Brian M Downing
Russian leader Vladimir Putin has audaciously seized the Crimea and positioned troops to move into eastern Ukraine and the Trans-Dniester region of Moldova. The Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are to say the least dismayed and look upon their sizable ethnic Russian populations with suspicion. Poles know quite well that Russia has seized large parts of their territory over the years and maintains a fortress-like exclave in nearby Kaliningrad.
Putin’s actions seek to reestablish his country as a world power and check NATO expansion. Their denouement in the region and world are unclear but they foreshadow significant consequences inside Russia, including the definition of the state firmly based on national security, religion, integration, and victory – the foundations of past periods of Russian greatness.
Victory and the state
A state victorious in war, or in bold foreign moves short of war, enjoys considerable acclamation. National myths are ratified, fears are allayed, leaders seem visionary and powerful – in older times, omnipotent. An independent research organization now charts Putin’s approval rating near eighty percent, up sharply since last December.
Facing legitimate security concerns over EU and NATO expansion, Putin has worsened the situation by heightening the defense postures and increasing hostility to ethnic Russian populations in countries along his periphery. The Russian state will orchestrate a measure of international danger to justify autocratic rule and oligarchic economic controls – even though the present danger is largely its own creation.
Powerful leaders have been revered throughout Russian history. Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great are respected and admired as leaders who defended the realm against foreign and internal enemies and built a powerful nation. Stalin’s victory in World War Two caused many to overlook his role in the deaths of tens of millions of people and endow an otherwise meritless system and ideology with sufficient legitimacy to hold it up for decades.
Putin already felt strong enough to intimidate reformist centers, but with the Crimean success, he can come down all the harder, on dissenters and the remaining independent media. Disaffection over oligarchic wealth and decision-making will be muted. Regional hostility to Muscovite elitism and wealth will diminish, especially in remote trans-Ural parts of the country.
Caesaropapism
The aura surrounding the victorious state is all the brighter as it enjoys a patina of sacredness and tradition bestowed by the Orthodox Church. Putin has long cultivated its support to offer a spiritual dimension to an otherwise newly-minted and historyless political order, placing him in a long line of national leaders. It has played well with rural populations that otherwise look askance at Muscovite pretensions and extractions.
The Orthodox Church has long supported powerful rulers who defended the realm from barbarian invaders and decadent ideas – one of the latter of course being democracy. Amid the Third Reich’s invasion, Stalin courted and won the support of the Church – and many Muslim leaders as well – by building thousands of churches and mosques.
The Church, unsurprisingly, is especially strong in the military, where it fuses religious and martial virtues along with myths of Russia’s mission in the world.
State-building
Russian leaders have often wielded less power than it appears from outside the borders as local officials refuse to carry out edicts from Moscow. An 18th-century empress once complained, “With what sorrow, we, with our love for our subjects, must see that many laws, enacted for the happiness and well-being of the state, are not implemented due to the widespread internal enemies, who prefer their own illegal profit to their oath, duty and honor.”
Irked by similar local opposition, Putin can use his new prestige to synchronize local officials with his distant state and create a level of vertical integration that tsars and general-secretaries could only have yearned for. This may be essential for Russia in its eastern areas where the economy is increasingly tied to China.
Success and failure
The upsurge in Putin’s popularity and Russian nationalism will bring opportunities but problems as well. A resurgent autocracy will signal the consolidation of autocracy, and talented young people and those with portable wealth will flee, if they haven’t already, for more hospitable environs to the west.
Rising Great Russian nationalism will lead to greater conflict with the millions of Central Asian people who have come to Russian cities to perform work that many Russians now find menial or low-paying, and who already find themselves attacked on city streets by ultra-nationalist gangs.
More worrisome would be the resurgence of terrorism – religious and otherwise. Chechens and other Muslim groups view Putin’s support for Crimean and Trans-Dniester independence and wonder why his obligingness does not extend to their demands for greater autonomy. Ethnic Russians, despairing of reform and seeing a new tsar in the Kremlin, may themselves turn to terrorism – there in the birthplace of nihilism and of groups convinced they best know the people’s will.
© 2014 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a political/military analyst, author of The Paths of Glory: Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam, and co-author with Danny Rittman of The Samson Heuristic.