by Michel Gurfinkiel
The Soviet “deep state” survived the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It is back with a vengeance.
The Lubyanka building (former KGB headquarters) in Moscow,
photo via Wikimedia Commons
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 796, April 15, 2018
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The Soviet “deep state” survived the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It is back with a vengeance.
The Soviet Union was not vanquished by the West in
the Cold War. It simply disintegrated in the late 1980s, the result of
cumulative failures. A military defeat or a popular insurrection might
have resulted in the elimination of its seventy-year-old totalitarian
infrastructure and superstructure (the Soviet “deep state”). A mere
collapse, however, had very different consequences.
Beyond the abandonment of the Eastern European
glacis and the formal independence of the fifteen Soviet Republics, the
ruling Soviet elite stayed largely in place. This was especially true in
the very heart of the Empire, the former Federative Socialist Soviet
Republic of Russia, rebranded as the Russian Federation. The army and
secret police stayed intact, the planned economy was turned into a
state-controlled oligarchy, and nationalism was substituted for
communism. Soon, Russia began to engage in systematic rebuilding and
reconquest.
This process started under Boris Yeltsin, the
allegedly liberal first president of post-Soviet Russia. Just a few
weeks after the USSR’s dismantlement, Yeltsin’s army seized Transnistria
as a Russian outpost between the now formally independent former Soviet
Republics of Ukraine and Moldavia. It was the Yeltsin bureaucracy in
the early 1990s that issued 1) the Near Abroad doctrine, according to
which Russia retained “vital interests” in neighboring
post-Soviet countries; and 2) the parallel doctrine of “the Russian
World”, which envisioned the “reunification” of all Russian-speaking
communities into a single nation-state.
Vladimir Putin, who was chief of the secret police in 1998, became prime minister in 1999 and then Yeltsin’s successor in 2000.
The primary strategic goal of a restored Russia is
to bring together all the Russian-speaking peoples into a single
nation-state. In 2014, after the forced incorporation into Russia of
Crimea, a province of Ukraine under international law, Putin elaborated
that, after the dissolution of the USSR, “millions of people went to bed
in one country and awoke in different ones, overnight becoming ethnic
minorities in former Union republics, while the Russian nation became
one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be
divided by borders.” What is at stake is not just Transnistria or Crimea
or eastern Ukraine, but the Russian-speaking communities in the Baltic
States and in Central Asia. This contention resembles that of Adolf
Hitler from 1933 to 1939, when he carved an ethnically defined Greater
Germany into the heart of Europe.
A second Russian goal is to reestablish the former
Soviet Union as a single geopolitical unit if not a single state:
a “Eurasian community” with Russia as first among equals. This
goal has been largely achieved. Most post-Soviet countries, with the
glaring exceptions of the Baltic states, which joined both NATO and the
EU, and of Ukraine, which strives to do the same, have reverted into a
Russian sphere of influence. The only countervailing power so far, at
least in Central Asia, has been China.
A third Russian goal is to weaken or eliminate any
rival power in Europe: be it the US and NATO, its military arm, or the
EU, at least as long as it has close ties with the US. A fourth is to
resume a world power role by reactivating support for former Soviet
client regimes like Baathist Syria or Cuba, or striking new strategic
alliances with emerging powers like Iran.
Sadly, most Western countries either failed to
understand what was going on or decided to ignore it, even in the face
of hard evidence. In his recently published book, The End of Europe,
James Kirchick writes: “As early as 1987,” when the Soviet Union still
existed, “Mikhaïl Gorbachev advocated Soviet entry into what he called
‘the common European home’.” Ten years later, after the demise of the
Soviet Union, “Boris Yeltsin hoped that Russia would one day join
‘greater Europe’.” In both cases, Western politicians and strategists
responded enthusiastically: many insisted that “a whole raft of
institutions, strategic theorems and intellectual currents born out of
the struggle against Soviet communism” were now passé, and “it was time
to supplant the bipolar order with more inclusive and ‘equitable’
arrangements.”
Seven years later, in 2005, the Gaullist president
of France, Jacques Chirac, and the social-democratic Chancellor of
Germany, Gerhard Schröder, planned for “a European Security and Defense
Union,” a “triangular” military alliance with Russia “that would exclude
Washington, to parallel and perhaps one day replace NATO.” It did not
appear to concern these analysts that “as the West slashed defense
budgets and relocated resources to Asia and the Middle East,” Russia was
undergoing “a massive conventional arms buildup to the point there
exists now a perilous imbalance on NATO’s Eastern flank.”
Even more intriguing was the attitude of Barack
Obama’s administration from 2009 to 2017. It did not do much to deter
Russian inroads into the Caucasus and Ukraine, and opted from 2015 on
for complete passivity in the Middle East and even active cooperation
with Iran, the new Russian protégé.
Much was achieved, in this respect, by soft power.
The old Soviet Union cultivated all kinds of networks in order to spy
on foreign countries, or to influence them: from communist parties to
front communist organizations, from fellow travelers to peace activists,
from businessmen or companies interested in East-West trade to
illiberal right-wingers. These networks accounted for perhaps one-half
of Soviet global power. As Cold Warriors used to say, “East minus West
equals zero”. Putin’s Russia is resorting to the same means and could
have equal or perhaps even greater success.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/strategic-goals-restored-russia/
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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