Putin’s War and the Re-Opening of History 9819981662, 9789819981663

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Putin’s War and the Re-Opening of History

Putin’s War and the Re-Opening of History

Jean-François Caron

Putin’s War and the Re-Opening of History

Jean-François Caron Astana, Kazakhstan

ISBN 978-981-99-8166-3 ISBN 978-981-99-8167-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8167-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: © Harvey Loake This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

1

1

Introduction

2

Understanding the Reasons for Russia Invading Ukraine References

5 29

3

The Slavophile Legacy References

31 55

4

Russia’s Foreign Policy and Its Civilizational Shift References

57 79

5

Russia’s Ideocratic Contribution to Tomorrow’s World References

Index

83 101 103

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. —Sun Tzu

Abstract These introductory remarks are emphasizing the need to shift our understanding of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in order to comprehend what lies at the heart of the Kremlin’s foreign policy. Keywords Russia · Ukraine · Foreign Policy

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was, for most people, unexpected. In the interconnected world that emerged after the Cold War, the general feeling is that only a foolish and irrational man would wage war against his neighbor knowing in advance what the geostrategic consequences of this decision would bring to his country. Unsurprisingly, this is why it has become quite common to describe Vladimir Putin as a nostalgic who has lost his mind and lost touch with reality by dreaming about recreating the borders of the former Soviet Union. The above explanation is convenient because it appeals to the hearts and minds of individuals living in liberal democracies who have a natural repulsion for authoritarian regimes and their leaders. It is also quite fitting, as it prevents people from doing the necessary introspection that any hegemony should do when the system it had so carefully crafted is © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Caron, Putin’s War and the Re-Opening of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8167-0_1

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collapsing. This has unfortunately created a narrow view of the causes of this war and an interpretative rabbit hole that tends to ignore any other explanations, with the result that anyone who dares question whether the West is somehow responsible for the shift in Russia’s foreign policy is automatically labeled as a “pro-Kremlin agent” and ostracized by mainstream media, who rather choose to give the floor to analysts who are keen on explaining the war through the expected filter. Therefore, more than a year and a half after the start of the war, many people are still stuck in this analytical mindset because they are unable to understand the dynamics of the world of tomorrow that are unraveling in front of their eyes. To add insult to injury, their statesmen are unable to develop a proper strategy for how they should adapt their future actions in a world that is not related to the one they have known since the collapse of the USSR. Not knowing what Putin’s real objectives are and ignoring the impact Western actions have had on Moscow’s decisions can only be a recipe for disaster. The core of the problem is that many people cannot see that Russia’s most important weapon in shaping international relations in the twenty-first century is not situated at the military or economic level, but rather, in terms of the alternative ideocratic world it is advocating. It involves the proposal to build a world that is—whether we like it or not—appealing to many nations globally. Anyone who has been following the evolution of Russia’s foreign policy since Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency—after Dmitri Medvedev was in office from 2008 to 2012 since the constitution, which has been modified since, did not allow Putin to run for a third consecutive term—knows that it required a major paradigm shift that has intensified since then, before peaking in February 2022. From that point forward, it has evolved from a conventional geostrategic perspective, according to which all actions are dictated by a rational calculation of costs and benefits, in favor of a civilizational one. Acknowledging the new reality—which is less predictable and more prone to decisions that can appear under the geostrategic scope as “irrational”—is critical because as long as people will operate in a parallel analytical reality they will, unfortunately, remain blind to the changes the world is experiencing and how these changes can be thwarted. Until this is achieved, the enemy will systematically have a head start over us and be able to constantly take us by surprise. The issue here is not about agreeing or disagreeing with the alternative view of the world Russia is advocating (the “russkiy mir” being the alternative to the Pax America). Furthermore, using that oversimplified

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INTRODUCTION

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binary logic in order to label some people as being “pro-Russians” to discard and ignore what they have to say is unconstructive. Rather, it is about understanding how tomorrow’s world may look, what the basis of the separation between allies and enemies could be, and most importantly, how that civilizational reshaping of the world is not automatically destined to occur. The reason is that Russia’s civilizational project has major hurdles it needs to overcome. However, understanding the world looming at the horizon requires the Western audience to start showing some open-mindedness and refraining from the “good and evil” dynamic that has dominated minds since February 2022. Therefore, it is my sincere hope that this book will provide a well-needed novel perspective on the war in Ukraine. Astana, Kazakhstan August 2023.

CHAPTER 2

Understanding the Reasons for Russia Invading Ukraine

Abstract This chapter analyzes the geostrategic consequences NATO’s eastward enlargement had on Russia and how it affected its relations with Europe and America before evoking another lesser-known factor of Moscow’s dissociation from the post-Cold War paradigm, namely Russia’s understanding of itself as a unique civilization. Keywords NATO · Russia · Ukraine · Vladimir Putin

Those who have been following the Ukrainian crisis that began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its invasion on February 24, 2022, could easily say that John Mearsheimer had predicted it. As was the case with Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington before him, who are respectively thought to have foreseen the fall of communism and the world that brought us the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Mearsheimer warned us, years ago, about the inevitability of Russia invading Ukraine (2014). “R. Wendell Harrison, the Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, in his lecture entitled “The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis,” which was published online six years ago and has since gone viral,1 argued that the West bears the responsibility for the Ukrainian crisis”. He posited this notion for the West attempting © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Caron, Putin’s War and the Re-Opening of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8167-0_2

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to remove Kyiv from the Russian orbit and expand Western influence on Moscow’s doorstep, with the push for Ukraine’s integration into NATO being the most significant attempt.2 This intention was confirmed in April 2008 during the 20th Summit of NATO in Bucharest when the organization’s members wrote in their final declaration that “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” This plan was unacceptable for Russia, as Vladimir Putin had previously issued a warning in his 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference—and then at many subsequent venues3 —in which he reaffirmed his reasons for his opposition to the West’s desire, a speech that foreshadowed the main components of Russia’s future foreign policy.4 Why was the above promise unacceptable to the master of the Kremlin? In his now famous speech in Munich, the Russian leader made it abundantly clear that any trust Russia had in NATO members was now nonexistent: an outcome of, at the time of his speech, more than 15 years of what many Russians viewed as false hopes and broken promises by the West. This was surprising considering the optimism that accompanied the end of the Cold War: an optimism that saw, in the Pax Americana, an opportunity to not only avoid letting the unrivalled superpower of the US hegemony open the door to unilateralism by Washington but also build an international order able to outlast any, future, great power tensions (Ikenberry, 2020, p. 263). Pax Americana’s objective was to make all parts of the world converge by establishing rules and norms that would create a quasi-natural tendency for states to systematically adopt a multilateral approach to address major foreign policy challenges, such as nuclear proliferation, climate change, the fight against terrorism, regional instability, and unfair trade practices. Often described as a paradigm of liberal convergence, its goal was to create an understanding of the world as a shared community in which cooperation was the best method for states to prosper and feel secure through the common development of a predictable, trustful, and rules-based order backed by global institutions governing how states behave internationally. The prevailing belief at the time was that if this logic helped Western Germany and Japan recover quickly after WWII by linking themselves with the Westernoriented liberal order, then post-Soviet societies, as well as China, would experience a similar outcome. Far from being conceived as an imperialist or colonialist model designed to drain profits and strategic advantages toward the dominant state, it was rather meant to distribute gains more

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evenly and prevent members from outpacing the United States and its Western partners. The hope was that states would begin to act as responsible stakeholders, realizing the benefits of this order, and that it would become too expensive for them, after a certain period, to sever ties and once again build walls between each other (Caron, 2022). Of course, it was assumed from the start that states would compete with one another over economic investments and trade opportunities, as well as over questions of national security; however, it was believed that these disagreements would be settled within the bounds of international norms that would be mutually beneficial for all states. Those who believed in this paradigm assumed that this mutually beneficial interdependence would assist in taming international anarchy. Ultimately, this paradigm allowed for the rise of other powers, the most obvious of which is China, just as it was during the Cold War with Japan and Germany. Indeed, during the 1990s, the United States made efforts to let China enter the World Trade Organization, which led to the rapid expansion of the Chinese economy and, simultaneously, favored its trading partners. As a “responsible stakeholder” in the post-Cold War system of convergence, China initially neither attempted to challenge the US hegemony in the region nor relinquished the dollarized world economy. China’s rise was considered peaceful and perfectly aligned with the expectations of any partner who believed in the virtues of a converging world and agreed to abide by the rules of the game. Despite its current setbacks, this paradigm worked well in the beginning. According to Thomas J. Wright, the initial success of the post-Cold War paradigm dramatically transformed world politics and produced an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity that no one could have expected in the weeks preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union when Moscow and Washington were still pointing nuclear warheads at each other (2017, p. 2). However, this optimism has not persisted. For many Russians, it quickly became obvious that this project of a convergent world was hypocritical as, with time, it became clear that the United States was simply using this logic to fool Russia and hide its true intention; that is, to ensure that no rival superpower would ever emerge to challenge the US hegemony.5 By the end of the 1990s, Russia concluded that the so-called rules-based order was, in fact, a sham and would never recognize Russia for what it ought to be, that is, a traditional, great power rather than a defeated enemy. Putin often reminds the world that NATO disavowed a verbal commitment made to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 by

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the then US Secretary of State James Baker—NATO would “not shift one inch eastward from its present position” if the USSR does not prevent the reunification of Germany (Sarotte, 2021).6 This disavowed commitment fueled mistrust between Russia and the United States. It was also recalled throughout the 1990s by Gorbachev himself (1995) and Yevgeny Primakov—when he served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Rather than considering the impact of NATO’s expansion on Russian ultranationalists and those skeptical of the West’s good intentions toward its former enemy (basically, those who are currently in power in Moscow), the decision was made to simply mock the promise as a “specious argument” and force the Russians to observe NATO’s eastward expansion as “one of those things in life you can’t avoid” and that which “you just have to get used to” (Sarotte, 2021, p. 255). Putin has also argued that the architecture of the post-Cold War European security was not established based on a willingness to consider it as an equal partnership between the US, European countries, and Russia; instead, it is considered as a containment strategy against Russia in which its interests were ignored or blurred by vague promises and projects that ultimately were mere smokescreens used to mask NATO’s real intentions. This was the case with (1) Russia’s demand to the United States to not allow the deployment of nuclear weapons and stationing of foreign troops in new NATO member states (for example, in Norway); (2) Russia’s participation with NATO and non-NATO members in the so-called “Partnership for Peace (PfP),” which was presented to Yeltsin as an alternative to NATO enlargement (Goldgeier, 2016); and (3) the 1997 creation of a permanent NATO–Russia forum as a parallel relationship. All these measures were hailed by Yeltsin as excellent initiatives7 destined to make Russia a key player in the management of Europe’s future security; however, the promises were not delivered.8 Considering these disappointments, Yeltsin, who had always attempted to make Russia a reliable partner to the West9 —often at the price of making enemies at home—gradually lost his illusions about the US–Russia marriage he had envisioned. For Yeltsin and those who had defended the Russian president’s international agenda of convergence with the Soviet Union’s former enemies, this scenario was hard to swallow. They concluded that the initial gesture of goodwill by Washington following the collapse of the USSR was only needed because Moscow’s support was essential to assure Germany’s reunification and guarantee the denuclearization of former Soviet republics by ensuring that the control over Soviet nuclear weapons came under a single entity to

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avoid the black-market sale of any of the 22,000 bombs that the USSR had left behind after its collapse. Once these objectives were achieved, the United States and its allies had the luxury of ignoring Russia. Many in the Kremlin believed that all the promises of the United States were part of a Machiavellian scheme to deceive the Russian president just enough—sometimes by taking advantage of his excessive drinking—for the United States to extend NATO up to 100 miles from St. Petersburg without jeopardizing NATO’s immediate strategic interests in the post-Cold War era. The Russian realization that it had been used and was never intended to be treated as a strategic partner by Washington came as a national humiliation and fulfilled George Kennan’s worst fears that this would “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; [have] an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; [restore] the atmosphere of the Cold War to East–West relations; and [impel] Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to [the US’s] liking” (1997). Washington seemed to have forgotten—in its willingness to copy the model that had successfully led Japan and Germany to embrace convergence with the Western order after WWII—that, unlike these countries that had been destroyed, vanquished, occupied, and punished, Russia had not been defeated; rather, its previous system simply collapsed because of its internal deficiencies and, as we often tend to forget, under the pressure of reformers. In this regard, if postwar Japan and Germany had no right to expect special treatment and accommodation, this was not the case in the minds of the people in Moscow (Simes, 2007, pp. 36–37). Russians expected more than witnessing their interests swiftly ignored whenever they did not align with Washington’s objectives or vision. From Putin’s perspective, the best example of the above was probably his 1999 offer to work with the United States against Al-Qaeda and its affiliate organizations that were active in Chechnya and in the neighboring regions, where they were raiding Russian bases and committing numerous attacks against civilians. At that time, Afghanistan—which was ruled by the Taliban—was the only country that had established diplomatic relations with Russia. However, this offer was ignored by Washington, a mistake that could have put this terrorist organization on the defensive and disrupted its plans that were dramatically realized on the fateful morning of September 11, 2001, which plunged the world into an endless war against terror that led to the death of tens of thousands of innocent people and destabilized the entire region. Nevertheless, until then, Russia

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was left alone in its fight against this type of political violence that had become transnational and required international coordination. Yet, this rebuff did not prevent Putin from being the first head of state to reach out to George W. Bush following Al-Qaeda’s attack and to offer operational capabilities from military bases located in Central Asia. However, Putin’s main criticism of NATO remained: the unwillingness of the organization’s main actor—the United States—to abide by international law. In this regard, he highlighted numerous unilateral and unlawful actions by Washington since the end of the Cold War, namely the 1999 intervention in Kosovo and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, during which the United States bypassed or simply ignored the disapproval of the UN Security Council; Putin believed that the UN Security Council was the only institution that ought to be allowed the legitimate use of force for the sake of peace and the building of genuine and wellneeded trust between nations. Quoting Franklin Delano Roosevelt,10 Putin argued in his Munich speech about the inapplicability of having a stable unipolar world, which he claimed is the perfect recipe for global instability. According to the Russian leader, such a world order runs the risk of allowing the hegemon to breach international norms whenever it wants by using unconstrained force, endangering the peace and security of all state entities that are increasingly perceiving it as a Hobbesian state of nature entirely at the mercy of the hegemon’s will; that is, creating an unpredictable and normless world.11 Indeed, he asked how mutual trust can exist when the American hegemon operates on a double standard by not abiding by the rules it imposes on all other states and when the military organization it is de facto leading (NATO) constantly mobilizes thousands of armed personnel and military equipment closer to the Russian border and, sometimes, wages large-scale military practices in countries that are only a few hundred kilometers away from St. Petersburg. Considering that NATO did not hesitate to unilaterally attack Serbia in 1999, and the United States waged war against Iraq in 2003, how can any other state feel safe in such a legal vacuum? Under such circumstances, what is the value of these actors’ promises that the enlargement of a military alliance comprising more than two dozen states—including three nuclear powers—bears no offensive purpose? For Putin, the Pax Americana has had terrible consequences for the rest of the world because it rests on the premise of pure force rather than restraint and compromise as a way to counterbalance the domination of the hegemon: “It results in the fact that no one feels safe. (…) [Further,]

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because no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them, such a policy [can only lead to] an arms race” (2007). The rise of strategic tensions and security dilemmas between the hegemon and states that feel threatened by its use of force—a fear that is not a theoretical paranoid fantasy, but rather based on previous unilateral actions that have remained unpunished—can be the only natural outcome of such a world order, which reached its peak in February 2022. It would be an exaggeration to argue that Putin is simply being paranoid here, as he is following the footsteps of his predecessor at the Kremlin. Indeed, even before his rise to power, NATO’s unilateral actions were the final nail in the coffin of Boris Yeltsin’s dream of a converging world.12 Following years of a friendly relationship with Bill Clinton, up to a point where Yeltsin considered the United States and the West more than mere partners, but as allies (Lukin, 2018, p. 73), Washington’s aggressive stance against Serbia and willingness to bypass the UN Security Council’s approval for NATO’s use of force in the region caused the dynamic between the two men to grow cold.13 As M.E. Sarotte wrote that this proved to be a point of no return in the US–Russia post-Cold War dynamic: Yeltsin and his advisers were horrified not only that NATO would take the unprecedented step of bypassing the UN Security Council in order to bomb a country but [also] that it would do so for reasons unrelated to either Article 5 or aggression against another state. Instead, unbelievably, in his view, the alliance was taking this dramatic step simply because of actions inside a country’s own borders. Coming at the same time as the implementation of enlargement, it seemed to prove irrefutably that the claim NATO expansion would bring peace to Europe had been pure deceit. As one US diplomat put it, ‘Yeltsin critics warned him, “Belgrade today, Moscow tomorrow!”’ (…) Despite knowing that, Yeltsin opposed what he was about to order. Clinton was ‘determined to do whatever [he] could to keep [their] disagreement on this from ruining everything else [they had] done and [could] do in the coming years’. Yeltsin replied bitterly, ‘I’m afraid we shall not succeed in that’. He pointedly reminded Clinton ‘how difficult it [had been for him] to try and turn the heads of [his] people, the heads of the politicians towards the West, towards the United States’. He had succeeded in that venture at great effort, and it was a tragedy ‘now to lose all that’ because of the NATO intervention. Yeltsin allowed that ‘of course, [they would keep talking to each other]. But there [would] not be such great drive and such friendship that [they] had before. That

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[would] not be there again’. For the future, he saw only ‘[very] difficult, difficult roads of contacts, if they prove to be possible’ at all. (Sarotte, 2021, pp. 316–317)

Yeltsin’s prophecy proved to be accurate, as the 2003 invasion of Iraq was yet another brick in the wall of American unilateralism and a lack of consideration for recognized international law. What was perceived as the West’s broken promises also created a dramatic shift in public opinion, as polls revealed Russians’ sense of mistrust toward NATO that would never disappear.14 Those who pushed alongside Yeltsin to develop converging ties with the United States, such as Yegor Gaidar—the architect of the economic shock therapy Russia went through after 1991—told the US Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott, how much of a disaster NATO’s use of force against Serbia was for those in Russia who had hoped for the establishment of long-lasting peaceful cooperation with the United States (Talbott, 2003, p. 307). Less than 10 years after the euphoria of security cooperation vanished, people were no longer dancing in the streets and hopeful for the easing of tensions between the major powers (Albright, 2003, p. 446)—revived tensions summarized by Yeltsin during a visit to China in December 1999 as follows: Clinton apparently forgot for a few seconds what Russia is. Russia has a full arsenal of nuclear weapons, but Clinton decided to flex his muscles. I want to tell Clinton: he should not forget what sort of world he is living in. There was no way and there is no way that he can dictate to people how they should live, pass their free time. (…) We will dictate, and not he (…). (Lukin, 2018, p. 79)

Since then, the relationship between Russia and the United States has steadily deteriorated, putting former security agreements in jeopardy and generating a context in which these countries have increasingly viewed each other through the prism of the old Cold War logic. In this context, owing to the other unilateral actions of the United States in the aftermath of the 1999 intervention in Kosovo and further NATO enlargements (or attempts at enlargements), it was easy for Putin to use this disillusionment to convince his countrymen of the necessity to build up Russia’s hard power.

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Unsurprisingly, Mearsheimer reiterated his theory a few months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine—or the beginning of its “special operation” as it has been labeled by the Kremlin—in a conference he gave at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies in Florence, Italy. During this conference, he argued that Moscow’s primary interest was not to make Ukraine part of Russia but rather to prevent Ukraine from becoming a Western bulwark on Russia’s borders, a scenario perceived as an existential threat by the Kremlin in light of the aforementioned problems associated with America’s unipolarity.15 This is also what Putin claimed in his address to the Russian people on February 24, 2022, in which he recalled the broken promises regarding NATO’s expansion during the 1990s and how the collapse of the USSR led to a new world dominated by the American hegemon that did not hesitate to unilaterally shape international norms according to its desires, transforming the unipolarity of the end of the Cold War. This, in Putin’s view, should have been a transitional period that led to a smooth and patient re-shifting of the international order into a multilateral environment that would have considered the interests of all states in a respectful manner (2022). Moreover, it should not have been normless actions that gradually transformed Russia from a partner to an adversary. We are now witnessing the beginning of a new geopolitical paradigm that resembles the bipolar one from the Cold War, in which competition between states and hard power prevail. At this point, it seems obvious that the consequences of the Ukrainian crisis are irreversible, and that the world order is destined to evolve in a different direction than the one that emerged from the Cold War. This in-between period explains why the world at present is so unpredictable, as has been the case with all similar moments in history when boundaries and red lines were unknown to new dominant actors.16 ∗ ∗ ∗ The question now is what Putin ought to gain from his invasion of Ukraine? Will he succeed in establishing a new bipolar world order? First things first, it appears that the war has simply accelerated this evolution rather than triggering it. Apart from Russia, we should not neglect the fact that China has also been criticizing the US-led world order for its hegemonic and bullying tendencies (Jinping, 2023)—a political positioning that has not occurred because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On the contrary, what is now openly assumed by Putin and Xi Jinping

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as a commitment to redesign the global order started a long time ago. As it has been summarized by the Chinese deputy foreign minister, “The Chinese-Russian relationship is a stable strategic partnership and by no means a marriage of convenience: it is complex, sturdy, and deeply rooted” (Lukin, 2018, p. 54). The relationship is the outcome of Moscow and Beijing’s reaction at the time of their common willingness to establish a multipolar world and what the Chinese foreign minister evoked in 2007 as a “just and rational international order” (Lukin, 2018, p. 49). Indeed, confronted by the West’s inability to abide by the rules of international order and its weakening by US-led alliances (with the NATO bombing of Serbia being, at the time, the clearest manifestation of this trend), both countries started to build their strategic relationship. This first led to the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in June 2001 and, one month later, the signing of the Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation that raised both countries’ collaboration to another dimension. The treaty now includes joint military exercises (the first of which was held in 2005), a growing rapprochement of both countries at the UN Security Council, and countless other agreements in the fields of culture and education, as well as the settlement of their historical border disputes.17 If Russia’s breakup with the West is viewed as drastic and the result of its military invasion of Ukraine, China’s can be viewed as being more prudent, opting for a slower approach, primarily aimed at gradually severing its economic ties with the United States. Therefore, China’s military threats against Taiwan have been mostly rhetorical and have simply taken the form of military exercises. Owing to this long collaborative buildup, China has gradually adopted a more protectionist tone toward the United States, taking measures aimed at protecting China’s economy out of fear that the United States may eventually impose a full-fledged containment strategy. This is why China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, has welcomed the decoupling of its economy from that of the United States when President Trump started a trade war; it was welcomed by both countries as a matter of economic independence. Semiconductors, materials required to fabricate batteries for electric cars, and other emerging technologies, are the top priorities for both superpowers. In fact, as stated by economist Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations, Xi Jinping has probably deglobalized more than the United States under the Trump administration (Setser, 2019). Furthermore, the severe sanctions imposed against Russia in 2022 that saw Moscow’s foreign assets being frozen

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have simply accelerated Beijing’s efforts to cut its dependence on the US dollar. Therefore, the invasion of Ukraine has simply deepened the respective containment of Russia and China from the West and accelerated the comprehensive strategic partnership between Moscow and Beijing (this has culminated in Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow where the two leaders have buried the post-Cold War Pax Americana by committing themselves to redesigning the global order with the clear goal of “driving changes that have not happened in [a] 100 years,” in March 2023). This outcome constitutes a failure by the West to apply the most basic saying in the world of international relations: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”18 However, this failure does not appear to be troubling the Western world, which seems to have (through the voices of its leaders,19 think tanks, and members of the intelligence community) openly accepted the new world contest between them—the liberal world or democracies—and their new enemies—members of the illiberal world or autocracies. In this sense, speaking about the end of the post-1991 paradigm and its replacement with a new divide has more to do with evoking an already existent reality than with mere speculation. Clearly, the illusions of the post-1991 period have disappeared: The real global unknown is more related to what will be the nature of the new dynamic between the two blocs. Will it be a closed one with little or no trade between their opposing members (as was the case during the Cold War20 and with Russia following its invasion of Ukraine) or can we expect that some sort of trade and cooperation will remain between them, which will also allow Washington and Beijing’s allies to enjoy some form of hedging between the two superpowers? Only time will tell; the chosen outcome will determine the degree of tension in tomorrow’s world. However, with this new world order emerging because of the war, the other question is what role Russia will play in it. In fact, as Russia has triggered the breakup with the Western bloc in February 2022, it will most likely not be the power that will be the leading force of its opposing bloc. In fact, to echo the words of Robert Kagan (2008), it is fair to say that Russia will never be a superpower again (it can only pretend to be a regional power at best), and the events in Ukraine seem to have highlighted this. It is obvious that his initial plans of beheading the Ukrainian regime by forcing Volodymyr Zelensky to flee into exile through the blitzkrieg attack of February 2022 and establishing a puppet government à la solde of Moscow’s interests have failed, and that which was supposed to be only a “special operation” has now degenerated into a bloody

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conflict that bears a lot of similarities with the trench warfare of WWI. To the rest of the world, Russia has shown its numerous and significant military limitations that—if we leave aside the country’s nuclear capabilities—make its armed forces appear like a simple Potemkin threat that now seems to have been reduced to sending T-54/55 tanks designed in the 1940s to the frontline to compensate for what is estimated to be almost 2000 modern tanks that have been destroyed, abandoned, damaged, or captured since the start of its campaign in Ukraine (Cole, 2023). This shortage of material was obvious during the traditional May 9 parade of 2023 in Red Square, during which the Russian military only displayed one T-34 tank instead of the usual dozens of T-72 and T-90’s (and sometimes the new T-14 Armata) it proudly displayed in previous years.21 In addition to the massive loss of equipment, the blow that the Russian army has suffered in Ukraine, from a human resources point of view, is so significant that the reconstruction of a professional military and the training of elite forces—the well-known VDV or airborne forces, as well as the replacement of high-ranking officers (generals,22 colonels, and lieutenant-colonels) killed since the start of the invasion—will take years (Caron, 2023). The 200th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade, described as an experienced unit better trained and equipped than any other Russian unit, as well as the 331st Guards Airborne Regiment, which was considered one of Russia’s most elite units, are good examples in this regard, as they have both suffered massive losses (some reports have suggested that they have in fact been virtually wiped out) (Epstein, 2022; Urban, 2022). If Russia is trying to form a new alliance of countries, its inability to defeat a much smaller military force that possesses less equipment will make it difficult to convince any other nation (apart from the already global pariahs, such as Iran, Belarus, or North Korea) to join Moscow in its new opposition to the West. In this regard, we can justifiably say that Russia has lost face by proving itself as a military giant with feet of clay that would never be able to win a conventional war against NATO. From this perspective, a military victory for Russia can only mean being able to cling onto its conquered territories of 2014, as well as the territory connecting Crimea to the Donbass around Mariupol. This evasive Pyrrhic victory in its poorest sense could simply be the result of Russia having— and the readers will pardon my expression—“more meat to grind” than Ukraine, which does not have the same potential reserves as its neighbor. In a way, it seems as though this war will not “be won” by the party that will gain or regain the most territory but by attrition, that is, by the

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country that will manage to drain out the other’s armed forces first.23 However, one thing is for certain: the now weakened Russian army has awakened the West, which will now resume its military buildup, which had momentarily paused after the end of the Cold War.24 From a military and strategic perspective, Putin’s plan has clearly backfired, and he is now facing a greater threat than before by waking up a defense organization that had been sleeping and searching for meaning for years. Furthermore, even though Russia’s economy has done much better than what many expected following the imposition of sanctions owing to Putin not removing the highly skilled head of the Central Bank, Elvira Niabullina, despite pressure from his Siloviks (France’s Minister of Economy and Finance, Bruno Le Maire, said that they would “cause the collapse of the Russian economy”). Nonetheless, Russia’s oil/gas/ coal-oriented economy is leaving doubts about its future capacity to transform into a leading economic actor. In fact, it is fair to say that Russia’s economy is on a ventilator and that its stability depends largely on continuous demand for oil and gas. Even though fossil fuels will most likely remain the most important source of power generation worldwide over the next few decades, the world will gradually transition toward other types of energy—especially non-hydro energy.25 This evolution can only occur at the expense of countries such as Russia. For the time being, and because of Western sanctions, Russia has had to turn itself eastward, toward its Chinese neighbor, which has been indirectly supporting Putin’s war efforts in Ukraine by buying a record amount of oil (Russia overtook Saudi Arabia as China’s top oil supplier in the aftermath of the war) and by providing Moscow with the well-needed machinery; automobiles; and technological components, such as semiconductors, that it can no longer import from the United States, or European countries. China’s support has been a lifeline for Russia, which has been on the receiving end of the deal. However, this may very well be momentary, as China is also planning to drastically expand its share of non-fossil fuels in its electricity supply.26 Nobody can be fooled by how unequal the dynamic is between Moscow and Beijing. For Putin, the establishment of an “unlimited friendship” with China can be viewed as a matter of economic survival for a statesman ruling what is obviously a declining power, whereas Xi Jinping is realizing a tremendous opportunity to find a weakened and dependent ally that would allow Beijing to strengthen its objective of becoming the central and dominant actor in the new regional bloc, opposed to the West, that

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it has actively been trying to build over the last decade; namely, by internationalizing the yuan as a currency that could end up challenging the US dollar’s 50-year domination (even though the renminbi is still far from being in a position to overtake the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency27 ). Desperation on the one hand and opportunism on the other can represent Putin’s war in Ukraine, so that, rather than becoming an equal partner in what appears to be the new opposition bloc to the West, Russia is inevitably destined to be relegated as a junior partner in China’s geopolitical orbit. However, China’s willingness to have such a partnership comes with an important obligation toward Putin. If China needs a “weakened Russia,” it cannot afford a “defeated Russia,” which, owing to a regime change, could once again fall in the arms of the Western world—as was the case 30 years ago following the collapse of USSR. This would isolate Beijing and reduce its capacity to lead the bipolar world it is looking to create. Consequently, a major military setback by the Russian forces in Ukraine may trigger a chain of events that could result in a more proactive involvement of China in this conflict—which would in return call upon the same reaction from NATO—or an acceptance of the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons in the advent of the collapse of the Russian military in Ukraine or the retaking of Crimea by the Ukrainian armed forces. Thus far, Beijing may have chosen to adopt a more reserved and apparently neutral attitude in this war, but this may not last. Let us keep in mind that more troubled times may be ahead. Consequently, if Russia can no longer be the reliable military protector of this emerging bloc, thereby being nothing more than its provider of raw goods (with some of them being nonrenewable), and with the rubble becoming a marginal secondary currency, what role can Russia expect to play in the new world order? I would argue that Russia’s potential in this emerging world may be on the side of idealism, that is, by providing the necessary narrative for the construction of a new bloc. Russia has undergone centuries of reflection in this regard. Although NATO’s eastward expansion, combined with the unwillingness of the United States to abide by the logic of convergence it was advocating, have played a significant role in Russia’s breaking away from the paradigm of liberal convergence, another lesser known and explored dimension has also, in my view, played a role in Moscow’s decision. Without denying the value of Mearsheimer’s assessment of the root causes of the Ukrainian crisis, his focus on the political and geostrategic reasons that contributed to

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the erosion of the post-Cold War paradigm’s initial promises offers only a partial view of Russia’s decision to invade its neighbor and tends to overlook another important factor that has also played a role in Putin’s decision to break away from the US-led world order—a factor that could play a fundamental role in our understanding of what tomorrow’s world may resemble. I am referring to Putin’s view that his opposition to the Western bloc28 is not only a matter of geostrategy but also one that is strongly influenced by a cultural and ideological battle that is too often confused with his so-called sinister and nostalgic desire to recreate the former borders of the Soviet Union, which would negate other nations’ right to self-determine freely. What cannot be ignored from his rhetoric is his clear disdain for Western values, which he sees as an inevitable byproduct of the US-led hegemony that has resulted in the denunciation of everything that is not aligned with the American model as “archaic, obsolete, and useless” and the willingness to impose abusively on others, and by any means available, “everything it regards as useful and as the ultimate truth,” by the Western bloc (Putin, 2022). Accordingly, most people tend to forget that the inherently unstable, anarchic, and distrustful Western political hegemony of the post-1991 world order, which Putin has been criticizing following his 2007 Munich speech, has also evolved into a form of contemporary colonialism that has resulted in an attempt “to destroy [Russia’s] traditional values and force on [its people] (…) false values that would erode [the Russian people from within], the attitudes [Western nations] have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature” (Putin, 2022). Similar to the geopolitical threat hiding behind NATO’s expansion into Ukraine, Putin observes the spread of Western values as an equally important menace to his country— a threat that acquires a broader dimension considering that Russia is itself moved by an ideal of “rooted cosmopolitanism,” that is, the belief that one’s particular spiritual values and way of life ought to influence the rest of the world (Caron, 2012). Of course, all nations have at some point in their history adopted such an egocentric viewpoint of their own values as special and worthy of expansion throughout the world. However, apart from the American ideal, very few cultures have maintained this belief over decades, let alone centuries. Russia is an exception. It has indeed understood itself for several centuries as exhibiting a unique—and superior—path of development. Although this belief finds its roots in the sixteenth century, it had become

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an obsessional aspect of Russia’s understanding of itself in the nineteenth century, when an entire intellectual current came to birth, with its impacts still clearly perceivable today as a key feature of Russia’s opposition to the West. This book will study the above-mentioned dimension by focusing on the historical roots behind Russia’s self-perception of being the incarnation of a uniquely distinctive civilizational idea. It will further examine how the evolution of the post-Cold War paradigm has hurt that vision. Consequently, this clash between Western values and what has been presented as inherently Russian values has fueled Russia’s nationalism and desire to accelerate its divergence with what has been labeled by Alexander Dugin, Carl Schmidt, and Alexandre Koyré as the “Atlantist” civilization, the “civilization of the sea” (Seenahme), and “Westernalism” (Occidentalisme), respectively. Far from being a new form of artificial opposition created by the Kremlin to justify its breakup from the post-Cold War US-led hegemony, it is an essential component—if not the most essential component—of Russian intellectual history since the nineteenth century, which has been dominated by the penetration of the European/Western civilization in Russia (Koyré, 1929).29 While some have advocated for the adoption of Western values, others have privileged a Slavophile understanding of Russia. In a certain manner, the post-Cold War period was the occasion for these two visions to clash with one another. If the Atlantist viewpoint prevailed for the greater part of the 1990s under the Yeltsin presidency, a return of the pendulum has gradually occurred in favor of the other under the rule of Putin (especially following the 2008– 2012 Medvedev interlude). If Yeltsin, the pro-Westerner, had worked for norms and values associated with the former world, Putin, the Slavophile, has advocated norms and values that are opposed to modernity and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. For this reason, focusing solely on the geostrategic dimension of the opposition between Russia and the West can lead us to overlook the role that culture has played in their divorce and Putin’s rejection of his predecessors’ policies, perceiving them as a rejection of Russia’s past and a disdain for what its people have always stood for. Therefore, the post-Cold War moment is another chapter of what has been at the heart of Russia’s understanding of itself throughout its history and its relationship with the Western world. In this case, the Slavophile viewpoint has prevailed, and Putin is simply following the footsteps of numerous Russian intellectuals (the first ones being individuals like Nikolai Karamzin, Ivan Kireyevsky, Alexey Khomyakov, and Nikolai

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Danilevsky) who have advocated for more than 200 years for a chauvinistic nationalism anchored in the belief of Russia’s radical differences with the Western civilization that should not be copied at the risk of witnessing Russia becoming the victim of calamity and decline. This is why his rhetoric about the inherent instability and chaotic nature of the Western world sounds hackneyed in light of the rhetoric employed by those who founded the Slavophile current and focused on the same flaws and who celebrated Russia’s so-called superiority. Putin’s opinions on democracy, Western moral decadence, and what he perceives as the supremacy of the monarchic principle are nothing new and are based on what is rather a deeply anchored and widely held belief in the Russian psyche that has its roots in the nineteenth century. Being profoundly irreconcilable with one another, the imperialistic attempts by the Atlantist world over the Russian world since the end of the Cold War have contributed to reviving the clash between these two civilizations. This has played a role in Russia’s desire to put a final halt to any convergence with the West, as the importance of Russia’s disdain for Western values should not be minimized. The simple fact of seeing a group of countries linked by the same military organization move closer to Russia’s borders does not explain Russia’s decision to invade its neighbor. We must also consider what these countries represent in terms of values and principles and how they clash with Russia’s collective identity. This aspect adds another layer of explanation to Russia’s decision to break up with the Western world (and with the heavy price it came with): Russia was not only facing a security dilemma but also what it felt was a clash of civilizations. Evoking the former factor as the sole reason for Moscow deciding to invade Ukraine poses a problem. It tends to mask the latter factor as the most probable cause of Moscow’s “special military operation.” This is because, from a military perspective, NATO’s ability to deploy troops and weapons in Ukraine does not increase Russia’s vulnerability. In the eventuality of NATO attacking Russia, its missiles launched from the Baltic States—with Tallinn only 225 miles from St. Petersburg— would land on Russian targets more quickly than those launched from Ukraine, whereas those that would potentially be launched from Poland, Romania, or Bulgaria would take as much time as those from Ukraine. Ukraine joining NATO was nothing comparable to the USSR suddenly deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. However, the latter factor, which is highly symbolic and emotionally charged for the Russian people who have always considered themselves

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as forming a unique civilization, may explain why so many analysts have perceived Putin’s decision to wage war on Ukraine as irrational not only because of the enormous costs it would have on Russia but also how it would backfire by reinvigorating NATO. Indeed, if the decision makes no sense from the sole geostrategic perspective, it does when we do not ignore the obscure and hidden spiritual motives that animate Russia and how its people perceive its civilizational destiny—a destiny threatened by what is perceived as a piece of its national territory and the people being dragged into a foreign civilizational entity. When this metaphysical factor is considered, the price that Russia has to pay for its war of conquest appears to have been worth it for its people and its elite. Therefore, ignoring this factor is a mistake and an omission that does not allow Western observers to understand (1) how the post-Cold War paradigm is now dead, (2) how civilizational opposition will be at the heart of tomorrow’s world order, and (3) how societies will clash with one another or form alliances with other nations. At the very least, Moscow will most likely use the above reasoning for autarkic purposes to mobilize its population behind the prospect of a more isolated world that awaits them following the invasion of Ukraine. However, it could also be used more expansively if Russia decides to lead the creation of an alternative bloc of countries with similar yearnings to exit the paradigm of Western convergence. If we are pragmatic, we cannot ignore that this could also be an outcome of the conflict and, as such, could become a central way for Russia (probably the only one in fact) to play a role in the formation of the opposition bloc to the Western world. If Russia successfully manages this task, the consequences would be enormous for the consolidation of tomorrow’s global opposition. It must be said that the growing unease that states may have about the paradigm of convergence, as well as their willingness to guarantee the resources needed, may not be sufficient to unite them in a longlasting bloc. Indeed, the common refusal of not wanting to be part of the same entity does not necessarily translate into the common desire to join another entity altogether, while the sharing of common advantages does not always last forever and can, at some point, lead to unforeseen negative outcomes. When people accept these virtues as constitutive parts of their way of life and collective identity, they become keener to fight for these ideals and less willing to compromise on them (which is why, contrary to a typical geostrategic conflict, any peace agreement in Ukraine that would result in the partition of the country appears to be, in the views

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of a majority of people both in Russia and in the Western world, as inappropriate and simply unthinkable). Furthermore, one must realize that being able to develop a counternarrative to liberal ideology is also Russia’s most powerful weapon in this war (with its war machine and economy, as well as the reasons supporting its so-called legality of its invasion of Ukraine not convincing or impressing anyone). Indeed, irrespective of what one may think about the value of liberalism, it is obvious that it is currently suffering from a major setback in Western societies, a conclusion drawn by Fukuyama himself (2022). If it were ever able to develop that counternarrative, Russia would be in possession of an idealistic “weapon of mass destruction” that would allow it to weaken the determination of Westerners by making them believe that they are fighting for a lesser civilizational ideal. This is not a point to minimize in the assessment of this conflict, especially considering the growing skepticism within liberal societies themselves about the direction the “end of history” is taking them. The unity and coherence of a bloc, as well as its members’ willingness to make significant sacrifices, require it to share something deeper that can coalesce into a common path forward by defining it as an imagined community that stands for a distinct and specific political project, as is the case with the paradigm of liberal convergence regarding democracy and human rights. Sharing and defending the shared values of liberal democracy has played a vital role within the Western bloc during the Cold War and has made the inevitable bargaining between its hegemon and its partners more acceptable. It also plays a pivotal role in the political rhetoric of Western countries, which have justified their unwavering support for Ukraine through the idealism of democracy, liberalism, and the fight against authoritarianism. By doing so, it has enabled them to generate very strong support from their people, despite the numerous consequences it has had on their lives, such as the sharp increase in their cost of living. If the clash between the Western/liberal way of life and the illiberal one of Russia has allowed a sense of sacrifice and unity in Europe and America, shared cultural values and norms that are opposed to those of the Atlantic world and more in line with Russia’s civilizational project, could be the glue required for illiberal states. To use Aristotle’s philosophy, communities must be able to think of their relationships as more than just military or economic alliances, but rather as ethical associations. The view that they share distinctive and superior virtues can provide this required sense of what people and their political associations stand for and

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can explain why the logic of absolute gains is sometimes not the one that prevails. Without really realizing it, it is this common sense of what the West stands for, which has been the backbone of the support its people have shown Ukraine—despite their lack of knowledge of the root causes of this conflict—which has allowed them to accept the difficult sacrifices that came with them. Without being driven by such higher values and incentives that can act in a way as “secular ghosts,” individuals can easily succumb to hedonistic and individualistic patterns of behavior. Therefore, the illiberal bloc also requires the development of a similar collective narrative that can generate the same sense of cohesion and spirit of sacrifice necessary to offset the potential loss of material benefits resulting from this renewed bipolarity. Russia can provide such a narrative; this is its added value in the emergence of tomorrow’s world. From this perspective, what we can presuppose as the last breath of the post-Cold War paradigm of liberal convergence could be more than the simple death of the geopolitical paradigm. It could also mark the reopening of history that had supposedly ended in the late 1980s, as per Francis Fukuyama’s famous thesis. Russia has the potential to unify the increasing number of states that are either openly opposed or critical of the American-led hegemony, beyond their mere opposition to it, by linking them politically and ideologically through its civilizational project, which would be uniquely distinct from the liberal project. In other words, the cultural element largely ignored in Mearsheimer’s (and others’) assessment of the Ukrainian crisis has the potential to become the essential element that could bring together the members of what we can already label the “illiberal bloc”—if they are eventually successful at extracting themselves from the paradigm of liberal convergence—beyond their simple discomfort of living in the hypocritical and lawless postCold War world described previously. If this becomes the case, then the opposition of tomorrow’s world may once again become the result of a divide that would find its roots in two irreconcilable modes of living and manners of interpreting the meaning of society: the liberal way of life that the Western world has been accustomed to since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and one organized around Russia’s stance as a politically and socially conservative Slavophile civilization. The next chapter will explore this fundamental and central aspect of Russia’s intellectual historiography.

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Notes 1. As of August 2022, the video had more than 27 million views on YouTube. Refer to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrM iSQAGOS4. 2. To be fair, Mearsheimer is not the only scholar who came to that conclusion. Henry Kissinger and Steve Cohen also made it clear, years ago, that it was a mistake for NATO to signal to Ukraine that it might eventually join the alliance, as that created the appearance of a threat for Russia. 3. See also his 2014 speech at the Valdai meeting. http://en.kremlin. ru/events/president/news/46860. 4. Certainly, it is difficult to ignore how paradoxical his invasion of Ukraine is. NATO had been declared “brain dead” (en état de mort cérébrale) by French President Emmanuel Macron in 2019; Russia’s invasion seemed to have revived the organization and led to the integration of Finland, thereby adding 832 miles of this “unfriendly entity” that is now continuous to the Russian borders. 5. This theory was advocated by many hawks within the US government of the time (Tyler, 1993). 6. As we know, NATO opened its doors to other countries that were once part of the Warsaw Pact, namely, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary in 1999, as well as the three Baltic states, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria five years later. 7. He called the PfP a “brilliant” idea and a “stroke of genius.” 8. The same goes for the vague promise that Russia could eventually join NATO itself as a full-fledged member (Sarotte, 2021, p. 179). 9. As a testimony to this optimism and desire on the part of Russia to be seen as a reliable and trustful partner, it is important to remember that Yeltsin’s decision to willfully provide Russia’s nuclear attack protocol to James Baker in 1991, as well as the Russian presidential exchange with Bill Clinton during which the former expressed his desire to give up being obligated to live constantly with his finger next to the red button and to whom the latter replied that they would not have to think about this problem if they were to work together and do the right thing (Sarotte, 2021, p. 7). 10. “When peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries everywhere is in danger.”

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11. In Putin’s view, unilateral actions that are intimately connected with unipolar logic also tend to destabilize the international community. As it was the case in Iraq, the unilateral intervention of the US-led coalition left an entire region in chaos, resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of lives and a colossal upsurge in terrorism. 12. As noted by Alexander Lukin, “It was not Russia, but the West that deliberately destroyed the postwar legal system based on the sovereignty of states and advocated the theories of ‘humanitarian intervention,’ ‘the responsibility to protect,’ and so on. It was not Russia, but the West that pressured the International Court of Justice into ruling that Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence did not violate international law. Russia repeatedly warned that the precedents set by the bombings of Serbia, the secession of Kosovo, and the military actions in Iraq and Libya would undermine the system of international law—including the principle of the inviolability of borders in Europe enshrined in the Helsinki Accords” (2018, p. 11). 13. On 5 October, 1998, Yeltsin and Clinton were discussing the matter on the phone when the Russian President hung up on his American counterpart. 14. This matter was seen by Putin as one of the main mistakes Yeltsin made during his presidency. Putin said at the 2017 Valdai Conference that Russia’s “most serious mistake in relations with the West [was] that we trusted [the West] too much. And [the West’s] mistake [was] that [it] took that trust as a weakness and abused it” (Putin, 2017). 15. Refer to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qciVozNtCDM. 16. This is why Thomas J. Wright wrote: “History suggests that instability is at its greatest in the early phases of a new paradigm, especially one involving strategic competition. For example, the early period of the Cold War was prone to crisis, which only abated and became more predictable after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The reason is clear: at the beginning, no one is quite sure where the red lines are. The protagonists probe and test each other and often overstep the mark. They are, in effect, in a learning process. Later on, clarity descends. They have a better sense of each other’s core interests and strategic limits, and they can adapt to a new equilibrium and peaceful, albeit tense, coexistence’ (2017, p. xi).

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17. Disputes that triggered in 1969 a Sino-Russian conflict that almost brought the two countries to the brink of war. 18. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger understood this logic very well when, three years after bloody fighting between Soviet and Chinese forces along the Amur River, the United States normalized its relations with Beijing, thereby deepening the tensions between Mao and Leonid Brezhnev. 19. During his last term, Barack Obama talked about China as a “threat,” a perception that has remained unchanged for Presidents Trump and Biden with the latter explicitly evoking the expression “a new Cold War” at the G20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia, in 2022. 20. At peak, the US and USSR traded $2 billion a year, while this amount represents the daily level of trade between the US and China. 21. The number of soldiers present was also lower than in previous years (8000, mostly cadets, compared to the usual 11,000). 22. The Japanese intelligence has estimated that up to 20 Russian generals have been killed in Ukraine since February 2022 (Cole, 2023), while a Telegram channel operated by Colonel Anatoly Stefan of the Ukrainian armed forces has collected reports of Russian military deaths and claims that 152 colonels and lieutenant colonels have been killed (Stewart & Averre, 2022). 23. Of course, it is very difficult to have estimates we can trust, as the number of casualties has been kept a state secret by both Russia and Ukraine. However, in November 2022 and January 2023, Mark Miley, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Eirik Kristoffersen, head of the Norwegian armed forces, have both stated that Ukraine had probably lost 100,000 soldiers (dead or wounded) since the start of the war. If we are to believe Volodymyr Zelensky, who said in June 2022 that Ukraine was losing “60 to 100 soldiers per day killed in action and something around 500 people wounded in action,” these estimates are probably accurate (Marcetic, 2023). For a country that was reported to have 688,000 active personnel and an additional 400,000 in reserve, these are staggering figures, in addition to the fact that we can assume that a significant number of professional soldiers trained by NATO from 2014 until 2022 are probably among those who have been killed (Atlamazoglou, 2023).

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24. For instance, Poland has announced that it will spend 4% of its GDP on defence in 2023 and is targeting to double the size of its armed forces from 150,000 to 300,000 personnel, as well as buying F-35 fighters, Patriot anti-missile systems, HIMARS rocket launchers, and Abrams tanks. 25. This is why it is probably fairer to talk about a “green evolution” than of a “green revolution.” Furthermore, “The development of renewables isn’t just a rich-country trend. Among the members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which mostly includes highly developed countries, renewables are expanding by 4.6 percent a year. Among those outside the OECD, the figure is 7.4 percent. In the next 25 years, renewables will account for an estimated 43 percent of Africa’s new power plants, 48 percent of Asia’s, and 63 percent of Latin America’s. Asia alone is projected to add 1,587 renewable-power plants, almost as many as the rest of the world combined” (McKinsey, 2016). 26. In its Five-Year Plan for Modern Energy System made public in 2022, China announced its intention to increase its share of nonfossil fuels to 39% by 2025, up from 29% in 2022. It is targeting 80% of non-fossil energy use by 2060. 27. Global payments in yuan represent less than 3%, and only 2.7% of Central Bank reserves of other countries are held in yuan as of 2023. 28. Putin makes no distinction between the United States and its allies, who he sees as being part of the same bloc. He said about the latter in his speech on February 24, 2022: “All [of the United States] satellites not only humbly and obediently say yes to and parrot it at the slightest pretext but also imitate its behavior and enthusiastically accept the rules it is offering them.” 29. Koyré writes: “The central problem of Slavophiles’ philosophy of history has always been the problems associated with the relationship between Russia and the Western world, or the respective value of the principles of the latter civilization with regards to those of the former. It has been the expression of a fact: the fact of the profound difference, that went as far as a clear opposition, between Russia and the West (…). In front of this Western civilization—or rather the countries composing it—Russia has erected itself as a world apart (…). We are witnessing an opposition that

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has dominated all of Russia’s history, that explains it” (1929, pp. 15–16).

References Albright, M. (2003). Madam Secretary: A Memoir. Harper Perrenial. Atlamazoglou, C. (2023). After a Year of Heavy Losses, Ukraine’s Military Is Juggling a ‘Very Uneven’ Force as It Prepares for Major Fighting, Expert Says. Business Insider, April 28. https://www.businessinsider.com/ukrainesmilitary-balances-uneven-training-levels-after-year-of-war-2023-4 Caron, J.-F. (2012). Rooted Cosmopolitanism in Canada and Quebec. National Identities, 14(4), 351–366. Caron, J.-F. (2022). Marginalisé. Réflexions sur l’isolement du Canada dans les relations internationales (with the collaboration of Frédéric Boily, Jocelyn Coulon and Zachary Paikin). Presses de l’Université Laval. Caron, J.-F. (2023). Russia’s Iron Horse and Its Logistics Limitations in the Ukrainian War. The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 36(3). Cole, B. (2023). Russia Mocked for Rolling Out T-54 Tanks from 1940s: ‘What Next, Horses?’. Newsweek, March 23. https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukr aine-tanks-t-54-war-1789730 Epstein, J. (2022). An elite Russian Military Brigade Was Basically ‘Wiped Out’, Taking so Many Losses in Ukraine That It Will ‘Take Years to Rebuild’, Report Says. Business Insider, December 16. https://www.businessinsider. com/elite-russian-brigade-basically-wiped-out-in-ukraine-losses-report-202 2-12 Fukuyama, F. (2022). Liberalism and Its Discontents. Profile Books. Goldgeier, J. (2016). Promises Made, Promises Broken? What Yelstin Was Told About NATO in 1993 and Why It Matters. War on the Rocks, November 22. https://warontherocks.com/2019/11/promises-made-promises-brokenwhat-yeltsin-was-told-about-nato-in-1993-and-why-it-matters-2/ Ikenberry, J. G. (2020). A World Safe for Democracy. Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order. Yale University Press. Jinping, X. (2023, March 20). Forging Ahead to Open a New Chapter of China-Russia Friendship, Cooperation and Common Development. https:// www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/zyjh_665391/202303/t20230 320_11044359.html Kagan, R. (2008). The Return of History and the End of Dreams. Atlantic Books. Kennan, G. (1997). Fateful Error. New York Times, February 5. https://www. nytimes.com/1997/02/05/opinion/a-fateful-error.html

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Koyré, A. (1929). La philosophie et le problème national en Russie au début du XIXème siècle. Gallimard. Lukin, A. (2018). China and Russia. The New Rapprochement. Polity. McKinsey. (2016, March 24). Renewable Energy: Evolution, Not Revolution. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/oil-and-gas/our-insights/ren ewable-energy-evolution-not-revolution Mearsheimer, J. (2014). Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin. Foreign Affairs, 93(5), 77–84. Putin, V. (2007, February 10). Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich Conference on Security Policy. Munich. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/presid ent/transcripts/copy/24034 Putin, V. (2017, October 19). Meeting of the ValdaiI International Discussion Club. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/55882 Putin, V. (2022, February 24). Address by the President of the Russian Federation. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67843 Sarotte, M. E. (2021). Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of PostCold War Stalemate. Yale University Press. Setser, B. (2019, June 25). President Xi, Still the Deglobalizer in Chief…. https://www.cfr.org/blog/president-xi-still-deglobalizer-chief Simes, D. (2007). Losing Russia: The Costs of Renewed Confrontation. Foreign Affairs, 86(6), 36–48. Talbott, S. (2003). The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy. Random House. Tyler, P. (1993, March 8). US Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop. New York Times. Urban, M. (2022, April 2). The Heavy Losses of an Elite Russian Regiment in Ukraine. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60946340 Wright, T. J. (2017). All Measures Short of War: The Contest for the 21st Century & the Future of American Power. Yale University Press.

CHAPTER 3

The Slavophile Legacy

Abstract This chapter explains how Russia’s understanding of itself as a distinctive civilization is far from being a novelty but is rather an idea that has deep historical roots that can be dated back to the Slavophile current of the nineteenth century. Keywords Slavophile · Nineteenth century Russian historiography · Civilization · Rooted Cosmopolitanism · Anti-Westernism

“Moscow is the third Rome and the last capital of the true faith.” In a way, this short sentence summarizes, in an exemplary manner, the civilizational ideal that has historically shaped the Russian mind and sense of identity and how it continues to do so in today’s world. This belief, profoundly anchored in Russia’s past, is central to its relationship with Europe. While many pivotal Russian historical figures, such as Peter I (the Great) or Catherine II (the Great), have advocated the need for Russia to “catch up” with the European culture and the necessity to cast off its “backwardness,” others (who are now referred to as belonging to the Slavophile current) have refused to idealize the European culture. With time, this tension remained vivid in the minds of political leaders and intellectuals, with some, such as Mikhail Gorbachev, arguing in 1987 that there is only one Europe, with Russia being a part of it.1 However, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Caron, Putin’s War and the Re-Opening of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8167-0_3

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others, such as Arnold Toynbee and Milan Kundera, said that Russia is not part of Western civilization, but of the Byzantine one, or that Russia’s adherence to authoritarian forms of political systems throughout its history was a sign of its radical negation of the Western world2 (Kundera, 1984; Toynbee, 1948, p. 166). What should be considered regarding this tension? Does Russia really belong to a different civilization than the rest of Europe? As Russell Bova has argued, Russia seems to be sitting between the two chairs. Regarding this, he wrote the following: To this day, Russia appears to many Westerners as an intriguing blend of the familiar and the foreign. Its literature is still widely read in the West, and it is hard to think of its great writers—Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoevsky, to name a few—as standing completely outside of the Western literary canon. Its music remains a staple of the Western concert hall with Russian composers, such as Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, among the most frequently requested and performed. Its religion, though adopted from the Byzantine Church, is a form of Christianity that shares, [with] both Catholics and Protestants, a belief in a single God, in the divinity of Jesus, and in the concept of the Trinity. In short, if, as Samuel Huntington suggests, the twenty-first century is to be marked by a ‘clash of civilizations’, it is much easier to see that manifested in the clash between the West and the Taliban than between the West and the Kremlin. (2015, p. 4)

These similarities, which are much more obvious than the differences that separate the West from the Taliban, should not lead us to ignore how the Orthodox nature of Russian Christianism has favored the development of a collective psyche with norms and values that were radically different from (and sometimes incompatible with) Western civilization, or how the works of Tolstoy, Chekov, or Dostoievsky have been linked to them. More precisely, these values are all connected to the myth of Holy Russia being the savior of humanity and have been instrumental in the development of a historical trajectory that has had tremendous influence on the country’s politics and economics, making it largely immune to parliamentary politics and the market economy. Another consequence of this thesis on cultural difference is the belief that it was Russia’s responsibility to fend off Western secular materialism by arguing that the Russian soul (which is said to be inherently inimical to Western values and the views of mankind) is the last rampart against the total collapse of Christian civilization. Understanding the idea that Russia is not only

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a country but also a civilization is essential in understanding many of Russia’s customs, political beliefs, and, regarding the war in Ukraine, the country’s foreign policy in the last 20 years. It is only through a clear understanding of the Slavophile current that we can fully understand why Vladimir Putin’s political rhetoric against the West’s unipolarity is not only based on geostrategic concerns and Washington’s unilateral actions but also (as many people tend to neglect) in opposition to the universalization of Western values. This will be extensively discussed in this chapter. ∗ ∗ ∗ As argued by Alexandre Koyré (1929), the whole intellectual history of Modern Russia has been dominated by one question: What ought to be the nature of the relationship between Russia and Europe? This interrogation was marked by an opposition between those who favored a tabula rasa, from Russia’s so-called uncivilized past, over adopting Western civilization values (advocated by those who will be called the “Westernizers”) and those who rather advocated the opposite viewpoint (known as the Slavophiles). The Slavophilic stance is the rejection of values judged foreign to the Russian soul and linked to all of Europe’s disorder, impiety, instability, and chaos. Kept away from Europe’s modern ideas because of its geographical situation, Russia was spared that tension for a significant period, during which most of what became the core of the Slavophiles’ ideas were able to flourish, unopposed by any other societal alternative. However, the first crack in Russia’s isolation from European ideas began during the reign of Alexei (1645–1676), the second ruler of the Romanov family. Not only was he introduced to Western ideas owing to his personal tutor but also because of the war he led against the Poles, which proved to be a turning point for him. Upon entering the conquered cities of Vilnius and Vitebsk, he witnessed architecture, objects, and a way of life that was completely unknown to him and his men: Every kind of European luxury—from clocks and telescopes to musical boxes, singing birds, and carriages—was imported for Alexei’s court. His childhood friend and close adviser, Artamon Matveev, introduced a court theatre, the first of its kind in Russia, where German baroque dramas were performed. Matveev held receptions at his Moscow home, completely furnished in the Western style, where guests came not to drink excessively,

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(…) but to socialize in well-mannered company, where women, for the first time, were expected to appear and even act as hostesses. (Figes, 2022, p. 99)

Naturally, the first infiltration of European ideas into Russia did not result in the deep questioning of Russia’s ancestral values or modes of living. In reality, they remained untouched, as exposure to European inventions allowed by the Tsar was limited and purely instrumental.3 However, this all changed with the accession of Peter I to the throne; he started a cultural revolution in his country by transforming Russia’s “old and backward” culture by copying the European one. After traveling to Europe under a false name, during which he took numerous jobs, he returned to his country and implemented a series of highly symbolic decisions that showed his disdain for his native culture, such as dressing up in Western clothes, shaving his beard, and distancing himself from the Orthodox Church. However, certainly, his most famous decision is the development of St. Petersburg, which he envisioned as Russia’s window to Europe and whose architecture was borrowed from famous European buildings with the clear aim of Westernizing his people. Orlando Figes wrote the following pertaining to this: St Petersburg was more than a city. It was Russia’s European school, a civilizing project of cultural engineering to reconstruct the Russian as a European citizen. Everything in it was intended to encourage a more Western way of life. Peter told his nobles where to live, how to build their palaces, how to school their children, how to dress and conduct themselves, how to eat and entertain in polite society. A manual of etiquette, The Honorable Mirror of Youth (1717), compiled from Western sources, appeared in many editions over the next fifty years. It advised its readers, among other things, not to ‘spit their food’, nor to ‘use a knife to clean their teeth’, nor ‘blow their nose like a trumpet’. Nothing in this dragooned capital was left to chance. It was administered by the police— in the sense of tight controls on public order and safety, public hygiene, and housing, as well as crime prevention—a system Peter modelled on the French lieutenants-généraux. (2022, p. 114)

Catherine II, for whom Russia was clearly a European state, continued the cultural trajectory; similar to Peter, she founded new cities around Crimea that copied European architecture—Odessa probably being the

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most famous example. Furthermore, it is well known that she entertained closed communication with Europe’s most famous philosophers, namely, Diderot and Voltaire; however, this did not lead her to abolish serfdom or democratize her regime. Nonetheless, the appeal of European cultural values suddenly came to a halt because of two events, namely, the terroristic turn of the French Revolution from 1793 to 1794 and the Napoleonic wars; both had a tremendous impact on Russian Slavophile intellectuals who developed its core ideas, which are all related to the fact that the differences between Russia and the Western world are irremediable. After a century marked by a widely shared belief, among Russian political and intellectual elites, of European universalism and that humanity is destined to be organized around the same civilization, the nineteenth century took the opposite direction not only by adopting the “Huntingtonian” belief that civilizations—Russia being one in itself—are divided into numerous historical-cultural types but also by asserting that Russia had a messianic mission to save the European civilization. In many ways, what was at the core of Slavophilism in the nineteenth century is still present in the contemporary Russian mind and explains why the current clash of Russia with the Western world is not only the result of a security dilemma but also the reaffirmation of a cultural idealism and sense of deep differences with a world understood as being decadent. One cannot comprehend this belief without understanding the central role religion has played throughout Russia’s history and how it has laid the ground for the harsh and uncompromising Slavophile criticisms of European ideals. The origins of the centrality of religion in the Russian mindset can be found in the second half of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries when Moscow was said to be the “third Rome” and was endowed with the political mission of saving the Christian world after the “first two Romes” (Rome and Constantinople) had failed at that mission. After the fall of Constantinople (“Tsargrad” for the Russians; a city to which Russia had been looking for its source of spiritual inspiration) at the hands of the Ottomans in 1453, owing to its inability to remain faithful to the purity of the Christian faith—as presented by many Slavophiles during the nineteenth century—Moscow took over as the sole defender of Orthodoxy, which came with a form of messianism. As it was argued that there would not be a fourth Rome, Moscow was perceived as the last and ultimate shield against heresy, which also explains Russia’s

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uncompromising attitude toward ideas deemed to be un-Christian4 — those that would inevitably lead to an apocalyptic scenario if Moscow was not to fulfill its holy mission. Furthermore, the close historical connection between Moscow and Constantinople, compared with Rome, led to long-lasting impacts on the organization of political power in Russia, which is insignificant compared with that in Western Europe. This was the result of the geographical proximity of the Kievan Rus (the first Eastern Slavic state that encompassed the western part of Russia, today’s Belarus and Ukraine) to the Byzantine empire. This engendered commercial exchanges and treaties at the beginning and then gradually led to more formal political alliances between the two entities, with the most important being the conversion of Grand Prince Vladimir to the Eastern Orthodox Church, in 988.5 One of the consequences of these historical connections was the transformation of the Russian Tsar into the protector of the faith, which allowed him to enjoy significantly more power than his European counterparts. While the Western Christian tradition has been able to operate a strict distinction between the spiritual order and the political one according to Jesus’ words that Christianity ought to “render therefore to Ceasar the things that are Ceasar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” this societal dualism was not a feature of the Eastern Roman empire, which rather adhered to societal monism that privileged a fusion of the spiritual and political orders. As a result of merging these two realities, Constantinople’s political power was “ceasaropapist” in the sense that the “voice of Ceasar” also became the “voice of St Peter,” which was favorable for the establishment of a concentration of power into the hands of one individual who was also considered to be God’s representative on earth. Inevitably, this tradition that was handed down to Russia was reinforced by the Mongol political system of the Golden Horde, which was also known for the concentration of power that granted rulers the property of all the lands and the people living within it—in other words, what is essentially serfdom. Therefore, this legacy of political power coinciding with the spiritual world, combined with the Mongol legacy of autocratic political power,6 enabled the creation of the long-lasting historical myth of “Holy Russia.” This resulted in the normalizing of the practice of a highly vertical form of political power that has largely predominated ever since (with only a few exceptions), with the ruler having absolute power over his subjects, that is, their souls and their properties. This is why so many comparisons have been made between Mongol rule and Russian autocratic history, which

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has prompted individuals to compare Russian leaders with Chingiz Khan.7 For instance, under the reign of Ivan IV (the Terrible), all members of the aristocracy (boyar) had to refer to themselves as “your slave” when addressing him and were not considered to be the actual owners of their lands, which could have been taken away from them by the simple decision of the Tsar if they were not performing their expected duties, such as providing men to the military. In other words, it meant that individuals were able to retain their properties (and pass them on to their sons) insofar as they were fulfilling the Tsar’s will, which was not constrained by any legislation. This system also allowed the Tsar to bestow land (pomeste) on individuals (known as pomeshchiki) who had served him faithfully. Ultimately, such a system was able to fuel the Russian absolutist logic, which initially took its roots in religion. Indeed, no one from the old boyar families had an interest in opposing the Tsar, and pomeshchiki became entirely indebted to him. Inevitably, this absolutism, which lasted until 1917, was not conducive to the development of an independent civil society capable of effectively offsetting and counterbalancing the will of the ruler. The way Vladimir Putin has managed to organize the state’s control over national properties is clearly reminiscent of the system described above. Indeed, the notion of individual property remains a foreign one in the current Russian world. Today’s oligarchs are acting in a way that reminds one of the former boyars; they did not attempt to overthrow Putin after their wealth and property were seized, following the invasion of Ukraine. This is because, rather than being self-made men who own their properties solely owing to their hard work, Russian oligarchs have more in common with pomeshchiki, as they have been given the ability to run state-owned companies by the master of the Kremlin. They are in a certain sense the custodians of the “Tsar’s property,” who effectively owns Russia and its territory as his personal estate, making him one of the (if not the most) richest men in the world.8 In this sense, if, using Western logic, losing one’s yacht may seem as a tragedy, it does not bear the same impact for individuals who have put themselves in a position where they know full well that what they have lost is not really their personal property, but rather something that had been gifted to them, and that their loss will be compensated somehow by their Tsar if they choose to remain faithful to him. The seizing of the oligarchs’ assets, who refused to abide by this logic during Putin’s first years in office, namely, Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is also in line with this system and explains why Putin’s governance is not a historical anachronism in light of how

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Russia has developed over the last 550 years.9 It is the result of a political history that has never made a clear distinction between political power and private property, which explains why the development of liberalism and constitutionalism, as it is known and experienced in the West, has not been successful in Russia (Pipes, 1999). Far from being the outcome of ill-conceived policies or of clumsy politicians, the inability to successfully transplant the democratic seed in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the culturalist thesis lies in the idea that democratization is not a political system that can be exported anywhere. Its successful implementation requires the presence of certain attributes that are closely associated with Western civilization, such as the following: the separation between the church and state; a commitment to individualism and individual rights; and the importance of having intermediary, effective, and diverse bodies between the people and those ruling. When these elements are present within the political culture of a people, the chances of consolidating such a type of regime are higher than when they are absent, which is why according to Samuel Huntington’s assessment, most democratic countries in the 1990s belonged to the Western world or had been influenced by its values and norms through colonialism (1991, p. 299). When considering the manner in which Russia’s political culture developed throughout its modern history, one can justifiably wonder how compatible it was with democracy when it was the last European country to claim autocracy as the backbone of its political system until the twentieth century10 (until 1905, when Tsar Nicholas II allowed for the creation of a parliament, the Duma). To a certain extent, the evolution of democracy in Russia after 1991 shows how Russia’s past has clashed with the Western democratic model. Rather than betting on the establishment of the usual Lockean type of counterpowers typically associated with classical liberalism, the 1993 Russian constitution tilted heavily in favor of the Presidency by granting its holder the right to dissolve the Duma or to adopt a multitude of laws by decree11 —a concentration of power that started before Putin’s rule and simply increased after he came to power. This is an important element to consider when evaluating contemporary Russia’s reactions to the West’s attempts to export its democratic values to Moscow’s neighbors. If these considerations explain to a large extent Russia’s political culture that has prevailed (from the Tsars, then passed on to the Soviet Union, and all the way to Putin’s system) and how it has followed a different path than the one in Western liberal democracies, it must be said that the thesis

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of Russia’s religious messianism and of Moscow as the third Rome has further aggravated the idea of a profound incompatibility between Russia and the rest of Europe—a theme that became dominant under the reign of Tsar Nicholas I in 1825. The anti-European component of Russia’s messianism was largely sparked by a text published in 1836 by Pyotr Chaadaev, entitled “First Philosophical Letter,”—first written in French in 1829, the proper language of a Russian admiring Western European culture, before being translated to Russian a few years later—in which he expressed his despair about the backwardness of Russian culture and praised Peter I for trying to unite Russia with the Western civilization: One of the worst features of our peculiar civilization is that we have not yet discovered truths that have elsewhere become truisms, even among nations that in many respects are far less advanced than we are. It is a result of never having walked hand in hand with other nations; we belong to none of the great families of mankind; we are neither the West nor the East, and we possess the traditions of neither. Somehow divorced from time and space, the universal education of mankind has not touched upon us. (…) At first brutal barbarianism, then crude superstition, then cruel and humiliating foreign domination, the spirit of which was later inherited by our national rulers—such is the sad history of our youth. (…) Our first years, spent in immobile brutishness, have left no traces on our minds, we have nothing that is ours on which to base our thinking. (quoted in Edie, 1976, pp. 109–111)

Immediately arrested and declared insane,12 Chaadaev was severely criticized by those who thought otherwise and saw a uniqueness in Russian culture that deserved to be celebrated, which led the latter to, as it was written by Aleksei Khomiakov, awaken those who had been buried in a deep involuntary sleep (Edie, 1976, p. 102). He undoubtedly played a vital role as a catalyst to the development of nineteenth century Slavophilism which was to a large extent a reaction against Chaadaev’s text (Walicki, 1979, p. 91), with Aleksander Herzen referencing it as “a shot that rang out in the dark night” and a French noble visiting Russia, the Marquis de Custine, saying that it “set Russia in fire” (Grier, 2015, p. 35). The thesis Chaadaev developed in his letters sees the cosmic unity of mankind as being connected with the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy, and as such, is the path that ought to be followed. The egoism of men and nations is therefore perceived as the original sin that simply shatters this unity; it was in Chaadaev’s opinion that the path Russia had

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followed was severing its ties with Rome, with the consequence that its people were left with no meaning to their lives. These pro-Catholic sympathies did not go well with many intellectuals who, instead of elevating Western civilization to such a pedestal with the role of universalizing itself throughout the world, believed that Russia was the only true Christian country in the world, with the West being defined by its paganism. Faithful to the myth of Holy Russia and of Moscow as the third Rome, many authors and intellectuals associated with the Slavophile movement, namely, Nikolai Danilevsky (1822–1885), Leon Tolstoy (1828–1910), and Aleksei Khomiakov (1804–1860), developed the argument that, unlike the rest of Europe, Russia had managed to remain faithful to the true Christian values, which had become constitutive parts of the collective identity of its people. This belief took many directions and emphasized different virtues, depending on the authors. One of them was the belief in the West’s inherent moral necrosis, which was largely perceived to be the result of how its cultural understanding of subjectivity had flourished thanks to its type of Christianism—a core feature of Slavophile thinking. If, as they believed, Orthodoxy had managed throughout its development to maintain the importance of faith, Roman Christianism—whether Catholicism or Protestantism—had succumbed to rationalism to ultimately erase faith and religion as the moral markers of people’s actions. For many Slavophiles, Europe’s emphasis on reason (which defined the Enlightenment, according to Immanuel Kant) led to the sacralization of personal freedom and to an individual’s right to pursue happiness in an extreme way that offset the necessary balance between liberty—which the Slavophiles argued could only lead to individual isolation13 —and the need for some objective truths. For Slavophiles like Ivan Kireyevsky, faith and reason ought to operate as an indissociable wholeness with one another, so that the former can serve as a guiding light for the latter.14 With the sole concern of experiencing personal existence, the Western man gradually forgot about morality for the sake of satisfying his desires and ended up substituting man for God as the repository of all moral principles and where everyone is allowed to create faith for oneself. This individualistic/rationalist pattern led Western Europe to engage in a development path that was entirely different from the one Russia followed, with one emphasizing private property and the other a disdain for unselfish activities. By separating reason from faith, Kireyevsky argued that the Western man had lost his capacity to reflect on anything higher

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than himself, and consequently, only one thing was left as a concern and a way to provide meaning to one’s existence: industry. By engaging themselves in what we might refer to today as “the work paradigm” (Caron, 2023; Susskind, 2018), people can pursue a path that provides meaning only to themselves and that does not require adherence to any higher moral notions. This individual and antisocial belief implies that if a specific path is considered valuable for one person, it does not matter to him if it divides people, creates classes, or leads to war, with the result that altruism and unselfish activities become largely inconceivable (Kireyevsky, 1976, p. 195). This selfish view of mankind clashed with the one the Slavophiles had about the Orthodox way of life, which inevitably also led to a completely different conception of individual personality. For someone like Khomiakov, individual freedom was not supposed to be antagonistic to unity, as prescribed in Western credo. On the contrary, and this is where his concept of sobornost lies, the Orthodox conception of freedom was rather indistinguishable from the collective in a way that competition was never supposed to be allowed at the expense of interpersonal cooperation. Referring to the idea of an assembly of people and, by way of extension, a church, this idea was in Khomiakov’s view, setting Orthodox apart from Western Christianity. According to him, while the Roman Catholic Church had adopted a highly hierarchical internal dynamic between believers and the institution itself (with the pope at its head)—which implied that the docility of the former created a mechanistic and lifeless relation to faith that was simply condemned to be lost—Protestantism took the other path, empowering believers by freeing them from the institutional hierarchy, at the expense of unity. His idea of sobornost , which took its full measure at the level of peasant communes (the obshchina, which has also been referred to as mir), allowed Orthodox to remain closely connected with the original message of Christianity by placing love at the center of its belief, thereby allowing people to find a moral purpose by being part of a collective—a principle unknown at the time (and even more nowadays) in Western societies.15 More precisely, because private property was an unknown notion to Russia (for the reasons I have already given), Khomiakov saw the potential to operate through a third way of life and organize communal life different from Protestant individualism and the authoritarian Roman Catholic Church. This was by allowing obshchinas to be governed by their members themselves, who had already developed the habit of unanimously agreeing on allocating the land according to the changing needs of families,16

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thereby making the Russian people alien to greed and selfishness and more able to uphold moral considerations in matters of property. For him, the Western Christian Church had committed nothing less than a sin by willfully rejecting the principle of sobornost —the turning point in the history of Christianity and the main difference between Russia and the Western world. In this sense, similar to other Slavophiles, such as Konstantin Aksakov, Khomiakov saw the true spirit of the Russian soul in the people themselves rather than its elite, who were held in suspicion after they had fallen victim to Western values owing to the Westernization efforts of Peter and Catherine, as well as the handful of high-rank aristocratic officers of the Russian army who, after occupying Paris in 1814 and having been exposed to the Western way of life and ideas, had the impression upon their return of Russia returning to a prehistoric past. It is these reformist officers who staged a short-lived revolution in December 1825—the reason their actors are known as the Decembrists, with Colonel Pavel Pestel being their leader—which advocated for the establishment of a republic and a deep reform of the Russian state in line with the path of Western Europe. For the Slavophiles, these individuals, who had opted to simply imitate Western civilization (and who, as a consequence, had become alienated from their own culture, which they could only perceive as being backward), had become estranged from the genuine Russian soul that found its most admirative form in the sobornost , which was able—unlike in the European civilization—to elevate people’s consciousness to an organic unity between life and community and to fundamental moral truths that are inaccessible to individualistic arbitrariness and egoistic calculations that can only be indifferent to the needs of others (Lavrin, 1964, pp. 42–43).17 This assessment of Western civilization led Kireyevsky (who was very close to Khomiakov) to develop the fundamental conviction that mankind had entered a new historical stage. He believed this would bring the completion of the spiritual history of the human race, a spiritual Enlightenment—which the Slavophiles called “prosveshchenie”—that would be led by Russia insofar as its people would dare, looking at their culture not through Western lenses that could only result in seeing it with contempt, but with pride as a distinctive yet superior path to societal development (Koyré, 1929, pp. 239, 243). Another consequence of the dissociation of faith from the meaning of life has been, in the eyes of many Slavophiles, the growing moral decadence of the West. In this regard, promiscuity and loose sexuality are presented as clear manifestations of paganism and symbols of Western

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culture. This was a way for the Slavophiles to attack the Westernizing attempts of Peter I and Catherine II—who were both known for their dissolute sexual behavior,18 as well as the members of the aristocracy who had fell victim of the disease of sexual debauchery when they returned to Russia as “real swine” (Shlapentokh, 2009, p. 17) after they had spent time in Europe. It also allowed them to theorize the idea that the Western world’s inherent violence was caused by the vices of sexuality. Nikolai Fedorov (1828–1903), an eccentric Moscow librarian who remains one of the most well-known figures in Russian intellectual history,19 is especially famous for having made such claims and exerted a significant influence on Tolstoy and Dostoievsky. According to him, sexual depravation was the extreme manifestation of a deeper problem of Western civilization, namely, the atrophy of its religious consciousness and its emphasis on individualism. Furthermore, the only possible outcome was an endless and insatiable Epicurian lust, as the liberal ideal of everybody being able to live their lives according to personal inclinations could only engender discord and chaos. For Fedorov, the French Revolution’s triad of liberty, equality, and fraternity was simply logical non-sense and self-contradictory, as “liberty for all to follow their personal inclinations and envious equality could engender only discord and not fraternity” (1990, p. 14). These beliefs contributed to establishing the basic cultural themes of the opposition between a rational, individualistic, and materialistic West, against the more spiritual East during the nineteenth century; these themes are still present today in political rhetoric and as core determinants of Russian foreign policy (but more on that later). The idea of cultural incompatibility between the Western and Russian civilizations is largely perceivable in nineteenth century Russian literature, namely, by Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), and Tolstoy. Gogol’s desire for faith led him to praise Orthodoxy and the Russian soul as the only option to save Christianity, which consequently caused him to believe that Russia had a divine civilizational mission for humanity (Duncan, 2000, p. 21; Figes, 2022, pp. 142–143). Even though he never declared himself a Slavophile, he nonetheless gravitated around the current’s main protagonists. Dostoevsky’s assessment of the Western world was also highly critical and followed the footsteps of the Slavophiles’ viewpoint,20 namely, its secularization that culminated in the loss of God and the ending of morality through the emergence of an ideal of man-God. Not only is this quite clear in The Devils with the character of Kirillov but also by Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, who

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believes that everything is permitted, as God does not exist. In return, and similar to Gogol, we can see in Dostoevsky’s work that he praises characters—for example, Shatov in The Devils —who have remained close to the Orthodox values of the Russian soul. This view is further reinforced by what he wrote in his Diaries between 1876 and 1877. In it, he clearly expressed the hope that Russia could somehow bring an end to Papal Catholicism and “cure” the European civilization by bringing to the world her own values (Duncan, 2000, p. 34; Vladiv-Glover, 2022). It was clear in Dostoevsky’s mind that discussing Russia’s uniqueness inevitably came with evoking its future contribution to the world—a contribution that would lead it to show the proper spiritual path to save humanity. From this perspective, he wrote the following: The future Russian Idea is not yet born but the entire earth awaits it in pain and suffering. (…) I make no attempt to compare Russia with the Western nations in the matter of economic and scientific renown. I only say that the Russian people are perhaps among all nations the most capable of upholding the ideal of [the] universal union of mankind, brotherly love, [and] the calm conception [that] forgives contrasts. This is not an economic, but a moral trait. (quoted in Lavrin, 1964, p. 44)

We could also add to the list Tolstoy’s War and Peace, in which the description of Russia’s wars with Napoleon provides an account of the moral distinctiveness of the Russian soul, compared to the West, that is meeker and not inclined to cruelty and violence. This contrast of inherent violence was, according to Fedorov and Fedor Bulgakov, the result of Europe’s “demonic sexuality.” Tolstoy followed a different path in his explanation of Europe’s inherent cruelty, believing that it was the natural outcome of European men’s personal vanity and quest for recognition that made them indifferent to other people’s suffering. For Tolstoy, this instrumental attitude toward other human beings led Napoleon to use his soldiers only for the sake of his own personal glory even if it meant throwing them mercilessly into the “meat grinder.” This view, which was also shared by Nikolai Danilevsky who believed that the irrational quest for honors in the Western world manifested itself through violence and war, trickled down all the way to Napoleon’s marshals and men. This is summarized by Dmitry Shlapentokh as follows:

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Before crossing the Neman, which divided Russia from the Napoleonic empire, the Emperor gave several routine orders, among them the execution of one of his soldiers. In sandwiching a death sentence between two administrative orders, Napoleon demonstrated his indifference to human life. Napoleon also showed his cruelty through his mass execution order of innocent people who allegedly committed arson in Moscow. In describing details of the execution, Tolstoy illustrated not only the cruelty of the action but [also] the cruelty of those endorsing [it]. Napoleon’s cruelty was further demonstrated by the harsh conditions under which the Russians were held captive, and by their executions, such as that of Platon Karataev. (…) Napoleon’s marshals epitomized the cruel and bellicose spirit of Western man and behaved accordingly. They enjoyed their power and liked to demonstrate it to the Russian’s messenger—a hopeless man in the midst of the enemy. Soldiers of the French army also enjoyed war and eagerly exercised their aggressive valor. (2009, p. 29)

In return, Tolstoy described Russian soldiers as compassionate, foreign to cruelty (or, when they did practice cruelty, it was immediately followed by strong guilt), and willing to resort to violence only as a means of self-defense and never for aggressive purposes. This civilizational clash between the two alien entities did not remain a mere theoretical idea within the philosophical and literary circles of the time. On the contrary, the defense of Orthodoxy—fueled by the thesis of Russia’s messianism and the inherent decadence of the Western world—became a key feature of the foreign policy of Tsar Nicholas I (1796–1855) and played a vital role in triggering the Crimean War (1853–1856), which sheds additional light on the latter point on Russia’s resort to violence. This war, which resulted from Russia’s demands to protect Orthodox subjects in the Ottoman empire, as well as control over churches in the Holy Lands, was perceived by the Tsar and Slavophiles—like Kireyevsky and Khomiakov—as a Holy War against the Turks and Western powers, and not as an aggressive war of expansion. In line with the myth of Russia’s meekness and opposition to violence, it was considered a purely defensive action against a different civilization that had been progressively extending its tentacles eastward to the point of knocking on Russia’s doorstep. It is this logic that prompted Russia to intervene in Poland in 1831 after the Poles revolted against Russian power; in 1848–1849 in Moldova, Wallachia; and in Hungary, when similar revolutionary movements established short-lived democratic republics animated by ideals of the Enlightenment Revolution.

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Largely influenced by Slavophiles like Danilevsky, the understanding of this conflict echoed what Samuel Huntington wrote 150 years later. In his work Russia and Europe (1869), Danilevsky argued that mankind was divided into different cultural civilizations that were incompatible with one another. Europe contained two of them, namely, the RomanGermanic type of civilization in its western part and the Slavonic type on its eastern borders (with the latter destined to triumph over the former). Philip T. Grier summarized this tension as follows: Such a conception of human history was directly opposed to the universalism of Hegel’s philosophy of history, according to which there was but a single underlying pattern of development that was effectively the story of the emergence of humanity as a whole. Instead, Danilevsky insisted that there was a plurality of distinct ‘humanities’ and no single pattern of civilization common to them all. Each distinct civilizational grouping was a fundamentally distinct form of human existence, unfolding according to its own internal dynamic and values, undergoing successive periods of births, youth, maturation, decay, and death over centuries or millennia. There was no common yardstick of ‘human’ or ‘historical’ value upon which the success and failure of separate civilizations could be compared and evaluated—save perhaps in terms of clash of arms. The independence of each cultural-historical civilization from the others implied that, among other things, the cultural values and standards of {Western} European civilization (the ‘Romano-Germanic civilization’) were of no relevance to the Slavic civilization. Thus, he dismissed Eurocentrism as an irrelevant stance for Russian intellectuals. (2015, p. 59)

For Danilevksy and other Slavophiles, like Mikhail Pogodin (1800– 1875), the founding editor of the influential journal Moskvitianin, who also exerted significant influence on Nicholas I, the way Western powers were behaving together and how they were opposing Russia’s geostrategic concerns clearly proved the civilizational clash with Europe. More precisely, it was clear from the Slavophile view that the European powers of that time viewed themselves as the only ones allowed to expand their civilization, which was deemed in their eyes to be superior to others, thereby denying Russia the right to create and lead a panSlav union. Reminiscent of Putin’s criticism of the United States and its Western allies, Pogodin exposed in a famous memorandum that he sent to the Tsar in 1853 the double standards of the West—a sign of its self-perceived moral superiority that allowed its members the freedom

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to perform certain actions that it denied to others. He complained that whenever the West conquered or annexed another territory, this was not perceived as a problem. However, when Russia did so (even temporarily), they condemn it by arguing that it disrupts the balance of power. The West has also given itself the right to declare war on other nations or to threaten the use of force, while Russia needs to ask permission to do so. Whenever Russia makes demands to protect its religious subjects abroad, this is always perceived by the West as a dangerous policy. In contrast, the West considers the aim of its own expansionism to spread superior values. These double standards were seen as the reflection of the West’s propensity to own the monopoly over moral matters, which was accompanied, at that time, by various publications discussing the “Russian menace” and Russia’s hostility to European values, while those who opposed Russia in Eastern Europe in 1830–1831 and 1848–1849 were hailed as freedom fighters. Needless to say, Russia’s defeat at the end of the Crimean War added insult to injury in the eyes of many, as it was the first time in European history that a state was forced to disarm itself.21 This illustrated to many Russians that their being denied a typical tradition among Western powers simply meant that they were not considered Europeans, but rather some sort of barbarian or uncivilized nation.22 Even if we may think that the legacy of Slavophilism was erased in the nineteenth century by European-born ideologies—namely, Socialism and Marxism—and that Bolshevism represented the triumph of Westernization over Russia’s unique culture,23 this belief would be largely misleading. In fact, one of the Slavophiles’ most important ideas—namely, the spirit of obshchina—played a fundamental role in the emergence of a Russian form of Bolshevism, which was significantly different from the theory that Marx and Engels had developed. As a reminder, based on historical materialism, Marxism set out a dialectical vision of history according to which every societal organization is based on a dialectic between the oppressed and the oppressors, which can only lead to its collapse when this system of exploitation reaches its systemic limitations, thereby leading to a new opposition between the two new social classes. For Marx and Engels, capitalism was the ultimate system of oppression and was destined to collapse because of the bourgeois’ greed and systemic contradictions (namely, the crisis of overproduction), leading to the emergence of a classless and equal society that would self-regulate freely according to its needs and that would not require any oppressive forms of state institutions. In their minds, the process leading to this

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new utopia was supposed to be participatory and the result of workers banding together. Inevitably, Communism was supposed to appear, first and foremost, in the most advanced capitalist societies; therefore, they did not consider Russia ready to lead that revolution. For them, it was too rural, had basically no urban proletariat, and was too autocratic— what Marx called a tradition of “Asiatic despotism” and Engels “oriental despotism,” two features that were preventing Russia from being able to witness a grassroot workers’ movement strong enough to overthrow capitalism (Engels, 1978, p. 672; Marx, 1978, p. 23). However, Russian Bolshevism followed a unique path owing to its unique history and peasant ideology. At the time, Tsar Alexander II— who succeeded his father, Nicholas I, in 1855—launched reforms in the early 1860s; the uniquely Russian spirit of obshchina was praised by numerous individuals associated with what is known as the “Populists” or the “Narodniks ” and who saw in this socio-political model of organization—and, instrumentally, the peasants—the basis and vehicles for the establishment of a very unique form of agrarian socialism (Herzen, 1851). This ideological position, which dominated at the end of the nineteenth century, evolved into the first socialist political movement in Russia, with its intelligentsia admiring the Russian people (narod) as the true bearers of the socialist ideal24 in an attempt to lead Russia onto a path of development that was different from Western Europe. However, after a short-lived attempt on their part to “go directly to the people” to enlighten them, the movement took a more hierarchical twist with its leaders assuming the sole responsibility of fomenting a revolution that, once triggered, would inevitably lead the peasants to join their cause. Put forward by Petr Tkachev, this theory of a top-down revolution had the same impact in Lenin’s view of Bolshevism as Marx’s work (Figes, 2022, p. 162), which is why he adapted Marx’s Orthodox logic to the peculiarities of Russia and its culture by including the peasants in his revolutionary logic, as well as the Narodniks ’ programmatic change based on the need for centralized violence led by intellectuals (which led to Lenin’s theory of the “Vanguard”). As we now know, the outcome of Lenin’s stepping away from Marx and Engels’ idealism led to his inorganic revolution to simply replace the former repressive tsarist system with a new one (an authoritarian state that Stalin elevated to new heights of cruelty and mass domination). However, considering Russia’s autocratic legacy, which has already been discussed, this outcome—which Marx and Engels foresaw—was hardly surprising.

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What I wish to emphasize through this evolution of Russia to the Soviet Union is the fact that the former’s messianism and its anti-Western opposition were simply transferred—what I call the “transfer theory”—to the new political entity.25 Instead of emphasizing the same uniqueness that comprised the Slavophile mantra (it would have been impossible, as Bolshevism destroyed the spirit of obshchina), Lenin and his successors maintained the previous mental construction of Russia’s—now the USSR’s—role of being an alternative to the West. This was achieved by creating an eschatological belief that their Russian-made Marxism was the realization of heaven on earth, with Russia being the creator of a fairer and more just society destined to provide the world with an alternative—a mission that encompassed the necessity to oppose the hegemony of the West. Ultimately, the old logic that the Slavophiles instituted was preserved; only the manner in which Russia was said to differ from the Western world—and in a superior manner, according to Soviet ideologists like Andrei Zhdanov—took another form.26 To use a metaphor, the communist authorities simply poured new wine into old bottles. Therefore, we can actually view the Bolshevik revolution more as a cultural continuity that took a different ideological form than as a fundamental rupture with Russia’s past.27 Overall, we often tend to see the historical opposition between Russia and the Western world through the lens of the ideological battle of the Cold War. However, this way of interpreting this relationship is shortsighted and neglects to fully accept that the inherent civilizational divide between Russia and the West is not only ideological but also cultural. Therefore, the battle between communism and liberalism that occurred between 1945 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was simply one manifestation of a broader trend that started many decades before the 1917 October Revolution—a trend that greatly influenced how Russian communism was shaped. With this in mind, what has been a guiding principle in the Russian collective psyche that their country is a civilizational entity irremediably distinct from the West can provide a broader sense of how Russia’s foreign policy has been shaped in the last 20 years in its opposition to the Western world and unwillingness and inability to embrace liberalism and the new world order. This will be explored in the next chapter by showing how the cultural opposition has, to a large extent, co-extended the geostrategic tensions that have made Mearsheimer’s assessment so appealing.

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Notes 1. He wrote in his 1987 book entitled Perestroika that “We [meaning the Russian people] are Europeans” (p. 191). 2. This is why Kundera argued in his text that the crushing of the Budapest uprisal against the Soviet rule was not only an attack of Russia against Hungary but also against Europe itself. For him, Europe does not represent a simple geographic space, but rather a spiritual notion defined primarily by its Roman Christian heritage. This rhetoric is similar to the one we have become accustomed to since the start of the war in Ukraine. 3. As Orlando Figes writes, “These were superficial signs of European influence—the mere borrowing of social customs and luxuries as markers of ‘civilisation’ without any meaningful change in Russian sensibilities or attitudes. A deeply pious man, Alexei favoured this limited exposure to Western ways. He thought that as long as Russia could import what it needed from Europe (first and foremost military weapons and technologies), it would not need to learn the science that had created them, nor give up its [religious] beliefs” (2022, p. 100). 4. Russian historiography famously remembers the letter Filofei, a monk from the Pskov monastery, wrote in 1511 to Tsar Vasily III: “The Church of old Rome fell because of the impiety of the Appollinarian heresy; the church of the Second Rome, Constantinople, was smitten under the battle-axes of the Agarenes; but this present Church of the Third, New Rome, of Thy sovereign empire: the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church (…) shines in the whole universe more resplendent than the sun. And let it be known to Thy Lordship, O pious Czar, that all the empires of the Orthodox Christian Faith have converged into Thine one empire. Thou art the sole Emperor of all the Christians in the whole universe (…). For two Romes have fallen, and the Third stands, and a fourth shall never be, for Thy Christian Empire shall never devolve upon others” (Tourmanoff, 1955, p. 438). 5. We can also not ignore the fact that the domination of the Golden Horde over a significant part of today’s Russia and Ukraine (it is estimated that 2/3 of the Kievan Rus’ towns were destroyed), which lasted almost 250 years until the beginning of the sixteenth

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century, also contributed to severe the ties and create an “Iron curtain” between Russia and Western European culture. A fundamental legacy the Mongols left on Russia according to George Vernadsky (1953). As Orlando Figes recalls, Tsar Nicholas 1 was compared to “Chingiz Khan with a telegraph,” while Bolchevik leader Nikolai Bukharin said the same about Stalin (Chingiz Khan with a telephone) (2022, p. 53). His assets have been estimated at more than £200 billion. The pomeste system was introduced in 1478 and is derived from the Mongol rule over the Kievan Rus. To quote Figes again, “Moscow’s princes emulated the behaviour of the khans when they drove them out of Russia and succeeded them as tsars. The khans had demanded, and mercilessly enforced, complete submission to their will from all classes of society—a principle continued by the Russian Tsars. Along with the khan’s despotic power came the idea of their ownership of all the land, an idea that the Mongols took from the Chinese. By the fourteenth century, this ideology of ownership also entered Muscovy. It reinforced the patrimonial principle of princely power inherited from Kievan Rus. Now, more than before, the power of the state was invested in the person of the Tsar as the lord or sovereign owner of the land. Like the Mongol khans, the grand prince claimed the domain he ruled as his household property. He was free to give his land (along with the dues owed by the peasants on it) to his servitors; and free to take it from them if they displeased him. Whereas previously, in Kievan Rus, the boyars owned their land as private property, which they kept if they left the service of the prince, henceforth they were deemed to own their land on condition of their service to the prince. They lost it when they left him. Here was the fundamental weakness of the Russian aristocracy. The most senior boyar clans—those who were closest through marriage or royal favour to the Moscow court— formed an oligarchic ruling class, which at times, when the grand prince was weak, might direct his government. But their wealth and power came from him. They kept them only for as long as they retained his protection. It was a system of dependency upon the ruler that has lasted to this day. Putin’s oligarchs are totally dependent on his will” (Figes, 2022, pp. 53–54).

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10. Even adored Russian writers in the West like Dostoevsky openly expressed their belief in the autocratic nature of the Russian psyche. Shortly before his death, he wrote “To the people, the Tsar is the incarnation of themselves, their whole ideology, their hopes and beliefs” (quoted in Hirsh, 2022). 11. As another sign of the weight of autocratic rule, we should also not forget that the Fall of 1993 witnessed tensions between Yeltsin and the legislative assembly that led the former to declare a state of emergency and to order the troops to fire on the building (the “White House”) where the legislators had taken refuge. This was the third time since the beginning of the twentieth century that force was used by the Russian government against its legislative assembly (the first time being in 1906, and the second time in 1917). 12. The individual who approved the text for publication, the Rector of Moscow’s University, was fired and deprived of his pension, while the editor of the journal was exiled in Northern Russia for two years. Of course, the journal was also permanently suspended. 13. This was Ivan Kireyevsky’s view, which he expressed in 1838 in his “Answer to Khomiakov.” 14. As he writes, “For the Orthodox thinking person, the teaching of the Church is not an empty mirror which reflects the features of each personality; it is not a Procrustean bed which deforms living personalities according to one arbitrary yearstick. It is rather the highest ideal toward which believing reason alone can aspire, the ultimate limit to the highest kind of thought, the guiding star which burns on high and, finding reflection in the heart, lights up the path to truth for reason” (in Edie, 1976, p. 198). 15. Despite having fundamental importance in his work, Khomiakov only provided one explicit definition of this notion in his voluminous writings, namely, in his “Letter to the Editor of L’Union Chrétienne Concerning the Meaning of the Words: ‘Catholic’ and ‘sobornyi’, with Special Reference to the Speech of the Jesuit Father Gagarin” published in 1860. He wrote: “Sobor expresses the idea of a gathering not only in the sense of an actual, visible union of many in a given place but also in the more general sense of the continual possibility of such a union; in other words, it expresses the idea of unity in multiplicity” (quoted in Riasanovsky, 1955, pp. 183–184).

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16. Figes summarizes the spirit of obshchina in the following manner: “[The obshchina was] the basic unit of administration in the countryside. The mir, as it was called, a word that also means ‘world’ and ‘universe’, regulated every aspect of the peasants’ lives: it decided the rotation of the crops (the open-field system of strip farming necessitated uniformity); took care of the woods and pasture lands; saw to the repair of roads and bridges; established welfare schemes for widows and the poor; organized the payment of redemption dues and taxes; fulfilled the conscription of soldiers; maintained public order; and enforced justice through customary law” (2022, pp. 156–157). 17. Inevitably, this belief led Khomyakov to share the belief of Russia as having a Holy mission. As summarized by Janko Lavrin, “In spite of Europe’s stupendous quantitative achievements, qualitatively, Russia was supposed to be superior to her, since the direction in which Russia was going was the right one. Hence, it was not for Europe to guide Russia but the other way round. The materialistic West was in fact doomed to perdition, unless Russia revealed and imparted to it the essential Orthodox-Christian spirit, the spirit of universal love and brotherhood. Such was in fact Russia’s historical mission as cherished by Khomyakov and the early Slavophiles” (1964, p. 44). 18. If Peter was known for organizing drunken orgies, Catherine was for her part known for having had many lovers. The most persistent sexual myth about her is certainly that she was crushed to death by a horse with whom she was having sex. 19. In his obituary, he was referred to as “Moscow’s Socrates” (Young, 2012, p. 51). 20. Dostoevsky was highly critical of whom he called the “Europeanized” Russians and was opposed to the need for and the existence of a “European education” (“net y nac evpopeNckogo obpazovaniR”) (Vladiv-Glover, 2022). 21. According to the peace treaty, Russia had to dismantle its Black Sea fleet. 22. China was subjected to the same policy after the First Opium War. 23. In a way, this is what a “revolution” entails according to Karl Popper. This is a common belief that Bolshevism had led to a complete repudiation of the past, a spirit that was symbolized by poet Vladimir Maykovsky (1893–1930), who wrote the following:

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Enough of living by laws That Adam and Eve have left Hustle old history’s horse Left! Left! Left!

24. Alexander Herzen wrote the following in 1849: “The peasant commune is everything in Russia. It is the key to Russia’s past, it is the germ of her future, [and] it is the vital nomad of the Russian state. Each peasant commune in Russia is a tiny republic that manages its own affairs, that knows neither private property nor proletariat, that has long since made some of the features of the socialist Utopias established facts. These people cannot live otherwise, and have never lived otherwise” (quoted in Schwarz, 1955, p. 43). 25. It also led the Soviet authorities to copy in many regards the former tsarist institutions. Apart from the authoritarian nature of the regime (Stalin was famous for having said that “the Russians need a Tsar”), the Soviet reward system that elevated the individuals who were faithful to the regime largely resembled the previous one (mestnichestvo) in which princes and boyars were granted favors and land for their service and dedication to the ruler, while the collective farm system (kolkhoz) tied peasants to where they were through a system of internal passports, which reminded them of serfdom. 26. The old Slavophile mantra that Russia was destined to save Europe and that its people were inhabited by a strong feeling of sacrifice for this cause was recycled by the Soviet authorities—the idea that Russia’s messianism could not spare the belief that Russia had to suffer to protect Europe from “barbarianism.” For instance, Aleksandr Pushkin believed it is only owing to Russian blood and sacrifice that Europe was spared the Mongol hordes. Inevitably, the huge sacrifice the Soviet Union had to undergo during the Second World War became the equivalent example for Stalin and the collective Russian psyche after 1945 (Barghoorn, 1955, pp. 540–541). In fact, the USSR’s victory over fascism is still today the most

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commonly used example in Russia to show that the country has a messianic role that no other country can fulfill. 27. Even regarding the controversial role of religion in Marxism, the Russian communist experience showed how it departed from the Marxist orthodoxy. While Lenin’s antipathy for religion was undeniable, as he imprisoned and killed many priests and believers after the October revolution (he also had the Patriarch of Moscow arrested in 1922), WWII helped the Orthodox Church to regain its past role and combined religious ideas with the communist ones, that is, in 1947 at the occasion of the 800th anniversary of the founding of Moscow when the city was once again presented as the “chosen one” and as the “Third Rome” (Duncan, 2000, pp. 58–60).

References Barghoorn, F. C. (1955). Great Russian Messianism in Postwar Soviet Ideology. In E. J. Simmons (Ed.), Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought (pp. 531–549). Harvard University Press. Bova, R. (2015). Russia and Western Civilization. Routledge. Caron, J.-F. (2023). Fear and the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Liberticidal Virus. Routledge. Duncan, P. J. S. (2000). Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After. Routledge. Edie, J. M. (1976). Russian Philosophy. University of Tennessee Press. Engels, F. (1978). On Social Relations in Russia. In R. C. Tucker (Ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed., pp. 665–675). Norton. Fedorov, N. (1990). What Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task. L’Âge d’Homme. Figes, O. (2022). The Story of Russia. Bloomsbury. Gorbachev, M. (1987). Perestroika. Harper and Row. Grier, P. T. (2015). The Russian Idea and the West. In R. Bova (Ed.), Russia and Western Civilization (pp. 23–77). Routledge. Herzen, A. I. (1851, September 22). Le peuple russe et le socialisme. Hirsh, M. (2022). Putin’s Thousand-Year War. Foreign Policy, March 12. Huntington, S. (1991). The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century. University of Oklahoma Press.

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Kireyevsky, I. (1976). On the Necessity and Possibility of New Principles in Philosophy. In J. M. Edie (Ed.), Russian Philosophy (pp. 171–213). University of Tennessee Press. Koyré, A. (1929). La philosophie et le problème national en Russie au début du XIXème siècle. Gallimard. Kundera, M. (1984). The Tragedy of Central Europe. New York Review of Books, 31(7), 33–38. Lavrin, J. (1964). Khomyakov and the Slavs. The Russian Review, 23(1), 35–48. Marx, K. (1978). Contribution to the Philosophy of Hegel. In R. C. Tucker (Ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed., pp. 16–25). Norton. Pipes, R. (1999). Property and Freedom. Knopf. Riasanovsky, N. V. (1955). Khomiakov on Sobornost. In E. J. Simmons (Ed.), Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought (pp. 183–196). Harvard University Press. Schwarz, S. M. (1955). Populism and Early Russian Marxism on Ways of Economic Development of Russia (the 1880’s and 1890’s). In E. J. Simmons (Ed.), Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought (pp. 40–62). Harvard University Press. Shlapentokh, D. (2009). The French Revolution in Russian Intellectual Life: 1865–1905. Routledge. Susskind, J. (2018). Future Politics. Oxford University Press. Tourmanoff, C. (1955). Moscow the Third Rome: Genesis and Significance of a Politico-Religious Idea. Catholic Historical Review, 40(4), 411–447. Toynbee, A. (1948). Civilization on Trial. Oxford University Press. Vernadsky, G. (1953). The Mongols and Russia, Vol. 3: A History of Russia. Yale University Press. Vladiv-Glover, S. M. (2022). Dostoyevsky’s View of Russian History and Assimilation of Hegel’s Concept of ‘Spirit.’ The Dostoyevsky Journal, 23(1), 75–89. Walicki, A. (1979). A History of Russian Thought From the Enlightenment to Marxism. Stanford University Press. Young, G. M. (2012). The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Russia’s Foreign Policy and Its Civilizational Shift

Abstract This chapter discusses the evolution of Russia’s foreign policy from 1991 until Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 by emphasizing the role played by its three main currents, namely Westernism, Statism, and Civilizationism. It shows how the first two dimensions have lost their importance starting from 2011 and how the latter is now the dominant one framing Russia’s foreign policy. Keywords Russia’s Foreign Policy · Vladimir Putin · Boris Yeltsin · Civilizationism

If it is possible to identify continuity between the pre-1917 world and Russian communism, the same can be said of the post-1991 world, as many core beliefs about Russia’s exceptionalism that were developed in the nineteenth century—and that influenced Russian bolshevism and kept playing a political and social role from 1917 until the collapse of the Soviet Union—are still present in contemporary Russia. The consequences of Russia’s autobiographical narrative anchored durably in its belief in messianism, which is necessarily opposed to the West, are not trivial at all. On the contrary, as argued by Henrikki Heikka (1999), the construction of Russia’s subjectivity around this opposition has become a central tenant of the cultural process of the Moscow-led nation-building © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Caron, Putin’s War and the Re-Opening of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8167-0_4

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strategy and has now strongly impregnated people’s minds. Therefore, rather than seeing the status of the current relations between Russia and the Western world as a result of the latter’s geostrategic frustrations with the evolution of the world order, we ought to consider the possibility that it is the natural outcome of the inability of the two different civilizations to understand each other and develop common policies. This can only be fueled by the fact that Western and Russian exceptionalisms fundamentally clash with one another. Indeed, what has been at the heart of Russia’s foreign policy under Putin’s reign has been a gradual return to the Slavophile legacy, while that advocated by the West—following Fukuyama’s logic of the end of history—has taken the form of a progressive crusade destined to extend freedom throughout the world; this can only directly clash with the former type of exceptionalism, which is inherently conservative by nature. From this perspective, clashes are all but inevitable between a “shield bearer” form of messianism and one that has opted for a “crusader” role (Curanovic, 2021, p. 82), which implies the development of a strong and decisive foreign policy destined to assert America’s moral leadership through proactive actions abroad. This will be discussed in this chapter. ∗ ∗ ∗ We often think of the first few years that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union as a period when the ideas of liberal Westernization were dominant in Russia. As I have argued, Yeltsin’s attempts to modernize Russia by embracing the liberal creed were indeed obvious and genuine. Backed by his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andrei Kozyrev, Yeltsin pushed to establish an external policy around the pillars of liberalism and to re-shift Russia’s national identity, in which Russia was presented as an organic part of Western civilization. As a sign of this integration of Russia into the Western world, we note that none of the presidential “Addresses to the Federal Assembly” from 1994 until 1999 included any reference to Russia having a distinctive civilizational identity (Curanovic, 2021, p. 133). However, despite Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis popularizing the self-congratulatory and triumphant mood of that time (especially in the West)—as seen in Yeltsin’s strategy, that is, the clear signs that the world was finally moving toward liberal convergence (Tsygankov, 2019, p. 58)—it would be a mistake to ignore how this direction was contested by individuals and currents who were not eager to see Russia’s identity

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being defined by an ideology that was presented for almost two centuries as the antithesis of what was at the heart of Russian national identity.1 Westernizers believed that the Bolshevik revolution suppressed Russia’s natural evolution toward liberalism and Western identity appeared as an artificially created one that had no real weight in Russian collective psyche. This explains why it did not take a decade or the accession of Putin to the Russian presidency for this approach to be severely criticized by members of the Russian intelligentsia and political elite, whose views of Russia were simply not those of a state deprived of its uniqueness and as being fully integrated within the Western melting pot. As it was argued by Alicja Curanovic, “The ‘liberal-internationalism’ promoted by Kozyrev did not pass the test of ‘historical fitness’ and was rejected by society as being inauthentic and un-Russian” (2021, p. 106) and only lasted the length of a song before being gradually marginalized as a viable option for Russia concerning its foreign policy. Helped by the rapid deterioration of the standards of living and the failure of liberal shock therapy, the Russian people quickly became disillusioned with their government’s pro-Western strategy, which was perceived as weakening Russia,2 and developed a growing resentment toward the West. At the electoral level, they were mainly the former communists led by Gennadi Zyuganov, the nationalists organized around the late Vladimir Zhirinovski, and those known as the “statists” behind Yevgeni Primakov. Owing to the extreme views they held, the first two groups, who defended a strong civilizationist view of Russia as a unique civilization that had to sever its ties with the Western world to maintain its uniqueness, were quickly eclipsed by the latter, who shared a less assertive view of what Russia’s interests had to be. This statist view held that power, stability, and the preservation of Russia’s sovereignty had to take precedence over establishing democracy and individual freedom. It became an integral part of Russia’s foreign policy after Kozyrev was ousted from his position and replaced by Primakov, who ended up playing a fundamental role—first as Minister of Foreign Affairs (1996–1998) and then as Yeltsin’s Prime minister (1998–1999). This has led Russia to focus primarily on the development of its economy and military capabilities to re-establish itself as a great power. Although statism was not inherently anti-Western, one of its main premises was the fact that the previous Westernist approach was not only undermining Russia’s statehood but also that the West had no intention of accepting Russia as an equal ally. The different waves of NATO’s expansion described in the first chapter give weight to this

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belief. However, these expansions may also have been partly driven by Primakov’s insistence on redefining Russia’s national interests in terms of becoming a great Eurasian power. This led him to re-establish economic ties with the former Soviet republics, thereby giving the impression of a renewed form of Russian imperialism, which was perceived in the West as a potential threat. Just like any other vicious circle, it led to an acceleration in the popularity of the statist approach and its perception of the right path to follow. Considering national identity, it is clear that statism was a better fit than Westernism, which is why it had a better reception among the elite and the Russian people. This perception was also sustained by the statist logic leading Russia to start paying closer attention to its neighbors in Eurasia, which fueled the civilizationist view of their country, embracing a civilization that was closer to its national credo and able to counterbalance the civilizational dominance of the West. Primakov’s exit from political life in 1999 coincided with Putin’s rise to Prime minister and then President, following Yeltsin’s resignation from the position. Putin remained faithful to Primakov’s statist views and his desire to make Russia a great power again. However, unlike him, the foreign policy Putin developed at the turn of the millennium was more pragmatic, which explains why it was more open to the West. As he explained in his December 30, 1999, speech “Russia at the turn of the millennium,” the country was still far from having achieved proper economic and social development; this was epitomized by Russia’s GNP being 10 times and 5 times smaller than that of the United States and China, respectively, and by an average per capita GDP of $3500, which was approximately 5 times smaller than that of the average of all G7 countries. To become a great power again, Russia’s economy needed to be controlled by a strong state3 and to widen its commercial exchanges with the rest of the world. For him, a high-power status was only going to be achieved through economic growth and modernization, two objectives that could not have been achieved without Russia’s integration into the world economy.4 This vision, which involved a closer relationship with the United States and Europe, was not a setback for the Kozyrev years and was culturally sustainable. Indeed, these links were purely instrumental and only served Putin’s pragmatic political objectives. They were never meant to develop deep cultural affinities with the West, nor to transform Russia by adopting Western methods of governing. This ship had already sailed years ago and was never meant to return as a core policy in Russia up to that day. Moreover, the Russian people seemed to have fully

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accepted their sense of estrangement from Western values, with less than 40% of them, in 2007, believing that Russia was part of Europe (Interfax, 2007). This strategy of economic pragmatism was never seriously questioned by the Kremlin during Putin’s first two mandates or under Dmitry Medvedev (2008–2012), mainly because it delivered the expected goods. As Andrei Tsygankov recalled the following: During 1999–2007, the economy caught up with the level of 1990 and continued to grow at the annual pace of about 7%. The overall size of the economy increased about six times in current dollars—from $200 billion to $1.3 trillion. Russia’s per capita GDP [had] quadrupled to nearly $7,000 and about 20 million people [had] been lifted out of poverty. By 2007, Russia’s middle class constituted about 25% of the population. Over 2000– 2005, the average Russian saw a 26% annual growth in income, relative to only a 10% rise in that of the average Chinese. Direct foreign investments to the Russian economy skyrocketed, making it first in the world among developing economies. (2019, pp. 173–174)

In line with his predecessor’s views, Medvedev emphasized, during his tenure as President, the need to further increase economic ties with the United States and other Western nations to bolster his country’s development, which was severely impacted by the 2008 financial crisis. For him, these relations, as essential features of his foreign policy, had to be judged by one simple criterion: “Are they improving the living standards in the country?” (as he said in November 2009).5 However, despite its obvious successes, this foreign policy, which was fundamentally statist with the zest of Westernism as a purely supporting role for the sake of re-establishing Russia as a great power, was criticized by many civilizationists who saw it as lacking a proper mission. For them, politics was meant to satisfy more than material needs and increase living standards. For them, it was an impoverished political conception, and saw politics and foreign policy to be at the service of advancing spiritual or cultural goals that were perceived as being largely anti-Western— according to Russia’s historical messianism. For instance, in the case of the Minister of Defense, Sergei Ivanov, who wrote in the newspaper Izvestia that Russia had now re-established itself as a great power; therefore, it was time for its foreign policy to shift its attention to improving the future of human civilization (2006). Although the civilizationist trend was always present in public discourse following the collapse of the Soviet Union,

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its political influence remained marginal despite being advocated by key members of the Russian state.6 This is no longer the case today, as the concept of a civilizational divide is now key to Russia’s foreign policy doctrine. In fact, the first reference to Russia being defined as a distinctive and unique “state-civilization” first appeared in Putin’s 2012 Address to the Federal Assembly. Furthermore, as Fabian Linde has highlighted, the 2013 Kremlin’s “Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation” largely framed the world in civilizational terms and clearly rejected the post-Cold war logic of liberal convergence7 (Linde, 2016a, p. 604)— an idea that was reinforced when a revised concept loaded with explicit attacks against the Western world was adopted in March 2023.8 Since then, Russia’s foreign policy and the Kremlin’s rhetoric were framed in civilizational terms by resorting to a strong anti-Western tone that attributed all the world’s problems to the messianic tendencies of the USled world order.9 The question is what allowed the perspective that the international community had to prevail in the Russian political sphere as a dominant form of state-sponsored nationalism to the point where it made the containment of Western values a matter of national imperative? The triggering factor was the numerous “color revolutions” in the post-Soviet space that gave the impression that the United States was interested in forcing the implementation of liberal democracy not only in that region but also in Russia itself.10 This impression was fueled by numerous US officials being vocal about that goal, such as then VicePresident Joe Biden, who said the following in 2011 in a speech at Moscow State University: Most Russians want to choose their national and local leaders in competitive elections. They want to be able to assemble freely, and they want to live in a country that fights corruption. That’s democracy. They’re ingredients of democracy. So, I urge all of you students here: don’t compromise on the basic elements of democracy. You need not make that Faustian bargain. (2011)

However, individuals who have worked at the very top of the US administration, such as Michael McFaul, who acted as an ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, openly admitted that the American government had sponsored regime changes. Not only did this happen after the Cold War (he named the case of Serbia as a paradigmatic case where money was given directly to the opposition to destabilize Milosovic’s regime) but

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also before 1991, with the overthrowing of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and the support for the Contras in Nicaragua (Remnick, 2014). Consequently, Putin developed a theory of American power that was clearly supported by empirical evidence. If these types of beliefs and rhetoric, which foresaw the threat of regime change in Russia, only resulted in increased suspicions of true Western interests, the numerous street protests that occurred following the 2011 parliamentary and 2012 presidential elections were those that pivoted Putin against the United States.11 His reaction took the form of a strong and assertive civilizational vision that led him to subordinate his previous imperatives of economic pragmatism to those of a messianic opposition to the West, which was now trying to impose its culture and values on his country. Since then, his goal was to adapt Russia’s foreign policy to make the country a global base for traditional values and conservatism. This shift, which began in 2011–2012 (Zlobin, 2012), was clearly the beginning of the end of the instrumental form of Westernism he and Medvedev had been advocating for up to that point. Putin’s civilizational rhetoric became clearer at that time,12 and this new version of Putinism saw him shift his priorities from politics and the economy to ideology, which explains why many decisions taken since then have been detrimental to Russia’s economy. Therefore, this shift explains why Putin was ready to face the consequences of his annexation of Crimea in 2014 (not only to protect its Russian population, justified as a civilizational and sacred duty, but also to prevent the West from seizing control of the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people whom he has always thought of as being an integral part of the broader Russian people/civilization since the ninth century13 ). That is, Putin was ready to confront the numerous Western sanctions that gradually led to the decline of living standards in Russia (which also explains why Russia, simultaneously, accelerated its strategic partnership with China). When an ideocratic and almost messianic logic driven by the belief of a Manichean war between two modes of living and ways of life prevails, actors inevitably become less inclined to consider more rational and down-to-earth concerns. The fact that the overwhelming majority of Western analysts were of the opinion (until February 24, 2022) that Putin was bluffing and that he would never dare attack his neighbor, based on the assumption that the economic price to pay would be too high for his country, was the result of them operating on a completely different mindset than that of the Russian

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President. While his reasoning was idealistic and civilizational (or geopolitical to use Alexander Dugin’s expression), theirs was based on a classical realist assessment of geopolitics articulated around costs and gains. The misunderstanding of Russia’s foreign policy, which is still framed primarily around the statist paradigm, has led many to make this mistake. However, despite this materialistic setback (which did not lead to the total collapse of the Russian economy as expected—proof that the statist strategy was able to provide solid foundations for the Russian economy), it appears that the Russian people have maintained their support for their President, which is a sign that they might also have massively accepted the necessity of shifting their foreign policy to a more assertive form of civilizationism. This can be highlighted through numerous policies and speeches in which the world of international relations started to be presented increasingly as a clash between different civilizations and Russia’s right as a unique civilization to remain a culturally distinctive nation and power (Tsygankov, 2019, pp. 231–232). In this regard, we can mention the restrictions imposed on the LGBT community, as well as Putin’s 2013 address to the Federation Council, in which he criticized the nihilism of the West that he deemed unable to distinguish between good and evil, while Russia was, for its part, faithful to its cultural values (Putin, 2013a). As the mirror of the Western world, Putin’s civilizational vision was presented as an openly conservative “shield” aimed at preventing the erosion of traditional values. In this regard, the annual Valdai Discussion Club meetings have certainly been Putin’s preferred moments during which he expresses the new divide in the international world. For example, in 2013, he claimed that Russia had always evolved as a state civilization defined by its unique values and culture associated with the Russian Orthodox Church (Putin, 2013b). However, over the years, he went even further in the development of his ideological vision of the world order and the place Russia ought to have in it by calling our moment in history as a struggle between “approaches and principles that determine the very existence of humans on Earth” (Putin, 2021). Furthermore, at the 2021 meeting, he said the following: We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries [that] have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress. Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out

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of this. Some people in the West believe [in] an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, “reverse discrimination” against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family, and even gender; they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal. Listen, I would like to point out once again that they have a right to do this; we are keeping out of this. But we would like to ask them to keep out of our business as well. We have a different viewpoint, at least the overwhelming majority of Russian society—it would be more correct to put it this way— has a different opinion on this matter. We believe that we must rely on our own spiritual values, our historical tradition, and the culture of our multi-ethnic nation. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity; [the] works of the great authors of the past, such as Shakespeare, are no longer taught at schools or universities because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood, memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what color or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause, but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into ‘reverse discrimination,’ that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, [while] the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color. Zealots of these new approaches even go so far as to want to abolish these concepts altogether. Anyone who dares mention that men and women actually exist, which is a biological fact, risk being ostracized. ‘Parent number one’ and ‘parent number two’, ‘birthing parent’ instead of ‘mother’, and ‘human milk’ replacing ‘breastmilk because it might upset the people who are unsure about their own gender. Not to mention some truly monstrous things [that] children are taught from an early age, that [is,] a boy can easily become a girl, and vice versa. That is, the teachers actually impose on them a choice we all supposedly have. They do so while shutting the parents out of the process and forcing the child to make decisions that can upend their entire life. They do not even bother to consult with child psychologists—Is a child at this age even capable of making a decision of this kind? Calling a spade a spade, this verges on a crime against humanity, and it is being done in the name and under the banner of progress. (2021)

The same criticisms were essentially repeated a year later when, quoting Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky, Putin blamed the West for its

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blind and unquestioning sense of moral and civilizational superiority over any other culture and nation, without realizing that it is drifting away from its past liberal essence and evolving into a form of despotism owing to its “cancel culture.” However, ultimately, he perceived the evolution of Western liberalism as being in a doctrinal crisis, which has nothing positive to offer to the world, unlike the alternative model of Asian countries that Muslim states and other countries have developed, which have proved themselves to be more effective and appealing, as well as, in his view, destined to evolve into more coherent systems. According to him, this is inevitable, as political development is always connected with spiritual and moral values, which vary between civilizations, and therefore, cannot be imposed on different cultures as has been the case with Westernism. According to Putin, this ought to be a significant element in the construction of the multipolar world order that he has been advocating. Referring directly to Nikolai Danilevsky, the great Slavophile author whose work has already been mentioned, was simply another piece of evidence of Putin’s conception of foreign policy having embraced a civilizational path (2022b). When such an ideological way of thinking about the world prevails, that is, when the notion of universal values is questioned and replaced by the idea of incompatibility between different civilizations (in this specific case, the Russian collective psyche being foreign to Western/ liberal values), the spaces wherein two distinctive civilizations meet will inevitably lead to clashes. Obviously, Ukraine is such a place (Putin emphasized that point at the 2014 Valdai meeting14 ). Therefore, we can understand why Moscow’s pressure to prevent its neighbor from joining NATO is more than just a simple geostrategic concern. It is also a fear that Russia might be dragged into the orbit of a different civilization, which might then simply use that new launching pad to gradually “contaminate” the Russian mind in the surrounding regions first and then deeper into the territory, which is why Moscow needed to establish a new buffer zone in the region (that is, the Donetsk and Luhansk regions). The remnants of this theme that was so dear to the Slavophiles have also been present following Putin’s return to power, especially the idea of Russia acting as a moral lighthouse and a shield against decadent forces, which summarizes the thesis of Moscow being the “Third Rome.” This idea is attached to the notion of personal sacrifice to save humanity, which has historically been presented as a quintessential Russian virtue. Whether we consider the thirteenth century during which the Rus’ were

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able to force the Mongols to retreat Eastward, when the Russian army defeated Napoleon, the nineteenth century when it prevented the Balkans from falling into the hands of the Ottomans, or the 1941–1945 Great Patriotic War, the idea of being a “shield” at the service of preserving mankind from decay and destruction has been and remains an important part of the Russian psyche. This has contributed to fueling its sense of moral superiority and the universalism of its calling. This is obviously an element that has been used by Putin to highlight the decay of the Western world in a way that recalls Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s main criticism of the Western world in his famous 1978 Harvard speech, in which he severely criticized the fact that civic courage has disappeared from Western societies.15 Rather, he has emphasized the idea of the Russian peoples’ sacrificial idealism as a component of the country’s exceptionalism, which has played a role in Russia’s lesser pragmatism and geostrategic rational calculations that have been replaced by its greater assertiveness in the international actions it has undertaken. In 2014, at his annual conference during which he was taking questions directly from the audience, he said the following: What lies at the foundation of our exceptionality? I believe that values are their source. It seems that a Russian person or, more broadly speaking, a person from the “Russian world” (russkiy mir) believes that some kind of higher moral destiny exists for a person, some higher moral principle. That is why Russians, people from the russkiy mir, are not only turned in on themselves, although of course, on a day-to-day basis, we all think about how to live better, how to get rich, to be healthy, to help our family, but, in spite of everything, these are not our main values. Western values lead to a person being focused inwardly, and the measure of success is personal success. The better a person is doing, the better that person is. That is not enough for us. Even rich people say, ‘Ok, I have millions, billions, and what next?’ They are oriented toward society. I feel that it is only in our nation that the saying ‘in the world even death is beautiful’ could arise. How is that possible? What is death? It is surely something terrible. No, it turns out that in the world even death can be beautiful. What does it mean ‘in the world?’ It means to die for your friends, for your nation, for the Homeland. It is precisely here that we find the deep roots of our patriotism. This is the source of the large-scale heroism in wartime and the self-sacrifice in peacetime. This is where our sense of community [and] our family values are drawn from. Of course, because of this, we are less pragmatic [and] less calculating than representatives of other nations, but

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we have bigger souls. Maybe precisely, here, the greatness of our country is expressed. We are more generous in soul. (quoted in Curanovic, 2021, pp. 140–141)

It is also important to note that this civilizational shift in Russia’s foreign policy and its belief that it represents a historical alternative to Western values is not simply a reminiscence of the past Slavophile ideology; It also finds its roots in the work of contemporary intellectuals who have also developed a certain civilizational view of international relations, which has gradually become the dominant view in Russia, with Alexander Dugin being by far the most influential. Although his true links with Putin are unknown (while some have labeled him as “Putin’s brain” or “Putin’s Rasputin” because of his personal relationships, and that of his protégés, with Putin’s party and close affiliates and also because of the benevolent attitude the authorities showed him since the early 2000s, it is also important to note that he has been critical of the master of the Kremlin for his affinity to Western-minded Russian businessmen), it is clear that the vision he has discussed over the last 25 years is now closely more in tone with Russia’s current civilizational foreign policy and has had an impact on the contemporary Russian elite, which have massively endorsed “Duginism” and his understanding of international relations. Driven by his antipathy for the post-Cold War US-led liberal order, Dugin came to the forefront of the Russian intellectual world in 1997 with the publication of his book The Foundation of Geopolitics in which he argued that politics is driven first and foremost by “geography.”16 Reminiscent of Carl Schmidt’s theory of land and sea powers (which he respectively called “thalassoracies” and “tellurocracies”) in his book Land and Sea: A World-historical Reflection,17 Dugin has developed an understanding of geopolitics based on the inherent dualism and incompatibility between these two types of entities. The tensions deriving from this dualism are, according to Dugin, at the heart of the evolution of human history and the main law of geopolitics, as all states are thought to be living organisms whose identities stem from their respective geography: ‘Tellurocracies’, ‘land power’, is associated with the fixity of space and the stability of its qualitative orientations and characteristics. At the civilizational level, it is embodied in sedentarism, in conservatism, [and] in strict legal norms, to which large associations of kin tribes, nations, states, [and] empires are subjected. The hardness of the dryland is culturally

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embodied in the firmness of ethics and the stability of social traditions. The dryland people (especially sedentary ones) are alien to individualism and entrepreneurial spirit. They are characterized by collectivism and hierarchy. ‘Thalassocracy’, ‘maritime power’, represents a type of civilization based on opposing attitudes. This type is dynamic, mobile, and inclined towards technical development. Its priorities are nomadism (especially navigation), trade, and the spirit of entrepreneurship. The individual, as the most mobile part of the collective, is elevated to the highest value, while ethical and legal norms become diluted, relative, and mobile. This type of civilization develops rapidly, evolves actively, and easily changes external cultural attributes, keeping unchanged only the internal identity of the general attitude. (2000, p. 19)

As is evident, tellurocracies (with Russia being one) are thought to be more traditionalist than their counterparts. This is not surprising considering Dugin’s celebration of traditionalism and his intellectual connections to the work of René Guénon, who was known for his hatred of modernity, democracy, and rationalism.18 If we view the tellurocratic reality as being associated with Eurasia, then the thalassocratic world is connected with the Anglo-Saxon world, which is why, in Dugin’s mind, the latter has gradually developed norms that are clearly distinguishable from an ideological and political dimension. Despite their inherent incompatibility, these two worlds could have cohabited peacefully, pending the condition that neither of them would try to interfere with the other’s geographical space. This is why, just like Putin has said on numerous occasions, he believes that the world ought to be multipolar where civilizations (which he calls “large politeia”) can freely emerge and organize themselves according to their respective values and alongside known and respected international norms. However, for Dugin, this did not occur after the collapse of the Soviet Union. On the contrary, the “victory of the West” has led the world of the sea to attempt to destroy the world of the land by trying to forcibly universalize its values and ideology globally, thereby leading to an inevitable civilizational clash. Dugin has made it abundantly clear in numerous presentations and writings that this tension could have been prevented if thalassocracies had accepted the multidimensional geopolitical reality of the world by treating its tellurocratic counterparts equally (Dugin, 2003, 2004).19 This would have required, on their part, a form of Huntingtonian realism anchored in the pessimistic belief of our inability to overcome geopolitical differences. However, this “neo-Atlantic” position did not prevail; instead, the West followed its

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desire to fulfill Fukuyama’s mondialist theory by trying to establish a common universal civilization (2000, p. 111). Inevitably, this type of philosophy planted the seed for Putin’s foreign policy shift when he re-assumed command of the Russian state, following the Medvedev intermission, by providing the Kremlin’s actions and rhetoric with thorough ideological support. Therefore, the opposition between the thalassocratic and tellurocratic is deemed by Dugin to be the defining feature of international relations in the twenty-first century, and Russia is destined to lead the latter. However, how did the neo-Atlantic scheme not prevail in the aftermath of the Cold War? In my opinion, the geostrategic tensions discussed earlier, and presented by Mearsheimer as the deep reasons for Russia’s breakup with the West, find their roots in this clash between the two ways of understanding the world. Returning to Schmidt’s theory, the development of the thalassocratic world, incarnated at the time by the discovery of the New World, led to the first genuine spatial revolution in mankind’s history, which was incomparable to any other at that time. In his view, this revolution had considerable consequences for the judicial order of the time and has remained within the DNA of the thalassocratic states. As he clarified from the outset in The Nomos of the Earth, telluric forces are the mother of law and political existence; they provide clear demarcations of who owns what (2006, p. 42), while the sea is a space that ignores these considerations and limitations, as it is by nature opposed to any judicial order. Therefore, unlike its tellurocratic counterpart—which was juridically organized by norms and rules that were recognized by a dozen or so sovereign European states when some societies opened up their reality to the world of the sea (the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia played a fundamental role in this regard)—the thalassocratic world was a lawless space that could have only led to instability, hostility, and constant change when it was allowed to take over the world of international relations.20 From this standpoint, these two universes are fundamentally different; this has played a significant historical role in how tellurocratic and thalassocratic states have thought about international law, a point that was at the heart of Putin’s famous 2007 Munich speech. Accordingly, in their attempts to assert their power and claims in their new territories, thalassocratic states have always innovated in related ways and means, such as commissioning privateers and granting them the right to engage in maritime warfare against their enemies, or by simply ignoring a nascent order (as was the case with the 1494 Papal Treaty of Tordesillas by the European nations,

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which was excluded). Therefore, unlike a hearty order, the thalassocratic reality is foreign to the notion of equality in terms of the rights of the different entities comprising it; rather, it is more Hobbesian and tends to consecrate the rule of the fittest (whatever means this entity deems necessary to accomplish its task). Therefore, it is not surprising that the gradual adoption of international norms regulating the seas and oceans has largely been the result of the universalization of British laws (Armitage, 2007). Therefore, the outcome of the opening of a new spatial reality in the fifteenth century was also a consequence of the death of a political paradigm, as was the case in 1991. As the prime example of a tellurocatic state, it is not surprising that over the last 30 years, Russia has always insisted on the need to respect established norms and laws and has criticized the dangers of the inherent murkiness of a subjective system unsurprisingly led by a thalassocratic entity. Being the successor of Great Britain as the leading contemporary example of a sea entity, the United States has naturally adopted a similar creative pattern in the aftermath of the Cold War by developing a new legal order that was respected only when it suited Washington’s strategic interests, while displaying indignation when other states followed the same path by choosing to ignore it. Therefore, these two different ways of envisioning a new reality— whether spatial or geopolitical—is another reason that can highlight how Mearsheimer’s aforementioned theory and the civilizational one I have suggested in this chapter are actually intertwined with one another and how Putin’s 2007 severe criticisms of the United States was not only “geostrategic” but also “geopolitical,” according to a Schmittian/ Duginian understanding of the term. Furthermore, by being first and foremost ideological, Russian religious authorities have also played a central role in the civilization vision of the world. In this regard, Patriarch Kirill, the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, has been vocal in the last decade in his attacks against the West, in which he has criticized the decadence of its culture and values, which give precedence to hedonism, the accumulation of wealth, and allowing what he is labeling as immoral relations, that is, homosexuality (Boussois & Morin, 2023, p. 116). In this regard, he perceives the war in Ukraine not as a political struggle but as a metaphysical one that is justified to save Russian culture and their Slave brothers from being subjected to this antichristian civilization. In this regard, the parallel between Kirill’s speeches and the writings of Slavophiles in the nineteenth

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century, especially prior to or during the Crimean War, is striking. Unsurprisingly, the relationship between the state and the Church has grown tremendously following Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, which has simply contributed to accentuating the civilizational nature of the regime. For instance, on the occasion of the new year in 2014, Putin sent copies of three books authored by theoreticians of Russian messianism (Nikolai Berdyaev’s Philosophy of Inequality, Vladimir Solovyov’s Justification of the Good, and Ivan Ilyin’s Our Tasks ) to all governors and high-level civil servants (Etchaninoff, 2015). Of course, we can wonder what Putin’s real motivation was when he implemented that change of orientation from 2011–2012. Similar to the Slavophile’s in the nineteenth century, was it a philosophical and idealistic attempt to guarantee Russia’s uniqueness, or rather a desperate attempt to silence his pro-democratic opponents and ensure the survival of his regime? Indeed, and as has been argued by Fabian Linde (2016b, pp. 26–27), the latter explanation would make sense, as in the weeks that led to the 2011 legislative and 2012 presidential elections, an increasing number of young urban elites were questioning the planned transition of power, the lack of democratic reforms, and the broader legitimacy of the regime. He harshly turned on them by implementing various measures that weakened the urban business class and started to fan the flames of an anti-Western discourse, which found numerous supporters among the non-urban, or rural population, owing to its conservative nature. Consequently, labeling them as members of a Western fifth column and traitors, to discredit them, allowed the regime to generate grassroots support from individuals whose civilizational views were genuine and to sweep under the rug the problems protesters were raising, thereby solidifying his apparent virtue in the eyes of the mostly conservative Russian population (Caron, 2019). In a way, after years of instrumental Westernism that inadvertently allowed Western values to gain traction among the young urban elite who had never experienced communism, statism had to find new foundations. This civilizational shift was a way to reinforce the state, which may have started to loosen its grip, because of its Westernism, through the promotion of an essentialized national identity irremediably incompatible with the Western model, which was meant to be sustained by the active and more expansive role of the state and government.21 Therefore, as was the case with Westernism from 1999 to 2012, it is not illegitimate to believe that the civilizational shift was instrumental

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Fig. 4.1 The evolution of Russia’s foreign policy from 1991 to 2023

and meant only to consolidate the statist paradigm. However, considering how far the civilizational axis has taken Russia, we must also ask ourselves whether the desire to reinforce the role of the state did not result in its weakening. Indeed, for the reasons that I have discussed in the first chapter, Russia’s breakup with the West has come at a significant price, namely, the destruction of significant parts of its armed forces, its economic dependency on a foreign power (China), and the challenge of Putin’s rule by the short-lived June 2023 rebellion of Yevgeny Progozhin’s Wagner group—Putin’s first display of feebleness in almost 25 years in power. This is why I adopt the view that—as shown in Fig. 4.1—the civilizational shift may have come at the expense of the actual affirmation of the power of the Russian state (see Fig. 4.1 for a simplified view of Russia’s foreign policy evolution from 1991 to 2023). Obviously, it is impossible to assess with certainty what Putin’s personal beliefs are in this regard; we are only left to speculate. However, I will note that Putin’s links, as well as those of his silovikis , with religious figures were not established in the 2011–2012 period but rather in the mid-1990s, which might substantiate the thesis that the symphony between the Kremlin and the Church is not solely explained through the prism of the former instrumentalizing the latter for the sake of political legitimacy. It is important to note that many of the current silovikis, who first started their careers in the KGB and other security apparatuses of the Soviet state, were responsible for monitoring members of the Orthodox Church during communism. Despite the atheistic nature of the USSR, many of these individuals, who were dismissive of the communist ideology,22 are sometimes referred to as “Orthodox Chekists” and

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have contributed financially to the construction of a Church dedicated to the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Orthodox Church, conveniently located next to the infamous Lubyanka Prison. Indeed, in immediate post-Soviet Russia, individuals such as Sergei Ivanov, Nikolai Patrushev, and Vladimir Yakunin (close confidants of Putin) had already developed ties with the superior of the Sretensky monastery. That is, Tikhon Shevkunov, who has played an important spiritual role in Putin’s life since they first met in 1996, when Putin was introduced into that circle,23 and who has since become a strong advocate of Russia’s exceptionalism and a virulent critic of Westernism in terms similar to those of Kirill. When asked to talk about their relationship, he declared to a Greek newspaper in 2001 that Putin is a sincere Orthodox Christian who confesses and receives communion regularly and who clearly understands his duty toward God (Boussois & Morin, 2023, p. 71). As a sign of his ante-2012 religious fervor, it is often pointed out that Putin had prioritized the reuniting of the Russian Orthodox Church with the Orthodox Church abroad after their split in 1917 (a reunification achieved in 2007 and in part attributable to Tikhon’s role), as well as his willingness to implement laws in line with the moral positions the Church adopted in 2000. Putin has also been quite ostentatious in the showing of his faith, especially by talking openly about the role religious faith has played in his youth and his “miraculous cross” that has survived the flames of his family dacha in the 1990s (and which he has also been keen to show to foreign leaders, like George W. Bush). Overall, although his instrumentalization of the Orthodox Church, as a way to solidify his rule, is undeniable, it would be a mistake to downplay Putin’s faith and the role it has had in his politics. That being said, if there are concrete reasons to believe that the strength of the Russian state has been hampered by its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which has been a direct result of the country’s civilizational shift in its foreign policy, we must also consider that the parallel weakening of the statist axis might also be only temporary. Indeed, this rhetoric has the potential to transcend Russia’s historical Slavophile legacy and serve as ideological glue that can expand beyond its borders to provide what seems to be a rising illiberal bloc with the necessary ethos it needs to consolidate itself into a coherent ethical space. If this is ever the case, the centrality of this message—which is at the heart of Russia’s history and collective self-understanding—may outweigh its current vulnerabilities that the war in Ukraine has exposed and allow the Russian state to regain the influence

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that its breakup with the Western world, for ideocratic reasons, may have caused. This will be explored in the next chapter.

Notes 1. Kozyrev argued that it was necessary to change Russia’s collective values, so that it could finally accept the priority of the individual and the free market over society and the collective (Tsygankov, 2019, p. 60). 2. At that time, polls showed a significant decline in the public support of the Western model of society, falling from 32% in 1990 to 13% two years later (Tsygankov, 2019, p. 66). 3. As such, his view of statism was in line with Russia’s past and the unique dynamic between the state and its people—as well as the prevailing view of individuality—which set it apart from the Western trajectory. This was something Putin was not willing to change: “It will not happen soon, if it ever happens at all, that Russia will become the second edition of, say, the US or Britain in which liberal values have deep historic traditions. Our state and its institutes and structures have always played an exceptionally important role in the life of the country and its people. For Russians a strong state is not an anomaly [that] should be got rid of. Quite the contrary, they see it as a source and guarantor of order and the initiator and main driving force of any change. (…) It is a fact that striving for corporative forms of activity has always prevailed over individualism. Paternalistic sentiments have struck deep roots in Russian society. The majority of Russians are used to connect improvements in their own condition, more with the aid and support of the state and society than with their own efforts, initiative, and flair for business.” 4. For Putin, “there [was] no alternative to it.” 5. This insistence on the necessity to improve living standards is a core component of people’s co-option in authoritarian states; they will forego their political freedom more easily when their material needs are met (Caron, 2021, 2023). 6. The current Russian minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, is a long-time advocate of this view. For instance, he wrote the following in 2007: “There is already no doubt that the end of

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7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

the Cold War marked the end of a longer stage in global development, which lasted for 400–500 years and when the world was dominated by European civilization. This domination was consistently led by the historical West. As regards the content of the new stage in humankind’s development, there are two basic approaches to it among countries. The first one holds that the world must gradually become a Greater West through the adoption of Western values. It is a kind of ‘the end of history’. The other approach— advocated by Russia—holds that competition is becoming truly global and acquiring a civilizational dimension; that is, the subject of competition now includes values and development models” (2008). It stated the following: “The reverse side of the globalization processes is the increased emphasis on civilizational identity. The desire to go back to one’s civilizational roots can be clearly seen in recent events in the Middle East and North Africa where the political and socioeconomic renewal of society has been frequently carried out under the banner of asserting Islamic values. Similar processes can be observed in other regions as well, which makes it a priority for world politics to prevent civilizational line clashes and to intensify efforts to forge a partnership of cultures, religions, and civilizations in order to ensure a harmonious development of mankind” (quoted in Linde, 2016a, p. 605). https://russiaeu.ru/en/news/concept-foreign-policy-russian-fed eration. For instance, the 2016 Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation attributed global tensions to the West’s colonialist approach, which also saw in it the root of terrorism (see Curanovic, 2021, p. 137). This impression was fed by official discourses and actions on the part of Washington, such as in the Spring of 2007 when the State Department severely criticized Russia for its authoritarian political system and pledged to aid democratic organizations inside the country (Tsygankov, 2019, p. 173). For him, the United States’ involvement in the 2014 Maidan protest in Ukraine to prompt a regime change (which he did not hesitate to call a “coup d’état”) was also clear. He said that the US embassy provided the equivalent of $1 million a day to support the protesters. He also questioned the value of Ukraine’s shift toward

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13. 14.

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the Western orbit, which led to the total collapse of the country’s economy after having been promised the heavenly pastures of Western civilization. In his mind, the price to pay for that decision was the transformation of Ukraine into a Western protectorate or a colony and its loss of sovereignty at the expense of its people simply for the sake of satisfying the civilizational ego of the West (2022a). Simultaneously, the Arab Spring revolution that had led to the rapid overthrow of authoritarian regimes in North Africa was also a wake-up call for Putin who came to believe that the American government, through the CIA, was directly involved in these efforts of democratization (Remnick, 2014). For instance, articles published in his name in January 2012 made references to Russia’s “civilizational model” (2012a) and its “civilizational identity” (2012b). As he made clear in his February 21, 2022, address to the nation (Putin, 2022a). In light of the civilizational shift, he warned that clashes at the border of different civilizations were a new risk factor to consider. He said, in this perspective, that “Ukraine (…) is one of the examples of such sorts of conflicts that affect international power balance, and I think it will certainly not be the last” (Putin, 2014). In his view, the Enlightenment allowed people to enjoy their freedom and capacity to pursue happiness. Moreover, the postWorld War II evolutions of liberalism have engendered a pattern that has led to the creation of a system where the state is solely responsible for ensuring people’s material well-being and their personal independence from any form of interference and discrimination through a legal framework that ignores the general interest and focuses solely on individuals’ rights. Inevitably, such a way of thinking has led to the general spiritual decay of ideals, such as courage, that require subordination of our personal interests to a higher goal. In this context, he wondered the following: “The individual’s independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of the people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, preparing them for and summoning them toward physical bloom, happiness, the possession of material goods, money, and leisure, toward an almost unlimited freedom in

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16.

17.

18. 19.

the choice of pleasures. So who should now renounce all this[?] [W]hy and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an as yet distant land?” (1979, pp. 13, 15). A civilizational incompatibility that implied, in his view, the necessity to avoid Western alcohol, cigars, and cigarettes, as well as Western-made cars (Shlapentokh, 2007, p. 218). Dugin’s view of geopolitics is also influenced by the work of multiple authors, such as Friedrich Ratzel, Rudolf Schellen, Halford Mackinder, and Pyotr Savitsky. Dugin has often presented himself as being “100% Guénonist” (2002). This view is also clearly in line with that of the Kremlin, which, in its 2023 Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, made it clear that a recognition of a multipolar world organized around civilizations was the only recipe for peace and that an inability to recognize this fact was, on the contrary, the source of global instability and war. It states: “Considering the strengthening of Russia as one of the leading centres of development in the modern world and its independent foreign policy as a threat to Western hegemony, the United States of America (USA) and their satellites used the measures taken by the Russian Federation as regards to Ukraine to protect its vital interests as a pretext to aggravate the longstanding anti-Russian policy and unleashed a new type of hybrid war. It is aimed at weakening Russia in every possible way, including at undermining its constructive civilizational role, power, [and] economic and technological capabilities, limiting its sovereignty in foreign and domestic policy [and] violating its territorial integrity. This Western policy has become comprehensive and is now enshrined at the doctrinal level. This was not the choice of the Russian Federation. Russia does not consider itself to be an enemy of the West, is not isolating itself from the West, and has no hostile intentions with regard to it; Russia hopes that in future the states belonging to the Western community will realize that their policy of confrontation and hegemonic ambitions lack prospects, will take into account the complex realities of a multipolar world, and will resume pragmatic cooperation with Russia, being guided by the principles of sovereign equality and respect for

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each other’s interests. The Russian Federation is ready for dialogue and cooperation on such a basis.” For him, while the land was organized around a legal order, the sea was for its part free. It knew no rules or norms and was not subjected to any state or territorial sovereignty (1997, p. 46). Which, in return, allowed the consolidation of a model of governance typically Russian and the antithesis of the Liberal model, that is “sovereign democracy” which is based upon the idea of the verticality of power. Similarly to the tsarist patrimonial autocracy that allowed and welcomed people to petition their ruler who was considered to be the embodiment of the state authority and the protector of his people, this approach tends to reinforce the omnipotence of the ruler over his people is a dynamic that is everything but egalitarian. In Putin’s Russia, people’s right to petition him has been maintained and has taken the form of his participation in TV programs where he is seen answering directly questions from the audience pr by phone. Putin admitted in 1999 that communism had been a “blind alley, far away from the mainstream of civilization” (Remnick, 2014). To a point where he is often referred to as Putin’s confessor and as the person who probably knows the most about Putin (Hutchins & Korobko, 2012, p. 241).

References Armitage, D. (2007). The Elephant and the Whale: Empires of Land and Sea. Journal for Maritime Research, 9(1), 23–36. Biden, J. (2011, March 10). Vice President Biden’s Remarks at Moscow State University. Boussois, S., & Morin, N. (2023). La guerre sainte de Poutine. Passés Composés. Caron, J.-F. (2019). The Prince 2.0: Applying Machiavellian Strategy to Contemporary Political Life. Springer. Caron, J.-F. (2021). Understanding Kazakhstan’s 2019 Political Transition. Springer. Caron, J.-F. (2023). A Revolt in the Steppe: Understanding Kazakhstan’s Events of January 2022. Springer. Curanovic, A. (2021). The Sense of Mission in Russian Foreign Policy. Destined for Greatness! Routledge. Dugin, A. (2000). Foundations of Geopolitics. Arktogeia.

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Dugin, A. (2002). René Guénon: Traditionalism as a Language. In Philosophy of Traditionalism: Lectures of the New University. Arktogeia. Dugin, A. (2003). Turtsija na vostochnom puti, zametki ob ofitsjal’nom vizite lidera mezhdunarodnogo Evrazijskogo dvizhenija A G Dugina v. Turtsiiu 3– 12 Dekabria. Evrazija, December 16. Dugin, A. (2004). Chto budet esli Ukraina raspadetsja. Radio Ekho Moskvy, December 4. Etchaninoff, M. (2015). Dans la tête de Vladimir Poutine. Actes Sud. Heikka, H. (1999). Beyond Neorealism and Constructivism, Desire, Identity, and Russian Foreign Policy. In N. Parker (Ed.), Understanding of Russian Foreign Policy (pp. 57–108). University Park. Hutchins, C., & Korobko, A. (2012). Putin. Troubadour Publishing. Ivanov, S. (2006). Triada natsional’nykh tsennostei. Izvestia, July 14. Lavrov, S. (2008, July–September). Russia and the World in the Twenty-First Century. Russia in Global Affairs, No. 3. https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/art icles/russia-and-the-world-in-the-21st-century/ Linde, F. (2016a). The Civilizational Turn in Russian Political Discourse: From Pan-Europeanism to Civilizational Distinctiveness. The Russian Review, 75(4), 604–625. Linde, F. (2016b). State Civilisation: The Statist Core of Vladimir Putin’s Civilisational Discourse and Its Implications for Russian Foreign Policy. Politics in Central Europe, 12(1), 21–35. Putin, V. (2012a). Russia Muscles Up: The Challenges We Must Rise to Face. Izvestia, January 16. Putin, V. (2012b). Russia: The Ethnicity Issue. Nezavisimaia gazeta, January 23. Putin, V. (2013a, December 12). Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/19825 Putin, V. (2013b, September 19). Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club. http://www.en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/page/601 Putin, V. (2014, October 24). Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club. http://www.en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/page/530 Putin, V. (2021, October 21). Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/deliberations/ 66975 Putin, V. (2022a, February 21). Address by the President of the Russian Federation. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/page/75 Putin, V. (2022b, October 27). Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/deliberations/ 69695 Remnick, D. (2014). Watching the Eclipse. The New Yorker, August 2. https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/watching-eclipse Russian Interests to Move to Asia in Future—Poll. Interfax, March 17, 2007.

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Schmidt, C. (1997). Land and Sea. Plutarch. Schmidt, C. (2006). The Nomos of the Earth. Telos. Shlapentokh, D. (2007). Dugin Eurasianism: A Window on the Monds of the Russian Elite or and Intellectual Ploy? Studies in East European Thought, 59(3), 215–236. Solzhenitsyn, A. (1979). A World Split Apart: Commencement Address Delivered at Harvard University June 8, 1978. Harper & Row. Tsygankov, A. (2019). Russia’s Foreign Policy: Change and Continuity in National Identity (5th ed.). San Francisco State University. Zlobin, N. (2012). Tsena Voprosa. Kommersant, Demcember 6.

CHAPTER 5

Russia’s Ideocratic Contribution to Tomorrow’s World

Abstract After having analyzed what lies at the heart of Russia’s foreign policy, this chapter explores what might be Russia’s contribution to the remodeling of the international order through its civilizational soft power, as well as showing the inherent difficulties and challenges that come with this objective. Keywords World Order · Russia · China · Illiberal Bloc

After thirty years of post-Cold War peace, it seems that the world has returned to the previous paradigm—a divided world between, what appears to be, two blocs. If the first one—mainly composed of the United States, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand—will remain liberal, all signs indicate that the second one will be organized around the Moscow–Beijing axis. In fact, it is difficult to ignore this new reality that is already well underway, as the leaders of these two countries, during a meeting in Moscow in March 2023, have revealed their common intention of changing the geopolitical order, which has not been seen for 100 years. Further facts are also showing the willingness of many states to—how to put it—“explore new options” by increasing their ties with Russia and China, such as their expressed desire to become BRICS’

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Caron, Putin’s War and the Re-Opening of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8167-0_5

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members,1 whose intention in the long run—among others—is to establish a new currency for international trade that will threaten the US dollar hegemony. As I have already stated, trying to build an alternative world to the US-led hegemony is one thing, but building one that will be sustainable in the long run and overcoming the inherent tensions that will inevitably emerge between their members is another. Accomplishing this feat cannot be the outcome of mere frustration with a world order deemed unequal, or by a willingness to increase economic opportunities that are, in essence, unstable and often lead to a relationship of dependence between small nations and countries that drive demand and innovation. In this regard, there are reasons to be doubtful, and the hope that the BRICS group will implement practices that are less colonizing than those the West and the United States are often criticized for using, may only remain a simple hope, as today’s excitement could very well lead to a terrible hangover in the future. This is especially true because the current and future members of BRICS are unequal, with China being the driving force of the organization. Based on Beijing’s past practices, there is reason to believe that Washington’s hegemony may simply be replaced by Beijing’s control over the sovereignty of other countries. For instance, China’s loans to its partners, as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, have often resulted in Beijing seizing key infrastructure abroad (Abi-Habib, 2018). Moreover, we can certainly criticize the way global capitalism has evolved under the guidance of the United States, but it has nonetheless managed to create a system of trade and investment that allowed other actors to greatly favor it, with China being the best example in this regard. As a result, the first glimpse of what could become a China-led economic order seems to share similarities with a traditional imperial order where profits and gains flow disproportionally toward the center, leaving the periphery impoverished. Furthermore, although the prospects of having tighter links with the Chinese economy than with the American or European ones may currently appear to be providing more advantages to many countries,2 the creation of a compartmentalized bipolar world may shatter these advantages, as China’s economy is heavily reliant on certain Western technologies, such as semiconductors. In other words, generating a common sense of belonging based on material benefits is a fragile foundation for any supranational entity. Its members will have a sense of a shared future and common interests only insofar as they benefit from the system. When this is no longer the case, they often choose to opt out.

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It should also be noted that, even between the two main drivers of this alternative bloc, the points of divergence are significant and should not be ignored. Despite Russia and China agreeing on the undesirability of a hegemonistic US-led world order, and the fact that they have deepened their relationship in recent years, their rapprochement is filled with several serious disagreements that can eventually outweigh the current benefits of their alliance. Apart from the strained historical relationship between these two countries—including (1) the Russian empire being part of many unequal treaties that China had to submit to, which resulted in the loss of many territories and (2) the Cold War during which the two countries came to the brink of war in 1969, which has remained a source of suspicion within China—the asymmetrical strength of the Chinese economy is another source of tension, especially in Russia’s Far East territories where negative feelings against China remain rampant and have even stopped investment projects (Moscow Times, 2019). We can also add the growing presence of China in Russia’s backyard and privileged sphere of influence, namely, in Central Asian republics that have increased their ties with Beijing over the last few years with the prospect that further convergence between Beijing and the “Stans” may lead to tensions for the future with Moscow—especially if these ties extend to military and strategic domains. Lastly, in accordance with its traditional stance on territorial integrity, China has refused to recognize the annexation of Crimea, Luhansk, and the Donetsk regions by Russia, an invasion Beijing was not informed of beforehand by Moscow, which has led to a war that now seriously threatens Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative—which he labeled the “Project of the Century”—to which China has already dedicated billions of dollars and which necessitates open trade routes between Europe and Russia.3 More importantly, what if Russia and China’s foreign policies were not operating on the same paradigm? What if, unlike Moscow, Beijing is still thinking in accordance with a geostrategic view of the world order, with the consequence that this relationship, which has been described in the past as a “pragmatic appreciation of the benefits of cooperation [rather] than a deeper like-mindedness” (Lo, 2008) was not the biggest vulnerability of Putin’s civilizational project? In hindsight, although it does not currently seem apparent, we should not let ourselves be blinded from the fact that the Moscow–Beijing axis is far from being as solid as we think it is. Apart from the important considerations that will be discussed in this chapter, the success of Moscow’s global project depends on finding a way

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to allow the members of the emerging bloc to unite such that their differences are superseded or at least appeased. Simple military or economic alliances do not allow for this broader sense of mission that gives a deeper meaning to their collective action, which, once deeply entrenched in their collective psyche, prevents entities from simply opting out at the first difficulty they face. To a large extent, this is the driving force behind the West’s support to Ukraine. Despite the enormous financial and military costs associated with this aid, people tend to see that upholding Kyiv’s turn to the West and its values is worth the sacrifices, as numerous polls have shown. This is where Russia’s civilizational approach to the world of international relations can play a role, by providing the necessary glue to a bloc that can potentially extend to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Indeed, the general rhetoric that seems to be playing a part in this emerging bloc is in tone with Putin’s civilizational discourse of the last 10 years, which is why the bloc is often labelled as the “illiberal bloc” (Caron, 2014, 2022). However, as I have already indicated, the opposition is still quite negative—that is, a simple rejection of liberal values—as this illiberal world has not reached the stage of developing a proper counter-ideology to its ideocratic enemy. Will it ever be able to? Will Russia be the driving force behind it as it was with Communism during the Cold War? Of course, these are hypotheses, and it is not the role of political scientists to predict the future. However, my point is that the potential exists, and it is up to Moscow to seize this type of rhetorical soft power as what I believe to be its sole way of playing a determinant role in building this geopolitical bloc. As mentioned in the first chapter, Russia is no longer an economic or military superpower (if we exclude its massive stockpile of nuclear weapons). However, it has the potential to become an “ideocratic” superpower, and it has already started to play a leading role in this regard in some African countries. Needless to say, the realization of this objective comes with numerous implications, challenges, and hurdles. This will be further discussed in this chapter. ∗ ∗ ∗ For many people living in the Western world, the end of the post-Cold War unipolar world and the loss of Western influence were inconvenient and uncomfortable. Like most political phenomena, this decline can be explained by multiple factors. The call on the part of the United States to

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abide by international rules that it refused to follow—combined with its military shortcomings shown in Iraq and, more explicitly, in Afghanistan, when the withdrawal of the last remaining troops had startling similarities with the 1975 evacuation of Saigon—has certainly played a role in negatively impacting America’s prestige. The deficiencies of global capitalism—exemplified by the 2008 financial crisis (and also those that preceded it in Mexico in 1994 and in East Asia in 1997), which had a global impact—have contributed to exposing Washington’s systemic weakness (Bader, 2010, p. 80; Ikenberry, 2020, p. 274; Johnston, 2013). Furthermore, even if nations have been able to successfully overcome these crises, the fact remains that the deep problems that led to them have not been fixed and, as such, they remain systemic, which only tends to exacerbate the belief that globalization is perceived as a liability to national economies, far from being a positive driver of change. Many have argued that the 2008 crisis was the triggering factor that ended China’s role as a constructive global actor. From the 1990s until that time, China had supported greater regional and global cooperation and showed its willingness to abide by multilateral rules. However, after the crisis, it started to (1) demonstrate more assertiveness than ever before in its claims in the South China Sea by refusing to engage in any serious discussions that could result in a binding agreement regarding sovereignty in the region, (2) criticize the United States more openly, and (3) obstruct the signature of international treaties (like the climate change negotiations that took place in Copenhagen in 2009). In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the interconnectedness of states can cause major problems (Caron, 2020). This health crisis demonstrated to many states that the delocalization of their production abroad, combined with the rupture of supply chains, deprived them of their ability to have strategic goods, such as ventilators or paracetamol. This crisis has also contributed in its own regard to the call for deglobalization. Another element that has weakened democratic belief in the post-Cold War liberal paradigm of convergence is that China has been able to clearly demonstrate that economic prosperity is not necessarily associated with the presence of a democratic regime. However, another very important factor that can explain the rejection of liberalism has a lot to do with its values since the turn of the millennium, which has resulted in a direct clash with populations abroad. Alexander Lukin summarized the reasons for this in a very clear manner:

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Mainstream Western foreign policy thinkers have failed to understand that the expansion of the West’s model has reached cultural and civilizational limits. The Western system was straightforward to spread in Eastern Europe, where countries tired of Soviet control sought to join Western alliances for political and cultural reasons. The system was established or restored there relatively easily (although not everywhere). [However,] this model is [much more culturally] alien to North Africa and Eurasia. Islam and Orthodox Christianity, which are gaining popularity in the postSoviet space, reject Western ‘democratism’, with its increasingly vague social role of men and women, euthanasia, surrogate motherhood, samesex marriages, and the like, not only for political but also for moral reasons. [Moreover,] they oppose it so strongly that they are ready to fight against this onslaught of sin. (Lukin, 2018, p. 6)

All these recriminations have been, as I have shown, central to Putin’s view of Russia’s foreign policy since he returned to the presidency in 2012 (actually, in the months leading to his return). The same attitude regarding these moral issues is also easily perceived by anyone who has worked abroad in Western countries or has lived (as I have for almost a decade now) in non-Western societies. Many members of the diplomatic corps can testify that demands on the part of their ministry to organize and host LGBT events or to actively criticize state authorities, either for not recognizing these rights or for limiting them, have often been met with anger and with a form of insensibility typical of Western colonialism. In fact, these clashes are the result of many countries having made the promotion of these moral values key components of their foreign policy, such as Canada4 and the Netherlands, whose “feminist foreign policy” has also extended to the field of LGBT+ rights.5 Furthermore, if we take the Canadian case, this priority is now explicitly listed in the Foreign Affairs’ mandate letter whenever the Prime minister appoints a new minister to this key position. The individual is asked to “expand Canada’s efforts to advance gender equality and LGBTQ2 rights abroad” and support organizations abroad whose objectives are to support “the rights of women and girls in all their diversity, LGBTQ2 people, and other marginalized communities.”6 Furthermore, Canada, as well as the United States under the Obama administration, has championed the inclusion of provisions in trade agreements designed to protect workers against discrimination based on sex, including sexual orientation and gender identity, which raises the fear that international aid may become conditional on countries being forced to amend their laws that would be deemed discriminatory.

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In other words, liberalism has become too hungry following the collapse of the Soviet Union, thinking that what worked during the Cold War in the limited sphere of influence it controlled would also apply to the rest of the world. Rather than limiting itself to the promotion of basic values, it transformed into a moralizing ideology that was combined with a punishment mentality in the sense that states that refused to abide by these moral values were shamed and sometimes sanctioned, thereby increasing their sense of alienation that simply created the perfect conditions for a revisionist state like Russia to engage in civilizational rhetoric. In addition to these measures, the fact that many Western leaders decided to boycott the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics held in Sochi and have rather deliberately chosen to send openly gay athletes to represent their country—the United States in this case with Billie Jean King and Caitlin Cahow—has simply contributed to Russia’s resentment toward the West and has been seen as a willingness on their part to judge them negatively for their “backward values.” However, liberalism has forgotten to consider that the cultural and civilization dimension where this expansion applies is different from the one it operated in during 1945–1991, as well as the fact that the West may have been blinded by the initial successes of the liberal convergence paradigm. Indeed, after decades of totalitarian rule combined with material misery, the former Soviet states did not hesitate to jump into the liberal and capitalist world order. Even China willfully joined the World Trade Organization and opened its domestic market, a decision that it and its population largely benefitted from with the country’s astronomic economic growth over the past 30 years (which, it must be said, is gradually slowing down). This has caused the Western world to make two mistakes. First, it confuses the basic values of classical liberalism that can overlap between different cultures with a form of moral progressivism that draws only on the aspirations and values of people living in Western societies. Second, it thinks that economic cooperation has to go hand in hand with democratization. These mistakes have proven to be fatal to the project of liberal convergence, contributed to exacerbating the current rejection of the West, and consequently, led to the rise of an illiberal bloc that is appealing to numerous nations globally. It must be said that these two mistakes are also fueling one another. Inevitably, for authoritarian leaders, democratization has been perceived as a threat to their own rule, which may explain why they have chosen to shift to a civilizationist rhetoric knowing full well that

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it would appeal to their population and contribute to motivating them, up to the desired point where people will even be willing to sacrifice some of their material well-being once provided by global capitalism in favor of opposing the West’s moral cosmopolitanism. Unsurprisingly, this has been a central part of Putin’s public speeches since his blitzkrieg invasion of Ukraine failed to distract his people from the sorrows of war and the economic consequences they may have to face because of Western sanctions. Putin has indeed resorted, more than ever before, to anti-colonial rhetoric in which he has depicted his country as the leader of all other countries that have been victims of this so-called cultural oppression7 : a feeling that is destined to grow and determine the future world order. It must be noted that Russia has been active on this front by trying to win over African leaders (some would call it the “opening of a second front”) by promising them the delivery of grains, writing off their debts, fighting anticolonialism alongside them, countering the practice and effects of economic sanctions, and combating any attempts at undermining traditional moral values. It is, of course, impossible to establish a causal link between these declarations, but it seems this rhetoric has played a huge part in the African continent, as seen in recent coups where the Russian flag has been waved, such as in Niger and Burkina Faso. Currently, Putin wishes to generate a shift in the minds of world leaders, similar to that which he has undertaken since his return to the presidency. Rather than framing the decision on severing ties with the Western world based on a cost–benefit axis concerned with geostrategic and economic concerns (that can be felt concretely by the people), he has been astute enough to make it a “spiritual choice” by also deploying all the necessary efforts to convert individuals to his new vision of geopolitics. More precisely, it is worth noting that many countries where Russia has established a foothold (in part owing to the presence of the Wagner group), such as the Central African Republic, have also helped the rapidly growing presence of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was announced in 2021 as the creation of a Patriarchal Exarchate composed of two dioceses in Africa and more than 200 parishes in 25 countries on the continent. Therefore, this has not only led to the sharing of the Orthodox message that is now acting as an essential component of Russia’s foreign policy8 but also to the deepening of the influence of Russian customs and languages in the region and the growing perception that Moscow is committed to helping the world’s poorest people. The strength of this type of soft power should not be ignored, as Western influence seems to

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be decreasing in this region. The large number (25) of African countries that refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when the United Nations was invited to vote on the matter in March 2022 is a good indication of this. Thus far, Russia’s strategy in Africa has been remarkably successful and has managed, through these well-targeted policies, to exert significant influence in the region, which is inversely proportional to its actual economic weight.9 However, ultimately, the spiritual influence Russia has had on people’s psyche may have more value than the overflow of products branded “made in China,” in the context of a world moving toward an ideocratic political split. That being said, Russia’s initial success in delivering its civilizational message abroad—namely, in Africa—should not blind its leaders into assuming that sustaining an alternative bloc will be an easy task. On the contrary, as I have already stated, building on people’s frustrations might be an undemanding task, but generating positive rhetoric that provides a genuine sense of superiority in contrast to the liberal world—and consequently, may facilitate the members of this bloc to make sacrifices—is a more arduous endeavor. Clearly, Russia’s assertiveness in world affairs has reached a point where it is no longer strictly defensive or critical of the post-Cold War order. Now, it needs to go on the offensive—not from a military perspective (the already discussed near debacle of its armed forces in Ukraine has certainly been a wake-up call for the Kremlin) but rather— on the battlefield of ideas in a way political scientist Sergey Karaganov has labelled a policy of “constructive destruction” (2022), which implies contributing to the decay of the liberal order while building an alternative for it. As he summarized in an astute manner, dismantling the “old world” will be an easy task for Moscow (mainly because the Western world’s recent shift to a moralizing and “woke” stance will naturally lead many nations to turn their backs on this colonizing model), but “uniting the lands” into an alternative system is a necessity for Moscow and not simply a whim. For the most part, Russia’s civilizational project has adopted the view that it had to be fulfilled through the Eurasian territorial space. There have been many variations regarding the extent of that geographical entity, but for the purposes of this book, I believe it is more interesting to turn our attention to Alexander Dugin’s view of Eurasia, as it has had the greatest influence on Putin’s foreign policy since his return to the presidency. Far from seeing Eurasia primarily as a limited territory organized more or less around Russia’s (or the USSR’s) former empire, he

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sees it as a political project aimed at challenging the Atlanticist world purely on ideological grounds, which, as a result, cannot be delimited, as it has the potential to welcome any nation looking for an alternative world. It is, in this sense, a universalist political project that explains why he has evoked a Eurasian territory composed of different axes, such as the Paris–Berlin–Moscow one, but also one ranging from Dublin all the way to Vladivostok, one in Central Asia (all the way to Teheran), and one in East Asia (through a Moscow–Tokyo axis). For this reason, he wrote the following: In such a broad understanding, Eurasianism takes on a new and unprecedented significance. Now it is not only a sort of national idea for a new post-communist Russia (as intended by the movements’ founding fathers) but also a broad program of universal planetary significance, which goes far beyond the boundaries of Russia and the Eurasian continent itself. In the same way that the concept of ‘Americanism’ can today be applied to geographical regions located far beyond the limits of the North American continents, so ‘Eurasianism’ indicates a special civilizational, cultural, philosophical, and strategic choice, which can be made by any member of the human race, regardless of what [specific] national and spiritual cultural they may belong to. (2002, pp. 36–37)

Owing to Russia’s long historical civilizational mission, the “Eurasian way of life,” so to speak, would find its roots in the anti-Western values it has always cherished. Of course, if Eurasianism is to be built around opposition to the colonialism of the West, its model should not follow the same pattern by trying to create institutions or organizations that would facilitate Russia’s domination over other nations. Rather, the idea should consist of articulating typical Russian values and norms that were at the core of Slavophile ideology in such a way that they could have global appeal in all cultures and nations, by finding sense in the specific national or local history of the various people that would be part of the Eurasian space. This is what distinguishes “hegemony” and “colonialism” from a genuine form of “rooted cosmopolitanism.” In the hegemony, specific beliefs and values are universally imposed on people, whereas in rooted cosmopolitanism, universal ideas can find meaning through national or cultural specificities. If the former calls for an assimilationist view, the latter is open to cultivating cultural diversity. What does this imply in reality? For instance, if the notion of “traditionalism,” which is central to the Slavophile legacy, as well as to Dugin, is to play that role in this regard,

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a hegemonic perspective would consist of imposing Russia’s conception of this idea on other countries. In return, its rooted cosmopolitan counterpart would rather assist in developing this idea in such a general way that all cultures, religions, or nations worldwide would be able to understand it based on their own unique histories or value systems. The goal is to elevate ideas by valorizing concepts and ways of life without creating a hierarchy between them, but rather by presenting them as different and equally valuable ways of achieving the highest virtue being advocated. From this perspective, while Russians may present the old Slavophile concept of sobornost as a quintessential example of what form traditionalism and community spirit can take, they should not present it as the sole possible type of social organization that can achieve this goal, but rather as one way among others that can exist in other cultures. This is what a universal call for tradition, expressed in a multitude of particular traditions, ought to be conveyed as under the logic of a non-colonial form of rooted cosmopolitanism. The same logic applies to the role of religion or gender, which ought to be developed in a way that Orthodoxies, Muslims, Confucianists, and even Animists would be able to find value in the ideas based on their own beliefs. This is obviously not an easy task, and the risk of a type of rooted cosmopolitanism evolving into a form of colonialism is very high. However, Russia has been able to manage that task at the domestic level by overcoming past traumatic events and maintaining cohesion with the various ethnic and religious groups composing its territory. It is worth mentioning the case of Chechnya. Despite two bloody wars in which religion played a major role, the rejection of Western Modernity has served as an umbrella that is now able to subordinate past grievances to the importance of preserving traditional values, with the result that the region is now actively involved in the war in Ukraine, alongside individuals they fought barely 20 years ago. The question is whether Russia’s civilizational messianism has the potential to be more than moral, but also political. However, one thing is certain: it needs to be; otherwise, relying strictly on its moral dimensions would not provide a clear sense of distinctiveness from—and superiority to—the Western liberal world. Of course, we would be putting our heads in the sand if we were to claim that liberalism is not seriously being challenged currently. Even Fukuyama (2022) himself is more than willing to acknowledge this fact in his discussion of how its recent progressivism has led to a point that confirms many of Putin’s assessments, such as the development of a “cancel culture” and a complete reassessment of

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gender identities. However, these moral tensions are not inherent flaws of liberal ideology. This implies that liberalism has the potential to correct these problems by becoming more moderate. As a result, if this were to happen, the civilizational differences between the Western world and the russkyi mir would disappear, thereby dissolving the irreducible differences between these two civilizations and challenging what is at the core of Putin’s foreign policy. This is why the extension of this logic of rooted cosmopolitanism to political notions, such as the meaning of freedom, the purpose of human existence, the role of political authority, and how the decision-making process ought to be organized, is not a luxury Putin’s civilizational project can ignore. This means that the civilizational path on which Russia has engaged also implies developing a completely new political ideology that would differ radically from liberalism. This implies going way beyond the mere criticism of the pragmatic reasons for liberalism being thought of as encompassing a superior way of life; that is, it being the only ideology that can regulate violence by allowing diverse populations to peacefully live together, as well as a mode of thinking that promotes economic growth and the material well-being of its people. This is because these beliefs can easily be refuted by facts. Regarding the economic growth and material well-being of people arguments, it can easily be said that economic liberalism has exacerbated inequalities between people to an obscene degree and that authoritarian societies, such as China, have been able to achieve higher levels of growth. Furthermore, peace and the absence of violence are by no means limited to liberal democracies, and the same conclusion can be drawn about the problems of managing the peaceful cohabitation of different cultural and religious groups. While some countries considered to be “partly free,” like Singapore,10 have been successful in this regard, many full-fledged liberal societies are for their part torn by ethnic or racial problems, often exemplified by the presence of extreme right-wing parties that play a central role in political life. The development of an ideological counterpart to liberalism consists of proposing a completely different (and morally superior) perspective regarding the meaning of human existence. This is a task that also implies the requirement for a new corpus of normative ideas associated with personal autonomy, the importance of negative freedom, and the dynamics between the government and its people. In other words, being able to establish philosophical foundations to what has been described in

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Russia as a form of “sovereign democracy” that manages to combine— although this may sound paradoxical, I must admit—a huge degree of individual freedom with a high degree of state control.11 This is essentially the project of Dugin, who has linked the development of a Eurasian space with the need to develop a “fourth ideology,” which would be entirely different from the three main ideologies that have been central to the history of the twentieth century (liberalism, fascism, and communism). Is this task possible? I do not know, but not everyone can be a John Locke or Karl Marx. One mistake would be to assume that those who criticize liberalism—because of the inequalities it engenders and its overly tolerant social progressivism—question and oppose the moral principles liberalism stands for. I do not think this is true. These individuals would never trade their personal freedom or the way they are treated equally to live in an illiberal world. Although they might be criticizing the excesses of liberalism, their goal is not to overthrow the system (that is, for an overwhelming majority of them) and subordinate their individual freedom to the collective and give up their political freedom— which would be the consequences of living in a russkyi mir that elevates these notions as higher virtues. However, although this might be highly unlikely to happen in societies in which liberalism is deeply rooted, we should not ignore the possibility of developing an illiberal moral corpus of ideas and conceptions of human existence in societies that have never known liberal democracy could be feasible. The second problem with Russia’s ability to build this alternative illiberal world is associated with its main de facto ally, China. As I have written previously, Beijing has been critical of the post–Cold War order. Its assertiveness has been on the rise since Xi Jinping became president, and its willingness to renegotiate, on more equal terms, the power dynamic in Asia with the United States has driven Beijing’s policies and actions. Similar to Russia, since 2011, the feeling on the part of the Chinese leadership and population that the West is strongly committed to undermining its regime either by supporting pro-democracy activists (in Hong Kong), by exposing the country’s high level of corruption, or by condemning what is going on in the Xinjiang region cannot be denied. However, despite these similarities, it must be acknowledged that China’s global objectives rest on a logic that is significantly different from the one Russia is currently defending. In fact, while Russia’s foreign policy appears to have taken a civilizational turn, Chinese policy still abides by

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a traditional geostrategic viewpoint, which can only force us to wonder if they can actually be compatible with one another. In contrast to Russia, China’s foreign policy aims to allow the country to acquire a larger sphere of influence in Asia without directly confronting the United States because doing otherwise would be tremendously counterproductive for the economy. Therefore, what China has accomplished over the last decade or so has been a well-calculated set of actions, short of war, by constantly moving one inch forward up to a point where the end of the US hegemony in the region will simply become a fait accompli. This strategy has taken different forms, such as claiming sovereignty in the East China Sea by constructing artificial islands, using its coast guard and fishing vessels to deter other countries from operating in contested territories, increasing the number of aerial and naval incursions in other states’ territories that it wishes to acquire, and increasing its pressure and military threats against Taiwan. However, by no means is China willing to sever ties with the United States and the Western world by crossing the red line that separates measures short of war from the war itself (as Russia has done): the consequences for its economy would be devastating, without any guarantee of defeating the US military.12 Therefore, it is fair to say that China’s foreign policy is predictable because it operates within the classical geostrategic logic. This rational way of achieving the end it is looking for explains why Beijing is in the uncomfortable situation of having to sit between two chairs. On the one hand, Russia is an objective ally—as Moscow is helping to weaken the post-Cold War US-led world order, as well as NATO and Washington’s alliance with certain European countries that are gradually becoming more critical of the organization’s involvement in the conflict in Ukraine (namely, France and Germany)—which explains why China has not condemned the invasion. On the other hand, Beijing’s lack of a reprimand for Moscow’s actions has not led to the recognition of the annexation of the seceding Ukrainian republics to Russia. In other words, this war clearly shows how China’s foreign policy dictates the need to contribute as much as possible to the demise of the Washington consensus without going too far in its support for its ally’s actions. This validates previous arguments that the current alliance between Russia and China is more of a matter of convenience than a genuine alliance in which actors irrevocably seal their common fate to one another. This constitutes a major vulnerability for Russia’s projects. If a pragmatic US administration would abide by China’s strategic revisionism

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in Asia by allowing Beijing to satisfy its objectives, the current antagonism that has led to a cooling of its relationship with Washington and rapprochement with Moscow could lead to a renewed dialogue that may break up the dynamic the world seems to be engaged in. We must realize that, like in any political process, Moscow’s strategy is not irreversible until it reaches its point of no return, which, despite all current rhetorical appearances, has not yet been met. This remains a possibility until the Chinese collective psyche ends up falling into the civilizational logic that Moscow has been pushing for. Clearly, when this shift occurs, it will be too late to act. Unfortunately, for world peace, this may be the unavoidable path we are destined to witness. Indeed, finding a controlled compromise with China based on sharing common interests would require the West to think and behave rationally and pragmatically. However, the fact of the matter is that the Western liberal project has also taken a civilizational and moralistic shift in recent years, as I have already explained. Therefore, this makes a possible agreement—which requires both partners to operate within the same paradigm and logic—highly improbable, thereby creating the risk of a Thucydides’ Trap, as the unsatisfied demands of China as an emerging power will not be met (Allison, 2017). In return, although China’s foreign policy is still inherently geostrategic, we cannot neglect the fact that this stance largely depends on circumstances and contingencies that may change soon, which might lead China and its political elites to change the country’s stand on international affairs. More precisely, China’s window of opportunity that might allow for more balanced control over East Asia may be currently closed, which could, in turn, contribute to a more forceful and less compromising US policy in the region. China’s looming demographic crisis, growing unemployment among young people, rapidly increasing debt, and economic slowdown may weaken the country’s future prospects and lead us to assume that Beijing’s Golden Age may have passed. However, in addition to the risk that this might generate—Washington’s unwillingness to achieve power parity with a declining country—this decline may also strengthen the hawkish dynamics in China. As Thomas J. Wright wrote, if we tend to fear a rising country, there are probably more reasons to be afraid of a declining one: A rising power believes that tomorrow will be better than today and it can wait. A rising authoritarian power derives legitimacy from economic growth and does not have to stoke the fires of nationalism. By contrast,

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a country in crisis or decline, especially after rising for many years, has a very different set of incentives. It can worry that its window of opportunity for geopolitical gains is closing, so it is better to act sooner than later. It may need to mobilize the country behind a nationalist message to garner legitimacy for [a] one-party rule. (2017, p. 97)

In a way, preventing the emergence of an illiberal bloc organized around the Moscow–Beijing axis, and fueled by the same civilizational view of the world, is not unavoidable. The momentum of this nascent political union—caused by circumstances, but historically unnatural and, currently, conceptually different considering the difference in geopolitics and geostrategies—could be broken with proper pragmatism and rational calculation. However, contemporary politics seem to navigate through anything but pragmatism and reason, with the conclusion that we should probably not hope for the best. ∗ ∗ ∗ The reader will now allow me to summarize what I have discussed. Analysts who have argued that Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine is the outcome of NATO’s expansion and the West’s unwillingness to abide by the norms and rules that it has itself encouraged others to respect are not wrong. This has certainly played a role in Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade his neighbor in February 2022. However, this is not the only reason, considering Russia’s intellectual history and the evolution of its foreign policy since Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012. It is clear that the decision has been animated by a civilizational vision that many have still not been able to see, either because they are solely focusing on the geostrategic dimension of the conflict or simply because they tend to see the Russian president as an irrational evil man who has gone mad with power. This is a mistake not only from an analytical perspective but also because it prevents those who remain blind to it from seeing the sort of world we may (not necessarily will ) end up living in for the coming decades. Following Sun Tzu’s famous citation mentioned in the introduction of this book, not understanding the enemy, their motivations, and their plans, in addition to not being able or willing to engage in wellneeded introspection about our responsibilities for their actions, can only lead us to succumb in the challenges that seem to be arising on the international sphere. It is because of this nonchalance and inability to expand

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their perception of the world, which is still entrenched in what is now a dead paradigm and into interpretative parameters that are out of touch with the new reality that Western nations are now rapidly losing ground in Africa. If this attitude persists, a snowball effect may be triggered and affect Western nations’ presence in other parts of the world, for example, the Middle East. Currently, it is of utmost importance for the West and anyone hoping to defeat Vladimir Putin’s global project to understand what has led him to finally break from 30 years of post–Cold War politics. What he is contemplating is, in accordance with the legacy of Russian messianism, more than just the invasion of another country. Rather, it is an ambitious civilizational project that may shape politics in the twenty-first century. Understanding this also means that we can determine its flaws, and consequently, how it can be hindered. It is my sincere hope that this book contributes to this task.

Notes 1. At the BRICS summit in South Africa in May 2023, it was reported that 22 countries had asked to join the organization, with 20 more having shown an interest in doing so. 2. To be more precise, the annual growth rate of China’s gross domestic product averaged 8.95% from 1989 to 2023, reaching a record high of 18.70% in the first quarter of 2021, while the US and the European Union have never experienced a growth rate higher than 5.95% (in 2021) and 5.39% (also in 2021), respectively, since 1992. 3. Owing to the war, trade by rail between China and Europe has decreased by a staggering 35% in 2022 (Knowler, 2022). 4. Chrystia Freeland, who was the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, said in a speech in front of members of the House of Commons that “it is [Canada’s] role to set a standard for how states should treat women, gays and lesbians, transgendered people, racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious minorities, and Indigenous people” (Freeland, 2017). 5. https://www.government.nl/latest/news/2022/11/18/fem inist-foreign-policy-netherlands. 6. https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/mandate-letters/2021/12/16/min ister-foreign-affairs-mandate-letter.

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7. In his speech in September 30, 2022, which followed the signing of the treaties on the accession of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions to the Russian federation, he has followed up on his previous criticisms of Western values that have created what he calls “a religion in reverse” by giving value to the degradation of family customs. However, he has also presented Russia’s culture and philosophy as threats to the West’s hegemony, which is why in his view some countries have banned the teaching of Russian authors and concerts of Russian composers. According to him, the new world order has emerged, and Russia’s civilization is directly competing with Western values that he presents as being colonial. Recalling Russia’s own past and openness to accommodate the various religious groups that lived in its country, as well as the USSR that led the anti-colonial movement, Putin’s speech clearly emphasizes the hope his country represents to other countries that are willing to escape Washington’s grip. More precisely, Russia’s ability to efficiently resist Western sanctions ought to serve in his mind as a clear sign that resistance is possible and that showing insubordination to the West and actively cooperating with Russia would not result in utter chaos. In fact, Russia has activated the collapse of the West’s “neocolonial model,” which is unsurprisingly why he used the word “colonial” (and derivations of it) 13 times in his speech that lasted 37 minutes (Putin, 2022). 8. It is believed that up to a quarter of the people living in the Country’s capital, Bangui, have converted from the Roman Catholic Church to Orthodoxy (One India News, 2023). 9. In comparison to China’s trade in Africa ($254 billion in 2021), Russia only traded $15.6 billion (Pilling & Schipani, 2023). 10. I would also not hesitate to include Kazakhstan to the list. With two national groups and more than 100 ethnic or religious minorities, the country has been able to maintain a remarkable peaceful coexistence with these groups since it became independent in 1991 (Caron, 2019). 11. That is, a degree of freedom that allows people to get mortgages, travel freely, and enjoy a large selection of high-tech products, while still knowing that the state controls information and that being actively involved in opposition movements may be dangerous (although not to the extent of Sovietism where people were deported, tortured, or killed).

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12. One very important thing we often tend to forget about the Chinese military is the fact that, unlike its US counterpart, it has no war experience and some of its operations would require a tremendous interarm collaboration between its various branches (as with the invasion of Taiwan): a titanic task for an unexperienced military.

References Abi-Habib, M. (2018). How China Got Sri Lanka to Cough Up a Port. New York Times, June 25. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/world/asia/ china-sri-lanka-port.html Allison, G. (2017). Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Bader, J. (2010). Obama and China’s Rise: An Insider’s Account of America’s Asia Strategy. Brookings Institute Press. Caron, J.-F. (2014). Affirmation identitaire du Canada: politique étrangère et nationalisme. Athéna. Caron, J.-F. (2019). The Contemporary Politics of Kazakhization: The Case of Astana’s Urbanism. In J.-F. Caron (Ed.), Kazakhstan and the Soviet Legacy: Between Continuity and Rupture (pp. 181–205). Springer. Caron, J.-F. (2020). A Sketch of the World After the Covid-19 Crisis: Essays on Political Authority, The Future of Globalization and the Rise of China. Springer. Caron, J.-F. (2022). Marginalisé: Réflexions sur l’isolement du Canada dans les relations internationales (with the collaboration of Frédéric Boily, Jocelyn Coulon and Zachary Paikin). Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval. Central African Republic: Amid Coup to Its West, Russian Influence in CAR Extends to Its Churches. One India News, August 2, 2023. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=6n2vKNm0sGg Dugin, A. (2002). Evraziiskii put’ kak natsional’naia ideia. Freeland, C. (2017, June 6). Address by Minister Freeland on Canada’s foreign policy priorities. https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2017/06/ address_by_ministerfreelandoncanadasforeignpolicypriorities.html Fukuyama, F. (2022). Liberalism and Its Discontent. Profile Books. Ikenberry, G. J. (2020). A World Safe for Democracy. Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order. Yale University Press. Johnston, A. I. (2013). How New and Assertive Is China’s New Assertiveness? International Security, 37 (4), 7–48.

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Karaganov, S. (2022). Russia’s New Foreign Policy, the Putin Doctrine. RT.com, February 23. https://www.rt.com/russia/550271-putin-doctrine-foreign-pol icy/ Knowler, G. (2022). Falling China-Europe Rail Volumes May Take Years to Recover: Rail Executives. Journal of Commerce, April 6. https://www.joc. com/article/falling-china-europe-rail-volumes-may-take-years-recover-rail-exe cutives_20220406.html Lo, B. (2008). Axis of Convenience: Moscow, Beijing and the New Geopolitics. Royal Institute of International Affairs. Lukin, A. (2018). China and Russia: The New Rapprochement. Polity Press. Moscow Times. (2019, March 15). Siberian Authorities Halt Construction of Lake Baikal Bottling Plant After Backlash. https://www.themoscowtimes. com/2019/03/15/siberian-authorities-halt-construction-of-lake-baikal-bot tling-plant-after-backlash-a64818 Pilling, D., & Schipani, A. (2023). How Moscow Bough a Sphere of Influence on the Cheap. Financial Times, February 7. https://www.ft.com/content/ 0c459575-5c72-4558-821e-b495c9db9b6f Putin, V. (2022, September 30). Signing of Treaties on Accession of Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions to Russia. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/page/21 Wright, T. J. (2017). All Measures Short of War. The Contest for the 21st Century & the Future of American Power. Yale University Press.

Index

A Africa, 28, 88, 92, 93, 101, 102

B Beijing, 14, 15, 17, 18, 27, 85–87, 97–100 Boyar, 39, 53, 56 BRICS, 85, 86, 101

C Catherine II, 33, 36, 45 Chaadaev, Pyotr, 41 China, 6, 7, 12–15, 17, 18, 62, 65, 75, 85–87, 89, 91, 93, 96–99 Civilization, 20–22, 24, 34, 35, 37, 40–42, 44–48, 60–63, 65, 66, 68, 71–73, 91 Cold War, 1, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17, 21, 23, 26, 51, 64, 72, 73, 77, 87, 88, 91 Constantinople, 37, 38 Crimean War, 47, 49, 74

D Danilevsky, Nikolai, 21, 42, 46, 48, 68 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 34, 45, 46, 54, 55 Dugin, Alexander, 20, 66, 70–72, 80, 93, 94, 97

F Fedorov, Nikolai, 45, 46 Fukuyama, Francis, 5, 23, 24, 60, 72, 95

G Gogol, Nikolai, 45, 46 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 7, 8, 33

H Herzen, Aleksander, 41, 50, 56 Huntington, Samuel, 5, 34, 40, 48

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Caron, Putin’s War and the Re-Opening of History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8167-0

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INDEX

I Illiberal bloc, 24, 76, 88, 91, 100 Iraq, 10, 12, 26, 89

J Jinping, Xi, 13–15, 17, 87, 97

K Karamzin, Nikolai, 20 Khomyakov, Alexey, 20, 55 Kireyevsky, Ivan, 20, 42–44, 47 Kirill, 73, 76 Kosovo, 10, 12, 26 Koyré, Alexandre, 20, 28, 35, 44

L LGBT, 66, 90 Liberalism, 23, 40, 51, 60, 61, 68, 79, 89, 91, 95–97

M Marx, Karl, 49, 50, 97 Mearsheimer, John, 5, 13, 18, 24, 25, 51, 72, 73 Medvedev, Dmitry, 2, 20, 63, 65, 72 Munich Security Conference, 6

N Narodnik, 50 NATO, 6–12, 14, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25, 27, 61, 68, 98, 100 Nicholas I, 41, 47, 48, 50 Nicholas II, 40

O Obshchina, 43, 49–51, 55

Orthodox, 34, 36, 43, 46, 47, 50, 52, 54, 55, 57, 75, 76, 90, 92. See also Orthodoxy Orthodoxy, 37, 42, 45, 47

P Pax Americana, 6, 10, 15 Peter I, 33, 36, 41, 45 Pogodin, Mikhail, 48 Pomeshchiki, 39 Pomeste, 39, 53. See also Pomeshchiki Primakov, Yevgeny, 8, 61, 62 Putin, Vladimir, 1, 2, 6–13, 17–22, 26, 28, 35, 39, 40, 48, 53, 60–77, 79, 81, 87, 88, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 100–102

R Rooted cosmopolitanism, 19, 94–96

S Schmidt, Carl, 20, 70, 72 Serbia, 10–12, 14, 26, 64 Shevkunov, Tikhon, 76 Siloviki, 75 Slavophile, 20, 21, 24, 28, 33, 35, 37, 42–45, 47–49, 51, 55, 56, 60, 68, 70, 73, 74, 76, 94, 95 Sobornost , 43, 44, 95 Soft power, 88, 92 Soviet Union, 1, 7, 8, 19, 40, 51, 56, 59, 60, 63, 67, 71, 91 Sretensky monastery, 76 Statism, 61, 62, 74, 77

T Third Rome, 33, 37, 41, 42, 57, 68 Tolstoy, Leon, 34, 42, 45–47 Tsar, 36, 38–40, 48, 53, 54

INDEX

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U Ukraine, 1, 3, 5, 6, 13–19, 21–25, 27, 35, 38, 39, 52, 68, 73, 76, 78–80, 88, 92, 93, 95, 98, 100 USSR, 2, 8, 9, 13, 18, 21, 27, 51, 56, 75, 93, 102. See also Soviet Union

W Westernism, 62, 63, 65, 68, 74, 76 Western values, 19–21, 34, 35, 44, 63, 64, 69, 70, 74, 78, 94, 102

V Valdai, 68

Y Yeltsin, Boris, 11, 12, 54, 60–62