By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

There can be no alliance between Russia and the West, either for interests or for the sake of principles. There is not a single interest, not a single trend in the West that does not conspire against Russia, especially her future, and does not try to harm her. Therefore Russia’s only natural policy towards the West must be to seek not an alliance with the Western powers but their disunion and division. Only then will they not be hostile to us, not of course out of conviction, but out of impotence. - Fyodor Tyutchev, Slavophile and a militant Pan-Slavist.1

What ideas drive the Kremlin elite? What binds Russia together? During the Soviet times, what held together the population was a mixture of ideology and nationalism. At the beginning of the communist era, people may have believed in Marxism-Leninism. Still, over time they became cynical as they understood the difference between communist slogans about equality and the dictatorship of the proletariat and the reality of a society in which the Communist Party elite (about 8 percent of the population) lived substantially better than those not in the party. By the time the USSR collapsed, the Soviet official national identity was a mixture of patriotism and a belief in the superiority of the socialist system. But it had been increasingly challenged by Mikhail Gorbachev, the provincial Communist Party ideology secretary who rose to become the leader of the USSR in 1985. He understood that he had to reform the atrophied Soviet system:

Imagine a country that flies into space, launches Sputniks, creates such a defense system, and can’t resolve the problem of women’s pantyhose. There’s no toothpaste, no soap powder, not the necessities of life. It was incredible and humiliating to work in such a government.2

Since the Soviet collapse, Russians have been searching for a new identity. But after twenty-five years, there is still no consensus, and the potential ethnic minefields are evident. What does it mean to be Russian? This question for centuries has provoked controversy and never has been fully answered. Is being Russian an ethnically exclusive concept? In Soviet times, the “fifth point” in every internal Soviet passport was nationality. At age sixteen, every citizen had to state their nationality, mainly determining their career trajectory. Being Russian was the most desirable category and most career-enhancing. Then came Ukrainian and other Slavic ethnicities. Being Jewish—defined as a non-Russian nationality—often meant exclusion from the most prestigious academic institutions or Communist Party positions. Being Kazakh, Uzbek, Chechen, or Azeri could also be problematic. This is the exclusive definition of being Russian: the privileged nationality in a multinational state.

Since the Soviet collapse, there have been attempts to define “Russianness” in a more inclusive, civic-based way—as a citizen of Russia, irrespective of ethnicity. The government attempted in the 1990s to introduce the inclusive term “Russian” (citizen of Russia) for Russian, as opposed to the ethnically exclusive “Russky.” It never caught on, and during the Putin era, the ethnically complete expression has become mainstream. Indeed, in 2017, Putin stated that the Russian language is the “spiritual framework” of the country, “our state language” that “cannot be replaced with anything.”3

After seventy-four years of communist rule and the loss of the non-Russian Soviet republics, it was unclear what Russia’s new national identity should be or who was a Russian. So in a rather unusual move, in 1996, Boris Yeltsin created a commission with a unique charter: to come up with a new Russian Idea. He appointed an advisory committee headed by the Kremlin’s assistant for political affairs, Georgii Satarov, and the government newspaper offered the equivalent of $2,000 to the person who produced the best essay on the topic in seven pages or less. But from the outset, the project was doomed. Satarov admitted that a national idea could not be imposed from above but had to come from the bottom up. No one could develop an appropriate national idea, even though one contestant won a prize for his essay on the “principles of Russianness.” In 1997, the project was terminated.4 Trying to have a commission create a new national identity on the spot in a fluid political transition was almost certain to fail. But a new identity is indeed gradually emerging.

In 2007, the Kremlin backed the creation of an international organization: Russky Mir (Russian World). Its head is Vyacheslav Nikonov, grandson of Stalin’s long-serving foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, whose demeanor and equally dour negotiating style was legendary. Nikonov, an outspoken defender of the Kremlin and critic of the United States, has served in the Duma and has held academic positions. His foundation is designed to promote Russian culture and language worldwide and appeal to people who have emigrated from Russia over the past century to return to their roots. It is usually defined as “Russian,” inclusively anyone who speaks Russian (Russko-Yazichny) and identifies with Russian culture irrespective of their ethnicity.

The seeming confusion about what it means to be Russian has its roots in the origins of the Russian state. Muscovy became a consolidated state at the same time as it began to expand and conquer adjacent territories in the fourteenth century. It expanded (and sometimes contracted)for the next five hundred years as the state grew stronger. It fought wars with Tatars, Livonian knights, Poles, Swedes, Turks, and Persians—and its population constantly became more ethnically diverse. Many “Russians” were the product of mixed marriages with various roots. Indeed, one-third of the prerevolutionary Russian imperial foreign ministry was staffed by Baltic Germans, ethnic Germans who lived in the Baltic states when the Russian Empire acquired them. For instance, in the early twentieth century, the Russian foreign minister was Count Vladimir Lamsdorf. One of his descendants later became West Germany’s economics minister. Russians’ sense of their own identity was also increasingly bound up with their sense of imperial destiny, paternalistically ruling those around them, including Ukrainians, who were known as their “little brothers.”

Perhaps because of this ambiguity about what it meant to be Russian, the elite grappled with the issue by focusing not so much on ethnicity but on the uniqueness of Russian civilization. Over the years, the Russian Idea became a powerful cornerstone of the country’s avoiding identity. Its core was “the conviction that Russia had its own independent, self-sufficient and eminently worthy cultural and historical tradition that sets it apart from the West and guarantees its future flourishing.”5 Russian rulers early on defined themselves by how they differed from Europe, stressing their Eurasian vocation. That, rather than comparing themselves, say, to Asia, was their starting point. In the nineteenth century, deputy minister of education and classical scholar Count Sergei Uvarov summed up the essence of the Russian Idea in the famous triad “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and NatIdeality.” This is what defined the Russian state. Its three fundamental institutional pillars were the Orthodox Church, the monarchy, and the peasant commune.

Inherent in this nineteenth-century definition of what it meant to be Russian was the belief in the superiority of a communal, collective way of life, as opposed to the competitive individualism of the more developed European countries. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, for instance, vividly portrays the contrast between the artificial, mannered lives of the Saint Petersburg courtiers who spoke only French to each other and the pure, simple, moral life Levin leads on his country estate. The organic ties between the monarch, the peasants, and the Church had little room for an emerging middle class, which might eventually challenge the power of the absolute monarch. The peasant commune, or mir (which also means both “world” and “peace”), formed the basis not only of the Russian Idea but also of an incipient political system that stiIdeanfluences the way Russians view relations between rulers and the ruled.

Harvard historian Edward Keenan elaborated on the distinctive aspects of the Russian system, which began in medieval times and arguably persists today. He described it in a pioneering article published just before the Soviet collapse. He argued that the political culture of both the Russian peasant commune and the Russian court emphasized the importance of the group over that of the individual and discouraging risk-taking. At the court, it was important for the boyars (nobles) to act as though they supported a strong tsar, even if the reality was otherwise and the tsar was weak. Informal mechanisms were far more critical than formal institutions of governance, and it was essential to obscure the rules of the game from all but a small group of power brokers who were privy to these rules. Moreover, foreign emissaries in Russia were primarily kept ignorant of what was happening in court. Over centuries, the persistence of opaque rules of the game within the Kremlin walls has made it difficult for outsiders and foreigners to understand how Russia is ruled and what motivates its foreign policy.6

The traditional tendency to emphasize Russia’s uniqueness also focused on the moral and spiritual qualities of the Russian Idea. The nineteenth-century poet Fyodr Tyutchev famousIdearote:

The notion that Russia was somehow beyond a rational understanding became part of the image of a country that could not adhere to norms constructed in the West.

Indeed, Russians have long been divided over whether they should look to the West or the East. Although the Russian Idea had many adherents in the nineteenth century, it also had opponents. Dissent and opposition have as long a tradition in Russia as has autocracy. After Russia’s humiliating defeat by Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War in 1856, there was growing pressure at home for reform. The serfs were emancipated in 1861, and Tsar Alexander II created local legislative councils and reformed the judiciary. He introduced other measures designed to give a small portion of the population a voice in the political system. But it was not enough for those who wanted Russia to adopt European institutions. Indeed, Alexander was assassinated in 1881 by members of a revolutionary group seeking radical change.

As the nineteenth century wore on, those who believed in Russia’s unique and superior destiny—the Slavophiles—were challenged by the Westernizers. They wanted Russia to adopt European values and institutions, the rule of law, and greater democracy. More radical elements turned to socialism or anarchism, but they all looked west to construct the socioeconomic model they wanted Russia to adopt. Although successive Russian tsars, beginning with Peter the Great, had looked to Europe as a technological and economic model they tried to emulate, they resolutely rejected the idea of emulating Europe’s political model because thaIdeauld have spelled the end of Russian absolutism.8 In today’s Russia, those committed to perpetuating Russia’s unique system and protecting their vested interests continue to battle the minority who would like Russia to become a thoroughly modern state with the rule of law and institutions that serve the population.

Just as Russians have been ambivalent about the West, the West has been uncertain about—if not downright hostile toward—Russia. The scathing—and ultimately incorrect—criticism in the Twittersphere of the shoddy state of Russian hotels in Sochi in 2014 on the eve of the Olympics echoed many past complaints of Russia’s backwardness. Indeed, for centuries the outside world was generally suspicious of Russia. A series of Western travelers to Russia in the nineteenth century described a Russia that shocked many of their readers: backward, even barbaric, and the antithesis of what an enlightened society should be. The French Marquis de Custine published La Russie en 1839 after a trip to Russia, in which he wrote:

He must have sojourned in that solitude without repose, that prison without leisure called Russia, to feel the liberty enjoyed in other European countries, whatever form of government they may have adopted. If your sons are ever discontented with France, try my recipe: tell them to go to Russia. It is a helpful journey for every foreigner; whoever has well examined that country will be content to live anywhere else. It is always good to know that a society exists where no happiness is possible because man cannot be happy unless he is free by the law of nature.9

Another renowned traveler was the American George Kennan, a cousin of the grandfather of the famous diplomat and historian George Frost Kennan. George Kennan, the elder, traveled extensively in Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, producing the two-volume Siberia and the Exile System, for which he interviewed political exiles sent to Siberia by tsarist bureaucrats. He became a fierce critic of the repressive tsarist system but soon became disillusioned with the Bolsheviks, writing, “The Russian leopard has not changed its spots.… The new Bolshevik constitution… leaves all power just where it has been for the last five years—in the hands of a small group of self-appointed bureaucrats which the people can neither remove nor control.”10

 

Soviet Ideology

How have ideas influenced Russian foreign policy? And does Russia need an ideology to guide its foreign policy? Or is nostalgia for the nineteenth-century days when Russia was a great power to inspire today’s Kremlin? Indeed, the current occupants of the Kremlin are fond of invoking the 1815 Congress of Vienna, when the great powers divided Europe, as a model to be admired. Tsarist Russia’s ideological trilogy of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality was directed mainly toward Russia’s internal evolution. There was no official foreign policy ideology in an era when Russia became a major player in the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe. When the Bolsheviks took power, however, that changed. Marxism-Leninism became the official ideology with an explicit foreign policy component. Of course, the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin took the writings of the German Karl Marx—and adapted them to the Russian environment. Marx had been dubious that the large peasant Russia was ripe for revolution, and Lenin had to explain it.

Nevertheless, what appeared revolutionary at the beginning increasingly began to resemble the imperial era as time went on. “Soviet socialism turned out to bear a remarkable resemblance to the Russian tradition it pretended to transform.”11 This was equally true in foreign and domestic policy. Soviet ideology blended the rhetorical aspects of Leninism with a heavy dose of Russian nationalism. And whatever the formal doctrine, the predominant feature of the Soviet attitude toward the international arena was a dialectical view of the world. The USSR was against the West, which was out to defeat the Soviet Union. Agreement with the West might be possible on a case-by-case basis, but in the long run, the interests of Russia and the glavnyi protivnik (main enemy) were opposed. This dialectical view and suspicion of the outside world has been remarkably durable throughout the reign of tsars, communist general secretaries, and post-Soviet presidents.

What was the international component of Marxism-Leninism? Ironically, Karl Marx believed that international relations would be irrelevant once the revolution took place. “The worker has no country,” he wrote.12 Foreign policy was the preserve of the bourgeoisie. Once the proletariat was in power, there would be no more national states. Of course, in Marx’s thousands of writing pages, he said very little about the future, only the past and present. It was left to his Russian disciple Vladimir Lenin to explain how Marx’s ideas pertained to relations between states. Lenin’s significant contribution was his treatise Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916. He sought to explain why World War One had broken out and why it would bring about the end of the capitalist system and the beginning of the socialist era. Without delving into the minutiae of Lenin’s arguments, Imperialism explained that capitalist countries would inevitably come to blows over competition for colonies, and the proletariat in both the metropolises and the colonies would rise to defeat their oppressors. Long after Soviet citizens had become cynical about their ideology, this theory retained its appeal in third world countries—and one can hear echoes of these theories in contemporary Cuba, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela. Lenin remained a committed internationalist until his early death in 1924, as did his would-be successor Leon Trotsky. But Trotsky was no match for his rival, the one-time Georgian seminarian Joseph Stalin, who defeated him in the succession struggle in the late 1920s and eventually had him murdered with an ice pick in Mexico City in 1940.

Unlike the other Bolshevik leaders, Stalin had spent very little time abroad, spoke no European languages, and was suspicious and resentful of his more cosmopolitan comrades. But precisely because his rivals did not take him as seriously as they should have, he could outmaneuver them and amass power. Once he was securely in the Kremlin, Stalin realized the international revolution predicted by Marx and Lenin would not happen anytime soon. So he redefined internationalism in 1928: “An internationalist is one who unreservedly supports the Soviet Union.” From then until the end of the USSR, Soviet ideology, under the guise of internationalism, became increasingly nationalistic. Behind the rhetoric was an understanding that Russian national interests should be paramount. The Soviet Union’s Eastern European allies after 1945 should define their appeals in terms of Moscow’s needs. During the height of Sino-Soviet hostility, when the USSR and China engaged in a brief border war in 1969, the struggle was explained in ideological terms. The real reason was a classical struggle for territory, power, and influence. Therefore, by the end of the Soviet era, very few in the Soviet elite believed in the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. It was only when Gorbachev came to power that the USSR officially eschewed the doctrine of the inevitable clash between communism and capitalism and began to promote the idea of mutual interdependence. Nevertheless, the ideal view of the world continued to influence many officials—including a mid-level KGB officer working in Dresden in the late 1980s. 

Putin had arrived in Dresden in the mid-1980s for his first foreign posting as a KGB agent, and he was 33 when he received this Stasi ID card:

 

In his biographical book Vladimir Putin, First Person. (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 55, Putin claims that he would have spent another couple of years in the USSR for extra training in West Germany, so he opted for East Germany, which did not require more training because he wanted to leave “right away.” So the thirty-three-year-old KGB agent set out for Dresden, which was considered a provincial backwater in the GDR, although its party chief, Hans Modrow, was a leading reform-minded politician. A more prestigious posting would have been in the capital, East Berlin. But Putin relished being in East Germany, which was a consumer paradise compared to the Soviet Union. His two-and-a-half-room apartment in a drab building on the Angelikastrasse was a decided improvement on his childhood kommunalka, and he was able to buy a car. Putin’s former wife, Ludmilla, later recalled that life in the GDR was very different from life in the USSR. “The streets were clean. They would wash their windows once a week.”

His former KGB colleague, Vladimir Usoltsev, describes Putin as spending hours leafing through Western mail-order catalogs, to keep up with fashions and trends.

He also enjoyed the beer - securing a special weekly supply of the local brew, Radeberger - which left him looking rather less trim than he does in the bare-chested sporty images issued by Russian presidential PR today. 

What else did Vladimir Putin do in Dresden during his five-year stay? There is no agreement on this question, largely because information about his years there is very scant. Putin’s own account of what he did is minimalist. He says he was engaged in “the usual” textbook political intelligence activities: “recruiting sources of information, analyzing it, and sending it to Moscow—recruitment of sources, procurement of information, and assessment and analysis were big parts of the job. It was very routine work.” (Putin, First Person, 69–70.) 

He was a senior case officer. In according to Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2014, 167) in 2001, he elaborated on his training by saying that the key attributes of a good case officer are the ability to work with people and with large amounts of information Putin has downplayed the extent of his activities in the GDR. Soviet and East German senior intelligence officials have confirmed that he was not on their radar screens, as have Western intelligence officials. Others have suggested that Putin’s KGB activities in the GDR may have been more extensive. Rahr claims that a “thick fog of silence” surrounds Putin’s Dresden years, and anyway it would not be in the interest of the German government to reveal what it knows. Some have claimed that Putin was part of Operation Luch (“ray,” or “beam”). This was a KGB project to steal Western technological secrets. Others argue that Luch involved recruiting top party and Stasi officials in the GDR with the aim of using them to replace the anti-reform die-hard Honecker regime. Indeed, Luch became the subject of an investigation by the German authorities after Putin came to power because they were concerned he might have recruited a network in East Germany that survived the fall of the wall. Apparently he did begin to recruit people, only to have them exposed after the Stasi (secret police) files were opened following unification.

Whatever the extent of his activities in the GDR, Putin may have seen Dresden as the first stepping-stone in an international career. But his time there ended very differently than he had expected. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, largely because, in the face of mass, peaceful street protests, Gorbachev made a principled decision not to use force to keep in power unpopular communist governments and because the East German police state had run out of steam. When an angry mob showed up at the Dresden Stasi headquarters—where the KGB was co-located in December 1989—demanding access to its voluminous files, Putin had to defend the building and burn the documents, “saving the lives of the people whose files were lying on my desk.” Indeed, the furnace exploded because it could not burn all the files fast enough. In his autobiography, Putin complains bitterly that there were no instructions from Moscow. “Moscow was silent.… Nobody lifted a finger to protect us” from the crowd outside. At this moment, he feared for his own safety.

One month later, a dejected Putin left Dresden. As a parting gift, his German friends gave his family a twenty-year-old washing machine, with which they drove back to Leningrad. The GDR would disappear nine months later, and the USSR would follow suit two years later. Putin’s 2000 epitaph on German unification was critical but unsentimental: “Actually, I thought the whole thing was inevitable. To be honest, I only regretted that the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe, although intellectually I understood that a position built on walls and dividers cannot last. But I wanted something different to rise in its place. And nothing different was proposed,” he concluded. “They just dropped everything and went away.”

Putin emerged from five years in the GDR not only with a deep understanding of East German society but also with a foundation that would prove important to him in his post-Soviet career. One East German who later became an important member of his inner circle was Matthias Warnig. After the fall of the wall, Warnig became head of the Dresdner Bank office in Saint Petersburg in 1991, and by 2002 he ran all their operations in Russia. He subsequently became the managing director of Nord Stream.

The five years in Dresden influenced Putin in other ways. He lived through the sudden collapse of a rigid, repressive system that was unable to deal with dissent. The experience of fending off the mob at the Stasi headquarters apparently gave him a lifelong aversion to dealing with hostile crowds. It also reinforced for him the need for control, particularly over opposition groups. Nothing like that should ever happen again, especially in Russia. He left the GDR humiliated by Moscow’s unwillingness and inability to support him during his most difficult hour, and not knowing what would await him when he returned to the USSR, which had dramatically changed during his five years abroad.

 

1. Kirk Bennett, “The Myth of Russia’s Containment,” American Interest, December 21, 2015, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/12/21/the-myth-of-russias-containment/. 

2. “Interview, Mikhail Gorbachev: The Impetus for Change in the Soviet Union,” transcript, Commanding Heights, PBS, April 23, 2001, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/int_mikhailgorbachev.html. 

3. Neil Hauer, “Putin’s Plan to Russify the Caucasus,” Foreign Affairs, August 1, 2018, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2018-08-01/putins-plan-russify-caucasus?cid=nlc-fa_fatoday-20180801. 

4. Timothy J. Colton, Yeltsin: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 389–90. 

5. Tim McDaniel, The Agony of the Russian Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 11. 

6. Edward L. Keenan, “Muscovite Political Folkways,” Russian Review 45, no. 2 (1986): 115–81. 

7. Cited in Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, by Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2015), 17.

8. Angela E. Stent, “Reluctant Europeans: Three Centuries of Russian Ambivalence Toward the West,” in Russian Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century and the Shadow of the Past, ed. Robert Legvold (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 

9. Astolphe de Custine, Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia, translation of La Russie en 1839 (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 619. 

10. https://collections.dartmouth.edu/teitexts/arctica/diplomatic/EA15-39-diplomatic.htm. 

11. Marshall Poe, The Russian Moment in World History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 82. 

12. The Communist Manifesto, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm. 

 

 

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