Review of 'The Russia Anxiety'

This is a review of the above book, but it also expresses my thoughts on the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, and of Russia's general place in the world and where it needs to get to.

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Russia as a people and nation deserve unconditional respect and esteem from the West, indeed as any country and people do, but also in particular for how Russia has contributed so much to the world, in basically all fields, but most famously in terms of literature, science, and aerospace engineering, with writers like Tolstoy, scientists such as Mendeleev, and great projects like the Soviet space programme.  In particular Russia is due all respect from the West for also having done the heavy lifting in defeating Nazi Germany in World War II and in this removing its wicked ascendancy from Europe. For the Soviet Union largely was the power that won the war in the European theatre, in that it was on the Eastern Front that the outcome of this war was decided, and this it is fair to say is not properly acknowledged by the West, or indeed perhaps at all. Eighty percent of the German army was on the Eastern front in the latter war years, and so by contrast the western fronts in France, the Benelux and Italy, were, while not sideshows, not nonetheless where the main brunt of the action was actually taking place. The largest battles by far with the most planes, tanks, guns and people, were always fought in the East, with the immense battle of Stalingrad being the decisive moment of the whole war. As such, the end of Hitler’s regime was for sure guaranteed by its defeat on the Eastern Front, but if rather the Nazi state had succeeded in swarming all the way up to the Urals, no Western Allied expeditionary force of any size could have plausibly made way against the resources of the entire European continent thereby assembled in such a malignant form. In this way, Russia is surely Hero of the nations on account of WWII, as the one who bore the weightiest burden and through whose especially tenacious agency a terrible dark age was averted.

 

Of course, this debt arising from the liberation of Europe owed to the USSR and its successor states is very much complicated by the character of the Soviet Union for much of this time as having been a Stalinist dictatorship, the governance of which, while actually better than Nazism (as even Churchill admitted), would of course involve an exercise in understatement in writing that there was room for improvement. Indeed, the imposition of that form of total state on Eastern Europe in the postwar era very much soured this part of the continent’s experience of being so liberated. The peoples of the former ‘People’s Republics’, who having been involuntarily held in Marxist-Leninist captivity, do not generally look back fondly on their countries’ experience of that. For while the book describes how the character of the Soviet Union and most of its puppet states changed very much with destalinisation, with the Khrushchev thaw, such as to allow for example some ‘permitted dissent’, yet this thaw was not so warm as to spare Hungary and Czechoslovakia Warsaw pact invasions, nor indeed to save the people of Berlin, and the rest of Eastern Europe, from the enjoyment of being walled into their far-left paradise. To be sure, the consent of the governed was obviously not felt to be necessary, neither in the USSR nor in its satellites, and so that fanciful experiment in utopianism continued for its unenthusiastic passengers for all-too long in the decades following World War II.

 

Now the Russians didn’t have a great time either under Stalin, and much Russian personal, familial and intellectual thought has been devoted to processing the various purges, gulags and deportations which occurred during this period, as the book makes clear. Yet more recently, it seems after the miseries of the 1990s, Stalin’s legacy to Russians has it seems become ‘complicated’ (and the book doesn’t actually cover this) in that he is now often remembered for the crash industrial development programme that turned the USSR into an industrial great power such that with this all the Soviet republics, including the Russian, managed to withstand the Nazi war of extermination, and indeed to emerge from World War II as one of the world’s two superpowers, and in this to have finally caught up with the West as very definitely its equal in strength and prestige. In this way, the state of things at the beginning of Stalin’s personal dictatorship was very different from the end, in that the USSR had become an industrial and military power of the first order, while for sure dispatching many millions of its own people along the way, in the manner of breaking lots of eggs to make the cult of personality omelette. Yet these basic facts, turning the Soviet Union from a backward largely peasant-agrarian economy into a modern industrial and military superpower, such that they could face off against Germany and practically all of Western Europe and in this emerge victorious, was obviously not a guaranteed nor an inevitable result, but rather only made possible, in part, by Stalin forcing the pace of things, to say it in euphemistic terms. That is, without this compelled development of extreme proportions, there would actually be no Russia today at all, in that Nazi Germany would have conquered the whole territory of European Russia and have then quickly exterminated all its Slavic inhabitants, to be replaced by Hitler-worshiping Lebensraum colonists. Quite naturally then, the means by which Nazi Germany was defeated do feature in the present day consciousness of Russia.

 

Now, such industrial development within the territory of the Soviet Union was in part a result of the Stalinist ‘Socialism in One Country’ policy, which prioritised building up the economy of the Soviet Union, as the world’s first socialist state, so that it might be defended from the capitalist powers, and therefore in this rejected the Trotskyist ‘Permanent Revolution’ plan which advocated fomenting worldwide Leninist revolution straight away, with the latter proposed as the only viable means of establishing the security of the Soviet state. As we know, the former strategy did work as it turns out in WWII, and not just in the minimal terms of preserving the revolution in the territory of the old Russian empire, but of exporting it further west into central Europe as well. So from the point of view that Russia exists at all today, Stalin’s legacy can be seen in this way as a complicated mixture of bad with some good, whose correct ratio has not been settled in Russia.

 

The book claims that the internal development tendency of the Soviet Union described above demonstrated an inherently irenic intention towards and desire for comity with the capitalist liberal democratic states. This however is clearly false in that the objective in either direction remained the eventual conversion of nothing less than the whole world to communism, which would very often involve the use of force whether by ‘vanguard’ revolutionary parties or simple invasion, since the class enemy, the international bourgeoisie, in principle would and could never voluntarily give up on their own expired and superannuated occupation of history. Yet, this was of course a similar version of the opposite grand desire resulting from the West’s faith in its own political philosophy and wish that all the world would become liberal democratic and capitalistic, which it is true was also aided by military intervention and subterfuge here and there (though it would very much seem that there was quite a lot less coercion employed by the liberal democratic world). However, while the means used by both sides were not always lofty, both worldviews could yet, and did, describe their purposes in exalted terms. As in, when the ascent of liberal democracy and capitalism almost happened in the lands of the former Soviet Union at the end of the 20^th century, it did indeed seem as if liberal history might have come to a rapturous close, in just the same way as that if Communism had somehow triumphed in Western Europe and North America it would have appeared as if the Marxist-Leninist scheme of history had been completed and perfected. Yet, in seeing that both sides of the Cold War were not always above using violence to achieve their ends, this is not to equate them in magnitude in this respect, for the Leninist project was the one of revolutionary violence by self-appointed coteries, and having attained power, the forceful suppression of ‘counter-revolutionary’ dissent. To this must be added the unhappy custody of the peoples of Eastern Europe both in Moscow’s sphere of influence and in its kind of statecraft. As such, it seems quite fair to characterise the Soviet Union as not quite so peaceful nor pleasant to those within it and in proximity to it, and in truth as not the moral equivalent of the western alliance.

 

Yet, the book convincingly shows that Russia, in its many versions, has been and is no more congenitally or inevitably aggressive, expansionist or amenable to autocratic government than any other European or non-European country. Rather it is the one actually who tends to get invaded, such as by the Mongols in the middle ages, the Swedish Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period, Napoleon’s invasion at the start of the 19^th Century, and the two most serious German invasions of the 20^th Century. With this history, and such a long border with so many other states, along with no natural features that afford geographic defence along the frontiers of or within its home, which is the great Eurasian steppe, a certain amount of anxiety and paranoia seems to be a permanent condition of whoever is ruling from either the Winter Palace or the Kremlin. This is only made worse by having generally been historically behind the rest of Europe in economic and technological development and power, combined also with a sometime inferiority complex in high cultural matters, to such a degree that Russia or its associated states have felt under assault just by mere proximity to its richer and more confident cousins. One possible, and antisocial, Russian state policy response to this predicament then has often been operate on the basis that if there are to be invasions directed at Russia it would be much better if rather they were to occur outside the lands of Russia, ideally by such hostile powers trying to get through a ring of ‘friendly’ states whose happy function would in this be to absorb the firepower of the invader so as to allow Russia enough time and space to later retake these now devastated lands and to perhaps then help bury the dead afterwards, if it felt that way inclined. Yet naturally the non-Russian states who are pressed into such a sphere of influence of a latterly risen imperial Russia will not obviously be enthusiastic about becoming the expendable punching bags that this new Russia will bravely hide behind.

 

So, while the book is called ‘The Russia Anxiety’ and goes on a lot about this putative concept, whose validity I will now begin to question and then reject, clearly Russia is just as much prone to a ‘West Anxiety’ as well. In general, I think the title of the book is not at all apt, not just by ignoring the anxiety and paranoia that Russia directs ‘our’ way (if Russia be fully excluded from the concept of the West), but also by its dressing up this ‘Russia Anxiety’, with capital letters, as though it were a unique and singular occurrence, which is, by even the most cursory sampling of history, shown to be more than a little ridiculous. For example, Ancient Egypt and the Hittite empire were uneasy neighbours, alternating between peace and war; Rome and Carthage did not much enjoy each other’s proximity and could well see the threat that each posed to the other, and so they dealt with each other by invasions; the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Sassanian empire raged against one another; the Ottoman Empire terrified Christian Europe at the height of its power and extent; again the Ottomans and the Safavid empire intimidated each other; France faced off against the Habsburg world empire, and was in this very concerned that it would be pushed off the stage as a front rank power; and later France had quite the anxiety about the German Empire from the moment of its creation in 1870 up to World War I and further on in the lead up into World War II naturally; England/Britain always acted in such a way as to keep France in particular, and continental powers generally, relatively manageable, and so warred often to keep Europe disunited; the present day Arab states would seem to be quite wary and indeed anxious about the whole West because of its various spiky interventions over the years and of the possibility of more to come; Russia itself had tremendous concern in relation to China after the Sino-Soviet split, inasmuch as there was more apprehension on the Soviet side of a Chinese invasion rather than a NATO one; and indeed as already mentioned, Russia itself very much can have a ‘West Anxiety’ itself in terms of being either invaded, infiltrated, undermined, broken up, dismissed, disrespected or in imagining wild conspiracies where there is felt to be some grand and intricate plot that coordinates all of the above from a central source. There are of course plenty of other examples of such interstate anxieties in history; suffice it to say that where there are states that have not settled into a stable equilibrium with one another, there will as a consequence be anxiety about how these states cannot but help threaten each other by their simple existence and proximity.

 

So, the evolving rivalries between established powers, or where new powers arrive on the scene and in this upset the balance of power, will all necessarily lead to a lot of anxiety about how the established order of things might become very much rearranged and remade, even to such a degree that certain states may go under in extremis. This is not a reaction based on xenophobia and lazy prejudice, but rather good perception and judgment about how new actors or actors who have developed certain powers could, if they so decide, seriously destabilise the basis of the state system or even end the statehood of certain nations as such, given that this has actually repeatedly happened in history, such as with the suppression of Poland and Ireland for hundreds of years, and indeed in what Russia is now trying to do to Ukraine. Given the possibility of deploying such powers in a situation where trust has broken down because of the evidence of malign intentions, it follows that there will ensue a lot of legitimate anxiety. As such, in enumerating all the pairings of mutual anxieties above between rival and threatened powers, this is not and cannot be such as to dismiss these concerning historical interstate situations as merely the paranoid fixations of those with active imaginations and a predisposition to impute to outsiders malevolent designs. As such, to name or focus on one existing interstate anxiety, namely the ‘Russia Anxiety’, such as is attempted in this book, is not in the mere act of its being stated to in this magic away its real basis given that the context in which this is done is of a Russian government that has made it its business to destabilise the democratic societies of the West and to invade its former ‘sphere of influence’, so that the Russian state might once again become an empire and the entirety of the European continent made ‘friendly’ to its scheming autocracy.

 

For clearly, in response to the chaotic first decade of Russia’s being a nation-state and the general predicament that the Russian people found themselves in after the break-up of the USSR, the current Russian government and state have plumped for the bizarre and very atavistic let’s be an empire again ‘solution’. That is, with, it seems, the bewilderment in Russian society about its latterday place and purpose in the world, in having lost a prime position and the respect that came with the Tsarist and Soviet versions of itself, along with indeed the raw memory of its violent ejection from the Soviet Union in terms of the economic and societal collapse in the 1990s, comparable to the miseries of the Weimar Republic, the ‘solution’ chased after was and remains to turn this reduced and lately born Russian nation-state, into something more traditional and yet grander, namely a ‘great’ empire that governs its near and its abroad primarily by way of the gun and the jackboot, to which fanciful notions about its place in the world are tacked on also.

 

For with the chaotic destitution that seemed to many Russians to have been caused by the adoption of western style liberal democracy and market capitalism in the 1990s, and the confusion in Russian society in having lost its grand narratives of it alone saving the world either through being, in its Tsarist form, the chief standard bearer of Christ’s one true church, Orthodoxy, or by way of Russia being the great helmsman in guiding humanity to the peace and prosperity of developed communism, Russian society in latter years came to exist by contrast in a somewhat liminal and indeterminate state, and of such a kind that could, in its anguished perplexity, be somewhat easily recast in potentially different ways. To this end, stepped in Putin and many likeminded former state security officials with various half-baked new narratives about how Russia could once again be made the centre of the world, and who in more prosaic terms thought that things would be greatly improved if rather there were to be instead a ‘managed’ democracy that would correct the poor choices of a volatile people, which people for example afforded the contemptible drunkard Yeltsin the opportunity to drive Russia into the ground, combined also with a ‘mighty’ state that would, amongst other things, put manners on the post-Soviet oligarchs, so that the economy as a whole might be better managed and that wealth would be spread around more widely within the state apparatus, to include high government officials like Putin obviously. By this means Russia would be stabilised and so could in this begin to recover some of the strength and self-respect that belonged to the Soviet Union and the Tsarist Empire before it, wherewith Moscow would once again become the capital of a power that all other states in the world would necessarily respect and take note of. Yet such a project for sure required and requires a narrative that accords to Russia a purpose that would make its autocratic internal governance and its subjugation of as much of Europe as possible a good and necessary thing, and as such Russian internal propaganda has had its task in part to discharge such a risible delusion as that it is Russia’s great and noble commission to ‘save’ ‘Christian’ civilisation from the perversions of a congenitally ‘decadent’ West, with its feverish consumerism, wild individualism, and its wacky penchant for inventing new ways of being sexual and gendered.

 

For the West is by this reckoning depraved and so its primacy within the current world order is intolerable for this reason, and indeed for many others. In this Putin and his good buddy Patriarch Kiril of the Russian Orthodox Church work in lockstep to keep such insidious policies as liberal democracy, probity in public life and allowing the existence of people who can’t fit into traditional identities from without the lands of Holy Russia. Or rather, Russia is in truth held to be genuinely secure only where it will have seized the leading position on the European continent, not only in terms of military forces and energy dependency, but also where the West’s all too alluring ideas and practices are gainsaid by the vaunted stability and success of the Russian autocratic state that is wont to claim the ability to rescue and integrate individuals from anomie and society from fracture by way of the ligaments of a ‘guided democracy’, and one that is arranged in terms of traditional religion and morals. To this end it would be very helpful if the societies of the West became debilitated through a very obvious and rancorous splintering, where the West’s institutions would come to be discredited, such as in terms of populist politics, culture wars, and a loss of faith in expertise and in truth itself. And so, by contrast Russia could present itself then as the only sane and sensible actor on the continent who would then, in its generosity, take care of those countries that finally accept their place within a Russian fold, and in this to leave democracy and human rights behind.

 

Indeed, this would involve serious bonus points for Russia in terms of what would be very gratifying to it as they it seems have very much not enjoyed the constant and unsolicited ‘advice’ that they have been getting from the West since the fall of the Soviet Union, in that where the result of such advice was not just direly catastrophic as with ‘shock therapy’ in the 1990s, the remainder has nonetheless very often been given in a spirit of arrogance and condescension, in holding or implying that Russia and its precursor states, including the USSR, have contributed nothing of worth to the world, and as such that Russia needs in this to be merely a passive student who knows its place and whose highest ambition could only be merely to take up an acceptable orbit around the West’s very high opinion of itself. So where now Russia could latterly position itself as having a superior political and economic system, such as to be able to offer advice to a basket case West about how to do things better, this would be quite pleasing to a lot of Russians, and indeed would make its present government more popular for sure. The storming of the US Capitol was covered in Russian state media with very deep satisfaction, for example.

  

Now, Russia has plenty of other gripes and grievances about the West’s general behaviour since the end of the Cold War, and the list of these things I think is important for understanding what seems to be the background to the unhinged decisions taken of late, such as to invade Ukraine, so I’ll try to reproduce them here. Firstly there has been on the Russian side what they feel as exasperation and indignation, and this indeed is shared by many other actors on the world stage, about how various combinations of Western countries have in the recent past took it upon themselves to invade certain states, depose their leaders and on at least one occasion to unilaterally change the borders of a UN state by setting up one of its provinces as a sovereign entity. That is, Iraq was of course invaded and its government deposed without a UN mandate, and the Libyan intervention approved by the UN, with Russia’s assent, was only supposed to be a no fly zone, yet Western countries went all in and created circumstances in which Ghaddafi was brutally dispatched. For sure, the ‘Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution’ was nuts, yet the state with him at its head was obviously a better place to live in terms of getting an education, healthcare and food to eat than what resulted afterwards, such as with the interminable civil wars and conflicts that have even now not yet subsided. The same is of course true with Iraq, in that while the dictator brought down was not exactly a benevolent leader, the fact is that the amount of suffering that arose because of the fact of and the manner of his removal is magnitudes greater than what would have been if there were no invasion. Also with the air campaign in Serbia, this operation occurred outside of the institutions of the United Nations and the requirements of international law as apart from the air bombing, it involved a coercive change to the borders of Serbia by alienating a part of its territory to become an independent and sovereign state. Russia was especially interested in this Serbian case on account of its hundreds year old view of itself as protector of Slavs and of the Orthodox, and so it felt an obligation to stand up for this country, having felt it to be one of its own. As such, it seems that Russia felt that a taboo had been broken, in that the borders of countries in Europe were from the end of World War II supposed to be sacrosanct, and rather ought only be changed by negotiation and consent. Of course it is true that Slobodan Milosevic’s government tried to do a similar but opposite thing to Kosovo by expelling all Albanians so that this province might become completely Serbian, and so it was not a bad thing to stop a new series of massacres and atrocities from occurring yet again on Europe’s doorstep, whatever the international rules might be.

 

Yet, for Russia, and of course Serbia, the unilateral diktat by the West about severing this most ancient and essential part of Serbia from itself and setting it up as a breakaway state and granting it wide recognition as a sovereign country set an outrageous precedent that allowed Russia to be content in its cynicism about setting up client breakaway states in Georgia and Ukraine, as we have seen. On the whole then, for these reasons and others, it seems that Russia, and many other non-Western states, have come to the view that the West selectively expatiates about international law, human rights, and the importance of popular consent in terms of the legitimacy of a state, when it suits it, and often as a way to beat down the door to gain entry to places, but that it can turn on a dime when such things are no longer convenient, and so these principles are then on such occasions quickly sent out the window. Indeed, such are the heights of the West’s arrogance that it has granted to itself alone the right to make exceptions to the common rules of the international order set up after WWII, such as in the examples listed, and yet it bizarrely expects that everyone else will nonetheless continue to observe them to the letter in all other cases.

 

Another serious bone of contention that seems to exercise Russia a lot is the Western media treatment of the Russo-Georgia war of 2008, where they did see the Western political and media response as nothing less than a full-scale propaganda attack, in it being an example of an old kind of aggression that yet has come of late to take a much greater prominence in the affairs of the world, namely information warfare. Now, the Russian view would seem to be that the collapse of the Soviet Union left a lot of demographic complexity in its wake, in a way that did not neatly match up ethnicities and nation states in general, but that in the Caucasus especially things were (and of course remain) extremely complex in that there are very many ethnic groups and religions indeed, who it seems have not always got on with each other very well, and in this example clearly Georgians versus Abkhazians and Ossetians have not always been very much enamoured with each other. In this Russia, as the successor state to what came before it, feels it seems that it has inherited many of the responsibilities and duties to the hundreds of ethnicities that the former Tsarist and Soviet Empires had in their territories, and that these are of such a kind that can be, in the Russian view, neatly folded into a ‘sphere of influence’ that Russia feels it cannot be Russia without. Indeed, Russia in the wider sense as a broad civilisation, it is claimed, would alone be the space in which all these various ethnicities might find an ample and agreeable habitation, with the contrary situation, as separated from one another, as one where both Russia and these smaller nationalities and ethnicities decline and indeed come to ruin.

 

So, the Socialist Soviet Republic of Georgia always had as federal components an Abkhazian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and an South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast, in much the same way as that the various nationalities and ethnicities were (nominally) catered for in the wider Soviet federal structure such as with the Ukrainian, Estonian, Kazakh, etc. Soviet Socialist Republics or within the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic itself, the Tatar, Yakut, and many other Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics. The theory was that every national and ethnic community would get their own autonomous polity such that, in part, no nationality or ethnicity would be able to oppress another, but also, or more importantly, to develop a literate class of proletarian leaders who could develop socialism in their respective communities. However, in practice, the Soviet Union was in reality highly centralised, so these complex federal structures were not completely relevant to that objective, yet those communities, nevertheless, very much liked having them anyway. So, in the Caucasus, the Abkhaz and South Ossetians in their respective autonomous republics did not and obviously still don’t want to be part of Georgia proper, in ways that are loosely analogous to Catalonia in terms of Spain or longer ago with Ireland in terms of the UK, and as such have always looked to Russia as their protector versus Georgia. Most of the rest of the various assorted ethnic groups in the Caucasus mountains have autonomous republics within the territory of the Russian Federation, but they are not exactly allowed to press for independence, vis Chechnya. Now, It appears that there was a very uneasy truce for a long time between Georgia and the South Ossetian forces and their Russian guarantors, from the events following the fall of the Soviet Union, but it does seem that it was President Saakashvili of Georgia who, indeed after some provocation, went nonetheless for a full scale invasion as an intended decision with the purpose being to restore what to the Georgians would be constitutional order, but to the South Ossetians and Abkhazians would naturally appear as an attempt to take their land and in general to bring them to heel. Of course, Russia under Putin supported Abkhaz and South Ossetian autonomy as a means of controlling Georgia, so that in particular it could never join NATO, and at the same time Russia under its current management views itself, and even necessarily, as a great power with a sphere of influence, which very much includes the Caucasus region, and so it was not about to have the map redrawn in this area without its say so and, moreover, for Russian soldiers stationed in these autonomous areas to be kicked out by the upstart and ‘small’ nation of Georgia. Also, however Russia, as said, would like to view itself as the protector of all those to whom it lends its credit (such as catering for all those within the complex federal structures listed above, and even Serbia as mentioned) and so for reasons of prestige and pride, and the other reasons mentioned, it responded very forcefully to the Georgian invasion. Russia did of course proceed beyond stopping the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia to itself invading Georgia, which it seems from the Russian side was an effort to punish the latter and convince it of the unwisdom of ever contemplating such a thing again, and so in general that it might know its place in the great power order of things and in a zone of the world that Russia considers its own.

 

So, it seems that because the present Russian elite and wider state philosophy can’t envisage a stable and secure version of Russia which isn’t a great power that in this necessarily has a sphere of influence over its traditional zone on the Eurasian continent, in which also Russia would be protector of those in need (Abkhazians and South Ossetians) but also punisher of those who attempt to damage this order or of those who even defect (such as Georgia), it follows that the Georgian governments’ attempt to go all in and make this frozen conflict very hot indeed by attempting a full invasion of those territories was something that this Russian calculus would necessarily process as being a scandalous transgression of the right order of things. As such, from the Russian point of view, the Western media coverage of this war largely ignored the trigger event for making this latent conflict burn with intensity again, namely the Georgian attempt to once and for all restore ‘constitutional order’ by making these territories a simple part of Georgia, and in this Russia perceived this to be not just unfair, but as actually an intentional misrepresentation of things in the service of some propagandistic end. The very same was felt about the wholesale castigation of Russia as entirely the aggressor for defending these territories and sending a punitive expedition that was intended to dissuade Georgia from ever attempting such a thing again, in that it seems the Russian state believed it was defending not just these peoples, whose defence was important enough to it, but also Russia’s core existential interests, such as they are or as they are believed to be. And all this seemed to be especially galling where, from the Russian side of things, NATO had intervened in Serbia to defend Kosovar Albanians, and in such a way as to dismiss international criticism of the bombing and the establishment of Kosovo as an independent state. So, Putin, and even Gorbachev, more than once said in many interviews that were widely reported in western media as that Russia had come under a full scale information warfare attack, and that Putin said that the next time where there is a clash between east and west, Russia would be able to respond in kind. It seems that Russia Today was set up not that long after this war, so as to, minimally project the Russian view of things to a wider audience, but also along with other methods, like using Facebook etc, to steadily undermine and destabilise the West in just the same way as that most Russians felt that they had never got a fair hearing in Western media outlets, but rather had always been assailed by hostile misrepresentations whose sinister aim was to reduce and wholly break up Russia as a geopolitical entity, or so the theory went and goes.

 

Of course, the current version of Russia was also mightily pissed about the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine which, being a revolution, unconstitutionally overthrew the pro-Russian government of Yanukovych. Yanukovych was elected fair and square by a majority of Ukrainian voters, and this was verified by numerous election monitors of which membership included representatives from the EU. As such, Russia viewed this revolution as an anti-democratic coup which subverted, what it held were, the basic desire of the ‘real’ Ukrainian people to enter into a brotherly union with Russia and Belarus. Now, this Yanukovych government inherited from a previous pro-Western one a European Union Association agreement process and the former one pretended to advance it until, at the last moment, when it was due to be signed, it quickly changed its colours and proceeded to begin acceding to the alternate Russian led free trade zone, the Eurasian Economic Union, instead. Yet a large majority in the Ukrainian parliament had approved the EU association deal, and its settled will on its preference for the European Union was very clear. Moreover, it is also very clear that a majority of the Ukrainian people wanted the association agreement with EU, and in no way was there an indication of popular support for the geopolitical abduction that Yanukovych attempted to perpetrate on Ukraine. Like David Cameron correctly said in his Brexit referendum, the Brexit vote was actually much more important than a general election since it would determine the entire geopolitical direction of the UK for decades to come, and so, similarly, it seems that many Ukrainians felt that Yanukovych though legitimately elected to the office of President merely, had obviously no mandate to make such a decision of extreme consequence, and so in this context his government’s actions were of such a radically illegitimate and dangerous nature that a revolution to overthrow him was a proportionate and very necessary response. Now, there was also much state violence against peaceful protestors with quite a lot of loss of life, and this provided some of the fuel for the revolution in addition, and indeed one of the aims of it was to bring to justice those who had so murdered. Moreover, the view of the vast majority of Ukrainians now is that Yanukovych is a traitor to his country, and that he may yet face justice too if Putin’s regime does not last, which prospect is not at all implausible.

 

Yet, because the current version of Russia discounts and dismisses the agency of ‘small’ states in general, it has not been able to process the fact that there was a genuine uprising by a representative gathering of Ukrainian people who legitimately exercised the emergency failsafe present in any democracy of the people’s duty to overthrow a clearly treacherous government, but rather Russia neurotically believes that all this was actually the result of the machinations of the United States in particular, and perhaps also the UK, as having fomented and engineered it from afar. Indeed Russia considered that all these pro-western ‘colour’ revolutions, such as in Georgia, and previously in Ukraine, were all of a piece and spoke to a common conspirator, and that indeed Russia was surely the next target of such foreign subversion. As such it was urgently necessary for this reason, and others, to harden Russian civil society against the insidious designs of the Western intelligence agencies responsible for these previous uprisings, given that they would use, amongst others, NGOs and news organisations to disrupt and then break the Russian state, and thereby finally succeed in their fiendish plot to put great Russia under the thumb of the West as its petty vassal and servant.

 

Further, yet in slightly less shrill and rather more composed terms, according to standard Russian nationalism, Ukraine is for sure not just another generic country whose trajectory can be a matter of indifference to Russia, but rather views it, on account of its reading of history, as being part of the Rus’ lands whose headship is Russia proper, and so for Ukraine to be lost to Russia by joining and integrating with Western Europe to the exclusion of Russia would be psychologically like as if (very counterfactually) the north of England somehow seceded and wanted to rejoin the EU alone, or as if India were expected to simply give up its claims to Kashmir and allow its integration with Pakistan. That is, it would feel like to Russia that it was losing part of its own self, and that it would not really be possible for the rump state that was left to be truly Russia at all, with the loss of such a venerable and essential part of the historical lands of Kievan Rus’. Indeed, East Slavic history has only recently, with the lead up to and then the commencement of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, got the attention in the Western media that it has always deserved. In this, it is clear that the medieval Kievan Rus’ state is the common legacy and progenitor of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, and of the various other principalities and republics that no longer exist, and in this Russian nationalism has always taken it for granted that Russia is the sole legitimate successor state to this first Rus’ state, such that if it generously ‘allows’ separate Ukrainian and Belarussian nations to exist, it does so merely as ‘little brothers’, who ought always to do as they are told and from within the confines of the one household. Yet, the lands of Ukraine, and indeed Belarus, were for hundreds of years within the very multicultural yet ill-fated Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose decline and eventual elimination from the map of Europe was not at all inevitable, since nothing is in history. Yet if Poland-Lithuania hadn’t disappeared the history of Ukraine and therefore the legacy of Kievan Rus’ would likely be read differently today, inasmuch as Russia might well have been forced to keep its original name of Muscovy, and as such would have had to have a more nuanced reading of its origins, by the recognition of not just one, but of multiple strands leading from Kievan Rus’. Even so, this is precisely what has happened anyway, for Ukraine exists and is one such valid successor to Kievan Rus’, indeed it holds Kyiv of course. Equally, if the people of Belarus could elect a government that actually represented their views, it seems that they also would consider themselves an equal successor in just the same way, and so expect their nation to be as sovereign as any other, and to make any of the free choices of association as they saw fit. As such, it is abundantly clear that the central part that Ukraine plays in Russian nationalism, as being an integral and essential part of the Rus’ world, is a very major part of the background of this conflict, a conflict that Russia did not need to make so much worse, but has nonetheless escalated up to a very murderous level of savagery anyway.

 

Now, certain Eastern portions of Ukraine did not receive the revolution in Kyiv at all favourably either, such as Donetsk and Luhansk, and it seems that there was not a small amount of the people there who presented with a choice between a pro-western government in Kyiv that defined itself largely by its opposition to Russia and with a Russia that stood over the achievements of their shared Tsarist and Soviet past, gave up on Ukraine and chose Russia as a better representative of their view on things instead. In them too taking to arms, of course Russia supported and fostered them, and contributed both ‘volunteers’ and complex and very deadly weapons, such as with the anti-aircraft missile system that negligently shot down a Malaysian airliner with the loss of hundreds of peoples’ lives. The aim was and naturally remains to annex these areas into the Russian Federation. Also, of course, Russia infiltrated and annexed Crimea, whose population is not just overwhelmingly Russian speaking but ethnically Russian as well, and who in fact were never happy about being assigned to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1956, yet whose perpetual and irrevocable inclusion in Ukraine was reaffirmed by Russia in 1994 in exchange for Ukraine giving up the nuclear weapons that it had acquired upon the fall of the Soviet Union.

 

Russia in losing a friendly government in Kyiv, resolved in all this to take as much of Ukraine by force as it could, since, as described above, in its view it basically ‘owns’ Ukraine anyway. Yet maybe Putin’s Russia thought that the pro-western government in Kyiv inaugurated in 2014 wouldn’t last at all by punching Ukraine up in this way, that in particular it would be taken down by the war in the Donbass, or be successfully subverted from within, so that in time it would be turned towards Moscow. Yet perhaps the batshit-crazy World War II style invasion begun this year was chosen out of sheer frustration on account of all these grubby and vicious methods of disfiguring Ukraine having flopped so completely, and that Putin maddened by his failure finally threw caution to the wind by making very plain, in all its appalling truth, what he has long been doing to Ukraine, and beyond, for very many years now, and in the process publicly confirming the idiocy of all those in the West who had been so useful to him.

 

So, it seems that Russia considers itself to have very many motives to justify it making things rough for the West, which is in addition to pushing back on the NATO and EU ‘encroachment’ on what it views as the core territories of its homeland. Yet before the barefaced invasion of Ukraine, there was of course, and only those who are a bit dense could deny it still, a continuous Russian state effort to pull on the seams of Western societies to see if the whole fabric might come undone, which is probably what they think the West did to the Soviet Union, in ‘infecting’ it with ideas of human rights and democracy, etc. Anyway, while the various faultlines in the West preexisted any outside agency that desired to exacerbate them, nonetheless in contributing nudges here and there, in terms of disinformation and manipulation of social media, certain thresholds of societal disturbance were it seems reached, that while relatively small in their moment such efforts have nonetheless because of the finely balanced state of things, had a large effect, such as with the election of Donald Trump for example. As in one or two percent less of a vote for him, and he could have continued being the very successful and classy entrepreneur that we all know him to be. Even if, counterfactually, the effect of such hostile efforts at destabilising the West was smaller than this, such as to have had no causative role in the increased instability experienced in the West, nonetheless the thought certainly counts in this regard, and as such the present Russian state has rightly been viewed as extremely hostile for many years now, and this hostility has been directed at in particular the political philosophy that the West propounds, being liberal democracy and the institutions through which it exists, since its ascendency is such a threat to the mafia-like rule of Putin and his crew in Russia.

 

Such subtle operations have however obviously given way to straight up invasions, such as in Ukraine. Indeed, if there is anyone still idiot enough not to see Russia’s wider designs for Eastern Europe in particular, let them have yet another pass over the issue by observing Russia’s menacing thoughts about ‘revoking’ Lithuania’s independence, an EU and NATO country, its blatant exploitation of gas and oil to bring the ‘small’ nations of Europe to heal by choking our economies, and its simply stated demand that the foreign policy of the entirety of Eastern Europe be subject to the yoke of Moscow. Of course, Russia’s expressed desire is that NATO be pushed back, at a minimum, to the extent that it had just at the Cold War’s ending. Yet this ultimatum is about much more than simply this in that the countries of Eastern Europe know all too well that closely following on from such a withdrawal would be Russia’s quick and matched pursuit that would sweep these countries up again into its own ‘legitimate sphere of influence’, so that these nations might once again have the enjoyment of being puppets to the retrograde polity that is centred in the Kremlin. The Eastern European states will tell anyone who will listen that it was they who asked to join NATO, that it was through their agency that they became members, and as such their accession to this organisation was very much demand led, with existing members simply holding the door open, and not by contrast, and this is what the current Russia is neurotically compelled to imagine, that they were somehow strongarmed, tricked or manipulated by the United States, the UK and France into coming into a western orbit, and further that this trio did this because, despite the facts, they still regarded and regard Russia as inevitably a great and mighty power who therefore needs containing, or better dismemberment. The countries of Eastern Europe rather saw the fall of the Soviet Union and the troubles that Russia was having in the 1990s that made it temporarily weak as a very time-limited opportunity to have their independence and sovereignty copperfastened, by recourse to the West, because the odds were, and they were right, that once Russia got back on its feet it would likely try reestablish the empire that it once had. So part of the account that contributes to an explanation of this situation is that this version of Russia is having a murderous strop about not being able to impress its neighbours into its habitual protection racket.

 

Yet, from the point of view of any version of Russia, including a peaceable and democratic nation-state one that values the rule of law and probity generally, it is very perplexing that NATO continued to exist after the end of the Cold War, in that with Russia trying to adopt western political and economic philosophy, in becoming liberal democratic and as having a market economy, there was surely no opponent in Russia left that could possibly justify the continued existence of an intercontinental military alliance that was only created to contain its very different precursor state, namely the Soviet Union. So the fact that not only that it continued to exist, but rather that it expanded all the way up to Russia’s very borders, such as to include virtually every ex-Soviet state, yet to pointedly exclude Russia itself, was and must be something that promotes anxiety and distrust on the Russian side, and indeed is likely to motivate efforts to stop this somehow. Russia even asked at one point for membership of NATO but this was refused, and so one cannot perhaps blame any Russian leader of whatever political hue from drawing the inference that NATO was and is still directed against Russia and that Russia is its chief opponent. Naturally then, Russia would find it very hard indeed to not oppose NATO expansion.

 

However it seems that the western view on this issue is not quite the same, in that the United States was prepared to continue underwriting the security of a liberal democratic and market capitalist Europe, for on the basis of democratic peace theory this would finally enable Europe to remain prosperous and peaceful, with the result that this would be one area of the world that would no longer need much attention or that in general cause nearly as much bother, and so the more of Europe that signed up to this scheme of things the more the very better. So it supported EU and NATO expansion. The western European states were at one with the US in this in making Europe whole and free, and integrating all these new democracies as content neighbours, as part of the larger project of Europe finally recovering from the two world wars. In the course of these projects, Russia however quickly became impaired during the cataclysm of its 1990s so that by the end of that decade it neither generally wanted to be included in these organisations nor was in turn much wanted. The western sympathy for the Chechen rebels in the two relevant wars was it seems a major aggravator in this as well. In general, neither on an economic, nor on a general governmental and civil society basis, did the West sufficiently trust Russia then to be wholly accepted as a fully respected and equal member of the West’s main clubs. So when the Eastern European countries started to be brought into NATO and the EU, the perception had taken hold, correctly, that Russia had not really turned a corner and become just like the other normal European polities, and so the West was not about to let such a fox into the NATO hen house as a result. Things have obviously only got worse since then, and so the relevance of NATO to each and every country in Europe as the principal rampart standing against a now marshalling Russia that is trying to live out some kind of weird period drama, one from a bygone century where international relations consisted simply in invading each other, has been made very clear. Indeed Putin’s cosplaying at being Peter the Great is the crowning farce that disposes the world to grow weary and give up on Russia, yet for as much as that Russia has given to the world in such abundance already, it will certainly do so again, and surely in the not so distant future when Putin and people like him are gone.

 

Moreover, for sure the West in general has no longer considered Russia to be a great power, and so it was generally not as a result consulted on various world affairs in the way that the Soviet Union had necessarily been, and this has very much bothered Russia. Indeed Russia was a lot more than annoyed about George W. Bush’s unilateral abrogation of the anti-ballistic missile treaties, which forbade systems that could shoot down each other’s nuclear deterrent, because the result of this would be to begin to annul Russia’s principal factor by which it was able to consider itself as still one of the top nations of the world whose views, because of this, have to be taken into consideration. Rather, in setting up interceptor rocket bases all over eastern Europe and building advanced radar that could see far afield towards Iran, but also deep into the Russian steppe, Russia felt that the United States and the west in general was trying to muscle it off the world stage, and as a result perhaps Russia felt that it should in response begin to use its elbows more in its dealings with the West. Also, with the further precipitous decline in relations over the last 15 years, it seems that the current paranoid Russian government began thinking that the United States and NATO generally might well actually attack with all the terrible nuclear weapons at their disposal, and so it was imperative for Russia to come up with all kinds of new scary strategic weapons that could defeat this exasperating new attempt at Star Wars, and so guarantee the survival of Russia.

 

Yet, the Russian Federation, but for a most unusual bequest from the departed Soviet Union, its eccentric relative now buried, of the world’s largest ever cache of nuclear weapons, it would not be a military power at all really. For its power status exists merely as the declining momentum imparted to it by that long deceased socialist state, that, with the passage of time will inevitably, because of the imminent wind-up of the world petro-economy in particular, diminish yet further. That is, unless it turns itself into a North Korea where basically all national wealth is spent on weapons, it won’t be too long before it will have to admit that by itself it very completely lacks the critical mass to be anything like a great power. For while Russia is often said to be the world’s largest country, and indeed it seems Russians are proud of this, yet Russia is merely the largest country in the world if the criterion used is that of empty space, and so this may not actually be a terribly fitting standard to assess Russia’s real magnitude. If rather size is assessed in terms of population or economic scale instead, obviously it doesn’t exactly rank very highly. So in terms of being a centre of statecraft with sufficient gravity to bring into orbit a large part of the world, in terms of the reach of trade, regulations, economic standards, technological development, economic variety, soft cultural power, and blunt military power, obviously Russia is not and cannot be the ‘great power’ that it keeps telling itself that it is. Again, it is only because of its strange inheritance from the USSR that we are forced to be cautious in how we try to talk down a polity that has become, of late, more than a bit unhinged. For this reason, most of the world is very motivated to stop any more states from acquiring nuclear weapons because as soon as they do, no matter how unbalanced and disturbed their later demands may become, one is then forced to treat them as though they had admissible claims whose substantial satisfaction is largely necessary. That is, any nuclear power in this world is typically just like some twitchy malcontent who keeps a gun on their person, who in heated arguments is inclined to take it out and place it down on the table in full view. In this way, it is fundamentally an antisocial form of misbehaviour to even possess weapons of mass destruction, because their very possession is at a minimum an implied and active threat to everyone else. To use another metaphor, by paraphrasing Borat a bit, a human with a nuclear bomb is invariably like a monkey with a gun. For overt, as well as the constant implied, nuclear threats are actually made all the time in this world, most recently by Putin at the start of his invasion of Ukraine, but they are by no means confined to him at all. Of course, if one country has nuclear weapons, other countries who don’t see eye to eye will be rationally compelled to seek their possession as well, as the only means by which their national survival could be guaranteed. Yet it would of course be wholly better if there was a general and wholescale nuclear disarmament, one that was completely verifiable to all sides. This would naturally be a better state of affairs, and such a world may yet come.

 

So, it would be better if Russia, and indeed everyone else, got rid of their weapons of mass destruction, both for the good of the world but in particular for Russia as in doing so it would be less inclined to be so deluded about the extent of its power and the consequence of its position. For while they are and will remain important to the world, the way in which this will be done is not in the form of an empire, however formed. To help Russia along this path, and because it is the decent and right thing to do anyway, the West needs to accord to Russia and its people an unconditional respect and esteem for the profuse achievements that they have brought about in every version of their polity. In particular, their role as saviour of Europe from Nazism needs to be recognised. In a situation where Europe and the rest of West treats Russia as an equal, I would argue that Russia will be less inclined to develop itself in an oppositional way to the West, and less likely to attack it as a result. That is, where the West dismisses and disrespects Russianness and the history of Russia as such, then Russia will tend to move towards an ideology which is different to that of the West and which opposes it. In this way, the current Russia tries to define itself by a return to a traditional morality and religion, in which no minority is afforded any existence in its world and where their survival is refused. It also tries to talk up autocracy as a good thing, as where a ‘guided democracy’ results in better governance, which is truly laughable due to the extraordinary degree of corruption in Russia at every level of its society. Of course, the current mafia which is the government of Russia, wants to stay in power using the current system, because they are the system, but doing so is made so much easier in a context where they can say to the Russian people that the West rejects them as their inferiors, and because of this Russia in turn should reject practically everything from the West, including its political institutions. Further, the west as a whole needs to be more conscious of how it has broken the world’s common rules, and of how this will invariably license similar actions by others that we will not like. We at least need to stop being so shocked when it happens – if we could manage that then the rest of the world might even become more amenable to negotiation given that we would be perceived as less arrogant and conceited. In the Russian case, things would be greatly helped if more understanding were demonstrated about the complexities of East Slavic history and the long genealogies of the different states that we have wound up with, and of how Russian nationalism of whatever stripe is unable to see Ukraine as a foreign country. So in a place where Russia feels less under conceptual attack, like with the above, they may in such a more breathable space begin to rethink and reconsider things a bit more, and so be less likely to be convinced by all that strange guff that the current Russian government discharges, such as that the only way that Russia can exist at all is by being a great power with an empire over at least half of the European continent.

 

I don’t think, actually, that it’s too much of an ask at all for Russia to finally come to terms with the fact that it is not and will not be a great power again, since France and Germany, for example, have got over their national egoism, and now get along just fine with their smaller neighbours, who now actually like, trust and respect these two as a result, and everyone gains from this arrangement. Indeed France and Germany are best buddies now, having buried the hatchet and agreed to work together in everything. Of course, this all occurred through the European Union and its precursor institutions, in that old hatreds, feuds and resentments are dissolved by cooperation and consent, where everyone has their basic interests protected, and where all emerge much stronger as a result. So it might be a good idea for a (very) reformed Russia to join the European Union and indeed NATO, so that it would not feel threatened by its exclusion nor disrespected through its marginalisation. Of course, the current version of Russia is so far beyond anything like even a passably normal European polity that the current prospect of its membership is vanishingly remote, and the current Russia is not looking to join anything like this in any case. But if somehow Russia became less frenzied, and somehow entered onto a path to normalisation, it might be right at some future date to offer it further encouragement by proposing full and equal membership of the EU and NATO too. Now Russia’s population is very large in a European context, at 146 million people, and so its representation in the European institutions would not be at all minor, but I think with some accommodation and readjustment, and with the large incentive of having peace and prosperity on the whole European continent, it could be made work.

 

Yet, at the moment, obviously, there is a very deep integration between Russia’s criminal class and its governing class; indeed it seems that the mafia is quite literally the government. So for this reason, and obviously the fact that Putin is Europe’s most appalling person since Adolf Hitler, no degree of trust can be placed in nor substantial dealings can be entered into with the current Russian leadership. The world was rightly shocked when Mohammed Bin Salman murdered one person; yet with Putin, through total war tactics and atrocities, various poisonings, and the violent murders of journalists, amongst so many others, it is hard to keep track and come up with a complete figure. Yet for as much as he is a degenerate, he is not entirely stupid, so no doubt he is looking for a way out from his disastrous attempt to acquire Ukraine. So it is likely that some kind of negotiations can be entered into to end the war, where some pathetic face saving trinket can be offered to him perhaps, and he will probably take it, so that he can climb down.

 

Let’s hope that Russians will sooner rather than later rid themselves of Putin and what he represents. For it would be nice to be able to go back to admiring Russia, and so to once again look forward to what its great genius will bring forth.

 

In terms of the book being reviewed, where the book writes that there can be a nasty western view that Russia is congenitally and inevitably given to non-democratic forms of government, mass violence against its own people, and inclined to invade its neighbours, then the book has a useful function in disproving it. Yet otherwise, the book has not aged well, in that its whole purpose is ultimately about saying that the West is irrationally paranoid about Russia, which to an extent it has been and is yes, yet I have argued that Russia’s paranoia directed at the West is much worse (and this isn’t covered in the book), and moreover that the anxieties between our parts of the world are not of an imaginary nature, and so cannot just be magically dismissed, but rather true perceptions of the current state of the international context with its various threats, and indeed invasions. Moreover these international relations anxieties are not terribly unique or all that unknown, given that for all of recorded history there have been these, and for however much of a future we have left they will inevitably be there too. So, as the book was trying to get people to be less worried about the current version of Russia, only then for Putin to do a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this main thesis of the book was ludicrously mistaken. So, the book obviously doesn’t get everything right, but nonetheless is a very good depiction of the kind of complex difficulties that Russia as a fundamentally European state has wrestled with over the course of its long existence, and of how indeed there is so much value in its creative and scientific works.