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Putin’s and Russia’s Quest for Identity and Belonging How withholding respect for Russia could lead to war.

ByMichael Vlahos, February 16, 2015

Credit: Mark Rain -


The West made of Russians exactly what it wished and had always imagined: A cartoon of evil.

  • Objectifying Russia is a truly longstanding US-UK joint enterprise.
  • We never asked ourselves why Soviets always played by the rules. Soviets were no Islamic State or DPRK assassins.
  • Putin represents the Russian people. Our cartoonish renditions of him inevitably become caricatures of them.
  • Is Russia without democratic expression? Is it worse than Saudi Arabia – the US ally that shares an ideology with IS?
  • Demanding submission to “the American way” goes too far with Russia – and is just plain wrong.
  • American treatment of Russia since the Cold War has been an historical mistake.

Will Americans ever feel the pain – of other nations? We Americans tend to see ourselves as above such sentimentality. Yet, perhaps we might make an exception for Russia. To see why, let us reflect on our responsibility for its desert wandering since 1991.

History shows how banishing a celebrated power to the wilderness can be like stripping that people of their identity. Russians do not wish to return there. And we Americans should not wish Russians to see us as the main agent of their exile.

National identity does not exist in isolation. Identity is all about belonging. And a nation’s standing within the larger community of nations is what belonging is all about.

For 500 years, Russia has been in an in-between space, struggling to form cultural communities of kinship and identity with others. It has longed to join such cultural communities (Western Europe) or to recreate them (Byzantine Commonwealth).

Irrespective of one’s politics and historical viewpoint, what stands out is how happily tone-deaf the West has been to the needs of Russian identity. At the drop of a hat, circa 1948, the Soviets – so elemental in the defeat of Hitler — were at once reduced again to the Russian Bear:Vicious, clawing, unreasoning– and yet alsoslothful, dolorous and dirty.

The West embraced its own stage-managed Cold War with real zest, making of Russians exactly what Russia had always feared: a cartoon of evil. That served the West’s purposes well – a Russia that was conveniently distant, always appropriately threatening, yet never truly out-of-line.

Playing by the rules

We Westerners never even asked ourselves why the Soviets played by the traditional rules of diplomacy and war? The Soviets were no Islamic State orDPRK assassins.

Americans always assured themselves that this was because the Soviets were cowed by the U.S.’s strength. But were they really?

Today’s parasite killers have no respect even for overwhelming power — so why then would the Soviet Union?

Perhaps we should consider why the Soviets wanted, even needed, to play by our rules. Might they have been trying to tell us something?

Maybe the Cold War shows our own deeper prejudice. In iconographic terms, it was an almost perfect re-run of Britain’s Crimean War fantasies, spun out frame-for-frame, but on America’s time, from 1950 to 1990.

Tony Richardson’s 1968 filmCharge of the Light Brigadelays bare all the Western — and mainly, Anglo-American — prejudice against Russia.

It is almost as if the seduction of mid-Victorian cartoons, in which Russia is bear-baited for the entertainment of the 19th century superpower Great Britain, reaches from a century past to seize American consciousness.

Objectifying Russia is a truly longstanding U.S.-UK joint enterprise. Our animus against Russia as the other, the alien, the stranger became a self-defeating cultural filter.

Is the Russia we see today, to an appreciable extent, not the product of our prejudicial wish fulfillment and our bullying over these post-1991 decades?

The lost U.S.-Russian alliance

Truth is, we Americans treated Russia (née Soviet Union) like a defeated power in 1991 – as if it had been some kind of junior Third Reich righteously vanquished. It was never seen as the ally we had known so long, finally come to its senses and having seen the light.

There is a big difference between the defeated power and an ally. Americans have never fought Russians. Russiawas the allyof the United States in its civil war with the Confederacy (unlike faithless Britain and France).

American foreign policy in the 1930s leaned pro-Soviet — premiere ship designers Gibbs and Cox even designedsuper-battleshipsfor Stalin. Then we were allies in the Good War against Nazism.

Can we not see now how NATO enlargement (pushed too far) was – in Russian eyes – no different from the grand sweep of historical contempt the West has shown Russian identity?

Redefining identity

If Germany and Italy, after deep defeat, could be allowed to rediscover themselves and make their identities whole again, why not Russia? We have never allowed Russia – always banished to in-between realms of identity – to find its own place of honor in our own halls.

If Russia seeks acknowledgment, why should we always, reflexively, deny them? Is Russia not, after all, a great civilization and a great nation? Can we not embrace them as such?

It seems not. We forget that Putin represents the Russian people, and our cartoonish renditions of him inevitably become the most inflammatory caricatures of them.

Four misconceptions underlie our enduring prejudice.

1.Putin as“Hitler returned”– so alien and evil that there is nothing we can do but get ready for the fight to come.

2.Putin as a brat andbully spoiler– Russians are all criminals, natural-born racketeers everywhere they go – and Putin is just the worst.

3.Putin as thePied Piper–Svengalior even more darkly, Rasputin, weaving a web to ensnare a benightedRus, who cannot resist him.

4.Russians makePutin happen– they thus show themselves to all be stupid fools just asprimitive and savageas we always thought.

All this is from a very old playbook:

First, we still treat Russia as a defeated power – forever.

Second, we still slather on triumphalism from the Crimean War to the Cold War

Third, we still harp on their “creepy” ways (meaning,Orthodoxways).

Fourth, we withhold respect until they reform their evil ways.

Yet our judgment should remind us that the United States and Russia have a very old, co-dependent relationship. How we regard Russian identity is in many ways more important than what we do to Russia.

We have become the judges of their identity, which is all any of us have. Moreover, their identity today is fragile, desperate and aggressive. Our active prejudice is a negatively charged force multiplier. Proud nations like Russia act badly when slighted.

How do we disentangle deliberate bad behavior (their responsibility) from centuries’ accumulation of Western contempt (our responsibility)? Is Russia wholly without democratic expression?

The democratic experience

We might remember that Soviet Communism lasted a lifetime in Russia itself, while it held sway for only a couple of generations in Central Europe. Very few Russians alive when communism ended could recall the pre-communist days (which themselves were not democratic).

In contrast, in a country such as Czechoslovakia, where communism’s duration was shorter and wedged between democratic periods, a new generation of democrats could still reach out to an older generation of democrats for guidance and inspiration. For example, Havel could call on Dubček and claim the stainless memory of Beneš.

Russia cannot rebuild such institutions, but will have to create a world wholly alien to their top-down traditions.

The U.S. government makes “rule of law” central to its promotion of “American democratic values.” But it does so explicitly as part of a media-showcased program of political conversion (much ballyhooed in the“Orange Revolution”of 2004-5).

The United States wields its color revolutions like acts of public submission. “Do the ritual” we demand, or the United States will simply withhold its respect – or worse.

As we can see from the color revolutions early this century, the real purpose is to generate good feeling in the American electorate and to put in pliant regimes. The democracy rhetoric is all window-dressing for political self-interest. Pushing this on the Russian Commonwealth is a very high-risk proposition.

What are our actual choices? Let’s start with this insight: Russians – Russia, Putin, it is all the same – will never submit. Americans are setting them up for failure by insisting that the only path to a better society lies through public submission to the United States.

Americans trumpet how well this worked inGermany and Japan. But Germany managed to reanimate deep, native democratic traditions. And Japannever truly submitted, but found ways to keep the old weave of institutional identities alive.

With Russia, demanding submission to “the American way” goes too far – and is just plain wrong. It is wrong to withhold respect if disrespect means risking a war — hot or cold.

American treatment of Russia since the Cold War has been an historical mistake – and though doubtless too late now, such a course is still ours to unmake before it is too late.

About Michael Vlahos

Michael Vlahos is a professor at The Johns Hopkins University Advanced Academic Programs.

“Ruxit” is Real: Russia’s Exit from Europe

Putin’s Russia never really wanted to be of Europe. Now, it doesn’t even want to be with Europe.

By Josef Janning, February 27, 2015

Credit: World Economic Forum -

Leaving aside a few brief moments in the Russian policy discourse of the 1990s, post-Soviet Russia has always thought of the country’s role as being with Europe, but not of Europe.

Dating from the times of the Helsinki process, which led to the founding of the OSCE, a favored metaphor in Soviet and Russian thinking was the inclusive notion of a “common European house” from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

This space of sovereign states would include Russia as the largest among them – and the United States would be left on the margins or outside.

Turning the page on Russia

That chapter is closing now, as the Russian leadership abandons its own idea of inclusiveness. German Chancellor Angela Merkel used the term at the Davos World Economic Forum this year, but Moscow gave no answer to her invitation to return to the wider European discourse.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia has never really wanted to be of Europe, because the continent is now defined in political terms by the European Union and its rationale, norms and processes.

As former Warsaw Pact countries and the previously Soviet Baltic republics have turned to the West, the EU has expanded east and now shares borders with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.

With the Ukraine war, Putin’s Russia also seems to have stopped wanting to be with Europe, because it feels its claim to remain a first-rate power has been disrespected and that the absence of a show of force allowed its interests to be overlooked.

In effect, Russia has become the Anti-Europe, organized by geopolitical reasoning and bound by military power, and it seeks just one thing from the West: respect borne out of fear for the harm it could do.

This Russia sees itself as entirely different from the EU in social and political norms, in its notion of a powerful and sovereign state and in its view of its national identity and mission.

Now, Moscow’s quest for status is focused on Washington. In Vladimir Putin’s world, Europe is second-class, troublesome but acquiescent. That some in Washington also look at Europe this way may help to reinforce his belief.

However, the EU is something different: Europeans might have misread the geopolitical significance of its Eastern Partnership scheme in the eyes of the neo-Russians in the Kremlin, but they were not naïve about the transformative impact that could be effected by seemingly technical trade and association agreements.

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European soft power

Obviously, Putin fears European soft power, since it is a force to which he has no response. Russia’s lack of attraction is one of its most serious weak spots. Its leverage rests on its state-controlled extracting industries and its military.

The ideology of integration has become a new nationalism, which has as its core mission the resurrection of the Russian space.

On Ukraine, EU leaders have chosen not to follow Putin’s shift from soft power to hard power. In political terms, their sanctions do not have as much effect on Putin’s Russia as they would have on a Russia that was seeking cooperation and trying to build a modern and competitive economy. To Moscow, Europe’s insistence on negotiations to end the fighting in Ukraine makes it look weak – indeed, it has allowed Russia to prevail in its attempt to neutralize Ukraine and prevent its departure to the West.

A veritable stalemate

The EU is not pursuing an expansionist strategy and it will not wrest the country from Russia’s grip, but neither will it close the door on Ukraine or on any of its neighbors – not even on Russia.

In the end, Putin will find that creating integration on Russian terms will have problematic implications.

But for now, the consequences for those in Ukraine who would like to see their country integrated into EU and NATO are tragic. Russia may very well stop the process by way of militant separatism, and moreover, Ukraine’s economy, governance and democracy are too weak to allow it to join the West.

Meanwhile, in its own house on the other side of the Kremlin’s dividing line, the EU will need to consolidate economic and social prosperity for all people under its roof, including the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians who must not be left marginalized and alienated in their home countries.

To achieve this, Europe will need to integrate still further; it should rethink defense integration and install more robust processes so that it can maintain a coherent foreign policy position.

Ironically, Vladimir Putin could thus become an external federator of Europe – while his attempt to unite Eurasia could show up the real diversity of the actors within what he imagines as being the Russian space.

About Josef Janning

Josef Janning is a Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Russia and the West: The Unpopular Prospect of World War III

Why have relations between the West and Russia become increasingly frosty? By Andreas Umland

  • Until August 2008, it appeared that Dmitry Medvedev's rise might usher in a new stage in Russian-Western relations.
  • Today, there is little ground for hope that the deep contamination of Russia's public discourse could be reversed.
  • The example of the Weimar Republic illustrates the dangers that a conspirological view of the world has among a country's population.

A plain extrapolation of recent political developments in Russia leads one to regard outright war with NATO as a still improbable, yet possible scenario. It is not unlikely that Russian public discourse will, during the coming years, continue to move in the same direction in, and with the same speed with, which it has been evolving since 2000.

What is in store for the world is not only a new "cold," but also the possibility of a "hot" and, perhaps even, nuclear war.

This assessment sounds not only apocalyptic, but also alarmingly "unmodern." Aren't the real challenges of the 21st century global warming, financial regulation, the North-South divide, international migration, etc.? Isn't that enough to worry about, and should we really distract ourselves from solving these real problems by falling victim to phobias of yesteryear?

Russian public opinion and elite discourse have — until August 2008, largely unnoticed in the West — made a fundamental shift in recent years. The 1990s began with Russia's enthusiastic embrace of the Western value system and partnership, and they ended with Russian skepticism and bitterness towards the West.

This fundamental shift in Russian public opinion and elite discourse was less the result of NATO expansion or the bombing of Yugoslavia. Rather, it was a consequence of Yeltsin's failure in the early 1990s to remove many of the Soviet Union's elites from their positions of power and influence.
This gave the ancien régime's representatives an opportunity to impregnate post-Soviet political discourse with a reformulated, yet again fundamentally dualistic, world-view. Under this framework, Russia and the United States remain archenemies fighting not only for control of the former Russian empire — but also deciding the future fate of humanity.

Originally, manifestations of this were visible only in the margins. With the beginning of Vladimir Putin's rise in 1999, however, they started to slowly but steadily move into the political center.

Today, the idea that the Western (or, at least, Anglo-Saxon) political leaders are deeply Russophobic is commonplace in Russia. That events like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine or Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia were fundamentally inspired, if not directly organized by the CIA, is considered a truism in today's Russia.

That the CIA or another Western secret service is behind 9/11 or the Beslan tragedy is a fully respected assessment frequently discussed in mainstream Moscow mass media. That the current behavior of the West and its supposed puppets in Eastern Europe has much in common with Nazi Germany's policies is an opinion with which many Russians would readily agree.