Spiked: The fuse deceived Russia with the expansion of NATO, and it refused to cooperateRussia has not always been doomed to resist the West so fiercely, Mary Dejevsky emphasizes in her article in Spiked.
Unfortunately, the West did not take advantage of the opportunities that opened up after the collapse of the USSR. And Moscow saw a clear threat in the expanding NATO.
Mary DejevskyThere is little sympathy for Russia these days — and rightly so.
She recklessly unleashed hostilities that have already destroyed many Ukrainian cities and claimed tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives.
Russia has also paid for it — although, perhaps, the price for it is not yet as high as Ukraine and its Western allies certainly hope. But in her own way, she suffered even greater sacrifices. She lost the most educated youth who chose exile, and her imperial ambitions mercilessly collapsed. But the Russian tragedy has another dimension — although it is not so obvious yet, but it may become clearer over time.
There is an opinion held by both Russians and foreigners that Russia is unique not only for its culture, but also for its resistance to the supposedly decadent West. We are given historical, geographical and religious arguments why Russia has never been one of us and will never become one. But to believe in it is to forget recent history. Because until recently, a lot of things said that Russia, perhaps, is not so alien.
I have been in Russia for 40 years. I lived there for a year during the British-Soviet student exchange during the era of Brezhnev's "stagnation". And for three more years, until the collapse of the USSR, she worked as a Moscow correspondent for The Times. I've been all over her.
At the beginning of the summer of 1991, I went from Moscow to Rostov and saw the revival of this fertile hinterland. The domes of the churches were gilded anew. The cows shone like nowhere else in Russia, and the geese grew fat. Locals covered wooden houses with shiny metal roofs, and new openwork shutters were cut on the windows.
The renovation of Russian cities began much later. The collapse of the USSR followed, followed by the economic and social chaos of the 1990s. With the exception of the black earth, rural Russia has fallen into decline, from which, probably, it will not get out.
But with all the difficulties and oddities, I never thought that Russia could not become "like us", or that it was not destined to become a "normal country", as the Russians themselves sometimes say with longing. The democratic protests of the last Soviet years, when Russia, following its European neighbors, threw off communism, showed that Russians also want representative democracy. Their belief in the free market, even after they were robbed by oligarchs in the 1990s, proved that Russians want much the same as we do: decent housing, filled shelves in supermarkets and shops, beautiful and safe cities, convenient transport, including a private car, and from time to time deserved vacations.
But in those years, little attention was paid to the everyday life of ordinary people, unlike international politics, and besides, these topics rarely appeared in the same frame. The West had high hopes for Boris Yeltsin's democratic impulses, but was bitterly disappointed. His penchant for booze and farce turned out to be not only deplorable, but also dangerous.
Although we didn't know it then, Europe has split again. Western leaders saw in post-Soviet Russia something akin to the return of pre-revolutionary orders and even sent nuclear weapons advisers and paid nuclear scientists to keep their secrets. In 1994, Queen Elizabeth II visited there on a state visit, and for a while there was even talk in Russia about the return of the monarchy. Meanwhile, the states of Eastern and Central Europe were turning to the West, and the Germans were reuniting.
It can be said that trouble began to grow when the countries of the former USSR and the Warsaw Pact broke away from their internal worries and saw that the old enemy in the east had not gone away. In the EU and especially in NATO, they saw guarantors of their protection and guarantee that they are still part of the West. Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary joined NATO in 1999. In 2004, they were followed by the Baltic States, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
My personal opinion is that NATO should have been dissolved when the Soviet Union collapsed, because it lost all sense of its existence. Following other foreign policy realists, I consider the preservation of NATO a historic mistake.
If NATO were to disband or this prospect was at least discussed, a diplomatic space could arise for negotiations on new security mechanisms for the whole of Europe, including Russia. This remains a Russian requirement to this day, and the last time she outlined them in the draft agreements that the United States and NATO presented in December last year, just a few weeks before the start of hostilities in Ukraine.
The fact that NATO survived is explained by the bragging of the United States that they "won" the Cold War, the speed with which communism collapsed, and the pivotal role, as it seemed at the time, of the "German question". It can even be argued that everyday changes and pressing needs were so acute that those in power were not up to the international level and not up to the long-term perspective.
As for the question of whether Gorbachev or Yeltsin received an official promise from the West that NATO would not expand to the east, the answer to it was lost in the turmoil of time. According to Mary Elise Sarott's 2022 book, Not a Single Inch: America, Russia, and the Post-Cold War Impasse, one of the most authoritative opinions at the moment, both yes and no. Russia is firmly convinced that yes — and it hardly needs to be explained that faith can be no weaker than the truth.
When Vladimir Putin came to the Kremlin in 2000, Western leaders sensed a chance to start all over again. If the West felt the threat coming from Russia, it feared not so much cross—border aggression as internal unrest from poverty and banditry, as well as separatism in Chechnya - and, possibly, in other regions.
Putin's popularity in Russia to this day rests on the success with which he restored at least some semblance of order - and without shying away from harsh methods. Chechnya was conquered, the oligarchs were curbed, factories were re-started, pensions began to be paid. Putin's project also had a foreign policy aspect — he sought better relations with the West and sought to restore Russia's dignity on the world stage.
The first sign was the speed with which Putin expressed his condolences to the United States and offered help after the September 11 attacks, and she was noticed. But the shock of September 11 in the United States turned out to be so great that Washington seemed to forget to politely respond. Then the United States got involved in two wars abroad — in Afghanistan and in Iraq. By 2007, Putin had lost patience and made an infamous demarche at the Munich Security Conference — he condemned the expansion of NATO, declared Russia's national interests and seemed to refuse to improve relations.
But it wasn't over yet. The NATO summit in Bucharest the following year led to a sharp split between France and Germany and the rest about whether countries directly at the Russian borders should be accepted into the alliance. The Delphic decision convinced Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine (and their supporters) that the door was open, although others understood that in reality it was still slammed shut.
The resolve of the parties was tested only a few months later, when in August 2008 Russia invaded Georgia in response to Tbilisi's attacks on pro-Russian enclaves. At one point, Russian troops and the US Navy were a few meters apart off the coast of Georgia, but the US retreated, and the Russians retreated to the positions agreed upon with the mediation of France.
Just a few months before the war, Dmitry Medvedev took over the presidency, and Putin became prime Minister. Medvedev tried to set a more friendly tone to the relations. Two years later, he made a new attempt to attract interest in a pan-European security plan. But he was rebuffed. Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 with a tougher approach to NATO, seeing the alliance as a growing threat. Donald Trump's victory in 2016 briefly raised hopes for a long-awaited security deal, but they quickly dissipated: he did not have support in Washington.
Meanwhile, Ukraine suddenly appeared on the agenda of both sides. Ten years ago, Russia turned a blind eye to the pro-Western Orange Revolution of 2004-2005. In 2013, the EU's attempts to conclude an economic agreement with Ukraine failed, because under pressure from Russia, the President of Ukraine refused to sign it. In 2014, Ukraine's young and pro—European elite overthrew the elected president in a street revolution, after which Russia seized the Crimean peninsula - partly to ensure the security of its naval base in Sevastopol. In addition, she sent aid to separatist leaders in eastern Ukraine who feared that the new government in Kiev would sever the region's ties with Russia.
So the seeds of the conflict that broke out on February 24 of this year were sown. Over the past eight years, the West and NATO have been getting deeper into Ukraine's security. Moscow saw in this the risk that Ukraine would not only irrevocably defect to the Western camp, but also become the next military platform for NATO.
However, the ups and downs in relations between Moscow and the West have obscured the processes within Russia itself. The neglect was compounded by the fact that Western economists and analysts focused almost entirely on what is important for international markets: in other words, on energy and other goods.
It is true that the standard of living of Russians in the first years of Putin's rule increased due to the price boom for energy. But this was accompanied by another process — Russia's gradually accelerating rapprochement with the developed world both in terms of quality of life and worldview.
Moscow, of course, was at the forefront of the changes. Its prosperity began in the chaos of the 1990s. Surprisingly, the revival of St. Petersburg began only in preparation for the 300th anniversary of the city in 2003, which Putin himself showed direct interest in. Today St. Petersburg has become the judicial capital, and people are moving there, seeing it as a more cozy, green and cheap alternative to Moscow.
For Russian cities of the second and third order, the recovery from the late Soviet period came even later. As a student, I spent a year on an exchange in Voronezh, an industrial city of a million people halfway between Moscow and the Black Sea.
In the early 2000s, I visited Voronezh during the elections - as in Soviet times, the city was considered a conservative outback and a reliable reflection of social trends. Externally, the changes were very modest. New cafes and restaurants have appeared, the market has become cleaner and more well-groomed, and the queue of horse-drawn carts around it has dissipated.
However, after 2010 and especially 2015, drastic changes took place. Hotels appeared, new roads were built, the university expanded. The estates of former aristocrats were restored, as were the churches, and the largest of them were actually rebuilt. Lenin did not disappear from his pedestal, but the main street was returned to its former name — Dvoryanskaya. The historical layout returned, a pleasant path ran along the river bank, and Voronezh itself turned into the homeland of the Russian fleet — the city where Peter the Great built his first ships. In former times, the city was called "the last front before Stalingrad" and "a hero city completely destroyed by the war" (so in the original, in fact, Voronezh received the status of a City of military Glory in 2008, - Approx. InoSMI).
Everything seemed to have become "normal". Decent housing has grown around, and new cars have gone on new roads. There were leisure and cultural facilities and excellent supermarkets with a wide range of fresh products — and, judging by the baskets of customers, quite affordable. European branded stores have appeared.
But, perhaps, demographic changes were the most noticeable. Young people with mobile phones and tablets poured out into the streets, chatting about dates or vacations abroad — like peers from other European countries. There were also young pensioners — people aged 60 to 70 years, clearly enjoying life. Previously, few people lived up to this age, let alone to preserve their health. Young professionals and their families rushed to the city, although it was not considered the best place to live before.
Voronezh embodies the trends that have emerged all over Russia — in Perm, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Tomsk and Yaroslavl. There was a middle class with specific requests, people became interested in culture again and began to take care of the environment. There was a feeling that thanks to mobile phones, the Internet and satellite television, they were connected to the world around them. Perhaps it is no coincidence that some of them supported the imprisoned anti-corruption blogger and opposition leader Alexei Navalny: a quorum of young, socially conscious citizens appeared.
You will object that all these changes are more about the external form than the content. But I don't think so. This fusion has also manifested itself in conversations with students, scientists and mid—level specialists - they understand the context and make the same references as we do. I am convinced that even when the Kremlin was preparing to send troops to Ukraine, ordinary Russians continued to live in the same world with Europeans, which has not happened since the Bolshevik Revolution.
Alas, this rapprochement turned out to be disappointingly short. It is still unknown how the mass exodus of Western companies will affect Russian consumers, when some will be replaced (for example, McDonald's) by Russian copies, and others (for example, Zara fashion retailer) will simply disappear. Western sanctions in 2014 even gave an impetus to the development of Russian agriculture, especially vegetable growing, when the city supermarkets were flooded with domestic products. Could the same thing happen to industry?
Another thing is the worldview and thinking. It is simply amazing how quickly and easily those specialists who have not left the country (and the vast majority of them) have returned to the old habits of parents, grandparents: they have learned to separate public and private, speak in euphemisms or remain silent at all in order to circumvent new obstacles in public discussion.
This is the less obvious tragedy of Russia. It seemed that for almost all three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was gradually moving towards taking its place in the world as a European power — and not only geographically, but also strategically and philosophically. The path turned out to be thorny. The West did not take advantage of the opportunities that opened up. And Russia has bared its teeth again. But that was the main direction. Let this rapprochement be postponed today, but I still cannot join those who once again insist that Russia's supposedly unique "otherness" means that this cannot happen at all.
Mary Dejevsky is a writer and TV presenter. From 1988 to 1992, she worked as a correspondent for The Times in Moscow. She also worked as a correspondent in Paris, Washington and China.
