From Primakov to Crimea
In the first two or three years after the collapse of the USSR, it was assumed that Russia should become an ally of the West, weaken the role of the military command in the life of the country, form a “belt of stability and good neighborliness” along the borders, that is, respect the independence and territorial integrity of the independent states that emerged from the ruins of the USSR.
This line, which was named after its author, the first Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, faced resistance from the army generals and the directorate of the military-industrial complex, the state security leadership, most of the regional elites and academic circles. It was finally buried in 1996, when Academician Yevgeny Primakov, director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, became head of the Foreign Ministry. “All of us in the leadership of the SVR,” he wrote, “were well aware that with the end of the Cold War the concept of “enemy” will not disappear <...> The leaders of a number of Western countries are acting to prevent Russia from playing a special role in stabilizing the situation in the former republics of the USSR, disrupt the development of trends toward their rapprochement with the Russian Federation.”
Primakov declared Russia’s most important foreign policy objectives to be opposition to NATO expansion, preservation of the Slobodan Milosevic regime in the former Yugoslavia, and the transformation of the CIS states into a strategic forefield where Russian troops would be stationed for operations “on distant frontiers.” None of these goals were achieved. But Primakov was able to transform the phobias, ambitions and expectations of the Russian elite into strategic concepts. The current Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is right: Primakov is indeed “the author of the key provisions of the foreign policy doctrine of modern Russia.”
The outside world was declared a center of danger, and the main threat to Russia's security was the establishment of a “unipolar world.” Washington was accused of undermining Russia's international influence and pushing it out of its traditional zones of influence and spheres of interest. This is a typical explanation for Russian political thinking of its own expansion by concern for countering an external threat. “Constantly at war and expanding in all directions, she [Russia] nevertheless believed that she was constantly under threat,” wrote Henry Kissinger.
In the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s, the emphasis was on manipulating contradictions between stronger actors in world politics. Actually, this was the meaning of the concept of “multipolarity” invented by Primakov. Western unity during the Cold War, he argued, was the result of confrontation with the USSR. But as soon as the Soviet threat disappeared, contradictions between the United States, Europe and Japan undermine their former military-political and economic unity, and China turns into a superpower competing with Japan and the United States. Moscow must stimulate contradictions between these centers of power and, by playing on them, achieve its goals. However, this concept turned out to be stillborn. The Japanese-American military alliance remained in force. In the 1990s, NATO survived and expanded, and after 2014 and especially 2022, the North Atlantic Alliance became the focus of the military-political power of the West, opposing Russian expansion.
In Russia it is often discussed that, having come to power, Putin sincerely wanted to be friends with the West, join NATO, and supported the deployment of American bases in Central Asia, necessary for the operation in Afghanistan. But contrary to Moscow’s demands, the United States withdrew from the ABM Treaty, and the states of Central and Eastern Europe were accepted into NATO, including, which especially irritates the Kremlin, the Baltic states. And, accordingly, Putin could not help but react to the hostile behavior of the West. This version is sometimes repeated in the West: if the Baltic states had not been accepted into NATO, then today Russia would be an ally of the North Atlantic Alliance and world politics would develop along a completely different trajectory.
The reality, however, is different. Indeed, once in the Kremlin, Putin tried to reduce tensions with the West - at that time Russia did not have the resources for a new confrontation with it. The war in Chechnya consumed almost all combat-ready units of the army. World oil and gas prices in 2000–2002 were only slightly higher than in the 1990s. In Moscow they spoke with alarm about a default in 2003, when the peak of payments on external loans would occur. Thus, without the weakening of the confrontation with the West, Putin’s presidency would have gone down in history as a “presidency of disaster.”
But in 2003, oil prices went up. A harsh anti-American campaign has unfolded in Russia in connection with the US operation in Iraq. Shortly before this, the State Duma postponed the ratification of the agreement signed with the United States on the reduction of strategic offensive capabilities. In early 2007, in Munich, Putin gave a keynote speech, saying that the economic and military power of the United States did not correspond to its claims to “global leadership,” and that Russia had always “enjoyed the privilege of pursuing an independent foreign policy” and was not going to “change this tradition.” It quickly became clear that “independent policy” means a policy independent of the rule of law and the need to comply with agreements signed by Russia.
The Munich speech reflected the ideas that had become entrenched in the Russian establishment about the strengthening of Russia and the deepening crisis of the West. The Russian foreign policy concept approved by Putin in December 2016 stated, for example, that “the ability of the historical West to dominate the world economy and politics is being reduced.”
As a result, as Moscow believed, the possibility of taking “historical revenge” opens up: establishing military-political control over the territory of the former USSR and East-Central Europe, as well as the destruction of NATO, which should have been presented with a dilemma - surrender or nuclear war. According to the Kremlin’s logic, Euro-Atlantic civilization has entered a period of decline, unable to cope with the growing crisis, and unable to resist by force the growing influence of Russia. And even if Western elites are able to stabilize the situation in the future, the Kremlin believes, it is necessary to take advantage of their current weakness and ensure the most favorable positions for future confrontation.
The response to the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 reinforced Moscow's confidence in the weakening of the West. In both cases, the United States and Europe were faced with a choice: either a new Cold War or non-resistance to the aggressive actions of the Kremlin. The West's reaction was ambivalent. In August 2008, warships of NATO member states, including American destroyers with cruise missiles, entered the Black Sea. This stopped the Russian troops rushing towards Tbilisi. However, by the end of the year they tried to forget about the invasion of Georgia. From the report of the European Union commission, known as the Tagliavini report, it is impossible to understand who is to blame for the outbreak of the war. Events developed in a similar way after the annexation of Crimea. On the one hand, Western states introduced economic sanctions against Russia, on the other, they set as their goal the settlement of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation on the basis of the Minsk agreements. This effectively legitimized the Russian occupation of Crimea and turned the so-called people's republics of Donbass into a powerful instrument of Russian influence in Ukraine.
The people are ready for aggression
The revanchist and militaristic nature of the strategic thinking of the Russian establishment and the aggressiveness of Russian foreign policy are due to the peculiarities of the Russian mentality. According to the Levada Center, which publishes fairly reliable (at least the most reliable of all known) data on the attitude of the Russian population to the war in Ukraine, about 70% of respondents consistently approve of it, approximately 20% disapprove of it, the rest cannot formulate their attitude towards it These data, naturally, were questioned by many: in a strictly authoritarian regime that is turning into a totalitarian regime, people are afraid to express their real attitude to current political problems for fear of reprisals.
Sociologists can be trusted or not. But you can't help but believe the facts. Anti-war protests at the beginning of the war were weak and today have been reduced to a minimum. Last fall, several hundred thousand people fled the country from mobilization. This is a small—maximum 10%—proportion of those who can be drafted into the army. The majority of those remaining, having received the summons, obediently go to the recruiting stations. The discontent of those mobilized is not caused by a protest against an aggressive war, but by the bungling of the authorities, poor provision, late payment of money, and the like.
It is also striking that the results of the Levada Center surveys correlate with the conclusions of numerous studies conducted before the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Thus, analyzing the reaction of Russians to the Kremlin’s aggression against Georgia, sociologists recorded a strange situation: on the one hand, in the summer of 2008, about two-thirds of respondents did not fully or partially trust the Russian media, on the other hand, almost immediately after the start of the invasion of Russian troops in Georgia, the official the picture of what was happening, broadcast on television channels, was accepted by 70 to 80% of adult residents of Russia. Putin's personal rating jumped in the fall of 2008 to a record 88%.
Events developed in the same way immediately after the annexation of Crimea. Putin's ratings rose quickly, rising by about twenty percentage points. The highest figure—88%—was in October 2014, after Russian troops attacked the Ukrainian cities of Mariupol and Ilovaisk. The mass consciousness entered a hysterically excited state, giving rise to the odious slogan “Crimea is ours!”, which, like a drop of water, reflected deeply rooted public sentiments As the famous Russian psychologist and psychotherapist Andrei Gronsky wrote: “Since the spring - summer of 2014, on the public stage we have been seeing a different person - a person obsessed with ridiculous, overvalued ideas, emotionally excitable and aggressive. <...> I would call a person of the 90s antisocial, a person of the 00s hedonistic, and a person of 14–15 years old psychotic (of course, not in the strict clinical meaning of the word). The question arises as to how a generally reasonable and peace-loving person could suddenly turn into an angry paranoid.”
Sociologists and psychologists have yet to explain this feature of Russian society. Moscow's aggressive policy, experts say, fully corresponds not only to the conscious, but also to the unconscious attitudes and expectations of at least three-quarters of the population. Leading analyst of the Levada Center Boris Dubin wrote: “I want to emphasize: this is not at all about “imposing” on the masses or the notorious “manipulation” of mass consciousness, its “zombification” by the media and political experts, but about semantic permission, if anything - a blessing, and additional symbolic reinforcement of those moods and stereotypes that already exist among the masses, but in an uncondensed, vague, unarticulated form.” In other words, propaganda liberated, legitimized, gave a more or less complete stable verbal form to the aggressive, militaristic and revanchist mentality and emotional state of mass consciousness and consolidated the political stereotypes that originally existed in it. This calls into question the idea that a change in propaganda strategy, say, in the case of replacing Putin and his clique at the top of Russian power, will lead to a change in the basic imperial and revanchist attitudes deeply rooted in the consciousness of the average Russian. At least for part of the Russian population, a change in propaganda theses may cause rejection. And finally, one of the factors of Putin’s overwhelming popularity becomes clear: the content and style of his thinking, declared values, geopolitical views, even humor, which is not without reason considered an example of bad taste, coincide with the way of thinking of 80–85% of Russians, who consistently approve and support his activities.
The fact that militaristic propaganda is readily accepted by Russian society, with the exception of a relatively small part of it, means that this society consciously or subconsciously shares the very assessments, views and stereotypes that the pro-Kremlin media instill in it. Facts that contradict the formed vision of what is happening are either simply ignored or interpreted in the desired direction. This well-known phenomenon, called the “paralogical type of thinking,” is characteristic of Russian mass consciousness. The latter has been formed over centuries. But the Soviet years were especially important, when total indoctrination was supported by equally total terror. The idea that one can avoid the Gulag and even save one’s life is firmly established in the minds of homo soveticus, not only by declaring one’s loyalty to the leaders, but also by accepting the way of thinking they impose, by believing what the authorities instill in their subjects. Psychologists can explain this not only by elementary fear, but also by the desire to avoid cognitive dissonance, a feeling of deep emotional discomfort caused by a clash in the mind of conflicting ideas, ideas, beliefs, values or emotional reactions, on the one hand, imposed by the authorities, and on the other, reflecting personal , an alternative to the official picture of the world.
Numerous researchers have tried to understand the causes and origins of the militarization of mass consciousness, the widespread prevalence of xenophobia and ethnic hatred, mythologized concepts that justify and glorify war, and the search for an external enemy. Many works noted a deficit of critical-analytical thinking and, accordingly, adherence to an indoctrinated point of view, infantile dependence on the authorities and pro-government media, rejection of logical arguments and facts. There are many theories that describe and explain these phenomena. They do not contradict each other and together form a complete picture.
Russian philosopher Igor Klyamkin is looking for the origins of the militarized culture of Russian society in the type of statehood that emerged as a result of the long stay of the Moscow Principality as part of the Golden Horde. The Moscow state was built on the model of a “big army.” “The statehood and, accordingly, the culture of post-Mongol Muscovy initially developed as a statehood and culture of a militaristic type,” writes Klyamkin. - <...> We are talking about militarization not only in the sense of spending most of the resources for military purposes, but also about the way the state is organized, as well as its relationship with the population.” Militarization, which also extended to peacetime, blurred “in people’s minds the boundaries between war and peace. And, accordingly, it could not but affect the type of culture that was establishing itself in Muscovy.
Not everyone in the Russian scientific community agrees with this. But in itself, the initial thesis about Russia as a militaristic type of state does not raise doubts. The entire system of power relations was built not on the basis of legal norms, to which both rulers and their subjects had to obey, but according to the army type, which presupposed the unquestioning subordination of the lower levels of the bureaucratic hierarchy to the higher ones. This organization of social relations best met the tasks of permanent territorial expansion, first of the Muscovite kingdom, and then of the Russian Empire, which was carried out primarily by military force. At the same time, the mentality of an “obedient subject” was formed, accustomed to submission, unquestioningly carrying out not only the orders and instructions of his superiors, but also easily assimilating the ideological and political doctrines and views imposed from above.
According to another concept, the militarization of Russian mass consciousness was a consequence of “negative selection”, which contributed to the accumulation of militaristic views, attitudes and sentiments in the Russian public consciousness, which has reached a dangerous level in our days. The changes experienced by the population of Russia, wrote the outstanding Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, “are typical of all major wars and revolutions. The latter have always been a tool of negative selection.” In particular, “the more strong-willed, gifted, morally and mentally developed” died in large numbers. Persons who are morally defective suffered less. During the revolution, conditions were just favorable to their survival. In conditions of brutal struggle, lies, deception, unprincipledness and moral cynicism, they felt great; they occupied profitable positions, committed atrocities, cheated, changed their positions as needed, and lived a satisfying and cheerful life.”
The Great Terror and World War II dealt a terrible blow to public morality in the former USSR. In order to survive, many people did not simply remain silent, without risking giving away a critical attitude towards Soviet reality with a careless word, but consciously or subconsciously forced themselves to believe in Bolshevik propaganda in order to avoid split thinking. As a result, a huge number of people became accustomed to communist dogmas, some deeply believed in them. And these dogmas, as one of the deepest experts on Soviet Bolshevism, Alexander Yakovlev, wrote, “harshly and strictly dictate the policy of violence as the “midwife of history.” Communism in Russia died before the collapse of the USSR, but its inherent logic of thinking, ideas about violence as the main or even the only political instrument remained and, largely thanks to Kremlin propaganda, were transferred to the foreign policy sphere.
The rootedness of militaristic attitudes in Russian society is also associated with the spread of the sadomasochistic personality type in it. “For the authoritarian character there are, so to speak, two sexes: the powerful and the powerless,” wrote Erich Fromm. “Strength automatically evokes his love and willingness to obey, regardless of who showed it. Strength attracts him not for the sake of the values that stand behind it, but in itself, because it is strength. And just as power automatically earns his “love,” powerless people or organizations automatically earn his contempt. At the mere sight of a weak person, he feels the desire to attack, suppress, humiliate. <…> An authoritarian personality feels the more rage, the more helpless its victim is.” In other words, a person best suited to existence in an authoritarian or totalitarian society finds a kind of pleasure in subordination to his superiors and at the same time overcomes the feeling of his own inferiority caused by this subordination, subordinating and humiliating people who are weaker or standing on the lower steps of the social ladder. This mechanism largely explains the origin of the aggressiveness of modern Russian society towards, for example, Ukraine and Ukrainians. Open hostility towards the former “brotherly people”, the desire to humiliate them by taking away Crimea or Donbass, may well be the product of a deeply hidden but powerful feeling of one’s own humiliation and discrimination in one’s own country.
Another mechanism, closely related to the authoritarian, sadomasochistic nature of mass consciousness, is based on the desire to compensate for one’s own weakness and humiliation by associating with a powerful state pursuing a tough aggressive policy towards its neighbors. Alexander Asmolov, one of the leading Russian psychologists, writes: “This is not masochism or even sadism, this is a different mechanism. As soon as a particular culture chooses a mobilization scenario rather than an innovative development scenario as a development strategy, it actualizes patriotism as a love not for society, but for the state. And it completely mobilizes all aggressive-patriotic xenophobic mechanisms. As soon as the country chose crisis as the path of development, as soon as we became a great country of permanent crisis, the main thing we do is to protect our security. <…> Thus, aggression exists at the political level as a tool for maintaining the crisis and justifying rigid vertical forms of power.”
The main conclusion seems far from optimistic. The aggressive foreign policy of Putin’s Russia, which took its final form in 2014, was generated not only by the views and geopolitical ideas of Putin himself, part of the highest circles of the bureaucracy, the interests of the military command, the owners of the military-industrial complex and the heads of the security services. Russia's aggressiveness on the world stage has deep roots in Russian society and reflects expectations, phobias and other mental and emotional characteristics of the Russian mass consciousness.
“The annexation of Crimea gave such a powerful effect of triumph and self-satisfaction, a sense of demonstration of strength, that it eliminated or pushed aside all claims to power,” wrote Levada Center director Lev Gudkov. — The annexation of Crimea and policy towards Ukraine, the war in Donbass, confrontation and demonstration of force towards the West have sharply increased Russians’ self-respect. I would say they doubled it. And claims to power and ideas about power as corrupt and selfish have not so much changed as they have been put into brackets.” This circumstance makes Russia and its foreign policy truly dangerous
