Russia in Global Affairs

Russia has stopped trying to turn itself into Europe, a goal Russian politicians and philosophers have been advocating for 300 years. Russia now has a more cautious attitude to long-term political and military involvement outside the national borders, and maintains a selective presence in regions of priority importance.

The risk of Russia’s involvement in low-intensity military conflicts has been growing since the early 2000s. Instability along many stretches of the border has forced Moscow to increase its military presence in the neighboring areas.

Absence of a state entails a lot of trouble, but it also offers certain advantages, the main of which is that there is no need to pay for a complex and very costly institutional system. This relieves the ruling groups of a tremendous burden of chores and gives them a free hand.

Bureaucracy is the direct customer of the majority of projects for promoting a certain image of Russia in the world. The challenge is whether it will be able to conceptually separate its own image from the image of the nation, and then promote the latter.

After gaining independence, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan have been plagued by wars and ethnic conflicts, they have lost transport links, and government agencies have collapsed. Yet the respective political regimes have had diverse fates: although the starting points and international situation were similar when they launched their policies, the outcome is fairly different.

An unsuccessful attempt to galvanize Stalin by declaring him an “effective manager” (incidentally, this is a glaring instance of insensitivity to the Russian language, because the phrase “effective manager” sounds sarcastic today) failed not only because the government stopped it. The campaign bumped into society’s stubborn, albeit silent, resistance.

The normalization of Russian relations with neighbors is rather a steady trend, than a string of casual diplomatic successes. The question is what this normalization is all about “technologically,” so to say, and not from the standpoint of content. Is there a reason to say that this successful experience may furnish a solid basis for an overall strategy of building relations with neighbors west of the Russian border?

The logic of Realpolitik pushes Russia not towards defining for itself the limits to restricting the sovereignty of neighbors, but towards taking as much sovereignty from its neighbors as – using Yeltsin’s famous metaphor – it can swallow. This approach rules out long-term agreements.