged no significant alterations to the system’s current priorities. If anything, the new government will most likely simply continue the budgetary austerity and ‘optimization’ measures of the past few years, which have brought school and hospital closures even as wages and pensions lag well behind inflation.^{2} In mid-June 2018, just as the country was distracted by the start of the World Cup, the government announced a plan to increase the retirement age, by five years for men and eight for women – highly regressive moves which the Kremlin may yet have cause to revisit.

Overall, the Putin government’s aim seems to be an inertial scenario. It has entered what political scientist Yekaterina Schulmann has called ‘calorie-conservation mode’.^{3} There is an obvious danger here, of aimless drift or complacent decline. Systems that lose their sense of purpose can rapidly end up losing their grip on power, too, overtaken by emergencies they lacked the imagination or energy to foresee. One possible scenario, indeed, is that the imitation-democratic system will gradually run out of steam, so hollowed out from the inside that it eventually crumbles at the slightest popular pressure.

Yet even once toppled, such regimes have often returned in near-equivalent forms, like strange political revenants. In Georgia, for example, Mikheil Saakashvili’s administration eventually replicated many of the authoritarian behaviours of the Shevardnadze government it displaced; further afield, in Egypt, after the hopeful upheavals of Tahrir Square Sisi took up many of the despotic habits of Mubarak. These repetitions were what Dmitri Furman had in mind when he gave his book on imitation democracies the title Spiral Motion – identifying the tendency, across the post-Soviet space and far beyond, for countries governed by such regimes to find themselves circling through variations on the same governmental theme.^{4} Furman’s compelling metaphor describes a default scenario – and implies that something substantive has to change for a country to break out of the spiral and forge a new trajectory.

Russia’s imitation democracy is capable of reproducing itself whether Putin is in charge or not. If it is to be replaced by something substantively different, an alternative to the system as a whole will have to coalesce – not just an anti-Putin who can take the current president’s place. This is no small task, and it would have to be the work of a large-scale movement rather than an elite plot or a few scattered individuals. Yet it’s possible that Putin’s fourth term might provide an opportunity for such a project to begin to take shape. A period of stasis for the ruling system could also be a valuable interval for those ranged against it, allowing Russians to think about what kind of country might await them beyond imitation democracy, and to imagine what a future without Putin would look like.

Acknowledgements

THE SEEDS OF THIS BOOK were sown by many years of discussions with colleagues and comrades at New Left Review. Thank you to the editor, Susan Watkins, for her consistent engagement with and support for the project, and for allowing me time off from my editorial duties there to explore the ideas that have gone into it. Thank you also to Kheya Bag, Rob Lucas, Johanna Zhang and Daniel Finn, and to Dylan Riley for his incisive comments on the NLR article that eventually became Chapter 3 of this book. I’m also tremendously grateful to Perry Anderson for his close critical reading of the final manuscript, and for suggestions which improved it significantly.

A preliminary version of Chapter 3 was presented at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at Södertörn University in October 2011, and I thank the participants in the seminar for their comments, in particular Zhanna Kravchenko for her thoughtful response; thanks also to Irina Sandomirskaia for offering encouragement, and to Sven Hort for making my stay at CBEES possible. Others of the book’s arguments were first sketched out in essays for the London Review of Books, and I’m grateful to Mary-Kay Wilmers for the chance to write regularly on Russian themes there, and to Daniel Soar and the rest of the editorial staff. Likewise to Keith Gessen and n+1, for organizing a symposium on Ukraine in the autumn of 2015 which helped focus my thinking on the Maidan and its aftermath.

Thanks must also go to Sean Guillory and Kyle Shybunko for their perceptive and helpful comments on the final manuscript; to Ilya Budraitskis, Aleksei Penzin and Maria Chekhonadskikh for many insights and conversations about contemporary Russia; to Leo Hollis, my editor at Verso, and to Jacob Stevens, Mark Martin, Anne Rumberger and everyone else at Verso for helping this book into the world. The list of family, friends and colleagues who have at various times been subjected to my ramblings on Russia is lengthy, and I apologize in advance for leaving anyone out – but for now, thank you to my parents, Michael Wood and Elena Uribe; to Gaby Wood, Ava Turner and Beatrice Turner; to Patrick Wood and Holly Chatham; to Richard Reeve, Surmaya Talyarkhan, Andrew Greenall, James Tindal, Susan Jones, Rob Leech, James Leech, Michael Frantzis, David Klassen, Chase Madar, Rachel Nolan, Brian Kuan Wood and Alexander Zevin.

Finally, but most importantly, thank you to Lidija Haas. With incredible patience, intelligence and editorial skill, she helped me rethink this book several times over, and offered unflagging encouragement throughout. Much more than making this book possible, she makes my life immeasurably better.

Index

Abkhazia (Georgia), 131, 133, 167

Abramovich, Roman, 45, 50

Afghanistan, 127, 145

A Just Russia (party), 22

Akunin, Boris (Grigorii Chkhartishvili), 99

Albright, Madeleine, 125

Aleppo, 140

Alexievich, Svetlana, 58

Alfa-Bank, 40, 50

Algeria, 139

Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, 127

Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), 54, 102

Arab Spring, 96, 138, 139

Åslund, Anders, 31

al-Assad, Bashar, 138–41

Aven, Pyotr, 15, 37, 40

Babitsky, Andrei, 23

Baburova, Anastasia, 149n

Baker, James, 121n

Bank Rossiia, 30

Basaev, Shamil, 18, 105

Baturina, Elena, 38

Belarus, 26, 119, 129, 134, 135, 154

Belovezha agreement (1991), 119

Benjamin, Walter, 68

Berezovsky, Boris, 33, 35, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45

Berger, Sandy, 125

Beslan, 169

Blue Buckets (organization), 99

Bodganov, Vladimir, 30

Bolshevik Revolution, 123

Boos, Georgi, 95

Borodin, Pavel, 16

Borogan, Irina, 49

Bortnikov, Aleksandr, 53

Braguinsky, Serguey, 38–39

Brecht, Bertolt, 64

Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 122, 125

Budanov, Yuri, 149n

Bykov, Dmitrii, 99

Camdessus, Michel, 86

Chaika, Yuri, 103

Chechnya

bid for independence of, 166–67

nationalism in, 168

Russia’s wars in, 18–19, 22–23, 73, 81, 104, 116, 127

Cherkesov, Viktor, 51

Chile, 80n

China, 47, 82, 116, 118, 143, 156, 158, 159, 160, 162

Christopher, Warren, 123

Chubais, Anatoly, 73, 124, 155

on capitalism in Russia, 27

on privatization, 35

during rouble crash, 45

class

Soviet understandings of, 60–61, 63

post-Soviet hierarchies of, 5–6, 66–67

Clément, Karine, 69

Clinton, Bill, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126

Clinton, Hillary, 130, 131, 141, 142

Collective Security Treaty Organization, 134

Colour Revolutions, 12, 128, 139

Committee to Investigate Russia, 142

Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), 119, 134

Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), 22, 173

Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), 34, 62–63, 97

cooperatives, 34

corruption

protests against, 96, 103

in Russia, 52–55

crime, 25, 64, 67, 77

Crimea, 8, 29–30, 101, 113, 132, 133, 136–37, 152, 165, 167, 171

culture workers, 72–74, 81

Cyprus, 77n

Czech Republic, 122, 123, 124

dal’noboishchiki (truck drivers), 110

Day of the Oprichnik (Sorokin), 160

Dead Again (Gessen), 74

Dead Souls (Gogol), 148

de Benoist, Alain, 151

Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Areas (DCFTAs), 135, 136, 137

demographic trends, 162–64

migrants and, 164–65

Deripaska, Oleg, 30, 45, 95

Djilas, Milovan, 63

domestic violence, 71

Donbass (Ukraine), 132, 136, 167, 169–70

Dubin, Boris, 72, 74

Dugin, Aleksander, 151–55, 168

Duma (parliament)

business influences in, 40

demonstrations against, 89–90

opposition parties in, 92

parties in, 21, 22

women in, 70–71

Yeltsin’s attack on, 27

Easter, Gerald, 25

Eastern Europe

during collapse of Soviet Union, 12

European Union and, 135

expansion of NATO into, 121–24, 132

Egypt, 123, 139, 163, 176

Erofeev, Viktor, 73–74

ethnic groups in Russia, 165, 168–69

Etmanov, Aleksei, 94, 110

Eurasian Customs Union, 154

Eurasian Economic

Community, 134

Eurasian Economic Space, 154

Eurasian Economic Union, 134, 154

Eurasianism, 150–51

European Neighbourhood Project, 135

European Union (EU), 125

Eastern Europe and, 135–36

Russian trade with, 134

sanctions against Russia by, 29

Ukraine and, 138

federalism, 165–70

Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR), 76, 93

First Person (Putin), 11, 126

Flynn, Michael, 142

Ford (firm), 93

‘For Honest Elections’ (organization), 99

Foundations of Geopolitics (Dugin), 152

Freeman, Morgan, 143

Fridman, Mikhail, 40

Friedman, Milton, 108

Friedman, Thomas, 23, 122

Frost, David, 126

FSB, 15, 16, 17, 51n, 53

Furman, Dmitri, 26–27, 176–77

Gaidar, Yegor, 73

gas, 24, 34, 161

Gazprom (firm), 34, 36, 37, 94

gender inequality, 62, 70–71, 78

Genscher, Hans-Dietrich, 121n

Georgia, 8, 26, 105, 113, 128–29, 134, 135, 105, 139, 155, 167, 176

Germany, 125, 128, 133, 156, 163

Gessen, Masha, 58, 74, 143

Gogol, Nikolay, 102n, 148

Goldgeier, James, 122

Gorbachev, Mikhail

coup attempt against, 16

economic reforms under, 12, 33, 160

Soviet foreign policy under, 118, 121

support among intelligentsia for, 73

view of West under, 115

Grudinin, Pavel, 173

Gryzlov, Boris, 22, 83

Gudkov, Lev, 72, 74

Gumilev, Lev, 150–51

Gunvor (firm), 30

Gusinsky, Vladimir, 33, 35, 40, 43, 45

Hayek, Friedrich, 108

Heritage Foundation, 23

Hoffman, David, 36

homelessness, 68

Homo sovieticus (‘Soviet man’), 57–58, 86, 90

housing, 66, 93

Humphrey, Caroline, 68

Hungary, 123, 124

Huntington, Samuel, 151

Il’in, Ivan, 153

income inequality, 61–62, 64–65, 77–78

intelligentsia, 71–74, 80–82

internet, 96, 143

Iraq, 127, 128, 129, 139, 140

Ivanov, Viktor, 48

Ivanov, Sergei (Sr), 48, 53

Ivanov, Sergei (Jr), 53

Jakobson, Roman, 150

Jewishness, 39n

Kaliningrad, 89, 95, 96

Kasparov, Garry, 101

Kennan, George, 122

Kerry, John, 137

KGB, 12, 16–17, 34, 49, 50

Khimki forest, 95–96

Khloponin, Aleksandr, 50, 53

Khodorkovsky, Mikhail, 23, 24, 31

currency speculation by, 33

imprisonment, 43

privatization and wealth of, 37, 41

Yukos under, 47

Kissinger, Henry, 124

Kohl, Helmut, 121n

Komsomol (Communist Youth League), 33, 37

Korzhakov, Aleksandr, 49

Kosovo, 7, 124, 127, 130, 131, 137, 145

Kovalchuk, Yuri, 15, 30, 55

Kozyrev, Andrei, 118, 120, 124–25

Kravchuk, Leonid, 119

Kryshtanovskaia, Olga, 33, 42, 49, 50

Kudrin, Aleksei, 15

Kunanbaev, Abai, 100

labour migration, 78–79

Lake, Anthony, 121

Lavrov, Sergei, 132, 141

League of Voters (organization), 99

Left Front (organization), 99, 101

Levada, Yuri, 80

Leviathan (Zvyagintsev), 55–56

LGBT rights, 101

Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), 22

liberal parties and opposition, 91–93, 99–100

Libya, 138–39

The Life of Insects (Pelevin), 75

Limonov, Eduard, 92

Lisin, Vladimir, 45

Lithuania, 69

LiveJournal blogs, 96

‘loans-for-shares’ deals, 41–42

Luzhkov, Yuri, 38

Mackinder, Halford, 153, 159

Maidan protests, see Ukraine

Major, John, 121n

Malofeev, Konstantin, 152

Markelov, Stanislav, 149n

McCain, John, 131

Medvedev, Dmitri, 15, 94, 96

economic policies of, 161

foreign policy of, 115, 130, 131

on Libya, 139–40

personal wealth of, 54, 103

Medvedev, Kirill, 81

Melikian, Gennadii, 71

Menatep Bank, 37

middle class, 82–85, 89, 97–98

migrants

hostility toward, 104, 105

Party of Progress on, 108

Russia’s demographic need for, 164–65

military spending

by Russia, 116, 156

by United States and NATO countries, 120, 156

‘militocracy,’ 25, 49–50

Mirsky, D. S., 150

Mitterrand, François, 121n

Mordashov, Aleksei, 45

Moscow (Russia), 38, 45–46, 65–66, 78

demonstrations in, 89, 92, 97, 98

homelessness in, 68

mayoral election in (2013), 102

‘Occupy Abai’ protest in, 99

Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI), 79, 99

Munich Security Conference (2007), 129–30

‘Narod’ (‘The People’; organization), 105

National Bolshevik Party, 92, 152

NATO

expansion of, 7, 114, 121–24, 128, 132

possibility of Russia joining, 125–27, 130

Navalnyi, Aleksei, 7, 52–54, 91, 101–7

Party of Progress of, 107–12

Nemtsov, Boris, 86, 99

assassination of, 102

on US war in Afghanistan, 127

Neo-Eurasianism, 151–55

nepotism, 53–54

The New Class (Djilas), 63

New Cold War, 113–14, 143–44

New Economic Plan (NEP), 60

Nixon, Richard, 118

nomenklatura (Soviet-era elite), 63

Norilsk Nickel (firm), 34, 41, 45, 47, 50, 53

Nuland, Victoria, 124

Obama, Barack, 131, 132, 141, 148

‘Occupy Abai’ protest, 99

oil

price of, 21, 94, 160–61

privatization of, 24, 37

Orange Revolution (Ukraine), 128–29, 134

organized crime, 67

The Other Russia (opposition coalition), 92

Pamyat (organization), 152

Parfyonov, Leonid, 99

parliament, see Duma

Partnership for Peace, 123, 125

Party of Progress, 107–12

Patrushev, Nikolai, 15, 53

Pelevin, Viktor, 49, 75

pensions, 78

demographic changes and, 164

demonstrations linked to, 92–93

Party of Progress on, 109

Perry, William, 122

Pikalevo, 95

Pinochet, Augusto, 80n

Pirani, Simon, 93

Pirate Party, 99

Pishchikova, Evgeniia, 84–85

Poland, 68–69, 122, 123, 124

Politkovskaia, Anna, 23, 81

Portugal, 127

Potanin, Vladimir, 41, 45

poverty, 64–65, 85, 94

among women, 70

Primakov, Evgeny, 118, 49, 120, 124, 126, 140, 158

privatizations

consequences of, 66–67, 75

at end of Soviet period, 35–36

latent privatization, 34

under Yeltsin, 36–39

Prokhorov, Mikhail, 41, 45

Pussy Riot, 90, 101

Putin, Vladimir

biography of, 11–12

economic policies of, 23–27, 31

first presidential campaign of, 19–20

foreign policy of, 115, 126–28

as FSB director, 16–17

as KGB staffer, 12–13

as prime minister under Yeltsin, 17–18

in St Petersburg, 13–15

support among intelligentsia for, 80, 81

Rasmussen, Anders Fogh, 130

Remington, Thomas, 38

Roldugin, Sergei, 55

Rotenberg, Arkady and Boris, 30, 55, 118

rouble

1998 crash in value of, 45

speculation in, 33

used by former Soviet states, 118

Rubtsovsk, 95

Russian March (2007), 104

Russian Orthodoxy, 101, 152–54

Russian Socialist Movement, 99

Russo-Georgian War (2008), 1, 105, 113, 131–32, 139, 155, 167

Ryklin, Mikhail, 74

Saakashvili, Mikheil, 131, 176

St Petersburg (Leningrad), 11, 13–15, 94

Salye, Marina, 14

sanctions, 29–30, 138

Savitsky, Pyotr, 150

Schmitt, Carl, 151, 153

Schulmann, Yekaterina, 176

Sevastopol, 165

Sechin, Igor, 15, 29, 48, 53

Seleznev, Gennady, 152

Sessions, Jeff, 142

Shamalov, Kirill, 30

Shamalov, Nikolai, 30, 55

Shevardnadze, Eduard, 176

Shevchuk, Yuri, 99

siloviki, 48–50

Sinyavsky, Andrei, 73

Skripal, Sergei, 173–74

The Slynx (Tolstaya), 59–60

Smolensky, Aleksandr, 33, 25, 37, 40, 45

Sobchak, Anatoly, 13–16

Sobchak, Ksenia, 100

Sochi, 30, 103

Soldatov, Andrei, 49

Solidarity (party), 99

Sorokin, Vladimir, 49, 160

South Ossetia, 131, 167

Soviet Union

collapse of, 12–13, 35, 115–16, 167

nationalism in, 150–51, 154–55

Spiral Motion (Furman), 176–77

Stalin, Josef, 44, 60, 81, 85

‘state capitalism’, 31–32

Stepashin, Sergei, 15, 18, 49

Stolypin, Pyotr, 153

strikes, 75, 93

Surkov, Vladislav, 30, 83

Syria, 2, 90, 113, 132, 138–41, 143, 144, 158

Talbott, Strobe, 124

Taylor, Brian, 166

Tillerson, Rex, 142

Timchenko, Gennady, 15, 30, 55

Togliatti (city), 95

Tolstaya, Tatyana, 59–60

Tompson, William, 48

trade unions, 76, 93–94

Trenin, Dmitri, 55

Trotsky, Leon, 61

Trubetskoi, Nikolai, 150

Trump, Donald (Sr), 2, 132, 141–43

Trump, Donald (Jr), 142

Tunisia, 139

Tuva, 66

Udaltsov, Sergei, 101

Ukraine, 131–32, 155

annexation of Crimea, 137–38

in Commonwealth of Independent States, 119

crisis in (2013–14), 8, 133–34, 136–37

European Union and, 135–36

Maidan protests in, 12, 135–136, 139, 154n

Orange Revolution in, 128–29

Ulitskaia, Liudmila, 99

unemployment, 21, 64, 68–69, 94

Union of Right Forces (party), 92, 127

United Kingdom (UK)

attempted murder of Russian spy in, 173–74

sanctions against Russia by, 29

United Nations (UN)

on Libya, 139

on Syria, 139

United Russia party

dominance of Duma by, 21, 22

and middle class, 83

personal wealth of children of officials in, 54

protests against, 95, 96

United States

hegemony of, 157, 158

middle class in, 83–84

NATO expansion and, 121–26

Post–Cold War power of, 120–21

sanctions against Russia by, 29

Urusov, Valentin, 93

Ustinov, Vladimir, 53

Vernadsky, George, 150

Vishnevsky, Anatoly, 164

Vladivostok, 94, 95, 130

voucher privatization, 36

Vsevolozhsk, 93–94

Warnig, Matthias, 15

Warsaw Pact, 118, 121, 132

White, Stephen, 49, 50

Woerner, Manfred, 121n

women

pay gap for, 78

poverty and, 70–71

in Soviet labour force, 62

Women of Russia (political party), 70–71

working class, 68–70

Yabloko (party), 92, 99, 104

Yakunin, Vladimir, 15

Yanukovych, Viktor, 128, 133–36, 154n

Yavlinsky, Grigory, 127

Yeltsin, Boris, 18, 26

foreign policy under, 118–21, 123–24

and NATO membership, 125

Parliament attacked by, 27, 73

poverty under, 64

privatizations under, 35–38, 40–42

Putin continuing the policies of, 4–5, 21–22, 27–28

support among intelligentsia for, 73

war in Chechnya under, 166

Yukos (firm), 23, 24, 31, 37, 41, 43, 46–47

Yushchenko, Viktor, 128

Zakharov, Andrei, 170

Zinoviev, Aleksandr, 57

Zvyagintsev, Andrei, 55–56

Copyright

First published by Verso 2018

© Tony Wood 2018

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-124-9

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Notes