What Is Russia Up To in the Middle East?

Dmitri Trenin

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781509522316, 9781509522309
• eBook ISBN: 9781509522347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The eyes of the world are on the Middle East. Today, more than ever, this deeply-troubled region is the focus of power games between major global players vying for international influence. Absent from this scene for the past quarter century, Russia is now back with gusto. Yet its motivations, decision-making processes and strategic objectives remain hard to pin down.

So just what is Russia up to in the Middle East? In this hard-hitting essay, leading analyst of Russian affairs Dmitri Trenin cuts through the hyperbole to offer a clear and nuanced analysis of Russia's involvement in the Middle East and its regional and global ramifications. Russia, he argues, cannot and will not supplant the U.S. as the leading external power in the region, but its actions are accelerating changes which will fundamentally remake the international system in the next two decades.

1
History

Russia’s links to the Eastern Mediterranean go back a millennium. Mediaeval Kievan princes from the tenth century occasionally raided Constantinople, but they also received Christianity there in 988. In political, religious, and cultural terms, Byzantium was the first model for Russia. Soon after the Eastern Roman Empire had been overrun by the Turks in 1453, Moscow’s Grand Duke Ivan III married the niece of the last Greek emperor and adopted the Byzantine double-headed eagle as Russia’s coat of arms, which is still there. From the sixteenth century, Moscow began to imagine itself as the political and spiritual heir to Constantinople, a “Third Rome,” another continuing legacy. With contemporary Russia becoming increasingly conscious of its historical roots, this kind of legacy is part of the context for current policy making.

Russia Pushes South

Modern Russia’s foreign policy was guided by the need to gain access to the sea, in the south as well as in the north. Just before he pushed against the Swedes in the Baltic, young Peter I, in 1695–96, engaged the Ottomans in the Black Sea area. Initially, he even thought of establishing Russia’s new capital in Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, but eventually he founded St. Petersburg on the Neva, which he made Russia’s capital. Peter led his troops to Bessarabia, where he was defeated, and to Persia’s Caspian coast, which Russia then held for a decade.

Peter’s heirs continued his work of pushing forth the borders of the empire. Catherine II annexed Crimea (1783) and the entire northern coast of the Black Sea, where she founded Odessa, a southern version of St. Petersburg. She was the first to send the Russian navy into the Mediterranean, which defeated the Ottomans in the Battle of Chesma, near Hios. She even envisaged a “Greek project,” which aimed at dislodging the Turks from the Straits and creating an Orthodox empire, as a Russian dependency under her grandson, the future Alexander I, whose name was chosen with a purpose. Alexander was never crowned in Constantinople, but he helped the Greeks to achieve independence from Turkey, and he annexed Bessarabia and much of South Caucasus.

The Persian Empire also had to give way, under Russian pressure, both in the Caucasus and the Caspian. Iran’s representative at the 1919 Paris peace conference complained that imperial Russia had annexed nearly half of the former Persian possessions, including the territories of modern Azerbaijan, Armenia, and the Russian Republic of Dagestan.¹ Georgia was added to the empire, more or less peacefully, in the early nineteenth century, followed by the long and bloody conquest of the North Caucasus, only completed by 1864. In 1878, Russia pushed its borders as far as Kars in northeastern Anatolia. Armenians under the Ottoman rule looked to it for support and protection.

It was under the 1774 Kucuk-Kaynarca treaty that Russian emperors won the right to be the protector of the Christian Orthodox population of the Ottoman Empire. Two and a half centuries before, French kings had won a similar right over all Christians. In both cases, protection of fellow Christians masked imperial designs. Eventually this led to conflict between the two powers. The formal pretext that sparked the Crimean War (1853–1856) was a dispute over the keys to the Nativity church in Bethlehem, in which Nicholas I of Russia contested the right of the French emperor Napoleon III to function as the champion of all followers of Christ in the Holy Land. With the Ottoman power progressively on the wane, Russia and major European countries began to fight over its inheritance.

The Great Game between the Russian and British Empires, which lasted the entire nineteenth century, became the epitome of Great Power rivalry across the entire continent of Eurasia. It extended from the Black Sea and the Caucasus across the Caspian and all the way to Central Asia, India, Tibet, China, and Korea. This competition resulted, among other things, in Russia expanding its rule to Turkestan, with Afghanistan becoming a buffer state between the Russian and British possessions. The megacontest was formally declared over only in 1907, when St. Petersburg and London divided Persia into spheres of influence, with Russia getting the northern part of the country, including Tehran. This agreement also paved the way to the future alliance between Russia and Britain in the First World War.

Russia’s entry into that war was motivated in no small measure by its leaders’ long-standing desire to “solve the Eastern Question.” That was code for taking control of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. If successful, Russia would have secured a direct and unimpeded access to the Mediterranean, while at the same time blocking southern maritime approaches to its own heartland to any foreign competitor. During World War I, with Ottoman Turkey joining the Central Powers, Russian forces were pushing back the Turks in eastern Anatolia and also occupied neutral Persia’s northwestern provinces.

Imperial Russia was mainly interested in the Straits, the Balkans, and to some extent Persia. The Arab-populated lands of the Ottoman Empire lay just outside the limit of St. Petersburg’s geopolitical ambitions. The one salient exception was the Holy Land. In 1882, a Russian Imperial Palestinian Society was formed, which sponsored Russian spiritual presence in Palestine and the Levant by helping Russian pilgrims with logistics, supporting Oriental Studies, and promoting cultural links, such as by running schools, which numbered about 100 by 1914. A number of Russian churches and monasteries sprang up. St. Sergius convent house, a major complex of buildings in the heart of Jerusalem that Russia won back in the 2000s, is a massive monument to that effort. Interestingly, the society did not stop functioning after the Russian revolution and was given a major boost after 1991.

In 1915, St. Petersburg, London, and Paris secretly agreed that the Straits, Constantinople, southwestern Armenian lands, and part of northern Kurdistan would come under Russia’s control, while Britain would get territories of modern Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, and the Haifa region, and France would receive southwestern Anatolia, northern Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Even though the name of the Sykes-Picot agreement gives the impression that it was a purely Anglo-French deal, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Sazonov was very much involved in carving up the Ottoman Empire.

Between the World Wars

The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was meant to be a radical break with the past ideas and practices of Russia’s foreign policy. Soviet Russia renounced the treaties and agreements made by the czars. Lenin and other Soviet leaders called on the “Muslim toilers of the East” to join in the fight against imperialist colonial oppressors. Comintern, which for a time functioned as a parallel foreign ministry in Moscow, began supporting communist parties in the Middle East in their work to undermine the European colonial rule. However, the Russian Empire itself, which disintegrated in the wake of the revolution, was succeeded within five years by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; this included, mainly thanks to the victorious Red Army, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Central Asia.

The Soviets welcomed Kemal Ataturk’s Turkish Republic, made a treaty with it in 1921, and even supplied arms to Ankara. To Moscow, a Turkey that was independent from Western powers was a valuable geopolitical buffer in the Black Sea and the Caucasus region. The treaty signed in the same year between the Soviet government and Iran again provided for possible Russian reoccupation of that country: another potential buffer. With the advent of World War II, and amid fears of the Shah siding with Germany, this clause was invoked. The 1943 Tehran conference of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill was held in a territory secured by the Red Army.

The war over, the Soviet forces were slow to leave Iran. Stalin had hoped that Iranian Azerbaijan, with its Soviet-inspired and -supported “people’s republics,” could separate from Tehran and eventually join the Soviet Union. These machinations produced the first post-World War II crisis between the USSR and its Anglo-American allies. Eventually, Stalin relented and in 1946 ordered his troops home, after which the republics were quickly snuffed out by the Shah.

In the final weeks of World War II, Stalin demanded that Turkey, which had been leaning toward Nazi Germany during the war, give the USSR special privileges in the Straits. In particular, Stalin wanted a revision of the 1936 Montreux convention, to make the Soviet Union, alongside Turkey, co-responsible for the control of the Straits. Stalin also claimed the right to build air and naval bases on the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. This demand enraged Ataturk’s heirs and helped throw Ankara into Washington’s arms. In 1952, Turkey acceded to NATO: a major coup for the West in the Cold War.

Having secured the Balkans for the Soviet sphere of influence as a result of World War II, Stalin also supported the Greek communists in a civil war that pitted pro-Soviet forces in the country against pro-British ones in 1944–1947. Eventually, Stalin had to give up and abandoned his allies. However, Britain’s inability to sustain control over Greece led to its outreach for help to the United States. President Harry S. Truman’s agreement, in 1947, to assume responsibility for keeping Greece and Turkey away from local Communists and the Soviet Union marked the beginning of the four-decade Cold War. Like Turkey, Greece joined NATO in 1952.

The Soviet Union Enters the Middle East

It was at that time that the Soviet Union made its first step into the geopolitics of the Middle East. Moscow became a very strong supporter of the partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel. In 1948, the Soviet Union immediately recognized the Jewish state. Stalin’s aim was to undermine the British Empire, which still exercised de facto control over a number of nominally independent Arab countries. He also hoped that Israel would “build socialism” in the Holy Land. During the Arab-Israeli war of 1948–1949, the USSR trained Israeli officers and supplied arms to Israel via Czechoslovakia. Ironically, a few years later this route would be used again, this time to support Egypt vis-à-vis Israel. Having won its first war, however, Israel turned out to be a disappointment for Moscow, refusing to serve as a pro-Soviet agent in the Cold War. This led to a brief suspension of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1952–1953, which helped provoke a fierce anti-Jewish campaign in the Soviet Union, cut short only by Stalin’s death in 1953.

By that time, Moscow had switched sides, hoping to use new opportunities offered by the advent of Arab nationalism and socialism. In 1952, a military coup in Egypt toppled the pro-Western monarchy, which was the linchpin of remaining British influence in the Middle East. The coup leader Gamal Abdel Nasser moved to nationalize the Suez Canal, which turned Britain and France against Egypt. Nasser started to look for supporters in the coming clash with the major European powers, allied to the United States. In 1955, he received the first shipment of Soviet and Czechoslovak arms. This event marked the Soviet Union’s first major entry into the Arab world, which soon turned it into a major player in the Middle East. Over the next three decades, the Soviet Union would send a total of 80,000 military advisers, technicians, and troops to the region, and train 55,000 Arab officers in the USSR.²

In 1956, as Britain, France, and Israel intervened militarily to take back control over the Suez Canal, the Soviet Union warned that it would use “missile systems” to “crush the aggressor and restore peace in the Middle East.” Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, then busy dealing with the revolt in Hungary, did not yet have nuclear missiles ready to launch against Britain and France, but his “psychological attack”—even though the word “nuclear” was never used—worked.³ With U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower also pressing his NATO allies to step back, the three invaders quickly retreated and Egypt triumphed. However, after 1956 the Middle East became a major battlefield of Soviet-American rivalry in the Cold War.

The Soviet Union hoped to capitalize on the political revolutions in the Middle East. As nationalists, inspired by quasi-socialist ideas as much as by Nasser’s example, toppled pro-Western regimes in a number of other Arab countries, such as Iraq...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 History
• Chapter 2 War
• Chapter 3 Diplomacy
• Chapter 4 Trade
• End User License Agreement