Gorchakov's Note

Nicholas I had understood the tensions between his commitment to the Holy Alliance and Russia's own interests but still chose to focus on the Holy Alliance. By appointing Prince Alexander Gorchakov to lead the Foreign Ministry, the new emperor Alexander II sought to redirect policy to concentrate on internal affairs. However, this was not a popular appointment. Gorchakov's predecessor, Count Karl Nesselrode, was a long-term supporter of the Holy Alliance and was not pleased by this appointment. Nesselrode did not think much of Gorchakov's abilities and had recommended someone else for the position.² In addition, Gorchakov himself first declined the offer, citing health reasons, to which Nesselrode reportedly remarked semi-sarcastically, “Prince, you shouldn't decline the position of the minister. Now that the Paris peace is concluded there will be practically no work to do.”³ Even though he recognized that attention needed to be paid to Russia's domestic needs after defeat in the Crimean War,⁴ Nesselrode favored a revival of the Holy Alliance in some form.⁵

Gorchakov, who took over foreign affairs in May 1856, soon demonstrated that he was of a different opinion. He did not think Russia had to be passive in foreign policy and did not feel that an alliance with Austriaand Prussia would be effective in helping Russia meet its objectives. The chancellor viewed the restoration of Russia's influence in the Balkans and access to the Black Sea as critically important objectives without which state honor could not be preserved. He therefore saw his task as ensuring a diplomatic return to the pre-Paris conditions. Gorchakov formulated his policy to Russia's ambassador in Paris this way: “I am looking for a man who will annul the clauses of the treaty of Paris, concerning the Black Sea question and the Bessarabian frontier; I am looking for him and I shall find him.”⁶ A believer in Russia's “return” to European politics, the chancellor liked to quote the words of Catherine the Great: “time will tell that we are not following anyone's tale.”⁷

Often posing as a passive executor of the Tsar's plans,⁸ Gorchakov in practice exercised a major influence on Alexander and played an active role in foreign policy formulation.⁹ In August, only a few months after accepting his new position, Gorchakov sent to European governments a note in which he formulated the new course of action and its justification. The two key principles of his foreign policy were relative isolation from European affairs and no commitment to coalitions with other states. The former principle was deemed necessary for implementing domestic reforms after defeat in the war, and the latter was designed to provide the international calm required for domestic recovery.¹⁰ “The circumstances have given us back a full freedom of action,” wrote Gorchakov,¹¹ referring to the collapsed Holy Alliance and the perceived betrayal of Austria. To the outside world, the chancellor sought to clarify that Russia had adopted a new policy because of its domestic needs, and not because it was angry at the European powers: “La Russie ne boude pas – elle se recueille.”¹² Scholars characterized the recueillement as a moderate and defensive policy that yet aimed to revise the status quo established by the Paris treaty.¹³

Rapprochement with France

However, Russia could not be entirely isolated from European affairs and needed to build some international ties to buy time for domestic reforms. Gorchakov's preference was to cultivate relations with France, rather than with Austria and Prussia, as recommended by Nesselrode. Eager to implement his policy of flexible alliances, the chancellor wanted to explore whether Russia's state interests could be better served by pursuing ties with Napoleon.

The rapprochement with France brought Russia some policy dividends by strengthening its role in the Balkans and helping neutralize potentially damaging British influences. Together with France, Russia provided strong support to Montenegro and Serbia by weakening the Austrian role in the region. Russia also protested the Sultan's military interference in Montenegro and supported an anti-Turkish rebellion in Herzegovina financially and diplomatically.¹⁴ In Gorchakov's words, Serbia “became the center and point of support for other areas of Turkey,” and Russia's assistance helped it establish greater independence and enhance Russia's own military standing.¹⁵

Meanwhile Napoleon was hoping to obtain Alexander's support for French plans to annex Italy's provinces, whereas Russia needed France's assistance in revising the Paris conditions. In March 1859, the two nations signed a bilateral Treaty of Neutrality and Cooperation, in which Russia pledged a “political and military position of benevolent neutrality” toward France in case of the latter's war with Austria.¹⁶ Austria tried to weaken Russo-French ties by offering support for Russia's interests in the Black Sea, based on principles of “conservative solidarity,” but Alexander no longer trusted Austria and refused to negotiate with it.¹⁷ When a Polish revolt broke out in 1863, the French position was also more moderate than that of Britain.¹⁸

However, Alexander and Gorchakov were also disappointed by the French. On issues that were most important to Russia, such as the Paris conditions and the status of Poland, the French position proved to be either vague or critical of Russia. When Alexander tried to link his support for territorial changes in Italy to abolition of the Paris clauses, Napoleon and his foreign minister Walewski offered a vague assurance that “the modification of existing treaties” may be addressed after the coming war with Austria.¹⁹ By that point Gorchakov had little faith in France, although Alexander remained hopeful that Napoleon would prove helpful in the future.²⁰ St. Petersburg also viewed as insufficient French support for Russia's actions in the Balkans during the series of revolts after 1860. For example, although the two cooperated on resisting Turkish military intervention in Chernogoria in 1862, France was wary of Russia's growing influence and not eager to pressure the Sultan.²¹

Increasingly, Russia was becoming convinced that French objectives had more to do with the politics of revolution than those of a traditional great power²² and therefore were hardly compatible with those of St. Petersburg. For this reason the two could not cooperate on preventing the rise of Germany, in addition to other issues. The Polish revolt confirmed this tension, and the two nations began to drift apart, with the French foreign minister declaring in 1863 that “France too resumed full freedom of judgment and action.”²³ Soon after, Alexander wrote to William I of Austria and offered to revive their old ties.²⁴

The Polish Revolt and Russia's Diplomacy

The Polish revolt further demonstrated the limitations of Russia's ties with the European powers. In early 1863 nationalist groups prevailed within the Polish political elite and led an uprising, demanding secession from Russia. Yielding to nationalist pressures was out of the question. In Alexander's perception doing so would have opened a Pandora's box of similar secessionist claims by Lithuania, Belorussia, and parts of Ukraine.²⁵ However, the Polish issue had to be handled in a delicate manner, given that Europe supported Poland and that Russia could not afford to go to war over the issue. Another serious complication was that Russian public opinion was united in opposition to Polish nationalism, demanding a tough response that would further worsen Russia's standing in Europe. According to Mikhail Katkov, a leading spokesman for Russian nationalism, the issue was no longer whether Russia or Poland “will become mightier,” but “which one of them will exist.”²⁶ Alexander decided to suppress the revolt, but also introduce administrative and land reforms to undermine both the domestic and foreign appeal of Russian nationalists.²⁷

However, the European powers made it more difficult for Alexander to manage the issue by pressuring him to accept the demands of Polish nationalists. Believing that Alexander was weak and seeking to further undermine him, Britain exerted especially strong pressure on Russia. The British foreign minister Earl Russell argued for a restoration of the Polish constitution of 1815 and claimed that by not granting it Russia would exclude itself from the civilized world.²⁸ Napoleon too requested the restoration of Polish self-government,²⁹ although not in the tough language used by the British. Instead, France proposed to deal with the issue in a multilateral way by addressing it at a European congress.³⁰ Prussia refrained from exerting diplomatic pressure, yet Count Otto Bismarck, the Prussian chancellor, was hoping to exploit the issue geopolitically by “Germanizing” an independent Poland within three years.³¹ Finally, Austria again joined what looked like the new “Crimean coalition.” In April 1863, Britain, France, and Austria each sent similar notes to the Russia government asking that Poland be independent and include Lithuania and Ruthenia.³²

In addition, Russia could not count on strong support from the Balkan nations, where the new generation of politicians were more Western and nationalist and the Orthodox appeal had weakened.³³ Even Serbia, a stronghold of Russia's influence, was helping the Polish uprising by attempting to instigate a larger movement to dissolve the Ottoman Empire.³⁴

As before the Crimean War, Russia was threatened with isolation and had to find a flexible response to the crisis. Although the Poland insurrection was considered an internal matter, Gorchakov played an important role in resolving the crisis and providing Alexander with the confidence necessary for carrying out the Great Reforms at home.³⁵ Generally pro-reform and moderate on Poland,³⁶ Gorchakov nevertheless firmly deflected European pressures by pointing out that the Polish issue was “exclusively the matter of Russia, and not Europe.”³⁷ Seeking to weaken the unity of the European governments, the chancellor then conceded that Austria and Prussia might legitimately discuss the issue as co-participants in Poland's partition.³⁸ Gorchakov also wrote individually to each European power and promised various concessions, reforms, and amnesty in exchange for the rebels’ surrender.³⁹ To Britain, he even promised a constitutional order for Poland similar to the British, although not in the near future.⁴⁰ Simultaneously, Russia accelerated its efforts to suppress the Polish revolt.

The approach worked, gradually reducing tensions and diffusing the power of the European coalition. As Seton-Watson wrote, “defeat of the rebellion increased Russian prestige in Europe: the Russians were no more loved than they had been, but they were more respected.”⁴¹ In tacit acknowledgment of this increased respect, Prussia expressed its readiness to assist the Russian government by offering to fight the Polish rebels on Prussian territory.⁴² Most importantly, Gorchakov isolated Britain, which was the only power ready to fight Russia over Poland. The British government was the most important of the chancellor's concerns because of his conviction that “in the Black Sea and in the Baltics, on the coasts of the Caspian Sea and in the Pacific – everywhere Britain is the unwavering enemy of our interests, everywhere she opposes us in the most aggressive fashion.”⁴³

Rapprochement with Prussia and Repudiation of the Paris Terms

The Polish revolt served as a critical test of Gorchakov's flexible coalition approach. Disillusioned with rapprochement with France and sensing an opportunity to strengthen its relationship with Prussia, Russia began to cultivate ties with the Prussian leadership. Alexander and Gorchakov came to believe that the support of the rapidly rising European power might prove sufficient to bring about revision of the Paris conditions. Prussia indicated its willingness to support Russia in exchange for Russia's not opposing Bismarck's drive to unify the German lands around Prussia – which could only come at the expense of Prussia's neighbors including Austria, France, and the Netherlands. Both Alexander and Gorchakov opposed the unification,⁴⁴ but Bismarck threatened the prospect of building an alliance with France and raising the Polish question anew.⁴⁵ As Russia and Prussia were moving closer, Napoleon III failed to notice the similarity of Alexander and Gorchakov's anti-unification position to his own and to exploit the opportunity for the purpose of restraining Prussia.

That Russia decided to use Prussia for the purposes of revising the Paris conditions became clear in 1866, when Alexander did not respond to Austria's offer of cooperation and did nothing to prevent the Prussia-Austria war. Russia's growing support of Balkan independence from the Ottoman Empire also put St. Petersburg at odds with Paris and Vienna. As the possibility of Prussia's war with France was becoming real, Alexander and Gorchakov visited Paris in April 1867 to clarify their relationship as foreign policy partners. The meeting with Napoleon was not successful,⁴⁶ solidifying Russia's position of benevolent neutrality in the case of a Prussian-French war. In 1868, in exchange for Bismarck's assurance of support, Russia pledged to neutralize Austria by sending 100,000 troops to the Austrian border.⁴⁷ The pledge provided Prussia with the necessary political room to fight, and in 1870, the powerful Prussian army defeated France, even taking the French emperor prisoner. Although Russia was disappointed by Bismarck's claims to the French territories of Alsace and Lorraine, Alexander and Gorchakov remained faithful to the agreement with Prussia.

This was the opportune time for Russia to neutralize the Paris Treaty by announcing to the European powers its denunciation of the Black Sea clauses. In his note to Russian ambassadors on October 31, 1870, Gorchakov explained that Russia could no longer be bound by the treaty, given that it constrained Russia's sovereign rights and that other European powers had already violated the agreement.⁴⁸ France and Austria were too weak to resist the move by Russia. Prussia was acting on the promise of support from Russia, which it still needed because it had not yet signed a peace treaty with France.⁴⁹ Great Britain was the only power that indicated its willingness to fight Russia, but it was marginalized by the lack of international support. Indeed, diplomatic historians view the British position as merely an attempt to signal to Prussia its desire to have it as a member of a new anti-Russian coalition.⁵⁰ In the meantime, the unified Germany had no plans of becoming an ally of Britain, and Emperor William I telegraphed his gratitude to Alexander: “Prussia will never forget that she owes it to you that the war has not assumed extreme dimension.”⁵¹ The European conference of 1871 in London solidified Russia's success.

Having achieved its key goal by practicing flexible coalition diplomacy, Russia again attempted to revive ties with France – partly to offset the growing power of a unified Germany. Although Russian-German ties were developing, Gorchakov sought to emphasize their purely defensive nature.⁵² When France and Germany came close to a military confrontation in 1874 and 1875, Russia signaled its support for France, discouraging Germany from further upsetting the existing balance of power.⁵³ Russia also revived its ties with Austria in an attempt to restrain German policies toward the Habsburgs and to influence Vienna's Balkan policies.

European Influences

The European powers sought to consolidate or even further to undermine Russia's post-Crimean position as a secondary power. The British government was the most hostile. Its hopes to rise to the position of European hegemon, as well as firmly entrenched Russophobia, shaped London's perception of Russia. Much of the European dislike of Russia originated in Britain soon after establishment of the Vienna Concert.⁵⁴Britain was the only power that opposed the end of the Crimean War on Austria-proposed conditions. London also labored to weaken Russia's influence in the Balkans and to prevent France and Prussia from becoming too close to Russia.⁵⁵ During the Polish revolt, Britain presented Alexander with the most strongly worded demands, with Palmerston characterizing Russia's actions as aiming to “exterminate the Poles.”⁵⁶ British perceptions continued to harden in response to Russia's expansion in the Caucasus and Central Asia.⁵⁷

The positions of other European powers toward Russia were not as hawkish, yet they too reflected the desire to prevent the rise of Russia as a great power competitor. The underlying reality was that the Europe-centered international system had entered the era of secular nationalist politics, with little room left for the traditional Christian values that had united the continent before the Crimean War. As Kalevi Holsti wrote, “the architects of the Paris and Vienna settlements ignored the principle of nationality,”⁵⁸ and the newly discovered approach of European states was to exploit national aspirations for the purpose of increasing their political and military power. That was especially true of Prussia, which aimed to unify the German lands around it and was interested in Russia only to the extent that the latter was able to offset potentially dangerous French and Austrian influences. That was also true of Austria, which sought to preserve its position in the Balkans and reached out to Russia only when Austria felt threatened by Prussia. Finally, that was true of France, which cared about the principle of nationality more than the other European powers, but was also eager to preserve the victorious status of the post-Crimean War system.

In that international context, Russia's vision of honor as morally driven cooperation with outside powers, which had underlined the Holy Alliance, could not be revived.

Domestic Conditions and Russia's Honor

Similarly Russia's weak economic and social conditions ruled out the possibility of acting under the assertive concept of state honor and defending cultural commitments outside the West. From an economic, technological, military, and administrative standpoint, Russia was lagging behind major European powers even before the Crimean War,⁵⁹ and the war only made it more difficult to pursue an activist foreign policy.

In addition to losing nearly a half-million people in the fighting,⁶⁰ Russia found itself in a dire financial situation. The postwar deficit was close to one billion rubles,⁶¹ which some historians characterized as forcing Russia to the brink of bankruptcy.⁶² Its foreign debt was almost 500 million rubles.⁶³ Western banks were reluctant to lend money under these conditions, and Russia had to rely on reviving private initiative in the economy.⁶⁴ Alexander, who reviewed the situation in 1862, assessed it as “indeed critical.”⁶⁵

The Russian military was both technologically backward and overly centralized. An enormous landmass, Russia nevertheless lacked railroads and often had to rely on horses or even moving the troops by foot.⁶⁶ The army was also poorly trained and underequipped. For example, in the Crimean War, Russian soldiers used flintlock muskets with a range of 200 yards, compared to the rifles used by the British and French that could reach a target 1,000 yards away.⁶⁷ No less important were the military's administrative deficiencies. Russia needed an improved system of military recruitment on a par with European practices of specialized training and mass nationalist mobilization.⁶⁸ In addition, the army lacked command flexibility, because any modification in military campaigns had to be approved by the Tsar himself.⁶⁹

The Russian leadership understood that, before it could return to a more active foreign policy, it had to strengthen its domestic institutions by reforming the system. In Gorchakov's words, “Russia cannot play an active role in its external policy when it is faced with internal poverty and mismanagement.”⁷⁰ To the chancellor, the central problem was the unresolved issue of serfdom, which he called “the cradle of all our evils.”⁷¹ Thinking in the framework of state honor, Russian statesmen began moving in the direction of reforming the institutions of autocratic power. In addition to emphasizing the importance of peasant emancipation, Gorchakov noted some advantages in involving the public in the business of ruling: “When a Palmerston commits infamous political acts, he takes refuge behind public opinion, majorities.…But the country is not dishonored, because it shields its honor behind the rampart of minorities.”⁷² While serving under Nesselrode, Gorchakov was the first to introduce to diplomatic language the term “Russia” as a personification of the state, in addition to the traditional “the Emperor.”⁷³ Others, like Grand Duke Konstantin, were also worried about the country's political, rather than material, conditions: “we are both weaker and poorer than the first-class powers…not only in material but also in mental resources, especially in matters of administration.”⁷⁴

Although they realized the need to reform the system decisively, Alexander and Gorchakov could not neglect the traditional aspects of state honor, which included concerns for the Straits and the well-being of Orthodox Christians in the Balkans. The Straits were essential for commercial reasons, because Russia exported about 80 percent of its grain via them.⁷⁵ Their control enhanced Russia's security and ability to preserve stability in the Caucasus. For example, in February 1857 Polish and Hungarian troops arrived in the region via the Black Sea to challenge Russia's rule.⁷⁶ Not sympathetic to extreme pan-Slavist ideas, both Alexander and Gorchakov nonetheless remained faithful to Russia's traditional obligations in the Balkans. As Gorchakov wrote to the Russian ambassador in Constantinople in 1856, “It is an interest of the first order for us to have in our immediate neighborhood populations that are attached to us by the ties of the faith.”⁷⁷

The Recueillement's Internal Support and Opposition

Immediately after the Crimean War, few people opposed the new policy of flexible alliances and a concentration on domestic affairs. Supporters of the principles underlying the Holy Alliance, including Nesselrode, hoped that the recueillement was a temporary necessity driven by considerations of postwar recovery and that Russia would eventually revive its previously strong ties with Prussia and Austria.⁷⁸ Russia's pro-Western liberals too refrained from opposing Gorchakov's ideas and were encouraged by the government's initial rapprochement with France, which they viewed as a turn away from autocracy and toward liberal Europe. Finally, advocates of Russia's strong ties with the Balkan Slavs, the pan-Slavists, favored the government's objective of reversing the Treaty of Paris, particularly the clauses about the Black Sea and southern Bessarabia. Indeed, one pan-Slavist sympathizer, the great poet Fyodor Tyutchev, was a diplomat and Gorchakov's close friend who praised the official policy in his poetry.⁷⁹

Further developments, however, divided the coalition of supporters. The advocates for ties with a conservative Europe were disappointed by the government's closer relationship with France. Russia's pro-Western liberals opposed the government's suppression of the Polish revolt and became alarmed by the prospects of a new European war in response to Russia's repudiation of the Paris conditions.⁸⁰ In general, Russia's progressive circles opposed the government's rapprochement with Prussia, and during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 the Russian press were overwhelmingly on France's side.⁸¹ Finally, the pan-Slavist groups increasingly viewed Alexander and Gorchakov as excessively pro-German and insufficiently decisive in developing Russian ties with the Balkan Slavs.

After the military defeat, pan-Slavism emerged as especially influential in response to the sense of national humiliation,⁸² which ultimately led to strong domestic support for another war with Turkey in 1876. Successors to the Slavophiles, the pan-Slavists formulated an ambitious international program that sought the removal of the Balkan Slavs from the control of Turkey and the European powers, as well as the organization of the Slavs into a federation under Russia's patronage.⁸³ They hoped that national affiliations of Slavs, including the Poles, would be superseded by a transnational identity.⁸⁴ To pan-Slavists such as Ivan Aksakov, Nikolai Danilevski, Vladimir Lamanski, Mikhail Katkov, and Mikhail Pogodin, the entirety of Europe, not just France or Germany, was the enemy because it did not accept Russia's “natural” Greco-Slavic way of living. Responding to the strengthening European discourse in Russia, Tyutchev warned in 1864,

The most serious threat to Russia in the West, according to the pan-Slavists, came from Germany and the Romano-Germanic type it represented.⁸⁶ Wrote Ivan Aksakov in 1867, if Slavs wished to remain Slavs, they had to choose “either the road to the West or the road to the East, the road to Latinity or the road of Orthodoxy, union either with the destinies of the Western European world or the destinies of the Greco-Slavic world.”⁸⁷ From this ideological position, pan-Slavists advocated a forceful policy of liberating the Balkan Slavs.

The ability of pan-Slavists to influence Russia's official course was considerable – partly because of their ability to exploit the new openness, or glasnost, encouraged by the Great Reforms. The number of periodicals and their circulation increased fourfold from 1855–75.⁸⁸ Although the government continued to intervene where it felt necessary, censorship was not as strict as under Nicholas I. For example, when Ivan Aksakov's Parus was closed in 1859 on the grounds of interfering with official foreign policy, Gorchakov and others objected to the ban and helped revive the newspaper, albeit under a different name.⁸⁹ Ivan Aksakov later credited the new, more open conditions for promoting a war with Turkey: “public opinion conducted a war apart from the government and without any state organization.”⁹⁰

Another reason for the growing pan-Slavist influence was the presence of their sympathizers within the government. The most prominent home for pan-Slavists was the Asiatic department of the Foreign Ministry headed by E. Kovalevski and, during 1861–4, by Count Nicholas Ignatyev.⁹¹ The latter advocated an assertive policy to strengthen Russia's position in the Balkans by providing extensive assistance to Serbia and other Slavic nations. Whenever an opportunity presented itself, Ignatyev argued, Russia had to assert control over the Slav lands, rather than merely expect Slavs to rise up against their masters. On that basis, he opposed Austria taking control of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the Ottoman Empire, insisting that Russia's interests would be harmed as a result. Especially hostile toward Austria, Ignatyev saw its war with Prussia as an opportunity for Russia.⁹² Gorchakov and others within the government did not favor such an assertive stance,⁹³ but Alexander valued diverse voices and even appointed Ignatyev ambassador to Constantinople.⁹⁴

Although the government was not united, the positions of Alexander and Gorchakov were very different from that of the pan-Slavists, and it would be a mistake to view Russia's foreign policy as driven solely by their ideas.⁹⁵ Despite being disappointed with the European powers’ actions during the Crimean War, the government did not turn away from Europe, as the pan-Slavists had hoped. Fearful of internal unrest and external destabilization, Gorchakov was opposed to conducting “a revolutionary policy” of challenging Turkey's stability, hoping instead for “the natural decadence of Islam” to run its course ⁹⁶ His policy stance can be best described as moderate, state-centered Westernism. Although the government provided partial support for pan-Slavist organizations and sponsored some of their activities, such as the 1867 Panslav Congress in Moscow, such support did not rise to the level of association with pan-Slavist radicals. The chancellor was in fact contemptuous of the pan-Slavic program, and his views had broad support within the Council of Ministers.⁹⁷

Alternative Explanations

According to defensive realism, states adopt a generally defensive stance in response to uncertainty within the international system. Under conditions of vulnerability, the weak state is expected to bandwagon with a more powerful state. Although Russia was most certainly a weak state after its military defeat, it refrained from pursuing a policy of bandwagoning with a powerful France or rising Germany. Instead, Russia's government decided to balance between the strong powers – partly because it was not satisfied with the conditions of the Paris peace treaty. Viewing the recueillement era as an example of a generally defensive and conciliatory foreign policy⁹⁸ is only partially correct, however, because Russia also had important revisionist objectives.⁹⁹ Presenting Gorchakov's policy as driven by irrational beliefs, rather than rational calculations of material weakness, is also problematic, because the overwhelming majority of the political class shared the “irrational” objective of revising the Paris conditions.

Defensive realism is therefore imprecise or even incorrect in characterizing Russia's post–Crimean war response. An honor-based account provides a more accurate interpretation of Russia's behavior by pointing to its government's obligations to Orthodox Christians and the importance of reviving the status of a great power. Limited by material conditions, St. Petersburg could not pursue the assertive policy favored by Ignatyev and the pan-Slavists. Nevertheless, Alexander and Gorchakov did not abandon their cultural obligations and used the opportunity to revise the post-Paris status quo when it presented itself. Although the Crimean War marked the transition of the European system to a period of greater anarchy,¹⁰⁰ cultural beliefs remained important, and Russia's statesmen should hardly be viewed as Western realist thinkers.¹⁰¹ As one historian wrote, “‘the primacy of domestic affairs imposed policies that clashed with the regime's conception of Russia's ‘dignity’ and ‘honor.’”¹⁰² Considerations of honor explain the durability of Russian nationalism and persistent expansion into Central Asia, despite the country's lack of financial, military, and technological resources.¹⁰³

Offensive realist accounts may seem more compelling because they view the recueillement as an example of a back-passing in response to unfavorable conditions of the international system.¹⁰⁴ Yet this explanation too misses the honor component of the Russia's post–Crimean War policy, capturing only part of the government's motivation. Much of what offensive realists view as Russia's struggle for material power was in fact the politics of cultural honor and prestige. For example, although Bismarck advised St. Petersburg to build warships in the Black Sea after revising the Paris clauses, the Russians did not follow this advice and had no active fleet even by the time of their war with Turkey in 1877. As A. J. P. Taylor wrote, “the Russians wanted the other Powers to recognize their right to keep warships there, not actually to have them.”¹⁰⁵

The End of the World Revolution

The doctrine of world revolution rested on key foreign and domestic policies. Externally, it implied the need for a chain reaction of other socialist revolutions in Europe, without which the revolution in Russia would not be secure amid fierce opposition from capitalist nations.³ In 1919, the Bolsheviks established the Communist International (Comintern) to promote such revolutions by spreading communist ideas and setting up new communist parties abroad. Internally, they established a system of military communism in which everything was to be decided from the top and executed with the help of an army of state bureaucrats. A product of the civil war, the system also had its roots in the Marxist critique of private property and “bourgeois” parliamentarism. For example, the Bolsheviks’ dissolution of the Constitutional Assembly in January 1918 resulted not only from their frustration with the results of the elections but also from their belief that their system of soviets “as revolutionary organs of the entire people” was “incomparably superior to all parliaments anywhere in the world.”⁴

By 1921, however, it had become clear that Bolshevik expectations of world revolution could no longer be matched by reality and that, without introducing a new policy, the Soviet regime was headed toward collapse. Externally, the Soviet Union was increasingly isolated. No revolutions had taken place in Europe. The new Soviet state had lost the war to Germany, and in March 1918 the Bolsheviks agreed to extremely harsh conditions of peace in Brest-Litovsk: Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, and Ukraine were ceded to Germany and Austria, with some territories in the Caucasus going to Turkey. The lost territories were a core of Russian industry, population, and fertile agricultural land.⁵ The civil war was long, violent, and devastating⁶ and took a formidable material toll. Industry was disorganized and agricultural production devastated. In addition to the violence, the horrific Volga famine, which was partly the result of the state requisition of grain from the peasantry, took the lives of an additional four million people.⁷ As the revolt at the Kronstadt naval base of March 1921 demonstrated, the army was no longer prepared to follow the Bolsheviks’ orders without changes in economic and political conditions.

In response, Lenin insisted on the New Economic Policy (NEP), presenting it to his comrades as a necessary compromise, a temporary “breathing space” in the struggle for world revolution. At the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, the Bolshevik leader called on his followers to “learn from capitalism” in economics while preserving strict control of the “commanding heights” in politics. The peasantry was to obtain greater freedom in selling its products, yet the party would tolerate no factions, let alone dissent, within its ranks or outside. The NEP's foreign policy equivalent was what Lenin called “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalism world until “the capitalist states of Western Europe have completed their development to socialism.”⁸ Lenin sought to justify the new policy in terms of a temporary retreat from the original honorable objectives of the Soviet state. The assertive policy of seeking world revolution had to be replaced by the defensive nature of the NEP until the USSR was back on its feet and able to influence socialist transformations abroad.

Arguing against what he called “infantile leftism,” Lenin visualized peaceful coexistence as “a new and lengthy period of development.” During this period, Soviet leaders had to restore diplomatic ties with advanced capitalist nations of the West and learn how to obtain their “means of production (locomotives, machines, and electrical equipment).”⁹ If they failed to do so, he argued, “we cannot more or less seriously rehabilitate our industry” or close the gap between the USSR and the advanced capitalist world.¹⁰ Supported by other Bolsheviks, including Leonid Krasin, Aleksei Rykov, and Grigori Sokol'nikov, Lenin hoped to engage the West through trade and concessions to Russia's natural resources.¹¹ Although his policy remained ideologically antagonistic to the capitalist world, he envisioned mutual economic benefits from growing interactions with it.¹² At the same time the Comintern would continue to engage in propaganda and subversive activities abroad.¹³

Lenin's version of peaceful coexistence differed from that later adopted by Joseph Stalin in 1928. Stalin had initially supported Lenin in his argument with the left wing of Bolshevism, yet his interpretation of Lenin's policy was inflexible and isolationist. Only the “commanding heights” element of it survived, whereas the thinking about greater economic integration with the capitalist world was transformed beyond recognition. The key test came in 1929, when Stalin refused to ask for assistance and aid from other countries to address a severe grain shortage, choosing instead to return to a forced requisition of bread from the peasantry akin to the policy of military communism.

Peaceful Coexistence: Achievements and Promises

Several of Lenin's expectations were fulfilled: the Soviets were able to secure important gains in Western loans, trade, and diplomatic recognition.

The first Western nation to fully recognize the Bolsheviks was Germany. The rapprochement with Germany grew out of the Genoa Economic Conference in 1922, during which Britain and France sought to press the Soviet Union on the issue of tsarist debt and to pressure Germany on reparations. Thanks to the brilliant diplomacy of Soviet foreign commissar Georgi Chicherin, the two outcast nations soon agreed to cooperate with each other by signing the Treaty of Rappalo. The treaty renounced Russia's territorial claims on Germany in exchange for its diplomatic recognition of the USSR,¹⁴ building on the already established trade relations between the two nations.¹⁵ To the Soviets, the relationship became critical in organizing their ties with the West because it encouraged the Bolsheviks to accentuate divisions within the imperialist camp and think along the lines of realpolitik.¹⁶ When in August 1924 Germany moved toward reconciliation with Britain and France by accepting the Dawes Plan on reparations in exchange for Western credit, Chicherin's first reaction was to play balance-of-power politics. In an attempt to weaken German rapprochement with the West, the Soviet minister traveled to Paris and even made a stop in Warsaw, the capital of Germany's enemy. To some historians, this meant Russia's attempts to revive the Franco-Russian alliance of the end of the nineteenth century.¹⁷ Despite these diplomatic efforts, Germany's closer relationship with Britain and France survived and was reaffirmed in the Treaty of Berlin of April 1926.

Peaceful coexistence was bearing fruits in relations with Britain and France as well. Britain was the first to formally accept the Bolsheviks’ offer of trade in March 1921, after which similar agreements were signed the same year with Germany, Norway, Austria, Italy, Denmark, and Czechoslovakia.¹⁸ The British prime minister, David Lloyd George, became a vocal advocate for improving economic and political ties with Lenin's Russia even before the Genoa Conference.¹⁹ The Soviet government exploited the opportunity by signing a de jure recognition treaty with the Labor government in 1924, although the more skeptical government of Ramsay MacDonald prevented further improvement of relations and made it difficult to ratify the treaty.²⁰ During the same year, France's new left government also recognized the new Russia because “the Soviet power was recognized by the Russian people.”²¹ However, Franco-Soviet relations remained tense because of the issue of tsarist debt and the special agreements signed by France with Poland and Romania that made it difficult for Soviet Russia to return Bessarabia.²²

In addition to improving bilateral ties with the European nations, the Bolsheviks sought to reduce their international isolation by joining multilateral agreements. In 1928, with Maxim Litvinov as foreign commissar, the Soviet Union expressed interest in joining the Kellogg-Briand Pact. This pact obligated its signatories, including France and the United States, to renounce war as a means of settling international disputes and commit to policies of disarmament. The Bolshevik leaders viewed joining the pact as a means to obtain an additional platform for improving ties with the West, especially in light of Franco-German rapprochement as expressed in the 1925 Locarno pact; this pact affirmed France's recognition of the new border with Germany in exchange for the latter's acceptance of the Versailles Treaty.

The Isolationist Turn

Around 1928, soon after Russia declared interest in joining the Kellogg-Briand Pact, peaceful coexistence begun to move in a more isolationist and nationalist direction. The Soviet regime did not have much faith in the pact's objective and merely wanted to signal its desire to be a part of a joint effort and avoid diplomatic marginalization. Responding partly to the British decision to break off diplomatic relations in May 1927, the Soviet Union began to pursue policies of domestic consolidation and preparation for a possible war. Intimidated by prospects of military confrontation, Stalin even stated at the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927 that “the period of ‘peaceful coexistence’ is receding into the past.”²³ The new leader of the Soviet state was preparing the ground for a turning inward that would fundamentally transform Russia's domestic institutions.

In the agricultural area, Stalin moved away from the NEP's market-based relationships with the peasantry. Because of a poor harvest and inefficient state procurement policies, the country was experiencing a severe shortage of grain. In January 1928, it purchased only 300 million pounds relative to 428 million the year before.²⁴ The shortage meant that the government had problems supplying the cities with bread, as well as financing industrialization through the export of grain.²⁵ Under these conditions, Stalin chose to implement a forced requisition of bread and a “full-scale collectivization” in the rural sector, rather than raising procurement prices or temporarily importing bread from abroad. The justification he provided was the need to “save the hard currency for importing industrial equipment.”²⁶

Simultaneously, the war-scare atmosphere prompted Stalin to adopt contingency plans for war and favor a militaristic blueprint for economic development. The first five-year plan reflected his threat perception by connecting the issue of military power to that of economic industrialization.²⁷ Although Soviet top commanders, such as Mikhail Tukhachevski, advocated a rapid and thorough modernization of the military during the first five-year plan, Stalin chose to build the entire economy around mobilization for “the needs of total war.”²⁸ The militarization of the economy, although also being undertaken by other nations, including Italy, France, and Germany,²⁹ put additional strains on the system. For example, from 1933–6, Soviet state procurement of aviation equipment increased about fourfold, that of tanks threefold, and that of naval construction and artillery fourfold.³⁰ The overall defense budget also increased by several factors.³¹

Stalin's isolationism was reflected in media policies and relations with the Comintern as well. Beginning in the early 1930s, the media increasingly promoted the notion of “Motherland” by connecting Soviet policies to those of the tsarist state. In relation to the West, the Soviet propaganda presented Stalin not only as a Leninist but also as a state builder in the manner of Ivan Kalita, Ivan III, Ivan IV, and particularly Peter the Great, who was forced to develop the capabilities of a great power in face of growing threats from abroad.³² The Comintern too was transformed to serve the needs of the Soviet state. As early as August 1927, Stalin proclaimed “an internationalist” anyone “who, unreservingly, without wavering, without conditions is ready to defend the USSR, because the USSR is the base of the world revolutionary movement.”³³

Despite the decidedly more isolationist turn, the Soviet state remained interested in engaging Western nations. By signaling its intent to participate in international disarmament efforts, initiating nonaggression pacts with its neighbors, and promoting the idea of an “Eastern Locarno” to define Germany's eastern border,³⁴ Stalin's Russia was hoping to preserve the accomplishments of peaceful coexistence with the West. New threats from Japan in the Far East only served to reinforce this thinking.³⁵ Indeed, subsequent efforts by Maxim Litvinov to promote collective security in Europe indicate that in its foreign policy the state saw no alternative to the overall framework of coexistence with the West.

From Collective Security to the Pact with Germany

The initial Soviet reaction to Fascism was hardly critical. For example, the leading party newspaper Pravda interpreted the electoral victory of the Nazis over the Social Democrats in September 1930 in terms of the Nazis’ potential to restrain France's hegemonic ambitions. According to the newspaper, the results of elections “promise great difficulties for French imperialism…the appearance in the European arena of a powerful imperialist competitor in the form of German neo-imperialism does not fit into its plans.”³⁶ As late as 1934 Stalin publicly expressed his hopes for “the most excellent relations” with Germany.³⁷

With time, however, the rising threat from Hitler's Germany was turning the Soviet Union more decisively toward the Western nations. Beginning as early as 1933, the Soviet authorities worked hard to undermine Hitler by establishing an alliance with France and other Western states. The Soviet Union joined the League of Nations and began to sharply differentiate between revisionist and status quo states. Litvinov emerged as a vocal critic of the League's inability to punish aggressive actions, such as Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and Germany's occupation of the Rhineland in 1936. The Soviet state also used the Comintern to serve the collective security agenda. The Kremlin signed nonaggression treaties, including those pledging military support in case of attack by a third power. From 1933–9 – after the Munich Conference and until August 1939 – Soviet diplomacy worked to secure bilateral military agreements with France and Britain.

The decision by Moscow to sign the nonaggression pact with Germany demonstrated the end of collective security diplomacy as practiced by both Litvinov and Stalin. Yet even that decision, although it opened the way to World War II, did not fundamentally contradict peaceful coexistence, with its emphasis on preserving its honorable ideological objectives and achieving a break from the struggle with capitalism.

Western Influences

Although they reflected a general mistrust, Soviet perceptions of the West varied over time. Stalin and his entourage viewed intentions of the “advanced capitalist countries” as either greatly or moderately threatening or even allowing the possibility of cooperation, depending on the Western nations’ internal strength, degree of unity, and actions toward the USSR. From 1921–39, Soviet perceptions of the West went through three stages. Before 1927, the dominant view was that capitalism had become stable and “well-entrenched”; in response Russia sought to gain some attributes of and recognition as a normal state, while continuing to exploit capitalist divisions and weaknesses. Around 1927 and especially with the beginning of the Great Depression, the Soviet perception of the West shifted to that of an especially acute threat. In the Soviet mind, the danger was that imperial powers could attack the East in a desperate search for new markets. This perception also served Stalin's agenda of concentrating power and eliminating internal opposition to his rule. Finally, the appointment of Hitler as Germany's chancellor created a new divide in Europe between the increasingly powerful and revisionist Germany and the weak and status-quo-oriented liberal Western nations. In this third stage, Stalin's Russia worked hard to build a collective security regime to restrain Hitler, but in the end returned to balance-of-power policies. All three stages were faces of peaceful coexistence with capitalism.

The NEP's foreign policy extension survived until 1927, partly because the West reciprocated the Soviet diplomatic and trade advancements. The “stabilization of capitalism” became the main line within the Bolshevik circles of both Stalin and Bukharin. Even Trotski, whom Stalin presented as the main opposition to his theory of “socialism in one country,” did not substantially oppose the stabilization thesis and the projected need for the USSR to maneuver among Western powers.³⁸ The USSR had to work hard not to be pushed into further isolation, especially after its seemingly special relations with Germany began to deteriorate after Germany signed the Locarno treaty. Stabilization, if it meant the emergence of Germany's alliance with France and Britain, was Moscow's worst nightmare. Taking a page from older tsarist diplomacy, Chicherin proposed to build an equivalent to the “grand alliance,” but failed to convince either Germany or France to act in concert with the Soviet Union and against Britain.³⁹ The wave of recognitions of the USSR by European nations and some openness to developing ties with the East, combined with the relatively low degree of practical cooperation and remaining Western mistrust toward the Soviet Union, served to consolidate Moscow's policy of peaceful coexistence.

Around 1927, Soviet perception changed in response to a series of setbacks in relations with European powers. Germany was showing signs of a Western orientation, and the USSR's relationship with it had not produced the expected results of military cooperation. In 1926, a coup in Poland brought Marshal Pilsudski, Russia's enemy, back to power. In May 1927, the British Conservative government broke off diplomatic ties with Moscow, accusing it of promoting interference in the internal affairs of the United Kingdom.⁴⁰ In June of the same year, Pyort Voikov, the Soviet ambassador in Poland, was assassinated. In September, Soviet-French economic negotiations ended with no results, and Khristian Rakovski, the ambassador to France, was declared persona non grata.⁴¹ Despite Chicherin's urges not to overreact to the setbacks in relations with European powers, Stalin took them extremely seriously, ordering the execution of twenty Russian nobles and arresting many German engineers in the coal industry.⁴² In his mind, all these developments were related, reflecting a concerted effort by neighboring states to isolate and dominate the Soviet Union. On July 28, 1927, Stalin wrote,

What shifted Soviet perceptions yet again was the economic crisis in the West and the subsequent rise of Germany in the mid-1930s. In response Communist theoreticians, led by Jeno Varga, again predicted “waves” of instability with potentially revolutionary consequences.⁴⁴ To Stalin, who had already decided to pursue collectivization of the peasantry and militarization of the economy, the new capitalist instability spelled dangers for his plans for domestic transformation. It also implied new geopolitical threats, particularly coming from the increasingly Western-influenced Eastern Europe. In September 1930, Stalin wrote to Molotov that Poland was working to draw the Baltic states into an alliance for a war against the USSR: “as soon as they've put this bloc together, they'll start to fight.”⁴⁵

With the ascendance of Hitler to power, the Soviets gradually focused their diplomatic efforts on deterring him by assembling an alliance with the West. France came back into the picture as a potential partner. Even Britain, which had restored its diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union in October 1929, now had to be engaged in an anti-German coalition. Initially viewing Germany's growing power⁴⁶ as a useful check on French ambitions in Europe, Moscow had now readjusted its attitude.

Domestic Conditions and Soviet Honor

Although the climate of mistrust between Soviet Russia and the West prevented efforts at serious cooperation, the overall fragility of the Soviet system precluded its leaders from developing assertive policies against the Western nations. This created conditions for the rise of a defensive discourse among state officials. From 1921–39, the Soviet discourse included various aspects of defensive honor – from the honor of building socialism with limited cooperation from the West, to the honor of defiance and reduced dependence on capitalist credit, to the honor of new socialist achievements in the late 1930s.

The NEP's discourse, despite the shift from the assertive stance of world revolution, reflected a degree of internal confidence. In Lenin's view, even while being surrounded by capitalist countries, the Soviet Union had obtained a degree of security after winning a devastating civil war and thwarting Western ambitions to topple the Bolshevik regime. As a result it was entering into a new period of development during which “our basic international existence in the context of capitalist states is secure.”⁴⁷ Lenin emphasized the gradual process of building new socialist institutions, contrasting military communism's “revolutionary approach” to economic development with the cautious “reformist approach” under the NEP.⁴⁸ He believed that it was in the greedy nature of capitalism to do business with the Soviet Union, which the new Russian state must be able to exploit to its advantage: “the capitalists themselves will be happy to sell us the rope which we will use to hang them.”⁴⁹ Some, like Chicherin, also proposed to establish a new collaborative organization devoted to global economic reconstruction and disarmament.⁵⁰

At the time, Stalin seemed fully supportive of Lenin's ideas. Even before the NEP, during the debate on peace with Germany in 1918, Stalin had argued against continuous military confrontation, pointing to the absence of revolutionary movements in the West.⁵¹ During the NEP, he championed the idea of “socialism in one country,” justifying it by “the unequal and uneven development of capitalist countries at the stage of imperialism.”⁵² He argued against the views of some leaders, such as Grigory Zinovyev, head of the Comintern, and Lev Trotski, former Commissar for Foreign Affairs, who still saw Soviet success as dependent on mass revolutionary uprising abroad. In contrast, Stalin argued that it was “a fact that the Russian Revolution, which did not win the support of the Western proletariat and which has remained surrounded by hostile capitalist regimes, continues to exist.”⁵³ At the time, his idea of socialism in one country, although having a nationalist overtone, was generally in line with views of the party's leading intellectual Nikolai Bukharin.⁵⁴

In the late 1920s, in response to fears of the increasingly more hostile international environment, Stalin's perception changed. As the Western economies began to suffer from the Great Depression, the nationalist/isolationist component of socialism in one country became fully revealed. The idea of limited cooperation with capitalism was replaced with that of self-sufficiency and a minimized reliance on the outside world. In 1929, Stalin justified the forced requisition of grain from the peasantry by the need “to demonstrate to our enemies that we stand firmly on our feet and have no intention to be dependent on pity promises of [foreign] help.”⁵⁵

That Stalin was more nationalist-minded that many of his comrades was clear from his earlier activities within the party. Long before his argument with Lenin over conditions of integrating the non-Russian nationalities,⁵⁶ Stalin, a native Georgian then named Djugashvili, had predicated his decision to join the Bolsheviks on an ethnic basis. Referring to the Mensheviks as the “Jewish faction,” he opted for the “true-Russian faction” and even had suggested the idea of conducting “a pogrom in the party.”⁵⁷ Internationally, he hardly ever concerned himself with Russia's European roots and identity. In E. H. Carr's words, “Unlike Lenin and Trotsky, or even Zinoviev and Bukharin, Stalin cared nothing for what happened in western Europe except in so far as it affected the destinies of his own country.”⁵⁸

The notion of nationalist-isolationist honor shaped Stalin's autarchic policies of industrialization and collectivization and soon put him at odds with Bukharin and other advocates of continuing with the NEP. Stalin's thesis about the intensification of the internal “class war” under the “socialist offensive,” although reflecting his own nationalist beliefs, also helped him discredit Bukharin within the party. Painting Bukharin and his supporters as soft on capitalism at home and abroad, Stalin was able to isolate his opposition, in part because Bukharin never developed the NEP's international corollary under the Great Depression.⁵⁹ Having defeated his opposition, Stalin finally had the power to launch his revolutionary policies. The appeal to nationalist honor also resonated within the party because it reflected a culturally accepted pattern of state-imposed modernization earlier practiced by the tsars. As Robert C. Tucker wrote, the Stalinist rural revolution from above and introduction of the kolkhoz bore a strong resemblance to serfdom and were “in essence an accelerated repetition of this tsarist developmental pattern.”⁶⁰

From the mid-1930s, Stalin was citing domestic achievements to justify his choices and provide a rationale for continuing with the policy of peaceful coexistence.⁶¹ In his mind, the fact that the Soviet Union “oriented itself in past and present to the USSR and only the USSR” strengthened it internally, adding confidence to its foreign policy.⁶²

Domestic Support and Opposition

Between 1921 and 1939, domestic debates focused on various versions of peaceful coexistence, rather than opposition to its key principles. Trotski and his supporters – in a paradoxical shift from their earlier theory of permanent revolution – advocated a version of integration with Europe, mainly through economic intercourse. They made it clear, however, that the purpose of such integration was to rebuild the economic foundations of Soviet Russia and ultimately liberate the “false” Europe of its capitalist vestiges in a new revolution.⁶³ Bukharin advocated a similar approach. An early supporter of “socialism in one country,” he spoke in favor of “the internationalist revolution” and warned against an ideology of “national Bolshevism” that would only lead to a “backward socialism.”⁶⁴ In the late 1920s, when Western capitalism could not be perceived as stable, both Trotski and Bukharin still insisted on a sustained engagement with the West, differing from Stalin, who now shifted to viewing the West as ready to launch a war on the USSR. Throughout the 1930s and until his arrest in February 1937, Bukharin also supported a coalition against Nazi Germany.

As did many within the party, Stalin did not support either assertiveness or strong cooperation with the Western nations. He shared the view that the main priority was for the country to rebuild its domestic foundations, and therefore it was necessary to avoid a confrontation with the outside world and to win diplomatic recognition by the Western states. For example, in the early 1930s, Stalin cautioned against a strong engagement on the anti-German side: “we shall have to come out, but we ought to be the last to come out. And we should come out in order to throw the decisive weight on the scales, the weight that should tilt the scales.”⁶⁵

However, Stalin generally favored a more isolationist version of peaceful coexistence than did Trotski, Bukharin, or Litvinov. Stalin's beliefs became obvious not just from his preferences for self-sufficient domestic modernization but also from his distinctly paranoid perception of the Western nations. Indeed, it was the latter that had precipitated the former. Like his tsarist predecessors, he thought in terms of overcoming Russia's backwardness in relation to the West, which he viewed as a potential threat to his country's survival.⁶⁶ While Bukharin and others were worried about balancing the budget,⁶⁷ Stalin was getting ready for a rapidly approaching war with capitalism, viewing collectivization and industrialization as essential prerequisites.

Stalin's views found support within the party because they reflected the dominant fear of capitalism at home and abroad. The NEP's long coexistence with the private sector required a certain sophistication on the part of the Bolshevik masses, and its rationale was never clearly articulated.⁶⁸ In addition, Trotski and Bukharin failed to develop a strong alternative to Stalin's international perspective, which emphasized the gathering external threats.⁶⁹

Alternative Explanations

One common approach to peaceful coexistence interprets it as a version of an ideologically driven assertive policy or as a preparation for launching an offensive war on the West. A classic statement of this position can be found in George Kennan's condemnation of “a regime, the attitude of which towards Western governments, psychologically and politically, was equivalent to that which would prevail toward an enemy in time of war.”⁷⁰ In this formulation, ideology is the principal source of Bolshevik antipathy vis-à-vis its hostile Western counterparts. To Kennan, Western nations came to hate the Soviet leaders “for what they did,” whereas the Bolsheviks hated the Western states “for what they were, regardless of what they did.”⁷¹ This distinction has become common in Western scholarship on Soviet foreign policy since the Cold War. More recently, David R. Stone attributed the Bolshevik's domestic and foreign policies from October 1917 to the post–Great Depression years to the Soviet leaders’ belief in the imminent war with capitalism.⁷²

This perspective correctly identifies the central role of ideology in Soviet foreign policy formulation. It is indeed communist ideology that provided the Bolshevik state with a new sense of honor and international obligations. However, the problem with this perspective is that it lacks nuance and proportion. By dismissing considerations of security, it loses the ability to account for important differences in Russia's policy across time after the revolution. The USSR soon abandoned its initial commitment to world revolution – a version of a genuinely assertive strategy – in favor of a search for accommodation with capitalism. The Bolsheviks differed in their perception of outside threats, and the outside world too provided them with differing environments to which to respond. As result, Soviet policies included such widely varying options as the world revolution, the NEP's limited cooperation with capitalism, militant isolationism, collective security, and balance of power. Although a confrontation with capitalism was never off the table, Stalin viewed it as something that must be delayed, rather than welcomed.

Yet the view that attributes Soviet actions primarily to security motivations is also insufficient.⁷³ The ideological sense of honor gave an ostensibly security-driven foreign policy an overall motivation and purpose. It was the ideological difference between the West and the Soviet Union that ultimately made it impossible for the two sides to develop genuine cooperation, save during the exceptional circumstances of World War II. Just like Russia under Alexander II, after being defeated in the Crimean War, did not abandon its perceived obligation to serve as the protector of Orthodox Christians in the Balkans, Stalin's Russia remained confident in its ability to ultimately convert Europeans to communist beliefs.

The Arrival of Yevgeni Primakov

In this increasingly politicized context, NATO made a decision to expand eastward by incorporating members of the former Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe.² The decision provided domestic nationalist opposition with additional arguments and resources to mobilize against the Westernist course.

Yevgeni Primakov, then director of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, issued a sharp criticism of the expansion, referring to the historical memory of the Cold War hostilities and warning that it would result in Russia's increased isolation. Critics of Yeltsin's course – both nationalists and communists – did well in the 1993 and 1995 elections, compelling Yeltsin to modify the pro-Western agenda. The president's sacking of Kozyrev and appointment of Primakov as the new foreign minister were a response to his critics. As the Financial Times editorialized, of all the possible successors to Kozyrev, Primakov was “probably the least welcome in Washington. By selecting him, President Boris Yeltsin has signaled that he cares more about assuaging nationalism at home than soothing US fears.”³ Primakov served as foreign minister from January 1996 to September 1998; he then served as prime minister, continuing to exert a guiding influence on foreign policy until May 1999.

Primakov's worldview solidified during his long career as a Middle East specialist and policy maker. During the Soviet era, he worked in several Middle Eastern countries as a correspondent for the leading communist newspaper Pravda. He also served as director of the Institute of Oriental Studies and, later, of the prestigious Institute of World Economy and International Relations. According to Primakov, “Russia is both Europe and Asia,” and that concept had “to play a tremendous role in formulation of its foreign policy.”⁴ Aware of Russia's weakness, the new minister was worried about becoming dependent on the strongest power in the international system, and he wanted to pursue “multi-vector” policies that would achieve more balanced relations with the West and preserve strong ties with China, India, and the Islamic world. Such thinking was reflected in official documents. The country's National Security Concept of 1997 identified Russia as an “influential European and Asian power.” It recommended that Russia maintain equidistant relations to the “global European and Asian economic and political actors,” and it presented a positive program for the integration of CIS efforts in the security sphere.⁵

The key focus of Primakov's policy was undoubtedly NATO's eastward expansion and Russia's adaptation to this new reality.⁶ The decision to expand the alliance was made in January 1994 in response to several security crises in the Balkans and pressures from the East European states. By the time Primakov had assumed his responsibilities in 1996, it had become clear that NATO, rather than the Russia-preferred Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), was becoming the cornerstone of European security. It was equally clear that, despite Russia's original hopes, it was not about to be considered for membership in the organization.

Diplomatic Efforts in Europe

Under these conditions, Primakov saw his task as limiting the potential damage of the NATO expansion. His very appointment served the purpose of ameliorating anti-NATO backlash because of his already established reputation as a tough defender of Russia's national interests. Primakov soon recognized that the expansion of the alliance was inevitable and that Russia had to shift from the mode of resistance to adaptation. Although he was highly critical of the developments, he recognized that “the expansion of NATO is not a military problem; it is a psychological one.”⁷ To reduce the perception of the alliance as a threat, Russia had little choice but to work on establishing closer diplomatic and political ties with the alliance. The result was the negotiated document signed by the two sides in May 1997, the Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between Russia and NATO. Russia saw this document as a quasi-institutionalization of its relationships with the alliance. In December 1997, in his speech to the State Duma, Primakov referred to the Founding Act as a major accomplishment, evidence of the success of Russia's diplomacy in attaining its objectives. Russia was also given the opportunity to collaborate with NATO in establishing a special body, the Permanent Joint Council, to consult about and – when appropriate – even participate in decision making⁸ and joint action.

Until the Western military intervention in the Balkans, Primakov followed the policy of pragmatic cooperation with NATO members. A few months before he took office, the Dayton Accords of November 1995 had been signed with minimal input from Russia. Although the new foreign minister saw the role of Belgrade in European security differently from NATO members, he refrained from setting Russia's policy unilaterally by working, instead, through the Contact Group – the framework for diplomatic coordination among Russia, the United States, France, Britain, and Germany created in February 1994 at Yeltsin's initiative. Although Russia opposed NATO's command of peacekeeping forces and in some cases objected to specific acts of force against the Bosnian Serbs, in general it did not interfere with UN-sanctioned actions in Bosnia.⁹

However, NATO's decision to begin air strikes against Belgrade in March 1999 changed the framework of the relationship. The military intervention came as a shock to Russia's foreign policy community. In response, Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov decided to cancel the economic negotiations with the United States and the IMF in Washington on March 24, 1999; en route to the United States when he heard about the airstrikes, Primakov ordered the plane to return home. Russia's official reaction was harsh: it accused the alliance of violating UN jurisdiction and the Helsinki act on the preservation of sovereignty, suspended its participation in the Founding Act agreement, withdrew its military mission from Brussels, and ordered NATO representatives to leave Russia.

This strong reaction reflected the largely negative attitudes toward the alliance within Russia's society and foreign policy community. An overwhelming majority believed that the Western actions were driven by power and hegemonic ambitions, rather than by concerns over Milosevic's actions against Kosovo's Albanians. Among the general public, about 90 percent opposed NATO's bombing of Belgrade and felt threatened by its actions.¹⁰

Yet it was the expansion of NATO, rather than the ethnic war in the Balkans, that shaped Russia's perception of the intervention in Yugoslavia. By the time of the airstrikes, the Western alliance had already invited the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary to apply for membership. At the Madrid summit in the summer of 1997, U.S. State Secretary of State Madeleine Albright specifically promised to extend an invitation to the Baltic states, which had been a part of the Soviet Union before 1991. Despite the Founding Act agreement of May 1997, the post-Madrid atmosphere of Russia–West relations was tense, as Primakov's foreign ministry insisted again on the unacceptability of the alliance's expansion. The clash over Kosovo intensified Russian fears; it responded with elements of political escalation and, at times, came close to a military confrontation. For instance, by just two or three votes, Russia's Duma fell short of passing a resolution to accept Yugoslavia into the Russia-Belarus Union, which would have made Russia a participant in the war.

Primakov had no plans to throw his support behind Serbia, which his nationalist opponents called on him to do. Instead, he got involved in mediating the conflict. Playing on the West's interest in Russia's involvement, he formulated tough conditions for ending the war, which included guarantees for Serbia's preserved sovereignty, broad autonomy for Kosovo, and the UN's assuming leadership in the postwar settlement. Yet the peace was reached more on Western than Russia's terms. Out of fear of further Russia–West political escalation, Yeltsin dismissed Primakov as the key negotiator and replaced him with former prime minister Victor Chernomyrdin, who was much too pro-Western and inexperienced in foreign affairs to negotiate the peace that Primakov had in mind. In early June, under pressure from Chernomyrdin, Serbia finally accepted the conditions for peace, which did not include Russia's initial conditions. As one Russian observer described the outcome of the war, “Russia took part in Yugoslavia's acceptance of the same NATO conditions that it had previously called unacceptable.”¹¹

Diplomatic Efforts outside the West

The active foreign policy sought by Primakov required the development of geostrategic and economic ties to countries outside the West. An Arabist by training, Primakov became active in the Middle East and considerably increased Russian arms sales in the region. Everywhere he traveled the new minister spread his message about the necessity of building a multipolar world order, which he viewed as the ultimate guarantee against the expansion of NATO. Three states played especially important roles in his vision – China, Iran, and India.

In addition to being the main buyer of Russian weapons, China shared Primakov's concerns about America's global dominance and perceived NATO expansion, the U.S. plans to build a national missile defense system, and interventions in Iraq and Kosovo as threatening developments. The countries also faced similar internal threats to security: from the separatist activities of Chechnya in Russia and the Muslim Uighur minority in China's province of Xinjiang. All of these factors brought the two countries closer together. In April 1996, the sides affirmed that they were entering into a new stage of partnership, and a year later the countries’ leaders signed the Joint Declaration on a Multipolar World and the Formation of a New International Order, which reflected Primakov's vision of multipolarity as a work in progress. Developments in 1998–9, such as U.S. military strikes against Iraq, plans for the creation of a U.S.-Japanese theater missile defense, NATO expansion, and the bombing of Yugoslavia, again brought the two together to actively coordinate their responses to what they saw as threatening developments in world affairs.

Another potential strategic partner in Primakov's calculus was Iran. Politically, he saw the country as a regional ally in containing the influences of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Turkey, particularly in the states of Central Asia and Azerbaijan. Geopolitically, Iran was yet another potential ally in resisting the U.S.-controlled unipolarity. Economically, Russia was building nuclear reactors in Iran, supplying industrial equipment, and planning on forming a joint policy in developing energy pipelines in the Caspian region. Despite objections from Washington that Iran was building a nuclear weapon in violation of the existing Non-Proliferation Regime, Russia continued to cooperate with Iran, denying all the allegations.

Finally, Primakov's diplomacy sought to engage India as a partner of strategic importance. In trying to revive Russia as India's key rearmament agent the foreign minister was capitalizing on old Soviet ties. In 1997, the Indian prime minister announced that his country had purchased $3 billion in arms from Russia over the previous two years and that the two sides had discussed potential contracts totaling another $7 billion – an amount that would move India ahead of China in the ranks of Moscow's arms customers.¹² Politically, Primakov was interested in building closer relations between Russia, India, and China to balance the power of the United States, which was a marked shift from the previous policy of balancing China's power through an alliance with India. In December 1998, Primakov spoke of the desirability of the three countries’ alliance as a “new pole in world politics.” The alliance, however, remained wishful thinking, as neither India nor China had a similar interest in working together.

Diplomacy in the Former Soviet World

Reintegration of the former Soviet states was another key pillar of Primakov's strategy of balancing Western power and resisting NATO expansion. In February 1995 – partly in response to nationalist pressures – in his state of the nation address, Yeltsin argued for a new integration of the CIS, unfavorably referring to some “forces abroad” who wanted to downgrade Russia's international role.¹³ The concept of reintegration was first clearly articulated on September 14, 1995, when Yeltsin issued a wide-ranging decree, “The Establishment of the Strategic Course of the Russian Federation with Member States of the CIS.” The eight-page document had been developed from one of the Primakov-led Foreign Intelligence Service reports, and it was transformed into the “CIS Concept of Economic Integrational Development” adopted in March 1997. The proclaimed goal was to create “an economically and politically integrated alliance of states capable of achieving a worthy place in world society,” which was similar to Primakov's definition of integration as a Russia-led “policy aimed at bringing together the states formed on the territory of the former Soviet Union.”¹⁴

Although Primakov and Yeltsin were concerned also with the economic and cultural aspects of reintegrating the region, political and security issues drove the effort. For the politically driven Yeltsin, raising the issue of reintegration was a way to neutralize his domestic opposition and restore the state's capacity to conduct foreign policy. For Primakov, the security context, particularly NATO expansion, prompted the need for reintegration. Russia was eager to establish itself as a center of power, as an alternative to NATO, yet it faced multiple regional threats, including the new conflicts in the Caucasus, Moldova, and Tajikistan; terrorism; illegal immigration; and narcotics trafficking, especially on the Sino-Russian and Tajik-Afghan borders. To preserve Russia's traditional, powerful influence, it therefore had to bring order and stability to the region.

In response to these threats Moscow applied to the United Nations for special peacekeeping powers in the region and began to see these powers as an area of “special responsibility and special interest.” It also began to advocate for a CIS collective security force and joint activities among the states. Taking as a point of departure the 1992 Treaty on Collective Security, the Russia-led CIS members developed a fairly ambitious vision of military and defense coordination, which the CIS summit adopted in February 1995 as the Collective Security Concept. The Concept, among other things, assumed the right to set up CIS peacekeeping forces. Yeltsin also declared his intention to set up thirty Russian military bases in the CIS states, especially in Central Asia and the Caucasus.¹⁵ Finally, to neutralize influences of Iran, China, and Afghanistan, Russia strengthened the border security of Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

Russia's integration efforts in the western direction differed from those in Central Asia and the Caucasus. In the West, Moscow was especially eager to respond to the “threat” of NATO's expansion by normalizing and developing military ties with Belarus and Ukraine. Given its vital geostrategic location and pro-Russian orientation, Belarus emerged as particularly important. In April 1996 the two sides had signed the Treaty on Formation of the Russia-Belarus Community, committing themselves to far-reaching integration in political and military areas. They developed a common perception of security threats and a close coordination of foreign policies, and pledged the establishment of a defense alliance. Under Primakov, Russia also activated political ties with Ukraine, which the new foreign minister saw as another top priority. As a result of Primakov's efforts, in May 1997 the two sides signed the so-called Big Treaty, which settled the status of the Black Sea Fleet and legalized the borders between the two countries. In terms of the most pro-Western Baltic states, Russia sought to minimize the negative consequences of NATO's expansion by offering them security guarantees and by making explicit its position that Baltic membership in NATO would endanger Russia's good relations with NATO.

Western Influences

Although the revival of Russia's defensiveness as the official foreign policy philosophy would not have occurred without security threats from both inside and outside the country, no less important was the relatively lukewarm reaction from the West, its significant other. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia's pro-Western leaders were hoping for massive assistance, delivered quickly, from the West. After all, Russia was decisively breaking with its Soviet past. In the words of Russia's first foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, the country's very system of values was to be changed, and the expectation was that such change would assist Russia greatly in raising it to the status of the front-rank countries, such as France, Germany, and the United States, within ten to twelve years.

The implications of the new liberal thinking were fundamental. Russia was presented as a “naturally” pro-Western nation, and its success was predicated on support and recognition from the West. However, the West's reaction was often excessively cautious or insensitive.¹⁶ The decision made by the Western nations to expand NATO eastward, excluding Russia from the process, came as a major blow to the reformers, dashing Moscow's hopes to transform the alliance into a nonmilitary one or one that would admit Russia as a full member.¹⁷ It strengthened the sense that Russia was not being accepted by Western civilization, and it provided the nationalist coalition with ammunition required to construct an image of an external threat and thereby question the objectives of the new government.

The decision to expand NATO reflected a broader change in the West's perception of the world. From the rhetoric of victory in the Cold War and the “end of history” in the early 1990s, the Western political community was becoming increasingly anxious about its ability to preserve peace and stability throughout the globe. The new ethnic conflicts in Europe and the former USSR, the perceived threat from the still extant regime of Saddam Hussein, and environmental and demographic pressures from Asia and Africa seemed to pose great risks. Various intellectual projects emerged to reflect the rising pessimism among U.S. policy makers about the future of the world order. With the growing awareness of new dangers came fear and suspicion of the non-Western world, which were best summarized by Samuel Huntington's thesis of the “clash of civilizations.” Just as Francis Fukuyama once expressed the West's optimism, even euphoria, about the future world order,¹⁸ Huntington expressed the growing feelings of anxiety and frustration. He insisted that, instead of expanding globally, the West should go on the defensive and prepare to fight for its cultural values in coming clashes with non-Western civilizations.¹⁹ In this new intellectual context, Russia, with its authoritarian past and politically unstable present, was often viewed as a source of threat rather than a strategic partner. The once reborn liberal ally was now increasingly perceived to be driven by traditional imperial aspirations or to be a failing state unable to govern itself.

Domestic Conditions and Russia's Honor

Primakov's foreign policy objectives fit the defensive honor vision: the policy of containing NATO was shaped by Russia's relative decline and desire to revive its capabilities as a great power. Primakov made it explicit that his strategy was reminiscent of that of State Chancellor Gorchakov. After Russia's defeat in the Crimean War, Gorchakov recommended to Alexander II that, in light of Russia's weakened state, it “will have to focus persistently on the realization of [its] internal development and the entire foreign policy will have to be subordinated to this main task.”²⁰ However, such a defensive policy would only be temporary, and after rebuilding its domestic base, Russia would again be in a position to defend its cultural allies and press for changes appropriate to its great power status. By pursuing flexible alliances, Russia was able to partially achieve its goal: in 1870 it felt strong enough to act unilaterally and partially renounce the conditions of the Paris peace treaty. Primakov too was hoping that, after rebuilding the economy, Russia would “return” to world politics. He shared with other officials a sense of responsibility to preserve ties with historic allies in the Balkans and with those gravitating to the new Russia, but out of domestic weakness, Primakov felt the need to concentrate on recovering the internal capabilities of a great power.

Like Gorchakov, Primakov believed that to enable a period of recovery Russia needed flexibility in international alliances and a pragmatic – that is low-cost – involvement in world politics, except where Russia's most vital interests were concerned. Although Russia had limited resources to pursue a grand foreign policy, Primakov's thinking was, counterintuitively, that the country had to pursue an “active” foreign policy (aktivnaya vneshnyaya politika)²¹ to compensate for its currently limited resources in reforming the economy and preserving its territorial integrity. He believed that Russia was in a geopolitically dangerous environment and simply could not afford to concentrate on purely domestic issues. In relations with the West, Primakov insisted that Russia had to engage in balancing tactics against the strongest, the United States, to facilitate the emergence of a multipolar world. He argued that the unipolar world was not going to be liberal or democratic, despite American promises, and that Russia should not succumb to the rhetoric of the strongest. Instead, it must use a combination of both cooperation and balancing policies for the purpose of undermining that unipolarity. In the minister's own words,

Primakov also believed that Russia could not afford culturally isolationist policies and had to respond to the identity void left after the Soviet disintegration. Some twenty-five million Russians found themselves outside the “homeland” with which they continued to identify. Many non-Russian nationalities too identified with Russia, and not the new nationalist regimes in the former Soviet states (Table 11.1 summarizes the linguistic and cultural dependencies between Russia and the other former republics). As early as in his 1994 Foreign Intelligence Report, Primakov directly linked the fate of the Russians in the former USSR to the survival and prosperity of Russia. Inside Russia, many also could not accept the country's new national identity and continued to favor the preservation of strong cultural ties across the post-Soviet world. Polls indicated that most Russians supported voluntary reunification of the ex-republics with Russia. For instance, in December 1997, 61 percent of Russian citizens were sorry that the USSR had collapsed – an increase from 33 percent in December 1992. At the same time, most respondents did not approve of military intervention to integrate the former Soviet region and were convinced that the only way to recovery was through successful development of the Russian economy.²³

Russia's domestic conditions were dismal because of territorial disintegration, civil war in the Caucasus, and economic breakdown. Russia was confronted with growing challenges of secessionism and instability in one of its key southern regions, Chechnya. Yeltsin's failure to respond to Chechnya's announcement of independence in 1991, as well as the largely political nature of his decision to intervene in late 1994, contributed to a long and bloody confrontation. For Yeltsin, the military intervention was an attempt to divert public attention from the failure to meet his promises to improve or, at least, sustain the living standards of ordinary Russians. Partly as a reaction to Yeltsin's opportunism, the public remained largely skeptical of his military intervention. With little support at home, the army was unable to resolve the conflict by force, and disorder and terrorism increasingly spread throughout Chechnya and beyond.

In the meantime, the real income of ordinary Russians, most of whom were wage earners and pensioners, fell drastically, and the economy shrank considerably (see Table 3.3). By the time Primakov assumed office, Russia's foreign debt and domestic budget deficit had greatly increased. Its largest foreign debt payment was due in 1999, when Russia had to pay $17.5 billion to the IMF; its total domestic budget at the time was around $20 billion.²⁴ The budget deficit – primarily the result of the government's inability to collect taxes – was consistently large from the beginning of Yeltsin's economic reforms (see Table 11.2).

The government was desperate to find non-inflationary ways to reduce the deficit and to restructure and reschedule its growing debt. Yet room for political maneuvering was severely limited, and the government continued the practice of borrowing from the IMF. In its turn, the IMF imposed restrictive conditions in an effort to secure a more politically compliant Russia. For all of IMF's talk about depoliticized relations with countries-recipients, the political side of the IMF–Russia relationship was always visible. For example, its 1995–6 loan was negotiated in the context of the approaching presidential elections, in which Yeltsin's victory was the number one priority for the West. The Western intervention in Yugoslavia – against which Russia objected vehemently – took place as the Russian government was in the process of negotiating the restructuring of the approaching $17.5 billion payment.²⁵

After assuming the responsibilities of prime minister, Primakov realized ever more painfully the difficulties of maintaining a posture of independence; even with what was considered to be a “leftist government,” he had to submit to the State Duma a tight budget and to fully comply with the IMF conditions.

Internal Supporters

An overwhelming majority of Russia's political class welcomed Primakov's vision and the change in policy that stemmed from it. Members of the new coalition of support included the military industries, army, and security services, which saw the largely ignored potential to generate revenue through the development of new technologies and the export of conventional weapons. In one of its documents, the influential nongovernmental organization Council on Foreign and Defense Policy expressed an attitude typical of these circles, when it described the military-industrial complex as “a key, possibly, the key factor of Russia's struggle for a dignified place in the twenty-first century.”²⁶ Over time, the Russian large security class grew in strength and was able to challenge the emerging and still nascent commercial class that promoted the Westernist component of Russia's identity. In addition to the security class, those constituencies that opposed the expansion of NATO on culturally essentialist grounds supported Primakov's course. Some advocated a cultural unity of Slavs and Muslims, whereas Russian ethnonationalists promoted the primacy of the Russian language and religion in the region. The Congress of Russian Communities, for example, proclaimed Russia responsible for Russian speakers in the former Soviet republics – a view later adopted by Yeltsin himself.

In this context of growing security threats, the insistence on viewing Russia as first and foremost a great power resonated with elites and the larger society. Primakov and his supporters did not see the forces of international cooperation as shaping world politics. They appealed to the historical notion of Russia as a Derzhava – an especially common term in the defensive honor vocabulary – which can be loosely translated as an entity that can influence the international power equilibrium. A Derzhava is capable of defending itself by relying on its own individual strength, and its main goal should be preservation of that status. To cultural nationalists, the term derzhava implied the ability to protect the national unity of the state. Although many Primakov supporters were former Westernizers, they no longer agreed that Russia was becoming a part of the West and argued that the country had its own interests to defend.

That NATO expanded without including Russia was incomprehensible in the light of Russia's historical commitments, its new relationships with the Western countries, and the West's own promises not to expand the alliance. Many Russians felt deceived, because the expansion followed Gorbachev's military withdrawals from Eastern Europe, Kozyrev's restriction of some profitable arms sales to comply with Western rules, and Russia's commitment to develop a strategic partnership with the West. Overwhelmingly, the Russian foreign policy community perceived the expansion as a violation of the norm of reciprocity and the very spirit of the post–Cold War transformation. Eventually, even radical Westernizers, such as Kozyrev, expressed their disillusionment. The general public, too, expressed concerns, which only increased over time. As former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry put it, Russian reactions to NATO expansion “ranged from being unhappy to being very unhappy…This is a very widely and very deeply held view in Russia.”²⁷

Historical parallels between the new course and the notion of Gorchakov's “concentration” were widely accepted in scholarly and political circles. In 1998, an annual conference for scholars and practitioners to debate current foreign policy, established at the Moscow Institute of International Relations, was named after Gorchakov. In 2001 Primakov was awarded the State Gorchakov Commemorative Medal for “outstanding service in strengthening peace and promoting international cooperation.”

The new course's pragmatic nature found strong support. Although virtually all statists wanted Russia to become one of the five great powers in the world – along with Germany, France, Japan, and China – most elites warned against attempts to organize foreign policy around resistance to the global influence of the United States. ²⁸ In fact, some questioned the notion of the multipolar world as the guiding vision of the international system.²⁹

Alternative Explanations

Alternative accounts of Russia's attempts to contain NATO expansion are either insufficient or incorrect. Defensive realists would be wrong to expect Russia, as a weak state, to bandwagon with a more powerful state or alliance of states. “Defeated” in the Cold War, instead Russia pursued a policy of balancing – however successful – with the powerful Western alliance. Nor was Russia as a power satisfied with the results of the post–Cold War international bargain. Instead, just as Gorchakov's Russia meant to revise the conditions of the Paris treaty, Primakov's Russia had every intention of returning to world politics as a great power with its own sphere of influence.³⁰

That expectation did not mean, however, as some Western observers argue, that Russia intended to use the West to restore its weakened power capabilities and to rebuild its empire.³¹ To argue this is to confuse pragmatic great power ambitions with Soviet-like imperial grandeur. It is also to ascribe one's own hegemonic viewpoint to policy makers, who made sense of the world in largely defensive categories of reviving great power capabilities in a multipolar world. The earlier cited evidence of Russia's material weakness demonstrates its inability to resist the encroachment of the Western military alliance.

Both defensive realist and imperialist perspectives also do not sufficiently take seriously what Primakov defined as the “psychological” dimension of the expansion of NATO. The notions of dignity, fairness, and equality were critical to the discourse of the Kremlin in dealing with the West. Primakov insisted that the principle of absolute power equality must be honored in each instance of cooperation not because he believed that NATO was presenting a serious military threat to Russia, but because he worried that Russia's status would be otherwise downgraded and it would be unfit to deliver on its obligations in the future. Primakov's insistence on upholding the power of the United Nations as the key agency for defining and enforcing the rules of international conduct and his efforts to develop close ties with influential states outside the Western hemisphere, such as China and India, can also be understood in terms of preserving the principles of fairness and equality in world politics. The minister was careful not to isolate Russia from the mainstream international politics centered at the UN Security Council. As a permanent member of the Security Council, Russia planned to exercise its voting power as it saw fit, while at the same time contributing to world peace and stability as a member of the world “concert of great powers.” Primakov and his supporters saw these elements as critical to establishing a multipolar world order and containing the power of the West, particularly the United States.

The issue was not merely one of external honor or prestige, as in the neoclassical realist vocabulary, because Primakov's policy had important domestic constituencies outside the state elites. Combined, the Russian-language-influenced community totaled about 30 percent of the population of the non-Russian post-Soviet states, which made Russia, as one scholar acknowledged, “not simply a marginal national European state, but a potential center of a revived, distinct civilization.”³² In attempting to assist ethnic Russians in their accommodation in new states, the Kremlin promoted the idea of dual citizenship in the former Soviet states, viewing it as an alternative to providing direct support for Russians abroad advocated by the hard-line opposition. However, the idea did not prove viable, and by 1995 all the post-Soviet states, with the exception of Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, had rejected dual citizenship.