Therefore, a Russia left to its own devices, and not deliberately drawn into a larger democratically transformative framework, could again become a source of tension and occasionally even a security threat to some of its neighbors.{7} Lacking leadership with the strength and the will to modernize, increasingly aware of its relative social retardation (with only Moscow and St. Petersburg regions matching the West’s standards of living), still uneasy regarding China’s growing global power, resentful of America’s continuing worldwide preeminence, proud of its vast and resource-rich territory, anxious over the depopulation of its far east and its general demographic crisis, and alert to the growing cultural and religious alienation of its Muslim population, Russia remains unable to define for itself a stable role that strikes a realistic balance between its ambitions and its actual potential.
Thus, in the short run, the currently entrenched Russian power elites—connected with the traditional coercive institutions of the state, nostalgic for the imperial past, and appealing to nationalistic notions deeply entrenched in the public—are an impediment to pro-Western gravitation. In fact, Putin—who could replace Medvedev as President in 2012, or in the least restrict Medvedev’s more ambitious democratic desires—has been quite frank that in his view Russia’s needed modernization should be a joint Russian-European project, to the exclusion of America and unrelated to democratization. Appealing directly to German business interests (in a personal message alluringly entitled “An Economic Community from Lisbon to Vladivostok,”
Given the urgency of Russia’s internal problems and depending on what choice Russia makes, the next decade—as already noted—could be decisive for Russia’s future and, indirectly, for the prospects of a more vital and larger democratic West. Unfortunately, Putin’s vision of that future is a backward-looking combination of assertive nationalism, thinly veiled hostility toward America for its victory in the Cold War, and nostalgia for both modernity and superpower status (financed, he hopes, by Europe). The state he wishes to shape bears a striking resemblance to Italy’s experiment with Fascism: a highly authoritarian (but not totalitarian) state involving a symbiotic relationship between its power elite and its business oligarchy, with its ideology based on thinly disguised and bombastic chauvinism.
Coolheaded realism, therefore, dictates caution regarding the declarations of some Russian policy advocates who publicly proclaim a desire for closer ties even with NATO. Private conversations with Moscow’s “think tankers” confirm that such advocacy is often guided by the reasonable assumption that any prompt movement in such direction would in fact advance the more familiar Russian objective of rendering NATO largely impotent. A more vulnerable Europe would then be easier to pick apart and its internal diversity exploited to the advantage of Russia’s more traditional national interests.
It follows from the foregoing that the argument made by some Europeans (often connected with commercial circles in Germany and Italy) that a prompt enlargement of NATO to include Russia would provide a shortcut to a grand accommodation is misguided. It would most likely produce the reverse. Russia’s entry, in its current authoritarian as well as highly corrupted political condition and with its military’s obsessively secretive mindset, would simply mean the end of NATO as an integrated alliance of democratic states. Much the same could be said if Russia were to become a part of the EU without first undergoing the required vigorous constitutional adaptation to Europe’s democratic standards that Turkey is currently trying to satisfy. Genuinely closer relations are not likely to be achieved by a commercial stampede driven by Western European businessmen (not to mention some former statesmen), anxious to capitalize on Russia’s resources while indifferent to the importance of shared values in developing a lasting relationship.
There are, however, also some hopeful signs that the needed and potentially historic geopolitical reorientation regarding Russia’s long-term future is incubating among its upper strata. Russia’s domestic retardation increasingly validates the anxieties of the Russian Westernizers, located mainly in Moscow’s increasingly numerous think tanks and its mass media, that Russia is falling behind. Spreading awareness of that retardation increases Russia’s potential susceptibility to a historically visionary but strategically prudent long-term Western outreach.
The unexpected surfacing in late 2009 of Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s handpicked replacement, as the most prominent spokesman for the modernization=democratization school of thought signaled the growing legitimacy of such views in Russia’s evolving political spectrum. Views that hitherto were confined to mostly intellectual dissenters thus began to percolate at the highest levels. Even if it eventually turns out that Putin reclaims the presidency, or that Medvedev ceases to press his case in the political arena, the very fact that the President of Russia could declare that in his view Western-type modernization of Russia (which he strongly advocates) inherently requires democratization was a milestone in Russia’s political evolution. In October 2010, during his private exchange of views in Moscow with this writer, Medvedev was even more outspoken.
It is now evident that there is in today’s Russia a growing constituency of people—admittedly, still mainly in the elites of the key urban centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg—who are attracted to Medvedev’s vision of modernization. They include not only the intellectuals, but also the growing thousands of graduates of Western institutions of higher learning, the millions who travel to the West, and the increasing number of entrepreneurs with ties and interests involving the West. Moreover, the Russian mass media, especially TV, both in mass entertainment and in more serious programs, now project the Western life-style as the norm. Last but by no means least, the daily press is generally nonideological, though Russia’s wounded imperial hubris more than occasionally slants news reportage about America.
Ultimately, it is up to the Russians to decide whether they wish to take advantage of their territorial and cultural proximity with the West, and their oft-noted social affinity for America, to link deliberately their efforts at social modernization with genuine Western-type political democratization. Russia’s intellectual elite increasingly recognizes the interdependence of these two processes; its business elite has belatedly become more aware of it after the financial crisis of 2007, while its power elite is increasingly worried that Russia’s development lags dramatically behind that of the emerging global colossus to its east. The gradually spreading Russian consensus regarding the cumulatively negative implications of the foregoing thus justifies cautious optimism concerning the longer-term prospects of a more stable and increasingly binding East-West relationship even in the face of Russia’s still-unsettled internal political power dynamics.
On September 10, 2009, the official web portal of the President of Russia released for public consumption Medvedev’s statement entitled “Go Russia!” It contained such a remarkably scathing indictment of Russia’s shortcomings and such a bold call for reforms that some excerpts from it deserve citation:
Our current economy still reflects the major flaw of the Soviet system: it largely ignores individual needs.... Centuries of corruption have debilitated Russia from time immemorial. Until today this corrosion has been due to the excessive government presence in many significant aspects of economic and other social activities.... The impressive legacy of the two greatest modernizations in our country’s history—that of Peter the Great (imperial) and the Soviet one—unleashed ruin, humiliation and resulted in the deaths of millions of our countrymen. . . . Only our own experience of democratic endeavor will give us the right to say: we are free, we are responsible, we are successful. Democracy needs to be protected. The fundamental rights and freedoms of our citizens must be as well. They need to be protected primarily from the sort of corruption that breeds tyranny, lack of freedom, and injustice.... Nostalgia should not guide our foreign policy and our strategic long-term goal is Russia’s modernization. [One can only wonder whom Medvedev had in mind when making his pointed reference to “nostalgia” in foreign policy.]
Accordingly, if it can be said that Europe is still unfinished business without a deeper and more extensive relationship with Russia, it can also be said that Russia will lack a secure geopolitical future as well as a self- satisfying modern and democratic identity without a closer connection with the West in general and with Europe specifically. Without a confidence-building and increasingly transformative accommodation with the West, Russia is likely to remain too weak internally and too conflicted in its external ambitions to become a truly successful democratic state. The September 2009 statement by Medvedev thus was not only a timely and stark warning to his
