Abstract
Langdon and Tismaneanu scrutinize Putin’s aggressive foreign policy decisions in Ukraine and Syria, presenting the conclusion that Putin manages to maintain his domestic popularity ratings through the totalitarian practice of artificially uniting the country against fabricated foreign threats. As such, foreign policy is not an end in itself, but rather a tool used to further legitimize Putin’s domestic authority by distracting the public from internal woes and instead presenting the celebratory image of a powerful, moral Russian state. Such a conclusion also highlights how the Russian citizenry itself plays a major role as an accomplice in their state’s rise to totalitarianism and imperialism.
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- 1.
Official Internet Resources of the President of Russia, speech by Vladimir Putin, “Vystuplenie i diskussija na Mjunhenskoj konferencii po voprosam politiki bezopasnosti,” 2007 Munich Conference on Security Policy, 10 February 2007.
- 2.
Leon Aron, “The Kremlin Emboldened: Putinism After Crimea,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 28, No. 4 (October 2017), p. 78.
- 3.
On a related note, the assumption that Kyivan Rus’ was the seed from which Russian culture began is flawed in itself. While Russian history textbooks (and some Western ones, as well) argue that Kyivan Rus’ marked the earliest manifestation of Russian identity, they are sure not to mention the birth of other identities, such as Ukrainian. Russian ethnonationalists might assert that this speaks to their position that Ukraine and Russia are one nation. Of course, theirs is an absurd claim, even if one considers from the most basic level that, by twenty-first-century international law, the two states are separate. And their ethnonationalist acceptance of the notion that Kyivan Rus’ was the beginning of Russian identity (and Russian identity, only) also fails to recognize the idea that perhaps the Kremlin’s version of history is distorted. In fact, it is: Ukrainians, too, can claim that Kyivan Rus’ was crucial to their cultural formation. The unquestioning agreement, though, that Kyivan Rus’ solely belongs to the Russian tradition is just another example of an ethnocentric, ultranationalist ideology at play. Czesław Porębski, “General Introduction: Political Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Russian History,” Russian Thought on Europe (class lecture, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland, 3 October 2018).
- 4.
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: Chicago University Press), p. 86.
- 5.
Leon Aron, “Drivers of Putin’s foreign policy,” American Enterprise Institute, 14 June 2016.
- 6.
Serhii Plokhy, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (London: Oneworld Publications, 2015), p. 406.
- 7.
M. Steven Fish, “What Has Russia Become?” Comparative Politics, Vol. 50, No. 3 (April 2018), p. 339.
- 8.
Luisa Passerini, “Memories Between Silence and Oblivion,” in Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts, eds. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006), p. 241.
- 9.
Edward Lucas, The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014), p. 147.
- 10.
Mikhail Gorbachev, The New Russia (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), p. 307.
- 11.
Gorbachev, The New Russia, p. 307.
- 12.
Douglas E. Schoen with Evan Roth Smith, Putin’s Master Plan: To Destroy Europe, Divide NATO, and Restore Russian Power and Global Influence (New York: Encounter Books, 2016), pp. 15–26 and 90–91; Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018), p. 100.
- 13.
BBC News, “Russian spy: What happened to Sergei and Yulia Skripal?,” BBC News, 27 September 2018. While the Kremlin of course denies involvement in the Skripal case and in many others, the authors of this book are confident in assigning overall responsibility to the Russian government because of the heavy hand it plays in the spread of Putinism. Even if the men who tried to kill Sergei Skripal really were just acting as “private Russian citizens” (a claim that various investigate sources have already debunked, anyway, finding that at least one of the attackers was a decorated Russian colonel) and had not been directly ordered by anyone in the Kremlin to murder Skripal, the issue remains that they live in a society in which such behaviors are encouraged through a myriad of already-discussed methods. The Kremlin is responsible for spinning this ideology, just as those would-be killers are responsible for acting on this ideology. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “Report: Third Alleged Russian Agent Involved In Skripal Mission Identified,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 28 September 2018.
- 14.
Schoen, Putin’s Master Plan, pp. 23 and 112–120.
- 15.
Timothy Snyder and Thomas Carothers, “The Road to Unfreedom” (presentation at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, 18 May 2018).
- 16.
Vladislav Inozemstev, “The Kremlin Emboldened: Why Putinism Arose,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 28, No. 4 (October 2017), p. 80.
- 17.
Official Internet Resources of the President of Russia, speech by Vladimir Putin, “Konferencija rossijskih poslov i postojannyh predstavitelej,” Official Internet Resources of the President of Russia, 1 July 2014; David M. Herszenhorn, “Putin Vows to ‘Actively Defend’ Russians Living Abroad,” the Atlantic Council, 2 July 2014.
- 18.
While the Russian government and media fabricated much of the hateful discourse around Ukraine and its language laws, we feel compelled to remind readers that Ukraine is certainly not perfect. It still struggles with its Communist past and all the corruption and stunted civil society that accompanies it. There was, in fact, uncertainty about the legal future of the Russian language in official capacities in Ukraine. The 2012 bill that sparked heated debate about the idea of the marginalization of the Russian language, entitled “On the principles of the state language policy,” proposed to allow languages besides Ukrainian to appear as additional official languages wherever the regional population comprised at least 10 percent of speakers. Language and identity is a complicated discussion, and certainly so in the post-Soviet space. The bill was rather favorable to Russian minorities, considering that the threshold was 10 percent and not at all unrealistically set. When the traitorous former president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych fled the country in February 2014, the national parliament voted in favor of abolishing that 2012 law. However, no Ukrainian president either signed or vetoed the decision to abolish the 2012 law; hence, it remained in effect. On top of that, certain minority language provisions still existed under the Ukrainian Constitution even without the “repealed” law. The Russian government’s decision to abuse this confusing set of events and legal parameters, then, demonstrates that it was keen to create a serious, definitive problem where there had not been one. In this case, that fabrication was illegitimate and meant to rally the Russian population to support the Kremlin’s “defense” of their compatriots abroad. In the interest of full disclosure, though, we inform readers that in February 2018, Ukraine declared that 2012 bill was, in fact, unconstitutional; what the country will do now regarding its language laws remains to be seen. Perhaps it will end unfairly for Russian speakers, or perhaps not. While this is important to understand for 2019, this discussion admittedly veers from the main topic at hand because it cannot retroactively legitimize the Russian aggression over the matter. There is a basic truth to the events of 2014: the Kremlin illegitimately fostered conflict about Russian-torturing Ukrainians in order to mobilize Russian nationalists both at home and abroad in support of what became a very illegal, unprecedented endeavor—the seizure of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine. Tetyana Ogarkova, “The Truth Behind Ukraine’s Language Policy,” the Atlantic Council, 12 March 2018.
- 19.
Carl Schmitt, Dictatorship: From the Beginning of the Modern Concept of Sovereignty to the Proletarian Class-Struggle, 7th ed. (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2006); Agamben, State of Exception, p. 67; Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books), p. 77; Mark Mardell, “Does Hitler’s legacy still cast shadow over the world?” BBC News, 21 October 2016. As more food for thought, Hillary Clinton, David Cameron and Prince Charles of Wales have all made the point that Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia using the excuse of the mistreatment of ethnic Germans, while Putin cited the fate of ethnic Russians in Ukraine and Crimea to justify his own military actions.
- 20.
Brown, Walled States, pp. 25 and 44; Masha Gessen, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017), p. 435.
- 21.
Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 28.
- 22.
James Marson, “Putin to the West: Hands off Ukraine,” TIME, 25 May 2009.
- 23.
Brown, Walled States, p. 44; Michael McFaul, From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2018), p. 394.
- 24.
Marci Shore, “The Poet Laureate of Hybrid War,” Foreign Policy, 26 October 2017.
- 25.
Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015), pp. 105 and 106.
- 26.
Timothy Snyder, “Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine,” The New York Review, 20 March 2014; Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, p. 133.
- 27.
Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Paul A. M. van Lange, “Power, Politics, and Paranoia: An Introduction,” in Power, Politics, and Paranoia: Why People are Suspicious of Their Leaders, eds. Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Paul A. M. van Lange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 1–14; Charles M. Blow, “The Political Uses of Paranoia,” New York Times, 25 April 2013.
- 28.
Brown, Walled States, p. 34; RT News, “‘We did what we had to do’: Putin opens up on Crimea reunification plan,” RT News, 10 March 2015.
- 29.
Russian Public Opinion Research Center, “Krym: dva goda vmeste s Rossiej,” Russian Public Opinion Research Center, 17 March 2016; Sergei Glazyev, “Predotvratit’ vojnu—pobedit’ v vojne,” Izborsky Club, 30 September 2014.
- 30.
Mark Adomanis, “Putin’s poll numbers are skyrocketing, but they aren’t going to last,” Center on Global Interests, 10 April 2014.
- 31.
The Official Internet Portal of Legal Information of the Russian Federation, presidential decree by Vladimir Putin, “Ukaz Prezidenta Rossijskoj Federacii ot 28.05.2015 Nо. 273 ‘O vnesenii izmenenij v perechen’ svedenij, otnesennyh k gosudarstvennoj tajne, utverzhdennyj Ukazom Prezidenta Rossijskoj Federacii ot 30 nojabrja 1995 g. Nо. 1203,’” The Official Internet Portal of Legal Information of the Russian Federation, 28 May 2015.
- 32.
BBC News, “Putin reveals secrets of Russia’s Crimea takeover plot,” BBC News, 9 March 2015.
- 33.
Paul Roderick Gregory, “Russia May Have Inadvertently Posted Its Casualties in Ukraine: 2000 Deaths, 3200 Disabled,” Forbes, 25 August 2015; Sergei Goriashko, “Rossijanam ne nravitsja evropejskij’ vybor Ukrainy,” Kommersant No. 227 (10 December 2015), p. 8; Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, p. 178.
- 34.
RT News, “Two-thirds of Russians declare readiness to vote in 2018 presidential polls,” RT News, 24 March 2017. Coincidentally, most supporters of the Crimean seizure—that is, most Russian nationals—do not question the absurdly high figure that 96.77 percent of the Crimean population that voted (cited at 83.1 percent) chose to support separation from Ukraine. Of course, neither did they question the official statement that 99.8 percent of voters in Chechnya chose to reelect Vladimir Putin as president in 2012, even after all the war, death, and repression he instigated there in his previous terms. This ignorance and unwillingness to think beyond the Kremlin’s version of events is further indicative of a society well indoctrinated under Putinism and engrossed in the “successes” of nationalist foreign policy. Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, p. 49.
- 35.
Schoen, Putin’s Master Plan, pp. 23–25.
- 36.
Dan Smith, “Whither peace?” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 21 September 2016; McFaul, From Cold War to Hot Peace, pp. 330–331.
- 37.
William E. Pomeranz, “Conclusion,” in Roots of Russia’s War in Ukraine, eds. Elizabeth A. Wood, William E. Pomeranz, E. Wayne Merry, and Maxim Trudolybov (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2016), p. 133.
- 38.
The United Nations, “STATEMENT by H.E. Mr. Vladimir V. PUTIN, President of the Russian Federation, at the 70th session of the UN General Assembly,” The United Nations, 28 September 2015.
- 39.
Official Internet Resources of the President of Russia, “Vstrecha s Sergeem Lavrovym i Sergeem Shojgu” [Meeting with Sergey Lavrov and Sergey Shoygu], Official Internet Resources of the President of Russia, 14 March 2016.
- 40.
Helene Cooper, Michael R. Gordon, and Neil MacFarquhar, “Russians Strike Targets in Syria, but Not ISIS Areas,” New York Times, 1 October 2015.
- 41.
Maksymilian Czuperski, John Herbst, Eliot Higgins, Frederic Hof, and Ben Nimmo, Distract, Deceive, Destroy: Putin at War in Syria (Washington, DC: The Atlantic Council, April 2016), p. 3.
- 42.
Czuperski et al., Distract, Deceive, Destroy, p. 12.
- 43.
Levada Center, “Syria,” Levada Center: Yuri Levada Analytical Center, 6 October 2016.
- 44.
Francesca Borri, Syrian Dust: Reporting from the Heart of the War, trans. Anne Milano Appel (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2016).
- 45.
Mikhail Zygar, All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin (New York: Public Affairs, 2016), p. 331.
- 46.
“Syria conflict: Aid convoy attack was air strike, UN expert says,” BBC News, 5 October 2016; Zygar, All the Kremlin’s Men, p. 333.
- 47.
Laura Mills, “Putin Says West Unfairly Blaming Russia for Syria Cease-Fire Failure,” The Wall Street Journal, 12 October 2016.
- 48.
Human Rights Watch, “Russia/Syria. Daily Cluster Munition Attacks: Increased Use of Widely Banned Weapon,” Human Rights Watch, 8 February 2016.
- 49.
Sergey Lavrov, “Istoricheskaja perspektiva vneshnej politiki Rossii” [A historical perspective of Russia’s foreign policy], Russia in Global Politics, 3 March 2016.
- 50.
Lavrov, “Istoricheskaja perspektiva.”
- 51.
Agamben, State of Exception, p. 87.
- 52.
Leon Aron, “The Putin Doctrine: Russia’s Quest to Rebuild the Soviet State,” Foreign Affairs, 8 March 2013.
- 53.
Keith Gessen, “What’s the Matter With Russia? Putin and the Soviet Legacy,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 93, No. 4 (July/August 2014); Keith Gessen, “Killer, kleptocrat, genius, spy: the many myths of Vladimir Putin,” The Guardian, 22 February 2017.
- 54.
Agamben, State of Exception, p. 69; Elena Barabantseva, “How do people come to identify with nations?” in Global Politics: A New Introduction, 2nd ed., eds. Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 258.
- 55.
Aron, “Putinism After Crimea,” p. 79.
- 56.
Agamben, State of Exception, pp. 16 and 67–73; Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, ed. George Simpson, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (New York: The Free Press, 1951), p. 252.
- 57.
Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), p. 141.
- 58.
Molly McKew, “Putin’s real long-game,” Politico, 1 January 2017.
- 59.
David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), p. 174; Lucas, The New Cold War, p. 12.
- 60.
Priyanka Boghani, “Putin’s Legal Crackdown on Civil Society,” PBS Frontline, 13 January 2015.
- 61.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. “10 Laws Putin’s Foes Say Russia Needs To Scrap,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 23 December 2015; Boghani, “Putin’s Legal Crackdown”; Graeme Robertson, “Managing Society: Protests, Civil Society, and Regime in Putin’s Russia,” Slavic Review, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Fall 2009), pp. 540 and 541.
- 62.
Hoffman, The Oligarchs, pp. 125 and 175.
- 63.
Marc Bennetts, Kicking the Kremlin: Russia’s New Dissident and the Battle to Topple Putin (London: Oneworld Publications, 2014), p. 198.
- 64.
Lucas, The New Cold War, p. 1.
- 65.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), p. 78.
- 66.
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. xxxvi.
- 67.
Tom Balmforth, “Putin’s New Security Force Seen As ‘Praetorian Guard,’” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 6 April 2016.
- 68.
Vadim Volkov (roundtable at the Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies’ 2016 Convention, Washington, DC, 17–20 November 2016).
- 69.
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 12; see also Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
- 70.
Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Benetti and Cesar Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 104, 121, and 122; Franz Kafka, The Trial (New York: Penguin Classics, 2000).
- 71.
Alain Besançon, interview by Marius Stan and Vladimir Tismaneanu, “I’m for the Cold War!” Contributors.ro, 28 June 2015; Alain Besançon, “La pensée Poutine,” Commentaire, No. 149 (2015), pp. 15–22.
References
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Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. Vincenzo Benetti and Cesar Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Meridian Books.
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———. 2016. Drivers of Putin’s Foreign Policy. American Enterprise Institute, June 14. Accessed 8 October 2016 at https://www.aei.org/publication/drivers-of-putins-foreign-policy/
———. 2017. The Kremlin Emboldened: Putinism After Crimea. Journal of Democracy 28 (4): 76–79.
Balmforth, Tom. 2016. Putin’s New Security Force Seen As ‘Praetorian Guard’. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, April 6. Accessed 6 April 2016 at http://www.rferl.org/a/russia-national-guard-or-praetorian-guard/27658769.html
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———. 2016. Syria Conflict: Aid Convoy Attack Was Air Strike, UN Expert Says. BBC News, October 5. Accessed 5 October 2016 at http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-37561755
———. 2018. Russian Spy: What Happened to Sergei and Yulia Skripal? BBC News, September 27. Accessed 15 March 2019 at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43643025
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———. 2015b. La pensée Poutine. Commentaire 149: 15–22.
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———. 2017a. Killer, Kleptocrat, Genius, Spy: The Many Myths of Vladimir Putin. The Guardian, February 22. Accessed 1 July 2018 at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/22/vladimir-putin-killer-genius-kleptocrat-spy-myths
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———. 2014. Speech by Vladimir Putin. Konferencija rossijskih poslov i postojannyh predstavitelej [Conference of Russian Ambassadors and Permanent Representatives]. Official Internet Resources of the President of Russia, July 1. Accessed 12 September 2016 at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/46131
———. 2016. Vstrecha s Sergeem Lavrovym i Sergeem Shojgu [Meeting with Sergey Lavrov and Sergey Shoygu]. Official Internet Resources of the President of Russia, March 14. Accessed 10 February 2017 at http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/51511
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Langdon, K.C., Tismaneanu, V. (2020). Russian Foreign Policy: Freedom for Whom, to Do What?. In: Putin’s Totalitarian Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20579-9_7
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