Paratroopers from Russia’s elite Spetsnaz brigade, the shock troops of the Russian military, have arrived in Kazakhstan to suppress violent, nationwide protests against the country’s Kremlin-friendly regime. The action comes at a time when Russian troops are already massed near Ukraine’s border, and just 15 months after a Russian rifle brigade intervened to end the fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh. Is Russian President Vladimir Putin really attempting to rebuild the Russian Empire?
Of course, it is impossible to know with any certainty what the Kremlin sphinx has in mind, but, whatever Putin’s intentions, his actions are fatally undermining the idea that underpinned the Russian Federation’s creation 30 years ago.
Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first post-Soviet president, is rarely a topic of conversation nowadays. If Russians mention him, they are most likely recalling his excessive drinking or, more important, the inflation and poverty that pervaded Russia’s transition to a market economy. They are probably not crediting him with profound historical insights.
Illustration: Mountain People
It was Yeltsin who recognized the monumental costs of sustaining the Soviet empire — costs that contributed to immiserating Russians and keeping them imprisoned in a police state. Only by shedding these costs — by dissolving the empire and establishing a free-market economy — could Russia deliver liberation and prosperity to its people.
However, on New Year’s Eve in 1999, Yeltsin might have doomed his own vision. The man to whom he handed power that night now seems determined to discard his keenest insight. While Putin might not seek to rebuild the Russian Empire per se, he seems resolved to establish suzerainty over former Soviet states. That is a highly costly proposition.
The precise share of Soviet GDP that went toward maintaining the empire is unclear. However, given the demands of industrial production and the Soviet military-industrial complex — which together claimed up to 80 percent of all government revenues — it is safe to say that the Soviet Union could not afford, say, subsidies to unproductive factories in isolated areas of its constituent states. This is to say nothing of the empire’s price in blood, highlighted in the years following the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.
These costs were not lost on ordinary Russians, who resented having to shoulder them, just as British, French and Austro-Hungarian citizens did during their own empires’ heydays.
However, the same cannot be said of those in charge. From the czars to Lenin and Stalin to Putin today, Russia’s leaders have almost universally believed that the cost of empire was justified.
This might partly reflect ideology. As the Palestinian academic Edward Said famously observed, every empire “tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control, but to educate and liberate.” Russians have said much the same about their empire, particularly when discussing the Belarusians and their “little brothers” in Ukraine.
If Russia’s leaders did believe in la mission civilisatrice, they believed even more strongly that the empire strengthened national security.
However, history tells another story. Imperial control quickly leads to overreach, makes a power less secure, and hastens the empire’s collapse.
For Russia, the costs of Putin’s ambitions are mounting. Consider the country’s military expenditure, which increased from 3.8 percent of GDP in 2013 — the year before Russia invaded Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and supported secessionist forces in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions — to 5.4 percent in 2016. While military expenditure as a share of GDP declined in 2017 and 2018, it is now climbing once again. With Russian troops stationed in the occupied Georgian region of Abkhazia, the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus, this is not a surprise.
More difficult to quantify are the strategic costs of empire, which Putin is loath to recognize. The Kremlin’s imperial agenda, especially the annexation of Crimea, has called into question the post-Cold War settlement in Eurasia, from the Baltic to the Bering Sea. The world’s other powers — particularly the US and China — are strongly invested in upholding the “status quo” that Putin is seeking to upset.
The post-Cold War settlement enabled governments to divert resources from military budgets to social programs. The peace dividend not only enabled Russia’s economic transition; it also supported the long economic boom in the West that ended with the 2008 financial crisis.
However, the biggest beneficiary was China. Recall that 40 years ago, vast armies were positioned along the Chinese-Soviet border, and thousands of Russian nuclear warheads were trained on Chinese cities. The Cold War’s end thus enabled China to redirect resources toward economic development and poverty reduction. China’s success on these fronts over the past 30 years speaks for itself.
Against this backdrop, one wonders how Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) views Russia’s intervention in Kazakhstan, which shares a nearly 1,800km border with China, especially in light of Putin’s earlier comments diminishing the history of Kazakhstan’s independent statehood. (He has shown similar contempt for the independence of Belarus, the Baltic states and Ukraine).
The domestic costs — and polling by the Levada Center in Moscow suggests that few Russians are willing to trade their living standards for enhanced global status — ought to be sufficient to convince Putin to abandon his imperial ambitions. If not, the possibility of reigniting a rivalry with China surely should.
However, it is far from guaranteed that Putin will give reason its due. He is already ignoring the lessons of Russia’s own history.
Nina Khrushcheva is a professor of international affairs at The New School.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) said in an interview with CNN on Sunday that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would render the company’s plants inoperable, and that such a war would produce “no winners.” Not only would Taiwan’s economy be destroyed in a cross-strait conflict, but the impact “would go well beyond semiconductors, and would bring about the destruction of the world’s rules-based order and totally change the geopolitical landscape,” Liu said in the interview, according to the Central News Agency. Bloomberg columnist Hal Brands wrote on June 24: “A major war over Taiwan could create global economic
Washington’s official position on US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan is that nothing has changed: The US government says it is maintaining its “one China” policy, that Pelosi is free to arrange international trips with congressional delegations independent of the government and that she is not the first US official to visit Taiwan even this year. Yet there is no denying that the fact and the optics of the second-in-line to the US presidency speaking with lawmakers at the Legislative Yuan about inter-parliamentary discussions and learning from each other as equals are hugely significant, as were
Amid a fervor in the global media, US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her congressional delegation made a high-profile visit to Taipei. President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) awarded a state honor to her at the Presidential Office. Evidently, the occasion took on the aspect of an inter-state relationship between the US and the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan, despite no mutual state recognition between the two. Beijing furiously condemned Pelosi’s visit in advance, with military drills in the waters surrounding coastal China to check the move. Pelosi is a well-known China hawk, and second in the line of succession to
A stark contrast in narratives about China’s future is emerging inside and outside of China. This is partly a function of the dramatic constriction in the flow of people and ideas into and out of China, owing to China’s COVID-19 quarantine requirements. There also are fewer foreign journalists in China to help the outside world make sense of developments. Those foreign journalists and diplomats who are in China often are limited in where they can travel and who they can meet. There also is tighter technological control over information inside China than at any point since the dawn of the
RSS