The deterioration in relations between Russia and the West has been cumulative, and the brief post-Soviet era history of Russia provides some key insights, as does the pre-World War I history of Russia, whereas Cold War era comparisons are perhaps rather less helpful. As a starting point, one should revisit Russia’s descent into chaos in the 1990s.
As is well known, President Yeltsin’s deputy Prime Minister Yego Gaidar opted for what was termed ‘shock therapy’ in economic terms, following the example of Poland in the same era, as the newly established Russian Federation looked to establish a transition from a ‘top-down, state-controlled’ to a ‘market-oriented economy’. That ‘shock therapy’ was straight out of the ‘Washington consensus’ (i.e. IMF, World Bank) playbook, and the accompanying moves to liberalize prices (i.e. remove price caps) exacerbated what was already peaking at 874.0% in 1993. The ensuing crisis may have spawned untold riches for a small section of the neo-oligarchs, but overall led to a deep seated well as impoverishing much of the population and exacerbating inequality on a spectacular scale.
As such, it was rather unsurprising that the predominantly Muslim region of Chechnya attempted to secede from Russia against this of 1995, which only formally ended in 1997 with a peace treaty that proved to be short-lived. The Financial Crisis in 1997, as well as an array of chronic domestic weaknesses – poor transport, energy and utilities infrastructure; very low tax collection along with weak public institutions that were unable to supply law, order or healthcare – were thus the catalysts for Russia’s default and Rouble devaluation in 1998. The devaluation allied with an IMF bail-out and a rebound in oil prices did however facilitate a fairly swift recovery in the economy (1990 GDP 6.4%, 2000 10.0%), though not without another bout of
However it is the context of how Russia’s economic and social decline (described as Russia’s ‘Wild West era’ by Helmut Schmidt) facilitated the expansion of both the EU and NATO into central and eastern the hapless Russian president Boris Yeltsin largely by surprise, and which in some ways sowed the seeds for the crisis that has emerged in recent years. In what was an inordinately prescient New York Times interview commenting on the US Senate’s Kennan, who was a key advocate of the US policy of containment of the Soviet expansion during the Cold War, opined: ‘’It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong.’’ (see:
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/02/opinion/ article observed in respect of how historians might evaluate the US Senate decision: “If we are unlucky they will say, as Mr. Kennan predicts, that NATO expansion set up a situation in which NATO now has to either expand all the way to Russia’s border, triggering a new cold war, or stop expanding after these three new countries and create a new dividing line through Europe.”
Be that as it may, it was into this environment that the relatively unknown Vladimir Putin stepped into the political limelight, rising rapidly from being appointed head of the FSB (one of the successors to the KGB) in July 1998 via Deputy Prime Minister to Prime Minister, and then anointed as Yeltsin’s successor as President in December 1999. Putin’s path to the presidency was in no small part aided by the brutal ‘scorched earth’ tactics that were deployed in the second Chechen War, that nominally end in February 2000, which not only established his reputation as strong, fearless and tough, but also played into the public sense of humiliation over the failures of the 1999 prior to the Chechen War support for Putin, according to opinion polls, was just 2.0% (probably not helped by Yeltsin’s anointment), but by the time of the (early) March elections he took 53%, in what remains a classic example of carpe diem. The rest as they say is history.
7 | ADMISI - The Ghost In The Machine | March/April 2018
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