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Enged the Existing International Order As Well HOW RUSSIAN IMPERIAL HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF UNDER PUTIN GIORGI JGHARKAVA 125 EXPERT OPINION ÓÀØÀÒÈÅÄËÏÓ ÓÔÒÀÔÄÂÉÉÓÀ ÃÀ ÓÀÄÒÈÀÛÏÒÉÓÏ ÖÒÈÉÄÒÈÏÁÀÈÀ ÊÅËÄÅÉÓ ×ÏÍÃÉ GEORGIAN FOUNDATION FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES EXPERT OPINION GIORGI JGHARKAVA HOW RUSSIAN IMPERIAL HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF UNDER PUTIN 125 2019 The publication is made possible with the support of the US Embassy in Georgia. The views expressed in the publication are the sole responsibility of the author and do not in any way represent the views of the Embassy. Technical Editor: Artem Melik-Nubarov All rights reserved and belong to Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, including electronic and mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher. The opinions and conclusions expressed are those of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies. Copyright © 2019 Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies ISSN 1512-4835 ISBN 978-9941-8-1852-3 It goes without saying that Putin managed to reassert Russia as a hegemonic power once again after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In order to do so, he needed to implement crucial political reforms inside the country.1 However, reforms from a conventional point of view would indicate modernization whereas in the case of Putin’s Russia, it was more about reestablishing order which leads us to the pre-history of the Russian traditional approach to governance. Putin’s choice had historical reasoning behind it and the ways in which this approach was implemented very much resembled the past experience. In order for Russia to reemerge as a hegemon again, Putin challenged the existing international order as well. Taking it as a Western imposed arrangement, Putin has been trying to reassert Russia as not only the legal successor of the Soviet Union but a political successor, too. In order to answer the common question about “why Russia rejects the West?,” one needs to look at this from a historical approach. It is hard to argue if Boris Yeltsin could make the list of Russia’s rulers like Peter the Great, Catherina II and Alexander II - the list of leaders who attempted to modernize the country - but Yeltsin did try to transform the country in terms of democracy and liberal economy. As Padma Desai argues “in only a few years, Russia’s firms were no longer state- owned, its people could own property and firms, its government relied on taxes for collecting revenue and its currency was traded on foreign exchange markets.”2 However, a lesser control of the country which had been centrally governed in indoctrinated terms led to lesser order. The transition from communism to a free market economy did not prove to be easy either. The rise of oligarchs and organized crime gave way to corruption. According to Giorgi Badridze, “the total corruption of his [Yeltsin’s] government and the reign of organized crime and poverty […] discredited democracy in the eyes of ordinary Russians for generations.”3 The above-described reality of the late 1990s Russia offered fertile soil for Putin in order to reject “Western chaos” and get back to Russian basics – order. The main idea of Putin’s policy turn takes us back to one of the main dilemmas about the threat of the West imposing its values on Russia. According to traditional Russian imperial political thought, in order to avoid Western influence (which implies instability), Russia should be governed in an absolutist way. One of the precursors of this approach could be considered Ivan the Terrible who articulated his narrative in his exchange with Andrey Kurbsky. The narrative was strengthened during 3 the years of Smuta (1598-1613, due to the Polish interference). One could argue that even the modernizing tsars of Russia (again, Peter the Great, Catherina II, Alexander II) ruled in absolutist manners. What is more, during Catherina II’s rule, absolutism was pushed even further – in order to deter the ideas of the French Revolution. It would be fair to say that the best articulation of the idea of Russian absolutism belongs to poet, Nikolay Karamzin, author of History of the Russian State, one of the most popular history books in Russia. Karamzin’s main idea is that the Westernization of the state usually harms its integrity. An adjustment of Karamzin’s idea to today’s world would be the following: liberty/freedom can lead to chaos while order in the Russian context can preserve integrity and stability.4 The same reasoning was used (and sometimes still is) by those who do not really favor Peter the Great’s reforms in 18th century Russia. According to this narrative, Peter’s Westernizing reforms led to disparity and separated the elite from the peasants, thus taking away the main advantage which Russia had over Europe. The idea of post-Soviet Russia is that during Yeltsin’s tenure the country experienced another attempt of Westernization and it surely led to chaos in many senses. This very reality gave Putin the legitimacy to reintroduce the old version of the centralized system with different contemporary means: a polarized political spectrum, strong intelligence services, controlled media and the strong presence of the state in the private sector. In order to implement his grand policy, Putin used a lot of different means. One of the interesting approaches which Putin opted for leads us again to Russian historical experience - Oprichnina. Oprichnina is the name for Ivan the Terrible’s policy against the external and internal enemies of Russia. Oprichnina lasted for eight years, from 1565 to 1572. The main idea of the policy was directed against the feudals (known as boyars) in the Tsardom of Russia. The objective of Oprichnina was to neutralize different centers of power in order to enhance the absolutist rule of the Tsar. The terrorizing policy was carried out in the forms of executions and oppressions. The executors of Oprichnina were called Oprichniks who were playing the role of the state police for the Tsar. The Oprichniks played a crucial role in Ivan’s success – after gaining full internal control, the Tsar managed to expand Russia further. At the beginning of his tenure in the 21th century, Putin had the same old objective as Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century – to establish his absolutist rule. In order to reach his goal, Putin used Russian “best practice” – the state police. The state police or security service had 4 also always been an integral pillar of Soviet governance. Starting from the Cheka and continued with the NKVD and eventually transformed into the KGB – it was a main political mean for setting order in the Union. The institution was used for party purges, oppressing religious entities, identifying party enemies, etc. The KGB was transposed to the post-Soviet Russian Federation too, with a new name – the FSB. The traditional role of the intelligence services was not undermined during Putin’s tenure. On the contrary, the role was enriched in forms of incorporating the increasing numbers of former KGB personnel to public institutions. According to the study conducted by Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White, the number of former KGB personnel in the governmental sector in Russia is surprisingly high.5 The study argues that Putin’s regime is characterized by “the increasing proportion of the elite that claimed a military or security background.”6 According to authors, Putin tried to gather his trustees around him7 - since the president of Russia was a former member of the KGB personnel and the Director of the FSB his trustees naturally came from the same group. Likewise, the Tsardom under Ivan the Terrible and the Soviet Union, Putin kept the tradition of governing by the police rule and made a new elite out of the special services. Another field where Putin has been challenging the West is international politics. Again, likewise with anti-Western internal politics, Putin’s foreign policy can also be deconstructed in historical terms. When it comes to the reassertion of Russia in contemporary international politics, Putin has been chiefly building his foreign policy on the basis of the Soviet Union’s legacy. Vladimir Putin in his speech in front of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation described the fall of the Soviet Union as a geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.8 The essence of the message is that the Soviet Union used to be a Russian project with a particular ideological context – hence, the dissolving of it deprived Russia of the countries which it controlled and made it vulnerable to external threats. The idea of every staggered power to go forward is to initially come back to a previously held position. In the context of Russia, it would translate to reasserting its influence on its near neighborhood – which would be at least the post-Soviet states. In this context, another idea which has been dominating Russian political discourse is Western betrayal. The notions of the ungratefulness and the selfishness of the West among the Russian political elites can be traced back in earlier times, too. Firstly, the narrative was based on the Mongol invasions which were held back by the 5 Russians (hence, the Mongols could not reach further into Europe). The discourse was later complemented with elements such as saving Europe from Napoleon and eventually from Nazi Germany. However, this time the West’s betrayal was based on an alleged promise to Russia that NATO would not expand further (supposedly the promise was given by George H.W. Bush to Mikhail Gorbachev). Although there is no actual proof of the promise, the later expansion of NATO did stimulate the relevancy of the narrative that the West went for the offensive.
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