Russian National Interests and the Current Crisis in Russia

Henry Trofimenko

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429786082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1999, this book analyses the national interests of Russia as thy are indicated by the current policies of the Russian government and formulated in public and not so public discussions in high echelons of government. The author not only sums up and critically reviews those interests in general, but gives detailed analysis of specific interests of Russia in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. A large chapter is devoted to the review of converging and diverging interests of the USA and Russia. The main value of the book is in its philosophical aspect. An outstanding Russian foreign policy expert, who for 20 years participated in inner debates on a high level on issues of Soviet foreign policy and was considered by US politicians and scholars to be one of the top experts in Moscow on the US foreign policy and military strategy, muses over the fate of Russia and its current foreign policy (and domestic) predicaments.

Chapter One

The Concept of National Interest

Before we can analyze national interests of Russia it is imperative to establish what the very notion of “national interest” is and what it means in the current Russian context.

In a brilliant essay on a term “national interest” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences James Rosenau gives the following definition of the concept of “national interest”:

The concept of national interest is used in both political analysis and political action. As an analytical tool, it is employed to describe, explain, or evaluate the sources or the adequacy of a nation’s foreign policy. As an instrument of political action, it serves as a means of justifying, denouncing, or proposing policies. Both usages, in other words, refer to what is best for a national society. They also share a tendency to confine the intended meaning to what is best for a nation in foreign affairs.

Although Rosenau admits that a notion of “national interest” will continue to be used in politics for a long time to come, he heavily criticizes the concept. Rosenau shows that the three best known approaches to the concept of national interest are deeply flawed. For example, the “objectivist” one, maintaining that the best interest of a nation is a matter of objective reality, is actually unable to convincingly prove what that reality is and construes the reality subjectively. “To explain that a certain policy is in the national interest, or to criticize it for being contrary to the national interest, is to give an imposing label to one’s own conception of what is desirable or undesirable course of action.” Even Hans Morgenthau’s approach to defining national interest in terms of power (for politics is a struggle for power, according to Morgenthau) lacks the method for determining what a nation’s relative power is and what degree of power might suffice.

Another - “subjectivist” - method, which shuns the search for an objective truth and defines “national interest” as a pluralistic set of subjective preferences, allegedly also has inherent limitations, because it cannot explain why this or that mix of subjectively defined “national interests” represents the real expressed and unexpressed interests of a society, especially a multiethnic one. In this respect the “subjectivist” approach comes “perilously close to the objectivisms practice of ascribing his own values to others”.

And, finally, the third theoretical approach - the so-called decisionmaking one - in which “the national interest is what the nation, i.e. the decision maker, decides it is” suffers from the fact that in present-day democratic societies “various officials of a society often hold and assert different conceptions of what the goals of foreign policy ought to be”.¹

Another expert on the problem of national interest - Robert Johansen - states:

The highly acclaimed concept of national interest is not scientifically determined. It is a cluster of goals and strategies derived from more fundamental values. Traditionally foremost among those are the preservation of the security and prosperity of the government and its supporters. This includes maintaining sovereign control over a defined territory and population. The competitive accumulation of military power and, secondly, of economic resources, are the principal means for pursuing the values of security and prosperity.²

“Of course”, Johansen points out, “one’s fundamental values are chosen or assumed, not proven.”

All of these valid observations will be taken into account in this study. However, the lack of a better generalizing concept of a nation’s aspirations on the world arena, means that one cannot avoid using the concept of national interest in trying to analyze the most basic goals and tasks of a nation in its quest for survival and self aggrandizement. Especially when a nation - contrary to what Dr. Rosenau asserted in 1968 - is not “declining in its importance as a political unit to which allegiances are attached”, but, as contemporary events show, is becoming the focal point of allegiances. The main thing is that the concept of national interest is not only an analytical tool of political scientists, but an instrument of political action, widely used by present day governments in defining, explaining, projecting and justifying their policies.

“National interest” of a multinational state

In modem Russian usage the expression “national interest” is difficult to use directly from English. In English, for example, the word “nation” is synonymous with the words “country”, “commonwealth”, “state”. However, in Russian the word natsiya (nation) is synonymous not so much with the word “country” or even “people” as with the notion of ethnic community (as in a phrase “national question”) denoting one of the key problems of the former Soviet Union’s and, presently, Russia’s federative organization. The meaning of this word corresponds more closely to the American Indians’ usage of the term “nation” than to its common literary use in English as a synonym of people or a state, as in “the United Nations”. The latter term, in its proper translation into Russian, should have sounded like “United Countries” (Obyedinenniye Strany) or “United Peoples” (Obyedinenniye Narody) but instead was translated literally into Russian without any change as Obyedinenniye Natsii.³

Actually, as Charles Beard one of the first serious students of “national interest” explains, the very notion was bom in America in opposition to the original term “state interest” (or “raison d’etat”, “reason of state”) that was in the wide usage in Europe:

In their resistance to the British government Americans acquired a habit of using terms like “the people”, the “nation” or “commonwealth” when speaking of res publica in a laudatory sense and of referring to government or state when employing derogatory language. To Americans the state appeared as a “Cold monster”... Dynastic interest and state reason had no roots in the American heritage, and British usage had prepared the way for a transition to commonwealth or national interest.⁴

This observation about the origin of the English-language term is very important because the problem is not just one of linguistic purity or political correctness. We need to consider what kind of interests Soviet scholars had in mind when talking of the “national interests” of the USSR.

The Soviet Union was a multinational state (mnogonatsionaVnoye gosudarstvo), in a similar way to the Russian Federation today. However, it makes no sense linguistically in Russian to speak about “national interests”, unless it is made perfectly clear that the word “national” refers to “state”, as in the phrase: “Soviet state interests”.

Soviet leaders and scholars were also able to talk of national interests in class terms because the Soviet Union’s national interests were, ostensibly, the interests of working masses of the country, represented by its ruling body - the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The theory was that this body represented and pursued identical class interests of Soviet working masses irrespective of their nationality. And since in Russia, socialism had already won “totally and irrevocably”, it was no longer possible to exploit classes with particular national interests, as the policies, mapped out by the CPSU, represented the interests of the whole population.

Ostensibly, it was only in the Soviet Union and other states of a similar type, that representatives of the “exploiter classes” were suppressed and destroyed, and where society was allegedly united around the interests and goals of “a working class and a toiling peasantry”. In this sense, the term “national interests” could be used straightforwardly, without any caveats.

On the other hand, any government of a capitalist country was not (and, by Soviet specialists’ definition was not capable of) expressing real interests even of an ethnically homogeneous nation, because it neglected the interests of its exploited working class majority. That is why the term “national interests”, when applied by Soviet authors to describe a capitalist country, such as the United States or France, would always be put in quotation marks in order to emphasize its dubious nature.

But with all the lip-service about “class interests” there was not much difference between the understanding and application of the term “national interest” by the pre-revolutionary Russian ruling dynasty and its postrevolutionary usage by the leadership of the CPSU. The only difference was that communists needed to constantly emphasize their guardianship of national interests to enhance their legitimacy in clinging to power.

Since the ruling body in a totalitarian Soviet state was the self-appointing and self-perpetuating Politburo of the CPSU, composed mostly of ethnic Russians, one could say that the Politburo not so much represented the interests of a multinational Soviet state as the interests of the domineering Russian nation. To a certain extent such a conclusion is correct, unless one takes into account that even the “domineering Russian nation” was itself enslaved by its totalitarian rulers (and suffered most heavily in comparison to other populous nations of the Soviet state during Lenin’s- Stalin’s murderous “class cleansing” campaigns and wars - the civil war and the Second World War).⁵

All in all, when one spoke of the “Soviet Union’s national interests” (up until the end of 1991, when the Union ceased to exist), this largely meant the state interests of the USSR as understood and formulated by the top Russian echelon of the CPSU.

One can question such a conclusion by pointing out that the top echelon of leadership, including the Politburo, always contained some ethnic non- Russians, Jews and Ukrainians being most prominent among them, and for 30 years was headed by an ethnic Georgian - Joseph Stalin. Because of this, with all the talk about “class interests”, those interests had to have some multinational aspect, if not coloration. But the fact is that, while being ethnically non-Russian, the aforementioned leaders essentially represented the great-power interests of the leading Russian nation, if not of the nation as a whole, then at least of its politically active communist stratum.

Leading Jews in the immediate post-revolutionary Soviet establishment (like Trotsky, Sverdlov, Kamenev, Zinoviev and others) actually did not give a damn about their nationality: they considered themselves to be above any nationality, as true representatives of the world proletariat.⁶ As for the Georgian Joseph Stalin, he was a model Russian great power chauvinist, despite his crimes against the Russian people (along with people of other nationalities) many of whom became victims of his mass incarcerations and massacres.

It often happens that a representative of a smaller ethnic group, who suddenly becomes a senior political figure of the ruling ethnic majority, becomes, so to speak, “more catholic than the Pope”. The Chechen Ruslan Khasbulatov, the speaker of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation in 1992-93, and the Jew, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, are clear examples of such a transformation.

Of course, with all the criminality and brutality of ruling dictators of the USSR (particularly Lenin and Stalin) taken into consideration, it stands to reason that none of them was set either on undermining or destroying the Soviet state. All of them in their policies were trying to build up the Great socialist state, to increase its power, its glory, its international standing, if not the well-being of its people. All of them saw the Soviet Union as a future super state of the world, not only a superpower on a par with the United States but The Superpower - the undisputed leader, if not the boss, of the global community of nations. That was an overriding goal among the set of “national interests” of the USSR: universal triumph of communist system, a communist way of life. However, as they gradually discovered for themselves, they did not want the triumph of communism per se, but the triumph of Soviet-style communism controlled by Moscow. This is why Stalin so brutally installed Soviet-style communism in Eastern Europe after World War Two and that is why Brezhnev was more afraid of independent communist China than of the capitalist United States. Communism, it appeared, despite all Moscow’s lip service to internationalism, was essentially a phenomenon of a nationalist, not an internationalist, brand.

All Moscow’s other goals were derivatives of this prime goal of destroying Westem-style capitalism. They were defined not so much in some positive way, but by the rule of contradiction: whatever was bad for imperialism, especially “American imperialism”, was good for the Soviet Union. This amounted to a zero-sum game. It was only in the mid-1970s that some Soviet political scientists, in trying to provide theoretical underpinnings for Moscow’s policy of opening up to “imperialism” - the policy of détente - argued that there were parallels between the foreign policy goals of the USSR and the USA, for instance in preventing nuclear war.

The Soviet leaders did everything they deemed necessary in order to achieve the goal of global pre-eminence. Cruelty in treating their own masses was - in their minds - a means to accelerate such an end. All means are moral, if they enhance the cause of (Soviet) communism - was Lenin’s dictum.

But they failed dismally! Instead of liquidating the alternative capitalist system, a system of individual enterprise, respect for human rights and democratic rule based on universal free elections of governing bodies, they maimed, ruined and finally destroyed their own “model” state that, according to its Marxist Gospel, was supposed for the first time in human history to do away with exploitation of man by man, with misery, hard toil and downtrodden workers and create a social paradise on earth.

Why and how this has happened is for historians, sociologists, political scientists to debate for several hundred years into the future against the background of the alleged triumph of the Great Liberal Idea of Western civilization, provided that they have enough time before the Great Liberal Idea itself degenerates into something painfully familiar, forced to mimic its erstwhile ugly opponent, when the West, in desperation, will borrow (through a totally democratic process of popular vote) some of the wicked methods of Soviet-style socialism in order to tackle increasing capital crime, the wholesale drugging of population and the onslaught of hungry hordes of ailing people fleeing totally impoverished and ecologically ruined Third and some Second World countries.⁷

However, in a short term, in order to shed some light on the communist legacy, it is imperative to at least sum up, if not to research in depth, some of the most flagrant conceptual and practical blunders and delusions of the communist state in its domestic and foreign policies. It is necessary to do so in order not to slide again into the old Bolshevik path of forcing people into happiness (nasil ‘stvennogo oschastlivlivaniya naroda) under the guise of such fashionable slogans as “marketization”, “dem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One The Concept of National Interest
• Chapter Two The “Tree” of National Interests
• Chapter Three The Problem of National Security
• Chapter Four Russian Interests in Europe
• Chapter Five Russian Interests in Asia
• Chapter Six Russian Interests in the Middle East
• Chapter Seven Russian versus American National Interests
• Postscript