John Rapley
Russia is a country which straddles two continents. That has meant that Russia has long looked both east and west: west to Europe, and its history of liberalism and capitalism; and east to Asian traditions of strong, paternalistic states.
Historically, the Russian state was marked by its dual heritage, with the political traditions of Mongol invaders giving the early Russian state a distinctive
character. This tendency towards strong leaders was apparently reinforced by another 'fault-line' that ran through Europe and Asia, that separating Eastern from Western Christendom. For a variety of reasons, eastern Orthodoxy - which moved into Russia - came to sanction strong rulers, giving them not merely temporal but also spiritual functions.
Ages-old dichotomy
This dichotomy, between 'Westernisers' and 'Slavophiles,' has run through much of Russian history. The country has veered back and forth between the ascendancy of those Russians who wanted their country to become part of the West, and those who preferred that it cling to its eastern traditions. During the communist era, it was said that the early liberalism of the revolution was soon overwhelmed by traditions of Russian autocracy. Communism, it was said, did not conquer Russia; Russia conquered communism.
When communism fell a decade and a half ago, there was a tremendous burst of optimism in the West that the 'end of history' had come. With that, it was expected that Russia would abandon her exceptionalism and join the Western fold. Crash liberali-zation, rapid privatization of a state-owned economy, a democratic revolution and the dissolution of the Cold War with the West seemed to herald a new Russia.
But the subsequent decade brought hardship. The privatization programme was hijacked by corruption, making clever manipulators into billionaires. Conditions for most Russians worsened as inflation soared, real incomes plummeted, and public services evaporated. The mercurial president, Boris Yeltsin, seemed to have no handle on the situation. Russians yearned for stability and prosperity. Nostalgia swelled.
When he became president in 2000, Vladimir Putin seemed to take the country around a corner. He reined in the 'oligarchs,' clamped down on civil society, harassed the political opposition and bolstered the Kremlin's powers. He took a hard line against crime and terrorism.
A strong leader had returned. And, happily for him, the decades-long slide in oil and commodity prices ended. Russia, previously sinking into poverty, now entered a boom period. Meanwhile, Russia's foreign policy played down previous efforts to cozy up to the West. Instead, Putin's Russia asserted its interests in the region more aggressively, and sought to restore its sphere of influence in eastern Europe and central Asia.
The Disappiontment
The strategy may have disappointed Western governments, whose hopes of integrating Russia into their sphere disappeared. But it pleased Russians. Parliamentary elections delivered a legislature subservient to Putin. And in the 2004 presidential election, although he took no chances and clamped down on his opponents, nobody doubted that Mr. Putin's landslide victory represented
genuine assent from a grateful people.
As he seeks to restore the role of Russian Orthodoxy in politics and takes pride in the Soviet past, Mr. Putin is apparently returning Russia to its roots: neither eastern nor western, but a bit of both. Russia is cooler to the West than it was in the 1990s, and its relations with countries like China and Iran have warmed. But it is not
returning to the avowed hostility of the Cold War. After all, it is eager to strike lucrative deals in western markets.
Instead, Russia seems to be finding her own way in the world, and simply ignores the complaints from the west that she is returning to an autocratic past to do so.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
