Putin's Wars: The Rise of Russia's New Imperialism

1

Dmitri Trenin, Post-Imperium: A Eurasian Story (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2011), 142.

2

Trenin, Post-Imperium, 200.

3

Trenin, Post-Imperium, 232.

4

Trenin, Post-Imperium, 233.

5

Trenin, Post-Imperium, 208.

6

Trenin, Post-Imperium, 62.

7

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Poslednyy brosok na yug (Moscow: Liberalnaya Demokraticheskaya Partiya Rossii, 1993), 117.

8

Zhirinovsky, Poslednyy brosok, 138.

9

Trenin, Post-Imperium, 27.

10

Trenin, Post-Imperium, 46.

11

Trenin, Post-Imperium, 45.

12

Trenin, Post-Imperium, 57.

13

Trenin, Post-Imperium, 100.

14

Trenin, Post-Imperium, 100.

1

Montesquieu, “Lettres persanes,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964), 89.

2

Montesquieu, “Lettres persanes,” 89.

3

Montesquieu, “De l’esprit des lois,” in Oeuvres complètes, 539.

4

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation projettée,” Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Part III (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 1039.

5

Rousseau, “Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation projettée,” Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Part III, 1039.

6

Cf. Denis Diderot, “Observations on the Instruction of the Empress of Russia to the Deputies for the Making of Laws,” in Diderot: Political Writings, ed. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 81.

7

Diderot, “Observations,” 82. Another contemporary who expressed his doubts concerning Catherine’s democratic credentials was the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. “The monarch of Russia,” he wrote, “presupposes a motivating force that her language, nation, and empire do not possess: honor. One should read Montesquieu on this and the Russian nation and state of mind is exactly its opposite: one should read him on despotism and fear, and both are exactly present.” (Johann Gottfried Herder, Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1976), 99.)

8

Cf. Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 622.

9

Israel, Democratic Enlightenment, 626.

10

Cf. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, I. The Challenge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 403. These special rights of the nobility included that “they could not lose their status, honor, property or life without judicial proceedings, and could be judged only by judges of equal birth with themselves…. They received permission to leave state service at will, to take service with foreign governments, and to travel outside the country. They were given the right to sign their names (like European nobles) with territorial titles. They were reconfirmed in their right to ‘buy villages’ (that is serfs), and to engage in wholesale or overseas trade.”

11

Palmer, Democratic Revolution, 404.

12

It is still a subject of discussion whether the Cold War could be called a “war” that ended in a defeat. This interpretation is defended by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wrote: “The Cold War did end in the victory of one side and in the defeat of the other. This reality cannot be denied.” (Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Cold War and its Aftermath,” Foreign Affairs 71, no. 4 (Fall 1992), 31.) Ernst-Otto Czempiel, on the other hand, stated: “It is easy, but erroneous, to argue that NATO won the conflict,… that the NATO alliance defeated the Warsaw Pact without firing a single round, so to speak…. The Warsaw Pact remained a strong military alliance until the very end. It was in many respects superior to NATO. No, a proper explanation lies elsewhere. It is more accurate to view the end of the East-West conflict as having been produced not by the military defeat of the Warsaw Pact.” (Ernst-Otto Czempiel, “Governance and Democratization,” in Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics, eds. James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 251.) Of course, Czempiel is right: it was not a military defeat. However, it certainly was an ideological, economic, political, and moral defeat. It was this moral defeat, in particular, that led to the breakdown of the empire and—ultimately—to the disestablishment of the Warsaw Pact.

13

Cf. Walter Pintner, “Russian Military Thought: The Western Model and the Shadow of Suvorov,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 360.

14

According to Benedict Anderson, as late as 1840, almost 98 percent (!) of the Russian population was illiterate. (Cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 75–76.) However, the Russian defeat in the Crimean War was caused not only by the illiteracy of the Russian serf soldiers, but also by the use of obsolete military technology. According to Daniel Headrick, “During the Crimean War, while French and British soldiers carried modern rifles, almost all Russian soldiers used smoothbore muskets, the same kind of guns used in the war against Napoleon. The Russian government tried to purchase new guns from the American Samuel Colt and from gun makers in Liège but were not able to import them in time.” (Daniel R. Headrick, Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 169.)

15

Pintner, “Russian Military Thought,” 362.

16

As concerns Russia’s membership of the G-8, even Moscow’s mayor and 1999 presidential hopeful, Yury Luzhkov, remarked: “Its [Russia’s] full membership of the ‘Big Eight’ is obviously also a self-deceit.” Luzhkov, however, was here not so much referring to Russia’s deficient democratic credentials, as to its insufficient economic potential. (Y. M. Luzhkov, The Renewal of History: Mankind in the 21st Century and the Future of Russia (London: Stacey International, 2003), 151–152).

17

Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (March/April 1994), 71.

18

Daniel Headrick contrasts this smooth, swift, and easy conquest of Siberia by the Russians with the slow conquest of its Western frontier by the young United States, where, due to the fierce resistance of the Native American tribes, “the conquest was slow, difficult, and costly” (Headrick, Power over Peoples, 277). “The contrast with the Russian expansion into Siberia is striking,” wrote Headrick. “In the 1590s, Russia was confined to the west of the Ural Mountains. By 1646, Russian explorers and fur traders had reached the eastern edge of Siberia and had founded Okhotsk off the sea of that name and Anadyrsk in northeastern Asia. By 1689—after only a hundred years—Russia controlled almost all of Siberia to the Pacific Ocean, 3,500 miles from European Russia” (Headrick, Power over Peoples, 278).

19

Nicholas J. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power, with a new introduction by Francis P. Sempa (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 69.

20

Cf. Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 31.

21

Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 140.

22

Tilly, Coercion, Capital, 141.

23

Colin S. Gray, “The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era: Heartland, Rimlands, and the Technological Revolution,” Strategy Paper No. 30, National Strategy Information Center, Inc., (New York: Crane, Russak & Company, Inc., 1977), 35. Charles Tilly even spoke of “two and a half centuries, [in which] Russian expansion scarcely ceased” (cf. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, 189). The Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen estimated that “every seven years from 1500 until his day [around 1910, MHVH], Russia gained an amount of territory equal to that of his own country, the Kingdom of Norway.” (Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Inside the Kremlin (London: W. H. Allen & Co Plc, 1988), 262–263.) The land surface won by Russia in four hundred years, was, according to Nansen, approximately fifty-seven times that of Norway, which is about 17 million square kilometers. The surface of the tsarist empire in 1910 was about 23 million square kilometers. Nansen’s estimate seems rather plausible.

24

Edward Dicey, “Mr Gladstone and Our Empire,” September 1877, in Nineteenth Century Opinion: An Anthology of Extracts from the First Fifty Volumes of The Nineteenth Century 1877–1901, ed. Michael Goodwin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), 261. Dicey added: “But our conquests have come to us as the accidents of war, not as the objects of our warfare. I do not deduce from this that our annexations of territory have been obtained more justly or more rightfully than those of other powers who have conquered for the sake of conquering. What I want to point out is that our Empire is the result not so much of any military spirit as of a certain instinct of development in our race. We have in us the blood of the Vikings; and the same impulse which sent the Norsemen forth to seek new homes in strange lands has, for century after century, impelled their descendants to wander forth in search of wealth, power, or adventure” (Dicey, “Mr Gladstone,” 262).

25

Quoted in Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard, “The Spectre of a Multipolar Europe,” Policy paper (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2010), 32.

26

Claire Mouradian, “Les Russes au Caucase,” in Le livre noir du colonialisme: XVIe–XXIe siècle: de l’extermination à la repentance, ed. Marc Ferro (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2003), 393 (emphasis mine).

27

John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Penguin, 2013), 399.

28

Cf. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 337.

29

Anderson, Lineages, 346.

30

Anonymous authors, Proekt Rossiya: Vybor Puti, Vtoraya Kniga (Moscow: Eksmo, 2007), 395.

31

John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, with a preface by F. A. Hayek, reprint of the original edition of 1861 (Indiana: Gateway Editions, 1962), 88. This compensatory function of imperialist policies had also been observed by the sociologist Max Weber: “Weber saw Russia as a typical imperialist power, its pressure for expansion coming from a combination of elements within Russian society: from the landhunger of the peasants; from the power interests of the bureaucracy; from the cultural imperialism of the intelligentsia, who, ‘too weak to secure even the most elementary demands for a constitutional order and guaranteed freedoms at home… find a support for their damaged self-esteem in the service of a policy of expansion, concealed under fine-sounding phrases.’” (David Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1974), 140.)

32

Peter Sloterdijk, Die Verachtung der Massen: Versuch über Kulturkämpfe in der modernen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 33.

33

Instead of seeking refuge in the ersatz self-esteem, provided by empire, a more authentic way to reappropriate the self-esteem that has been denied, is described by Axel Honneth in his book The Struggle for Recognition. “In the context of the emotional response associated with shame,” he wrote, “the experience of being disrespected can become the motivational impetus for a struggle for recognition. For it is only by regaining the possibility of active conduct that individuals can dispel the state of emotional tension into which they are forced as a result of humiliation.” The praxis thus opened up makes it possible, according to Honneth, “to take the form of political resistance.” (Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 138.)

34

Stalin was a great admirer of Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozny), whom he considered as his great historical role model. According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, “[H]e regarded Ivan the Terrible as his true alter ego, his ‘teacher.’” (Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 177.) Montefiore described how Stalin, at the very moment that the German armies stood before Moscow, “kept reading history: it was now that he scribbled on a new biography of Ivan the Terrible: ‘teacher teacher’ and then: ‘We shall overcome!’” (Sebag Montefiore, Stalin, 396). Stalin admired in Ivan not only his imperialist policies, but also—if not more—his ruthless killing of the boyars, the Russian nobility. (On Stalin’s self-identification with Ivan the Terrible, see also Benedict Anderson, Lineages, 160, and Vladimir Fédorovski, “Le Fantôme d’Ivan le Terrible,” in Le Fantôme de Staline (Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2007), 175–181).

35

An example of this imperial inequality was the fact that even when, in 1946, the Algerians obtained civil rights, they did not get the same voting rights as French colonists. They got these only in 1956 after the war of liberation had already started.

36

Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Empire & Emancipation: Power and Liberation on a World Scale (London: Pluto Press, 1990), 187.

37

Nederveen Pieterse, Empire, ibid.

38

Rousseau, “Considérations,” 1039.

39

Rousseau, “Considérations,” 970.

40

Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (London and New York: Penguin, 2004), 193.

41

Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, reprint of the original, Edinburgh, 1767 (Milano: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 2001), 417.

42

Ferguson, An Essay, 418.

43

Sir John Rober Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (London: Macmillan & Co, 1914), 294.

44

Seeley, Expansion of England, 347.

45

Seeley, Expansion of England, 348.

46

The young and democratic United States had an important flaw, which was the status of black slaves who were not considered citizens. However, in its territorial expansion the United States did not act as an empire (at least not until 1898, when it took the Philippines from Spain). Neither did it incorporate the native American tribes. Their land was “bought,” and they were driven from their lands, finally ending up in extraterritorial reservations. Alexis de Tocqueville, a profound admirer of American democracy, who, in December 1831, witnessed the deportation of the Chactas Indians, denounced the silent extermination that went on behind a juridical façade, writing that “the Americans of the United States, more humane, more moderate, more respectful of the law and legality [than the Spaniards in South America], never bloodthirsty, are more profoundly destructive of their race [Chactas tribe] and it is beyond doubt that in one hundred years there will remain in North America not one single tribe, nor even one single man, belonging to the most remarkable of the Indian races.” (Alexis de Tocqueville, “Contre le génocide des Indiens d’Amérique,” in Textes essentiels, Anthologie critique par J.-L. Benoît, (Paris: Havas, 2000), 305.)

1

Carlos Malamud, Historia de América (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2005), 66.

2

Voltaire, in his satirical novel Candide ou l’optimisme (1759), criticized Leibniz’s theorem that we live “in the best of possible worlds” and gave as one of his counterexamples the case of a slave in Surinam whose leg had been cut off because he had tried to escape. Diderot, in his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772), criticized French Admiral Louis Antoine de Bougainville who, in 1767, visited Tahiti and had laid claim to the island for France. Diderot let an old and wise Tahitian man describe the French visitors as follows: “ambitious and evil men: one day you will know them better. One day they will return… to put you in chains, slit your throats, or subjugate you to their extravagancies and to their vices, one day you will serve under them.” The (French) text is available at http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/8spvb10.txt.

3

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty (London: BBC, 1977), 111.

4

The expression “the white man’s burden” came from the 1899 poem by Rudyard Kipling in which he appealed to the United States to shoulder Britain’s imperial responsibilities:

(Quoted in Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 369.)

5

H. F. Wyatt, “The Ethics of Empire,” April 1897, in Nineteenth Century Opinion: An Anthology of Extracts from the First Fifty Volumes of The Nineteenth Century 1877–1901, ed. Michael Goodwin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), 267.

6

Wyatt, “The Ethics of Empire,” 268.

7

Quoted in Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1991), 72.

8

Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 124.

9

Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 127.

10

Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 127. Galbraith, who, in the beginning of the 1960s served as US ambassador to India, recounted that he often met with the Indian leader Nehru and that “Nehru made no secret of his British background and its influence on his political thought. He once said, ‘You realize, Galbraith, that I am the last Englishman to rule in India.’” (John Kenneth Galbraith, Name-Dropping: From F.D.R. On (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999), 132.)

11

In 1923, when this policy was at its apogee, the Dutch historian C. Te Lintum wrote: “The ethical course or enlightened despotism that had, since 1870 (at least officially), replaced the old egoistic exploitation policy, had also brought for the native more transport facilities and more education, especially on Java.” (C. Te Lintum, Nederland en de Indiën in de laatste kwart eeuw (Zutphen: W. J. Thieme & Cie., 1923), 254.) The author added—paternalistically, “They were a people living traditional lives, submissive and quiet, who held the Dutch rulers in high regard.”

12

Cf. J. A. A. van Doorn, Indische lessen: Nederland en de koloniale ervaring (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1995), 43. This Dutch self-satisfaction was still present in 1941, when—during the German occupation!—a book titled Daar wérd wat groots verricht (Over there something great has indeed been achieved) was published, in which one could read: “We brought peace and prosperity, under our government the population on Java has grown tenfold, Indonesia has become one of the first countries of the world in terms of production. We can point with pride to what we have achieved in Indonesia” (ibid.). In spite of these fine words the Dutch—unlike the British—were too obstinate to recognize the new post–World War II realities and, some years later, would fight two colonial wars—euphemistically called “police actions”—which would cost the lives of thousands of Dutch soldiers and tens of thousands of Indonesians.

13

Van Doorn, Indische lessen, 38. Van Doorn added: “That these high sentiments did not fit the existing colonial interests, was still the least objection one might make. More questionable was the sense of superiority hidden behind the ethical responsibility: the certainty that it was the Netherlands especially that had had the calling to ‘elevate’ the indigenous population and, after a while, the conviction, just as strongly held, that it had completed this task in an excellent way. The myth of the Netherlands as a gidsland (guiding country) would, in particular, block the ability to assess the emerging nationalism in a positive way, or even merely to notice it” (Van Doorn, Indische lessen, 38–39).

14

Hendrik Spruyt, Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 57.

15

V. G. Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony (London: Zed Press, 1978), 269.

16

Vilfredo Pareto, Trattato di sociologia generale, Volume secondo, “I residui” (Milano: Edizione di Comunità, 1981), 123–124.

17

Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme suivi de Discours sur la Négritude (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2004), 27–28 (emphasis in original).

18

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (New York: Prometheus Books, 1998), 148.

19

Karl Marx, Letter of June 18, 1862, Marx Engels Werke (Berlin/DDR: Dietz Verlag, 1974), Band 30, 249.

20

Quoted in Friedrich Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte, Werke Bd. I, Herausgegeben und eingeleitet von Walther Hofer (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1976), 466.

21

Meinecke, Staatsräson, 466.

22

Meinecke, Staatsräson, 466.

23

Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 181.

24

Wehler, Kaiserreich, 181.

25

Helge Pross, Was ist heute deutsch?: Wertorientierungen in der Bundesrepublik (Reinbek-Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1982), 62.

26

Pross, Was ist heute deutsch? 49.

27

Wehler, Kaiserreich, 179.

28

Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991), 37. Cf. also E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 49–50.

29

Herfried Münkler drew attention to the fact that for Roman authors, such as Virgil and Horace, “empires are of world-historical importance, in a cosmological or salvationist sense, as well as in terms of power politics…. Empires take it upon themselves to shape the course of time. The strongest expression of this is the sacral charge of the imperial mission…. In an age when decline and fall were seen as the natural tendency of history, the world-historical role of empire was to arrest the decline and to prevent the end of the world…. Once Christianity became the state religion, it was necessary to give up some of the sacral components of the imperial mission…. But the sense of sacrality remained so strong that in the eleventh century the Hohenstaufen chancellery began to speak of the sacrum imperium—a term that then passed down into the Holy Roman Empire (of the German Nation).” (Herfried Münkler, Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 88–89.)

30

Cf. Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 103.

31

In Russian: Pravoslavie: Samoderzhavie: Narodnost. On the exact connotation of the Russian word narodnost (nationality), see note 35.

32

Alexander Chubarov, The Fragile Empire — A History of Imperial Russia (New York: Continuum, 2001), 61.

33

David Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1974), 186.

34

Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 347.

35

The German equivalent of narodnost is Volkstum. Volkstum, however, has a more cultural connotation: it stands mainly for the cultural expression of the people (Volk) in folklore, customs, language, poems, popular myths, and so on. The Russian word narodnost has a more spiritual connotation and refers to the unique psychological and spiritual qualities that are ascribed to the Russian people. This different focus probably results from the fact that, unlike Germany’s population, the majority of the Russian population was illiterate and excluded from (higher) culture. At the end of the nineteenth century, both German Volkstum and Russian narodnost—originally conceived as counterconcepts against the cosmopolitism of the French Revolution—would acquire clearly racist overtones.

36

Cf. Frank Golczewski and Gertrud Pickhan, Russischer Nationalismus: Die russische Idee im 19. und 20: Jahrhundert. Darstellung und Texte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 36.

37

Leonid Luks, “Die politisch-religiöse ‘Sendung’ Russlands,” in Freiheit oder imperiale Größe: Essays zu einem russischen Dilemma, ed. Leonid Luks (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2009), 48. Dostoevsky fully shared this anti-Semitism and did not hesitate to use the pejorative word “Yid” in his Writer’s Diary. In a chapter titled “The Jewish Question,” he depicts a Jewish plot for world dominance, writing, “the Jews reign over all the stock exchanges there… they control the credit… they are the ones who control the whole of international politics as well; and what will happen hereafter is, of course, known to the Jews themselves: their reign, their complete reign, is drawing nigh!” (Dostoevsky, Fyodor. A Writer’s Diary, Volume II: 1877–1881, trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 914.)

38

V. F. Zalevsky, “Chto takoe Soyuz Russkogo Naroda i dlya chego on nuzhen?” Excerpts published in Golczewski and Pickhan, Russischer Nationalismus, 210–216.

39

“Resolution of the ‘Section for the Struggle against Jewish Supremacy’ of the Congress of the Union of the Russian People in Nizhny Novgorod, November 1915,” in Golczewski and Pickhan, Russischer Nationalismus, 216–221.

40

V. Ivanovich, ed., Rossiyskie partii, soyuzy i ligi (Saint Petersburg, 1906), 117–122. http://www.dur.ac.uk/a.k.harrington/urpprog.html.

41

Ivanovich, Rossiyskie partii.

42

Ivanovich, Rossiyskie partii.

43

Cf. Walter Laqueur, Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 35. Cf. also Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 241.

44

Laqueur, Black Hundred, 20.

45

Laqueur, Black Hundred, 21.

46

Stepan Shevyrev, 1841, “Vzglyad Russkogo na sovremennoe obrazovanie Evropy” (A Russian’s View of the Contemporary Development of Europe). In Golczewski and Pickhan, Russischer Nationalismus, 163.

47

Nikolay Danilevsky, “Rossiya i Evropa” (Russia and Europe), in Golczewski and Pickhan, Russischer Nationalismus, 181–183.

48

Arendt, Totalitarianism, 227.

49

Quoted in Arendt, Totalitarianism, 224.

50

Arendt, Totalitarianism, 226.

51

Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 136.

52

According to Yegor Gaidar, “Russia is unique in restoring a failed empire, which it did in the period 1918–22. This required an unprecedented use of force and violence. But that was not the only factor in the Bolshevik’s success. Messianic Communist ideology shifted the center of political conflict from a confrontation between ethnic groups to a struggle among social classes. That struggle garnered support from people in the non-Russian regions, who fought for a new social order that would open the way to a brilliant future, and played a large role in forming the Soviet Union within borders resembling those of the Russian Empire.” (Yegor Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007), 17.)

53

Cf. Robert Service, Penguin History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 129.

54

Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1947), 404.

55

Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, 404.

56

On the devastating consequences of the purges, not only for the general population, but also for the communist elite, George Kennan wrote: “And the great old names of communism had not died alone. With them had gone a full 75 percent of the governing class of the country, a similar proportion of the leading intelligentsia, and over half of the higher officers’ corps of the Red army.” (George F. Kennan, “Russia: Seven Years Later,” Annex to George Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), 503–504.)

57

Arendt, Totalitarianism, 222.

58

Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950, 519.

59

Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950, 519.

1

Vicken Cheterian, War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia’s Troubled Frontier (London: Hurst & Company, 2008), 220.

2

Igor Yakovenko, “Ukraina i Rossiya: suzhety sootnesennosti,” Vestnik Evropy 26, no. 64 (2005).

3

Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (1994), 72.

4

It is not correct, therefore, to speak of an American “empire” as, for instance, the Marxist economists Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy did in their book Monopoly Capital (1968). They wrote: “Legitimate differences of opinion will of course exist as to whether this or that country should be counted as belonging to the American empire. We offer the following list as being on the conservative side: The United States itself and a few colonial possessions (notably Puerto Rico and the Pacific islands); all Latin American countries except Cuba; Canada; four countries in the Near and Middle East (Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran); four countries in South and South-East Asia (Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, and South Vietnam); two countries in East Asia (South Korea and Formosa); two countries in Africa (Liberia and Libya); and one country in Europe (Greece).” (Paul A. Baran, and Paul M. Sweezy. Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 183.) Clearly this hotchpotch of sovereign countries does not make an empire. Alexander Motyl’s description of the relationship of the United States with many Latin American countries as a “hegemonic nonimperial relationship” comes closer to the reality. (Alexander J. Motyl, Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 20 (emphasis mine).)

5

Charles Tilly, “How Empires End,” in After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires, eds. Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 7 (emphasis mine).

6

Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” 79.

7

Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture: Volume II: The Power of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 37.

8

In 1990 Estonia’s per capita GDP was 119.3 percent, and Latvia’s 107.5 percent of Russia’s. (Source: Statistical Handbook: States of the Former USSR, Studies of Economies in Transformation, Paper No. 3 (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1992), 4–5 and 14–15). This also occurred sometimes in other colonial empires. Piers Brendon, for instance, indicated that Hong Kong, at the time of its handover to China in 1997, had “£37 billion in reserves and inhabitants who were richer per capita than those of the United Kingdom.” (Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997 (London: Vintage Books, 2008), 655.)

9

The figures for 1991 for the other republics are: Armenia 17.1 percent, Belarus 16.3 percent, Kazakhstan 23.1 percent, Turkmenistan 21.7 percent, and Ukraine 5.9 percent (Statistical Handbook: States of the Former USSR, 14–15). This dependence on the Union Budget could be one of the factors that explain the Central Asian republics’ initial, sometimes almost reluctant, attitude to “accepting” their independence in 1991.

10

The Russian situation resembled, therefore, that of the British in India, of which A. N. Wilson wrote: “[T]he British incursion into India, which had begun as a profit-making enterprise for merchants, had become a drain on British resources.” (A. N. Wilson, After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 489.)

11

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Volume II, with an introduction by Prof. Edwin R. A. Seligman (London: Dent Dutton, 1971), 112–113.

12

In 1881, for instance, the Earl of Dunraven wrote: “The future of England certainly depends upon her relationship with her colonies. She may remain the centre of a great empire, or become a small, scantily populated, and unimportant kingdom.” A prospect that was considered totally unacceptable by the author: “British possessions will remain British as long as we can hold them, by force if necessary.” (The Earl of Dunraven, “The Revolutionary Party,” August 1881, in Michael Goodwin, Nineteenth Century Opinion, 272–273.)

13

Franz Cede, “The Post-Imperial Blues,” The American Interest, 7, no. 2 (2011), 118.

14

Despite these doomsday prophecies the Netherlands experienced a protracted economic boom after the loss of Indonesia. This certainly helped to assuage post-imperial pain, but did not eradicate it. According to Thomas Beaufils, “In the Netherlands the workings of memory still prove difficult…. Fifty years [!] is a too short period to hope that wounds that are still open can be healed.” (Thomas Beaufils, “Le colonialisme aux Indes néerlandaises,” in Le livre noir du colonialisme: XVIe–XXIe siècle: de l’extermination à la repentance, ed. Marc Ferro (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2003), 262.)

15

Yegor Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire, xiv. The same image was used by the Russian sociologist Yury Levada, who said: “The phantom pain from the loss of the Soviet empire remains vivid, like an amputated limb that one still feels.” (Quoted in Marie Jégo, Alexandre Billette, Natalie Nougayrède, Sophie Shibab, and Piotr Smolar, “Autopsie d’un conflit,” Le Monde (August 31–September 1, 2008).)

16

Van Doorn, Indische lessen, 72.

17

Van Doorn, Indische lessen, 72.

18

Van Doorn, Indische lessen, 73.

19

Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire, xvi.

20

Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire, xvi.

21

Pitirim A. Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity: The Effects of War, Revolution, Famine, Pestilence upon Human Mind, Behavior, Social Organization and Cultural Life (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1946), 277. Sorokin was not the first to analyze the different phases of revolutions, nor their immanent tendency toward restoration of prerevolutionary trends. In his classic book, The Anatomy of Revolution (1938), Crane Brinton made a similar analysis. Sorokin, whose book was published four years later (the first printing was in 1942), did not quote Brinton.

22

Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity, 277.

23

Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity, 277.

24

Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity, 280.

25

Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity, 284.

26

Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity, 283.

27

Lilia Shevtsova, Russia: Lost in Transition: The Yeltsin and Putin Legacies (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2007), 320.

28

F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 103.

29

Ulrich Beck, “Nation-States without Enemies: The Military and Democracy after the End of the Cold War,” in Democracy without Enemies, ed. Ulrich Beck (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 143 (emphasis mine).

30

Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire, xiv.

31

Jean-Sylvestre Mongrenier, La Russie menace-t-elle l’Occident? with a preface by Yves Lacoste (Paris: Choiseul, 2009), 202.

32

Mongrenier, La Russie menace-t-elle l’Occident? 98.

33

Michel Guénec, “La Russie face à l’extension de l’OTAN en Europe,” Hérodote no. 129 (2008), 224.

34

Yuri M. Luzhkov, The Renewal of History: Mankind in the 21st Century and the Future of Russia (London: Stacey International, 2003), 156 (emphasis mine).

1

“Top Kremlin Aide Says Putin Is God’s Gift to Russia,” Reuters, July 8, 2011.

2

Yevgenia Albats, The State within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia: Past, Present, and Future (New York: Farrar-Straus-Giroux, 1994), 325.

3

Former Prime Minister Primakov, for instance, did not hide his disappointment. He wrote that after the war with Georgia in 2008, “Russian society was pained by the silence in the beginning from our CIS allies, and still more by that of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Quite certainly we have overestimated relations within the CIS and the CSTO.” (Evgueni Primakov, Le monde sans la Russie? À quoi conduit la myopie politique, with a preface by Hubert Védrine (Paris: Economica, 2009), 175.)

4

Cf. Janusz Bugajski, Georgian Lessons: Conflicting Russian and Western Interests in the Wider Europe (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic & International Studies, 2010), 19.

5

Dmitry Babich, “Russia-Belarus Union State on Shaky Legs,” RIA Novosti (December 8, 2009).

6

Chubais quoted in Valery Paniouchkine and Mikhaïl Zygar. Gazprom: L’arme de la Russie (Paris: Actes Sud, 2008), 188.

7

Larissa Sayenko, “Kto kogo dushit,” Moskovskie Novosti, no. 13 (March 30–April 6, 1997), 8.

8

“Lukashenka at Bay,” The Economist (December 4, 2010).

9

Dmitri Trenin, Post-Imperium: A Eurasian Story (Washington, DC, and Moscow: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2011), 46.

10

Jan Maksymiuk, “Belarus: Lukashenka Eyes Union with Ukraine,” RFE/RL (November 24, 2006).

11

“Putin Named PM of Belarus-Russia Alliance,” msnbc.com (May 27, 2008).

12

“Medvedev Says Belarus Has Not Been Asked to Become Part of Russia,” RIA Novosti (November 23, 2009).

13

“Medvedev Says Belarus Has Not Been Asked to Become Part of Russia.”

14

Sergey Borisov, “Common Economic Space May ‘Absorb’ Union State of Russia, Belarus,” RT (October 19, 2010).

15

Borodin quoted by Ivan Savelyev, “Union State of Russia and Belarus Needs Intensive Care,” RIA Novosti (October 14, 2010).

16

Dmitry Medvedev’s blog, October 4, 2010. http://rt.com/About_Us/Blogs/kremlin-messages-president-talks-to-the-web.html.

17

“Union State Should Re-integrate Former USSR, Russian Analyst Says,” Belta (November 26, 2010).

18

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 94.

19

“Speaker Rules Out Ukraine Joining Belarus-Russia Union State,” iupdp.org (April 7, 2010).

20

“Speaker Rules Out Ukraine Joining Belarus-Russia Union State.”

21

“Klaus von Beyme: Slavic Federation of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia Would be a Natural Partner for the EU and NATO,” Information Analysis Portal of the Union State (November 19, 2010). http://www.soyuz.by/en/print.aspx?guid=93465 (accessed December 7, 2010).

22

“South Ossetia May Join Russia-Belarus Union State,” RT (August 2, 2011).

23

Andrew Jack, “Putin ‘Could Head Post-Soviet Confederation,’” The Financial Times (October 28, 2003).

24

“Ukraine to Observe Russian-Belarusian-Kazakh Negotiations on Creation of Customs Union,” Office for a Democratic Belarus (December 1, 2010).

25

“Ukraine to Observe Russian-Belarusian-Kazakh Negotiations on Creation of Customs Union.”

26

“Putin Reminded to Whom Belarus Obliged Its GDP Growth,” udf.by (July 13, 2012).

27

“Ukraine to Observe Russian-Belarusian-Kazakh Negotiations on Creation of Customs Union.”

28

Åslund quoted by Konstantin Rozhnov, “Will a New Customs Union Hurt Russia’s WTO Bid?” BBC News (June 30, 2010).

29

“Putin: Ukraina prodast Evrope 2 litra moloka, a Tamozhennyy Soyuz dast ey $9mlrd v god,” Zerkalo Nedeli. Ukraina (October 6, 2012).

30

Cf. Konstantin von Eggert, “Due West: Georgia’s Wildcard in Russia’s WTO Membership,” RIA Novosti (December 8, 2010). http://en.rian.ru/colmnists/20101208/161688551.html.

31

Pavel K. Baev, “Medvedev Enjoys Foreign Policy ‘Successes,’” Eurasia Daily Monitor 7, no. 222 (December 13, 2010).

32

“Putin Reminded to Whom Belarus Obliged its GDP Growth.”

33

“Russia Still Considering to Include Armenia in Single Customs Union,” News.am (December 6, 2010).

34

For a critical analysis of Medvedev’s proposal, see my paper “Medvedev’s Proposal for a Pan-European Security Pact: Its Six Hidden Objectives and How the West Should Respond,” The Cicero Foundation (October 2008). http://www.cicerofoundation.org/lectures/Marcel_H_Van_Herpen_Medvedevs_Proposal_for_a_Pan-European_Security_Pact.pdf.

35

Cf. Stephen Blank, “The CSTO: Gendarme of Eurasia,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 8, no. 176 (September 26, 2011).

36

Fyodor Lukyanov, “Eurasian Union is Putin’s Top Priority,” Valdai Discussion Club (June 4, 2012).

37

Uwe Halbach, “Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Union: A New Integration Project for the CIS Region?” SWP Comments 1, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (January 2012), 3.

38

“Interview: Analyst Says Uzbekistan’s Suspension Shows CSTO is ‘Irrelevant,’” RFE/RL (June 29, 2012).

39

“Serbia Becomes PA CSTO Observer,” Tanjug (April 11, 2013).

40

Hall Gardner, Dangerous Crossroads: Europe, Russia, and the Future of NATO (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 112.

41

Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov, Putin Itogi: Nezavisimyy Ekspertnyy Doklad (Moscow: Novaya Gazeta, 2008), 54.

42

Eugene B. Rumer, “Russian Foreign Policy beyond Putin,” Adelphi Paper No. 390 (London: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2007), 24.

43

Anders Åslund, “The End Seems Near for the Putin Model,” The Washington Post (February 26, 2010).

44

It led in South Africa to critical comments. One economist “berated the government for simply replacing Western corporations plundering Africa’s natural resources with a new group of what he called ‘sub-imperialist’ powers, the Brics.” (Peter Fabricius, “Brics Summit Important for SA,” IOL News (March 22, 2013).)

45

Alain Faujas, “La création de la banque de développement des Brics renvoyée à 2014,” Le Monde (March 29, 2013).

46

“Russia Offers S. Africa Help with Nuclear Power,” RIA Novosti (March 26, 2013).

47

“Russian, South African Presidents Sign Declaration on Strategic Partnership,” ITAR-TASS (March 26, 2013).

48

Cf. Michael Schuman, “Should BRICS Become BRIICS?” Time (March 3, 2010). Cf. also Karen Brooks, “Is Indonesia Bound for the BRICS?” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 6 (November/December 2011).

49

Martyn Davies, “Indonesia and Turkey Top Brics Contenders,” Business Day (South Africa) (March 3, 2013).

50

Ruchir Sharma, “Broken BRICs: Why the Rest Stopped Rising,” Foreign Affairs 91, no. 6 (November/December 2012), 4–5.

1

Vladimir Putin, “Novyy integratsionnyy proekt dlya Evrazii: budushchee, kotoroe rozhdaetsya segodnya,” Izvestia (October 8, 2011).

2

“Professor Igor Panarin: Gosudarem postsovetskogo prostranstva stanet Vladimir Putin,” Izvestia (April 1, 2009).

3

On Panarin’s grandiose visions see also Marcel H. Van Herpen, Putinism: The Slow Rise of a Radical Right Regime in Russia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 82–83.

4

Igor Panarin, “The Information War against Russia: Operation Putin. Part 1. Eurasian Integration: A Pathway Out of the World Crisis.” Lecture in the International Conference Securing Mankind’s Future (February 25–26, 2012), organized in Berlin by the Schiller-Institut. http://www.schiller-institut.de/seiten/201202-berlin/panarin-english.html (accessed June 28, 2013).

5

Panarin, “The Information War against Russia: Operation Putin.”

6

New Zealand has expressed an interest in creating a free trade zone with the Eurasian Union, but this is, of course, nowhere near becoming a full member. (Cf. Letter of Dmitry Shtodin, Minister Counsellor at the Russian Embassy in Rome, published as an appendix to Mauro De Bonis, “Urss? No grazie, Putin sogna l’Unione Euroasiatica,” Limes (September 3, 2012). Shtodin corrects the statement of De Bonis that New Zealand would become a member.) More viable candidates—mentioned by Panarin in another article—are Cuba and Venezuela. This “might sound like something out of a novel today,” he rejoiced, “far more than my own idea about Serbia joining, but we are living in very dynamic times” (Cf. Igor Panarin, “Eurasian Union: Stage 1,” RT (November 18, 2011)). In another article even war-torn Syria is mentioned as “seeking a free trade zone” with the new emerging Union. (Cf. Svetlana Kalmykova, “Eurasian Union Idea Takes Shape,” The Voice of Russia (October 20, 2011).)

7

Dugin quoted by Marlène Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 117.

8

Dugin, Konservativnaya Revolyutsiya, 1994. http://anticompromat.ru/dugin/3put.html.

9

Cf. “Evraziyskie komissary poluchat status federalnykh ministrov,” Tut.by (November 17, 2011).

10

“Vstrecha prezidentov Rossii, Respubliki Belarus i Kazakhstana,” Official Website of the President of Russia (November 18, 2011).

11

“Vstrecha prezidentov Rossii, Respubliki Belarus i Kazakhstana.”

12

“Vstrecha prezidentov Rossii, Respubliki Belarus i Kazakhstana.”

13

Marlène Laruelle, “When the ‘Near Abroad’ Looks at Russia: The Eurasian Union Project as Seen from the Southern Republics,” Russian Analytical Digest no. 112 (April 20, 2012), 9.

14

“Evraziyskiy tamozhennyy soyuz i ego vliyanie na Tsentralnuyu Aziyu,” Analiticheskiy Forum Tsentralnoy Azii no. 4 (February 2013), 2.

15

“Evraziyskiy tamozhennyy soyuz i ego vliyanie na Tsentralnuyu Aziyu.”

16

“Evraziyskiy tamozhennyy soyuz i ego vliyanie na Tsentralnuyu Aziyu.” Putin, in his speech, said: “The combined GDP measured in purchasing power parity of countries such as India and China is already greater than that of the United States. And a similar calculation with the GDP of the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China—surpasses the cumulative GDP of the EU. And according to experts this gap will only increase in the future.” (Cf. “Putin’s Prepared Remarks at 43d Munich Conference on Security Policy,” The Washington Post (February 12, 2007).) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2007/02/12/AR2007021200555.html.

17

Putin, “Novyy integratsionnyy proekt dlya Evrazii: budushchee, kotoroe rozhdaetsya segodnya.”

18

Andreas Umland, “The Stillborn Project of a Eurasian Union: Why Post-Soviet Integration Has Little Prospects,” Valdai Discussion Club (December 7, 2011).

19

Umland, “The Stillborn Project of a Eurasian Union.”

20

Tatyana Valovaya, minister responsible for the main areas of integration and macroeconomics of the Eurasian Economic Commission, reacting to the remark that “the idea of unifying the countries of the CIS is often called the realization of the imperial ambitions of our country’s leadership,” said: “In this space some ‘unity’ has always existed.” She added: “The original six countries of the EEC were, in fact—precisely the empire of Charlemagne.” Valovaya saw no problem in comparing the empire of Charlemagne, which ended in 814—this is 1,200 years ago!—with the Russian Empire, which ended only twenty years ago. (Cf. “Integratsiya obedinyaet vsekh: ot kommunistov do ‘Edinoy Rossii’ i pravykh,” Izvestia (July 20, 2012).)

21

Putin’s argument is repeated by Yevgeny Vinokurov, who wrote that “one should not consider European and post-Soviet integration to be mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the regionalism of the CIS is a step along the way toward integration with the European Union.” (Y. Yu. Vinokurov, “Pragmaticheskoe evraziystvo,” Rossiya v Globalnoy Politike (April 30, 2013).)

22

Tropkina, Olga. “Yevgeny Primakov nazval usloviya dlya uspekha Evraziyskogo soyuza,” Izvestia (November 24, 2011).

23

Putin quoted by Maria Antonova, “State Lays Claim to Geography Society,” The St. Petersburg Times (November 20, 2009). The speech was held on November 18, 2009, when Putin became head of the Society’s Board of Trustees. Putin’s sudden interest in Russia’s oldest organization seemed less motivated by scientific than by geopolitical reasons. According to Antonova, “Tsar Nicholas I created the Russian Geographical Society in 1845 as part of the imperial drive for geographical expansion and exploration of the country’s natural resources.”

24

Gleb Bryanski, “Putin, Medvedev Praise Values of Soviet Union,” Reuters (November 17, 2011).

25

“Moscow Fleshes Out ‘Eurasian Union’ Plans,” EurActiv (November 17, 2011).

26

“Moscow Fleshes Out ‘Eurasian Union’ Plans.”

27

“Eurasian Union Proposal Key Aspect of Putin’s Expected Presidency,” EurasiaNet.org (October 7, 2011).

28

Tropkina, “Yevgeny Primakov nazval usloviya dlya uspekha Evraziyskogo soyuza.”

29

Prof. Sheng Shiliang, “Putin’s Eurasian Chess Match,” Valdai Discussion Club (October 31, 2011).

30

Katharina Hoffmann, “Eurasian Union: A New Name for an Old Integration Idea,” Russian Analytical Digest no. 112 (April 20, 2011).

31

Andrei Liakhovich, “The Reasons behind Putin’s Unprecedented Generosity Towards Lukashenka,” Belarus Digest (January 5, 2012).

32

Andrew Wilson wrote that Lukashenko “might find a new role with Putin by selling Belarus as an exemplar in Russia-supported integration schemes such as the Eurasian Union. Russia cannot allow Belarus as a member of the Eurasian Union to go bust because that would seriously undermine the whole idea of Russian-sponsored integration projects.” (Cf. “Andrew Wilson on His Belarus Book and Lukashenka’s Survival,” Belarus Digest (December 4, 2011).)

33

“Russia-Belarus Union State May Take Backseat if Eurasian Union Project Pans Out: Lukashenko,” RIA Novosti (November 18, 2011).

34

Halbach, “Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Union: A New Integration Project for the CIS Region?”

35

Tropkina, “Yevgeny Primakov nazval usloviya dlya uspekha Evraziyskogo soyuza.”

36

Halbach, “Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Union: A New Integration Project for the CIS Region?”

37

On the influence of Carl Schmitt’s geopolitical Grossraum theory on Medvedev’s proposal, see my paper “Medvedev’s Proposal for a Pan-European Security Pact: Its Six Hidden Objectives and How the West Should Respond.” http://www.cicerofoundation.org/lectures/Marcel_H_Van_Herpen_Medvedevs_Proposal_for_a_Pan-European_Security_Pact.pdf.

38

This part of the Kremlin’s hidden agenda is also emphasized by Marlène Laruelle, who wrote: “Putin’s Eurasian Union project is aimed mainly at Central Asia, less at the South Caucasus, with the ultimate aim and supreme reward being the potential reintegration of Ukraine into the Russian bosom” (emphasis mine). (Cf. Marlène Laruelle, “When the ‘Near Abroad’ Looks at Russia: the Eurasian Union Project as Seen from the Southern Republics,” 9.)

39

“Posol RF: Moldaviya i Tamozhennyy soyuz: vozvrat v proshloe ili proryv v budushchee?” Regnum (February 7, 2012).

40

Vladimir Socor, “Putin Suggests Transnistria Self-Determination, Rogozin Displays Transnistria Flag,” Eurasian Daily Monitor 9, no. 149 (August 16, 2012).

41

Socor, “Putin Suggests Transnistria Self-Determination.”

42

George Niculescu, “The Myths and Realities of Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union,” The European Geopolitical Forum (January 8, 2013).

1

Quoted in Boris Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), 330.

2

“Prime Minister Vladimir Putin Met with Members of the Sixth Valdai Discussion Club,” Ria Novosti (September 19, 2009). http://en.rian.ru/valdai_op/20090914/156117965-print.html.

3

These were the Christian-Democratic Union, the Liberal-Democratic Party of Germany, the National-Democratic Party of Germany, and the Democratic Peasants Party of Germany.

4

Apart from the political parties, also representatives of communist mass organizations (youth and women’s organizations, the communist trade union FDGB, etc.) were also on the National Front’s list.

5

As a member of a delegation of the Dutch Social-Democratic Party, I personally had the opportunity to visit, on June 14, 1981, a polling station at the Alexanderplatz in East-Berlin, during the elections of the Volkskammer, the parliament of the German Democratic Republic. I was able to observe how all voters were given the “National Front” ballot paper and deposited it straight into the ballot box. In a corner was a voting booth covered with white sheets, but nobody entered it. On my question to the director of the polling station why nobody went into the booth, he said that voters “were free to go in the booth, delete some names on the list or even invalidate it.” When I said that entering the booth, “might, perhaps, attract some unwelcome attention,” he went to a table and came back with a booklet. It was the constitution of the German Democratic Republic. He leafed through the booklet, then read aloud a paragraph that said that elections in the GDR were “free and secret.” Next day the party paper Neues Deutschland published the results under the heading “Great Victory for the National Front.” In total 99.86 percent of the electorate had voted for the National Front. East German citizens told me the next day that entering the voting booth and deleting names would diminish your chances of getting an apartment, a promotion, or a permit for traveling abroad. Not one of my interlocutors had, himself or herself, ventured into the booth.

6

Vladimir Putin, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 69–70.

7

United Russia was formed in April 2001 from a merger between the Unity Party of Russia and the Fatherland-All Russia Party, led by the mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov.

8

Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society (London: Routledge, 2000), 187.

9

“Gorbachev alarm at Soviet echoes,” BBC (March 6, 2009). http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7927920.stm.

10

“A Just Russia” was originally a merger of three parties: Rodina (Fatherland Party), Pensionery (Pensioners’ Party), and Zhizn (Russian Party of Life, led by Sergey Mironov, chairman of the Federation Council, the Russian Upper House). The Rodina party, led by Dmitry Rogozin, was the most important of the three: it got 9 percent of the votes in the legislative elections of 2003. Rodina was barred from the elections for the Moscow City Duma in 2005 for inciting racial hatred after it had broadcasted ads with the slogan “clear our city of trash,” showing a group of Caucasian people littering a park with watermelon rinds. Its xenophobic tradition seems to have been taken over by its successor, A Just Russia, which was accused by SOVA-Center, a Russian NGO, of having three anti-Semites on its list of candidates for the State Duma. One of them, Yury Lopusov, a leader of the youth movement Pobeda, quoted Hitler’s Mein Kampf in an interview published on the party’s website. (Cf. “‘Spravedlivaya Rossiya’ beret antisemitov, rogozintsev i lubiteley ‘Mein Kampf,’” (A Just Russia is welcoming anti-Semites, Rogozin adepts and admirers of ‘Mein Kampf’), SOVA-Center (September 24, 2007). http://xeno.sova-center.ru/45A29F2/9DF6F26. In 2006 Dmitry Rogozin resigned as party leader of Rodina. His appointment in January 2008 to the important post of ambassador to NATO was a sign of his excellent relationship with Putin.

11

The Gini coefficient, which measures the inequality in a country (0 = total equality and 1 = total inequality) was on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union 0.29. In 2006 it had risen to 0.41—which was above the average of the EU.

12

The Moscow Times (October 30, 2006).

13

Stuart D. Goldman, “Russia’s 2008 Presidential Succession,” CRS Report for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2008), 2. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL34392.pdf.

14

Goldman, “Russia’s 2008 Presidential Succession.”

15

Anna Politkovskaya, Putin’s Russia (London: The Harvill Press, 2004), 282–283.

16

Primakov, Le monde sans la Russie? À quoi conduit la myopie politique? 111. Primakov also criticized the fact that in the Federation Council “one could even find individuals with a criminal past or present.”

17

Cf. Anatoly G. Vishnevsky, Russkiy ili Prusskiy? Razmyshleniya perekhodnogo vremeni (Moscow: Izdatelskiy dom GU VShE, 2005), 325: “The history of the emergence of the LDPR is surrounded by rumours according to which this party would be a creation of the KGB.” Cf. also Dimitri K. Simes and Paul J. Saunders, “The Kremlin Begs to Differ,” The National Interest no. 104 (November/December 2009), 42.

18

Owen Matthews, “Moscow’s Phoney Liberal,” Newsweek (February 26, 2010).

19

The party program can be found at http://www.patriot-rus.ru/#partyProgramm.

20

“Attacks of the Clones,” The Economist (March 19, 2011).

21

Politkovskaya, Putin’s Russia, 282.

22

Cf. Roland Oliphant, “Another Blow to Russian Democracy,” Russia Profile (October 13, 2009). According to Oliphant, “VTsIOM’s General Director Valery Fyodorov tried to anticipate the discrepancy in a press release, citing the experimental use of SMS technology and saying that such differences are ‘normal,’ because ‘the goal of the exit poll is not to check the work of electoral commissions, but to capture the general trends of the vote and report them to the public as soon as possible.’” “That may be so,” wrote Oliphant, “but a 20 percent margin of error is well beyond the generally accepted standard, as some commentators have already pointed out.” In the exit polls the Communist Party got 17.7 percent, Yabloko got 13.6 percent, and A Just Russia 8.4 percent. The two last parties were above the 7 percent hurdle and should, normally, have been represented in the city council. Cf. also “Oppozitsiya budet protestovat protiv itogov vyborov v Mosgordumu,” Newsru.com (October 16, 2009).

23

Oliphant, “Another Blow to Russian Democracy.”

24

Mikhai Tulsky, “Falsifikatsii: narusheniya i vbrosy v tsifrach i faktakh,” Novoe Vremya no. 37 (October 19, 2009).

25

“Mikhail Gorbachev: Na glazakh u vsekh vybory prevratili v nasmeshku nad ludmi,” Novaya Gazeta no. 116 (October 19, 2009).

26

“Regional Elections Go According to the Kremlin’s Script,” RFE/RL Newsline (October 12, 2009). http://www.rferl.org/articleprintview/1849659.html.

27

According to Gazeta these elections were no cleaner compared with those of October 2009. Pressure was exerted on state-sector workers. There was also manipulation of absentee voting and early voting. (Cf. Kynev, Aleksandr. “Preodolevaya Vertikal,” Gazeta (March 15, 2010).)

28

Julia Ioffe, “A Happy Defeat for the Kremlin,” Foreign Policy (March 16, 2010).

29

Robert Coalson, “Victory in Defeat,” RFE/RL (March 15, 2010).

30

There is a Russian joke that the only political alternation the country has known is between bald and not bald leaders. This is, indeed, striking, if one considers the following succession: tsar Nicholas II–Lenin (bald)–Stalin–Khrushchev (bald)–Brezhnev–Andropov (bald)–Chernenko–Gorbachev (bald)–Yeltsin–Putin (bald)–Medvedev–Putin (bald). As a matter of fact, this kind of alternation worked well over the last century.

31

It was the result of a Kremlin-inspired merger of three parties: the liberal Union of Right Forces, Civilian Power, and the Democratic Party of Russia.

32

Yekatarina Vinokurova, “Yo-Partiya: Mikhail Prokhorov gotov vozglavit ‘Pravoe Delo,’” Gazeta.ru (May 16, 2011).

33

Maria-Luisa Tirmaste and Natalya Bashlykova, “Mikhailu Prokhorovu pora zanyatsya svoim delom,” Kommersant (September 16, 2011).

34

Pavel K. Baev, “Moscow Dithers over New Scandal and Forgets the Old Tragedy,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 8, no. 171 (September 19, 2011).

35

Cf. “Rogozin’s New Rodina Registered,” Moscow Times (August 22, 2011).

36

Cf. Robert Coalson, “United Russia, Putin Prepare For National Elections,” RFE/RL (May 12, 2011).

37

“Ignatov: Narodnoy front: modernizatsiya ‘Yedinoy Rossii,’” Yedinaya Rossiya ofitsialnyy sait partii (May 10, 2011).

38

Andrey Kolesnikov, “Tea with Putin-2,” Novaya Gazeta (May 12, 2011).

39

Cf. Ilya Kharlamov, “Court Refuses to Register Russia’s PARNAS Party,” The Voice of Russia (June 23, 2011).

40

Cf. Jadwiga Rogoza, “The Kremlin’s New Political Project,” Eastweek, Centre for Eastern Studies (March 20, 2013).

41

“All-Russia People’s Front Organising Committees to Be Created in All Regions by May 20,” Itar Tass (May 6, 2013).

42

“Putin izbran liderom Fronta,” Interfaks (June 12, 2013).

43

“Surkov and Prokhorov Spin Election,” Moscow Times (December 7, 2011).

44

Julia Smirnova,“Wie Russlands patriotische Kosaken Moskau erobern,” Die Welt (November 28, 2012).

45

“Medvedev Invites Opposition to Speak,” RIA Novosti (March 27, 2013).

46

Cf. Aleksandra Samarina and Ivan Rodin, “Partiyno-politicheskiy modern,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta (April 7, 2010).

47

Emilio Gentile, Qu’est-ce que le fascisme? Histoire et interprétation (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 41.

48

Renzo De Felice, Brève histoire du fascisme (Paris: Éditions Audibert, 2002), 46.

49

De Felice, Brève histoire du fascisme, 46.

50

Possibly different clans are behind the launch of different pro-Kremlin parties. According to Philip P. Pan, Dmitry Medvedev was behind the launch of Pravoe Delo (The Right Cause), on February 18, 2009. The core of this new party was formed by a former liberal opposition party, the Union of Right Forces, which had been convinced by Vladislav Surkov to transform itself in a pro-Kremlin party. Leonid Gozman, one of the leaders of The Right Cause, “said he considered the effort an attempt by Medvedev to build a base of support.” But he immediately added that “he saw no serious differences between Medvedev’s and Putin’s policies.” (Philip P. Pan, “Stepping Out From Putin’s Shadow,” The Washington Post (February 9, 2009).)

51

Roy Medvedev seemed to anticipate this scenario in a biography of Dmitry Medvedev. “[T]he power question in Russia has been resolved,” he wrote, “and not only for the next four years. One can say with certainty that this question has also been resolved for the next twelve [years], and, maybe, even more.” (Cf. Roy Medvedev, Dmitry Medvedev: Prezident Rossiyskoy Federatsii (Moscow: Vremya, 2008), 5.) That President Dmitry Medvedev was ready to play a subservient role in his relationship with his future prime minister was evident in the words he spoke before being elected: “As the President said, I will work with the government, according to its wishes, like clockwork. I am a man… who worked with the President for 17 years” (ibid.). Medvedev was exactly the kind of president Prime Minister Putin needed.

52

This scenario was predicted by Mikhail Kasyanov, who served as Putin’s prime minister for almost four years until 2004, but has since fallen out with the leadership and now heads an opposition party. “I am convinced,” said Kasyanov in 2009, “that Putin will run in 2012 for two six-year terms.” “Putin’s bid,” he added, “[is] to become the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Stalin.” (Conor Humphries, “Russian Ex-PM Says Putin Will Rule to 2024,” Reuters (September 25, 2009).)

1

Almost until the demise of the Soviet Union, Russia (then called RSFSR), unlike the other fourteen Soviet republics, did not have its own Communist Party, but fell directly under the CPSU. It was only in June 1990 that on the initiative of conservative circles inside the CPSU, a Communist Party of Russia was constituted. After the 1991 August putsch this party was banned, together with the CPSU and the local parties in the other republics. The party was refounded in February 1993 under the name Communist Party of the Russian Federation. (Cf. A. Shlyapuzhnikov and A. Yolkin, Est takie partii: putevoditel izbiratelya (Moscow: Panorama, 2008), 67–68.)

2

Stephen D. Shenfield, Russian Fascism: Tradition, Tendencies, Movements (New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2001), 51.

3

Quoted in Shenfield, Russian Fascism, 51.

4

Cf. Aleksandr Verkhovsky and Galina Kozhevnikova, Radikalnyy russkiy natsionalizm: struktury, idei, litsa (Moscow: SOVA, 2009), 25.

5

Cf. “Ksenofobnye kandidaty KPRF na Moskovskikh munitsipalnykh vyborakh,” SOVA (February 22, 2008). http://xeno.sova-center.ru/29481C8/AA109CD.

6

Gennady Zyuganov, My Russia: The Political Autobiography of Gennady Zyuganov (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 3.

7

Nicole J. Jackson, Russian Foreign Policy and the CIS: Theories, Debates and Actions (London: Routledge, 2003), 40.

8

Marcel H. Van Herpen, Putinism: The Slow Rise of a Radical Right Regime in Russia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 126.

9

CPRF Platform in Election Platform of Political Parties Participating in the Elections for State Duma, Moscow, International Republican Institute, (December 6, 1995), 44. (Quoted in Jackson, Russian Foreign Policy and the CIS, 41.)

10

Cf. Andreas Umland, “Toward an Uncivil Society? Contextualizing the Recent Decline of Extremely Right-Wing Parties in Russia,” WCFIA Working Paper 02–03 (Boston: Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 2002). http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/555__Toward_An_Uncivil_Society.pdf.

Cf. also Andreas Umland, “Rechtsekstremes Engagement jenseits von Parteien: Vorkriegsdeutschland und Russland im Vergleich,” Forschungsjournal Neue Soziale Bewegungen, Heft 4 (December 2008), 63–66.

11

Umland, “Toward an Uncivil Society?” 10.

12

Umland, “Toward an Uncivil Society?” 10.

13

Umland, “Toward an Uncivil Society?” 10–11.

14

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 76.

15

Andreas Umland, “Rechtsekstremes Engagement jenseits von Parteien,” 65.

16

Marlène Laruelle, “Inside and Around the Kremlin’s Black Box: The New Nationalist Think Tanks in Russia,” Stockholm Paper (Stockholm: Institute for Security & Development Policy, 2009), 19.

17

Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky, The Corporation: Russia and the KGB in the Age of Putin (New York: Encounter Books, 2008), 153. The authors added: “Then, in 2001, in response to a question about how he envisioned the Russia of 2010, he said: ‘We will be happy.’ If by ‘we’ Putin meant the people who would be in power in Russia, then he was telling the truth.”

18

Gregory L. Freeze, Russia: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 494.

19

“Putin: Ideologiey v Rossii dolzhen stat patriotism,” Gazeta (July 17, 2003).

20

“Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin: Nam nuzhno grazhdanskoe obshchestvo, pronizannoe patriotizmom.” http://www.lawmix.ru/content.php?id=182.

21

Putin, Vladimir. “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta (December 30, 1999). http://www.ng.ru/printed/3681.

22

Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 5.

23

Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 5.

24

Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 6.

25

Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 5.

26

Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 6.

27

Sergei Medvedev, “The Role of International Regimes in Promoting Democratic Institutions: The Case of NATO and Russia,” NATO Research Fellowships 1994–1996 (Brussels: NATO, 1996). http://www.nato.int/acad/fellow/94-96/medvedev/02.htm.

28

Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 6.

29

John Steinbeck, A Russian Journal, with photographs by Robert Capa (London: Penguin, 2000), 26. Steinbeck’s Journal is a record of a forty-day trip to the Soviet Union between July 31 and mid-September 1947.

30

Vladimir Putin, “Poslanie Federalnomu Sobraniyu Rossiyskoy Federatsii” (July 8, 2000). http://archive.kremlin.ru/text/appears/2000/07/28782.shtml.

31

Putin, “Poslanie Federalnomu Sobraniyu Rossiyskoy Federatsii,” 4.

32

Putin, “Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheletii,” 7.

33

Putin, “Poslanie Federalnomu Sobraniyu Rossiyskoy Federatsii,” 4.

34

Roger Griffin, wanting to define the essence of fascist systems, came up with the following definition of the “fascist minimum”: “Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythical core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.” Ideas of national rebirth (palingenesis) were, according to him, essential for fascist movements. (Cf. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993), 26. See also Marcel H. Van Herpen, Putinism: The Slow Rise of a Radical Right Regime in Russia, Part II: The Specter of a Fascist Russia (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).)

35

Aleksandr Yeliseev, “Slavyanofil v Kremle,” Politicheskiy Klass 12, no. 60 (December 2009), 69–70.

36

The members were not the only ones who were “gray.” Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow and himself one of the founders of United Russia, said in an interview, “the leaders of that party are weak and gray in terms of their potential—organizationally, intellectually, and so on…. [Duma speaker] Boris Gryzlov, as the boss of the party—not the leader, but the boss—is a gray personality, a person who has always been a servant and who is incapable of having an independent position.” (Cf. “Moscow’s Bitter Ex-Boss Luzhkov Lashes Out at Kremlin, Calls United Russia ‘Shameful,’” RFE/RL (October 22, 2011).)

37

Vladimir Putin, “Zachem ya vozglavil spisok ‘Edinoy Rossii’” (November 13, 2007). http://www.kreml.org/media/165463628?mode=print.

38

Putin, “Zachem ya vozglavil spisok ‘Edinoy Rossii.’”

39

Cf. Paul Goble, “United Russia Party Now has 40,000 Apparatchiks, Moscow Analyst Says,” Window on Russia (May 10, 2010).

40

Laruelle, “Inside and Around the Kremlin’s Black Box,” 5.

41

Laruelle, “Inside and Around the Kremlin’s Black Box,” 7.

42

“Boris Gryzlov: u ‘Edinoy Rossii krylev ne budet,’” Russkaya Liniya (April, 23, 2005).

43

“Boris Gryzlov: u ‘Edinoy Rossii krylev ne budet.’”

44

Robert Service, The Penguin History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century (London: Penguin, 2009), 127.

45

“Boris Gryzlov: u ‘Edinoy Rossii krylev ne budet.’”

46

Konstantin Kosachev, “Why Would a Bear Need Wings?” Russia in Global Affairs (June 20, 2005).

47

Quoted in Pavel Zakharov, “Yedinaya Rossiya sozdaet Russkiy proekt,” KM.RU (February 5, 2007).

48

“Yedinorusskiy proekt,” Obshchaya Gazeta.ru (February 5, 2007).

49

Aleksandra Samarina, Natalia Kostenko, and Ivan Rodin, “Yedinaya Rossiya razdelitsya na techeniya,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta (November 2, 2007).

50

Konstantin Remchukov, “Liberalno-konservativnoe videnie budushchego Rossii,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta (November 18, 2005).

51

Remchukov, “Liberalno-konservativnoe videnie budushchego Rossii.”

52

Lev Sigal, “Predlozheniya k platforme rossiyskogo sotsialnogo konservatizma,” Tsentr sotsialno-konservativnoy politiki. http://www.cscp.ru/about/manifest/41/.

53

“Politicheskaya Deklaratsiya Gosudarstvenno-Patrioticheskiy Klub Vserossiyskoy politicheskoy partii ‘Edinaya Rossiya,’” 1. http://www.gpclub.ru/news/0x1x2_p.html.

54

“Politicheskaya Deklaratsiya Gosudarstvenno-Patrioticheskiy Klub,” 2.

55

“Politicheskaya Deklaratsiya Gosudarstvenno-Patrioticheskiy Klub,” 4.

56

Laruelle, “Inside and Around the Kremlin’s Black Box,” 58.

57

Aleksandr Dugin, “The Post-Liberal Era in Russia.” http://arctogaia.com/public/eng/.

1

Cf. “Istoriya voprosa: Saga o ‘Putinjugende,’” NEWSru.com (January 14, 2005).

2

Novaya Gazeta of September 23, 2002. Quoted in “Istoriya voprosa: Saga o ‘Putinjugende.’”

3

Politkovskaya, Putin’s Russia (London: The Harvill Press, 2004), 282–283.

4

Fedor Yermolov, “Free Speech and the Attack on Vladimir Sorokin” (August 13, 2002). Published on Sorokin’s website. http://www.srkn.ru/criticism/yermolov.shtml.

5

Yermolov, “Free Speech and the Attack on Vladimir Sorokin.”

6

However, it would not take long before the movement itself would be implicated in a—this time real—mini pornographic scandal, when it came out that a leading figure of the Saint Petersburg branch produced pornographic cassettes, which he sold on the market. This scandal further tarnished the already tainted reputation of the movement. (Cf. “Lider ‘Idushchikh Vmeste’ poiman na rasprostranenii pornografii,” NEWSru.com (November 4, 2004).)

7

“Kreml gotovit novyy molodezhnyy proekt na zamenu ‘Idushchim Vmeste.’” NEWSru.com (February 21, 2005).

8

Some texts by Gene Sharp, such as “The Politics of Nonviolent Action,” can be freely downloaded from the website of the Albert Einstein Institution. http://www.aeinstein.org.

9

According to Marie Jégo, Moscow correspondent for Le Monde, from 2008 to late 2010 the Nashi received—in addition to other gifts—11.5 million euros directly from the Kremlin. (Marie Jégo, “Fascistes ou fans de foot?” Le Monde (December 24, 2010).) The Kremlin has repeatedly accused Western NGOs and governments of having organized and financed the opposition groups that were active in the color revolutions. However, according to Parol Demes and Joerg Forbrig this support was rather restricted. In Ukraine “the Pora campaign was only sparsely supported by international donors. A mere $130,000 was distributed in foreign funding: by the Canadian International Development Agency, Freedom House, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States. By comparison, Pora’s total financing was $1.56 million. In-kind contributions in the form of free publications, communications, and transportation exceeded an estimated $6.5 million.” (Parol Demes and Joerg Forbrig, “Pora: ‘It’s Time’ for Democracy in Ukraine,” in Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine’s Democratic Breakthrough, eds. Anders Åslund and Michael McFaul (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006), 97–98.)

10

Politkovskaya, A Russian Diary, 270–271.

11

Charles Clover, “‘Managed Nationalism’ Turns Nasty for Putin,” Financial Times (December 23, 2010).

12

Official website of the Nashi (in Russian). http://www.nashi.su.

13

Quoted in John Follett, “Russia’s Past Mobilised to Shape the Present,” Herald Scotland (October 16, 2009).

14

Tony Halpin, “Winning Young Hearts and Minds: Putin’s Strategy for a New Superpower,” The Times (July 25, 2007).

15

In his famous Ascension Day Speech of May 1927 Mussolini exhorted Italians to increase the population from 40 million to 60 million in twenty-five years. Italian women were called upon to have a dozen children each. Pro-natalist measures included a tax on bachelors, tax exemptions for large families, and restrictions on emigration. (Cf. Carl Ipsen, Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 173–174.)

16

Luke Harding, “Welcome to Putin’s Summer Camp,” The Guardian (July 24, 2008).

17

Roland Oliphant, “Seliger Camp’s Growing Pains,” Moscow News (July 20, 2009).

18

Oliphant, “Seliger Camp’s Growing Pains.”

19

Halford J. MacKinder, an English geopolitician, developed the theory of a Eurasian heartland for the first time in a paper “The Geographical Pivot of History” (1904). According to him the power that dominated this heartland would dominate the world, a theory that became very popular in Russia. (Cf. Halford J. MacKinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” in Democratic Ideals and Reality, ed. Halford J. MacKinder (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1996), 175–193.)

20

Mark Franchetti, “Putin’s Fanatical Youth Brigade Targets Britain,” The Sunday Times (September 2, 2007).

21

“Vashe Velichestvo, pishet Vam kollektiv russkikh druzey” (Your Majesty, A Collective of Russian Friends Writes to You), Kommersant (December 6, 2007). When, on March 28, 2008, the Foreign Office announced that Brenton would be replaced by Anne Pringle, former ambassador to the Czech Republic, there was speculation on the website of Robert Amsterdam, Khodorkovsky’s lawyer, that this was done under pressure from the British energy giant BP that had billions of dollars invested in projects in Russia. http://www.robertamsterdam.com/2008/03/the_departure_of_uk_ambassador.htm.

However, the Foreign Office “rejected speculation the change was due to worsening ties between the two countries” (Cf. “Update 1: Britain names Russian envoy, hopes for better ties,” Reuters (March 28, 2008).)

22

Estonian Review 17, no. 16–17 (April 18–May 2, 2007), 3.

23

Even during these Russian attacks the Estonian government had the diplomatic correctness to receive, on April 30, a delegation from the Russian State Duma to discuss the events around the removal of the war memorial. This delegation was headed by the former FSB director Nikolay Kovalyov, who, on his arrival in Tallinn, bluntly called for the immediate resignation of the Estonian government—a more than ill-mannered intervention in the internal affairs of a neighboring state that awoke memories of a not so distant past. (Cf. Victor Yasmann, “Monument Dispute with Estonia Gets Dirty,” RFE/RL (May 8, 2007). http://www.rferl.org/articleprintview/1347550.html.

24

Quoted in Ronald D. Asmus, A Little War That Shook the World: Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 246.

25

The attacks were distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in which hundreds of thousands of “zombie” computers overwhelm the target network. According to an Estonian spokesperson the attack on Estonia originated in 178 countries. The Kremlin denied being implicated in the cyber attacks. Afterward, however, direct Russian implication was conceded through two incidents. The first involved Duma deputy and Kremlin pundit Sergei Markov, who, on March 3, 2009, in a panel discussion with American experts on information warfare, said: “About the cyber-attacks on Estonia… don’t worry, that attack was carried out by my assistant. I won’t tell you his name, because then he might not be able to get visas.” The assistant was thought to have been in “one of the unrecognized republics.” Later it was stated that he was in the Moldovan breakaway province of Transnistria—outside the territory of Russia. (Cf. “Sergei Markov Says He Knows Who Started the Estonia Cyber War,” Intelfusion (March 6, 2009).) http://www.intelfusion.net/wordpress/?p=544.

The name of this assistant was revealed later. It would have been Konstantin Goloskokov, a Nashi commissar. He told the Financial Times “that he and some associates had launched the attack.” (Charles Clover, “Kremlin-backed Group Behind Estonia Cyber Blitz,” The Financial Times (March 11, 2009).) Markov wanted to present the unprecedented massive cyber attacks on the government of a NATO member state as a kind of innocent “naughty boys” prank that, apparently, was organized from outside Russia. One might confidently assume, however, that this was an attempt at active disinformation aimed at hiding the likely real instigators of the attack: the Russian secret services FSB, GRU, and/or the Russian army.

26

Cf. Evgeny Morozov, “What Do They Teach at the ‘Kremlin’s School of Bloggers’?” Foreign Policy (May 26, 2009).

27

In 2005 the movement distributed a brochure titled “Program for Combating Fascism” in secondary schools and universities. The “fascists” named in the brochure included Ilya Yashin, the leader of the liberal Yabloko youth organization; Yukos shareholder Leonid Nevzlin; and the democratic opposition leaders Garry Kasparov and Vladimir Ryzhkov. It is telling that Dmitry Rogozin, who at that time was chairman of the nationalist Rodina party and, maybe, the only representative of the extreme right on this list, was later appointed ambassador to NATO by Putin. (Cf. Oleg Kashin and Yuliya Taratuta, “Obyknovennyy antifashizm,” Kommersant (May 12, 2005).)

28

Shaun Walker, “Pro-Kremlin Youth Group Blamed for Attacking Paper,” The Independent (March 6, 2008). http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/prokremlin-youth-group-blamed-for-attacking-paper-792074.html.

29

Dmitry Sidorov, “A Mafia-Style Message on Russian Free Speech,” Forbes (April 7, 2009). http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/07/donkey-ears-press-freedom-opinions-contributors-nashi-medvedev.html.

30

In his article Podrabinek attacked Soviet veterans. “Your fatherland,” he wrote, “is not Russia. Your fatherland is the Soviet Union. You are Soviet veterans, and your country, thank god, has not existed for eighteen years. The Soviet Union is not at all the country that you described in the school books and your liar press. The Soviet Union—it is not only political leaders, Stakhanov workers, communist superproductive workers, and cosmonauts. The Soviet Union—it is also peasant rebellions, victims of the collectivization and the Holodomor, hundreds of thousands of innocent people who are shot in the basements of the Cheka and millions who are tortured to death in the Gulag…. The Soviet Union—it is permanent confinement in psychiatric hospitals for dissidents, treacherous murders, and in countless Gulag cemeteries the anonymous graves of my friends, the political prisoners who did not live to see our freedom.” (Alexander Podrabinek, “Kak antisovetchik antisovetchikam,” Ezhednevnyy Zhurnal (September 21, 2009).)

31

Cf. Follett, “Russia’s Past Mobilized to Shape the Present.”

32

These papers were the British The Independent, the French Le Monde and Le Journal du Dimanche, and the German Frankfurter Rundschau. The Nashi were demanding 500,000 rubles (11,500 euro) in damages from each of the newspapers. The group’s lawyer, Sergey Zhorin, confirmed on October 27, 2009, that four lawsuits had been filed at Moscow’s Savelyovsky District Court. (Cf. “Pro-Putin Youth Group Sues European Newspapers,” Euranet (October 27, 2009).) The first hearing took place on December 7, 2009. The correspondent of Le Monde, Marie Jégo, present at the hearing, said: “It is an opinion, it is not slander. To give your opinion is authorized by article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, signed by Russia in 1998.” (“‘Le Monde’ poursuivi par les Nachi,” Le Monde (December 9, 2009).) On April 21, 2010, the Court sentenced Le Journal du dimanche to pay the Nashi 250,000 rubles (6,400 euro), although the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, of which Russia is a member, had confirmed that the facts reported by the four papers, could, indeed, be described as harassment. (Alexandre Billette, “De jeunes nationalistes russes obtiennent la condamnation du ‘JDD,’” Le Monde, (April 24, 2010).) Although the probability that the sentence would be carried out in France was extremely low, the Nashi felt they had won an important propaganda victory in their home country.

33

“Kashin-Yakemenko Feud Heats Up,” seansrussiablog.org (March 28, 2011).

34

Cf. Tony Halpin, “Vladimir Putin’s Youth Army Nashi Loses Purpose,” The Times (July 22, 2008). Another British journalist, The Guardian’s Luke Harding, came to a similar conclusion two days later, when he wrote: “This year’s camp, the fourth, is smaller than last year’s—a sign that Nashi’s days may be numbered.” (Luke Harding, “Welcome to Putin’s summer camp,” The Guardian (July 24, 2008).)

35

Cf. John Wendle, “Children’s Movement Fails to Draw Kids,” Moscow Times (December 7, 2007).

36

Quoted in Chloe Arnold, “Russia: New ‘Teddy Bears’ Have Overtones of Soviet-Era Youth Groups,” RFE/RL (February 15, 2008).

37

Jégo, “Fascistes ou fans de foot?”

38

Anna Nemtsova, “Fear and Loathing in Moscow,” Newsweek (October 24, 2008).

39

“Batting a Thousand,” Kommersant (August 31, 2005).

40

Cf. Tom Balmforth, “Moscow Beefs Up Police Presence Amid Opposition, Pro-Kremlin Rallies,” RFE/RL (December 6, 2011).

41

They were each paid between 200 and 500 rubles (respectively approximately €5 and €12.50). Cf. Daisy Sindelar, “How Many Demonstrated For The Kremlin? And How Willing Were They?” RFE/RL (December 13, 2011). The correspondent of the French Figaro reported having “witnessed similarly a scene at the end of the meeting where the organizers of the demonstration handed out bills of 100 rubles to adolescents who were queuing up, waiting for their payment.” (Pierre Avril, “Les manifestants sur commande de Russie unie,” Le Figaro (December 14, 2011).)

42

Cf. Novaya Gazeta no. 18 (March 17, 2008).

43

Daniil Eisenstadt, “Vertikal Druzhina RF,” Gazeta (August 3, 2009). http://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2009/08/03_a_3231369.shtml.

44

The full name of the Association is Vserossiyskaya Assotsiatsiya Druzhin, abbreviated VAD.

45

“Nashi Looks to Expand Youth Militia,” Official Russia (August 11, 2009). http://officialrussia.com/?p=6379.

46

“Nashi Looks to Expand Youth Militia.”

47

Cf. Lev Davydov, “Provoslavnye druzhiny ispugali pravozashchitnikov,” Utro.ru (November 21, 2008).

48

“MVD obeshchaut rassmotret initiativu Tserkvi o sozdanii pravoslavnykh narodnykh druzhin,” Interfax (November 20, 2008).

49

Davydov, “Pravoslavnye druzhiny ispugali pravozashchitnikov.”

50

Peter Pomerantsev, “Putin’s God Squad,” Newsweek (September 10, 2012).

51

Pomerantsev, “Putin’s God Squad.”

52

Cf. Condoleezza Rice, “The Making of Soviet Strategy,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 652: “Many Bolsheviks were never completely satisfied with Trotsky’s Red Army, however. It was created as a temporary device in 1918, to be demobilized and replaced by the militia as quickly as possible after the Civil War.”

53

Cf. Darrell P. Hammer, “Law Enforcement, Social Control and the Withering of the State: Recent Soviet Experience,” Soviet Studies 14, no. 4 (April 1963), 379.

54

Boris Yakemenko, “Vernyy Put” (February 21, 2008). http://boris-yakemenko.livejournal.com/2011/02/21/.

55

“Sledstvie podtverdilo, chto glava Rosmolodozh osnoval firmu dlya banditov iz ’29-go kompleksa,’” Newsru.com (March 23, 2011).

56

The official name of the Soviet youth organization Komsomol was VLKSM = Vsesoyuznyy Leninskiy Kommunisticheskiy Soyuz Molodezhi (All-Union Leninist Communist Union of Youth).

57

Cathy Young, “Putin’s Young ‘Brownshirts,’” The Boston Globe (August 10, 2007).

58

Lilia Shevtsova, Russia: Lost in Transition, The Yeltsin and Putin Legacies (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2007), 282.

59

Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova, “Fascist Russia?” Newsweek (August 15, 2011).

60

Matthews and Nemtsova, “Fascist Russia?”

61

“Bolshe ne ‘Nashi,’” (no date), website of Rosmolodezh, http://www.rosmolodezh.ru/novoteka-rosmolodezh/1-novosti-rosmolodezh/1365-boshe-ne-nashi.html. Accessed May 27, 2013.

62

“Bolshe ne ‘Nashi.’”

63

“Bolshe ne ‘Nashi.’”

1

Cf. Shane O’Rourke, “From Region to Nation: The Don Cossacks 1870–1920,” in Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930, eds. Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatoliy Remnev (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 221.

2

Vladimir Sineokov, Kazachestvo i ego gosudarstvennoe znachenie (Paris: Prince Gortchakoff, 1928), 44.

3

Sineokov, Kazachestvo i ego gosudarstvennoe znachenie, 28.

4

O’Rourke, “From Region to Nation,” 232. O’Rourke wrote: “This was not a clinical exercise in removing inveterate opponents of the Soviet regime, but the wholesale slaughter of a people” (233).

5

Lester W. Grau, “The Cossack Brotherhood Reborn: A Political/Military Force in a Realm of Chaos,” Low Intensity Conflict & Law Enforcement 2, no. 3 (Winter 1993). http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/cossack/cossack.htm.

6

Grau, “The Cossack Brotherhood Reborn.”

7

Mark Galeotti, “The Cossacks: A Cross-Border Complication to Post-Soviet Eurasia,” IBRU Boundary and Security Bulletin (Summer 1995), 56.

8

Galeotti, “The Cossacks: A Cross-Border Complication to Post-Soviet Eurasia.”

9

Galeotti, “The Cossacks: A Cross-Border Complication to Post-Soviet Eurasia.”

10

Galeotti, Mark. “The Cossacks Are Coming (Maybe),” Moscow News (February 22, 2012).

11

Galeotti, “The Cossacks Are Coming (Maybe).”

12

Olga Dorokhina, “Kratkiy kurs istorii kazachestva,” Kommersant Vlast (November 19, 2012).

13

“Cossacks Return to State Service,” RIA Novosti (June 30, 2005).

14

“Cossacks Return to State Service.”

15

Marie Jégo, “Le renouveau cosaque,” Le Monde (February 3–4, 2013).

16

Vladimir Putin, “Being Strong: National Security Guarantees for Russia,” RT (February 20, 2012).

17

Olivia Kroth, “Moscow Police Shall Revive the Great Cossack Tradition,” Pravda (November 20, 2012).

18

Kroth, “Moscow Police Shall Revive the Great Cossack Tradition.”

19

Sergey Israpilov, “Rossii neobkhodimo ‘Novoe kazachestvo,’” Krasnoyarskoe Vremya (December 17, 2012).

20

Vladimir Putin, “Address to the Federal Assembly” (December 12, 2012).

21

Steven Eke, “Russia’s Cossacks Rise Again,” BBC News (August 9, 2007).

22

Eke, “Russia’s Cossacks Rise Again.”

23

“The Patriarch on the Cossacks” (October 14, 2009), speech by Patriarch Kirill at the session of the Council for Cossack Affairs under the President of the Russian Federation in Novocherkassk on October 14, 2009. http://www.fondkazachestva.org/patriarcheng.htm.

24

“The Patriarch on the Cossacks.”

25

Max Seddon, “Russia Restores Cossacks to Positions of Power,” Times of Israel (November 28, 2012).

26

Quoted in US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Resource Information Center (August 27, 1999).

27

“Georgia/Russia: Use of Rocket System Can Harm Civilians,” Human Rights Watch (August 12, 2008).

28

“Shashki nagolo: Donskie Kazaki gotovyatsya voevat v Yuznoy Osetii” (Swords drawn: Don Cossacks preparing themselves to fight in South Ossetia), Nezavisimaya Gazeta (August 6, 2008).

29

“The Cossacks Return,” StrategyPage.com (September 17, 2010).

30

“The Cossacks Return.”

31

“The Cossacks Return.”

32

Luke Harding, “Russia’s Cruel Intention,” The Guardian (September 1, 2008).

33

Israpilov, “Rossii neobkhodimo ‘Novoe kazachestvo.’”

34

Fatima Tlisova, “Kremlin Backing of Cossacks Heightens Tensions in the North Caucasus,” North Caucasus Analysis 9, no. 14 (April 10, 2008).

35

Tlisova, “Kremlin Backing of Cossacks Heightens Tensions in the North Caucasus.”

36

Quoted in Masha Lipman, “Putin’s Patriotism Lessons,” The New Yorker (September 24, 2012).

37

Lipman, “Putin’s Patriotism Lessons.”

38

Lipman, “Putin’s Patriotism Lessons.”

39

Olesya Gerasimenko, “Kazak: eto ne natsionalnost, eto rytsar pravoslaviya” (A Cossack: this is not a nationality, this is a knight of the Orthodox religion), Kommersant Vlast no. 46 (November 19, 2012).

40

Gerasimenko, “Kazak: eto ne natsionalnost, eto rytsar pravoslaviya.”

41

Dorokhina, “Kratkiy kurs istorii kazachestva.”

42

Kroth, “Moscow Police Shall Revive the Great Cossack Tradition.”

43

“Russia’s Cossacks Take on New Foes in Moscow: Beggars, Drunks and Illegally Parked Cars,” Associated Press (November 27, 2012).

44

“Cossacks Should Be Allowed to Flog Gays, Siberian Lawmaker Says,” Moscow News (July 5, 2013).

45

http://www.kazakirossii.ru.

46

Julia Smirnova, “Wie Russlands patriotische Kosaken Moskau erobern,” Die Welt (November 28, 2012).

47

Lyudmila Alexandrova, “Russian Cossacks Want to Have More Say in Russia’s Social and Political Life,” Itar-Tass (November 26, 2012).

48

Alexander Golts, “A Cossack Mafia in the Making,” Moscow Times (December 4, 2012).

49

Golts, “A Cossack Mafia in the Making.”

50

Golts, “A Cossack Mafia in the Making.”

1

George F. Kennan, “Russia: Seven Years Later,” in Memoirs 1925–1950, ed. George F. Kennan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), 521.

2

Kennan, “Russia: Seven Years Later,” 521–522.

3

Mr. X (George F. Kennan), “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 25, no. 4 (July 1947). This article was an elaboration of his “Long Telegram” of February 22, 1946, to the US Treasury Department. In this telegram he answered the question of the US Treasury to the US Embassy in Moscow why the Soviet Union did not support the recently founded World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In the telegram Kennan wrote that the Soviet Union was “impervious to the logic of reason,” but that it was “highly sensitive to the logic of force.”

4

Cf. Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (London: Vintage Books, 2010), 353.

5

Andreï Kozovoï, Les services secrets Russes: Des tsars à Poutine (Paris: Tallandier, 2010), 253.

6

J. Michael Waller, Secret Empire: The KGB in Russia Today (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 127.

7

Artyom Borovik, The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan (New York: Grove Press, 1990), 9.

8

Svetlana Savranskaya, ed., “The September 11th Sourcebooks, Volume II: Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War: The Soviet Experience in Afghanistan: Russian Documents and Memoirs,” National Security Archive (October 9, 2001), 1. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/soviet.html.

9

“Personal Memorandum, Andropov to Brezhnev, n.d. [early December 1979],” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 8–9, (Winter 1996–97), 159–60. In this memorandum Andropov wrote that “alarming information started to arrive about Amin’s secret activities, forewarning of a possible political shift to the West.” Andropov said to have been “contacted by [a] group of Afghan communists abroad.” He mentioned the name of Babrak Karmal, “who had worked out a plan for opposing Amin and creating new party and state organs. But Amin, as a preventive measure, had begun mass arrests of ‘suspect persons’ (300 people have been shot).” His conclusion was that the situation was urgent. “We have two battalions stationed in Kabul,” wrote Andropov. “It appears that this is entirely sufficient for a successful operation.” He added that “it would be wise to have a military group close to the border. In case of the deployment of military forces we could at the same time decide various questions pertaining to the liquidation of gangs.” The implementation of the given operation “would allow us to decide the question of defending the gains of the April revolution.”

10

Savranskaya, ed., “The September 11th Source Books, Volume II,” 5.

11

Thierry Wolton, Le KGB au pouvoir: Le système Poutine (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 24.

12

Alexander Lyakhovsky, The Tragedy and Valor of Afghan, translated by Svetlana Savranskaya (Moscow: GPI Iskon, 1995), 109–112. The author, Major General Lyakhovsky, served during the war in Afghanistan as assistant to General V. Varennikov, commander of the Operative Group of the Defense Ministry. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/.

13

Georgy M. Kornienko, The Cold War: Testimony of a Participant, translated by Svetlana Savranskaya (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnie otnosheniya, 1994), 193. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/.

14

Savranskaya, ed., “The September 11th Sourcebooks Volume II,” 2–3.

15

Cf. Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism, 389–390: “At the beginning of that month [July] a two-day Politburo meeting found Brezhnev and Kosygin still favouring intense pressure on Dubček—to remove the people in high office whom the Soviet leadership most objected to, and to crack down on the mass media—whereas several others already favoured the use of force. They included KGB chairman Yury Andropov and the Central Committee secretary (later to be minister of defense) who supervised the military and military industry, Dmitry Ustinov.”

16

Ion Mihai Pacepa, “No Peter the Great: Vladimir Putin is in the Andropov Mold,” National Review Online (September 20, 2004).

17

Cf. Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Inside the Kremlin (London: W.H. Allen & Co Plc., 1988), 246: “We know, then, where to assign responsibility for that occupation [of Afghanistan]. Although it took place in the last phase of the Brezhnev era, the authorship of that deed must be ascribed to the empire’s regent, Andropov (by that time all-powerful), his supporters, and others he could count on.”

18

Cf. Vladimir Fédorovski, Le Fantôme de Staline (Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2007), 227. Before he died Andropov had informed his entourage that he wanted Gorbachev to succeed him as general secretary. The politburo, however, ignored Andropov’s wish and chose, after four days of deliberations, the seventy-three-year-old Chernenko. Andropov’s preference for Gorbachev, however, had nothing to do with Andropov’s supposed “liberal” or “democratic” leanings. Andropov wanted economic reforms (such as he had witnessed in Kadar’s Hungary), while maintaining a repressive political regime. Gorbachev would later remain rather evasive about his close relationship with the former KGB chief. In his conversations with the Czech dissident (and study friend) Zdenĕk Mlynář he called Andropov “a very interesting and complex personality…. Andropov definitely wanted to start making changes, …but there were certain bounds he could not go beyond; he was too deeply entrenched in his own past experience—it held him firmly in its grasp.” (Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdenĕk Mlynář, Conversations with Gorbachev on Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 50.)

19

Borovik, The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan, 14.

20

The related Chechens and Ingushes lived together in the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic. When the Ingush, who constituted a minority, did not want to follow the Chechens on the road toward independence, the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation founded, in June 1992, the Republic of Ingushetia.

21

John B. Dunlop quotes the testimony of one of the victims, a Chechen communist, as follows: “Packed in overcrowded cattle cars, without light or water, we spent almost a month heading to an unknown destination…. Typhus broke out. No treatment was available…. The dead were buried in snow.” According to Dunlop, “the local populace of settlements at which the special trains stopped were strictly forbidden to assist the dying by giving them water or medicine. In some cars, 50 percent of the imprisoned Chechens and Ingush were said to have perished.” (John B. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 68.)

22

Eric D. Weitz, “Racial Politics without the Concept: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002), 3.

23

Weitz, “Racial Politics Without the Concept,” 3.

24

Georgi Derluguian, “Introduction,” in Anna Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches of Chechnya (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 20.

25

Cf. Vicken Cheterian, War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia’s Troubled Frontier (London: Hurst & Company, 2008), 258.

26

John B. Dunlop, “‘Storm in Moscow’: A Plan of the Yeltsin ‘Family’ to Destabilize Russia,” Project on Systemic Change and International Security in Russia and the New States of Eurasia, The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (October 8, 2004), 2.

27

Frederick C. Cuny, “Killing Chechnya,” New York Review of Books (April 6, 1995).

28

Maj. Gregory J. Celestan, “Wounded Bear: The Ongoing Russian Military Operation in Chechnya,” Foreign Military Studies Office Publications (August 1996). http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/wounded/wounded.htm.

29

David Hoffman, “Yeltsin Says a 2nd Term Depends on Ending War; Chernomyrdin Named to Seek Chechnya Settlement,” The Washington Post (February 9, 1996).

30

Thomas de Waal, “Introduction,” in Anna Politkovskaya, A Dirty War, (London: The Harvill Press, 2007), xiii–xiv.

31

S. Kovalyov, “Neskolko replik po povodu chechenskogo konflikta,” in Pravovye aspekty Chechenskogo krizisa: Materialy seminara, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al. (Moscow: Memorial, 1995), 82.

32

M. Polyakova, “Kriminalnye aspekty voennykh sobytiy v Chechne,” in Pravovye aspekty, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al., 44.

33

Polyakova, “Kriminalnye aspekty voennykh sobytiy v Chechne,” 44–45.

34

Kovalyov, “Summary,” in Pravovye aspekty, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al., 179.

35

Kovalyov, “Neskolko replik po povodu chechenskogo konflikta,” 83.

36

Kovalyov, “Summary,” in Pravovye aspekty, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al., 176. Secession was not an option, neither in Imperial Russia nor in the Soviet Union. This fact was recognized by Yeltsin. “The Soviet empire,” he wrote, “spanning one-sixth of the earth’s surface, was built over the course of many years according, without the shadow of a doubt, to an ironclad plan. The internal contradictions were ignored. No one proposed a scenario that allowed the empire to abandon some of its territories or yield to the formation of new states. They didn’t even think of it.” (Boris Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), 53). The Chechen case was certainly not helped by the inappropriate comparison made by US President Bill Clinton during a press conference in Moscow in April 1996, when Clinton said: “I would remind you that we once had a civil war in our country, in which we lost on a per capita basis far more people than we lost in any of the wars of the twentieth century, over the proposition that Abraham Lincoln gave his life for, that no state had a right to withdrawal from our Union.” (Quoted in Thomas de Waal, “The Chechen Conflict and the Outside World,” Crimes of War Project (April 18, 2003).) http://www.crimesofwar.org/chechnya-mag/chech-waal.html.

37

Sergey Kovalyov stands out as a unique personality in post-Soviet politics. Born in 1930, he studied biology, was arrested as a dissident in 1974, and was sent for seven years to a labor camp in the Perm region. This was followed by an exile of three years. In 1990 he was elected to the Supreme Soviet (Parliament) of the Soviet Union, and from 1993 he was a member of the State Duma. As a founder and cochairman of the human rights organization Memorial he was appointed in 1994 by Yeltsin to become chairman of the Presidential Human Rights Commission. He resigned in 1996 because of the war in Chechnya.

38

Kovalyov, “Summary,” in Pravovye aspekty, eds. L. I. Bogoraz et al., 180.

39

Kovalyov, “Neskolko replik po povodu chechenskogo konflikta,” 78.

40

Interesting in this context are Elazar Barkan’s remarks on the important role apologies play in improving the relations between nations. Barkan wrote that “the new international emphasis on morality has been characterized not only by accusing other countries of human rights abuses but also by self-examination. The leaders of the policies of a new internationalism—Clinton, Blair, Chirac, and Schröder—all have previously apologized and repented for gross historical crimes in their own countries and for policies that ignored human rights. These actions did not wipe the slate clean, nor… were they a total novelty or unprecedented. Yet the dramatic shift produced a new scale: Moral issues came to dominate public attention and political issues and displayed the willingness of nations to embrace their own guilt. This national self-reflexivity is the new guilt of nations.” (Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustice (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), xvii.) Although I would prefer to speak of “responsibility of nations” instead of “guilt of nations” (the latter term is too “psychological” and comes too close to collective guilt), I agree with Barkan when he writes that the “interaction between perpetrator and victim is a new form of political negotiation that enables the rewriting of memory and historical identity in ways that both can share” (viii).

41

Quoted in Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, 335. Yeltsin added: “But the guilt syndrome persists. There is a great deal of misunderstanding about Chechnya, even in Russia itself. But more often it’s the West trying to instill this feeling of guilt in us” (ibid.). Yeltsin, tellingly, referred to a guilt syndrome, qualifying guilt feelings as some kind of a psychological disorder. Yeltsin apparently rejected any guilt and considered attempts at putting the crimes committed against the Chechen population on the agenda a deliberate policy of the West to weaken Russia.

42

Quoted in Emma Gilligan, Defending Human Rights in Russia: Sergei Kovalyov, Dissident and Human Rights Commissioner 1969–2003 (Abingdon: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 203.

43

Cheterian, War and Peace in the Caucasus: Russia’s Troubled Frontier, 259.

1

Sergei Kovalev, “Putin’s War,” New York Review of Books (February 10, 2000). (Note that Kovalyov’s name can also be spelled Kovalev.)

2

Skuratov would soon be dismissed. On March 17, 1999, a video was broadcast on state television showing him naked on a bed with two prostitutes. This was a classic case of Russian kompromat (compromising information). During a press conference a few weeks later FSB director Putin and Interior Minister Stepashin confirmed that the man on the video was Skuratov and that the prostitutes had been paid for by individuals who were being investigated for criminal offences.

3

John B. Dunlop, “‘Storm in Moscow’: A Plan of the Yeltsin ‘Family’ to Destabilize Russia,” The Hoover Institution (October 8, 2004), 20.

4

Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, 284.

5

How serious the threat of a coup d’état was in May 1999 became clear from the publication in the Novaya Gazeta of July 5, 1999, of the leaked text of the draft presidential decree, in which emergency rule was to be instituted from May 13 “in connection with the aggravation of the political and criminal situation.” (Cf. Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow,” 23.)

6

It was Sergey Stepashin, critical of the war in Chechnya, who, in an article in the Nezavisimaya Gazeta of January 14, 2000, revealed that this meeting was held.

7

Cf. Emma Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya: Russia and the Tragedy of Civilians in War (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 30.

8

In a second article in Versiya in August 2000, the exact date of this meeting was given: July 4, 1999. (Quoted in Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow,” 40.)

9

Martin Malek, “Russia’s Asymmetric Wars in Chechnya since 1994,” Connections 8, no. 4 (Fall 2009), 88.

10

This version of a simulated Chechen attack on Dagestan finds support in a report by Florian Hassel, the Moscow correspondent for the Frankfurter Rundschau, who, in October 1999, met five Dagestani policemen who had briefly fought Basayev’s troops: “Basaev’s [Basayev’s] attack on Dagestan was apparently organized in Moscow,” said one policeman, Elgar, who watched the Chechens retreat from the village of Botlikh on September 11. “Basaev and his people went back comfortably in broad daylight with about 100 cars and trucks and many on foot. They used the main road to Chechnya, and were not fired at by our combat helicopters. We received express orders not to attack.” (Quoted in Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow,” 47.)

11

Cf. Novaya Gazeta (February 14–20, 2000) and David Satter, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 29–30.

12

Sergey Topol and Nadezhda Kurbacheva, “Terakt predotvratil voditel avtobusa” (Bus Driver Prevented Terrorist Act), Kommersant (September 24, 1999). In March 2000, the Moscow Times wrote about a paratrooper, Alexei P. “While guarding a storehouse last fall, Alexei and his friend discovered hexagen [i.e., hexogen], the explosive that the Ryazan authorities say was found in the apartment building. The hexagen was in large sacks marked ‘sugar,’ and the soldiers said they broke one open hoping to be able to sweeten their tea. When their tea tasted strange, they informed their supervisors, who had the white powder tested. In the end, FSB officials sent from Moscow scolded the soldiers for ‘exposing state secrets,’ and advised them to forget what they had seen.” (Sarah Karush, “Hackers Attack Novaya Gazeta,” Moscow Times (March 16, 2000).)

13

Cf. Patrick Cockburn, “Russia ‘Planned Chechen War before Bombings,’” The Independent (January 29, 2000).

14

Giulietto Chiesa, “Terroristy tozhe raznye,” Literaturnaya Gazeta (June 16, 1999).

15

Giulietto Chiesa, “Cecenia, l’invenzione di una Guerra,” La rivista del Manifesto no. 6 (May 2000).

16

Chiesa, “Cecenia, l’invenzione di una Guerra.”

17

Aleksandr Zhilin, “Burya v Moskve,” Moskovskaya Pravda (July 22, 1999). (Quoted in Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow,” 11.)

18

Zhilin, “Burya v Moskve.”

19

Zhilin, Aleksandr, and Grigory Vanin. “Burya v Moskve: Sushchestvuet li sekretnyy plan destabilizatsii obstanovki v stolitse?” (Storm in Moscow: Does There Exist a Secret Plan to Destabilize the Situation in the Capital?), Novaya Gazeta (November 18, 1999). (Quoted in Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow,” 12.)

20

Yelena Tregubova, Baiki kremlevskogo diggera (Tales of a Kremlin Digger), (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2003), 98–99.

21

Sophie Shihab, “Qui a commis les attentats de 1999?” Le Monde (November 17, 2002).

22

“Gennady Seleznev predupredili o vzryve v Volgodonske za tri dnya do terakta” (Gennady Seleznev Was Warned about the Explosion in Volgodonsk Three Days before the Terrorist Act), NEWSru.com (March 21, 2002).

23

“Gennady Seleznev predupredili o vzryve v Volgodonske za tri dnya do terakta.”

24

Helen Womack, “Russian Agents ‘Blew up Moscow Flats,’” The Independent (January 6, 2000).

25

“Ya khochu rasskazat o vzryvakh zhilykh domov” (I Want to Talk about the Apartment Bombings), Novaya Gazeta (March 14, 2005).

26

Quoted in Sarah Karush, “Hackers Attack Novaya Gazeta,” The Moscow Times (March 16, 2000).

27

Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky, Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror (London: Gibson Square, 2007). A transcript of the teleconference of July 25, 2002, is published in this book (254–284). The original Russian edition of the book was printed in Latvia and brought into Russia to be distributed by the Prima Information Agency of ex-dissident Alexander Podrabinek. On December 29, 2003, the 4,376 copies were confiscated by the Ministry of the Interior and the FSB. The copies were ultimately destroyed in 2009. The reason given for the confiscation was “dissemination of state secrets.”

28

Cf. “Svedeniya Litvinenko o vrzyvakh zhilykh domov v Moskve” (Testimony of Litvinenko on the explosions of apartment buildings in Moscow), interview with Sergey Kovalyov by Tatyana Pelipeiko, Ekho Moskvy (July 25, 2002).

29

“Gennady Seleznev predupredili o vrzyve v Volgodonske za tri dnya do terakta.”

30

“Russian MP’s Death Sparks Storm,” BBC News (April 18, 2003).

31

“Russian MP’s Death Sparks Storm.”

32

Arkadi Vaksberg, Le laboratoire des poisons: De Lénine à Poutine (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 263.

33

Anastasia Kirilenko, “Putin’s Old Nemesis Speaks Out After Decade of Silence,” RFE/RL (March 5, 2010).

34

Cf. Grigory Pasko, “Russia’s Disappearing Journalists,” Robert Amsterdam Perspectives on Global Politics and Business (December 14, 2006). After the bomb explosion in the entrance of Tregubova’s apartment, she was questioned at the Criminal Investigation Office. The officer, Vadim Romanov, “wondered whether Tregubova happened to be acquainted with former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko. She replied that she did not know him, and asked why this would be of interest to the investigator. ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’ Romanov answered her. ‘After all, in your book [Tales of a Kremlin Digger], you write the same thing Litvinenko is saying—that Putin is involved in the bombings of the apartment buildings in Moscow.’” Tregubova has described the events around the bomb attack in the first chapter, titled Kak vzryvali menya (How they blew me up) of her 2004 book Proshchanie kremlevskogo diggera (Farewell of a Kremlin Digger), (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2004), 10–65.

35

The Novaya Gazeta wrote: “Within two weeks he turned into a very old man, his skin came off and his inner organs stopped functioning one by one. Doctors in the special government hospital speculated that he had been poisoned. Forensic experts said the same in private conversations. However, everyone signed the official reports confirming his death was natural.” (“Shchekochikhin’s Case,” Novaya Gazeta (March 25, 2008).)

36

Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky, The Age of Assassins: The Rise and Rise of Vladimir Putin (London: Gibson Square, 2008), 242.

37

Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, 343.

38

Natalie Nougayrède, “La démocratie dévoyée,” in Droits humains en Russie: Résister pour l’état de droit, Amnesty International Report (Paris: Editions Autrement Frontières, 2010), 15.

39

Vaksberg, Le laboratoire des poisons de Lénine à Poutine, 351.

40

Satter, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State, 252.

1

Martin Malek, “Russia’s Asymmetric Wars in Chechnya since 1994,” Connections 8, no. 4 (Fall 2009), 85.

2

Pavel Felgenhauer, “The Russian Army in Chechnya,” Crimes of War Project (April 18, 2003). http://www.crimesofwar.org/chechnya-mag/chech-felgenhauer.html.

3

Jonathan Marcus, “Russians Urged to Stop ‘Vacuum’ Bombings,” BBC News Online (February 15, 2000).

4

Felgenhauer, “The Russian Army in Chechnya.”

5

Quoted by Maura Reynolds, “Krieg ohne Regeln: Russische Soldaten in Tschetschenien,” in Der Krieg im Schatten: Russland und Tschetschenien, ed. Florian Hassel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 135.

6

Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 101.

7

Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 101–102.

8

Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 103.

9

Cf. Felgenhauer, “The Russian Army in Chechnya.”

10

Cf. Marina Caparini, “Private Military Companies,” in Combating Terrorism and Its Implications for the Security Sector, eds. Amb. Dr. Theodor H. Winkler, Anja H. Ebnöther, and Mats B. Hansson (Stockholm: Swedish National Defence College, 2005), 216.

11

Caparini, “Private Military Companies,” 209.

12

Caparini, “Private Military Companies,” 209.

13

Felgenhauer, “The Russian Army in Chechnya.”

14

Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 71.

15

Thomas de Waal, “Introduction,” in Anna Politkovskaya, A Dirty War (London: The Harvill Press, 2007), xxv–xxvi.

16

According to the Main Military Procurator, Sergey Fridinsky, “in 2006–2007, more than 5,000 recorded crimes were committed by contract personnel. In 2008, the number of recorded crimes committed by contract servicemen increased by 50.5 percent.” (Cf. Roger N. McDermott, The Reform of Russia’s Conventional Armed Forces: Problems, Challenges and Policy Implications (Washington, DC: The Jamestown Foundation, 2011), 82–83.) Note that these recorded crimes mainly took place outside Chechnya, in the Russian Federation proper. Most crimes in Chechnya were neither recorded, nor punished.

17

Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 56.

18

Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 53.

19

Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 51.

20

Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 51–52.

21

Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict, 29. And these were not mere words. “Between 1856 and 1864, approximately 600,000 Muslim peoples of the Caucasus quit that region for the Ottoman empire” (ibid.).

22

Quoted in Solovyov and Klepikova, Inside the Kremlin, 249.

23

Sergey Maksudov, “Naselenie Chechni: prava li perepis?” (The Population of Chechnya: Is the Census Right?), Kavkaz-Forum (September 8, 2005). http://www.kavkaz-forum.ru/dossier/12963.html?print=on.

The total number of victims of the zachistki for the period 1999–2009 will be higher. But from 2003 the number of victims gradually decreased, due to three facts. First, from 2003 fewer kontraktniki were engaged. Second, due to the collaboration of the Chechen mufti Akhmad Kadyrov, the Russians were better informed and replaced widespread and massive zachistki by adresnye zachistki, sweep operations that targeted only the homes of selected suspected individuals. And, third, there was the fact that at that time probably the majority of Chechen fighters had already been killed. On January 20, 2003, the Russian press agency Interfax set the figure at more than fourteen thousand rebels killed. (Quoted in Uwe Halbach, “Gewalt in Tschetschenien: Ein gemiedenes Problem internationaler Politik,” SWP-Studie, Berlin (February 2004).)

24

Alice Lagnado, “An Interview with Oleg Orlov,” Crimes of War Project (April 18, 2003).

25

Herfried Münkler, Die neuen Kriege (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 2002), 32.

26

Münkler, Die neuen Kriege, 31–32.

27

That the special troops and Spetsnaz elite troops began to play a more important role from the end of 2000 becomes clear from the fact that Putin (by Presidential Decree No. 61—signed on January 22, 2001) put the FSB in charge of all anti-terrorist operations in Chechnya. All power structures operating in the North Caucasus, including the army, were to be subordinated to the new HQ. (Cf. Gordon Bennett, “Vladimir Putin & Russia’s Special Services,” C108, Conflict Studies Research Centre (August 2002), 29.)

28

Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 63.

29

Malek, “Russia’s Asymmetric Wars in Chechnya since 1994,” 93.

30

Politkovskaya, A Dirty War.

31

Halbach, “Gewalt in Tschetschenien: Ein gemiedenes Problem internationaler Politik,” 15.

32

Droits humains en Russie: Résister pour l’état de droit, Amnesty International Report, 103.

33

Krystyna Kurczab-Redlich, “Torture and Rape Stalk the Streets of Chechnya,” The Guardian (October 27, 2002).

34

Sarah Karush, “A Grim New Allegation in Chechnya: Russians Blowing up Bodies,” Associated Press (March 13, 2003). In April 2003 also Oleg Orlov of the Russian NGO Memorial confirmed that this had become routine practice: “Particularly over the past few months, security forces blow up the bodies in order that they cannot be identified.” (Cf. Lagnado, “An Interview with Oleg Orlov.”) This practice had a striking resemblance with that of the Chekists just after the October Revolution. According to J. Michael Waller, “the early chekist killing method was designed so as not to create martyrs around whom opponents could rally. The doomed, naked prisoner would be brought to a normally drunken executioner armed with a tsarist-era Colt pistol. The Colt was favoured for its large caliber; when fired into the back of the head, the bullet would mutilate the face upon exiting the skull, making the body unrecognizable. This method saved the chekists the problem of dealing with relatives searching for bodies, and made recovery of a potential martyr impossible.” (Waller, Secret Empire: The KGB in Russia Today, 21–22).

35

Gilligan, Terror in Chechnya, 63.

36

Quoted by Maura Reynolds, “Krieg ohne Regeln: Russische Soldaten in Tschetschenien,” in Der Krieg im Schatten: Russland und Tschetschenien, ed. Florian Hassel, 128.

37

On January 1, 2014, the convention had ninety-three signatories and was ratified by forty-one countries. The convention came into force on December 23, 2010. The Russian Federation did not sign the convention.

38

Felgenhauer, “The Russian Army in Chechnya.”

39

Jonathan Littell, Tchétchénie: An III (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 38.

40

Littell, Tchétchénie: An III, 41–42.

41

Suspicions have been aired that Ramzan Kadyrov is behind a series of political murders inside and outside Chechnya, that is, the murder of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya and of human rights activist Natalya Estemirova. Until recently there was no proof. This changed in 2009. A Chechen refugee in Austria, Umar Israilov, who started a procedure against Kadyrov for torture before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, was killed on the street on January 13, 2009, by a commando. One of the three accused Chechens, Otto Kaltenbrunner, had “pictures on his cell phone that show him embracing Mr Kadyrov, one of the indications of their closeness.” One of the alleged murderers had called Shakya Turlaev, an adviser of Kadyrov, after the operation. According to the Austrian MP Peter Pilz, spokesman for the Greens on questions of security and defense, Kadyrov has formed in Austria “a shock troop of 30 to 50 men who are tasked to terrorize, kidnap or kill” Chechen exiles. In the EU are living about a hundred thousand refugees, of whom twenty-six thousand in Austria. Pilz said that the FSB agent Saïd Selim Peshkoev at the Russian embassy in Vienna, a former minister of the interior of Chechnya, had direct access to data on Chechen refugees collected by the BVT (Austrian intelligence service). A statement to this effect was signed by the former conservative Austrian minister of the interior, Ernst Strasser, who is now a member of the European Parliament and president of the Austrian-Russian Friendship Association ORFG. (Cf. Joëlle Stolz, “Le procès des meurtriers d’un réfugié tchétchène dévoile le ‘système Kadyrov,’” Le Monde (November 17, 2010).)

42

Littell, Tchétchénie: An III, 64–65.

43

Quoted in Paul Goble, “Chechnya Far from Peaceful and Far Less under Russian Control,” Moldova.org (April 15, 2010).

44

Charles King and Rajan Menon, “Prisoners of the Caucasus: Russia’s Invisible Civil War,” Foreign Affairs 89, no. 4 (July/August 2010), 30.

45

Cf. Sergey Maksudov, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Aleksey Malashenko, and Nikolay Petrov, “Chechentsy i russkie: pobedy, porazheniya, poteri” (Moscow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2010). In this interview, in which the authors discuss their book of the same title, they say “that at this moment in this space [Chechnya] has formed a half-independent vassal government (polunezavisimoe vassalnoe gosudarstvo) that is not at all controlled from Moscow.”

46

Paul Quinn-Judge, “Russia’s Brutal Guerilla War,” Foreign Policy (August 31, 2009).

47

Piotr Smolar, “En Tchétchénie la violence augmente, selon un rapport,” Le Monde (November 26, 2009).

48

Aleksey Malashenko, “Militant Attack on Tsentoroi Village,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Commentary (August 30, 2010).

49

Malashenko, “Militant Attack on Tsentoroi Village.”

50

Piotr Smolar, “Le maire de Moscou, Iouri Loujkov, a été évincé car il n’appartenait pas au ‘cercle du pouvoir,’” Le Monde (September 30, 2010).

51

Cf. Nougayrède, “La démocratie dévoilée,” in Droits humains en Russie: Résister pour l’état de droit, 22–23.

52

Cf. Katlijn Malfliet and Stephan Parmentier, “Russia’s Membership of the Council of Europe: Ten Years After,” in Russia and the Council of Europe: 10 Years After, eds. Katlijn Malfliet and Stephan Parmentier (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 14.

53

Cf. Nougayrède, Droits humains en Russie: Résister pour l’état de droit, 89.

54

Kirill Koroteev, “Les violations des droits humains en Tchétchénie devant la Cour Européenne des Droits de l’Homme,” in Nougayrède, Droits humains en Russie: Résister pour l’état de droit, 120.

55

Andrey Bortsov and Vadim Trukhachev, “Poland Ascribes Non-existent Genocide of Chechens to Russia,” Pravda.ru (September 28, 2010).

56

Hallbach, “Gewalt in Tschetschenien: ein gemiedenes Problem internationaler Politik,” 18.

57

Littell, Tchétchénie, An III, 56.

58

Martin Malek, “Understanding Chechen Culture,” in Chechens in the European Union, eds. Alexander Janda, Norbert Leitner, and Mathias Vogl (Vienna: Austrian Integration Fund: Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior, 2008), 32.

59

Russian sources give other figures for the civilian war dead. Sergey Maksudov, for instance, gives a total number of Chechens killed in both wars of twenty-eight thousand (!). He contrasts this number with twenty thousand Chechen Russophones (in the next sentence called “Russians”) killed by the Chechens (and not by the Russian bombardments). (Maksudov et al., “Chechentsy i russkie: pobedy, porazheniya, poteri.”) It is surprising to read these figures with no critical comment on the website of the Moscow Center of the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

60

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 36.

61

Goldhagen, Worse than War, 29. A similar argument is made by Susan Neiman who, rightly, emphasized that not intentions, but the results are decisive. “What counts,” she wrote, “is not what your road is paved with, but whether it leads to hell. Precisely the belief that evil actions require evil intentions allowed totalitarian regimes to convince people to override moral objections that might otherwise have functioned.” (Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 275.)

62

Kovalev, “Putin’s War.”

63

Goldhagen, Worse than War, 250–251.

64

Koroteev, “Les violations des droits humains en Tchétchénie devant la Cour Européenne des Droits de l’Homme,” 119.

65

Cf. Miriam Kosmehl, “Tschetschenien und das internationale Recht,” in Der Krieg im Schatten: Rußland und Tschetschenien, ed. Florian Hassel, 121–122.

66

Michael Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Politics,” in Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, edited and introduced by Amy Gutmann (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 41–42.

1

Vaclav Havel, Valdas Adamkus, Mart Laar, Vytautas Landsbergis, Otto de Habsbourg, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Timothy Garton Ash, André Glucksmann, Mark Leonard, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Adam Michnik, and Josep Ramoneda, “Le test géorgien, un nouveau Munich?” Le Monde (September 23, 2009). The real question was, indeed, who invaded and not who fired the first bullet. As John Lukacs wrote, it is an old ruse used by politicians, “who wanted war (and attempted to tempt their opponents ‘to maneuver [them] into firing the first shot.’” (John Lukacs, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 211.)

2

Hans Crooijmans, the Moscow correspondent of the Dutch weekly Elsevier, for instance, four days after the ceasefire published an article titled “Reckless Violence.” The word “reckless” referred not to the Russians, but to Saakashvili, who was believed to have started the war regardless of the consequences. “What incited the political leaders of Georgia to attack exactly on August 8, Tskinhvali, the capital of South Ossetia,” wrote Crooijmans, “we cannot be sure.” And he continued, “As could be expected the Russians came to the rescue of the South Ossetians.” (Hans Crooijmans, “Onbesuisd geweld,” Elsevier (August 16, 2008).)

3

Pavel K. Baev, “Russian “Tandemocracy” Stumbles into War,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 5, no. 153 (August 11, 2008).

4

Nicu Popescu, Mark Leonard, and Andrew Wilson, “Can the EU Win the Peace in Georgia?” Policy Brief (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2008), 3 (emphasis mine).

5

Cf. Thornike Gordadze, “Georgian-Russian Relations in the 1990s,” in The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia, eds. Svante E. Cornell and S. Frederick Starr (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2009), 37. Shevardnadze reported Grachev’s assertion in an interview, published in the Russian magazine Argumenty i Fakty on July 2, 2005. In a report of the International Crisis Group even the separatist Abkhaz authorities expressed a certain distrust vis-à-vis Moscow’s intentions. According to the report they believed that Moscow “is more interested in its territory than its people. The Abkhaz de facto leader, Bagapsh, said, ‘Russia is interested in access to the sea, of which our territory offers 240 km.’” (“Georgia and Russia: Clashing over Abkhazia,” Europe Report No. 193, International Crisis Group, June 5, 2008, 3.)

6

Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (March-April 1994), 73–74.

7

Cf. Andrey Illarionov, “Another Look at the August War,” Center for Eurasian Policy, Hudson Institute, Washington (September 12, 2008), 7.

8

Ronald D. Asmus, A Little War That Shook the World: Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West, 73. The Abkhaz and South Ossetian holders of Russian passports enjoyed complete Russian citizen rights. In December 2007 they voted in the Duma elections and in March 2008 in the presidential elections of the Russian Federation. (Cf. Marie Jégo, “’L’indépendance’, et après?” Le Monde (August 28, 2008).)

9

Asmus, A Little War, 42.

10

Janusz Bugajski, “Russia’s Soft Power Wars,” The Ukrainian Week (February 8, 2013).

11

Cf. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia, Report, Volume II (September 2009), 182. http://www.ceiig.ch/pdf/IIFFMCG_Volume_II.pdf.

12

Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia, 147. In October 2009 the Abkhaz Ministry of the Interior announced that between 2006 and 2009 141,245 of the 180,000–200,000 inhabitants of Abkhazia had received Abkhaz passports. On the basis of the data given in 2006 this would mean that almost all Abkhaz passport holders also had a Russian passport. (Quoted in Sabine Fischer, “Abkhazia and the Georgian-Abkhaz Conflict: Autumn 2009,” ISS Analysis, EU Institute for Security Studies (December 2009), 3.)

13

The passports in Abkhazia were issued on the basis of the Law on Citizenship of the Republic of Abkhazia of October 24, 2005. Article 6 of this Law stipulated “that a citizen of the Republic of Abkhazia is also entitled to obtain the citizenship of the Russian Federation.” The South Ossetian de facto Constitution of April 8, 2001, stipulated “(1) The Republic of South Ossetia shall have its own citizenship. (2) Double-citizenship is admissible in the Republic of South Ossetia.” (Cf. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia, 163.)

14

The Abkhaz minister of Economic Affairs, Christina Osgan, confirmed in June 2008 that there were fifty-one thousand pensioners in Abkhazia, thirty thousand of whom received a pension from the Russian government. The average payment was 57 euro per month. (Cf. Gerald Hosp, “Leise Hoffnung an der Roten Riviera,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (June 14, 2008).) From 2003, paying pensions was one of the incentives Moscow used to distribute its passports in Abkhazia. Only holders of Russian passports could apply for a pension paid by Moscow.

15

“Putin Says Russia Has No Imperial Ambitions,” RIA Novosti, September 11, 2008. Cf. also Hannah Strange, “South Ossetia Slapped Down over Russia Unity Claim,” Times Online (September 11, 2008).

16

A former minister of the interior of his government, Alan Parastayev, accused Kokoity of terrorism and banditry. The terrorist acts were alleged to have been committed in South Ossetia and have been attributed subsequently to Georgia. Cf. “Byvshyy glava MVD Yuzhnoy Osetii obvinil Eduarda Kokoyti v terrorizme” (Former Head of the Ministry of the Interior of South Ossetia Accused Eduard Kokoity of Terrorism), Lenta.ru (February 23, 2009).

17

Cf. Marlène Laruelle, “Neo-Eurasianist Alexander Dugin on the Russia-Georgia Conflict,” Central Asia-Caucasus Institute Analyst (September 3, 2008). http://www.cacianalyst.org/?q=node/4928/print.

18

“Russia Launches Economic Blockade of Georgia, Puts Troops on High Alert,” Pravda (September 30, 2006).

19

Salomé Zourabichvili, La tragédie géorgienne 2003–2008, De la révolution des Roses à la guerre (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2009), 305.

20

“Aktsiya Ya Gruzin,” Radio Ekho Moskvy (October 6, 2006). http://www.echo.msk.ru/doc/281.html.

21

Andrey Illarionov, “The Russian Leadership’s Preparation for War, 1999–2008,” in The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia, eds. Svante E. Cornell and S. Frederick Starr, 65.

22

Thomas Graham Jr. and Damien J. LaVera, “The Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty,” in Cornerstones of Security: Arms Control Treaties in the Nuclear Era, eds. Thomas Graham Jr. and Damien J. LaVera (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 597.

23

Graham Jr. and LaVera, Cornerstones of Security, 593.

24

Graham Jr. and LaVera, Cornerstones of Security, 593.

25

There is no right “to suspend.” Article XIX of the CFE Treaty gives each State Party “the right to withdraw from this Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events related to the subject matter of this Treaty have jeopardized its supreme interests.”

26

The snub was not lessened by the heads of state and government agreeing “that these countries will become members of NATO” (Bucharest Summit Declaration, April 3, 2008). Without a concrete time schedule this membership risked being postponed indefinitely. On Angela Merkel’s refusal to grant Georgia a MAP, Illarionov wrote, not without irony: “[A]t the NATO Bucharest SummitA] on April 3–5 [in fact it was April 2–4], German Chancellor Angela Merkel noted that countries with unresolved territorial conflicts could not join NATO. On the basis of this principle, which would have applied equally to West Germany at the time of its NATO accession, the summit denied both Georgia and Ukraine a Membership Action Plan” (Illarionov, “The Russian Leadership’s Preparation for War, 1999–2008,” 68).

27

Quoted in “Georgia and Russia: Clashing over Abkhazia,” Europe Report No. 193, International Crisis Group (June 5, 2008), 14. http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/europe/193_georgia_and_russia_clashing_over_abkhazia.ashx.

28

David J. Smith, “The Saakashvili Administration’s Reaction to Russian Policies before the 2008 War,” in The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia, eds. Cornell and Starr, 126.

29

Vladimir Socor, “The Goals Behind Moscow’s Proxy Offensive in South Ossetia,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 5, no. 152 (August 8, 2008).

30

Neil Buckley, “Russia Accused of Annexation Attempt,” The Financial Times (April 17, 2008).

31

Buckley, “Russia Accused of Annexation Attempt.”

32

Andrey Illarionov provided a small list of Russians in the government of South Ossetia. They included lieutenant-general Anatoly Barankevich, minister of defense from July 6, 2004, to December 10, 2006; Anatoly Yarovoy, FSB major-general, chairman of the KGB in South Ossetia from January 17, 2005, to March 2, 2006; Mikhail Mindzayev, FSB lieutenant-general, minister of the interior of South Ossetia from April 26, 2005, to August 18, 2008; Andrey Laptev, lieutenant-general, minister of defense of South Ossetia from December 11, 2006, to February 28, 2008; Aslanbek Bulatsev, FSB colonel, prime minister of South Ossetia since October 31, 2008 (Illarionov, “The Russian Leadership’s Preparation for War, 1999–2008,” 81–82).

33

Alexander Golts, “Opyat Kavkazskaya Voyna,” Ezhednevnyy Zhurnal (August 9, 2008).

34

Illarionov, “The Russian Leadership’s Preparation for War, 1999–2008,” 68.

35

Mart Laar, “Echoes of the 1930s in Russia’s Sweeping Annexation,” Financial Times (April 17, 2008).

36

“Georgia and Russia: Clashing over Abkhazia,” 4.

37

Cf. “Kommentary Departamenta informatsii i pechati MID Rossii v svyazi s voprosami SMI otnositelno intsidenta s gruzinskim bespilotnym samoletom 20 aprelya 2008 goda” (Comment of the Information and Press Department of the Foreign Ministry of Russia concerning questions from the media on the incident with the Georgian drone on April 20, 2008). Website of the Russian Foreign Ministry.

38

Yuliya Latynina, “200 km. tankov. O rossiysko: gruzinskoy voyne” (Two Hundred Kilometres of Tanks. On the Russian-Georgian War), Ezhednevnyy Zhurnal (November 19, 2008), 7.

39

Cf. Neil Buckley and Roman Olearchyk, “UN Says Moscow Shot Georgian Drone,” The Financial Times (May 27, 2008). The Russian attack also endangered the civil aviation. According to the UN investigators the interception “took place very close to, or even inside an international airway, at a time where civilian aircraft were flying.”

40

Pavel Felgenhauer, “Saakashvili Wants to Get to Moscow, While Russian Troops Are in Abkhazia Already,” Novaya Gazeta (May 20, 2008). These plans for an ethnically cleansed “buffer zone” had, at that time, certainly already been discussed with Shamba’s Kremlin bosses. The plans would be executed during the August war.

41

Felgenhauer, “Saakashvili Wants to Get to Moscow, While Russian Troops Are in Abkhazia Already.”

42

“NATO calls on Russia to withdraw railway troops from Georgia,” International Herald Tribune (June 3, 2008).

43

“Saakashvili Calls Security Council to Decide on Abkhazia,” Nevtegaz.ru Novosti (June 3, 2008). The journalist of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung who visited Abkhazia in June 2008 repeated, uncritically, the vocabulary used by the Russian side to justify the entry of these troops, calling them “unarmed pioneers” (unbewaffnete Pioniere), comparing this Russian army battalion of engineers and technicians with a group of idealistic boy scouts. (Cf. Hosp, “Leise Hoffnung an der Roten Riviera.”)

44

“Tbilisi Condemns Russian ’Railway Troops’ in Abkhazia,” Civil Georgia (May 31, 2008). http://www.civil.ge/eng/_print.php?id=18445.

45

Socor, “The Goals Behind Moscow’s Proxy Offensive in South Ossetia.”

46

“Rossiya stoit na grani bolshoy Kavkazkoy voyny,” Forum.msk.ru (July 5, 2008). http://forum-msk.org/print.html?id=496351.

47

“Rossiya stoit na grani bolshoy Kavkazkoy voyny.”

48

“58-ay armiya RF gotova voyti v Tskhinvali,” Gruziya Online (August 3, 2008). http://www.apsny.ge/news/1217792861.php.

49

“58-ay armiya RF gotova voyti v Tskhinvali.”

50

Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia, 238.

1

Wesley K. Clark and Peter L. Levin, “Securing the Information Highway: How to Enhance the United States’ Electronic Defenses,” Foreign Affairs 88, no. 6, (November/December 2009), 3.

2

Asmus, A Little War That Shook the World, 21.

3

Valentina Pop, “Saakashvili Saved Georgia from Coup, Former Putin Aide Says,” interview with Andrey Illarionov, EU Observer (October 14, 2008).

4

Quoted in Illarionov, “The Russian Leadership’s Preparations for War, 1999–2008,” 83.

5

“Tskhinvalskiy Pul Spiskom,” December 4, 2008. This list gives thirty-one names. http://davnym-davno.livejournal.com/6488.html.

6

“Donskie kazaki gotovy vstat na zashchitu naroda Yuzhnoy Osetii ot gruzinskoy agressii,” Nezavisimaya Gazeta, August 6, 2008. http://www.ng.ru/regions/2008-08-06/1_kazaki.html.

7

“Donskie kazaki gotovy vstat na zashchitu naroda Yuzhnoy Osetii ot gruzinskoy agressii.”

8

Cf. Marie Jégo, Alexandre Billette, Natalie Nougayrède, Sophie Shihab, and Piotr Smolar, “Autopsie d’un conflit,” Le Monde (August 31–September 1, 2008). In secret reports from the US embassy in Tbilisi sent to the state department and subsequently published by WikiLeaks, this version of the facts was confirmed: “Putin has said to him [Saakashvili] that he does not care about South Ossetia, as long as Georgia avoids a massacre and solves the problem quietly.” (“La Géorgie, grande perdante du rapprochement russo-américain,” Le Monde (December 3, 2010).) This trap is also intimated by Salomé Zourabishvili, a former Georgian Minister of Foreign Affairs, who has become a fierce critic of Saakashvili. According to her the Russians must have given an unofficial green light to Georgia to intervene in South Ossetia to fight the local militias, which Moscow said it “could no longer control.” Zourabichvili even speaks of the possibility of a “tacit agreement.” (Zourabichvili, La tragédie géorgienne 2003–2008: de la révolution des Roses à la guerre, 317.) But even if such an improbable tacit agreement could have existed, the fact remains that at the very moment that Saakashvili ordered his attack he no longer had any illusions about the Russian response. We must also remember that this was not the first time the Kremlin had tried to disseminate active disinformation by suggesting that there was disagreement between themselves and the leadership of the self-proclaimed republics. Putin, for instance, when visiting Paris at the end of May 2008, said to his French interlocutors that he agreed with a Georgian peace plan that would grant Abkhazia great autonomy—a position contradicting Putin’s earlier positions. When the Abkhaz “President” Bagapsh visited Paris one month later, Bagapsh said: “Putin can agree with this plan, but we don’t and we never will do,” suggesting a difference of opinion between a “cooperative” Russian government and the “radical” separatists. (Cf. Piotr Smolar, “L’Abkhazie rejette la responsabilité de la crise sur les autorités géorgiennes,” Le Monde (June 22–23, 2008).)

9

This shelling of Georgian villages inside South Ossetia by South Ossetian militias had already started on August 2. According to Martin Malek, “On August 5 a tripartite monitoring group, which included Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) observers and representatives of Russian peacekeeping forces in the region, issued a report. This document, signed by the commander of the Russian ‘peacekeepers’ in the region, General Marat Kulakhmetov, stated that there was evidence of attacks against several ethnic Georgian villages. It also claimed that South Ossetian separatists were using heavy weapons against the Georgian villages, which was prohibited by a 1992 ceasefire agreement.” (Martin Malek, “Georgia & Russia: The ‘Unkown’ Prelude to the ‘Five Day War,’” Caucasian Review of International Affairs 3, no. 2 (Spring 2009.) http://cria-online.org/7_10.html.)

10

Jégo et al., “Autopsie d’un conflit.”

11

Asmus, A Little War that Shook the World, 31.

12

Asmus, A Little War that Shook the World, 25.

13

Felgenhauer estimated the Georgian army to be seventeen-thousand-strong, supported by up to five thousand police officers (two thousand of Georgia’s elite 1st Infantry Brigade were deployed in Iraq. They were flown back but arrived after the war was over). The overall number of Russian troops that took part in the war in Georgia in August 2008 was approximately forty thousand. They were supported by ten thousand to fifteen thousand separatist militias. This makes the power ratio 2.5:1—illustrating the clear numerical superiority of the Russian forces, even without including differences in equipment. (Cf. Pavel Felgenhauer, “After August 7: The Escalation of the Russia-Georgia War,” in The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia, eds. Cornell and Starr, 170–173.)

14

Svante E. Cornell and S. Frederick Starr, “Introduction,” in The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia, eds. Cornell and Starr, 9.

15

Cornell and Starr, “Introduction.”

16

Jonathan Littell, “Carnet de route,” Le Monde 2 (October 4, 2008), 18. This version of the facts was confirmed in a testimony before Congress, made by Dan Fried, at that time Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, who said the Georgians “believed at the time—that they thought the Russian forces were coming through the Roki tunnel (linking Russia with South Ossetia) and they were in imminent danger.” (Daniel Dombey, “Congress Attacks Stance on Georgia,” Financial Times (September 11, 2008).)

17

Quoted by Malek, “Georgia & Russia: The ‘Unkown’ Prelude to the ‘Five Day War.’”

18

Quoted in “Soldaty govoryat, chto pribyli v Yuzhnuyu Osetiyu eshche 7 Avgusta” (Soldiers Say That They Were Already on August 7 in South Ossetia), Polit.ru, (September 10, 2008). http://www.polit.ru/news/2008/09/10/seven/print/.

19

“Soldaty govoryat, chto pribyli v Yuzhnuyu Osetiyu eshche 7 Avgusta.”

20

The article was quoted on the same day by the news agency Newsru.com. The agency concluded: “Thus the captain was on the Southern side of the Caucasus ridge, already on Georgian territory, and saw the shelling of Tskhinvali and the position of the peacekeepers during the night of August 8.” (“SMI: Rossiyskie voyska voshli v Yuzhnuyu Osetiyu eshche do nachala boevykh deystviy,” NEWSru.com (September 11, 2008).)

21

“S saita ‘Krasnoy Zvezdy’ udaleno intervyu kapitana Sidristogo o vtorzhenii Rossiyskikh voysk v Yu O do napadeniya Gruzii,” NEWSru.com (September 15, 2008).

22

“S saita ‘Krasnoy Zvezdy’ udaleno intervyu kapitana Sidristogo o vtorzhenii Rossiyskikh voysk v Yu O do napadeniya Gruzii.”

23

The story of the changed and subsequently removed article in Krasnaya Zvezda raised doubts for even the German magazine Der Spiegel, which after the war published an article extremely critical of Saakashvili (he was called “the choleric ruler of Tbilisi”). “Did Moscow’s deployment start, after all, earlier than it was until now admitted?” asked the authors. (Ralf Beste, Uwe Klussmann, Cordula Meyer, Christian Neef, Matthias Schepp, Hans-Jürgen Schlamp, and Holger Stark, “Wettlauf zum Tunnel,” Der Spiegel no. 38 (September 15, 2008), 132. http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-60135192.html.)

1

“Georgia Conflict: Key Statements,” BBC News (August 19, 2008).

2

“The Georgian War: Minute by Minute, August 9,” Russia Today (August 9, 2008). http://rt.com/news/the-georgian-war-minute-by-minute-august-9/.

3

“South Ossetia Conflict FAQs,” RIA Novosti (September 17, 2008). http://en.ria.ru/russia/20080917/.

4

Charles Clover, “Civilian Deaths Put at 133,” Financial Times (August 21, 2008).

5

“Ustanovlenyy lichnosti 162 pogibshikh zhiteley Yuzhnoy Osetii: SKP RF,” RIA Novosti (December 23, 2008). http://www.rian.ru/society/20081223/157895855.html.

6

Another example of such a prepared attack was the accusation made immediately after the fighting that Georgia had destroyed protected historical buildings in Tskhinvali. “For Russia’s part, which until now showed little interest in South Ossetia’s cultural heritage, acts of destruction are [used] particularly as an argument to denounce Georgia as a war criminal,” wrote the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. (Holm, Kerstin. “Brüder als Barbaren: Russland empört sich über die Zerstörung von Kulturdenkmälern in Südossetien,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (August 16, 2008).)

7

Quoted in “Put Out Even More Flags,” The Economist (August 30, 2008).

8

Robert Amsterdam, “Andrei Piontkovsky and the Doppelgänger Theory” (September 26, 2007). http://www.robertamsterdam.com.

9

Zhirinovsky, Poslednyy brosok na yug, 132.

10

Kovalev, “Putin’s War.”

11

Luke Harding, “Russia’s Cruel Intention,” The Guardian (September 1, 2008).

12

“Eduard Kokoity: My tam prakticheski vyrovnyali vse,” Kommersant (August 15, 2008).

13

“Russian Invasion of Georgia: The Facts on Ethnic Cleansing of Georgians during the Russian Invasion and Occupation,” Georgia Update website (October 8, 2008). http://georgiaupdate.gov.ge/.

14

“Georgia: Russian Cluster Bombs Kill Civilians,” Human Rights Watch (August 15, 2008).

15

The Russian Ministry of Defense denied in a news release on August 16, 2008, that it had used the Iskander missile in South Ossetia. Because the missile landed in Gori, which is situated outside South Ossetia, the Iskander missile may well have been used there. (Cf. “Up In Flames: Humanitarian Law Violations and Civilian Victims in the Conflict over South Ossetia,” Human Rights Watch, New York (January 2009) 113).

16

Latynina, “200 km. tankov. O rossiysko-gruzinskoy voyne. Chast 2.”

17

“Verslag onderzoeksmissie Storimans,” Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, The Hague (October 20, 2008).

18

“Kamerbrief inzake het verslag van de onderzoekscommissie Storimans,” Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, The Hague (October 20, 2008).

19

“Up In Flames: Humanitarian Law Violations and Civilian Victims in the Conflict over South Ossetia,” 113.

20

Quoted in Nico Hines, “Russia Accused of Dropping Cluster Bombs on Georgian Civilians,” The Times (August 15, 2008).

21

“Georgia: More Cluster Bomb Damage Than Reported,” Human Rights Watch, (November 4, 2008). Georgia also used cluster bombs in the conflict, but, unlike Russia, it did not deny this. In the same report Human Rights Watch wrote that in the case of Georgia there was probably no intent to hit the civilian population. Georgian Israeli-made M85 cluster bombs did not land in villages as a result of an intentional strike, but probably due to a failure of the (equally Israeli- supplied) Mk-4 rockets that fell down before reaching their goal.

22

Paul A. Goble makes a useful difference between misinfomation and disinformation. “Misinformation,” he wrote, “the spread of complete false reports is the less serious threat. Typically, reportage that is completely false is not only easily identified but quickly challenged. But disinformation is another matter… disinformation almost always involves the careful mixing of obvious truths with falsehoods in a way that many will either find plausible or, at the very least, impossible to check.” (Paul A. Goble, “Defining Victory and Defeat: The Information War Between Russia and Georgia,” in The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia, eds. Cornell and Starr, 189–90.)

23

“Georgia Conflict: Key Statements.”

24

“South Ossetia conflict FAQs,” RIA Novosti (September 17, 2008).

25

Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” 79.

26

François Paulhac, Les accords de Munich et les origines de la guerre de 1939 (Paris: Vrin, 1998), 139.

27

Pavel Felgenhauer, “After August 7: The Escalation of the Russia: Georgia War,” in The Guns of August 2008: Russia’s War in Georgia, eds. Cornell and Starr, 172–173.

28

Illarionov, “Another Look at the August War,” 1.

29

Paul Kennedy, The Realities Behind Diplomacy: Background Influences on British External Policy 1865–1980 (London: Fontana Press, 1989), 294.

30

“EU Must be United and Firm on Russia,” Financial Times (September 1, 2008).

31

On this lukewarm response, see Marcel H. Van Herpen, “Russia, Georgia, and the European Union: The Creeping Finlandization of Europe,” The Cicero Foundation (September 2008). http://www.cicerofoundation.org/lectures/Marcel_H_Van_Herpen_Russia_Georgia_and_the_European_Union.pdf.

32

Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, La Russie entre deux mondes (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2010), 291.

33

Carrère d’Encausse, La Russie entre deux mondes, 293.

34

On September 11, 2008, during a meeting of the Valdai Club with Vladimir Putin in Sochi, Carrère d’Encausse asked Putin if he would respond positively to Kokoity’s demand for integration of South Ossetia into the Russian Federation. She wrote: “Vladimir Putin answered with the greatest firmness that such a hypothesis was excluded. He explained that if Russia in this specific case was unable to ignore the will of the Ossetian people to be independent, it was firm regarding the principles of respecting the inviolability of existing frontiers. This principle, according to him, applied without exception to the Russian Federation which could not, therefore, welcome into its midst a nation or territory that so desired.” Putin’s double-talk (he is speaking about the “inviolability of existing frontiers” just after having changed the frontiers of Georgia by brutal force) brings her to the—naive—conclusion that “the blunt refusal that was opposed to the Ossetian demand for integration into Russia makes the Russian position clear: the August intervention in Georgia… could lead to a settlement of a conflict between Georgia and its separatist minorities, [but] in no case to a dossier that was of interest to Russia.” (Carrère d’Encausse, La Russie entre deux mondes, 298–299.)

35

Cf. “Medvedev: August War Stopped Georgia’s NATO Membership,” Civil Georgia (November 21, 2011). Cf. also Brian Whitmore, “Medvedev Gets Caught Telling The Truth,” RFE/RL (November 23, 2011).

36

Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: My Years in Washington (London: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 688.

37

Rice, No Higher Honor: My Years in Washington, 688.

38

Tony Blair, A Journey: My Political Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 447.

39

“Saakashvili: Georgia Was Ready to Trade NATO for Breakaway Regions,” RFE/RL (August 8, 2013).

40

“Saakashvili: Georgia Was Ready to Trade NATO for Breakaway Regions.”

41

“8 Avgusta 2008 goda. Poteryannyy den.” http://rutube.ru/video/eddef3b31e4bdff29de4db46ebdd4e44/.

42

Cf. Pavel Felgenhauer, “Putin Confirms the Invasion of Georgia Was Preplanned,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 9, no. 152 (August 9, 2012).

43

Felgenhauer, “Putin Confirms the Invasion of Georgia Was Preplanned.”

44

Quoted in Stephen Ennis, “Russian Film on Georgia War Fuels Talk of Kremlin Rift,” BBC (August 10, 2012).

45

Felgenhauer, “Putin Confirms the Invasion of Georgia Was Preplanned.”

1

Kennan, “Russia: Seven Years Later,” in Memoirs 1925–1950, 519.

2

Alexander J. Motyl, “Empire Falls,” Foreign Affairs 85, no. 4 (July-August 2006).

3

Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture: Volume II: The Power of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 42.

4

Trenin, Post-Imperium: A Eurasian Story, 233.

5

Putin, “Novyy integratsionnyy proekt dlya Evrazii: budushchee kotoroe rozhdaetsya segodnya.”

6

“Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation.” http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_25468.htm.

7

Chrystia Freeland, “From Empire to Nation State,” Financial Times (July 10, 1997).

8

Freeland, “From Empire to Nation State.”

9

Freeland, “From Empire to Nation State.”

10

John Thornhill, “Russia Signs Union Treaty with Belarus,” Financial Times (April 4, 1997).

11

Grigory Yavlinsky criticized the Union Treaty with the following words: “You cannot talk about negotiating integration with a state where there is political repression and the conditions for the normal existence of the opposition are ruled out and the work of the media is restricted.” (Quoted in John Thornhill, “Belarus Link Alarms Russian Liberals,” Financial Times (April 2, 1997).)

12

Sophie Shihab, “M. Eltsine cherche à minimiser les conséquences de l’ “union” entre la Russie et la Biélorussie,” Le Monde (April 8, 1997).

13

Ronald D. Asmus, Opening NATO’s Doors: How the Alliance Remade Itself for a New Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 141.

14

Asmus, Opening NATO’s Doors, 141.

15

“L’avertissement biélorusse,” Le Monde (April 3, 1997).

16

Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” 79.

17

Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” 76.

18

Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia, 17.

19

Nargis Kassenova, Alexander Libman, and Jeremy Smith, “Discussing the Eurasian Customs Union and Its Impact on Central Asia,” Central Asia Policy Forum 4 (February 2013), 6. http://www.centralasiaprogram.org/images/Policy_Forum_4,_February_2013.pdf.

20

Kassenova et al., “Discussing the Eurasian Customs Union and Its Impact on Central Asia.”

21

Fyodor Lukyanov, “Imperiya Naoborot,” Gazeta.ru (November 17, 2011).

22

Lukyanov, “Imperiya Naoborot.”

23

Lukyanov, “Imperiya Naoborot.”

24

“What Precisely Vladimir Putin Said at Bucharest,” Zerkalo Nedeli (April 25, 2008). http://www.mw.ua/1000:1600/62750/.

25

Gleb Pavlovsky, “Will Ukraine Lose Its Sovereignty?” Russkiy Zhurnal (March 16, 2009). http://www.russ.ru.

26

“No One Needs Monsters: Desovereignization of Ukraine,” Interview with Sergey Karaganov, Russkiy Zhurnal (March 20, 2009). http://www.russ.ru.

27

“No One Needs Monsters: Desovereignization of Ukraine.”

28

Yuriy Shcherbak, “Ukraine as a Failed State: Myths and Reality,” The Weekly Digest 15, Kyiv (May 26, 2009).

29

Quoted in Nicu Popescu and Andrew Wilson, “The Limits of Enlargement-Lite: European and Russian Power in the Troubled Neighbourhood,” Policy paper (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, June 2009), 29.

30

Since 1992 there has existed in Ukraine, alongside the official Orthodox Church that recognizes the Patriarch of Moscow, a rival independent Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate (UPTs-KP), led by Patriarch Filaret.

31

Pavel Korduban, “Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill Visits Ukraine,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 6, no.155 (August 12, 2009), 5.

32

James Marson, “Faith or Politics? The Russian Patriarch Ends Ukraine Visit,” Time (August 4, 2009).

33

Korduban, “Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill Visits Ukraine.”

34

Cf. Hélène Blanc and Renata Lesnik, Les prédateurs du Kremlin [1917–2009] (Paris: Seuil, 2009), 263.

35

“Dear Viktor, You’re Dead, Love Dmitry,” The Economist (August 22, 2009).

36

Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote: “Dressed all in black, including a black turtleneck sweater—a color scheme once favored by Benito Mussolini—the former KGB lieutenant colonel and now president, Vladimir Putin, addressed thousands of enthusiastic young supporters filling a Moscow sport stadium on November 21, 2007.” (Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Putin’s Choice,” The Washington Quarterly 31, no. 2 (Spring 2008), 95.)

37

Dmitry Medvedev, “Relations between Russia and Ukraine: A New Era Must Begin,” President of Russia Official Web Portal, August 11, 2009. Available at http://eng.kremlin.ru/text/speeches/2009/08/11/0832_type207221_220745.shtml.

38

Medvedev, “Relations between Russia and Ukraine: A New Era Must Begin.”

39

Richard Sennett, Authority (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 89.

40

Sennett, Authority, 79.

41

Medvedev, “Relations between Russia and Ukraine: A New Era Must Begin.”

42

“Ukraina ne stanet nablyudatelem pri TS do 2015 g.,” kapital.kz (May 20, 2013).

43

Cf. Oleg Varfolomeyev, “Ukraine Seeks Both Association Deal with EU and Observer Status in Customs Union,” Eurasia Daily Monitor 10, no. 101 (May 29, 2013).

44

Cf. Fyodor Lukyanov, “Imperiya sdala passport,” Rossiya v Globalnoy Politike (December 13, 2012).

45

Vladimir Socor, “Will Poland Consider a Gas Deal with Russia at Ukraine’s Expense?” Eurasia Daily Monitor 10, no. 67 (April 10, 2013).

46

Cf. Devin Ackles and Luke Rodeheffer, “Eurasian Paper Tigers,” New Eastern Europe (June 24, 2013).

47

Oleksandr Sushko, et al., “EU-Ukraine Association Agreement: Guideline for Reforms,” Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation, KAS Policy Paper, no. 20 (Kyiv, 2012), 6.

48

Margarita Lyutova, “Ukraina stanet nablyudatelem v Evraziyskom Soyuze ne ranee 2015 goda,” Vedomosti (May 20, 2013).

49

“Interview given by Dmitry Medvedev to Television Channels Channel One, Rossia, NTV,” Sochi (August 31, 2008). President of Russia Official Web Portal. http://www.kremlin.ru/text/speeches/2008/08/31/ (emphasis mine).

50

Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” 80.

51

Brzezinski, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power, 95.

52

Another analyst of Polish origin, Janusz Bugajski, also warned that “Russia under Putin has evolved into an imperial project…. The Russian regime defines its national interests at the expense of its neighbors, whose statehood is considered secondary or subsidiary and whose borders may not be permanent.” Cf. Janusz Bugajski, “Russia’s Pragmatic Reimperialization,” Caucasian Review of International Affairs 4, no.1, (Winter 2010). http://www.cria-online.org/10_2.html.

53

“The Polish Model: A Conversation With Radek Sikorski,” Foreign Affairs 92, no. 3 (May/June 2013), 5–6.

54

“The Polish Model: A Conversation With Radek Sikorski,” 6.

55

Vaclav Havel, “L’alliance euro-américaine doit s’approfondir en s’élargissant,” Le Monde (May 21, 1997).