Mette Skak, Aarhus ([email protected]) : The Strategic Culture of Russia:
One Paradigm, Multiple Strategies
Paper for the 13th Aleksanteri Conference ”Russia and the
World”, University of Helsinki, 23rd to 25th October 2013.
While some scholars argue that Russian foreign policy is one of short- termism
this paper sees Russia as representing a peculiar strategic culture – one of social
Darwinism (‘кто кого’) close to neorealism. Within this broad framework Russia
pursues multiple grand strategies, implying that there are several valid ways to
interpret Russia’s behaviour as a security policy actor: Copycat conduct &
interventionism, Gorchakovism, i.e. internal balancing bordering on military
revisionism or, conversely, geoeconomics and last, but not least soft balancing.
These are but a handfuld of actual strategies pursued by contemporary Russia.
The key point to observe is the absence of liberal strategic culture.
1-10-2013
Introduction to the argument
Three years have passed since Oxford Analytica (2010) published a brief, but thoughtful essay
on the syndrome of short-termism characterizing Russian foreign and security policy. While
acknowledging that Russian foreign policy-making has become less chaotic than during the
Yeltsin years – cf. Skak (1996: 137-191) – Oxford Analytica (2010) insists that Russia’s
external conduct too often contradicts Russia’s self-proclaimed long-term strategic goals such
as the absolute priority of entertaining great power status and upholding principles like
territorial integrity. Regarding the latter, Russia’s recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia
”flagrantly ignored this principle” (ibid.). Similarly, all Russian foreign and security policy
doctrines as well as each and every Russian foreign policy decision-maker cite CIS integration
as a vital national interest, yet ”very little effort has been put into achiveing this goal” (ibid.).
Russia’s entry into the WTO is of paramount importance if Russia is ever to ’modernize’ i.e.
move beyond its current status of exporting just oil, gas and arms. But Russia’s recent effort of
coercing Ukraine and others into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s EurAsEC project
threatens to torpedo not just Ukraine’s agenda of modernization, but Russia’s as well.
Indeed, there is much to be said for the insights of the anonymous Oxford Analytica (2010)
authors whose views seem close to those held by the British government traditionally biased
against Russia. There have been instances of Russian sudden and untenable foreign policy
reorientations, for instance when Putin overnight – on the occasion of the ’9/11’ terror
attacks upon the United States - decided to align Russia firmly with U.S. President George W.
Bush and his war on terror (Blank, 2002). Russia’s policy during the current civil war in Syria
has also been rich on improvisations and short-termism. However, if one takes the larger, if
complex pattern of Russian foreign and security policy ever since so-called Eurasianism
popped up in early 1992 (Skak, 1996: 143) one sees exactly that: a pattern. Patterned
behaviour is what the approach of strategic culture is all about. What follows will be an
attempt to establish the contents of this particular pattern and to pinpoint policy implications
for the outside world in its own policy towards Russia.
As for my particular argument, it is this: Russia does not really pursue an improvised foreign
and security policy of short-termism. On the contrary, Russia displays an entire strategic
culture close to neorealism based on the Russian maxim кто кого (who will beat whom?). This
broad framework allows Russia to pursue multiple strategies resulting in a perplexing pattern
of interpretations offered within the scholarly study of Russian affairs. However, one option of
strategic culture remains absent, namely a genuinely liberal strategic culture. I shall address
the broader siginificance of this illiberal configuration of Russian strategic culture in the
concluding part of the paper.
The analysis begins by briefly presenting the concept and methodology of strategic culture. It
goes on by presenting examples of strategic culture interpretations of the Russian case
including a couple of widely cited and respected monographs on Russian foreign policy.
Already this exercise will turn my contribution into a research review. Then follows the
empirical part sensu strictu - an examination of Russia’s multiple grand strategies of …

copycat conduct and interventionism
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Gorchakovism, i. e. internal balancing
military revisionism
geoeconomics
soft balancing.
The penultimate section of the paper is perhaps the most important as it contains my attempt
of explaining the above overrepresentation of neorealist grand strategies. It will employ a
methodology of its own by establishing a path depedendency from Russia’s recent Soviet past.
As already indicated, the interesting conclusion to draw from the peculiar configuration of
Russian grand strategies is the strategic cultural option which is never seriously considered
by Russian foreign and security policy decision makers. Namely that of liberalism – of
proceeding from a perception of win-win options, pursuing diplomacy out of confidence in the
Western world, its institutions, its Enlightenment values of individualism, cosmopolitanism
and secularism. Some readers may see this as a myopic, irrelevant measure for the sanity of
Russian foreign policy and security policy making. I shall later argue why this is not so.
On the approach of strategic culture
The study of strategic culture as a way to gain insight into the security policy decision-making
of states goes back to early Cold War sovietology in the shape of analyses of the Soviet
Politburo’s ’operational code’ (Skak, 2011a). In recent years the field has gained new
prominence as the way to undig the real agenda of Communist China and North Korea, but
also encompasses in-depth studies of democracies like Israel and Denmark (Lantis & Howlett,
2013; Johnson, Kartchner & Larsen). The rediscovery of strategic culture is articulated in open
opposition to neorealism in defence of cultural, local variables of geography, history, and
regime type whereas neorealism relies on abstract global variables of polarity (Waltz, 1979).
Thus, Colin S. Gray(1999) and his methodological rival Alastair Iain Johnston (Johnston, 1995)
do agree on the need to treat the possible neorealism of any state and its decision-makers an
empirical question, not something we can deduce from the global balance of power. Johnston,
thus sees actual strategic cultures as being placed on a continuum stretching from the hard
realism and aggressiveness of, say, Nazi Germany, on the one hand, to the soft idealpolitik of,
say, Czechoslovakia (ibid.: 47). So what makes strategic culture studies relevant from security
policy practicioners’ point of view is their ambition of pinpointing the attitude to the use of
force of any given actor in world affairs (cf. Gray, 1999: 50). Tellingly, the term strategic
culture was invented by a Sovietologist, Jack Snyder in 1977. His definition sounds:
”the sum total of ideas, conditional emotional responses, and patterns of habitual
behaviour that members of a national strategic community have acquired through
instruction or imitation and share with each other with regard to [nuclear] strategy
(Snyder quoted from Gray, 2009: 226f.).
Indeed, when scholars are studying strategic culture they study ’group-think’ writ large (Janis,
1972) – or security ’political cultures’ to add a political science synonym opening another vast
field of inquiry. They study the rise and consolidation of ’hegemonic discourses’ by ’process
tracing’ their specific geopolitical, historical and political context, deconstruct their ontology
altogether proceeding from a basic epistemological premise of security policy ’path
dependency’ known from historical sociology (Mahoney, 2000). This research agenda sounds
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dangerously ambitous, way too complex and absolutely unfitting for just a brief conference
paper. Luckily, veterans in the field like Gray (1999, 2009) happen to offer pragmatic advices
of common sense and eclecticism. As for Johnston’s meticulous process tracing of
contemporary Chinese strategic thinking several centuries backwards ”to the earliest point in
history” (Johnston, 1995: 49f.), I believe his diachronic model of causality makes much more
sense if turned upside down in order to emphasize the recent past, cf. figure 1 below:
My heresy towards Johnston (1995) draws inspiration from the far more straightforward
methodology of Kanti Bajpai (2002) regarding India’s strategic culture as well as my own
reasoning. Clearly, the most direct socializing of Russia’s geography, security policy history,
norms and values onto today’s Russian decision-making elite must have taken place during
that generation’s own formative years during the mid-to-late 20th century Soviet past. In
other words, the explanatory analysis towards the end of the paper will dwell on the
evolution of Soviet political culture and expose the strategic culture in the decades prior to
the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev to Secretary General of the CPSU. In another respect I
do build upon Johnston, namely by following his distinction into the overarching paradigm1 of
As mentioned earlier Johnston (1995) posits two ideal types – the paradigm of hard or
offensive realpolitik (cf. Mearsheimer, 2001) vs. that of soft idealpolitik along with legion of
in-betweens. The offensive vs. pacifist quality of a given paradigm results from how its host
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strategic culture and the resulting grand-strategic preferences in the plural (Johnston, 1995:
46-48). If one takes Johnston earnestly these must be consistent across different canonical
texts and across time, criteria which can be difficult to live up to and maybe not that decisive
at all as long as one is able to identify truly recurrent discoursive and behavioral security
policy stereotypes. As will be demonstrated below it is possible to identify at minimum five
such grand strategies within the Kremlin’s diplomacy. This is not to say that grand strategies
never overlap or contradict one another, and they may also happen to embody idiosyncracies.
This brings me to one highly important observation by Gray (1999: 65 f.): Strategic cultures
may be dysfunctional i.e. functionally irrational. In real life – i. e. in the necessary biological
short-term perspective of just a few generations - political systems may be locked onto deeply
counterproductive strategic cultures and yet survive for quite some time. This has to do with
the fact that within cultural studies rationality is a question of what makes sense, not what
pays off – in other words, the logic of appropriateness. Even so, students of strategic culture
need not be cultural relativists blinding themselves to what is evidently a case of misguided
and dangerous strategic culture – e.g. from the point of view of the citizenry like in the case of
North Korea. On this vital point Gray himself refers to Russia whose strategic culture
”contributed massively to three wholesale Russian/Soviet collapses of the twentieth century,
and might have yielded an utterly irretrievable collapse in 1941-2” (ibid.: 66).
’Stand der Forschung’
The revival of the strategic cultural analysis of Russia was pioneered by a bright young
Finnish scholar, Henrikki Heikka (2000) who wrote a very well-documented monograph that
portrayed Soviet strategic culture as a ’Cult of the Offensive’. He thus debunked the myth of
Soviet caution, but went on to document a post-Soviet evolution of Russian strategic culture
towards moderation as the point of departure for the entire Putin era. Nevertheless,
concerning Russia’s striving for regional hegemony in its post-Soviet neighbourhood, Heikka
stressed the ”violent ways in which Russia seeks to further its national interests” as both
”morally unacceptable” and dangerous (ibid.: 92). Regarding the equally delicate security
situation of the Nordic-Baltic region, Heikka displayed curious confidence in the rationalistic
logic of deterrence by indicating that the way to enhance security would be to extend NATO
membership to not just the three Baltic states, but also to Finland and Sweden. Since then the
Baltic states did enter NATO, yet there was a presumably Russian cyber war against Estonia in
2007 and multiple minor Russian provocations. So would a swifter extension of NATO
membership to Georgia have moderated Russia’s behaviour there? Is Russia really a realible
defensive neorealist – or only superficially so and in reality quite an idiosyncratic neorealist? It is
doubts along these lines about e.g. Russia that inspired Gray (2009) to launch a frontal assault
on neorealism due to its naïve belief in Western-style cost/benefit rationaliy in an agitated
defence of the cultural approach to studying security policy. Still, Heikka’s work set a high
standard as the best primer on Russian strategic cultural evolution through the 20th century.
political system ”answers” to ontological questions like the role of war in human history, are
conflicts zero-sum conflicts of ’кто кого’? plus its view of the efficacy of the use of force.
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The U.S. private consultant and intelligence officer Fritz W. Ermarth (2009) agrees with
Heikka about the relative demilitarization of contemporary Russia compared to the vile
standards of militarization set by Russian and Soviet (commie-)czars. He cites the modest
figure of 2.7 per cent of Russia’s admittedly growing GDP spent on defence as ”akin to that of
advanced European countries” (ibid.: 95). For all their anti-NATO rhetoric, ”Russian leaders
actually perceive an historically mild threat environment” (loc. cit.) He continues: ”An old
aphorism held that Russia had only two reliable allies, its army and navy. Today pundits
rephrase this to proclaim that oil and gas are now Russia’s reliable allies” (ibid.).” This leads
him to speculate about the possible ”civilizing“ influence upon Russian strategic culture from
contemporary Russia’s political economy. However, Ermarth stops his brief contribution by
reminding the reader about the possible revival of “[t]he combative and militaristic qualities
of Russian strategic culture” (ibid.). And his key observation deserves to be quoted at length:
”In rhetoric and action, Russian foreign policy culture has often expressed a puzzling
combination of contradictory attitudes: defensiveness bordering on paranoia, on one hand,
combined with assertiveness bordering on pugnacity, on the other. In the Russian
mentality, both an inferiority complex and a superiority complex can be simultaneously on
display. The traumatic effect of the break up of the USSR and decline of Russia’s role as a
great power have amplified these complexes, especially among Russia’s national security
elites. The partial recovery of Russia’s international standing under Putin’s more
disciplined and, as a result of energy revenues, better-funded regime, has produced another
amplification of these complexes in the pronouncements of leaders and pundits.” (Ermarth,
2009: 88).
The perplexing message in these lines is this: Russia may be both better and worse than we
expect it to be, the policy implication for our own policy towards Russia being … a big haw!
Ermarth (2009) thus comes across as less certain than Heikka (2000) about the turn for the
better within Russian strategic culture. Among other things he stresses the intimate link
between Russian political culture in general – in his words one characterized by deep
authoritarianism – and the particular strategic culture guiding security policy-making.
The German defence analyst Norbert Eitelhuber (2009) arrives at a more optimistic
conclusion than Ermarth about the rationality of current Russian strategic culture. It is
surprising in view of some of the evidence cited and the points he makes in the passing. On
the one hand, ”Russia is simply behaving like any rising power that wants to have its say in
international politics” (ibid.: 19). Moreover around 2000 there was ”a fundamental shift” in
Russian strategic culture towards taking economic power more seriously; something which
Eitelhuber asserts already has had ”a civilizing influence” on the otherwise hypermilitaristic
Russian strategic culture (ibid.: 21, 27). On the other hand, Eitelhuber points to the steep rise
in then Russian President Medvedev’s popularity rating from below 40 per cent to above 70
per cent – i. e. akin to Putin – because of Medvedev’s willingness to enter war with Georgia
(ibid.: 20). Accordingly, Russians see ”[o]nly autocratic leadership” as capable of coping with
the ”threat towards Russian sovereignty and territorial integrity” (ibid.: 27) – in itself an
”obsessive” threat perception according to Eitelhuber (loc. cit.). One senses here that the
author himself is at pains when trying to accept the logic of Russian strategic culture, and in
any event the United States was strikingly passive in the case of Russia’s war against Georgia.
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So while Eitelhuber is absolutely right about the danger of hollowing NATO’s article 5 security
guarantee to e.g. the Baltic states should NATO ever accept Georgia as a member, he displays a
disturbingly naïve trust in Russia’s willingness to reciprocate when citing Joe Biden’s olive
branch of ”reset” extended to Russia in early 2009 – i.e. after Russia’s proxy war2 against
NATO and the US in Georgia. Not only did the U.S. stay calm then, all the other permanent
members of the United Nations’ Security Council had to acquiesce to Russia’s unilateral
military intervention breaching another state’s sovereignty. So the Kremlin did not
reciprocate to the preceding NATO Defence Minister meeting in April 2008 in Bucharest
where it was decided not to offer Georgia a Membership Action Plan guaranteeing Tbilisi a
subsequent entry into NATO. In stead Moscow overreacted as Moscow often does – I believe
this is an important clue to Russia’s operational strategic culture. To quote an understatement
of Eitelhuber’s (2009: 28) ”heated Russian rhetoric and other provocations” may be obvious
causes behind ”the current strategic instability” to quote an apt phrase of his (2009: 27) about
the time we Europeans live in.
Not that Eitelhuber’s contribution is not worth reading; on the contrary, as it is both wellresearched, well-written and wonderfully thought-provoking. Among other things he advises
European powers to embrace Medvedev’s proposal of reforming the European security
architecture through ’network diplomacy’ (newspeak for mainly great power concerts, I
suspect, forum shopping as it were). Eitelhuber cites as an argument for embracing this that it
was Putin who originally launched the idea at the 43rd Munich security conceference in 2007.
A few pages later, however, Eitelhuber goes into the problem of the hawkish siloviki and their
critical say over Russian foreign and security policy. There, he comments upon Putin’s own
notoriously hawkish performance in Munich as ”an act of obeisance to his [siloviki]
benefactors” (ibid.: 18). So unintentionally, Eitelhuber’s analysis reveals highly problematic
dynamics in Russia’s policy towards the surrounding world. As for his policy recommendation
of proceeding from the ”reset”, many analysts now mock it as having been torpedoed by the
Kremlin, for instance when it gave political asylum to Edward Snowden earlier this year.
So the overall insight from the examples of strategic culture analysis of Russia presented
above is that the optimistic expectation of Russian defensive realism held by Heikka (2000)
has been proven wrong. Putin’s Russia is less chaotic in its foreign policy making than was
Yeltsin’s Russia, but Russia has grown decidedly more hawkish – assertive to cite the
buzzword used by Ermarth (2009), Jeffrey Mankoff (2012: 8, 258 ff.) and many other experts.
Russia again represents a threat to its immediate post-Soviet neighbours3. To be sure, Russia
is neither reiterating the Soviet Cult of the Offensive, nor its earlier hypermilitarism and
Leninist ideological messianism, but even lesser evils can be dangerous. Accordingly, all three
strategic culture analysts presented here agree on the utter irrelevance of the liberal
understanding of international relations (IR) a clue to Russian foreign and security policy. In
stead, they see a ”predominance of realism” (Eitelhuber, 2009: 9 ff.) making it clear that
Gorbachev’s New Thinking and its brief revival under Yeltsin’s first foreign minister Andrei
Kozyrev was an aberration in Russian strategic culture.
In my own analysis of the war in Georgia (Skak, 2011) I used the term proxy war.
From media coverage of the Nordic defence debate etc. I have the impression that Sweden,
to some extent Finland and Norway at times all perceive a military threat emanating from
Russia. See also Tunberger (2013), Larsson (ed.) (2008) and Ries (2012).
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In a manner of its own, the early study of Russian foreign policy was devoted to exposing the
presumably different strands of Russian strategic culture without using the term. Virtually
each and every scholarly contribution from the 1990s devoted a lot of space to presenting
competing schools of thought and inventing fancy typologies of zapadniki vs. slavyanofily or
westernizers vs. Eurasianists etc. This approach is reiterated by Andrei P. Tsygankov (2006)
in his three-fold typology of liberal Westernizers vs. Statists and Civilizationists. Arguably, the
latter two can be lumped together as variations of illiberal strategic cultures with Statists
embodying the modern, technocratic great power chauvivism and Civilizationists embodying
aggressive cultural realism of the Vladimir Zhirinovsky kind. The problem I have with
Tsygankov’s typology is that it proceeds from the premise of a powerful liberal constituency
in today’s Russia without actually identifying one regarding Putin’s Russia. Tellingly, the
evidence he presents concerns the liberal aberration around 19904, whereas today’s Russian
liberals are isolated, sacked from government, or they have converted to Putin’s Statism.
Proceeding from this flawed understanding of the strength of the liberal position Tsygankov
draws exaggerated policy conclusions about the decisive influence of the West upon Russia in
its capacity as ”Russia’s significant Other” (ibid.: 182). He, too, advises an energetic Western
Russia policy based on ”mutually acceptable terms”, ”reciprocal action, honest communication
over existing approaches” (ibid: 186) and similar niceties. But he deserves credit for citing the
uncomfortable fact that already in 2001 half of the Russian population saw the USA as playing
a negative role in world affairs (ibid.: 185). Since then Russian animosity towards the West
ballooned, underscoring the theoretical insight that the foreign policy of great powers like
Russia cannot necessarily be influenced from abroad. In its policy towards Russia, the West
has precious little control over outcomes, probably the most important lesson to draw.
Turning to another frequently cited monograph on Russian foreign policy I have already
invoked Mankoff (2012) whose much more updated analysis makes it clear that there is no
such thing as a liberal position within Russian strategic culture, only a slight controversy
between aggressive Civilizationists like Aleksandr Dugin and moderate Statists of the Putin
kind (ibid.: 63 ff., 69 ff.). Mankoff suggests that Dugin may have drafted Medvedev’s five point
speech following the war against Georgia about Russia’s ’privileged interests’ (ibid.: 268). He
depicts Dugin’s Osnovy Geopolitiki (Foundations of Geopolitics) as the most widely read work
on strategy and foreign policy in Russia today – in short, the canon of Russian strategic culture.
While Mankoff abstains from employing strategic culture methodology, his analysis contains
quite a few insights in this genre, and he further frames his study as one of ’grand strategy’.
Mankoff stresses that Dugin’s vision of apocalyptic confrontation between Russia and the
United States is dismissed by Kremlin officials who, after all, prefer the prestige inherent in
nourishing a special relationship of bilateral diplomacy and summitry with the U.S. (ibid.:
269). Accordingly, he arrives at the following operational grand strategy of Russia:
” […] state-driven economic development, the employment of Russia’s new-found wealth to
rebuild the foundations of national power (military, political, and economic) and a
concerted effort to minimize conflicts with the other Great Powers to allow Russia time to
recover from the upheavals of the 1990s” (Mankoff, 2012: 271).
Moreover, Tsygankov (2006: 76 ff.) portrays his liberals as CIS isolationists, but in reality the
CIS vision of the early Kozyrev was one of good neighbourly relations (Skak, 1996: 144 ff.).
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In itself quite reasonable and natural targets, not least in view of the Russian obsession with
great power status (ibid.: passim; cf. Petersson, 2013), but as Mankoff notes it harks back to
the mainly prenationalist era of Gorchakov and Stolypin who are therefore problematic role
models. I shall return to the grand strategy of Gorchakovism, and finish by highlighting a few
other relevant points from Mankoff. He cites Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov for his
insistence upon Russia’s autonomy as an international actor vis-á-vis an American audience in
2006 (ibid.: 21). This indicates that Russia poses the same kind of strategic challenge for the
West as China does, and on some issues Russia happens to lie further away from the Western
view than China says Mankoff. So his policy recommendation for the West is to do all it can to
turn Russia into a ’responsible stakeholder’ (ibid. 280) – the terminology of World Bank boss
Robert Zoellick – represents a tall order of the near-impossible. Instructively, due to the
chronic instability along Russia’s southern rim and China’s rise, Mankoff also observes that
”Russia is loosing the luxury of seeing the West as the principal threat to its security” (ibid.:
280). This is another way of saying that for the time being, Russia’s strategic culture is a case
of dysfunctional strategic culture5.
Copycat conduct and interventionism
One of the large ironies about Russian strategic culture is that just as much as the Russian
elite and the Russian public fear and detest U.S. manipulations in and around Russia, just as
much is it exactly the United States which represents the superpower role model for Russians.
This strategic cultural pattern obviously has its roots in the rivalry cum ”cosy condomonium”
among the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Postcommunist Russia
took it for granted that it would inherit the Soviet permanent seat in the UN which it did
hereby continuing to play a key role in global security affairs amidst military and economic
collapse. So actually there were limits to Western arrogance and triumphalism in the early
1990s. Postcommunist Russia also copied U.S. institutions like the National Security Council,
the annual State of the Union address as well as the more irregular publishing of National
Security Strategies. Already the Yeltsin era National Security Blueprint of 1997 established
Russia’s great power ambition as a matter of developing ”equal pertnership with the other
great powers – the centers of economic and military might” (quoted from Eitelhuber, 2009:
13). The Russian elite knows perfectly well that Russia is no match for the United States in
military and other power terms – be they hard or soft power – but is nevertheless keen to
imitate U.S. behaviour in international affairs, not least within international security affairs.
I have published a strategic culture interpretation of Russia’s war against Georgia in 2008 that
goes into what amounts to a Russian Monroe Doctrine (Skak, 2011a). It traces the origins of
2008 Medvedev’s statement about Russia’s ’privileged interests’ in the CIS region to early
pronouncements of such a ”Monrovski” doctrine inter alia by one of Yeltsin’s advisors,
Andranik Migranian. In my methodological reflections I dwelled on the possibility of e.g.
normative ”impulses from abroad due to the contemporary pressure of from globalization” on
the one hand, and ”the actual opening of postcommunist political systems, as in Russia” (ibid.:
Upon reading the Day of the Oprichnik, a famous short-story by the Russian fiction writer
Vladimir Sorokin (2006) his political satire struck me as being a most vivid exposition of the
vices of today’s Russian strategic culture. Cf. my later comments on Russia’s “pivot to Asia”.
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143) on the other hand. This analytical framework together with the copycat nature of
Russia’s Monrovski grand strategy caused me to recommend U.S. policy makers to employ
reciprocity by formally abandoning their Monroe doctrine of 1823 as irrelevant for 21st
century globalized world affairs as one possible short-cut to civilize Russia’s policy towards
the CIS and the Baltic states. Since then I have become less certain of the logic of great power
reciprocity as panacea when it comes to an idiosyncratic actor like Russia. Still, giving up the
Monroe doctrine would probably do no harm to legitimate U. S. interests and might in a gentle
way push Russia in the right direction although we do not really control outcomes here.
In any event, the conclusion to draw from Russia’s Monrovski grand strategy is that Russia
managed to cultivate a ’pivot to Asia’ of its own long before U.S. President Obama - an Eurasia
pivot covering the vast CIS area. The problem here is that the strategy inevitably clashes with
post-Cold War European norms of undivided security, rule of law, human rights etc. for all
across the OSCE area, cf. Lavrov’s earlier cited ideal of ’autonomy’ along with ’sovereign
democracy’ – slogans coined to stem the tide of colour revolutions and popular dissatisfaction
with authorian rule and corruption (cf. Eitelhuber, 2009: 17f.; Mankoff, 2012: 6 f., 20). Russian
decision-makers sincerely want to shut off their vast geopolitical neighbourhood from the
larger political spin-offs from globalization, and at the same time they want market access to
the EU, Western FDIs and Western university degrees for their kids. They want to have their
cake and eat it too. For this reason Eitelhuber (2009: 28) sees Russia’s claim of ’privileged
interests’ in the CIS region as ”the most controversial element of Russia’s current foreign
policy stance” making ”compromise all the more difficult”.
So far so good if I may so. But then, in June 2010, inter-ethnic riots erupted in Osh, Kyrgyzstan,
causing at least 77 casualties, nearly 1,000 wounded and the displacement of 400,000 Uzbeks.
Surely, a most acute and dangerous CIS crisis of far greater magnitude than the Georgian
tragedy two years earlier that sent the world spiralling down Cold War memory lane. The
Kyrgyz President Roza Otunbaeva - no loose cannon of the Eduard Kokoity kind, South
Ossetia’s leader in 2008, but a self-declared social democrat - formally and unmistakingly
asked the Kremlin to intervene militarily to bring the explosive situation to a halt. Russia
declined (Pan, 2010). The crisis deescalated on its own, but the whole affair underscores how
whimsical Russian strategic culture really is – how little Russia cares for its own backyard.
In order to explain this true puzzle – the non-intervention of Russia in its explicitly exclusive
zone of influence in the one and only country hosting both a Russian and a U.S. military base
one could consult another intriguing monograph written by the U.S. political scientist Andrew
Bennett (1999). Although cast as a study of learning, not strategic culture, its object of study
happens to be the recurrent syndrome of unilateral military intervention by Russia, climaxing
in the 1994 war against secessionist Chechnia. The volume is rich on empirical evidence of
hawkish group think, but it also makes clear that originally there was a liberal strategic
cultural position of responsible CIS policy (ibid.: 306). What happened was that liberals
became enmeshed in illiberal group think of falling CIS dominoes ultimately bringing about
the Chechen disaster. Although Bennett does not cover post-Chechnia evolutions it appears
that it served as a reality check for the hawks, but only for some time. The economic fallout
from the mini-war in Georgia may similarly serve as a temporary deterrent, Russian
Monrovski rhetoric notwithstanding. The troubling thing apart from the sad fate of thousands
of Uzbeks is that the rare Kyrgyz case of ”underreaction” is no safeguard against another fatal
overreaction, another reckless Russian intervention.
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One should take notice of, but then also be careful not to dramatize what may seem to be an
actual Asia pivot of Putin’s as when he and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in March 2013.
Putin attached much great power significance to the fact that Xi picked Russia for his first
state visit abroad (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBHvGticgMs). Under the surface,
Russo-Sino affairs are highly complex (Lo, YEAR) - also in ways not always appreciated. China
is the formally authoritarian of the two, but in reality often the more prudent and
conservative one in the progressive sense of that word: when you want to reform in order to
preserve. China is less keen to confront the U.S. openly and to openly challenge the great
power concert in the United Nations’ Security Council and it was plainly abhorred by Russia’s
sponsoring of South Ossetian and Abkhaz secessionism (Mankoff, 2012: 273).
Gorchakovism, i. e. internal balancing
More than anyone else, it is the Danish scholar Flemming Splidsboel-Hansen (2002, 2008)
who deserves credit for having brought attention to this remarkable grand strategy of Russia.
As indicated in the name Gorchakovism, the strategy refers to the Foreign Minister, later
Chancellor of Imperial Russia in the decades following the traumatizing defeat in the Crimean
war, Aleksandr Gorchakov. His diplomatic career began as ambassador to Vienna during the
Crimean war (1853-56) when he came to realize the futility of Russia’s designs in the face of
Anglo-French warfare for the benefit of Turkey. According to Splidsboel, czar Aleksandr II
instructed the highly talented Gorchakov to formulate a suitable new vision for Russia’s
foreign policy. Upon the signing of the humiliating Paris peace treaty in 1856, Gorchakov
made a virtue out of a necessity by sending a circular to his colleagues and via them to foreign
governments containing the aphorism ”La Russie ne boude pas, elle se recueille” (Russia is not
sulking, she is composing herself/ Россия не сердится, Россия сосредотачивается). On
behalf of his czar, Gorchakov accepted the demilitarization of the Black Sea for a while and
sought compensation through imperialism further eastwards and, famously, through
domestic reform of Russia, e.g. the emanciation of serfs in 1861. Gorchakov came to be
respected even abroad at a time of badly needed Russian 'soft power'.
For this reason it is not difficult to understand why Russian senior diplomats from Primakov
to Lavrov and lately Putin identify with Gorchakov's tenure, whereas Russian Westernizers
are more critical of his record (Tsygankov, 2006: 27; cf. Mankoff, 2012: 50; Skak, 2011a: 148
f). As for Putin's use of Gorchakov's Terminator-like motto («I'll be back!»), his platform for
his presidential elections campaign published in January 2012 contained the following
statement: «Russia is not a country that backs down when facing challenges. Russia composes
herself, gathers strength and answers any challenge with dignity» (Putin, 2012). Notably,
when Lavrov reiterated Gorchakov in the aftermath of the Georgian war 2008 amidst harsh
economic crisis in Russia, it was to celebrate that now Russia was past its painful era of
enforced moderation. Lavrov pointed to the prominence of the new BRICs concert and the
larger G20 of which Russia is also a member as reasons for a making Russia feel like a rising
power again (Skak, loc. cit.; cf. Skak, 2010). So when explaining why Gorchakov has been
rediscovered by contemporary Russian foreign ministers and presidents as role model for
contemporary Russian foreign and security policy, Splidsboel-Hansen (2002, 2008) is
basically right in drawing parallels to Russia's feeling of humiliation following the end of the
Cold War and the Soviet collapse and Russia's acute need for recovery.
Given the sudden change in state preferences away from foreign policy towards domestic
reform in order to gather great power strength, Gorchakovism qualifies as an example of
10
internal balancing. This was the term coined by Kenneth Waltz (1979: 168, 118) about the
superpower option of building up economic and military strength on one’s own rather than
having to rely on the whims and capabilities of allies (external balancing). When writing in an
upbeat manner about Putin’s sudden alignment with the U.S. on the occasion of ‘9/11’ I once
launched a creative reinterpration of internal balancing under conditions of globalization
(Skak, 2005) which I now believe must be shelved as wishful thinking about Russian strategic
culture. It may be true in theory that only internal balancing strategies of liberal nature will
work in the long run – my reasoning back then – but the Russian rediscovery of Gorchakov
signifies a problematic leap backwards to late 19th century-great power rivalry with which
Russia identifies under the newspeak label of multipolarity. So I’m afraid I was right only
when citing Japan’s Meiji restoration of 1868 as illustrating the real grand strategy of internal
balancing. Hereby I do not mean to suggest that contemporary Gorchakovism is in the same
ominuous class as Japan’s internal balancing turned out to be – the massacre of Nanking,
colonization of Korea, concentration camps throughout the Pacific during World War II etc. It
is just a reminder that we as researchers must not go native and identify with Russian
romanticism towards Gorchakov. Not that Splidsboel-Hansen falls into this particular trap.
He would, however, seem to have fallen into the same trap as I did by, first, invoking the term
revisionism about the intentions driving domestic restructuring á la Gorchakov and, second,
insisting on a curiously benign operationalization of what revisionism means in pratice in
Russia nowadays (Splidsboel-Hansen, 2002). Or to be more precise, he advises us to see
revisionism not as something inherently aggressive in the military sense, in stead we should
stick to the basic point: revisionists do not identify with the existing world order, they literally
want to revise it (cf. Splidsboel-Hansen, 2008: 287). The sticking point is that already this
formulation indicates Russia cannot be considered what World Bank boss Robert Zoellick
(2005) called ‘a responsible stakeholder’ - his buzzword for which finalité should motivate
Western diplomacy towards China and other rising BRICS powers when opening existing
international institutions for their better representation. So revisionism as clue to Russian
strategic culture is no cause for comfort in itself, on the contrary (Rynning and Ringsmose,
2008; Ries 2012). Russia is not a Soviet Union inspired by extreme Leninist revisionism, but
this is a truism that mocks the ideal of careful analysis needed here. Thus, when SplidsboelHansen mentions Russia’s wish to adapt the rules of the international game so that they better
match Russian interests, he draws quite an open-ended conclusion (ibid.: 292).
As for the logical opposite of revisionism, the grand strategy of status quo, the ‘rising China’
debate is one long complex exegesis of the million dollar question about strategic culture: is
China moving towards genuine, reliable status quo policies or not (Buzan, 2010)? Indeed, the
opposing poles of revisionism and status quo carefully analysed by Sten Rynning and Jens
Ringsmose (2008) represent the diametrically opposed in-between concepts for world order
grand strategies in relation to Johnston’s earlier cited extremes of hard, offensive realism vs.
pacifist soft idealpolitik. One straightforward definition of revisionist states sounds “those
wreaking [not wrecking] havoc in international politics” (Rynning and Ringsmose: 22). The
conclusion to draw from this conceptual excursus into the highly ambiguous grand strategy of
Gorchakovism is that Gorchakovism gives Russian state preferences a fatal twist towards
challenging the existing world order - of opting for “exit” at the expense of not just “loyalty”,
but even “voice” to cite the famous ideal types of Albert O. Hirschmann (1970). This posture is
paradoxical in the extreme, although one probably has to be a believer in hegemonic stability
theory to see the irony. On this account, I should like to quote an in-depth analysis of Russian
11
strategic impulses:
“ […] Putin’s acquiescence, even encouragement of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in
October 2001 reflected his understanding that the U.S. military would be solving a problem
– that is, an aggressive Taliban government alongside a vital Russian sphere of influence –
that the Russian military and the Russian state more generally could not. (Lynch, 2005: 6)
Military revisionism
Luckily, few analysts believe in a Russia challenging the United States militarily in general –
surely a recipe for world war - but then, the argument of so-called offensive realism
(Mearsheimer, 2001) was never one of world hegemony, but about regional hegemony. Some
perceive a Russian grand strategy of disrupting U.S.-European ties (Goodrich, 2011) implying
that Russia’s Eurasia pivot implies a truly far-fetched ambition of regional hegemony on the
European continent. There was one surprise military exercise in the Black Sea earlier this
year that came to be seen as a sign of a new seriousness of Russian military preparedness
given the context of Moscow’s substantial restructuring and re-arming of its military
(Friedman, 2013). Interestingly, the exercise in itself flashed vintage Gorchakovism –
returning to challenge the naval status quo in the Black Sea. And, as stated in fn. 3, some
Nordic defence analysts are alarmed by Russia’s relative military rise in the context of NATO’s
relative disarmament and a weak European Union. During Easter this year, the Swedish public
was alarmed when two Russian bombers simulated an attack in the Baltic Sea disturbingly
close to Stockholm intercepted only by two Danish F-16s from their base in Siauliai, Lithuania
(“Svenskerne sov, da russiske bombefly nærmede Stockholm”, 2013).
Already the hawkish 2010 military doctrine that identified NATO as a threat towards Russia
sparked much debate and cogent analysis (Schmidt and Müller, 2010). This was during the
tenure of something as a rare as a reform-minded civilian Russian defence minister, Anatoly
Serdiukov; nothing short of a miracle for the Russian army according to the respected Russian
defence analyst Aleksandr Golts. Tellingly, Serdiukov was sacked in November 2012, an
outcome that bodes ill for the recovery of the notoriously corrupt and inefficient Russian
military industrial complex (cf. Putin, 2012). Another sad news was when the old Soviet spy
and eminent Russian defence economist, Vitaly Shlykov, died, because his was another voice
of military common sense (Shlykov, 2011). Judging from the monograph by Steven Rosefielde
(2005) on the political economy of Russia’s armed forces that borrows from works by Shlykov
among others, the overall problem is not military revisionism in the sense of Hitlerite
warmongering. It is a post-Soviet Russian strategic culture of squandering resources once it is
for military purposes, a militarism dubbed structural militarization. Because of this syndrome
of imperial overstretch not unlike the one diagnosed by Paul Kennedy (1987) about the Soviet
Union, Rosefielde holds Russia to be a prodigal superpower. The domestic factors, he cites authoritarianism, Muscovite economics i.e. rent-seeking and structural remilitarzation –
threaten both Russia itself and global stability (Rosefielde, 2005: 130, 166). In this sense there
remains a problem of military revisionism in Russia that should concern us all.6
Danish military intelligence displays less concern over Russian military revisionism, but
points to Russian ambitions of playing a role matching that of the United States in the Middle
6
12
Geoeconomics
The novelty about Russia is obviously not the country’s conversion to liberal democracy, but
its conversion to capitalism (Trenin, 2007). This means that strategic culture analysis must
address not just military affairs, but also possible spillovers from civil economic dynamics and
designs upon strategic culture as held by Ermath (2009). However, civil considerations of
earning profits and enjoying life under capitalism may not necessarily have the civilizing
effect upon Russia which Ermarth and even more so Eitelhuber (2009) maintain. One
particularly alarmist interpretation is that of The Economist journalist Edward Lucas (2009:
xxiii) who perceives a new cold war being played out in the civil economic sphere by the Putin
regime in the shape of energy blackmail. He wrote at the height of Western alarm over
Georgia and the preceding Russian gas wars against e.g. Ukraine that happened to hit many
EU consumers. Since then, the so-called shale-gas revolution – the fracking technology – has
changed the balance of power between the Russian bear and its European customers
(“Spooked by shale”, 2013).
In order to understand the strategic cultural logic of Russia’s energy diplomacy, the analysis
must consult the concept of geoeconomics coined by the military historian Edward N. Luttwak
(1990) in an effort of updating the school of realism, rivalry and great power competition to
conditions of globalization. The reason is that geoeconomics - геоэкономика in Russian – is
part and parcel of the vocabulary of Russian semi-official think tanks like SVOP (Strategia
2000) – a concept reflecting their zero-sum onthology of the capitalist world economy.
Following Luttwak, the option of military confrontation between great powers has become
obsolete because of the destructiveness of WMDs forcing great powers to turn to civil
economic rivalry. So states and their nationalistic goals are still the drivers of world politics,
something that sounds like a revival of mercantilism. Not quite says Luttwak: 17th century
mercantilism was always secondary to what he terms ‘geopolitics’ – pure military rivalry.
What I am arguing here is that the Russian elite has embraced the realist paradigm of
geoeconomics in order to turn it into a grand strategy for itself, in short an analytical tool for
waging non-military cold war. This may all sound unbalanced as an interpretation of what
Russia actually does and notably can do. Seen in a macro-historical perspective there was in
fact originally a defensive logic at work in the shape of the Russian political economy’s double
geographical curse of ‘high costs of security’ and ‘high costs of extraction’ as those structural
conditions that pushed Russia into hypermilitarism and patrimonialism (Lynch, 2005: 43).
So perhaps it was in order to make an offensive virtue out of a defensive necessity that Putin
already in 1997 began to formulate ambitious grand strategies for Russia’s vast resources of
gas and oil which he saw as vital tools for turning Russia into a real economic superpower
within the next 50 years. This offensive grand design can be deduced from what is known
about the contents of Putin’s allegedly own dissertation in economics (Balzer, 2005). Putin
here anticipated his own policy of tough state regulation – essentially state ownership of
strategic producers of gas and oil - alongside market mechanisms e.g. foreign direct
investment. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Putin in December 2005 presented a “National Energy
Strategy” to the Russian Security Council, and claimed that Russia “must become ‘an energy
superpower’ to regain political leadership in the world” (quoted from Eitelhuber, 2009: 15).
This makes it clear that geoeconomics may serve to inspire revisionist grand strategies of
East and North Africa including a view of Syria as the strategic bastion of Russia. In a longterm perspective, Indian military and economic might is predicted to surpass that of Russia.
13
economic hegemony in continuation of the Russian basically realist strategic cultural
paradigm of кто кого.
At the G8 summit hosted by Putin’s native town Sankt Petersburg in 2005 Putin boasted that
Russia was already the world leader on the energy market, with the biggest potential in oil,
gas, and nuclear power taken together. (Oldberg, 2011). Russia’s official energy strategy of
2003 explicitly mentioned these great resources as a political instrument, and they were
reiterated in the 2009 security doctrine (Ibid.; Skak, 2010: 147; Lucas, 2009: 211 ff.).
However, Russia’s state-controlled energy giants have violated sound economic sense by not
investing in the exploration of new reserves and distribution networks at home. As a result,
Russia depends on its resource-rich CIS neighbours in that Russia to a large extent reexports
their gas and oil, and just earns its profits from pricing differences between the internal CIS
market and the EU where world market prices are being paid (Oldberg, ibid.). Concerning
Russia’s energy blackmail, this happens to be an option that Russia pursues most openly and
aggressively towards its CIS neighbourhood, whereas Moscow probably does its best to avoid
shutting down gas supplies to the vastly more lucrative EU markets in relation to which
Ukraine, in turn, is a most critical gatekeeper (Skak, 2010: 147-148). In any event, Swedish
experts on Russia have identified no less than 55 instances of energy blackmail exerted by
Russia against its CIS partners between 1991 and 2006 often in order to influence elections
and punish bad behaviour. In addition, the Kremlin has also frequently targeted its energy
weapon at the Baltic EU states, a possible factor behind the growing apprehension towards
Russia discernible in the energy policy of the EU and in several member countries (Oldberg,
2011: 51).
This outcome combined with the fact that the USA already in 2009 became a leading producer
of so-called unconventional gas and a prospective net exporter of LNG all serve to hollow out
Russia’s hegemonic strategy of becoming the energy hub of the world (ibid.: 53). Whenever
the energy dialogue between Russia and the EU breaks down, Putin often cites his option of
turning to China and other Asian energy-hungry nations as an even more strategic export
destination for Russia. But judging from in-depth examinations into the pricing of the rather
few Sino-Russian energy delivery contracts presented by scholars from SIPRI at the 11th
Aleksanteri conference devoted to the study of “The Dragon and the Bear” in Helsinki, 2011, it
is China, not Russia who has the upper hand when settling prices. China rejects to pay world
market prices and insists on rebates resulting in humble, CIS-level profits to Russia. China
generally seeks to diversify its energy imports and is determined to increase its production of
sustainable energy just like the EU. The conclusion reached by the Swedish analyst Ingmar
Oldberg (loc. cit.) is that, on balance, Russia is more dependent on the West than the latter is
on Russia. Ultimately, there may thus be a ”civilizing“ influence upon Russia from the more
liberal, less realist logic of interdependence as speculated by Ermarth (2009). The theoretical
argument about interdependence was never one of power symmetry, but one of critical
power asymmetries stemming from twin logic of ‘sensitivity’ (being affected by shut-downs
etc.) vs. ‘vulnerability’ (not having alternative options or partners to switch to; Keohane and
Nye, 1971). Given that Russia in this context comes out as the vulnerable party and its
partners except for the CIS nations rather as the sensitive ones, one can safely conclude that
Russia is overplaying its hand in the field of geoeconomics like in so many other spheres.
There is an even greater inherent danger in Putin’s grand strategy of turning Russia’s
resource curse into a blessing, namely that the rent-seeking characterizing these branches of
production undermines the capacity of Russian decision-makers to take on ‘modernization’,
14
i.e. diversification of the economy (Skak, 2010). Until now, the sole step forward in this
direction is Russia’s recent entry into the WTO; meanwhile Russian economic growth is
slowing down once again (Sputtering, 2013). Exactly Russia’s failure to diversify its economy
is cited by the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC, 2012) in the context of ominious gamechangers, because failed diversification and political liberalization would transform Russia
into an increasing threat to security in a multipolar Asia and hereby into a threat to global
stability. Overall, this source portrays Russia as a declining power in the class of Japan. NIC
(2012) also cites anonymous Russian interlocutors as perceiving an ever more acute need for
Russia to align itself with Europe and strengthen its partnership with the United States in
order to stem the tide of global instability. If true, this underscores that actual Russian
strategic culture is deeply dysfunctional in its anti-Western instincts of кто кого.
Soft balancing
Last, but certainly not least it is tempting to summarize all of what Russia does strategically
under the neorealist rubric of soft balancing provided one proceeds from the strictly
neorealist understanding of the concept offered by Robert S. Pape (2005). True, his approach
has been criticized for being too narrowly connected to the travails of the U.S. in the aftermath
of its war against Iraq. But especially when applied upon Russia, the eternal neorealist grand
strategy of balancing premised upon a Hobbesian onthology of кто кого is really the decisive
ingredient to soft balancing. Soft balancing simply means to balance against the unipole – the
United States – by employing any means except for direct military confrontation. The latter
are deemed too dangerous due to the absolute military supremacy of the U.S. quantitatively
and qualitatively. What rising powers can do to stem U. S. dominance in world affairs is to
engage themselves in the following four tactics within the grand strategy of soft balancing:




territorial denial
entangling diplomacy
economic strengthening
signals of resolve to balance
As for the first bullet point, there are indeed no U.S. bases in Russia proper, but this is not the
whole story. One remaining result from Putin’s decision to align himself with the war on
terror of W. Bush back in 2001 was to allow the U.S. to use CIS airfields – Manas - and air
space in Kyrgyzstan to support the waging of war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
On page 11 above I quoted Allen C. Lynch for his insight about the limits to Russian antiAmericanism, namely when Russia sees itself as cornered into the strategic turmoil of South
Asia. Throughout the ISAF operation, Russia was fairly forthcoming for reasons of enlightened
self-interest. So regarding territorial denial it is important to appreciate Russia’s actual
capacity for pragmatism at display here.
Entangling diplomacy is a more evident avenue for Russian soft balancing. It is Russia rather
than China that takes the initiative to actively, but thwart U. S. agendas via its permanent seat
in the United Nations’ Security Council. A textbook example is the triangular entangling
diplomacy among France, Germany and Russia to counter the U.S. decision to wage war in
Iraq in 2003. This was about the time when the world became aware of the BRIC acronym
referring to Brazil, Russia, India, and China - the prospective four economic powerhouses
projected to overtake the U.S. in terms of absolute GDP by 2040 or so (Skak (ed.) 2010). From
the very beginning Russia sought diplomatic ownership of the BRICs climaxing in Putin’s self-
15
confident remarks about the BRICs in his famous Munich speech of 2007 (ibid.). The four,
later five BRICS – the great power concert now includes South Africa - are singled out in
diverse Russian foreign policy doctrines and in the annual ‘state of the Federation’ speeches
held by the Russian President as a key target for Russian diplomacy (Skak, 2010). A climax
was reached on 9th February this year, when Russia published a special foreign policy
doctrine for its BRICS strategy (Concept of […] BRICS, 2013).
This document contains phrases like “[t]he creation of BRICS initiated in 2006 by the Russian
Federation”. The BRICS concept establishes “an objective trend […] towards the formation of a
polycentric system of international relations […] the use of non-institutionalized mechanisms
of global governance and network-based diplomacy, and the growing economic
interdependence of states” (ibid.). Such phrases confirm Russia’s instinct of balancing as well
as some awareness of Russia’s own vulnerability regarding the logic of interdependence
discussed above. For Russia, “the BRICS format is a key long-term foreign policy vector”
(ibid.), its strategic objectives being to uphold “the rule of law international relations” by
which Russia above all understands “respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of other
states and non-interference” (ibid.). Yet, I believe Russia clearly overplayed its hand when
declaring an ambition of gradually transforming this fragile great power concert “into a full
fledged mechanism of strategic and ongoing cooperation on key international political and
economic issues” (ibid.). Putin did try to push this agenda at the BRICS summit in Durban,
South Africa, but only Russian diplomats and Russian media seem to have taken notice
(“Russia to voice its BRICS priorities in S. Africa”, 2013).
Beneath the surface of BRICS economic cooperation including a concerted effort of gaining a
larger say in fora like the IMF, there is serious tension between China and India, and China
seeks to prevent India and Brazil from gaining a permanent seat in the UN Security Council.
There is serious, albeit unofficial concern in Russia about not just the rise of China, but the
entire ‘Asia rising’ scenario. In May 2010, a document containing Lavrov’s foreign policy
priorities on behalf of Russia was leaked; a document flashing second thoughts about China:
“Special attention must be directed towards monitoring the growing role of China in
international affairs, including having in mind the consequences of Beijing’s activities
for our regional and global interests. We must proceed from the fundamental
importance of keeping China on a position of acting jointly with us – taking into
account the situational dynamics – within the G20, BRIC and SCO and also the
Security Council of the U.N. (in which our support is often of greater significance for
the Chinese than their support is for us nowadays).” (quoted from Skak, 2011b).
The document further leaked that Russia’s real priority was not so much the BRICS as
building up so-called modernization partnerships with the United States, Germany and other
EU partners. Despite this tenor of pragmatism and enlightened self-interest, Mankoff (2012:
17 f.) sees concessions to the siloviki position of upholding autarky along with upholding
Russia’s Eurasia pivot in the 2010 document. I shall later return to the topic of Russian second
thoughts and how they might be interpreted from a strategic culture perspective.
In any event, economic strengthening is clearly a leitmotif in current Russian strategic culture
16
as the common interest that initially brought the BRICS together (Skak (ed.) 2010) and in the
case of Russia in line with its Gorchakovism and geoeconomics. As for Russia’s resort to
energy blackmail against its CIS partners this is a dimension of Russian strategic culture that
backfires. The Central Asian CIS countries are looking more eagerly to China, its generous
FDIs and its Shanghai Cooperation Organization than to the CIS organizational framework
irrespective of some sinophobia (on the SCO and Russia, see also Mankoff, 2012: 202-208).
Concerning signals of resolve to balance, Pape (2005) stresses – true to his neorealist
convictions – that soft balancing may turn into confrontational, hard military balancing
against the unipole. This dimension of soft balancing, however, is the one that seriously
threatens to isolate Russia even from its BRIC partners. One case in point is Russia’s proxy
war with Georgia – a reprisal against the United States for having toyed too much with the
idea of inviting Georgia and Ukraine inside NATO (Skak, 2011a). This measure of soft
bordering on hard balancing never received support from the other BRICs. As pointed out
earlier, China was plainly abhorred by Russia’s overt sponsoring of territorial revisionism
regarding South Ossetia and Abkhazia - not even Belarus bothered to recognize them
diplomaticilly. For this reason Lucas (2009: xxiii) considers the 2008 war an aberration from
an otherwise coherent pattern of non-military Cold War.
The bottom line remains that Russia identifies with the neorealist logic of balancing against
the unipole in all of its grand strategies. Not surprisingly, then, the most recent concept for
Russian foreign policy is essentially one of soft balancing – of proceeding from the Hobbesian
logic of кто кого, but in an updated, sophisticated manner reflecting Russia’s awareness of
living in a complex era of globalization, WMDs and new high-tech options of waging wars
including propaganda wars. When the concept was launched at a meeting in Russia’s Security
Council on 15th February 2013, Putin saw the transformation of the global balance of power
and the multiple new dynamics as opening for ”flexible forms of participation in many-sided
structures with the goal of effectively attempting to resolve the errors of the West” (quoted from
Jensen, 2013). The concept perceives an ominous trend of ’reideologization’ of world affairs
which it links directly with the United States in a reference to the international intervention in
Libya where Russia believed the West abused the principle of R2P to actively bring about
regime change. Given that the U.S. was at best ”leading from behind” in this particular crisis
and has exercised unusual restraint in its Syria policy, the Russian obsession with the U.S. so
to say underscores the neorealism in contemporary Russian strategic culture. In our times of
upheaval, Russia, by contrast, views itself as a balancer and civilizer of world affairs (ibid.).
One novelty in the new concept is its instructions on how to make use of ’soft power’, a
political science concept for the immaterial dimensions of power – being seen as a role model
etc. – that is associated with the liberal school of thought personified by Joseph S. Nye. To be
sure, Putin’s own reasoning about soft power are cast in terms of кто кого as when he
criticizes unanimous foreign sponsors for stagedirecting ”pseudo-NGOs” in Russia proper
(Putin, 2012a). In order to stem the tide of Western soft power diffusing from the activity of
such influence agents serving major states he advises to use the Russian Foreign Ministry’s
section dealing with the 27 million strong Russian diaspora, Россотрудничество, as a foreign
policy tool (ibid.). Putin’s overall approach to foreign policy in what he rightly identifies as a
time of changes and challenges is one of ”not wanting Russia to isolate itself”. However, ”we
intend to proceed from our own interests and goals, not some that are enforced upon us by
17
decisions made by somebody else. Russia is going to be approached respectfully only if she is
powerful and forcefully stands on her own feet” [a hint to Peter the Great via Pushkin’s poem]
(ibid.). Here the message is ambiguous in the sense of signals to balance – hard if necessary.
Furthermore, Putins phraseology in Russian reiterates Stalin in its social-Darwinian, fascismlike outlook, a feature that was even more pronounced in his article to the state-controlled
Rossiiskaia Gazeta on his military investment policy (Putin 2012b). His motto sounds here:
”We should not tempt anyone by allowing ourselves to be weak”. Stalin also spoke about the
danger of falling behind and the desperate need for the Soviet Union to catch up militarily by
the time of his forced collectivization, forced industrialization and militarization of the USSR.
Self-reliance in military affairs is cited as an ideal, and Putin ends his contribution by
reminding his mostly Russian military audience about the lesson of Hitler’s attack: ”We cannot
afford repeating the tragedy of 1941, when a lack of readiness of the state and the Army for war
led to the vast loss of human lives” (ibid.). This leaves the impression that contrary to the other
BRICS, Russia’s pursuit of soft balancing takes place in a very grim environment.
From this exposition of a handful of Russian grand strategies I shall now return to the larger
issue of strategic culture by going into the functional and causal logic behind Russia’s conduct.
The larger logic behind contemporary Russian strategic culture
Provided that the above analysis is generally valid most readers would probably tend to draw
conclusions in pessimistic Cold War-terms about Russia. But within the study of strategic
culture another option is offered in the shape of a quite different methodology which will be
briefly addressed below. 
’second generation’, i.e. functional logic (Klein) + evidence
Pessimistic ’causal’, i. e. contextual logic more persuasive: Late Soviet era (BRUDNY etc.)
SORRY, I did not manage to fully finalize my paper; shall present the last sections orally
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