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mariacallous · 2 years ago

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The other day, I included a link to an article in The Atlantic titled Putin is just following the manual: A utopian Russian novel predicted Putin’s war plan. “If you read only one article today,” I wrote, “make it this one.”

The author, Dina Khapaeva, is the director of the Russian studies program at Georgia Tech’s School of Modern Language. Monique Camarra and I spoke to her on the Cosmopolicast about the article, which begins this way:

No one can read Vladimir Putin’s mind. But we can read the book that foretells the Russian leader’s imperialist foreign policy. Mikhail Yuriev’s 2006 utopian novel, The Third Empire: Russia as It Ought to Be, anticipates—with astonishing precision—Russia’s strategy of hybrid war and its recent military campaigns: the 2008 war with Georgia, the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the incursion into the Donetsk and Luhansk regions the same year, and Russia’s current assault on Ukraine.

It is, apparently, “the Kremlin’s favorite book.”

Yuriev was the chairman of the Russian Government’s Council on Economy and Entrepreneurship and a deputy speaker of the State Duma. I wasn’t able to read the novel in full, because it hasn’t been translated into English at all. I was only able to read a few extracts that have been translated to French.

But as we discuss in the podcast, those extracts, along with Dina’s commentary, still offer significant insights into modern Russia and its ideological commitments. If John Mearsheimer and his coterie were aware of this book, perhaps they would have thought twice about confidently advancing the thesis that NATO’s expansion provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The discussion is especially timely in light of the assassination of Darya Dugina, whose father is a prominent exponent of this ideology.

I’ve argued before in this newsletter that the West is at a tremendous disadvantage in its analysis of modern Russia because we refuse to take its culture seriously, and in particular, because we refuse to recognize that it is in the grip of an ideology as significant and as dangerous as Soviet communism. It’s as if having seen off Soviet Union, we collectively determined that we’d invested enough time and energy trying to understand that benighted place and refused to do it again. Now, over and over, I hear one or another politician or columnist insist that the threat Russia now poses is nothing like the threat we confronted in the Soviet Union because the Soviet Union was a communist empire, whereas modern Russia is not. The suppressed premises of this argument are false.

It is true that a communist super-state poses an inherent threat to a capitalist one—as we perfectly understood during the Cold War—because to subscribe to the ideology, at least as the Bolsheviks understood it, is to understand oneself to be at war with the capitalist world. Just as you cannot be a Christian without believing in the resurrection of Christ, you could not be a Bolshevik without seeking to overthrow the capitalist state system, seize power, and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. We understood from studying Bolshevik writings, speech, and behavior that so long as men who ascribed to this ideology remained in power, the USSR would endeavor implacably to overthrow our governments and replace them with totalitarian dictatorships—and if, in reality, a “dictatorship of the proletariat” amounted to nothing grander than a particularly immiserated dictatorship, it was because the theory was wrong, not because its exponents failed sincerely to ascribe to it.

Understanding Bolshevism was key to understanding the Soviet Union and thus key to mounting an effective defense against its expansion. Had we persuaded ourselves that its ideology was insignificant—that the USSR had no global ambitions—our response to it would have been inadequate. Had we accepted (as indeed some argued) that the Soviet Union was swiftly imprisoning one after another country behind the Iron Curtain because its conception of its security demanded this, we wouldn’t have conjured up a globe-spanning series of alliances to contain it. Senator Vandenberg would not have said, “Politics stops at the water’s edge” and cooperated with the Truman administration to forge durable, bipartisan support for the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, SEATO, and CENTO. The Soviet Union would have continued to expand, enslave, and immiserate many more millions before it collapsed—if indeed it ever collapsed.1

The sources of American conduct may be found in George Kennan’s 1947 telegram, The Sources of Soviet Conduct. He wrote:

The political personality of Soviet power as we know it today is the product of ideology and circumstances: ideology inherited by the present Soviet leaders from the movement in which they had their political origin, and circumstances of the power which they now have exercised for nearly three decades in Russia. There can be few tasks of psychological analysis more difficult than to try to trace the interaction of these two forces and the relative role of each in the determination of official Soviet conduct. Yet the attempt must be made if that conduct is to be understood and effectively countered. [My emphasis, as is all bold text below.]

It is worth rereading that telegram. It’s hard to imagine that an equally lucid document is now circulating among our national security apparatus. One lives in hope, but the Long Telegram is so much more intelligent and better written than any government document I’ve seen in recent years that I can’t quite bring myself to believe it.

Kennan understood that the Soviet leaders’ ideology reflected the pathologies of Tsarist Russia. “From the Russian-Asiatic world out of which they had emerged [the men in the Kremlin] carried with them a skepticism as to the possibilities of permanent and peaceful coexistence of rival forces.” And he understood what this implied for the rest of the world:

[T]he men in the Kremlin have continued to be predominantly absorbed with the struggle to secure and make absolute the power which they seized in November 1917. They have endeavored to secure it primarily against forces at home, within Soviet society itself. But they have also endeavored to secure it against the outside world. For ideology, as we have seen, taught them that the outside world was hostile and that it was their duty eventually to overthrow the political forces beyond their borders. The powerful hands of Russian history and tradition reached up to sustain them in this feeling. Finally, their own aggressive intransigence with respect to the outside world began to find its own reaction; and they were soon forced, to use another Gibbonesque phrase, “to chastise the contumacy” which they themselves had provoked. It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right.

What, concretely, did this ideology imply? It had, wrote Kennan, “profound implications for Russia’s conduct as a member of international society.”

It means that there can never be on Moscow’s side any sincere assumption of a community of aims between the Soviet Union and powers which are regarded as capitalist. It must invariably be assumed in Moscow that the aims of the capitalist world are antagonistic to the Soviet regime, and therefore to the interests of the peoples it controls. If the Soviet government occasionally sets its signature to documents which would indicate the contrary, this is to be regarded as a tactical maneuver permissible in dealing with the enemy (who is without honor) and should be taken in the spirit of caveat emptor. Basically, the antagonism remains. It is postulated. And from it flow many of the phenomena which we find disturbing in the Kremlin's conduct of foreign policy: the secretiveness, the lack of frankness, the duplicity, the wary suspiciousness and the basic unfriendliness of purpose. These phenomena are there to stay, for the foreseeable future. There can be variations of degree and of emphasis. When there is something the Russians want from us, one or the other of these features of their policy may be thrust temporarily into the background; and when that happens there will always be Americans who will leap forward with gleeful announcements that “the Russians have changed,” and some who will even try to take credit for having brought about such “changes.” But we should not be misled by tactical maneuvers. These characteristics of Soviet policy, like the postulate from which they flow, are basic to the internal nature of Soviet power, and will be with us, whether in the foreground or the background, until the internal nature of Soviet power is changed.

The saving grace, Kennan argued, was that the Kremlin was not in a hurry. “Like the Church, it is dealing in ideological concepts which are of long-term validity, and it can afford to be patient.”

Its main concern is to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power. But if it finds unassailable barriers in its path, it accepts these philosophically and accommodates itself to them. The main thing is that there should always be pressure, unceasing constant pressure, toward the desired goal. There is no trace of any feeling in Soviet psychology that that goal must be reached at any given time. These considerations make Soviet diplomacy at once easier and more difficult to deal with than the diplomacy of individual aggressive leaders like Napoleon and Hitler. On the one hand it is more sensitive to contrary force, more ready to yield on individual sectors of the diplomatic front when that force is felt to be too strong, and thus more rational in the logic and rhetoric of power. On the other hand it cannot be easily defeated or discouraged by a single victory on the part of its opponents. And the patient persistence by which it is animated means that it can be effectively countered not by sporadic acts which represent the momentary whims of democratic opinion but only by intelligent long-range policies on the part of Russia’s adversaries—policies no less steady in their purpose, and no less variegated and resourceful in their application, than those of the Soviet Union itself. In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.

There it is: The concept that for the next 43 years was to guide American foreign policy, accepted by both parties and executed so successfully that the Soviet Union collapsed—not, as is often and stupidly said, “without a shot fired” (and not by any means), but without, at least, a nuclear exchange.

The telegram was brilliant in several respects. Not only was it correct (a great virtue in a policy document), it was brilliantly written, in that it conveyed complex and alien ideas in so lucid a manner that every American understood it, and thereafter (for the most part) lent their support to the policies it entailed.

No similar understanding guides American foreign policy today, or if it has, it hasn’t been shared with the public. Our policy toward Russia has been so confused, inconsistent, and indifferent that it is hard to imagine it conforms to any overarching logic, no less a sound and considered one.

Nor does politics stop at the water’s edge. When Mitt Romney proposed that Russia was our primary geopolitical adversary, Obama sneered. Romney was right, but it is no good being right if you can’t articulate your case in a way that Americans understand. What he said made no sense to them: The Soviet Union had, after all, collapsed, and we were mired in any number of wars with countries that clearly weren’t Russia. Why should our relationship with Russia be adversarial?

Trump exploited this confusion by insisting that NATO was “obsolete.” Nothing, he insisted, prevented him from having “a great relationship” with Russia. If he’s reelected (God forbid), he would presumably say the same thing and behave the same way, a prospect at this point almost too horrifying to contemplate. A significant fraction of the American public would once again thrill to the prospect of “getting along with Russia.”

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