Russia's Paranoid Foreign Policy

“A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known.”

It is probably banal to begin an essay about Russia with a quote from Russia’s most famous piece of literature, written by Russia’s most famous author. But it’s hard to beat the greatest thinkers, and in this expression, Tolstoy succinctly captures the essence of what it is to be Russian, both then and now. What’s more interesting is that Tolstoy’s quote, written probably in 1862, could easily have been written about Americans today. If we were his subject, the fox cum hedgehog might have said instead, “an American is self-assured just because he thinks he knows everything,” full stop.

Shamelessly appropriated from Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1964 article, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” published by Harper’s. Hofstadter, who George Will once called the “icon of liberal condescension,”^[3] wrote in the febrile climate of the 1960s when the American ‘culture wars’ were in perhaps their most heated phase with violent clashes over Vietnam, Civil Rights, and the emerging counter-culture movement. Hofstadter draws linkages throughout American history of what he called the ‘paranoid style’ of its populist politicians, many of whom saw conspiracies and threats behind every corner, from the Illuminati and global Catholicism to the Red Scare. Hofstadter called it the “paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,” that he had in mind.^[4] The paranoid style, he wrote, “has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated than with the truth or falsity of their content.”^[5]

Hofstadter, had he been a Russologist, might have made much the same argument about Moscow. Russia, like the United States, is a study in contrasts. Russia is full of both pernicious lies and hard truths. There is the seductively appealing Russia of myth and mystery, of Baba Yaga and Haji Murad and Alexander Nevsky—and the Russia of purges and gulags and cold, calculating geopolitics. It contains the amalgamated cultural heritage of dozens of European and Asian civilizations that have flowed across its wide plains over the centuries. It is both a land of dreadfully impoverished near-peasants, living much like their ancestors did in the 16th-century, and unbelievably wealthy oligarchs that live in ostentatious gauche whom caricatures of such say, “Opulence: I has it.”^[6]

Why is Russia the way that it is? Causal factors are complicated wholes, concatenated chains of effect after effect after effect. All is a contingency, and while history and geography are a guide, they are not absolutely deterministic.

What we think of as Russian civilization today is complex—in the sense of the Latin root of that word which means ‘to weave,’ ‘braided,’ or ‘entwined.’ Of course, all civilizations are complex, but few in the myriad ways that Russia is. Neither fully western or eastern, The “Russian Soul” is both fiercely independent and all too comfortable with an autocrat’s paternalistic embrace. The civilization of the Kievan Rus, from whence modern Russia derives its cultural heritage, ceased to exist after the Mongol invasion in the early 13th-century. Modern Russia, which grew out of Mongol-friendly Moscow, nevertheless makes great effort to claim this heritage—going so far as to unveil a 60-foot tall statue of Kievan Prince Volodymyr the Great, the semi-mythical 10th-century Scandinavian ruler of Kiev who converted the Rus to Christianity—in central Moscow, practically right beside the Kremlin in 2016 in a much more prominent position than the statue of its own native Muscovite founder.^[7] 

In 1700, after a humiliating defeat at the hands of Sweden at the Battle of Narva, the Russian Empire completely reformed its military over the next several years to mimic that of the Swedes, eventually returning to defeat them at the decisive battle of Poltava in 1709 and to win the Great Northern War.^[8] There are many over examples of Russian appropriation of ideas and forms from the other. Communism, after all, wasn’t invented in Russia. The latest tools Russia adroitly adopted were an American invention—advertising. After being laid low for twenty years from 1992 by a combination of American capitalism and military power during the Cold War—the new post-war Russia has appropriated the West’s techniques and turned them back against it in the 2016 elections and beyond.

Russia’s appropriation of other cultures and ideas is the norm because Russia is a land of make-believe. Russia has always been more of an idea than a country, because, on the vast Eurasian plain, ideas lasted longer than governments. Because national myth-making is the only recourse when there is no naturally circumscribed nation to speak of, myth-making has been a distinct feature of Russian history. Russian civilization, such as it exists, is chronically pastiched; a magpie’s nest of pieces woven together whether they fit or not.^[9] As such, it is a gestalt, built by borrowing, appropriating, and yes, stealing.

In addition to the appropriation of outside forms, Russians have always held themselves as simultaneously inferior and superior to a fetishized external force—first the Byzantines, then the Mongols, followed by Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden, Germany, France, Germany, France, Germany, and finally moving to the United States during the decades of the Cold War and beyond. Russia, it might be said, is nothing without an external threat to keep its unruly melting pot of peoples united in lies.

No wonder it is paranoid.

In Russian mythology, the Slavic peoples of the Dnieper river valley invited Scandinavian warlords including one Rurik (from whence the Rus derive their name) to govern them in some misty prehistory, probably in the 8th or 9th-century. “Invited” being a loaded term here—but in any case, the Scandinavian Rus, or Normans in Russian historiography (yes, those Normans; see, the Russians are just as good as France and England!), gave the Slavs law and order, and by the 11th-century their culture, centered on Kiev, dominated the river valley trade networks from the Black Sea to the Baltic.^[10]

But even these proto-Russians lusted after the power and prestige of their wealthier neighbors—they very soon turned to the Byzantine Empire as a model to emulate and posture themselves against. Volodymyr the Great converted to Byzantine (Greek) Orthodox Christianity in 988 as an instrumentalist maneuver to seal his marriage to the daughter of the Byzantine emperor Basil II.^[11]  

The Mongol invasion, beginning around 1220, dramatically altered the trajectory of Russian political development. Prior to the Mongol influence, The Kievan Rus demonstrated early forms of democratic development and even a strong measure of individualism. Novgorod, on the Baltic coast, was governed as a merchant republic not dissimilar to the Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice. After Mongol occupation, however, the Rus turned completely towards eastern-style despotism.

It should be noted; given President Putin’s notorious penchant for politically-motivated murders, that Batu Khan’s excuse for entering Russia was an episode of diplomatic murder—when the Kievan princes gathered to treat with Mongol emissaries, they instead had them murdered out of paranoia. As a result, within twenty years Batu Khan’s horde had reduced every Russian principality to rubble, killing their citizens and sacking their cities, eventually burning Kiev itself to the ground. By the 1250s the vibrant culture of the Kievan Rus had been entirely subordinated, if not outright obliterated, a cultural purge that would become ingrained over the next three centuries of the ‘Mongol Yoke.’ The destruction of Kievan society left what was left of Russian culture to alternate between periods of conflict and cooperation with the West, driven by a deep sense of both pride and inferiority.

In 1441, for example, the Greek metropolitan of what was then simply Rus, still under Mongol dominance, was thrown into a Muscovite prison for attempting to broker union between the schismatic Christian world of Catholics and Orthodoxy. Grand Prince Vasilii—the father of Ivan Velikii (who should not be confused with Ivan the Terrible more accurately known as Ivan Grozny)—cited theological differences as his reason, but clerics on both sides had already approved the union at various councils held in Florence. The real reason, according to historian Serhii Plokhy, was that Vasilii wanted his appointee to be made metropolitan, and was rebuffed repeatedly by church fathers in Constantinople. The collapse of the union permitted Prince Vasilii to elevate Moscow to an equal footing with the Byzantines, create his own distinct brand of  Russian Orthodoxy, and appoint his prelates to the most important positions within the church hierarchy.[12] It would certainly not be the last time a Russian leader teased negotiations with Western international institutions only to pull the proverbial rug out at the last minute for personal benefit.

Western politicians, philosophers, and military strategists have been trying to figure Russia out ever since. In 1568, England’s first ambassadorial mission to the Russian Empire was accompanied by the poet George Turbeville, who reported back to Queen Elizabeth I that “none other news to thee, but that the country is too cold, and the people beastly be.”^[13] Beastly or not, Russians have always been both misunderstood by, and skeptical of, Western Europeans and their influence, even while desiring nothing more than to be a part of the European order, recognized as the West’s equal. 

Russia, as its current ‘great’ Volodymyr—President Vladimir Putin, often points out, is a unique Eurasian civilization, adjacent to Europe but distinct—even, at times, superior. It was Russia, after all, that saved the world from Nazi Germany—a scourge born in the very heart of Europe. But Russia, even when it puts on airs of superiority, always secretly lusts after Europa’s warmer embrace. After appropriating the religion, language, and culture of the Byzantine Greeks, it adopted the autocratic forms and military style of its Mongol overlords. Its autocracy deeply ingrained into deeply ingrained into the ‘Russian Soul’ by the end of the Time of Troubles, and thus the Russian Empire was made.^[14] 

Russia’s paranoia is also, perhaps more than anything, informed by its geography, which influences culture in myriad complex ways. The Eurasian plain, the largest uninterrupted such landscape on earth, is something of a cultural superhighway flowing east and west.^[14] Its obstacles, like the Ural mountains that traditionally mark the border between Europe and Asia, are no substantial barrier. This vast plain was impossible to circumscribe, and thus impossible to defend. The polities that grew up in and around it, as a result, are intrinsically defensive and suspicious of outsiders.

Stratfor

Unlike the easily circumscribed polities of Western Europe, where private property and devolved government became the norm—eventually leading to concepts of common law and ruler accountability, Russia’s medieval period was more about ownership of people than property—because in a realm where land was abundant, peasants were the scarce resource. Generations of Mongol rule had inscribed Russians with a peasant mentality. Until remarkably recently, Russian aristocrats still ‘owned’ every person that lived on their land and had an incredible amount of control over their personal lives. The Russian druzhina, though often compared to the Western concept of a man-at-arms, for instance, is more similar to an Ottoman timariot than a Norman knight in the Western feudal tradition. Unlike the French or English knight, who owned a plot of land and served their ruler in times of war, in the Turkish and Russian system, the state continued to own all land, while the vassal owned the people.

As a result, Russia is an excellent example of what political scientists call a ‘low trust society,’ marked by the broad absence of social confidence and reliance on paternalistic, even familial connections as the basis for social cooperation. If you consider the other oft-cited example of a low-trust society in southern Italy and Sicily, home of the Cosa Nostra, Camorra, and N’drangheta mafia enterprises, you will begin to better understand some aspects of Russian culture.

Political scientist Francis Fukuyama notes that cooperation based on the sort of familistic systems that dominant low-trust societies come at the expense of a broader ability to trust strangers. “any advantage that may be given to another is necessarily at the expense of one’s own family. Therefore, one cannot afford the luxury of charity, which is giving others more than their due, or even of justice, which is giving them their due…toward those who are not of the family, the reasonable attitude is suspicion.”^[15] Another political scientist marks these cultures by the “prevalence of violence and the consciousness of death, the modest place of the woman in society, and the almost occult role of corruption in economics and politics…people participate and directly perceive modern secondary organizations, but for some reason reject them as illegitimate or corrupt.”^[16]

In the 2016 book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, television producer Peter Pomerantsev examines the rise of the political technologists—public relations experts in Western terminology—in Putin’s Russia, and their erosion of truth. Anne Applebaum, recounting her youth as a student in Moscow, called this the “the sense of being surrounded by lies.”^[17]

Though the Russians have always been keen propagandists, today the media ecosystem is expressed not through the creaking institutions of the Kremlin; rather the sleek, efficient, and all too-modern mechanisms of mass communication like ‘reality’ television and social media manipulation. The new media conglomerates in Russia are captured by the state but with the resources and talent of a globalized information technology enterprise.

Pomerantsev describes the Russian system as one in which “authoritarianism is the best of all possible systems…because the others are, despite appearances, no better. Lying in the service of the status quo is perfectly justified since the other side’s lies are more pernicious.” Mikhail Zygar agrees: “Putin loves the idea that no one is a saint. That every politician is corrupt. Any election is rigged. That we are all the same—we are all dirty bastards.”^[18]

Putinism’s reliance on lies is reminiscent of the propaganda of the Third Reich and Hitler’s ideology. Perhaps another appropriation: “Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”^[19]

Twitter

My favorite descriptor for Vladimir Putin’s Russia is Ekaterina Schumann's ‘autumnal autocracy.’ “The more it tries to seem young and energetic,” she writes, “the more it obviously fails.”^[20] This is what the Twitter-verse calls the ‘fellow kids’ meme.

The idea of Russia as an empire in shadowy twilight is intuitively appealing. In some ways, the entire century of the Cold War was merely a pause in the collapse of Russian authoritarianism that is now resuming right where it left off in 1905. A grasping plutocratic regime that will do almost anything to retain its power is manipulating reality among its own populace, denying accusations from its rivals and casting counter-accusations abroad, assassinating its enemies, and becoming increasingly brazen in its attacks to upset the international status quo.

Nearly four hundred years after Turbeville’s poem, another Englishman famously called Russia a “riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”^[21] It is all of these things, because discerning Russia’s real motives have always been a shell game, much like its famous nesting dolls. Much of Russia’s vacillating strategic character can be ascribed to its endemic paranoia and self-doubt as it enters what could very well be the terminal stage of Russian autocracy. Less than a generation ago, it should be remembered, Russia owned the largest land empire in world history, and today it is a rump—a revanchist rump armed with an increasingly modern nuclear arsenal and a host of other weapons, but a rump nonetheless.

But the idea that Putin is playing chess while the west plays checkers is, frankly, nonsense. Putin’s lack of strategic insight and sense of danger points to just the opposite, says no less an expert than Garry Kasparov.^[22] President Putin’s continued violations of international norms—such as the brazen use of a fourth-generation chemical weapon in a botched assassination attempt, or the more overt outright annexation of Crimea, are more wily tactical movements of opportunity, indicative of strategic agility than a master plan. Putin is nothing if not an excellent improviser because he is undoubtedly willing to take risks and embrace uncertainty.

Bobo Lo, the former Head of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, describes Putin’s actions in Ukraine, for example, as an “odd melange of mystical vision, historical and geopolitical anxieties, feelings of strategic entitlement, gut instincts, and tactical dexterity.”^[23]

Decisions are of course easier to reach in autocracies, and distributed influence networks like Russia’s Sistema are more adaptive overall than the bureaucratic, structured hierarchies of most Western institutions. Lo elaborates:

“Putin operates on the principle that ‘fewer is better’—at once more cohesive, more secure, and more effective. The mechanics of his response to the 2014 Ukrainian revolution are instructive here. There was no wide, much less public, consultation process. Neither Kyiv nor Western capitals, and almost no one in Moscow, had any inkling as to how he would respond to the overthrow of Victor Yanukovych. This meant that when he did decide to act—embarking on the annexation of Crimea and imitating separatist actions in eastern Ukraine—Russia’s ‘enemies’ were confounded. The surprise was near total, enabling the Kremlin to sustain the diplomatic as well as military initiative.”^[24]

The most dangerous aspect of Putin’s gamesmanship, however, is as Lo says: “In a febrile climate where short-termism trumps rationality, no scenario can be safely ruled out.”^[25]

But analysts (or more often, pundits) who see Russia’s actions in Georgia^[26] or Ukraine as the opening thrusts of a new age of imperialism, do not understand either the diminished nature of the Russian system, or the hyper-connected world of the 21st-century, where owning a state’s territory is less important than being able to exploit its resources. Lo describes two views of Russia: first, that it is a revanchist power, incapable of seeing itself as anything but a civilizational empire determined to reassert control over its former possessions. Second, that it has abandoned these unrealistic aims, and acts purely defensively to protect its rent-seeking elites. Lo correctly, I think, posits that neither of these is quite right, that Russia is in fact what he calls a post-modernist empire.^[27]

The truth is that Russia is today (and in some ways has always been) intrinsically defensive in character, insular, covetous, and jealous to protect what it still has. It seeks the influence of empire without the burdens of imperialism. It is less an empire in the physical sense and more like a networked criminal organization. The Russian Sistema works through a true whole-of-society web-like apparatus, blending military, intelligence, and criminal means with the mentality of corporate raiders and undeclared agents. It is emblematic that even looking at a map of Russia from above at night, you will see Moscow resembles nothing so much as a spiderweb, its tendrils branching out like the spokes of a wheel in every direction.

But spiders, after all, eat their own. Perhaps they’re paranoid, too.

Zachery Tyson Brown is a career intelligence analyst and consultant who currently serves as an intelligence advisor to the Department of Defense. He can be found on Twitter @Zaknafien_DC. Zach previously served in the United States Army and as a civilian intelligence officer in the Department of Defense. Zach is most recently a graduate of the National Intelligence University, where his thesis "Adaptive Intelligence for an Age of Uncertainty" was awarded the LTC Michael D. Kuszewski Award for Outstanding Thesis on Operations-Intelligence Partnership. He also holds a Master’s Degree in History from American Military University and is currently enrolled in the Masters of International Service Executive Program at American University. 

[1] Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1989), Book 9 Ch. 10, 498

[2] Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” (1855). Retrieved from http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/whitman/song.htm;

[3] George F. Will “Candidate on a High Horse,” The Washington Post, (April 15th, 2008). Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/14/AR2008041402450.html;

[4] Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s Magazine(November, 1964), 1. Retrieved from https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/;

[5] Ibid., 2.

[6] DirectTV, “Opulence: I Has it,” (July 22nd, 2010). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjWYbcbpiWA;

[7] Neil MacFarqhar, “A New Vladimir Overlooking Moscow,” The New York Times, (November 4th, 2016). Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/05/world/europe/vladimir-statue-moscow-kremlin.html;

[8] Serhii Plokhy, Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2016), 42-43.

[9] Unknown, “The Magpie’s Nest,” in English Fairy Tales, ed. Joseph Jacobs (London, UK: David Nutt, 1890). Retrieved from http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/jacobs/english/magpiesnest.html’;

[10] Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1984), 30-66.

[11] Paul Bushkovitch, A Concise History of Russia (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 7-8.

[12] Serhii Plokhy, Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2016), 21-22.

[13] Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1984), 1.

[14] Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1984), 173.

[15] Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1984), 4-5.

[16] Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2014).

[17] Sidney G. Tarrow, Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967).

[18] Anne Applebaum, “Russia and the Great Forgetting,” Commentary (December 2015). Retrieved from https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/russia-great-forgetting/;

[19] Mikhail Zygar, All the Kremlin’s Men (New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2016).

[20] Walter C. Langer, “A Psychological Profile of Adolf Hitler: His Life and Legend,” Office of Strategic Services (1943). Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78-02646R000600240001-5.pdf; 

[21] Julia Ioffe, “What Putin Really Wants,” The Atlantic, (February, 2018). Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/putins-game/546548/

[22] Winston Churchill, radio broadcast, British Broadcast Service, (October 1st, 1939).

[23] Ibid., 105.

[24] Bobo Lo, Russia and the New World Disorder (London, UK: Chatham House, 2015), 108.

[25] Bobo Lo, Russia and the New World Disorder (London, UK: Chatham House, 2015), 7.

[26] Ibid., 112.

[27] Ronald Asmus, A Little War that Shook the World: Georgia, Russia, and the Future of the West (Basingstroke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

[28] Lo, 100-101