The Kremlin, Moscow (Image: Ben Robinson)

Domestic Determinants of Russia’s anti-Western Campaign

By Hannes Adomeit

Introduction

The central argument that will be made here is that the Kremlin’s narrative about the reasons for the dramatic deterioration of the relationship between Russia and the West as being external and military in nature is fundamentally flawed. Internal factors — the power elite’s calculations about its tenure in office — will be shown to be the main explanatory variables. To the extent that external challenges and threats can he said to determine the Kremlin’s foreign policy, these are held to be essentially socio-economic in nature. They are, the argument continues, rooted primarily in the concern of the Russian power elite that the regulatory model and socio-economic attractiveness of the West pose a threat to the legitimacy of its rule in Russia and the country’s influence in its self-declared sphere of interest.¹

The argument will be developed as follows:

− An analytical basis will be set in the first chapter. This will include clarification of the relationship between information, disinformation and narratives, and the utilization of the latter as an instrument of domestic and foreign policy; that is, its ‘weaponization’. This will be related to the Russian narrative with its focus on the external military and security challenges and the ‘defensive’ reaction allegedly necessary to cope with them.

− Chapter two demonstrates that the first major indication of the primacy of internal factors for anti-Western attitudes and policies dates back to the Yeltsin era. The spotlight is directed to the period from autumn 1992 to winter 1993 with the, for all practical purposes, abandonment of the Euroatlantic course and its replacement with a Russian nationalist and ‘Eurasian’ orientation.

− In the third chapter, the regulatory and socio-economic quality of the Western challenge for Russia under Putin will be dealt with. It will be shown that this challenge has been considered by the Russian power elite as a serious threat to its rule.

− The fourth chapter asks the question as to why this is the case and argues that the answer is to be found in the system of government — the Putin System — with its main structural elements. These are held to be undemocratic, anti-liberal and authoritarian, accompanied by centralization, corruption, legal nihilism and repression of civil society.

− Fifth, however, this system was regarded by some representatives of the Russian power elite as dysfunctional for economic modernization and even as ‘endangering the existence of the country’. Such assessments were particularly evident in 2009–2011 during Dmitry Medvedev’s tenure in office as president. It seemed that Russia would not only contemplate but embark upon profound structural changes and that these would be set in motion through ‘modernization partnerships’ with Europe and in close cooperation with the United States.

− The sixth chapter shows that Medvedev’s scathing criticism of the system Putin had built and his ‘modernisation’ campaign raised hopes and expectations of the middle class and produced a crisis of legitimacy.

− The seventh chapter develops the argument that, after Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, the socio-economic (inevitably also political) modernization campaign was abruptly terminated by the dominant faction of Russian power elite because it regarded the pursuit of that orientation as a threat to its rule. In the elite’s perception, it had raised concern that ‘colour revolutions’ would spread and spill over to Russia. As a result, the drive for socio-economic modernization was replaced by national-patriotic mobilization. That drive ultimately explains the annexation of the Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine.

− The final chapter addresses the question as to whether the current precedence of Russian internal politics over foreign policy with its weaponization of narratives and the strident anti-Western national-patriotic campaign reflects a trend that is impervious to change in the foreseeable future. In particular, it analyses the problem of whether economic stagnation and decline will lead to further military pressure and military intervention abroad or, conversely, whether it will set limits to adventurism and aggression. This also raises the policy-relevant question as to whether there is anything the West can do to alter Russia’s current orientation. Is it appropriate and promising to conduct a diplomacy of small steps and ‘dialogue instead of confrontation’, search for common ground, revive arms control and endeavour to create ‘confidence’ in well-meaning Western intentions? Or is a counter-strategy required that sets firm limits and impresses upon the Russian leadership the costs and risks of its current foreign policy orientation?

The Russian Narrative: Weapon in the Information War

According to standard definitions, ‘information’ pertains to ‘facts provided or learned about something or someone’.² Narratives can consist of both information and disinformation, of truths, half-truths and lies. An examination of the Kremlin’s narrative about the causes for the substantial deterioration of relations between Russia and the West is such a mixture. Disinformation, half-truths and lies, however, are clearly dominant.
After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, so the Kremlin’s argument goes, the West adopted a fundamentally hostile attitude to Russia. It had pursued policies so as to ‘belittle’, ‘demean’, ‘degrade’, ‘contain’, ‘encircle’, ‘weaken’ and ‘destabilize’ the country, and ‘to bring it to its knees’. NATO, an ‘aggressive’ military alliance controlled by the United States, is painted as the spearhead of anti-Russian policies, pushing its forces and military infrastructure ‘ever closer to Russia’s borders’. In essence, NATO had continued the Cold War ‘containment’ policy.

In his March 2018 State of the Union address, Putin reiterated the standard narrative of a benevolent Russia that had stretched out the hand of cooperation and a US and NATO that had rejected it. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he contended, our partners apparently got the impression that it was impossible in the foreseeable historical perspective for our country to revive its economy, industry, defence industry and armed forces to levels supporting the necessary strategic potential. Since this was the case, [they thought that] there was no point in taking Russia’s opinion into account, they [deemed] it necessary to further pursue ultimate unilateral military advantage in order to dictate the terms in every sphere.³

Speaking specifically about strategic nuclear issues, he claimed that ‘we consistently tried to re-engage the American side in serious discussions, in reaching agreements in the sphere of strategic stability’ but ‘nobody listened to us. Well, listen to us now.’⁴

The narrative even goes as far as asserting that the West, having successfully succeeded in destroying the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, was now bent on dismembering Russia. Thus, speaking on national television after the September 2004 terrorist attack in Beslan in North Ossetia, Putin deplored that we failed to understand the complexities and dangers of processes under way in our own country and in the world. At any rate, we failed to respond appropriately to them. We showed weakness. And the weak get beaten. Some would like to tear off a ‘juicy piece’ from us. Others help them. They help, because they believe that Russia, as one of the major nuclear powers, is still a threat to them — a threat that therefore should be removed. And terrorism is, of course, a mere instrument to achieve such aims.⁵

Putin did not specifically mention the West, but others in Russia’s power structure have. Thus, five years later, the president of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, who was recovering from injuries inflicted when his motorcade was targeted in a suicide bombing, claimed that ‘more serious’ forces than Arabs were behind terrorism in the North Caucasus:

I have already emphasized this and say it [again] now. The West will seek to destabilise [us]; it will seek to prevent Russia from reviving our former [Soviet] might. It will do what it thinks is necessary.

Pressed by the interviewer as to who those forces behind the Arab terrorists might be, he identified first and foremost ‘the United States and Britain’.⁶

The sanctions adopted by the United States, the EU member states, other European countries and OECD members in response to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and its military intervention in eastern Ukraine are portrayed by the Kremlin as part and parcel of the West’s alleged containment policy and strategic design to weaken Russia. Thus, Putin recalled that in the Cold War it was forbidden to sell certain technologies and equipment to the USSR, products that were on the so-called CoCom lists. ‘These have now been formally annulled, but only formally’, he charged, ‘because in fact many prohibitions continue to apply.’⁷ The Russian population shares this view. According to a survey by the independent Analytical Centre Levada, 66% of respondents believe that the Western sanctions are aimed at weakening and degrading Russia; only 5% said that these were related to the conflict in Ukraine.⁸

Proof positive according to the narrative is NATO’s eastward enlargement. Putin took aim at this issue in particularly uncompromising form on 10 February 2007 at the 43rd Munich Security Conference. To him it was
obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation to the modernisation of the alliance or to ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion directed?⁹

‘NATO’s eastern enlargement and the installation of military infrastructure near our borders’ was also one of the main arguments Putin used to justify the annexation of Crimea:

Let me note too that we have already heard declarations from Kiev about Ukraine soon joining NATO. What would this have meant for Crimea and Sevastopol in the future? It would have meant that NATO’s navy would be right there in this city of Russia’s military glory, and this would create not an illusory but a perfectly real threat to the whole of southern Russia.¹⁰

The Kremlin’s NATO narrative has a moral dimension which consists in the charge that Western leaders gave solid ‘guarantees’ and ‘assurances’ and made firm ‘commitments’ not to expand eastward if the Soviet Union consented to German unification and united Germany’s membership in NATO. ‘What happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today?’, Putin asked pointedly.¹¹ Eleven years later, at the 54th Munich Security Conference, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov once again held the West responsible for the deterioration of relations between Russia and the West, and he too accused the West of a breach of trust. ‘Contrary to the assurances [zavereniya] given to us in the 1990s, as the publication of documents from the US National Archives has recently confirmed again, NATO is moving eastward. NATO troops and military infrastructure are accumulating on our borders.’¹² What appears to be mere statement of fact (Western assurances) and its confirmation (publication of documents) by a US government institution (US National Archives) on closer examination turns out to be erroneous on all three counts.¹³

2. The Yeltsin Era: The Domestic Roots of Anti-Westernism

The first major indication of the primacy of internal factors for anti-Western attitudes and policies dates back to the Yeltsin era. Essentially, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Russian foreign policy constituted a continuation of Gorbachev’s New Political Thinking. Conceptual approaches were Euroatlantic in nature and informed by the visions of ‘Europe whole and free’ and ‘Euroatlantic community from Vancouver to Vladivostok’. Devolution of empire, abandonment of military-strategic parity with the United States, eradication of regional military preponderance, pursuit of broad political cooperation to form a ‘strategic partnership’ the West, full participation in international economic institutions such as GATT, IMF and the G-7 and even membership in NATO came to be the declared goals of the new Russia under reformist foreign minister Andrey Kozyrev. Yet another failure ‘to integrate into the democratic community of states and the world economy’, Kozyrev warned, ‘would amount to a betrayal of the nation and the final slide of Russia down to the category of third-rank states’.¹⁴

Specifically, concerning NATO, a few days before the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union and the first ever meeting between NATO foreign ministers and those of the former Warsaw Pact, Yeltsin wrote to the secretary general of NATO, stating that Russia wished to develop a dialogue between former adversaries ‘both on the political and military levels’. Furthermore, ‘Today, we are raising the question of Russia’s membership in NATO regarding it, however, as a long-term political aim.’¹⁵ Kozyrev explained in a radio interview that Russia no longer regarded NATO ‘as an aggressive military bloc’ but viewed it ‘as one of the mechanisms of stability in Europe and in the world as a whole. Our desire to cooperate with this mechanism and to join it is therefore natural.’ He advocated the creation of a ‘zone of security and cooperation from Vancouver to Vladivostok’ in which NATO would ‘play a role that is positive and by no means insignificant’.¹⁶ In his address to the United Nations at the beginning of 1992, Yeltsin stated that Russia regarded the Western countries (not merely as partners but even) as ‘allies’.¹⁷

The Euroatlantic orientation was anathema to political forces representing a bewildering array of ideological concepts and currents. The hodgepodge formed what was then called in the public discourse a ‘patriotic consensus’, consisting of Russian nationalist and chauvinist, pan-Slavist, Eurasianist, neoimperialist, revisionist and irredentist forces, all of an essentially anti-democratic, anti-liberal and anti-Western persuasion. Their common goal was to restore Russia as a Great Power (velikaya derzhava). The domestic political clout that drove the return to traditional thinking rested in the reassertion of the power and influence of the siloviki, former or current holders of leading positions in the military and security ministries and agencies, especially the intelligence services; the managers and employees of the military-industrial complex; and the leadership and members of the Communist Party.¹⁸

In the period from autumn 1992 to winter 1993, five major indications are to be found that reveal the primacy of domestic politics and the impact of the national ‘patriotic’ forces on foreign policy. The first pertained to Russia’s relationship with Japan. The idea of the reformist forces in Moscow’s foreign policy community was evidently that now, in 1992, after a comprehensive resolution of the Cold War confrontation in Europe had been reached and Germany reunified, a similarly fundamental rearrangement of relations with Japan should be set in motion.¹⁹

In February of that year, Yeltsin correspondingly prepared the ground in a letter to Japanese prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa, in which he referred to Japan as a potential alliance partner.²⁰ In August, deputy prime minister Mikhail Poltoranin visited Tokyo and acknowledged at a news conference that the (‘southern’) Kuril Islands issue constituted a major stumbling block to Russian-Japanese relations but that Yeltsin supported a formula, agreed upon in 1956 but never implemented, according to which two smaller islands of the four islands’ chain would be returned in exchange for the conclusion of a peace treaty and a normalization of relations, and that the status of the remaining two islands would be determined later.²¹

Preparations for Yeltsin’s visit to Japan proceeded but on 9 September, only four days before the visit was to take place, it was abruptly cancelled. Pravda reported this to have been the result of a decision of the Russian Security Council. Opposition to making any concessions to Japan on the disputed islands had evidently hardened and made itself felt in that body. Yeltsin’s spokesman hinted at a struggle over the issue when he stated shortly before the official announcement of the cancellation of the trip that the meeting of the Council had ‘proceeded with great difficulty’.²² A subsequent visit scheduled for May 1993 was also cancelled, and when it did take place in October of that year, no progress in the resolution of the issue was achieved.

The second major domestic political event that was to shape both basic structural features of the ‘new’ Russia’s system of government and its foreign policy was the constitutional crisis of 1993 and its resolution by the use of military force. The background to the crisis was a stand-off between president Yeltsin and the parliament (the Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet). The crisis reached a tipping point on 21 September 1993, when Yeltsin decreed the legislature to be dissolved, although he did not have the power to do so. In response, the parliament declared that the president’s decision was null and void, impeached Yeltsin and proclaimed vice president Aleksandr Rutskoy to be acting president. The situation deteriorated at the beginning of October.

On 3 October, demonstrators removed police cordons around the parliament and, urged by their leaders, took over the mayor’s offices and tried to storm the Ostankino television centre. The army, which had initially declared its neutrality, stormed the Supreme Soviet building in the early morning hours of 4 October on Yeltsin’s orders, and arrested the leaders of the resistance. The ten-day conflict became the deadliest single event of street fighting in Moscow’s history since the Russian Revolution. According to government estimates, 187 people were killed and 437 wounded, while estimates from non-governmental sources put the death toll at as high as 1,500.²³

Controversies as to whether there was no other possibility than the use of military force to solve the constitutional crisis are still on-going a quarter of a century after the event. Whatever the verdict of history, however, the fact is that, as so often in Russian history, military force was used in domestic political power struggles. It set the stage for the (first) Chechen war in the following year, resulting in an even higher number of casualties, estimated at between 80,000 and 100,000. It also set the stage for Putin’s use of force on post-Soviet space outside the Russian borders, in Georgia in 2008, and in Ukraine beginning in 2014.

Third, the mindset of siloviki and their proclivity for the use of military force to solve domestic (and foreign policy) political problems can be demonstrated also by remarks made by Putin in December 1993. In his then capacity as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg and chairman of the city’s foreign relations committee, he told German business representatives at a meeting in the city that a military dictatorship on the Chilean model would be the solution to the current political problems in Russia. He distinguished between ‘necessary’ and ‘criminal’ violence. Political power was to be considered criminal if it aimed at the elimination of market conditions but necessary if it promoted or protected private capital investment. In view of the difficult private-sector path to be taken by Russia and opposition to it that could be expected in the process, he expressly approved of any preparations by Yeltsin and the military for a Pinochet-style dictatorship.²⁴

The fourth indication of the strength of national-patriotic, anti-democratic and anti-Western sentiment not just at the apex of political power but in the country at large was the December 1993 parliamentary election. The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) emerged as its winner — a political party neither liberal nor democratic, not even a party in the strict sense of the word with due-paying members, led by the stridently nationalist and chauvinist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky. It received 22.92 percent of the votes; the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) came in second with 12.4 percent; and its wing in the Russian countryside, the Agrarian Party, received 7.99 percent. Thus, the electoral strength of what was dubbed the ‘red-brown alliance’ amounted to a stunning 43.29 percent of the votes. The success of these forces raised the spectre of the fate of the Weimar republic, the demise of democracy in Germany due to the combined onslaught by Hitler’s NSDAP and the communist KPD. Furthermore, when considering the issue of NATO’s eastward ‘expansion’ and why Russia’s neighbours, first and foremost the Baltic States, were so keen to join the Western alliance, it is obligatory to recall Zhirinovsky’s threats, such as:

I’ll start by squeezing the Baltics and other small nations. I don’t care if they are recognized by the UN — I’m not going to invade them or anything. I’ll bury radioactive waste along the Lithuanian border and put up powerful fans and blow the stuff across the border at night. I’ll turn the fans off during the day. They’ll all get radiation sickness. They’ll die of it. When they either die out or get down on their knees, I’ll stop.²⁵

The fifth indication of the increased power and influence of the siloviki and anti-Western forces and their impact on Russian foreign policy was very evident in relation to NATO. One month prior to the Duma elections, a widely publicized study by the Russian foreign intelligence service again characterized NATO yet again as the ‘biggest military grouping in the world that possesses an enormous offensive potential’. It called the alliance an organization ‘wedded to the stereotypes of bloc thinking’.²⁶ It also charged that NATO wanted to remain a ‘defence alliance’ rather than embark on the ‘creation of a mechanism for the support of international security’.²⁷ The study was emphatic in its opposition to NATO membership of the Central and Eastern European countries. As for the Kremlin, Yeltsin’s press spokesman, reacting to Lithuania’s official request for membership in NATO, warned that the expansion of NATO into areas ‘in direct proximity to the Russian border’ would lead to the ‘military-political destabilization of the region’.²⁸ As for Russia’s possible participation in NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PFP), Russia’s stance was first characterized by indecisiveness and ambiguity, and Moscow ultimately declined to join.²⁹ The crux of the matter was that Russia wanted a ‘special status’ in any security arrangement in Europe that would reflect her ‘position in world and European affairs’ and her ‘military might and nuclear status’.³⁰

What then are the domestic political and socio-economic roots of the anti-Western orientation evident in the Yeltsin era? One of them lies in the fact that the huge military establishment of more than one million soldiers in the forces of the defence ministry and other armed formations such as those of the interior ministry, and the far-flung research, development and production facilities of the military-industrial complex, would suffer further contraction if the West, that is, NATO, no longer posed a threat but figured as a ‘strategic partner’ or even ‘ally’. That explains the stubborn retention of the risk of a ‘large-scale war’ (krupnomasshtabnaya voina) in the November 1993 military doctrine, that is, in the same month in which the SVR’s NATO study appeared.³¹ Evidently, a large-scale war was conceivable only with NATO. From that perspective, a mass army with significant mobilization potential and a substantial military-industrial complex was required. It also necessitated portraying NATO and, generally, ‘the West’ as ill-disposed in principle to Russia. Ultimately, in Putin’s third term in office as president, it appeared necessary to embark on even more strident national-patriotic mobilization and the cultivation of a siege mentality.

3. Political and Socio-Economic Challenges to the Russian Power Elite

While the Russian power elite, less than a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, returned to portraying NATO as a military and security threat, the EU was at that time a lesser target in Moscow’s line of fire. Yet given the increasing deviation of Russia’s domestic development from Western models of democracy, free market with fair competition, the rule of law and an active civil society, a new dividing line in Europe began to open. Objectively, therefore, the EU, with its value-based approach to European integration, began to present a much bigger problem for Moscow than NATO. This became evident at the end of the Yeltsin era and the transition to Putin’s rule in Russia’s Medium-Term Strategy towards the EU, a document that Putin in his then capacity as prime minister presented to the head of the ‘troika’ of EU council president, CFSP high representative, and commission president at the EU-Russia summit in Helsinki in October 1999.³² The document was Moscow’s response to the EC’s Common Strategy towards Russia of June 1999.³³

‘The European Council’, the document states, ‘adopts this Common Strategy to strengthen the strategic partnership [sic] between the Union and Russia at the dawn of a new century.’³⁴ The ‘strategic goals’ that the EU outlined were, among others, to facilitate Russia’s ‘return to its rightful place in the European family in a spirit of friendship, cooperation, fair accommodation of interests and on the foundations of shared values enshrined in the common heritage of European civilisation [and its transformation] to a stable, democratic and prosperous [country], firmly anchored in a united Europe free of new dividing lines […] a stable, open and pluralistic democracy, governed by the rule of law and underpinning a prosperous market economy’.

The goals also included ‘the integration of Russia into a wider area of cooperation in Europe’ and ‘enabling Russia to integrate into a common economic and social space in Europe’. The processes to achieve the EU’s strategic aims were thought essentially to move upward ‘from below’. They were meant to include support for local self government, small and medium enterprises and non-governmental institutions; the build-up of cooperation between universities and scientific institutions; the training of managers, journalists, lawyers and administrators; youth exchanges; and city partnerships.

The response conveyed by Putin was unambiguous. Moscow de facto rejected the idea that Russia had serious structural deficiencies that could and should be remedied through cooperation with the West. Its model seemed to be Soviet-style, that is, the forging of agreements at the top level with the EU and its member states, and implementation of the agreements ‘from the top down’. It scoffed at the idea of the country’s integration into Western institutions. The document stated that Russia’s strategy vis-à-vis the EU was ‘aimed at insuring national interests and enhancing the role and image of Russia in Europe and in the world’. It demanded that ‘Russia, as a world power situated on two continents, should retain its freedom to determine and implement its domestic and foreign policies, its status and advantages of a Euro-Asian state and the largest country of the CIS, and the independence of its position and activities in international organizations’. For all practical purposes it thus rejected the notion of integration into a common European space embracing both the EU and Russia.

The term ‘integration’ is mentioned explicitly but in a sense which is entirely different from what the EU had in mind. Russia wanted ‘to use the positive experience of integration in the EU with a view to consolidating and developing integration processes in the CIS’. This position was directly related to the consideration of the area covered by the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as a Russian sphere of influence. Russia in the document is referred to as the ‘largest country of the CIS’ with a special ‘status and advantages of a Euro-Asian state’. According to the Euro-Asian or Eurasian logic, the strategy rejected any Euroatlantic orientation and the vision of a community of values ranging from Vancouver to Vladivostok. Rather than endorsing policies for the creation of ‘common spaces’ including Russia, Europe and the United States, it stated that the purpose and promotion of cooperation in the security area was ‘to counterbalance U.S. and NATO dominance’ and ‘NATO-centrism’ in Europe.

Furthermore, the document clarified that it was not only United States engagement and NATO enlargement that the Kremlin considered to be detrimental to Russian interests in East Central Europe and the post-Soviet area, but also the involvement of the EU. This is indicated by statements such as that EU enlargement had an ‘ambivalent impact’ on EU-Russia cooperation; that Russia ‘reserves the right to refuse agreement to the extension of the PCA [Partnership and Cooperation Agreement]’ to EU candidate countries; that it would ‘oppose any attempts to hamper economic integration in the CIS’; and, most importantly, that it was against the establishment of ‘“special relations” by the EU with individual CIS countries to the detriment of Russian interests’.

Since it was obvious that Moscow would define what was harmful to its interests, it was also evident that it was precisely the EU’s European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and, even more so, its eastern dimension, the Eastern Partnership (EaP), would be regarded as an attempt to establish ‘special relations’ with CIS countries. In fact, shortly prior to the official launch of the EaP in May 2009 in Prague, Lavrov charged: ‘We are being accused of having spheres of influence. But what is the Eastern Partnership, if not an attempt to extend the EU’s sphere of influence?’³⁵ In his then capacity as president, Medvedev also criticized the Eastern Partnership. Shortly after the launching of the EaP initiative, at the May 2009 EU-Russia summit in Khabarovsk, he professed to be ‘embarrassed by the fact that some countries see this partnership as a partnership directed against Russia’.³⁶

Domestic politics and foreign policy are intertwined in every political system. In Russia’s case, however, there is an important distinguishing feature. Its policies on the post-Soviet space lie in the middle of a continuum between domestic politics and foreign policy. Internal matters are closely linked to that space of ‘special’ or, as Medvedev was to say after the war in Georgia, ‘privileged’ interests. Conversely, developments in this area have a greater impact on Russian domestic policy than the world outside that space. From the perspective of an increasingly authoritarian regime, the emergence of democratic systems in its neighbourhood would therefore be not just a challenge but a threat to its legitimacy.

The perceived threat developed in the 2000s in the shape of so-called ‘colour revolutions’, consisting in the toppling of undemocratic, corrupt regimes through mass demonstrations which were the popular reaction to massive electoral manipulation and falsifications by the authorities. The sequence of such regime changes began in October 2000 with the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević in Serbia. It was followed in November 2003 by the ‘rose’ revolution in Georgia and the toppling of Eduard Shevardnadze. And it continued in December 2004 with the ‘orange’ revolution in Ukraine and the failure of Russian-supported Viktor Yanukovich to be reelected.

The challenge to the Kremlin’s legitimacy, notably in the post-Soviet space, found its institutional form in the creation of the Community of Democratic Choice (CDC), founded on the initiative of democratically elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko and his Georgian counterpart, Mikheil Saakashvili, in December 2005 during a two-day forum in Kiev. The organization, according to a joint statement by the two leaders signed in Borjomi in Georgia in the preceding year, was meant to become a ‘powerful tool for the eradication of the remaining divisions, human rights abuses, and any kind of confrontation or frozen conflict in the region from the Baltic to the Black Sea’.³⁷ Participants in the founding congress were the presidents of nine states: Ukraine, Georgia, the three Baltic States, Moldova, Romania, Macedonia and Slovenia. The United States, the EU, the OSCE, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Azerbaijan aligned themselves with it in the form of observers.³⁸

This development was perceived by the Kremlin as a serious challenge to its claimed hegemony on post-Soviet space. In its propaganda counter to the challenge, it denied that the ‘colour revolutions’ were the result of domestic popular protest against corrupt, reactionary and repressive regimes but that they were coups d’états organized from the outside. Western governments, most notably the US and some of their European allies, most notably the UK, the argument went, had carefully planned and implemented the overthrows with the help of their intelligence services and government-financed NGOs. They had supposedly conducted training sessions to wage civil conflicts, developed new campaign techniques and technologies and applied new methods of mass mobilization. Several governmental and non-governmental organizations, the narrative ran, were directly held responsible for such external interference (USAID and British Council) or indirectly through the foundations they were funding, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the International Republican Institute (IRI). These had worked closely with alleged non-party organizations, such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the network of Hungary-born billionaire George Soros with his Open Society Institute.

The claim that the mass protests had their origin in the collusion of Western intelligence agencies and NGOs was authoritatively stated by Putin at the 43rd Munich Security Conference in February 2007. In the context of alleged attempts by ‘people’ to transform the OSCE into a ‘vulgar instrument to promote the foreign policy interests of one or a group of countries’ (that is, essentially, to emphasize the human rights aspects). It was not only the ‘bureaucratic apparatus’ of the OSCE but also ‘decision-making procedures and the involvement of so-called non-governmental organisations that are tailored for this task’.³⁹ ‘What bothers us?’, Putin asked and provided the following answer:

I can say, and I think that it is clear for all, that when these non-governmental organisations are financed by foreign governments, we see them as an instrument that foreign states use to carry out their Russia policies. According to the founding documents, in the humanitarian field the OSCE is designed to assist country members in observing international human rights norms at their request. This is an important task. We support this. But this does not mean interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, and especially not imposing a regime that determines how these states should live and develop. It is obvious that such interference does not promote the development of democratic states at all. On the contrary, it makes them dependent and, as a consequence, politically and economically unstable.⁴⁰

In order to understand the great importance of the Kremlin’s threat perceptions attached to systemic changes in its neighbourhood as epitomized by ‘colour revolutions’ and the destructive role such perceptions played in shaping Putin’s policies in the third term in office as president it is necessary to dwell on the enormous gap between developments in neighbouring countries and those in Russia, in the ‘Putin System’.

4. Constituent Elements of the ‘Putin System’

In contrast to Eastern and Central Europe after the collapse of the communist systems, no successful transformation towards democracy, the rule of law, the free market economy with fair competition and an active civil society took place in Russia. Russia, as one of the most astute academic specialists wrote, got ‘lost in transition’ and constructed a system sui generis, the Putin System.⁴¹ Its structural elements, which emerged and solidified in Putin’s first two terms in office in the years 2000 to 2008, can be characterized as follows.

4.1 Reconstitution of the ‘Cult of Personality’

Important constituent elements of the Soviet system, built by Josef Stalin, softened by communist party general secretary Nikita Khrushchev and hardened again by Leonid Brezhnev, have been reintroduced in Russia under Putin in almost all areas of politics, economics, society and foreign affairs. These include the preeminent position of the top leader in the power structure. Like the tsar before the 1917 revolution and the CPSU general secretary in the Soviet era, the president of the Russian Federation is central to the system. While the legitimacy of Tsarist rule was theocratic and that of Soviet rule ideological, that of the present system is, according to Max Weber’s typology of systems of government, ‘charismatic’.

In a dazzling PR mixture organized by the Kremlin’s spin doctors and self-staging by Putin, the Kremlin chief appears in glows of glory and radiating efficiency. He emerges as pilot from fighter jets, goes on board mini-submarines, stands on the bridge of warships and icebreakers, dives in the Black Sea and emerges with Greek amphorae, stands bare-chested in rivers and catches big fish, tames tigers and polar bears, and flies with the cranes to Siberia. While critics, including in Russia, may ridicule such PR stunts, Putin’s daily appearance on all national TV channels conveys the impression that he is an outstanding political leader who deals competently with all affairs of the state. This message is reinforced by live reports from the Kremlin’s offices where Putin is shown presiding over cabinet meetings or sessions of the national security council, attentively listening, commenting, criticizing and issuing instructions.

One of the pressures pertaining to ‘charismatic’ leadership and its legitimacy is the constant requirement to maintain or improve political stability, economic wellbeing and success in foreign policy. Putin undoubtedly met the requirement in domestic political and economic affairs in the first two terms in office as president and, with the annexation of the Crimea, in his third term. To continue meeting the requirement may not be as easy.

4.2 Reconstitution of the ‘Power Vertical’ (vertikal’ vlasti)

In the Soviet era, after the dictatorship of Stalin and Khrushchev’s failed attempt at one-man rule, decisions in the Kremlin were taken by consensus, within the framework of ‘collective leadership’. The state of affairs under Putin is different or, to put it in the words of the former Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin: ‘It has never been like this and now it is exactly the same again.’⁴² There is no formal equivalent of the CPSU Politburo but there are several informal interest groups and their leaders. These include top representatives from the state-controlled ‘strategic sectors’ of the Russian economy (Gazprom, Rosneft and the military-industrial complex — see below); former or current chiefs of the intelligence and secret services as well as the law enforcement agencies (KGB, FSB, SVR, Rosgvardia, Prokuratura and the Investigative Committee); and the heads of private enterprise groups (LUKoil, Interros, Rusal, Alfa-renova and Rusnano).

In this complex power structure of politics, business and state bureaucracy obtain both close connections (coalitions) and sharp conflicts. Together they constitute the power cartel, the ‘power syndicate’ or simply the ‘power’ (vlast’) of the state.⁴³

These interest groups have not merged organisationally. This, too, in addition to the constitutional powers, explains Putin’s strong position in the system of government. He can determine the balance of power among the groups and make the difference in important decisions, including the distribution of resources. Without him nothing of any significance happens in Russia.

In the centralized system, the Kremlin extensively uses economic and financial redistributive powers. These include the exercise of control through administrative supervision, federal transfers, a bilateral negotiation mode and cadres policy. This has not always been the case. During Putin’s first term in office as president, direct gubernatorial elections often produced strong governors willing and able to assert regional autonomy. However, in 2004, Putin abolished the direct elections and de facto appointed the governors himself, and when, in 2012, direct elections were reintroduced the previous state of affairs failed to materialize. A ‘filter’ was introduced in the form of the president’s right to invite the candidates for ‘consultation’. Even without that right, the president possesses sufficient — euphemistically labelled — ‘administrative resources’ to make sure that the candidate he wants will be elected.

Furthermore, the absence of regional parties and the Kremlin’s control over party registration restrict intra-regional competition and the candidate-governors mostly belong to the United Russia party, for all practical purposes the ‘party of power’ (partiya vlasti).

4.3 Abolition of the Separation of Powers

In the Russian system of government the president and his administration, that is, the executive, occupies a dominant position in relation to the other two ‘classical’ arms of power, or estates, the legislative and judiciary; he also controls the media, the ‘fourth estate’. One of the chief instruments of the executive are the siloviki. Police, including the secret police and the tax police, work closely with the prosecutor’s offices (prokuratury), and in conjunction with the courts, they form a unit that fails to do justice to the citizen who finds himself in its wheels. That applies in particular to cases where the government has a political interest or where it sees its authority called into question.

To add insult to ignominy from the citizen’s point of view, all the executive bodies are riddled with corruption. Since corruption is an impediment to economic efficiency and to improved supervision from the top, an Investigative Committee (sledstvennyj komitet) was established in 2011. It reports to the president and is able to investigate independently, although in practice it does so at the direction of the presidential administration. The presidential administration has over 20,000 employees and is expected to triple in size over the next few years. It has thus become one of the Kremlin’s key instruments of power. It does not so much fight corruption itself, but rather serves as an instrument of control over the persons and officials in the power vertical by the president.

In comparison to the executive, the legislative branch of government is practically negligible as an independent power factor. Nevertheless, elections are held to provide the system with a certain amount of legitimacy. Their results are then portrayed as confirming that the people endorse the course adopted by the ruling United Russia party. To achieve the desired result, the government uses many instruments. For instance, the justice ministry will refuse to register parties that are not toeing the Kremlin line, and the candidates of parties that are allowed to participate in the elections are harassed, and reviled on the state-controlled television channels.

As a result of such efforts, after the September 2016 parliamentary election, only four parties were represented in parliament. The ruling United Russia party again received the largest share and is now represented in the Duma with 343 of 450 seats, thereby gaining a two-thirds majority that would allow it to change the constitution. Theoretically, non-party candidates can stand for election. However, in the 2016 parliamentary election only 23 such people were able to register, and only one candidate was successful.

The downgrading of the legislature to an extended arm of the executive finds its counterpart in the establishment of political control over the judiciary. The prime examples of this are the circumstances of the arrest and conviction of the former CEO of the Yukos oil company, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the destruction of his company and the transfer of its most valuable parts in an obscure auction to Russian oil company Rosneft.

The presumed initiator and main beneficiary of the fraudulent transaction was and is a close ally and confidant of Putin, ex-KGB operative Igor Sechin, who is widely seen as the second most powerful man in Russia. The fact that the breakup of the Yukos group was politically motivated and the company deliberately bankrupted was confirmed in a ruling by the International Arbitration Court in The Hague in July 2014. Former shareholders were awarded $50 billion in compensation. As for Sechin’s Rosneft, with the acquisition of 100 per cent of the TNK-BP oil company to the tune of US$55bn (£36bn) in 2013, the corporation rose to become the largest oil producer in the world in 2013.

Typical for authoritarian political systems with the absence of the rule of law are vicious power redistribution struggles at the top. A major example of this concerns Igor Sechin and his feud with the then economics minister Aleksey Ulyukaev. In December 2017 a Moscow court sentenced the former minister to eight years in a high-security prison for corruption. He was arrested in a sting operation at Rosneft’s headquarters, after Sechin handed him a basket containing $2m in specially marked $100 bills. Sechin said in his testimony that Ulyukaev had asked for the bribe during a game of billiards at a summit in India. The former minister said he had never made any demands and assumed that the basket contained sausages or wine. There was little evidence in the case except Sechin’s testimony, and he refused to show up at court despite receiving several summons.⁴⁴

To legitimise the system, it is important for the Kremlin to possess the unchallenged authority to interpret internal and international developments. Putin has been acutely conscious of this requirement. It is for this reason that he wanted to make sure that the ‘fourth estate’ in the system of government — the major newspapers, radio and television channels — would safely be put under state control.

Nationwide television, the medium that has exerted the strongest influence on the opinion of most of the population, was the first target and victim of efforts to do so. In 2001, the chiefs of the two major private television channels, Boris Berezovsky of Channel One (Perviy kanal) and Vladimir Gusinsky of NTV, were put under pressure by state prosecutors and forced to hand over their channels to the state. As a result, nationwide Russian television today is state-controlled, as in the Soviet era. There are still a few niches of independent journalism, but, as murders of regime-critical journalists (as well as politicians and human rights activists) show, it is dangerous to deviate from the official line.

4.4 State Control of the ‘Strategic Sectors’ of the Economy

Like Marxist-Leninist ideology, the Soviet command economy is also a thing of the past. Private business has replaced it — but only to some extent. Putin’s economic system is rife with elements of state capitalism. This is reflected first and foremost in the size of the state sector of the economy. According to the Russian Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS), its share rose from 35 percent of gross domestic product in 2005 to a staggering 70 percent in 2015.⁴⁵ The number of state and municipal unitary enterprises tripled in the period from 2012 to 2015, and they continue to appear in the market where their use of administrative resources and government financing poses a serious threat to private competitors. The current policies of import substitution as a result of international sanctions have compounded the problem and further reduced competition and diminished efficiency in product markets.

The size and economic importance of the state-owned companies in the so-called ‘strategic sectors’ of the economy are especially noteworthy. These are to be found in the military-industrial complex, with its large enterprises for the research, development and production of weapons, and in the hydrocarbons sector (Gazprom, Rosneft, Surgutnefegaz, Tatneft), pipelines (Transneft), electricity (IDGC Holding), telecommunications (Rostelecom), transportation (Russian Railways) and banking (Sberbank, VTB Group). These corporations occupy a special position, each governed by a separate law that includes privileges such as preferential access to credit and corporate accountability exemptions, provisions that eliminate fair competition and open the door to corruption.

Whatever the legal regulations may look like and regardless of whether the state is the sole owner or majority or in part shareholder of large corporations, the Kremlin plays a central role in decisions of significant economic importance. In the Putin System, the primacy of politics over economics is firmly rooted, a principle that was clearly established in the meeting of the Russian president with the ‘oligarchs’ on 19 February 2003. Reminiscent of the treatment of the businessmen by the governor in Nikolay Gogol’s Inspector General, Putin clarified who was running the country and that private business should stay out of politics.⁴⁶

4.5 Resource Dependency

The Putin system contains the essential features of a state that bases its wealth on natural resources, especially oil and natural gas. One of the structural elements of what is known in the scientific literature as ‘petro-state’ is the emergence of a rentier class living on the distribution of dividends generated by the export of raw materials. In addition, such states are characterised by the emergence of monopolies, systemic corruption, non-transparent distribution struggles and the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a few. Other characteristics are a lack of flexibility; inability to react quickly and appropriately to external shocks; a low capacity for innovation; and the deterioration of the industrial sector known in the literature as the ‘resource curse’ or Dutch Disease.

In Russia, a closely interlinked and at the same time competing power elite has been formed, which has appropriated raw materials and other ‘strategically’ important resources through legal, semi-legal and illegal means, including through intimidation and murder. It largely controls not only these resources but also (as shown above) the leadership and management positions of the economy.⁴⁷ The result is a ‘kleptocracy’,⁴⁸ a system based on greed or, to put it more euphemistically, on the quest for personal enrichment. Mechanisms driving the kleptocratic system are patronage, clientelism and nepotism: in short, corruption.

4.6 Corruption

Corruption permeates not only all levels of the economy and society but also state structures, including the so-called ‘law-enforcement bodies’, and it is closely linked to organized crime.⁴⁹ Intermittently in the history of the Soviet Union and the ‘new’ Russia, the Kremlin announces and appears to wage a determined struggle against this evil. Spectacular cases of arrests and convictions even of high-ranking officials and heads of corporations are made public but time and again the anti-corruption campaign fails. The reasons for this are manifold.

The arrests and convictions often have little or nothing to do with the attempt at weeding out corruption but are related to strengthening the role of the state in the economy, as in the Khodorkovsky case; or are part and parcel of the power struggles and personal vendettas, as appears to be the case in the conviction and imprisonment of Ulyukaev. There are much larger reasons to explain the phenomenon. They can be found not only in the pertinent description of Russia as a country of ‘legal nihilism that in its cynicism has no equal anywhere on the European continent’ but also in the fact that corruption is a constituent element of the Putin System, not some alien and dysfunctional component.⁵⁰

Whereas, however, corruption may be considered functional from the perspective of the ruling elite to maintain power and privilege it is nevertheless one of the main causes of economic inefficiency. It discourages innovation, and is also a serious impediment to modernisation and the maintenance of international competitiveness. The Kremlin began to realize this fact of economic life and, with Medvedev nominally at its helm, embarked on a campaign of ‘modernisation’ with fateful consequences.

5. Attempts to Overcome the System’s Impediments: Medvedev’s ‘Modernisation’ Campaign and its Consequences

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it was not ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ president Medvedev who first pointed to the necessity of fundamental change, but Putin in his capacity as president. In his speech at an enlarged session of the state council in February 2008, that is, even before the onset of the 2008–2009 global economic and financial crisis and its huge impact on Russia, he introduced a Development Strategy until the Year 2020.⁵¹ The main content of the speech was a review of his two terms in office as president, and predictably he provided a favourable assessment of his achievements.

However, he was also, as he said, willing to take ‘an objective and realistic look at the situation and adopt a resolutely self-critical approach’. Russia, he acknowledged, had not succeeded in breaking away from the inertia of development based on energy resources and commodities. Only fragmentary attempts had been made to modernize the economy. As a result, Russia’s dependence on exports of raw materials and imported goods and technology was increasing. For him, this was evidently a nightmare. ‘In the future, this could lead to us lagging behind the world’s big economic powers and could push us out from among the world leaders. If we were to continue on this road we would not make the necessary progress in raising living standards. Moreover, we would not be able to ensure our country’s security or its normal development. We would be placing its very existence under threat. I say this without any exaggeration.’⁵² The country had to choose ‘between the opportunity to become a leader in economic and social development and the threat of losing our economic standing, losing our security and ultimately even losing our sovereignty’.⁵³

One year later, in the midst of the global financial and economic crisis, Medvedev was even more critical of the system that had developed.⁵⁴ He decried, as mentioned above, the fact that Russia had a ‘culture of legal nihilism’ that was unparalleled anywhere on the European continent. Russians needed to understand clearly that ‘if we want to become a civilized state, first of all we need to become a lawful one’. Further, on social affairs, he pointed to ‘chronic corruption’ as an impediment to change, a ‘semi-Soviet social system’ and ‘demographic decline’ that needed to be overcome. In economic affairs he decried Russia’s ‘chronic inefficiency’, its ‘primitive raw materials economy’ and ‘humiliating dependence on raw materials’.

The scathing criticism culminated in the message that, in essence, replicated the one conveyed earlier by Putin: ‘We have to draw lessons from recent events. So long as oil prices were growing many, almost all of us, to be honest, harboured the illusion that structural reforms could wait […] but we can tarry no longer. We must begin the modernization and technological upgrading of our entire industrial sector. I see this as a question of our country’s survival in the modern world.’⁵⁵ Russia had to aim at the creation of a modern, diversified economy based on high technology and innovation. In contrast to previous such efforts, modernisation this time had to be achieved not through coercion but via the development of the creative potential of every individual, through private entrepreneurship and initiative.

The dire warnings of Putin and Medvedev are based on incontrovertible facts. According to detailed calculations by economist Andrey Movchan, at least 60 percent of consolidated budget revenues come directly or indirectly from the mineral extraction tax, excise duties, export duties, value-added tax on imports and other taxes attributable to the oil and gas sector. Another 60 percent of its total consumption is paid for with earnings from exports, which are overwhelmingly dominated by oil and gas. Factoring in the direct influx of petrodollars converted into investments and spending in other sectors of the economy, the economist arrives at 67 and 70 percent of Russia’s GDP that depends on oil and gas.⁵⁶

What was to be done? Deep changes had to be made in all dimensions of society, the economy and state management.⁵⁷ Russia, for instance, had to:

• achieve the transition to a new generation of education standards that would meet the needs of the modern innovative economy
• improve interaction between scientific and educational organisations, the state and the business community
• encourage the business community to invest in research and development
• make more effective use of state resources invested in science and concentrate them on fundamental and cutting-edge areas of research
• change the healthcare system and modernise healthcare facilities
• create a national innovative system based on all of the different state and private institutions supporting innovation
• embark on the large-scale modernisation of production facilities in all economic sectors
• develop new sectors able to compete globally, above all in the high technology sectors that are leaders in the ‘knowledge economy’, including aircraft manufacturing, shipbuilding, energy, information technology and medicine
• build new and modernise existing roads, railway stations, ports, airports, electricity stations and communications systems
• develop market institutions and a competitive environment that would motivate companies to cut costs, modernise production and respond flexibly to consumer demand
• eradicate the ‘excessive administrative pressure’ on the economy that had become one of the biggest brakes on development
• establish competitive conditions for attracting the best and the brightest into the civil service, and make them more accountable to society
• since the government took months and even years to take even the most elementary decisions, do away with the ‘excessive centralisation of state management’
• make use of the possibilities that exist for bringing private capital into the state sector, whether in industry or in the social sector
• continue the work to ‘establish an independent and effective judiciary that unquestionably guarantees entrepreneurs’ rights, including the right to protection from arbitrary action by bureaucrats’.

Medvedev put particular emphasis on innovation in the fields of energy efficiency and new fuels; medical technologies and pharmaceuticals; nuclear power engineering; information technologies; and space and telecommunications. He called for the development of internet broadband and fourth-generation wireless communications, a new cluster of orbital satellites, new-generation nuclear reactors and sophisticated medicine.⁵⁸

The central point to be made in the context of Medvedev’s ‘modernisation’ drive and its consequences is the link he established between his domestic ambitions and the international environment. In a move reminiscent of Peter the Great’s epic journey in 1697–1698, in June 2010 president Medvedev, as part of a visit that would also take him to Washington for talks with president Barack Obama and to Toronto for a meeting of the G20, travelled to Silicon Valley in California. In addition to visiting Apple and Twitter, his itinerary included meetings with top executives from Google and internet equipment maker Cisco. He also visited Stanford University and gave a speech there. Like his 17th century predecessor, he had a dual purpose in mind: to learn about the newest products and processes and to persuade foreign firms and institutions to come to Russia to involve themselves in the country’s modernisation. In his words: ‘My purpose [for coming here] is not just to see what is going on. I would like to have my visit be translated into full-fledged relations and into co-operation with those companies.’⁵⁹

Several months before his visit, presumably with universities in mind like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, among others, Medvedev had advocated the idea of transforming universities into ‘business incubators’ to make it possible for graduates from science and engineering departments to apply their research results in commercial enterprises. The most well-known project of the president’s modernisation campaign, however, was the ‘foundation of an advanced research and development centre concentrated on the support of all priority spheres, […] a modern technology centre modelled, if you like, after Silicon Valley and other foreign centres. The conditions would be created there, to offer an attractive environment for leading scientists, engineers, designers, programming specialists, managers and financial experts; new technologies would be developed there, which would be able to compete successfully on the world market.’⁶⁰

In March 2010, Medvedev announced that the research and development ‘innovation centre’ was to established in Skolkovo not far from Moscow, soon to be referred to as ‘innovation city’ (inograd).⁶¹ Foreign research institutes and the most modern and advanced corporations, as well as the most well-known scientists, including at least ‘two, three, four Nobel prize winners’,⁶² were to be invited to take part in the research and development project. The idea appeared to be a winning proposition. For instance, during Medvedev’s visit to Silicon Valley, Cisco Chief Executive John Chambers said that his corporation was ready to take ‘good business risks’ and plough $1 billion over the next decade into Russia, including helping to build the Skolkovo innovation centre.⁶³

The logic of Medvedev’s expressed ‘interest in capital, new technologies and modern ideas flowing into the country’ required that foreign policy should be put to the service of the country’s modernisation. The foreign ministry should ‘not only provide practical assistance to Russian enterprises abroad and make efforts for the introduction of indigenous [Russian] quality brands of products and services [abroad] but also attract foreign investment and modern technologies to Russia’. For that very purpose, he called on the foreign ministry ‘to develop a programme for the effective utilisation of foreign policy factors for the purpose of [accelerating] Russia’s long-term development’.⁶⁴ This is precisely what the ministry did in a voluminous document leaked to the press.⁶⁵

5.1 Modernisation Partnerships

The document, in essence, outlines the ministry’s views and the contribution that it can make to the transformation of a new, innovative and dynamic Russia by means of modernisation partnerships or, as foreign minister Sergey Lavrov called them in an accompanying letter to the president, ‘modernisation alliances’.⁶⁶ These were to be constructed ‘with our most important partners [in Europe] and the European Union’. He also considered the ‘technological potential of the United States’ to be another of the relevant ‘external factors’ to be used. Europe, however, was his primary focus — for conceptual reasons.

The global crisis had demonstrated, Lavrov averred, that ‘the state is the most important instrument for the defence and the adjudication of the interests of the individual and society’ and that ‘the socially-oriented model of economic development of Western Europe has proven its resilience’. Why, however, should Europe and the United States be interested in helping Russia with its modernisation effort — particularly in view of the fact, convincingly and at length explained by the president and the premier, that it was Russia that had tremendous deficits? Why should Europe (or the United States) regard that country as an equal ‘partner’ rather than a recipient? This remained largely unexplained in Lavrov’s letter and the ‘programme’ except for the less than credible assertion that the crisis of 2008–2009 had produced a ‘modernisation imperative for all countries, without exception’.

The document itself clearly defines Russian interests and requirements, as well as existing and future projects, in more than sixty countries on five continents in the economic and, above all, the technological sphere.

Concerning Europe, in the context of the modernisation partnerships, it suggests that Russia’s diplomats should aim to attract investments and highly qualified personnel, foster scientific and educational exchanges and facilitate the participation of Russian scientists in EU research projects. In their activity in the EU member states, they should cooperate and coordinate efforts ‘with big Russian corporations and with participation of the state to acquire assets of banks, financial institutions and industrial firms’, ‘to develop beneficial cooperative patterns of relations’ and ‘to transfer innovative and high-technology products to Russia’.

The document clarifies that in its approach, the foreign ministry should give preference to Europe rather than the United States, and to individual member states rather than the EU per se. ‘Priority attention’, the programme states, should be devoted to ‘cooperation with such countries of the EU as are favourably disposed towards Russia, above all, Germany, France, Italy and Spain’. Two countries of the special group of four are regarded as even more special: Germany and France, referred to in the document as the ‘French-German tandem’. This vehicle should be ‘utilised to strengthen balanced and constructive approaches in Europe’s relations with Russia’. Germany, finally, for the obvious reason that it is the biggest economic power in Europe and entertains special relations with Russia, is singled out even further. ‘Central attention’ had to be given to that country. The foreign ministry correspondingly provided a list of cooperative projects to which the Russian government should lend its support. This concerned Russian-German cooperation in the following fields:

Natural gas: The Nord Stream pipeline should be completed and extended. Cooperation should be promoted between Gazprom and German partners, mainly Wintershall and its parent firm BASF, in the construction of gas pipelines and the creation of joint ventures for marketing Russian gas in Germany.

Nuclear energy: In the framework of an agreement concluded between Rosatom, the Russian Nuclear Energy State Corporation, and Siemens AG, joint ventures for the modernisation of nuclear power plants on the basis of Russian and German technology should be promoted, and joint marketing efforts should be made.

Energy efficiency: Support should be given to broaden the activities of the Russian-German Energy Agency (RUDEA) and the realisation of projects planned with Siemens in Yekaterinburg and the construction of a wind park in Krasnodar.

Laser Technology: Efforts should be made to secure Russia’s participation as the main partner in the development of x-ray laser technology on the basis of free electrons (XFEL) in Hamburg and the creation of a European Centre for the Acceleration of Heavy Ions (FAIR) in Darmstadt.

Russian-German cooperation should also be enhanced in the design and construction of aircraft, notably the construction of the Airbus A-350 transport aircraft on the basis of the Airbus A-320; the production of German automobiles and their components in Russia, mainly with Volkswagen, Daimler-Benz and BMW as German partners; and railway transport between Russian Railways, Deutsche Bahn and Siemens for the construction of high-speed trains and the improvement of railway connections between Europe and Russia’s Asian-Pacific region.

Impressive as this list may be, with the exception of XFEL and FAIR, the existing and planned projects would draw on fairly conventional technology that simply needed to be improved. Concerning Nord Stream, it is entirely unclear how it could contribute to the modernisation of Russia. The German dimension is important nevertheless also for the reason that Berlin was not only instrumental in conceptualising the German-Russian modernisation partnership but in the construction of the EU-Russia equivalent. In the second half of 2007, that is, even before Putin put forward his 2020 Strategy, experts at a German think tank and the foreign ministry elaborated scenarios of Russia’s development which were presented to foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.⁶⁷ The preferred scenario was called ‘Russian Davos’, which meant ‘effective modernisation’ of the country; Russia’s ‘integration in the world economy’; and the ‘step-by-step approximation to European norms, such as law-based governance’. German and European policies ought to be constructed and conducted in such a way as to create favourable conditions for the realisation of such a scenario. This could be achieved by the creation of a ‘modernisation partnership’ with Russia.

The German foreign minister conveyed the essence of this idea to the Russian government in a speech in Yekaterinburg in May 2008.⁶⁸ Medvedev, just inaugurated as Russian president, reacted favourably to this idea. In the same year Germany and Russia created a ‘partnership for modernisation’. Several European countries followed suit and so did the EU Commission. In February 2010, it confidentially conveyed to Moscow a corresponding draft agreement.⁶⁹

From the very beginning of the envisaged partnerships it was evident that the potential for substantial change in the relationship between Russia and Europe (and the United States) would not be realised.

Why? Essentially, the approach adopted by the EU and its member states, Germany first and foremost, replicated the ideas underlying the (as quoted) 1999 EU Common Strategy and that of Russia’s answer similarly conformed to that of its Medium-Term Strategy of the same year. The EU proceeded from the assumption that the partnerships should be interpreted broadly and serve as a framework for comprehensive socio-economic and political change. Its draft agreement allocated first place to the realisation of values in the partnership, that is, democratisation, the creation of a law-based state and an active civil society.

Next on the list came offers of assistance for change in Russia: the improvement of the investment climate, the struggle against corruption and approximation to European norms and standards.

The first (unofficial) reaction by the Russian government was correspondingly negative. With a touch of sarcasm, the EU proposal was lauded as having the character of a ‘positive intellectual input’, but cold water was thrown at the ‘values’ approach.⁷⁰ Vladimir Chizhov, Russia’s EU representative, clarified Moscow’s viewpoint: The partnership for modernisation ‘should direct attention to practical questions rather than to the benefits of European values’.⁷¹ Foreign minister Lavrov concurred: ‘We intend to give precedence to the most concrete and significant questions, including the economy, social problems, education, science [and] technology’. He mentioned cooperation in the legal sphere but only at the very end of his priority listing.⁷² Moscow’s insistence that primarily economic purposes should be pursued with the EU-Russia modernisation partnership was to manifest itself in the fact that responsibility in Russia for designing and implementing the partnership was given to the economics ministry.

In the end, Russia signed on to the EU’s ‘values’ approach. The joint statement on the foundation of an EU-Russia Partnership for Modernisation that was adopted at the Rostov-on-Don summit on 1 June 2010 refers to the EU and Russia as ‘long-standing strategic partners’ committed to working together ‘on the basis of democracy and the rule of law’. It even was ‘to serve as a flexible framework for promoting reform, enhancing growth and raising competitiveness’ (in Russia, unstated but obviously meant here).⁷³ As it turned out, however, from the Russian perspective, this was just hot air. Moscow’s power elite had no intention of embarking on comprehensive socio-economic, let alone political, reform, realising that thereby it would undermine the very system it had established.

Foreign policy, however, was conducted in such a way as if Medvedev’s concept for creating favourable external conditions for comprehensive internal change was to be carried out. It wasn’t just Russia’s relationship with the EU that seemed to improve significantly but also that with NATO. The meeting of the NATO-Russia Council in November 2010 in Lisbon, in which President Medvedev participated, marked the official resumption of relations after the historic low they suffered after the Russian military intervention in Georgia.

Both Russian and Western participants in the council meeting enthusiastically claimed that a ‘historic breakthrough’ had been achieved.⁷⁴

Russia’s relations with the United States also took a turn for the better. Moscow responded positively to the ‘reset’ in US Russia policy that the Obama administration had announced in February 2009. In June 2010, Moscow approved new sanctions against Iran to prevent Tehran from continuing to enrich uranium. Another step in the reorganization of relations was the drafting of a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), ratified by Russia in January 2011. The Russian attitude toward US and NATO military intervention was also subject to revision as Moscow abstained in the vote in the UN Security Council on resolution 1973 of 17 March 2011 authorizing the use of military force in Libya.⁷⁵

The Kremlin also made efforts to improve its relationship with Poland. Putin opened this process with his participation in the celebration in Gdansk (Danzig) in September 2009 in memory of the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War. On the occasion of Prime Minister Tusk’s visit to Moscow in April 2010, he was the first Russian or Soviet head of state, together with his Polish counterpart, to visit the Katyn memorial in a forest near Smolensk, and to lay a wreath at the memorial to the thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals murdered by the Soviet secret service NKVD.

Shortly thereafter, Putin and Polish premier Donald Tusk embraced each other at the site where the Polish government plane with president Lech Kaczynski and other high-ranking Polish officials and officers on board had crashed. These were significant gestures, particularly considering the comprehensive efforts made by the Kremlin only one and a half years later to eradicate black spots in Russian and Soviet history and to transform the image of the secret police from that of a vicious instrument of large-scale repression to one of benevolent patriots selflessly serving the fatherland.

Finally, Russia’s policy toward the post-Soviet geopolitical space also appeared to have significantly changed. Thus, foreign minister Lavrov said that Russia’s ‘modernization strategy’ was designed, among other things, to change perceptions in neighbouring countries and make Russia look more attractive to them.⁷⁶ He reiterated the Russian standard formula that ‘the former republics of the Soviet Union are our primary partners’, but reversing Medvedev’s formula of Russia’s privileged interests in the area, he asserted that ‘Russia is the country upon which are focused the privileged interests of [our partners]’.

He also moderated somewhat the ‘hands off the CIS’ message of the 1999 Medium-Term Strategy by saying that ‘the interests of the United States and Europe in this area are absolutely objective. The only thing we want is that these legitimate interests are not realized to the detriment of Russia’s legitimate interests […] and that they are being pursued by means of legitimate, acceptable and transparent methods.’⁷⁷ Even generally harsh critics of the Kremlin’s policies euphorically concluded that ‘Russia’s policy in the region has genuinely changed for the simple reason that the Kremlin realizes that the old aggressive policy has completely failed. […] Russia’s new policy is essentially pragmatic and focussing on its national interests, grounded in the need to modernize and attract foreign investment.’⁷⁸ To the extent that the change existed, however, it did not last.

6. The Crisis of Legitimacy

The course towards ‘modernisation’ and cooperation with the West as set by Medvedev in 2008–2010 not only evaporated but was abruptly and radically reversed in 2011–2012. The public discourse and policies were subjected to ‘demedvedisation’.⁷⁹ As previously the term ‘democratisation’ under Yeltsin, so too now was the term ‘modernisation’ removed from the slogan inventory of the Kremlin leadership. When the term was used in the latter period, it was almost exclusively in the context of the modernisation of the Russian armed forces. The deep structural deficiencies of Russia’s socio-economic system, such as ‘legal nihilism’, rampant corruption and the ‘humiliating’ dependence on oil and gas, miraculously seemed to have disappeared overnight — and so had the perceived necessity of comprehensive cooperation with the United States and Europe.

The first momentous event to set in motion a fateful development took place on 24 September 2011. With a view to the elections to the Duma on 4 December of the same year and the presidential elections on 4 March 2012, president Medvedev announced in front of about 11,000 activists of the United Russia party congress in the Moscow Luzhniki sports stadium that, in consideration of premier Putin’s ‘slightly higher approval ratings’ in society, he would not stand as a candidate in the presidential elections. Furthermore, he explained that ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] and I have always been asked: when will you decide? Sometimes we were asked, have you two fought? I want to entirely confirm what was just said: what we propose to the congress, is a deeply thought-through decision. I hope you’ll understand why we waited so long to publicly reveal our position.’

Putin, in turn, admitted that the exchange of positions in the tandem had been the plan all along, and that Medvedev had been party to it. ‘I would like to say directly that the agreement about what should be done [was] reached a long time ago, several years ago’, he told the congress.⁸⁰

To many Russian citizens this admission was seen as a cynical plot and the castling came as a crushing disappointment to Medvedev supporters.⁸¹ He had repeatedly suggested that he wanted to be president again and had done nothing to dissuade supporters who saw in him the hope that the socio-economic and perhaps also political ‘modernisation’ agenda might be continued in the course of a second Medvedev term of office. Such hopes and expectations were even shared by prominent television anchors such as Alexey Pushkov of Russia’s popular TV public affairs program Post Scriptum (who, after Putin’s return to power, transformed himself into one of the most rabid anti-American propagandists).

Prior to the announcement of the planned change of positions at the top, he thought that ‘If we had two candidates, Putin and Medvedev, with somewhat different political lines, that could create the basis for a genuine two party system in Russia. After all, these are authentic differences within Russian society. Some favour the more traditional approach of Putin, while others are for the more liberal line that Medvedev pushes. […] Whoever the next president would be, he would possess a new level of legitimacy. If it were Medvedev, he would finally be free from the bonds of the Putin system and able to chart his own course. If it were Putin, we would know that his victory was based on honest public support.’⁸²

A second event that foreshadowed the abandonment of the Medvedev approach is the resignation of his economic advisor and finance minister Aleksey Kudrin from his office only two days after the announcement of the Kremlin castling. There are different accounts as to whether he was fired by Medvedev because of ‘insubordination’; forced to leave as a result of Putin’s recommendation; or resigned of his own volition. Whichever version of events or combination thereof may be accurate, the facts are that major disagreements existed between him and the government, with Putin as premier, concerning the budget and planned military expenditures and that Kudrin stated after the announcement of the coming switch of power at the top that he would refuse to serve under Putin as president.⁸³

One of the sources of disagreement concerned military expenditures as planned according to the State Armament Programme (GPV-2020) signed into law on 31 December 2010.⁸⁴ This is a highly ambitious document setting out plans for the comprehensive modernization of the Russian armed forces in the period from 2011 to 2020 by means of the procurement of new weapons and other military equipment amounting to a total value of over 23 trillion roubles, or 755 billion dollars at the then exchange rate. The program, in turn, was part of the substantial military reform initiated by defence minister Anatoly Serdyukov after the Georgian war.

Putin, it appears in retrospect, had decided that it was time to forge the armed forces into a major instrument for the support of Russian foreign policy. Kudrin did not agree with the change of priorities, arguing that the planned military outlays could not sensibly be financed, would hamper socio-economic structural reform efforts and perpetuate Russia’s economic dependence on exports of raw materials.

The third event that set in motion a fateful development is the article Putin published in the newspaper Izvestiya on 4 October 2011 entitled ‘A New Integration Project for Eurasia: The Future in the Making’.⁸⁵ Since it was by that date evident that Putin would (also formally) return to power as president, the article can be taken as a platform and a statement of the priorities he wanted to pursue in his third term in office. These were made clear in the form of the initiative for the creation of a ‘Eurasian Union’ to be based on the customs union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Russia, Putin stated, was ‘not going to stop’ at the removal of all barriers to trade, capital and labour movement in that organization but ‘we are setting an ambitious goal − to achieve an even higher level of integration’ and to set ‘a historic milestone for all three countries and for the broader post-Soviet space’.⁸⁶

As the initial absence of the term ‘economic’ suggested, the project was meant to lead from economic integration to a political union. To that extent, it was modelled after the European Union, and explicitly so. As Putin explained, it had taken Europe 40 years to move from the European Coal and Steel Community to the full Union. In the east, however, that process could ‘proceed at a much faster pace’ because the countries concerned could ‘draw on the experience of the EU and avoid mistakes and unnecessary bureaucratic superstructures’. That this was the road that was to be taken was recognized and opposed by Belarus’ Alexander Lukashenko and Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbayev — one of the reasons why the ‘Economic’ was squeezed in between ‘Eurasian’ and ‘Union’.

In one sense, Putin’s initiative is patently absurd. The Eurasian Union, whether it was to be limited to economics or not, would be seriously deficient without Ukraine, next to Russia the biggest country in terms of population in the post-Soviet space. However, there is not a single word about Ukraine in the article. This is despite the fact that Putin’s initiative, among other things, was obviously designed to prevent the countries in the post-Soviet space from signing or implementing any Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) with the EU for, in the Kremlin’s view, EU and Russian integration projects in the common European neighbourhood are mutually exclusive. This applies in particular to Ukraine.

Even before Putin launched his initiative, Medvedev told Kiev that it had to make up its mind: ‘You cannot sit on two chairs.’⁸⁷ Sergey Glazyev, Putin’s adviser on matters of Eurasian integration, concurred and put it even more strongly. He warned Ukraine that it would be ‘suicidal’ to opt for an EU association agreement rather than the EEU. The borderline between states participating in Eurasian integration projects and those who are not, he warned, was a ‘line of barricades’.⁸⁸

To sum up, the ambitious military modernisation effort as codified in the GPV-2020 and Putin’s equally ambitious project for Eurasian economic and political integration contained the seeds for a turn away from socio-economic modernisation and cooperation with the United States and Europe to competition and conflict.

The fourth significant event was a martial arts event in Moscow’s Olympic Stadium on 20 November 2011.⁸⁹ In front of about 22,000 fans, a Russian martial artist had just defeated his American challenger. In front of television cameras, Putin climbed into the ring to congratulate the Russian winner. To his and his entourage’s utter surprise and consternation, his appearance was greeted by a cacophony of whistling, boos and catcalls. Putin was visibly taken aback but quickly regained his composure. State television crews hastily switched off their cameras so as not to show what was from the Kremlin’s perspective an embarrassing scene.

The significance of the event cannot be overestimated. The cynical switch of position announced by the tandem two months earlier at the United Russia congress had evidently offended even sports fans; not usually regarded as being particularly interested in politics. While Putin generally remained highly popular, his approval ratings had fallen steadily in recent months. According to a poll conducted in late October 2011 by the independent Levada Center, Putin’s popularity rating had decreased to 61 percent, down from 77 percent in the previous year.⁹⁰

The fifth and sixth events of importance for the subsequent change of the Kremlin’s policies were the elections to the Duma on 4 December 2011 and to the presidency on 4 March 2012. On 10 December, in the largest anti-Kremlin protests since the early 1990s, tens of thousands of Russians rallied in central Moscow, shouting ‘Putin is a thief’ and ‘Russia without Putin’. Picking up the slogan that blogger and opposition activist Alexander Navalny had coined in February 2011, they also protested against Putin’s United Russia as the ‘party of crooks and thieves’.

On 23 December, despite the winter holidays and the onset of bitter cold, tens of thousands of citizens yet again converged in Moscow for another huge anti-government demonstration. This time, even more people participated. The police put the crowd at 30,000 but organisers said it was closer to 120,000. Both times, the demonstrations were accompanied by dozens of smaller rallies across Russia, with crowds nevertheless of several thousands of people taking part in rallies in, among other cities, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Saratov, Tomsk and Vladivostok. The demonstrations forced the Kremlin to confront a level of public discontent that had not been seen since Putin first became president 12 years earlier.⁹¹

The organizers of the protests made several demands: the immediate release of prisoners arrested in connection with the protests; the scheduling of new parliamentary elections; the ouster of Vladimir Y. Churov, who had run the Central Election Commission; an investigation of election violations; and the registration of so-called non-system opposition parties, ones that had been unable to win seats in Parliament or put forward presidential candidates.

A third mass demonstration was held in Moscow, organized by the For Fair Elections movement on 4 February 2012. Despite temperatures of -20 degrees Celsius, this time 160,000 people participated, according to estimates by the organizers. Whereas the December rallies were in protest against the election to the Duma and the United Russia party, these and subsequent demonstrations in the spring of 2012 were directed at the presidential election, held on 4 March, and Putin’s inauguration on 7 May 2012.

One of the most noteworthy features of the demonstrations and rallies was that, perhaps paradoxically, many of the anti-Putin protesters were from the middle class that had benefited from the economic upturn in Putin’s first two terms in office as president. ‘You see all these people who are well dressed and earn a good salary’, observers noted. The protesters also included many young and digitally well-connected people who broadcast the events live by holding iPads over their heads. Surprisingly, even many employees of state enterprises were participating in the demonstrations. This was noted by ex-finance minister Kudrin, who had taken to the stage at the 23 December rally to express his support for many of the protesters’ demands. In an article for the respected daily newspaper Kommersant, he wrote: ‘It seems to me that they [the employees of state enterprises] wanted to say the following:

“Respected leaders! Many of us have come here for the first time, fully consciously and entirely independently. We have something to lose, and we are for stability but the violation of your own rules − and this is the way we see the reports about mass falsifications and violations [of the law] − this is too much.”’⁹²

Whereas the demonstrations in December 2011 and in February (and March) 2012 had largely proceeded without violence and had led to relatively few arrests, matters changed dramatically at the rally of about 20,000 on 6 May. On that day, the security forces turned out in full force to watch the demonstrations against the inauguration of Putin for a third term in office as president. When tens of thousands of people wanted to proceed from two approved rallies in Moscow to a meeting place at Bolotnaya Square, violent clashes broke out. These were suspected to have been provoked by plainclothes law-enforcement operatives in order to discredit the hitherto peaceful protests and to provide the OMON riot police with a pretext to clamp down hard on the demonstrations. About 400 protesters were arrested, including Aleksey Navalny, the former reformist governor of Nizhny Novgorod Boris Nemtsov and the left-wing political activist Sergey Udaltsov, and 80 were injured. Evidently for deterrent purposes, several participants in the protests were brought to trial and sentenced to several years in prison.⁹³

The Kremlin portrayed the demonstrators as paid activists attempting to engineer a violent, Libya-style overthrow. Hundreds of millions of dollars in ‘foreign money’ was being used to influence Russian politics, Putin claimed. In particular, he blamed US foreign secretary Hillary Clinton for such efforts. ‘She set the tone for certain actors in our country and gave them a signal. They heard the signal and with the support of the U.S. State Department began active work.’⁹⁴

Such assertions miss the essence of the momentous developments. The catcalls at the Olympic Stadium on 20 November 2011 and the mass demonstrations in the period from 10 December 2011 to 6 May 2012 revealed a crisis of legitimacy of the system Putin had built. Hopes and expectations of the Russian middle class had been raised by Medvedev’s scathing criticism of Russia’s ‘archaic’ and ‘semi-Soviet’ socio-economic system, rampant corruption, unparalleled ‘legal nihilism’ and the country’s ‘humiliating’ dependence on raw materials, posing the ‘urgent’ requirement for the country to embark on a comprehensive ‘modernisation’ effort in close cooperation with the United States and Europe. These hopes, however, were to be bitterly disappointed.

7. Putin’s Shift from Socio-Economic ‘Modernisation’ to National-Patriotic Mobilisation

It is difficult to say whether the Kremlin genuinely believed its repeated claims that the ‘colour revolutions’ and the mass demonstrations of 2011–2012 were due to external financing and organisational support by ‘so-called’ NGOs and Western governments, or whether it used them as a pretext for the rationalisation of restrictive policies. Perhaps they were a mixture of both.

Whatever the case may be, the conclusion that the Moscow power elite drew from the mass protests was unambiguous: Medvedev’s frank admission of fundamental deficiencies of the socio-economic − and indirectly also of the political − system and the call for comprehensive change, not just reformist tinkering, had undermined the legitimacy of the Putin system. As a result, domestic policies were set onto a national-patriotic, anti-liberal, anti-democratic and anti-pluralist course, and foreign policy on an anti-Western footing.

In detail, the Kremlin pursued a multi-pronged strategy, closely linking internal and external policies. In domestic politics, this has included the adoption of new legislation to criminalise opposition; the taking of ‘administrative measures’ to prevent anti-government protests; the portrayal of ‘the West’ as decadent and fundamentally ill-disposed to Russia; the adoption of laws and their application to denigrate and impede the cooperation of Russian NGOs critical of the government with Western institutions; the prohibition of, from the Kremlin’s perspective, literally ‘undesirable’ international organisations; the airbrushing of ‘black spots’ in Tsarist Russian and Soviet history; the transformation of the image of Stalin from a mass murderer to an ‘effective political leader’; and the glorification of the central instruments of power, emphasizing the important role played by the secret services and the armed forces to foil conspiracies against the country, safeguard its security and to elevate it to the status of a world power.

In June 2012, 150-fold and 300-fold increases to existing fines for violating rules on the participation in and organization of public protests for individuals and organizations, respectively, were enacted.⁹⁵

− In July 2012, defamation was reintroduced as a criminal offense, which mandates fines on media outlets of up to two million rubles (approximately £24,000) for producing ‘defamatory’ public statements.

− In July 2012, changes introduced to the Law on Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection increased Internet censorship and curbed freedom of expression.

− In October 2012, the Law on Amendments to the Criminal Code was adopted, which expands the definition of treason, making it so vague as to enable the government to brand any critic as a traitor.

− In July 2014, amendments to legislation on public actions came into force, which affect the freedom of assembly as they introduce criminal penalties for repeated violations of public order during organized rallies as well as new administrative sanctions for violating the rules of assembly. The law also expands the authority of police during mass events.

Concerning foreign policy, the Kremlin’s strategy has been directed at strengthening Moscow’s pre-eminence on post-Soviet territory and beyond that in what it calls the ‘Russian World’; the weakening and if possible destabilisation of Western governments and undermining their cohesion and cooperation in the EU and NATO; and the allocation of a central role to what can rightfully be called information warfare, with a campaign of defamation and disinformation.

Finally, the government’s comprehensive anti-Western strategy also provides for a link between domestic policies and foreign policy. This is apparent in the adoption of laws and taking measures to curtail the role of foreign and international organisations, be they governmental, non-governmental or commercial, both in Russia and so as to disrupt transnational networks. Two laws in particular — the ‘foreign agents’ law and the law on ‘undesirable organisations’ — can serve to demonstrate the translation of the link into practice.

7.1 The ‘Foreign Agents’ Law

In July 2012, Putin signed the law on ‘foreign agents’, which came into force in November of that year. It is called the ‘Law on the regulation of the activities of non-commercial organizations fulfilling the role of foreign agents’, in the public discourse simply referred to as the ‘foreign agents law’.⁹⁶ It is important to note in this context, that an ‘agent’ (agent) in Russian understanding is not some kind of commercial actor or some member of a governmental or non-governmental ‘agency’ but a traitor to the country. The term evokes Soviet-era images of spies, a ‘fifth column’ and ‘enemies of the people’ operating in the country.⁹⁷ As the chairman of the Russian human rights organization Memorial, Arseniy Roginskiy, complained after the Andrey Sakharov Center had been put on the ‘foreign agents’ list, ‘it brings back memories of the worst forms of propaganda against dissidents in the Soviet years [ …] and returns us to an era when [Andrey Sakharov] himself was constantly accused of “treachery” and “serving Western interests”’.⁹⁸

The law requires Russian NGOs that are politically active and receive funding from abroad under pain of severe punishment to register as ‘foreign agents’. For this purpose, a special register was opened at the justice ministry. Not registering as required is punishable by heavy fines or jail. Since the law was passed, the Russian administrative organs have carried out hundreds of unannounced searches. Several NGOs were fined and had to close. As of June 2018, the justice ministry had branded 158 groups ‘foreign agents’, courts have levied staggering fines on many groups for failing to comply with the law, and about 30 groups have shut down rather than wear the ‘foreign agent’ label. The ministry has removed its ‘foreign agent’ tag from over 20 groups, acknowledging that they had stopped accepting foreign funding. Accordingly, as of 18 June 2018, the official list of active ‘foreign agents’ consisted of 76 groups.⁹⁹

The law excludes activities organized, among others, in the fields of science, culture, the arts, health, social assistance, support for the disabled, environmental protection, and philanthropy. In practice, however, these exemptions are meaningless because the cutting edge of the law is the term ‘political activity’. The application of the term shows that it pertains to just about any activity that, from the Kremlin’s perspective, seeks to influence government policy or public opinion deviating from its narrative. This can be shown exemplarily by the presence of NGOs on the list in the following fields of activity:

− Human Rights. The Memorial Human Rights Center and the Memorial Society;¹⁰⁰ the Public Commission for the Preservation of the Heritage of Academician Sakharov (Moscow); the Kaliningrad regional public organisation ‘Human Rights Centre’; the Saint Petersburg public human rights organization ‘Civil Control’ and the ‘Committee Against Torture’ in Nizhniy Novgorod.

− Civil Rights. The ‘Golos’ association of non-profit organisations in defence of voters’ rights; the ‘Transparency International-R’ Centre for Anti-Corruption Research and Initiatives; and the Nizhny Novgorod region public organisation the Institute for Forecasting and Settlement of Political Conflicts.

− Freedom of Information and the Media. The ‘Yuriy Levada’Analytical Center; the MEMO. RU Information Agency; the Institute of Regional Press in Saint-Petersburg; the Institute for Information Freedom Development, also in Saint-Petersburg; the non-profit organisation Glasnost Defence Foundation; and the non-profit partnership Press Development Institute — Siberia, in Novosibirsk.

The list is far from exhaustive. It also includes − or previously included − organisations concerned with protecting the environment and women’s and minority rights; social and natural science; education; and culture.

The purpose of the ‘foreign agents’ legislation is clearly recognisable. The activities of the NGOs concerned are to be discredited among the Russian population, their influence on society to be curtailed and their international contacts to be disrupted.

The branding of an NGOs as a ‘foreign agent’ has serious consequences. Under it, offices of the affected NGOs have repeatedly been searched, documents and computers seized and penalties imposed. In some cases, organizations concerned that they might be placed on the register have turned down foreign financing, and frozen contacts with foreign partners, foundations and international organizations so as try to remain within the boundaries of the law. At the same time, not every NGO has managed to find substitute funding in Russia, putting both specific projects and the existence of the organisations themselves at risk. Furthermore, if everything fails to deter the NGO from engaging in non-conformist activities, the government simply closes it down.

A case in point is the forcible dissolution of the Agora association, one of Russia’s leading human rights organizations:

In 2014, the justice ministry had registered Agora as a ‘foreign agent’.¹⁰¹ In response, the organization had stopped accepting foreign funding and asked the ministry to remove it from the register. The ministry refused, despite the fact that the ‘foreign agents’ registration requirement is only applicable to foreign-funded organizations. On 10 February 2016, after having suffered numerous intrusive inspections by justice ministry officials, prosecutors, and the tax authorities, the regional court of Tatarstan issued a ruling to dissolve the association. In their suit, the justice ministry had alleged that the group was in breach of Russian legislation on nongovernmental organizations by engaging in ‘political activities’ and carrying out work beyond its statutory objectives, and that it did not comply with Russian tax regulations. Prior to its shut-down, Agora’s network of lawyers had been working on more than 300 human rights cases across Russia. These included numerous high profile court cases as, for instance, the case against the feminist punk group Pussy Riot; the criminal prosecution of blogger and opposition politician Aleksey Navalny; and the ‘terrorism’ cases against the Ukrainian filmmaker from Crimea, Oleg Sentsov, and his alleged accomplice, the Crimean activist Oleksander Kolchenko.

Another major example of the government’s broad campaign to stamp out dissent and rupture non-governmental transnational networks is the harassment of Memorial, both the umbrella movement (‘society’) and its human rights centre, and their branding as ‘foreign agents’. The society emerged as a civil rights movement during the perestroika period in the Soviet Union with the aim of documenting Stalinist crimes and keeping alive the memory of the victims. Its first chairman was the nuclear physicist and dissident Andrey Sakharov.¹⁰² Specifically, according to its charter, Memorial’s aims are to promote mature civil society and democracy based on the rule of law to prevent a return to totalitarianism; to establish firmly respect for human rights in practical politics and in public life; and to promote the revelation of the truth about the past and perpetuate the memory of the victims of political repression exercised by totalitarian regimes.

Such aims evidently do not fit into the post-2012 repressive patterns established by the government. Particularly problematic and objectionable from its perspective is the extensive transnational network the movement has created, with six branches in Ukraine and one each in Germany, France, Italy and Latvia.

In its campaign to eradicate foreign influence on Russian politics and society, Moscow has not only taken aim at Russian organisations and movements cooperating with foreign national and international organisations but also at the activities of foreign governmental, non-governmental and commercial as well as international organisations active in Russia.

7.2 The Law on ‘Undesirable Organisations’

A first major measure of this kind came as early as September 2012. With immediate effect, the Russian foreign ministry prohibited any activity of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on Russian soil. The organization had spent more than US$ 2.6 billion in Russia over the past two decades to develop a stronger civil society, foster educational programmes, help modernise the economy, combat infectious diseases and protect the environment.

In May 2015, the government broadened the scope of its campaign against foreign influence and enacted a law on ‘undesirable organizations’.¹⁰³ Its stated rationale is that ‘destructive organizations’ operating in Russia had to be stopped since they were a threat to the ‘values of the Russian state’ and could provoke coups as in Russia’s neighbouring countries. On the face of it, the bill is directed against foreign and international non-governmental organizations but due to the fact that such NGOs usually have Russian cooperation partners and employees, it takes aim at Russian organisations and citizens. Formally, the decision to list a foreign or international NGO as ‘undesirable’ is taken by the Russian public prosecutor’s office in cooperation with the ministry of foreign affairs. The conditions that have to be met for an NGO to be put on the ‘patriotic stop-list’, as the roster is called in the public discourse, are that their activities are likely to endanger Russia’s ‘constitutional order’, ‘national security’ or ‘defence capability’.¹⁰⁴

The consequences of classifying an organization as ‘undesirable’ are quite serious. The organization becomes illegal; its head office and all its subdivisions have to be disbanded; all of their activities and projects must be stopped; banks and credit institutions are no longer allowed to process payments; and the media are prohibited from providing information about the branded organization. At risk also are third parties who involve themselves in the activities of an organization on the ‘undesirable’ list. Corporate entities face stiff fines; and individuals face entry bans in addition to financial penalties and in extreme cases up to six years imprisonment.

In July of 2015, the justice ministry for the first time applied the law for the control of foreign NGOs and declared the US Congress-sponsored National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to be an ‘undesirable’ organization. The endowment had provided financial support of approximately US$ 5.2 million to commercial and non-profit organizations in Russia in 2013 and 2014. According to the prosecutor’s office, it had tried to influence political decisions in Russia, to put in doubt the results of the 2011 parliamentary election and the presidential election in 2012, and to discredit service in the armed forces. The endowment, therefore, posed a threat to the constitutional order as well as Russia’s defence capability and security.

In December 2015, the justice ministry included George Soros’s Open Society and the US-Russia Foundation for Economic Advancement and the Rule of Law (USRF) on its registry of ‘unwanted organizations’. The task of the latter (according to its statutes) was to advise American companies on Russian business and to promote investment projects. The prosecution, however, provided quite a different interpretation of its purposes. It charged that the foundation had funded Russian ‘foreign agent’ NGOs to influence Russian government policy and that its activities posed a threat to Russia’s constitution and the country’s national security.

Subsequently, the following foreign NGOs were added to the ‘undesirable organisations’ list: the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (in May 2016); the Media Development Investment Fund (in August 2016); the International Republican Institute (in August 2016); Open Russia, the Institute of Modern Russia and the Open Russia Civic Movement (in April 2017); and the Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation (30 June 2017).

A special target of the campaign to curtail Western influence and to disrupt transnational networks have been domestic and foreign NGOs that monitor local, regional and national elections in Russia. More often than not, independent election observer organisations come to the conclusion that the elections (like Russian democracy in general) are ‘fake’ or ‘virtual’ events and ‘imitations’ of their true nature.¹⁰⁵ To prevent Russian and foreign as well as international organisations from constructing a true picture of electoral processes in the country, the latest additions to the ‘patriotic stop-list’ have been the European Platform for Democratic Elections (EPDE), its Lithuanian partner International Elections Study Center (IESC) and the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) in March 2018.¹⁰⁶ The decision outlawing EPDE was taken five days before the presidential elections that extended Putin’s term in office for another six years.

EPDE was founded in December 2012 by thirteen European civil society organisations. Its aim is to assist the observation of elections in the countries of the EU’s Eastern Partnership countries and in Russia, and to contribute to democratic election processes throughout Europe. On 10 September 2018, at the OSCE-ODIHR Human Dimension Implementation Meeting in Warsaw, EPDE Chair Stefanie Schiffer took aim also at the practice in Russia and other post-Soviet states of constantly inviting to their elections ‘international observers’ who do everything but observe elections. This, however, did not hinder them from giving public evidence about their invariably favourable findings to national media — often even before the closing of the polling stations. Thereby they violated a whole series of agreements, standards and principles of good electoral practice. EPDE, Schiffer continued, ‘is researching fake observation missions. We publish our findings and call on the OSCE member states to take critical note of this phenomenon and to take action against it. These election fellow travellers and those who invite them are trying to destroy the integrity of elections and trust in them.’¹⁰⁷

As for the listing of EPDE and ISCE, Schiffer pointed out that as a consequence of the listing, both organisations were forbidden from undertaking any sort of activity in Russia. ‘Russian citizens may be subject to legal prosecution if they cooperate with our organizations [which amounted to] criminalisation of all our partners in the Russian Federation — election observers, electoral experts, citizens, voters, and volunteers with whom we’ve been working for years.’¹⁰⁸

This concerns first and foremost EDPE’s cooperation with the Russian independent election monitoring organisation Golos and its staff and volunteers, an NGO that is on the justice ministry’s ‘foreign agents’ list. To that extent, Schiffer’s observation serves to underline the linkage of the domestic and international dimensions of the Kremlin’s comprehensive anti-Western strategy.

The determination with which this strategy is being pursued can be demonstrated by the scandal surrounding the October 2018 meeting of the Petersburger Dialog, a German-Russian discussion forum , co-founded by ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Putin in 2001, whose declared purpose is the strengthening of civil society cooperation in and between the two countries. Consistent with this aim, the title of the October 2018 conference was ‘To Build Trust, to Strengthen Partnership’. Schiffer, however, who in addition to being EDP chair is also a board member of the Petersburger Dialog, was denied a visa by the Russian foreign ministry.¹⁰⁹

The Kremlin’s anti-Western strategy extends to other dimensions of activities beyond the observation of elections that are, from the government’s point of view, ‘undesirable’. That also concerns the role of domestic and foreign media for it is not only that the Kremlin is weaponizing information (facts) and disinformation but also limiting and excluding possible sources of information.

7.3 Curtailment of Domestic and Foreign Media

In October 2014, the Duma adopted changes to the Federal Law on Mass Media, which provide that a foreign state, an international organization or any organization under its control, a foreign entity, a Russian legal entity with foreign participation, a foreign citizen, a stateless person, or a citizen of the Russian Federation who is also a citizen of another state may not act as the founder of a media company. In addition, federal law prohibits any group in these categories to act as a media outlet or organization (legal entity) or to broadcast. These persons are also prohibited from owning, managing, or controlling, directly or indirectly, more than 20% of the shares or capital of a media entity.¹¹⁰

Ostensibly, the threshold reduction was intended to prevent foreigners from possessing a blocking minority. It would seem, however, that the main objective of the law is to displace foreign media from the Russian market. As a result, German publishers like Burda, which sold more than eighty different magazines in Russia, albeit mainly non-political titles such as Playboy or women’s magazines, have had to reduce their financial stakes. The law also affected other publishing houses carrying newspapers and magazines with a more political and business orientation like Axel Springer, publisher of the Forbes business magazine; the publishers of the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal; and the Finnish publishing house Sanoma, with its Kremlin-critical daily newspaper Vedomosti. To date, CNN, Axel Springer, Sanoma and Edipresse Media Asia have withdrawn from ownership in the Russian media business.

Furthermore, in December 2017, Russia tightened its ‘foreign agent’ law to target foreign media operating in the country. The government can require these media outlets to state that they are ‘foreign agents’. They, like their Russian counterparts, now have to submit to intensive scrutiny of staffing and financing.¹¹¹

Finally, as an indication that the campaign against independent thought under the guise of their alleged activities as ‘foreign agents’ shows no sign of abating: in October 2018 a Moscow court imposed a stifling fine on The New Times, an independent Russian magazine, for supposed failure to report foreign funding, putting it at risk of closure. The paper has been known for its critical coverage of the government’s domestic and foreign policies — as has, indeed, Yevginya Albats, its chief editor. The fine levied on the magazine amounted to an unprecedented 22.25 million rubles (about £256,000) for allegedly failing to report its income.¹¹²

7.4 Government Control of the Internet

Limitations on digital rights in Russia are part of the Kremlin’s comprehensive strategy to stifle dissent and disrupt transnational networks. The Russian government is curtailing freedom of expression online, seeking to control what is said and published on the internet through restrictive legislation, surveillance and criminal prosecutions of online dissent.¹¹³ The mass protests in 2011–12, as the authorities realised, were sparked by reports of electoral fraud disseminated online by election observers and were largely organised using online social networks. This confirmed the authorities’ fears that the internet posed a threat to government power, precipitating significant changes to the legal and regulatory framework governing the internet in Russia, aimed at preventing it from providing a platform for dissent.

The first legal instrument in the restrictive effort was Law №139 of July 2012 that replaced the procedure of shutting down telecom operators by prosecutors’ orders with a blacklist of internet sites alleged to contain, among others, ‘extremist’ material.¹¹⁴ The blacklist was supposed to be implemented and supervised by a self-regulating NGO of internet users, but it was never created and this duty was assumed by the government agency responsible for the supervision of communications, Roskomnadzor.

In February 2014 there followed Law №398-FZ, the so-called ‘Lugovoy Law’, that sharpened and broadened the legislation against ‘extremism’.¹¹⁵ Passed in the wake of the Maidan protests in Kiev, it allows Roskomnadzor to block sites ‘containing calls for unsanctioned acts of protest’ without a court injunction. It also provided legal cover to block news sites offering sympathetic coverage to Ukrainian protesters and was used also to quell protests planned in Russia against the Crimean secession referendum.

Finally, in July 2016 the Duma approved the ‘Yarovaya Package’, consisting of two federal laws amending over twenty-one existing laws.¹¹⁶ The package was justified on the grounds of ‘countering extremism’. The amendments are broadly framed and allow arbitrary application, severely undermining the rights to freedom of expression, privacy and freedom of religion or belief.

They provide for prison terms of up to seven years for publicly calling for or justifying terrorism online and prison terms of up to ten years for ‘convincing, recruiting or engaging’ a person for creating ‘mass disorder’. They also oblige communications providers and internet operators to store information about users’ communication activities from 20 July 2016, and to store all content of communications from 1 July 2018. Information must be stored for at least six months, and made accessible to the security services without a court order. Operators are required to disclose means to decrypt encrypted data at the request of the security services, and only use encryption methods approved by the government (effectively imposing mandatory cryptographic backdoors). Administrative sanctions for noncompliance were also introduced. Although the feasibility of implementing these provisions is unclear, their existence has a chilling effect on the exercise of the right to freedom of expression, and violates the right to privacy of internet users.

The Russian authorities have unhindered access to the user information of VKontakte, which is by far Russia’s most popular social network, with an estimated 46 million daily users.¹¹⁷ This facilitates the application of arbitrary criminal charges, casting a chilling effect on internet users, and encouraging self-censorship on social media. The British embassy has provided important examples of the Kremlin’s control of the internet, including VKontakte.
VKontakte was founded by Pavel Durov in 2006 and instantly took off; but as the number of users grew, even outstripping audience figures for the state-owned Channel One TV, Durov came under increasing pressure from the authorities to cooperate with them. He was forced to sell his share in the company in April 2014, and soon after left the country. VKontakte is now part of Mail.ru, a media company owned by Alisher Usmanov, who has close ties with the Kremlin.

Under its new ownership, VKontakte has become increasingly intolerant of dissent and has openly worked with the Federal Security Service and other government authorities. Speaking at a bloggers’ forum in Kazan in June 2016, Evgeniy Krasnikov, a VKontakte spokesperson, confirmed how close this relationship was: in response to a question about how the company felt about working with the authorities, he said: ‘I would like to think that our security services, who have the possibility to access any information about our users, use that in the interest of national security.’¹¹⁸ It is more likely that the information is used in the interest of stifling criticism of the power elite.
Internet service providers, according to laws in Western countries, are required to disclose personal information about their users only on the basis of a court order, which must be in line with the requirements of legality, legitimate aim, necessity, and proportionality. VKontakte, however, discloses users’ personal details at an investigator’s request — real names, IP-addresses, phone numbers — and does so without due process to decide on the legal appropriateness of the request, and with a lack of transparency about the process. VKontakte’s cooperation has been useful to prosecutors in court trying to prove that a defendant was responsible for posting content judged to be offensive. Indeed, armed police squads have arrested people in their homes on the basis of the information provided.

7.5 Denigration of the West, Glorification of Russia

The shift from cooperation with the Euroatlantic countries in the interest of socio-economic ‘modernisation’ to national-patriotic mobilisation has significant cultural dimensions which conform to the idea of a ‘clash of civilisations’.¹¹⁹ Its essence lies in the Kremlin’s juxtaposition of an allegedly ‘decadent’ materialistic and hedonistic West and Russia as the repository of true Christian values. Putin has apodictically confirmed this as follows: ‘We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilisation. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan. The excesses of political correctness have reached the point where people are seriously talking about registering political parties whose aim is to promote paedophilia. People in many European countries are embarrassed or afraid to talk about their religious affiliations. Holidays are abolished or even called something different; their essence is hidden away, as is their moral foundation. And people are aggressively trying to export this model all over the world. I am convinced that this opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis.’¹²⁰ A comprehensive Russian disinformation campaign constantly feeds the Russian public with images to confirm this picture of a Euroatlantic world devoid of any moral fibre.

In contrast, the Kremlin has for all practical purposes resurrected the Tsarist empire’s trinity of orthodoxy, autocracy (authoritarianism at present) and nationality − pravoslavie, samoderzhavie, narodnost’ − and integrated it into the Putin system. It has propounded the concept of the ‘Russian World’ (russkii mir) with ‘the Russian Orthodox Church … essentially unifying the millions of people who belong to it’ and with ‘the Russian language as the main form of expression and bearer of national unity, cementing together the vast Russian world that stretches far beyond our country’s borders’.¹²¹ That concept is also being used to deny to Ukraine and Belarus a separate identity. This is because ‘at the foundation of the Russian nation and the centralized Russian state are the same spiritual values that unite the whole of that part of Europe now shared by Russia, Ukraine and Belarus’, and that their peoples have a ‘common destiny’.¹²²

Summary and Conclusions

The Kremlin’s narrative about the reasons for the dramatic deterioration of the relationship between Russia and the West as being external and military in nature is fundamentally flawed. Internal factors — the power elite’s calculations about its tenure in office — furnish the main explanations for the development. To the extent that external challenges and threats can he said to determine the Kremlin’s foreign policy, these are essentially socio-economic in nature. They are rooted primarily in the concern of the Russian power elite that the regulatory model and socio-economic attractiveness of Europe and the United States pose a threat to the legitimacy of its rule in Russia and the country’s influence in its self-declared sphere of interest and beyond.

The primacy of internal factors for anti-Western attitudes and policies can be found as early as in the Yeltsin era. In the period from autumn 1992 to winter 1993, Russia’s firm declared Euroatlantic orientation, associated with the then foreign minister Andrey Kozyrev, came under fire and was beginning to be replaced with a ‘patriotic consensus’ − a hodgepodge of Russian nationalist and ‘Eurasian’ currents, revisionist geopolitical notions and ‘Great Power’ ambitions. In official perceptions, NATO was turned from a ‘strategic partner’ and ‘ally’ to a military alliance with ‘enormous offensive potential’ (directed presumably against Russia) ‘wedded to the stereotypes of bloc thinking’. The conservative officialdom in the foreign ministry and the top officers and officials in the huge military establishment of the armed forces of the defence ministry and other armed formations as well as the top managers of the far-flung research, development and production facilities of the military-industrial complex had reasserted their power and influence.

Objectively, the challenge or, from the perception of the siloviki, ‘threat’ from the West was not military but socio-economic. It rested in successful European integration and peace and prosperity in the Euroatlantic area. The challenge to the legitimacy of power in Russia increased as the system Putin was building reintegrated ever more building blocks of the Soviet system. In the political realm, these have included an authoritarian and arbitrary form of government focused on one single leader; the abolition of ‘checks and balances’, as evidenced by the pre-eminence of the executive with the emasculation of the legislative and re-establishment of political control over the judiciary; legal nihilism and corruption that in its cynicism has no equal anywhere on the European continent; limitation of the freedom of the media, with national television functioning as a major instrument of government propaganda; curtailment of civil society as witnessed in the harassment of non-governmental organisations; the increasing role of ‘state management’ of the economy and society; and the elevation of the military-industrial complex to a ‘motor’ or ‘locomotive’ for the modernization of the economy. This development conforms to Putin’s observation that ‘The Soviet Union, too, is Russia, only under another name.’¹²³

The Putin system was and is dysfunctional for economic modernization. This concerned yet another of the structural similarities between the Putin and Soviet systems: Russia’s ‘humiliating dependency on raw materials’, as Medvedev called it. To him, the abolition of this dependency and the establishment of a modern, innovative economy and society was ‘a question of our country’s survival’. Putin had made the same point: If Russia continued on its current path, it ‘would be placing its very existence under threat’. In 2009–2011, therefore, it seemed that the Russian power elite not only contemplated but, under Medvedev’s leadership as president and with the backing of Putin in the background as premier, would actually embark upon profound structural changes and that these would be supported and sustained through comprehensive ‘modernisation partnerships’ with Europe and in close cooperation with the United States. In fact, Medvedev had repeatedly suggested that he would be a candidate in the 2012 presidential election. Some analysts were even dreaming about Russian voters being presented with a choice between two orientations and the possible development of a two-party system.

Such hopes and expectations were to be dashed by the announcement by the tandem leadership in September 2011 that in the presidential election of March 2012 there was going to be nothing but a castling, with Putin to return to the presidency until at least 2024, and that this musical chairs arrangement had been agreed upon by him and Medvedev ‘a long time ago’.

That nonchalant display of cynicism coupled with large-scale electoral fraud in both the parliamentary elections in December 2011 and the subsequent presidential elections led to mass protests which, in their scale, intensity and duration pointed to a serious crisis of legitimacy of the system of government Putin had created. The power elite appeared to be fully aware of this. In its perceptions, the frank admission of fundamental deficiencies of Russia’s socio-economic system and the call for its ‘modernisation’ in close cooperation with the Euroatlantic world had opened a Pandora’s box. The Kremlin’s reaction was unambiguous and decisive: domestic policies were set onto a national-patriotic, anti-liberal, anti-democratic and anti-pluralist course, and foreign policy on an anti-Western ‘Eurasian’ footing. In implementation of the radical shift, it has closely linked internal and external policies.

This has included the portrayal of ‘the West’ as decadent and fundamentally ill-disposed to Russia; the adoption of laws and their application to denigrate and impede cooperation of Russian NGOs critical of the government with Western institutions; the prohibition of, from the Kremlin’s perspective, literally ‘undesirable’ international organisations; the extinction of ‘black spots’ in Tsarist Russian and Soviet history; transformation of the image of Stalin from a mass murderer to an ‘effective political leader’; and the glorification of the central instruments of power, emphasizing the important role played by the secret services and the armed forces to foil conspiracies against the country, safeguard its security and to elevate it to the status of a world power.

The foreign policy aspects of the shift from socio-economic ‘modernisation’ to national-patriotic mobilisation have included glorification of the Russian imperial past and the Russian army and navy’s brilliant military achievements against foreign invaders; Stalin’s great achievements of leading Russia through the Great Patriotic War to achieve superpower status; the emphasis on the ‘liberation’ of the Baltic nations, East Central and Southeastern Europe from fascism with the concomitant denial of the replacement of one foreign occupation regime by another — including the argument that the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was a pre-emptive move to protect the country against a coup engineered by NATO.¹²⁴

The corollary of the anti-Euroatlantic shift has been, quite in conformity with Putin’s initiative as published on 4 October 2011, the promotion of Eurasian integration and implementation of the concept of the ‘Russian World’. The fundamental change of priorities also serves to explain the sharp opposition to Ukraine joining the EU’s Deep and Comprehensive Trade Area, the annexation of the Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine with creation of yet another hot ‘frozen conflict’.

These conclusions raise the question as to whether the precedence of Russian internal politics over foreign policy with its weaponization of narratives and the strident anti-Western national-patriotic campaign reflects a trend that is impervious to change or whether there is anything the Euroatlantic countries can do to reverse the Kremlin’s approach. Is it appropriate and promising to conduct diplomacy of small steps and ‘dialogue’ at all levels, search for common ground, revive arms control and engage in ‘confidence-building’? Or is a counter-strategy required that sets firm limits to Russian behaviour and impresses upon the Russian leadership the costs and risks of its domestic and foreign policy orientation? In this writer’s view, the latter approach is required. The reason for this lies in yet another return by the Putin regime to Soviet-era approaches— and, perhaps beyond that, Russian political culture: the inability to engage foreign actors in ‘win-win’ situations and the tendency to misinterpret compromise and good will as weakness.

About the author

Hannes Adomeit, based in Berlin, is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for International Security Policy at the University of Kiel (ISPK) in Germany and at the Institute for Statecraft (IfS) in London. He was born in 1942 in Memel, East Prussia, now Klaipeda, Lithuania. His academic degrees include, in Germany, an M.A. in Political Science from the Freie Universität in Berlin. In the US, he received an MA in International Relations, a Certificate in Russian Studies, and a PhD “with distinction” from Columbia University in New York. He has held teaching and/or research positions at different institutions in several countries, including the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London; the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California; the Harvard Russian Research Center; and the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) in Berlin. Until 2013 he was Professor at the College of Europe in Warsaw, teaching courses on the EU and Russia. Foremost among of his many publications is the 2nd expanded and updated edition of his widely acclaimed Imperial Overstretch: Germany in Soviet Policy from Stalin to Gorbachev (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2016).

¹ The ensuing examination is based on this author’s article, ‘Innenpolitische Determinanten der Putinschen Außenpolitik’ [Domestic Determinants of Putin’s Foreign Policy‘], Sirius: Zeitschrift für Strategische Analysen, Vol. 1, №1 (March 2017), pp. 33–52.

² Oxford Dictionary, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/information.

³ ‘Обращение Президента России Владимира Путина’, Kremlin.ru, 1 March 2018, http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/56957.

⁴Ibid.

⁵ ‘Обращение Президента России Владимира Путина’, Kremlin.ru, 4 September 2004, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/22589.

⁶ ‘Интервью главного редактора “Русской службы новостей” Сергея Доренко с президентом Ингушетии Юнус-Бэком Евкуровым’, Rusnovosti.ru, 17 August 2009, http://www.rusnovosti.ru/programms/prog/39980/46307/.

⁷ Putin’s speech justifying the annexation of Crimea, ‘Обращение Президента России Владимира Путина’, Kremlin.ru, 18 March 2014, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20603.

⁸ The poll was conducted in June 2014, ‘Санкции и контрсанкции’, Levada.ru, 30.9,2014, http://www.levada.ru/2014/09/30/sanktsii-i-kontrsanktsii/.

⁹ Putin’s speech at the 43rd Munich Security Conference, Kremlin.ru, 10 February 2007, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24034 (italics mine).

¹⁰ Putin’s address to Duma deputies, Federation Council members, heads of Russian regions and civil society representatives in the Kremlin, Kremlin.ru, 18 April 2014, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20603 (italics mine).

¹¹ Putin at the 43rd Munich Security Conference.

¹² Lavrov’s speech as delivered in Russian, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYzt-HfHAs4. − The English version of his speech published on the foreign ministry’s website downgrades the ‘assurances’ to mere ‘promises’: http://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/3081301.

¹³ What Lavrov evidently was referring to is a publication by two US historians, Thomas Blanton and Svetlana Savranskaya, from the non-governmental organization National Security Archive at George Washington University. The study with extensive documentation entitled ‘What Gorbachev Heard’, put on the NSArchive on 12 December 2017 as Briefing Book #613, argues that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory; several Western heads of state or government and foreign ministers were considering the extension of NATO membership to Central and Eastern European countries; and that, therefore, subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion are justified, given that NATO did indeed later enlarge.− The Internet address at which Briefing Book #613 can be accessed is http://nsarchive.gwu.edu. The National Security Archive was founded in the early 1980s and has its origins in the left-wing spectrum of US society. It is probably not wrong to assume that its name was intentionally chosen to create the impression that it is a governmental organization comparable or identical to the official US archives, the address of which is https://www.archives.gov/. − A comprehensive rebuttal of Lavrov’s assertions and the ‘NATO guarantees’ myth can be found in this author’s article, ‘NATO’s Eastward Enlargement: What Western Leaders Said’, Federal Academy for Security Policy (Berlin), Working Paper №3/2018, February 2018, https://www.baks.bund.de/sites/baks010/files/working_paper_2018_03.pdf.

¹⁴ ‘Преображение или кафкианская метаморфоза’, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 20 August 1992; see also his interview with Izvestiya, 10 October 1991.

¹⁵ Yeltsin’s letter of 20 December 1991, Pravda, 23 December 1991. At the Brussels meeting, the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC) was created, later renamed Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council.

¹⁶ Andrey Kozyrev, on Radio Mayak (Moscow), in Russian, on 23 December 1991, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Soviet Union, FBIS-SOV-91–247, 24 December 1991, p. 41

¹⁷ Дипломатический вестник, №4–5, 29 February — 15 March 1992, p. 49 (italics mine).

¹⁸ Some contemporaries noted this development early on. See, for instance, this author’s conclusions in ‘Russia as a “Great Power” in World Affairs: Images and Reality’, International Affairs (London), Vol. 7, №1 (January 1995), pp. 35–68.

¹⁹ For a reconstruction of this development see Hiroshi Kimura, ‘The Russian Decision-Making Process Toward Japan’, Japan Review, №7, pp. 61–68.

²⁰ Kyoji Komachi, ‘Concept Building in Russian Diplomacy: The Struggle for Identity’, Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, Working Paper Series, 3 May 1994, pp. 3–4.

²¹ James Sterngold, ‘Japan and Russia End Talks on Disputed Isles’, The New York Times, 6 August 1992.

²² Serge Schmemann, ‘Yeltsin Cancels Visit to Japan as Dispute Over Islands Simmers’, The New York Times, 10 September 1992.

²³ See the extensive documentation by Alexander Domrin, The Limits of Russian Democratisation: Emergency Powers and States of Emergency (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 178 and fn. 82–85.

²⁴ ‘Pinochet als Vorbild: St. Petersburger Politiker will Diktatur’, Neues Deutschland, 31 December 1993, https://www.neues-deutschland.de/artikel/461493.pinochet-als-vorbild.html?sstr=putin.

²⁵ Remarks made at a parliamentary session at the Kremlin shortly after the August 1991 Soviet coup, ‘For the Record: Associated Press Summary of Statements of Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky’, Washington Post, 15 December 1993, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1993/12/15/for-the-record/2681748e-f8cd-4573-843f-19fc8a2fa8e6/?utm_term=.f5ef579beaa9.

²⁶ The text (30 pages) of the study was distributed to journalists at a press conference in Moscow and published in full or in excerpts in all the major national newspapers; quotes here are from ‘Перспективы расширения НАТО и интересы России. Доклад службы внешней разведки’, Izvestiya, 26 November 1993.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ ITAR-TASS, 5 January 1994.

²⁹ On 32 March 1994, for instance, the president’s press spokesman stated that Russia would not be ready to sign on to PFP for at least six or seven months. This was flatly denied the next day by Kozyrev who said that PFP would be signed later in the month. It was not, however. And, indeed, in April, after the NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serb gun positions outside Gorazde, Kozyrev announced that Russia would not sign on to PFP after all.

³⁰ Interfax (Moscow), 6 April 1994.

³¹ ‘Указ Президента Российской Федерации от 02.11.1993 г. № 1833 “Об утверждении Военной доктрины Российской Федерации”’, Kremlin.ru, 02.11.1993, http://www.kremlin.ru/acts/bank/4747.

³² ‘Стратегия развития отношений Российской Федерации с Европейским Союзом на среднесрочную перспективу (2000–2010 годы)’, Ieras.ru [no date], http://www.ieras.ru/journal/journal1.2000/9.htm.

³³ ‘Common Strategy of the European Union of 4 June 1999 on Russia’, Official Journal of the European Communities, Doc. 1999/414/CFSP.

³⁴ The formulation strained credulity when it asserted that a ‘strategic partnership’ between Russia and the EU were not some distant prospect but a fact of life.

³⁵ ‘EU Expanding its “Sphere of Influence”’, Russia Says’, Eurobserver.com, 21 March 2009, http://euobserver.com/9/27827.

³⁶ ‘Пресс-конференция по итогам саммита Россия-Евросоюз’, Kremlin.ru, 22 May 2009, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/4172.

³⁷ Vladimir Socor, ‘Saakashvili-Yushchenko “Borjomi Declaration” Broadens Euro-Atlantic Integration Vision’,
Eurasia Daily Monitor,Vol. 2, Issue 159, Jamestown.org, 15 August 2005, https://jamestown.org/program/saakashvili-yushchenko-borjomi-declaration-broadens-euro-atlantic-integration-vision/.

³⁸ Only one more high-level meeting took place after the founding congress in December 2005 in Kiev, a summit conference in May 2006 in Vilnius.

³⁹ Putin’s speech at the 43rd Munich Security Conference on 10 February 2007. Russian original at Youtube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlY5aZfOgPA; English text at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24034.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Lilia Shevtsova: Lost in Transition: The Yeltsin and Putin Legacies (Washington, D.C., Carnegie Endowment, 2007)

⁴² https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Viktor_Chernomyrdin.

⁴³ The German political scientist Margarete Mommsen, therefore, aptly calls the Russian system of government ‘the Putin Syndicate’, emphasizing the strong role that the secret services play in it: Margarete Mommsen, Das Putin-Syndikat: Russland im Griff der Geheimdienstler (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2017).

⁴⁴ For other major politically motivated cases see Hannes Adomeit, ‘The Putin System: Crime and Corruption as Constituent Elements’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 68, №6, pp. 1067–73.

⁴⁵ Dmitri Grishkin, ‘Russian Anti-Monopoly Service: State Doubles Presence Over Past Decade’, Moscow Times, 29 September 1916, https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/russian-state-doubles-economy-presence-over-past-decade-55529.

⁴⁶ ‘Владимир Путин встретился с представителями Российского союза промышленников и предпринимателей’, Kremlin.ru, 19 February 2003, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/28196. It was also at that meeting where a verbal controversy took place between Putin and Khodorkovsky that is widely considered to have laid the basis for the Kremlin chief’s animosity towards Khodorkovsky and his later conviction and imprisonment.

⁴⁷ These are among the central points made by Marshall Goldman: Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

⁴⁸ The term is used in the title of the most important and most comprehensive book on the subject by Karen Dawisha: Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).

⁴⁹ See, for instance, the extensive study by Rustam Abasov, Organisierte Kriminalität in Russland (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2016); Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy; and Adomeit, ‘Crime and Corruption’. The connections between government officials and organized crime, of course, are not a recent phenomenon but is one that existed in the Soviet Union and took its current form in the Yeltsin era. This has been shown conclusively, among others, by Yuriy Voronin, ‘The Emerging Criminal State: Economic and Political Aspects of Organized Crime in Russia’, in: Phil Williams (ed.), Organized Crime in Russia: The New Threat (London; Frank Cass, 1997), pp. 53–62.

⁵⁰ Dmitri Medvedev shortly prior to his election as president (2 March 2008) at a Citizens Forum, ‘Д. Медведев: Россия — страна правового нигилизма’, Vedomosti.ru, 22 January 2008, https://www.vedomosti.ru/library/news/2008/01/22/dmedvedev-rossiya---strana-pravovogo-nigilizma.

⁵¹ Putin’s speech at the enlarged session of the state council ‘Выступление на расширенном заседании Государственного совета “О стратегии развития России до 2020 года”’, Kremlin.ru, February 8, 2008, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24825.

⁵² Ibid. (italics mine).

⁵³ Ibid. (italics mine).

⁵⁴ The sources used here to recount Medvedev’s scathing criticism of the state of affairs in 2008–2009 and the requirements for ‘modernisation’ are the interview he gave shortly after his election to the presidency on 2 March 2008 to Lionel Barber, Neil Buckley and Catherine Belton, ‘Laying down the law: Medvedev vows war on Russia’s “legal nihilism”’, Financial Times, 24 December 2008, https://www.ft.com/content/e46ea1d8-c6c8-11dd-97a5-000077b07658; his address to the federal assembly, also referred to in Western sources as ‘state of the nation’ address, in 2008, ‘Послание Федеральному Собранию Российской Федерации’, Kremlin.ru, 5 November 2008, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/1968; ; the article titled ‘Go Russia!’, published online in September 2009, ‘Россия, вперёд! Статья Дмитрия Медведева’, Kremlin.ru, 10 September 2009, http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/5413; and his address to the federal assembly in 2009, ‘Послание Федеральному Собранию Российской Федерации’, Kremlin.ru, 22 November 2009, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/5979.

⁵⁵ Мedvedev, ‘Послание’ 2009 (italics mine).

⁵⁶ Andrey Movchan, ‘Just an Oil Company? The True Extent of Russia’s Dependency on Oil and Gas’, Carnegie.ru, 14 September 2015, http://carnegieendowment.org/2015/09/14/just-oil-company-true-extent-of-russia-s-dependency-on-oil-and-gas/ihtg.

⁵⁷ These required changes were enumerated by Putin in his ‘Development Strategy’, ‘О стратегии развития России до 2020 года’. This makes it fairly safe to assume that the authors of the document that Putin introduced in February 2008 and Medvedev’s economic advisers were one and the same.

⁵⁸ ‘Послание Федеральному Собранию’ 2009.

⁵⁹ Medvedev at a reception in San Francisco hosted by California’s governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. For reports on his visit to Silicon Valley see Andrew Clark, ‘Dmitry Medvedev picks Silicon Valley’s brains’, Guardian, 23 June 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/jun/23/dmitry-medvedev-silicon-Valley-visit, and Peter Henderson, ‘Russian president tweets, tours Silicon Valley’, Reuters, 23 June 2010, https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-politics-russia/update-1-russian-president-at-twitter-off-to-silicon-Valley-idUSN2321765620100623.

⁶⁰ ‘Послание Федеральному Собранию’ 2009.

⁶¹ On the history and the current information on the ‘innovation centre’s’ foundation and projects in Russian see http://skolkovomedia.ru/; for corresponding information in English see http://www.i-gorod.com/en/about/.

⁶² According to Vladislav Surkov, one of the deputy heads of the presidential administration; ‘Milliardär Wekselberg koordiniert russisches Silicon Valley’, Aktuell.ru, 23 March 2010, http://www.aktuell.ru/russland/news/milliardaer_wekselberg_koordiniert_russ_silicon_Valley_26565.html.

⁶³ Henderson, ‘Russian president tours Silicon Valley’.

⁶⁴ ‘Послание Федеральному Собранию’ 2009.

⁶⁵ ‘Программа еффективного исползования на системной основе внешнеполитических факторов в целях долгосрочного развития Российской Федерации’, 11 May 2010, Russky Newsweek, May 2010, http://www.runewsweek.ru/country/34184/, accessed on 10 October 2010. The website, however, is no longer available since Russky Newsweek ceased publication. For a time the document could be accessed under http://perevodika.ru/articles/13590.html but this, too, is no longer possible. The foreign ministry, as far as this author is aware, never published the document but also did not deny its existence. It seems that the ministry was not at all happy with the task.

⁶⁶ Ibid. − The following analysis uses text by this author’s article ‘Russia’s Partnerships for Modernisation: Origins, Content and Prospects’, in The Medvedev Presidency: A Wasted Effort, EU-Russia Centre Review, №19 (October 2011), pp. 31–51, http://www.eu-russiacentre.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/EURC_review_XIX_ENG.pdf; in Russian: ‘Российское Партнерство для модернизации: причины, содержание и перспективы’, в Обзорах от Центра ЕС-Россия Президентство Медведева — мартышкин труд, вып. 19 (октябрь 2011), стр. 34–54, http://eu-russiacentre.ru/wp-content/sklad/2009/10/EURC_review_XIX_RUS.pdf.

⁶⁷ This author was part of this effort. The think tank in question was the German Institute on International Politics and Security (SWP), in Berlin. Details of the scenarios were correctly described by the German news magazine Der Spiegel; see ‘Kalter Krieg. Der Krieg um die georgischen Gebiete Abchasien und Südossetien hat die westliche Staatengemeinschaft in eine Krise gestürzt: Wie soll man dem neuen russischen Selbstbewusstsein begegnen?’, Der Spiegel, №36 (2008), pp. 20–28.

⁶⁸ ‘“Time for a German-Russian Modernization Partnership”, Speech by Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier at the Department of International Relations of Urals University’, German Foreign Office, 13 May 2008, https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/en/newsroom/news/080513-bm-russland/232842.

⁶⁹ A copy of the draft agreement in the possession of this author.

⁷⁰ Quoted by Владимир Соловьев, ‘Законность, вперед! Эксперты еврокомиссии написали свой план модернизации России по сценарию Дмитрия Медведева’, Kommersant’, 1 February 2010, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1319877.

⁷¹ Ibid (italics mine).

⁷² Sergey Lavrov, ‘The Next Russia-EU Summit Will Take Place in Rostov-on-Don on 31 May and 1 June’, RIA Novosti, 24.2.2010, http://en.rian.ru/russia/20100224/157989227.html.

⁷³ ‘EU-Russia Summit, Rostov-on-Don, 31 May-1 June 2010, Joint Statement on the Partnership for Modernisation’, European Union, http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/en/er/114747.pdf.

⁷⁴ The independent Russian military specialist Aleksandr Golts, however, was sceptical about such claims. He had heard them before, he wrote, only to notice not long thereafter that the euphoria had dissipated. ‘Lisbon’s NATO Celebration Misses the Point’, Moscow Times, 23 November 2010, https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/lisbons-nato-celebration-misses-the-point-3169.

⁷⁵ As an indication that a rift existed between the approach adopted by Medvedev and himself, Putin appeared to be furious about the abstention. He called the resolution ‘defective and flawed’. It allowed ‘everything’ and resembled ‘medieval calls for crusades’. In an unusual rebuke of his mentor, Medvedev called such language ‘unacceptable’. For an analysis of the split between Putin and Medvedev on Libya see Ellen Barry, ‘Putin Criticizes West for Libya Incursion’, New York Times, 26 April 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/world/europe/27putin.html

⁷⁶ ‘Russia does not want “zero-sum” geopolitical games in CIS — Lavrov’, Vesti TV, 10 December 2008.

⁷⁷ Ibid.

⁷⁸ Anders Åslund, The Kremlin’s New Policy in Its Near Abroad, Moscow Times, 27 July 2010, https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/the-kremlins-new-policy-in-its-near-abroad-173.

⁷⁹ For a compilation of how Russian and Western experts interpreted the ‘demedvedisation’ phenomenon see, for instance, ‘Кому нужна “демедведизация”? Почему отменяют указы Медведева? Что происходит в тандеме?: эксперты об отставке Дмитрия Медведева‘, Iarex.ru, 26 September 2012, http://www.iarex.ru/interviews/29539.html.

⁸⁰ ‘Съезд партии “Единая Россия”’, Kremlin.ru, 24 September 2011, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/12802.

⁸¹ The hopes and expectations that Medvedev would run and the disappointment that he didn’t is best described in the analyses of Fred Weir, ‘Could Putin and Medvedev face off in an open Russian election?’, Christian Science Monitor, 20 April 2011, https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2011/0420/Could-Putin-and-Medvedev-face-off-in-an-open-Russian-election, and id., ‘Russia skeptics proven right as Putin set to take top spot again’, Christian Science Monitor, 25 September 2011, https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2011/0925/Russia-skeptics-proven-right-as-Putin-set-to-take-top-spot-again.

⁸² Weir, ‘Could Putin and Medvedev face off in an open Russian election?’ (italics mine).

⁸³ See ‘Кудрин ушел в отставку’, Lenta.ru, 26 September 2011, https://lenta.ru/news/2011/09/26/kudrin3/;
‘Кудрин vs Медведев: Экс-Глава Минфина и гонка вооружений’, Azerros.ru, 4 April 2012, http://azerros.ru/analytics/2412-kudrin-vsmedvedev-eks-glava-minfina-i-gonka-vooruzheniy.html.

⁸⁴ ‘Указ Президента Российской Федерации от 31 декабря 2010 г. № 1565’, Бюллетень Счетной палаты №10, 2013, http://ach.gov.ru/userfiles/bulletins/2013-10-06-buleten_doc_%20files-fl-2454.pdf. − The presidential ukaz did not provide much detail of the programme. Putin, however, had revealed some of its content on 14 December 2010; see Илья Крамник, ‘Госпрограмма вооружении 2020’, www.vvprf.ru/archive/clause324.html; for further detail: Алексей Арбатов, ‘Вооружатьсия рачительно и c умом. Как превратить ГПВ и “оборонку” v двигатель российской экономики’, VPK-news.ru, 10 April 2013, http://vpk-news.ru/articles/15337. For an assessment of the GPV’s implementation in the first six years of is existence see Julian Cooper, Russia’s State Armament Program to 2020: A Quantitative Assessment of Implementation, 2011–2015, Swedish Defense Research Institute (FOI), Swedish Defence Research Agency, 21 March 2016, http://www.foi.se/sv/Sok/Sammanfattningssida/?rNo=FOI-R--4239--SE

⁸⁵ ‘Новый интеграционный проект для Евразии — будущее, которое рождается сегодня’, Izvestiya, 4 October 2011, http://izvestia.ru/news/502761.

⁸⁶ Ibid. (italics mine).

⁸⁷ Medvedev in his capacity as prime minister at a press conference in Skolkovo; ‘Ukrainian Integration with Europe Could Hamper Ties with Customs Union — Medvedev’, RIA Novosti, 18 May 2011, http://en.rian.ru/world/20110518/164092502.html.

⁸⁸ ‘Советник Путина попросил Украину выбрать, по какую сторону баррикад жить’, Inworld.ukraina, 27 April 2013, http://news.mail.ru/inworld/ukraina/global/112/politics/12910361/?frommail=1&social=fb (italics mine).

⁸⁹ For reports on the event, see ‘Russia PM Vladimir Putin “booed” at martial arts fight’, BBC, 21 November 2011, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-15818517, and Associated Press, ‘Moscow’s martial arts fans boo Putin as he steps into the ring’, publ. by The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/20/putin-booed-moscow-martial-arts-fans.

⁹⁰ Ibid.

⁹¹ The portrayal of the demonstrations and rallies against Putin and United Russia in December 2011 and the spring of 2011 is based mainly on the reports by David M. Herszenhorn and Ellen Barry, ‘Putin Contends Clinton Incited Unrest Over Vote’, New York Times, 8 December 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/world/europe/putin-accuses-clinton-of-instigating-russian-protests.html; ‘Rally Defying Putin’s Party Draws Tens of Thousands’, ibid, 10 December 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/world/europe/thousands-protest-in-moscow-russia-in-defiance-of-putin.html; and Ellen Barry and Michael Schwirtz, ‘Vast Rally in Moscow Is a Challenge to Putin’s Power’, ibid., 24 December 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/world/europe/tens-of-thousands-of-protesters-gather-in-moscow-russia.html?module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=Europe&action=keypress&region=FixedLeft&pgtype=article. — For a comprehensive review of the demonstrations and rallies, estimated numbers of participants, and speakers see ‘2011–2013 Russian protests’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011%E2%80%932013_Russian_protests.

⁹² Quoted by Herszenhorn and Barry, ‘Putin Contends Clinton Incited Unrest’ (italics mine).

⁹³ ‘Authorized riots’, Gazeta.ru, 7 May 2012, http://en.gazeta.ru/opinions/2012/05/07/a_4576657.shtml, and ‘Nach Urteil im Bolotnaja-Prozess: Hunderte Festnahmen bei Protesten in Moskau’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14 April 2014, http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/nach-urteil-im-bolotnaja-prozess-hunderte-festnahmen-bei-protesten-in-moskau-1.1896821.

⁹⁴ Herszenhorn and Barry, ‘Putin Contends Clinton Incited Unrest’. — It stands to reason that this perception, whether genuine or instrumental — was one of the reasons why the Russian propaganda apparatus, in an unprecedented campaign, did its utmost in the 2016 US presidential election to discredit Clinton and to support Trump.

⁹⁵ The subsequent enumeration as compiled by the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), ‘Civic Freedom Monitor: Russia’, ICNL, 17 September 2018, http://www.icnl.org/research/monitor/russia.html.

⁹⁶ ‘Федеральный закон от 20 июля 2012 г. N 121-ФЗ “О внесении изменений в отдельные законодательные акты Российской Федерации в части регулирования деятельности некоммерческих организаций, выполняющих функции иностранного агента”’, Rossiyskaya gazeta, 23 July 2012, https://rg.ru/2012/07/23/nko-dok.html. The act is not a stand-alone measure but rather a series of amendments to existing laws. − Although the term of ‘non-governmental’ (неправительственная) organisation is current in Russia, the targets of the law here are called ‘non-commercial’ (некоммерческие) organisations.

⁹⁷ Indeed, a website with precisely this name does exist, 5-Я Колонна. Враги народа [The Fifth Column. Enemies of the People], www.pятаяколонна.рф. The following persons, among others, are mentioned as outstanding representatives of the 5th column: Former chairman of the board of the Yukos oil company Michal Khodorkovsky; blogger and opposition politician Alexander Navalny; former world chess champion and − together with Boris Nemtsov — co-founder of the extra-parliamentary opposition movement Solidarnost’, Garry Kasparov; former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar; a former head of presidential administration under Yeltsin and former chairman of the energy group EES Rossii, Anatoly Chubais; the daughter of the former liberal mayor of St. Petersburg, Ksenia Sobchak; and liberal Kremlin critic, satirist, journalist and screenwriter Viktor Shenderovich. Before his murder Boris Nemtsov was also on this list.

⁹⁸ Statement on behalf of Memorial International, Memorial.de, 26 December 2014, http://memorial-de.blogspot.com/search/label/Sacharow-Zentrum.

⁹⁹ The justice ministry provides a running update; see, for instance, Minjust.ru, 20 July 2018, http://minjust.ru/ru/vedenie-reestra-nekommercheskih-organizaciy-vypolnyayushchih-funkcii-inostrannogo-agenta-1. The international human rights organisation Human Rights Watch also traces the list and reports on the application of the law; see ‘Human Rights Watch‘Russia: Government vs. Rights Groups − The Battle Chronicle’, Human Rights Watch, 18 June 2018, https://www.hrw.org/russia-government-against-rights-groups-battle-chronicle, ‘World Report 2018 — Russia’, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2018/country-chapters/russia.

¹⁰⁰ The Memorial Human Rights Center was founded and is operating under the auspices of Memorial International Historical, Educational, Human Rights and Charitable Society. Memorial Human Rights Center, was placed on the government’s register of ‘foreign agents’ in November 2015, the international branch of Memorial (society) in October 2016.

¹⁰¹ For the description of the closure see ‘Russia: Court Orders Rights Group Closed’, Human Rights Watch, 2 February 2016, https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/02/11/russia-court-orders-rights-group-closed.

¹⁰² The Andrey Sakharov Center is also on the ‘foreign agents’ list; see above.
¹⁰³ ‘Федеральный закон от 23.05.2015 № 129-ФЗ О “внесении изменений в отдельные законодательные акты Российской Федерации”’, Pravo.gov.ru, 23 May 2015, http://publication.pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/0001201505230001?index=0&rangeSize=1.

¹⁰⁴ ‘Совет Федерации попросил МИД и прокуратуру проверить НПО из патриотического стоп-листа”’,
Interfax.ru, 8 July 2015, http://www.interfax.ru/russia/452317.

¹⁰⁵ As argued as early as 2006 by Lilia Shevtsova, ‘Imitation Russia’, The American Interest, Vol. 2, №2, 1 November 2006, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2006/11/01/imitation-russia/.

¹⁰⁶ The German Marshall Fund of the United States was included on the registry despite the fact that it did not have offices or staff in Russia. By the end of 2018, the justice ministry had branded 14 foreign and international NGOs as ‘undesirable’.

¹⁰⁷ ‘EPDE calls on Russia: Remove the listing’, EPDE, 13 September 2018, https://www.epde.org/en/news/details/epde-calls-on-russia-remove-the-listing.html.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid.

¹⁰⁹ The type of visa necessary for the participation in such conferences is called ‘humanitarian’. Schiffer was told that she could apply for a ‘tourist’ visa, which she (correctly) refused to do as it would have meant that she would enter Russia under false pretexts, that is, illegally. For a report on the denial and the reaction of the board of the Petersburger Dialog see Katja Riedel and Sebastian Pittelkow, ‘Petersburger Dialog: Kein Visum für deutschen Vorstand’, Tagesschau.de, 8 October 2018, https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/petersburgerdialog-schiffer-101.html?fbclid=IwAR12StBn4R-hzdtNxxjaCqorFbbmkGXjgFcpT5R9BKQLT8A7pgkBruRzpfA.

¹¹⁰ Civic Freedom Monitor: Russia.

¹¹¹ One of the first victims of the law was Voice of America; see ‘Russia’s Foreign Agent Law Has a Chilling Effect on Civil Society Groups, NGOs’, Voice of America, 24 January 2018, https://www.voanews.com/a/russia-labels-media-outlets-as-foreign-agents/4221609.html.

¹¹² ‘Russia: Independent Magazine Faces Huge Fine’, Human Rights Watch, 2 November 2018, https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/11/02/russia-independent-magazine-faces-huge-fine.

¹¹³ This is the conclusion of the report by the British embassy in Russia supported in detail by five case studies; ‘Digital Rights in Russia: An Analysis of the Deterioration of Freedom of Expression Online’, https://www.article19.org/data/files/medialibrary/38696/case_studies_R02_A5_WEB.pdf. For a comprehensive listing of restrictive legislation, including laws concerning the Internet, see ‘Table Illustrating Legislative Crackdown on Rights and Freedoms of the Civil Society in Russia since 2012’, International Federation of Human Rights, [no date], https://www.fidh.org/IMG/pdf/loisrussie_web_finalv4.pdf.

¹¹⁴ ‘Федеральный закон от 28 июля 2012 г. N 139-ФЗ’, Российская газета, 20 July 2012. https://rg.ru/2012/07/30/zakon-dok.html.

¹¹⁵ ‘Российская Федерация, Федеральный закон от 28.12.2013 N 398-ФЗ, “Об информации, информационных технологиях и о защите информации”’, http://rulaws.ru/laws/Federalnyy-zakon-ot-28.12.2013-N-398-FZ/2.

¹¹⁶ ‘Федеральный закон N 374-ФЗ от 06.07.2016 “О внесении изменений в Федеральный закон О противодействии терроризму и отдельные законодательные акты Российской Федерации в части установления дополнительных мер противодействия терроризму и обеспечения общественной безопасности”’, Consultant.ru, 6 July 2016, http://www.consultant.ru/document/cons_doc_LAW_201078/. The law is named after Irina Yarovaya, a Duma deputy and member of the ruling United Russia party who has authored or co-authored a number of laws restricting freedom of expression and assembly.

¹¹⁷ The following portrayal of the evolution and importance of the government’s successful effort to control VKontakte reproduces the embassy’s analysis, ‘Digital Rights in Russia’.

¹¹⁸ Ibid.

¹¹⁹ Part of this was described early on by Samuel P. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

¹²⁰ ‘Дискуссионный клуб Валдай, Выступление Владимира Путина’, 19 September 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGCUg1AEzy4.

¹²¹ ‘В основе русской нации и российского централизованного государства лежат единые духовные ценности: Владимир Путин’, Regnum.ru, 23 July 2013, https://regnum.ru/news/polit/1687151.html.

¹²² Ibid.

¹²³ ‘Советский Союз − это та же Россия, но с другим названием’, Русская народная линия, Информационно-аналитическая служба: православие, самодержавие, народность, 18 October 2011, http://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2011/10/18/sovetskij_soyuz_eto_ta_zhe_rossiya_no_s_drugim_nazvaniem/. Putin made this statement in an interview broadcast on national television on 17 October 2011

¹²⁴ According to a documentary on the Warsaw Pact aired by the Russian national TV channel Rossiya 1, Russia.tv, June 2015, http://russia.tv/video/show/brand_id/59427/episode_id/1199513/video_id/1175621/.