14 March 2022. Russia | Geopolitics
A ‘Russianist’ reflects on Russia. Paradoxes of power: snapshots of Russia.
A slight change of format today, because I came across so many good pieces over the weekend that put the Ukraine war in a wider historical and geopolitical context that I could have run them all week. So I’ve grouped them together under the second ‘Geopolitics’ heading with a short guide. Only read all of them if you have a lot of time on your hands.
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1: A ‘Russianist’ reflects on Russia
My former colleague Jake Goretzki is a Russophile. He studied Russian, he speaks the language, he’s visited it many times, he’s worked there, he loves the people and the culture.
On LinkedIn he published a piece called ‘Love-Hate’, which seemed to be an expression of his mixed feelings—his 10 reflections on Russia and on the war, or what he’d have told you (his phrase) if you’d got stuck in a lift with him and mentioned the war on Ukraine. I should say here that he’s certainly not an apologist. All the same, he says he doesn’t understand it that well:
I wouldn’t claim to know much about Russia though, for as the Russian saying ‘Umom Rossiu ne poniat’ goes (‘One cannot understand Russia with the mind’), nobody can. (Russia positively delights in the idea of itself being unfathomable. Don’t get them started on ‘the Russian soul’).
But despite this, I learned quite a lot from his list—even the ones I thought I had a good handle on—and am going to share some of his list here.
1. Never underestimate Russian exceptionalism. It makes British and Swedish exceptionalism look like minor character tics. Russians feel Russia has a unique mission in the world. In the past, Russia’s seen itself as the ‘Third Rome’, heirs of the Roman Empire. It’s also viewed itself as a Christian martyr for the sins of the world. More recently, it’s seen itself as the fount of world revolution. This is a kid whose mum always told him he’s extremely special. Rules don’t apply to someone special.
He talks about the way in which the Second World War is used as an ideological tool, which was familiar, and that Russia’s enthusiasm for ‘strong man’ rulers is partly because the history of the country has often been chaotic. Hence the pictures of Putin doing macho type things with his shirt off.
(Image of Putin by Roberto Rizzato/flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0)
But, importantly, Putin has brought economic stability, despite the corruption and embezzling by the oligarchs:
6. These are still good times in Russia, for Putin has brought two decades of stability and relative prosperity. You may not be able to protest about corruption or talk about journalists being murdered, but you have H&M and supermarkets. We talk about ‘death and taxes’ as life’s certainties. Russia’s equivalent - looking back on the last millennium - would be ‘Starvation, imprisonment and deportation’... So today, these are still pretty good times, actually. Don’t wait for a popular rebellion.
He reminded me how much Russia scares its neighbours:
8. Russia—and its casual observers—don’t realise quite how much fear and loathing its neighbours can feel towards it. They rubbed the Baltic states out. Their treatment of Poland has always been akin to Britain’s historic treatment of Ireland. They turned Eastern Europe into a prison camp after 1945. (Yes, yes, CIA and Operation Condor, I know—I read about that in a book that wasn’t banned). They invaded Hungary. They invaded Czechoslovakia.
And because of this, he likens the desire of many of its neighbours to be in NATO to having a burglar alarm. If you have a big neighbour who breaks into you house and garden, and breaks things up, it’s useful to know you have some support.
James Meek makes a similar point about Ukraine and NATO on a worthwhile LRB podcast I listened to over the weekend. It was recorded just after the invasion, but mostly discusses the older history. Meek points out that Ukraine only started discussing the benefits of NATO membership after Russia invaded in 2014.
Despite all of this, Jake hasn’t yet lost his love of the people or the place.
10. There is much to love about Russia. The language is gorgeous and a delight to know. High culture—literature, music, art, cinema, architecture—is magnificent. The humour is dry, cynical and playful. The food is much maligned. The people I’ve met are resilient, warm, hospitable and smart - and the crap they have to put up with in everyday life is astonishing compared to the average Western European’s troubles.
But right now, it’s impossible to have a love-hate relationship with the place:
At the moment, I’m in a hate-hate relationship. Russia is like a cousin or an old college mate with a serious coke problem, who’s behaving like a thug, has started getting into conspiracy theories and crashed the family car into your front garden last night, before relieving himself in your recycle bin. One day—International Criminal Court and major regime change permitting—I hope we return to better terms.
2: Paradoxes of Russian power
On Russia, I stumbled on a whole host of other pieces over the weekend that gave me a better sense of perspective. The first two touch on the geopolitics of Russia: an awkwardly located big state that—paradoxically—isn’t quite powerful enough for its size. The next one ranges more widely. Finally, the last piece is more impressionistic. Dip in.
In an interview in The New Yorker, the Russia scholar Stephen Kotkin places Putin in a more historical context, and Russia too, as a state that has aspired to super-power status over several hundred years, but without ever quite having the ability to do it. (He’s interviewed by New Yorker editor David Remnick.)
Russia is a remarkable civilization: in the arts, music, literature, dance, film. In every sphere, it’s a profound, remarkable place––a whole civilization, more than just a country. At the same time, Russia feels that it has a “special place” in the world, a special mission. It’s Eastern Orthodox, not Western. And it wants to stand out as a great power. Its problem has always been not this sense of self or identity but the fact that its capabilities have never matched its aspirations. It’s always in a struggle to live up to these aspirations, but it can’t, because the West has always been more powerful...
In trying to match the West or at least manage the differential between Russia and the West, they resort to coercion. They use a very heavy state-centric approach to try to beat the country forward and upwards in order, militarily and economically, to either match or compete with the West. And that works for a time, but very superficially.
On the NLR blog Sidecar Marco d’Eramo has a similar diagnosis of ‘the Russia problem’, but from the perspective of the West:
This is something the West has not confronted since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Put simply, what place should Russia occupy in a more or less stable world order? Given the vicissitudes of the past, the small to medium states neighbouring Russia – from Lithuania to Poland to the other ex-Soviet satellites—may hope that it disappears from the geopolitical map. But that isn’t possible.
Five Books has the ‘best five books’ on Putin’s Russia, recommended by Simon Pirani. (I’d love to credit the interviewer, but they don’t get one on this occasion). I liked this interview because the books were unfamiliar, and also looked towards political economy—for example talking about the impact of Russia’s oil economy.
Is an oil economy a curse or a blessing in the end?
There are three short answers. For the elite – both money people and power people (the private capitalists have by no means gone away) – the rising price of oil which continued right up to 2008 has been an enormous asset, and provided resources that could have been used to modernise the economy and take the next economic step. There were a lot of conversations about that but not a lot of progress...
The second point is that for Russia’s population it was a double-edged sword. Most Russian families will tell you that their living standards went up during the 2000s and they pulled away from the 90s disaster. That was a fantastic thing. It was partly due to the side-effects of the oil economy, but the problem was that the opportunity to diversify away and make the economy more than just an oil and gas economy was lost, and the people paying the price for that now are the ordinary people of Russia, not the people who run the country. The final sense in which it was not good is that while the average living standard has increased, inequality widened and some people at the bottom of the scale... have got poorer and poorer.
Finally, The New Republic re-published a piece it ran a couple of years ago, marking the anniversary of a post-war visit by the novelist John Steinbeck and photographer Robert Capa to the then Soviet Union. That trip produced a book, A Russian Journal. In 2017, journalist Julius Strauss and photographer Thomas Dworzak—like Capa, a member of the photographers’ co-operative Magnum—retraced their steps, taking similar photographs in similar locations—from Moscow to Donetsk— at least where this was possible.
(Photo: (c) Thomas Dworzak/Magnum. 2017: Miss Moscow contestants wait behind stage before the winners are announced.)
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