Putin's Wars Read online

  The thesis of this book is that the Russian Federation is both a post-imperial state and a pre-imperial state. The aim of this book is to analyze Putin’s wars in Chechnya and Georgia and to put them in a broader context in order to better understand the inner dynamic of Putin’s system. The key idea of the book is that in Russian history there has always existed a negative relationship between empire building and territorial expansion on the one hand and internal democratization on the other. Reform periods in Russia (after 1855, 1905, and 1989) are often the result of lost wars and/or the weakening of the empire. Periods of imperial expansion, on the contrary, tended to have a negative impact on internal reform and democratization. Gorbachev’s perestroika—a product of the lost Cold War—is an example of the former, Putin’s policy of a reimperialization of the former Soviet space is an example of the latter.

  Structure of the Book

  The book consists of three parts.

  Part I: “Russia and the Curse of Empire” (chapters 1–5)

  In this part I analyze the role of empire building in Russian history and look at the similarities and differences with empire building in Western Europe. Why is it that in Russia empire building and despotism have always tended to go hand in hand? What are the differences and similarities between the legitimation theories used for empire building in Russia and in the West? This part ends with a chapter on “empire fatigue” in post-Soviet Russia and suggests that empire fatigue came to an end with the arrival of Vladimir Putin, who considered it his historic role to reestablish the lost empire. In the final chapters of this part the different diplomatic initiatives of Putin are analyzed, such as the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Russia-Belarus Union State, the BRICS, the Customs Union, as well as his most recent project: the Eurasian Union.

  Part II: “The ‘Internal War’” (chapters 6–9)

  Part II analyzes how Putin, convinced that in order to rebuild the empire he needed to rule for at least twenty years without interruption, put a system in place that guaranteed this continued rule. It analyzes in detail how he eroded and dismantled the democratic reforms, manipulated the party system, introduced fake parties, falsified elections, and transformed the ruling party “United Russia” from a centrist party into a revanchist and ultranationalist party. One particular chapter describes the activities of the Kremlin’s youth movement “Nashi,” which enabled the Kremlin to inculcate its adherents with its ultranationalist ideology and strengthen its grip on civil society by harassing and intimidating opponents. Another chapter describes the new role, assigned to the Cossacks, who function as Putin’s praetorian guard and auxiliary police force after the mass protests of 2011–2012.

  Part III: “The Wheels of War” (chapters 10–16)

  In this part the wars of Putin’s regime are analyzed and compared with other recent wars fought by (Soviet) Russia. In the first chapter three lost wars are analyzed: the war in Afghanistan, the Cold War, and the First Chechen War. This analysis is followed by a chapter on the casus belli, which offered (then) Prime Minister Putin an opportunity to start an all-out second war in Chechnya: the so-called “apartment bombings” of September 1999, which killed hundreds of Russian citizens. The Kremlin ascribed these attacks to Chechen terrorists, but the official Kremlin version is put in doubt by allegations that the FSB, the KGB’s follow-up organization, masterminded these explosions. This chapter is followed by a chapter on the Second Chechen War, a war characterized by purges, torture, and forced disappearances. I explain that this war had a triple function for the Kremlin: to consolidate Putin’s position, to legitimate Putin’s power, and, additionally, to enable him to roll back the democratic reforms. In the final chapters the 2008 war with Georgia is analyzed. I distinguish three phases in this war: a “cold” war, a “lukewarm” war, and, finally, the “hot” (five-day) war. Despite the Kremlin’s declarations that this war came as a surprise, I present and analyze the many circumstances indicating that this war was preplanned with the objective of bringing about a regime change in Georgia.

  Notes

  1. Dmitri Trenin, Post-Imperium: A Eurasian Story (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2011), 142.

  2. Trenin, Post-Imperium, 200.

  3. Trenin, Post-Imperium, 232.

  4. Trenin, Post-Imperium, 233.

  5. Trenin, Post-Imperium, 208.

  6. Trenin, Post-Imperium, 62.

  7. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Poslednyy brosok na yug (Moscow: Liberalnaya Demokraticheskaya Partiya Rossii, 1993), 117.

  8. Zhirinovsky, Poslednyy brosok, 138.

  9. Trenin, Post-Imperium, 27.

  10. Trenin, Post-Imperium, 46.

  11. Trenin, Post-Imperium, 45.

  12. Trenin, Post-Imperium, 57.

  13. Trenin, Post-Imperium, 100.

  14. Trenin, Post-Imperium, 100.

  Part I

  Russia and the Curse of Empire

  Chapter 1

  Despotism and the Quest for Empire

  The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

  —Winston Churchill, speech at Harvard University, September 6, 1943

  Russia has always been, and still is, a very special country: first, because of its geographical size, and second, because of its history. Russia is huge. It covers the biggest landmass in the world. But this huge country is mostly landlocked and has only some sparse outlets to the sea—on the Baltic and the Barents Seas in the north, the Black Sea in the south, and the Pacific Ocean in the east. If the sea is a “window on the world” (as tsar Peter the Great thought, which was why he built his new capital in Saint Petersburg), then Russia resembles a huge bunker with high closed walls and only a few small apertures. Is this the reason for the “bunker mentality” that foreign visitors often observed and which led Russians to view their Western neighbors with mixed feelings of distrust and jealousy?: jealousy because of the economic progress and technical prowess of these neighbors (which Russia was eager to copy) and distrust because of the dangerous democratic ideas that were considered a contagious disease that should be stopped at the frontier. This country on the fringes of Europe was known for the despotism of its leaders, its lack of freedom, and its eternal drive for territorial expansion.

  Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot: Early Critics of Russian Despotism

  In the eighteenth century especially, when in Western Europe philosophers of the Enlightenment started to attack absolutist rule and formulated their first radical democratic projects, Russia became the counterexample to everything the philosophes stood for. Montesquieu, for instance, considered Russia a huge prison: “The Moscovites cannot leave the empire,” he wrote, “not even to travel.”[1] The tsar, he continued, was “the absolute ruler over the life and the goods of his subjects, who, with the exception of four families, are all slaves.”[2] In De l’esprit des lois Montesquieu wrote that despotic governments, like Russia’s, are exclusively based on fear: “One cannot speak without trembling about these monstrous governments.”[3] Jean-Jacques Rousseau was hardly more friendly in his assessment of the Russians, who were for him not only “cruel fellows,” but who “will always regard free people as they themselves should be regarded, that is to say as nobodies on whom only two instruments bear any influence, namely money and the knout.”[4] Rousseau wrote these words in a recommendation for reform of the Polish government that he sent to his Polish interlocutors shortly before Poland’s first partition in 1772. It was not without foresight that he warned the Poles: “You will never be free as long as there remains one Russian soldier in Poland and your freedom will always be threatened as long as Russia interferes in your affairs.”[5]

  It is interesting to note that Rousseau wrote this text during the reign of tsarina Catherine the Great, who reigned from 1762 to 1796 and was a great admirer of the French encyclopaedists. She corresponded with Diderot and Voltaire, and she actually invited Diderot to Saint Petersburg for five months. Like Pe
ter the Great before her, she displayed an energetic drive to modernize the country, and she herself wrote the 655 articles of the Nakaz, a radical law reform based on the works of Montesquieu. She even introduced some pseudo-democratic measures, such as convening an All-Russian Legislative Commission. But all this had no lasting consequences. Back in Paris, Diderot wrote his Observations, in which he expressed a sharp critique of the Nakaz. “There is no true sovereign except the nation,” he wrote. “There can be no true legislator except the people. It is rare that people submit sincerely to laws which have been imposed on them. But they will love the laws, respect, obey and protect them as their own achievement, if they are themselves the authors of them.”[6] Diderot made no effort to flatter the tsarina. “The Empress of Russia,” he wrote, “is certainly a despot.”[7] Catherine only saw Diderot’s critical Observations after the death of the philosopher, when his library was transferred to Saint Petersburg under a contractual agreement. When she finally read Diderot’s comments, wrote Jonathan Israel, “she flew into a rage and apparently destroyed the copy she received.”[8]

  However, Catherine, this modern, enlightened despot, became less enlightened and more despotic during the Pugachev revolt (1774–1775). This popular uprising in the southwestern part of her empire, led by a Cossack leader who claimed to be acting on behalf of the assassinated tsar Peter III, Catherine’s former husband, changed her ideas. During this peasants’ revolt over a thousand noblemen and their families were killed, which was approximately 5 percent of the Russian nobility.[9] Instead of abolishing serfdom and giving the Russian people a parliament as she had promised to do, she signed in 1785 the Charter of Nobility, which gave the Russian nobility the same special rights as in Western Europe. Ironically, this happened at a time when in Western Europe these rights began to be questioned and would be abolished some years later during the French Revolution.[10] In the end Catherine’s “democratic revolution” created precisely the opposite: it “created an aristocracy, the better to govern, or rather to dominate the mass of the people. For some to have a sphere of rights due to special birth or rank was doubtless better than for no one to have any assured rights at all.”[11] Catherine remained a convinced autocrat and is mainly remembered for her exuberant love life and the Russian expansion into the Crimea.

  How Lost Wars Led to Short-Lived Reforms

  The despotic character of Russian rule was criticized not only by foreigners, but equally by the Russian intelligentsia. However, reform periods in Russia were, in general, short-lived. They were mostly introduced after lost wars, when the absolute power of the tsar and the ruling elite was temporarily weakened. In the last two centuries there were at least four such lost wars that led to deep and important reforms: the Crimean War (1853–1856), the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), the First World War, and the Cold War.[12] The Crimean War had the effect of a wake-up call. Despite the fact that tsarist Russia mobilized 1,742,297 officers and men, plus 787,197 irregulars and militia, it was unable to deal with a force of 300,000 French, British, Sardinian, and Ottoman troops.[13] The rank and file of the Russian army consisted of serfs, who were conscripts for life. The officers came from the nobility. It became clear that in an epoch of mounting nationalism one could not win a war with an army of unmotivated and illiterate serfs.[14] A direct consequence of the lost war was the Era of the Great Reforms, initiated by tsar Alexander II, who during his reign (1855–1881) abolished serfdom in Russia.

  However, these social reforms were less inspired by a genuine concern for the situation of the exploited Russian muzhik, as by the geopolitical needs of the Russian empire. Walter Pintner rightly remarked that it was “Russia’s military requirements [which] dictated major social changes.”[15] A similar situation arose in 1905 after the defeat in the war against Japan. This defeat led to a revolution and subsequently to the formation of the first parliament, the State Duma in Saint Petersburg. Another lost war: the defeat of the tsarist army in the First World War gave birth to the February Revolution of 1917 that laid the foundation for a Western-style democracy. Unfortunately, at the end of the same year the fragile democratic government of Kerensky was swept away by the Bolsheviks, who installed an autocratic and totalitarian system that endured for the next seventy years. Although during the communist era Khrushchev’s rule brought a short period of cultural “thaw” after Stalin’s death, it did not bring internal democratization, and one had to wait until 1989 before the autocratic communist system began to crumble.

  The High Expectations of 1989

  When this finally happened expectations were high. At last Russia would take its rightful place amongst the ranks of the democratic countries of Europe. At last it would build a viable Rechtsstaat with an independent judiciary and abolish the almost inborn fear that the police and secret services instilled in Russian citizens. Inside, as well as outside, Russia there was a sense of relief: finally Russia would become a “normal” country. Western powers were so eager to let this transformation happen that they offered Russia access to democratic forums even before Russia had shown itself worthy of this honor and had acquired the necessary democratic credentials. Rather prematurely Russia was invited to the G7 meetings (renamed G8) and became a member of the Council of Europe. In retrospect this early embracing of a new democratic Russia was too optimistic and too hasty, granting Russia a position among the democratic nations it did not yet deserve.[16] It was as if the West, by granting Russia the status of a fully fledged democratic state, wanted to invoke a “democratic spirit,” hoping that Russia, having been accepted as a member of the club, would automatically behave as a member of the club.

  A few critical voices in the West warned against too much optimism. One of them was Zbigniew Brzezinski. “Unfortunately,” he wrote as early as 1994, “considerable evidence suggests that the near-term perspectives for a stable Russian democracy are not very promising.”[17] Brzezinski was right. It did not take long, indeed, before the West grew disappointed. After the chaotic, but democratically still promising decade of the 1990s under Yeltsin the Russian spring turned into a chilly winter. While the façade of a multiparty democracy was kept in place, elections were falsified and stolen, corruption was rampant, democratic freedoms were trampled upon, journalists, lawyers, and human rights activists were killed, the judiciary lacked independence, and not the people, but the spymasters of the KGB—rebaptized into FSB—became the country’s supreme masters. Despite Medvedev’s repeated mantras on modernizatsiya, it was not the modernization of the country, but its own self-perpetuation that was the real objective of the regime.

  Three times—in 1856, 1905, and 1917—modern Russia had tried to reform itself after a lost war. Three times it failed. The only enduring success was the abolition of serfdom by tsar Alexander II. After the end of the Cold War it had—probably for the first time in its history—a real chance to join the democratic mainstream. Unfortunately, Russia missed this unique historical opportunity. Russian despotism could be likened to a mythical monster: every time it lies down on the ground and appears finally defeated, it rises to power again. This despotic nature of the Russian polity is not only a problem for the Russian population, its immediate victim, but also for the neighboring peoples, and—ultimately—for the whole world. The reason for this is that Russian despotism is intimately linked with Russia’s imperial drive.

  The Four Roots of Russian Imperialism

  This “eternal” Russian imperialism has four origins:

  Russia’s geographical position

  Russia’s economic system

  Russia’s expansionist tradition

  A deliberate expansionist policy conducted by the Russian ruling elite

  Historically it was Russia’s geographical position, near Siberia—a huge and almost empty space—that made expansion easy. This was a great advantage for Russia compared with the countries of mainland Europe that competed for territorial expansion in an area where land was scarce. Russia’s opportunities for territorial expansion wer
e enhanced after Ivan III (The Great), who reigned from 1462 to 1505, had succeeded in driving the Mongols back. Under his grandson Ivan IV (The Terrible), who reigned from 1547 to 1584, Russia—as if driven by a horror vacui—started to conquer the vast expanses of Siberia. Within a century the Russians had reached the Pacific. They did not stop there, but crossed the Bering Strait and went on to conquer Alaska. In the early nineteenth century Russian colonists went as far as California, where, in 1812, they founded Fort Ross north of Bodega Bay on the Pacific coast, just above San Francisco.[18] According to the American geopolitician Nicholas J. Spykman, “It was fair to assume that if the grip of Spain in California ever weakened, Russia would be eager to take her place.”[19] However, Russian territorial expansion into the South, the West, and the North was less easy. Here it was less pull factors of an easy expansion than the push factors of a deliberate imperialist policy that prevailed.