The Putin Succession and Russian Foreign Policy
The Putin Succession and Russian
Foreign Policy
Allen C. Lynch
Director, Center for Russian & East European Studies
University of Virginia
As the long history of military coups—in Latin America, Turkey (four since 1960),
Greece (1967), and even Spain (aborted, 1981)—suggests, political succession in poorly
institutionalized polities often leads to upheaval and even foreign intervention.1 Such
succession crises touch upon the link between the distribution of economic, social,
and political power within a country and a country’s capacity to defend and project its
sovereign power internationally.
These patterns assume special importance in light of the scheduled “successor”
presidential election in Russia in March 2008, when Vladimir V. Putin will likely
hand over executive authority to an anointed protégé.2 Considering the predominantly
charismatic foundation of Putin’s authority and the fact that, to date, executive power
has yet to change hands in Russia through electoral means, Putin’s succession assumes
particular significance for Russia’s foreign relations and domestic trajectory. This article
will attempt to frame the Putin succession and Russian foreign policy by examining,
first, enduring historical patterns of succession and Russian diplomacy; second, the
specific pattern of Putin’s diplomacy; third, elite patterns and preferences in the current Russian political system; and finally, the external and internal contexts for future
Russian influence in the wider world.
Putin’s successor will face a complex balancing act as he walks along political, economic, and diplomatic tightropes. Putin’s successor must continue to satisfy
multiple domestic factions, balancing the economic interests of the export-oriented
energy sector against the internationally non-competitive bulk of Russia’s industrial
and agricultural economy, which sustains a large portion of Russian employment and
is therefore susceptible to nationalist, protectionist, and even chauvinist pressures. The
Allen C. Lynch is the director of the Center for Russian & European Studies at the University of
Virginia. His most recent book is How Russia is Not Ruled: Reflections on Russian Political Development.
Copyright © 2007 by the Brown Journal of World Affairs
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Allen C. Lynch
next president must be able to exploit high global energy prices to bring revenue into
the Russian state and society and not just the country’s vast criminalized patronage
networks (as prevailed in the 1990s). Diplomatically, Putin’s successor must reinforce
Russia’s claim to preeminence in central Eurasia without spoiling Russia’s relations with
Europe, the United States, and Japan. Finally, and perhaps most challenging, Putin’s
successor will have to establish his political authority and legitimacy as Putin’s handpicked successor, while Putin himself will try to retain at least a veto power behind the
scenes in preparation to run again for president in 2012.
Russian Succession and Russian Power in Historical Perspective
54
A brief historical review will show that Russia has historically had weak political institutions in place for succession. Consequently, changes in leadership have frequently
been accompanied by dramatic discontinuities in domestic policies as well as in foreign
relations.
Major gains in Russia’s pre-1600 standing as an East Slavic, then European, and
eventually global power tended to coincide with unusually long reigns of its rulers.3
Correspondingly, major modern advances in Russia’s standing as a world power happened to coincide with exceptionally long tenures in power for such rulers as Peter I
(1683−1725), Catherine II (1762−1796), Aleksandr I (1801−1825), and Joseph Stalin
(1926−1953). This is not to say that long tenures are necessarily linked with foreign
policy advance and domestic order, but length of tenure—where it does not coincide
with an obviously disabled ruler—does tend to remove a major impediment: domestic
dissonance (i.e., the raw contest for power).
To note the obverse, Russian succession crises have led to dramatic departures
and even vulnerabilities in foreign affairs. Prior to the twentieth century, successions
such as those of Peter III (1762) and
Russian succession crises have led Paul I (1796–1801) each took Russia
to dramatic departures and even backwards in its foreign policy, the forvulnerabilities in foreign affairs. mer by withdrawing from Prussia on the
verge of victory in the Seven Year’s War
(1756–1763), the latter by capriciously veering between anti-French and anti-British
alliances in the wars of the French Revolution. Russia’s most profound succession crisis
took place in 1917, as Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and the Bolsheviks seized power that
fall. Foreign policy consequences were immediate, as the Bolsheviks codified Russia’s
defeat in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918), allowing for a massive German
troop transfer to France that nearly saw a total German victory there in spring 1918.
A similar pattern characterized the Soviet years. Stalin’s succession of Lenin
replaced Lenin’s moderate New Economic Policy (1921–1926) with forced-draft in-
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The Putin Succession and Russian Foreign Policy
dustrialization and later (1932) with tactical cooperation with the Nazis. Khrushchev’s
succession brought an end to the Korean War and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from
Austria. When Khrushchev himself was overthrown in a non-violent coup in October
1964, his Brezhnevite successors adopted a corporate model of elite decision making
and departed from the confrontations with the West of Khrushchev’s later years.
The Gorbachev succession in 1985 would see the most radical foreign policy
changes since the Bolsheviks’ withdrawal of Russia from World War I: determined
to transform the domestic foundations of the Soviet political economy, Gorbachev
revolutionized the country’s relations with the United States, reading communist
ideology formally out of the operational conduct of Soviet foreign policy and ending
the cold war.
The unexpected collapse of the USSR in 1991, the virtual disintegration of Russia
as a functioning polity following the financial crash of August 1998, Putin’s own rise
to power in a virtual palace coup in 1999, and now Putin’s impressive personalization
of political power in Russia all affirm that Russia has yet to establish a stable constitutional method for political succession. For this reason alone, the Putin succession
merits close attention.
Patterns of Putin’s Foreign Policy
55
Putin sees Russia as a recovering power whose gravest threat is isolation from the international system—economically, politically, and militarily.4 Russia must thus avoid
direct conflicts with the most powerful states while seeking allies to avoid a counterproductive isolation.
After 9/11, Putin placed his country foursquare behind U.S. policy in the war
on terror, providing basing and overflight rights in the U.S. war in Afghanistan and
accelerating arms deliveries to the Northern Alliance. Washington and Moscow moved
towards a truly substantial bilateral relationship, securing Putin’s hopes for Russia’s
position in the Western world.
But relations between the powers soon soured. Despite Russian support for
U.S. military policy, the United States has withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile
(ABM) Treaty; has offered Russia a merely symbolic relationship with NATO; and has
not appreciably rethought the nature of the Russo–Western economic relationship,
continuing to uphold trade bans from the cold war.5 Putin’s calculated gamble that a
pro-U.S. stance after 9/11 could trigger a deeper Russo–U.S. relationship has thus not
borne fruit. Meanwhile, domestic political support for his pro-U.S. orientation has
virtually disappeared.6
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Allen C. Lynch
Toward the Putin Succession: Elite Patterns and Preferences
56
Despite his failures, Putin’s voluntary departure from office in spring 2008 would cement
his historical reputation as a leader who held the Russian state together and earned it
a measure of respect in the wider world.
In fact, most Russian elites would prefer that Putin not step down after the completion of his constitutionally limited second term. There is, at the most general level, a
vague doubt that the likely alternatives can be better or even half as good. Moreover,
there is broad recognition that Putin has been able to preserve a precarious balance
among various factions, restraining the contest for power in a system that still resembles
a winner-take-all game. What binds all of these factions together is the confidence that
the historic privatization of Soviet Russia’s raw materials and industrial economy, which
most Russians have seen as theft on the grandest scale, will not be reversed under Putin
(so long as political fealty to Putin is maintained).
Some 40 percent of Russia’s GDP is controlled by industrial, trading, and financial
networks owned or supervised by perhaps as few as eight men, all of whom have been
integrated into Putin’s system of rule.7 The deputy prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev,
runs Gazprom, the state-controlled natural gas monopoly; his deputy Igor Sechin is
chief of Russia’s fastest growing oil company, Rosneft. Anatoly Chubais, architect of
the privatization program of the 1990s, is also head of the management board of the
state electricity monopoly RAO-UES; RAO-UES’s CEO Aleksandr Voloshin is Putin’s
former chief of staff. Former minister of finance Aleksei Kudrin was also head of the
gigantic diamond firm Almaz and the export-import bank Vneshtorgbank. Three other
deputy chiefs of staff—Viktor Ivanov, Vladislav Surkov, and Sergei Prikhodko—have
chaired Aeroflot (aviation), Almaz-Antey (missiles), Transneftprodukt (oil pipelines),
TVEL (nuclear fuel trade), Sberbank (Russia’s largest and state-owned savings bank),
and United Aircraft corporation, among others.8
For the time being, these elites have been integrated into a remarkably successful
political machine based on a concentration of power within an executive branch of some
40,000 officials who report directly to the office of the president and who constitute a
parallel government. Putin has transformed the Duma into a de facto extension of the
executive branch, where the two largest parties, United Russia and the “opposition”
party, Fair Russia, are both pro-Putin and largely financed by the executive branch.
The executive branch has also assumed de facto control of the Central Elections Commission, the television, radio, and parts of the print media, and several key industries.
Meanwhile, Putin’s government has maintained massive subsidies for domestic natural
gas consumption (at less than 25 percent of the world market price) and developed
substantial dollar reserves (third-largest in the world). The autonomy of Russia’s federal
regions has been curtailed by the executive’s control over elections and appointments,
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The Putin Succession and Russian Foreign Policy
an aggressive nationalist war in the secessionist province of Chechnya, and the selective punishing and prosecuting of (Jewish) “oligarchs” such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky
and Boris Berezovsky.9 By skillfully weaving together Tsarist and Soviet-era symbols,
Putin has established his authority on a charismatic foundation, best exemplified by
his encouragement of the May 2007 unification of the domestic and foreign branches
of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Certainly, Putin has been the beneficiary of some fortunate circumstances, above
all the rise in the price of oil from $10 per barrel in late 1998 to an average of $60 to
$75 in the last two years. Yet Putin has also been able to lend administrative coherence
to these resources: a prudent fiscal policy has seen large budget surpluses, a concentrated
energy export policy has seen consistent trade surpluses, and the revenues from energy
export receipts (the government takes 90 percent of all such revenues over $27 per
barrel) have fueled its massive hard currency reserves. 10 Additionally, Russia has built
a Stabilization Fund modeled after Norway’s that now totals about $100 billion and
has liquidated its foreign sovereign debt in its entirety and ahead of schedule.
Yet Russia continues to face major obstacles to recovery as a world power. Its
overdependence on energy and raw materials as the basis for economic growth has
led to a persistent appreciation of the ruble, with depressive effects on native industry.
Wages and incomes are growing much faster than overall productivity, yielding a base
inflation rate of 10 to 12 percent, while investment still lags at two-fifths the rate of
1991.11 Income and wealth inequalities are alarming, the murder rate is four to five
times as high as that of the United States, and deaths by external causes are the highest
among 187 countries measured. The increase in the rate of HIV infection shows no sign
of abating. Attempts to establish a qualified civil service have failed, and there is little
evidence that Russia is becoming a society ruled by laws instead of figureheads. Yet by
comparison to the Yelstin years, when Russia nearly ceased functioning as a coherent
state, Putin will bequeath an impressive legacy of political and economic accomplishment to his political heirs.12 What might they do with it?
As of fall 2007, Putin’s heir apparent would seem to be Sergei Ivanov, erstwhile
defense minister, appointed first deputy prime minister in February 2007 with responsibility for the military–industrial economy. As defense minister, Ivanov has been an
articulate exponent of the pragmatic nationalist consensus that has prevailed in Russia
since the discrediting of Russia’s liberal internationalists by economic “shock therapy”
and NATO expansion in the mid-1990s. Ivanov has been preoccupied with “presidential” themes of national security affairs—for instance, opposing NATO expansion
firmly but without provocation.13 Another likely candidate is fellow first deputy prime
minister Dmitri Medvedev, who has mainly domestic responsibilities. It is Putin who
will be engineering the selection of candidates and thus structuring the choices before
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Allen C. Lynch
the Russian electorate in the presidential election slated for 2 March 2008. Both Ivanov
and Medvedev belong to Putin’s circle of trusted “St. Petersburg” advisors, having worked
closely with Putin in the St. Petersburg city administration in the early 1990’s. Each
candidate’s career trajectory since then has depended on Putin’s continuing favor.
Clearly, in order to minimize any lame duck effect on himself, as well as to
constrain the chance of any effective opposition congealing, Putin will wait as long as
possible to anoint his chosen successor. It is even probable that the two main candidates
will emerge from the two largest “political parties,” United Russia and Fair Russia, both
of which are creatures of the Putin machine. In this way Putin can enjoy the reputation
of allowing a free choice while ensuring that his own interests are protected. It is even
more certain that Putin will not endorse a candidate who falls outside the pragmatic
nationalist mainstream, and that Putin will seek a way to maintain his influence on
public affairs after his term in office. As Putin said to the Russian public in October
2006:
Even after I no longer have my presidential powers . . . I will be able to hold on to
what is most important and valuable to any politician: your trust. And, using this,
we will be able to influence life in our country, to guarantee that it develops in a
continuous manner so as to have an impact on what happens in Russia.14
58
The Contexts of Foreign Policy after Putin
Any Putin successor will have to manage three key challenges in crafting a foreign policy:
Russia’s asymmetrical interdependence with foreign nations, constraints on Russian
power, and domestic political opposition to alliance with the West. In order to balance
primacy in central Eurasia with friendly relations with the G-7 world, the next president
will have to maintain the coherence of Putin’s delicate political machine.
Asymmetries of Interdependence
For all of the decline in Russian strength since the Soviet collapse, Russia remains
disproportionately powerful vis-à-vis its ex-Soviet neighbors. Most importantly, there
exists a profound economic asymmetry of interdependence between Russia and its immediate neighbors in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which sustains
Russia’s claim to geopolitical predominance throughout central Eurasia. Russia remains
the primary destination for CIS country exports while CIS countries like Ukraine,
Belarus, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland import
90 to 100 percent of their oil and natural gas from Russia; these imports in turn sustain up to 80 percent of each country’s industrial production. Likewise, 80 percent of
Ukraine’s defense industry depends on Russian components. These economic ties serve
to undermine efforts at diplomatic independence from Russia.
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A comparably profound but inverse asymmetry of interdependence binds Russia
to the European Union. While France, Germany, and Italy receive between 30 and
40 percent of their energy supplies from Russia (a figure that is sure to increase in the
coming years), EU exports to Russia account for only 4 percent of total EU foreign
trade; by contrast, Russian exports to EU
states account for more than half of Russian Russia can no longer play its
exports by dollar value. Some have suggested close, dependent neighbors
that Russia might substitute an exclusive
against its allies in the G-7.
relationship with China for its ties with the
West. But since both China and Russia trade 10 times as much with the G-7 states as
they do with each other, such a deal is far from the minds of the economically rational
elite circles currently in power in both Moscow and Beijing.
These double asymmetries have recently converged in two striking developments
in the fuel sector, where Russia’s economic elites have their highest stakes. In 2005,
Russia and Germany began collaboration to construct a natural gas pipeline under
the Baltic Sea that will bypass Poland and Ukraine as transit zones for Russian natural
gas and thus heighten Eastern European dependence on Russia.15 Former German
chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was appointed to the board at Gazprom to oversee the
project. But the strength of Russia’s energy card is limited: Russia cannot isolate relations
with Eastern Europe from its energy deals with the rest of the EU. In January 2006,
Russia tried to quadruple the price Ukraine paid for Russian gas, and had to settle for
a doubling instead when the EU protested this use of energy as a political weapon.
Similar Russian pressure on Estonia and Poland has led to formal EU statements at the
EU–Russian summit in Russia in mid-May 2007 that their security was a matter of
EU collective security.16 The results simply underscore the fact that Eastern European
security is a matter of European concern, so that Russia can no longer play its close,
dependent neighbors against its allies in the G-7.
Structural Domestic Constraints on Russian Power
Even if Putin’s successor effectively resolves these asymmetries, Russia will still face internal constraints on its power. Russia needs enormous investment in order to renew a
mainly Soviet-era fuel infrastructure, as growth in energy output has been declining in
recent years and over half of Russia’s known oil fields are essentially depleted. Two-thirds
of undeveloped fields are in the most inaccessible regions of Arctic and Siberian Russia
where the costs of exploration and development are exceptionally high. A renewal of
Russia’s energy infrastructure will require $10 to $20 billion per year of direct investment
over the next twenty years. In spite of a genuine recovery since 1999, in dollar terms
the Russian economy is the size of Holland’s and ranks thirteenth in the world in the
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Allen C. Lynch
value of its exports while Belgium, with 10 percent of Russia’s population and half of
Russia’s GDP, ranks tenth.17
Enormous social and demographic problems will impinge directly upon the
country’s capacity to build and project power in the decades ahead: life expectancy
lags far behind that of China (67.1 years to 72.3 , with Russian male life expectancy
hovering at 60 years), while demographic trends presage a decline in population by
tens of millions in the coming decades.18 A ratio of workers to retirees approaching
parity (from 6:1 in 1995 to 2:1 in 2010 to 1:1 by 2025) has crushing implications for
the fiscal capacity of the state with respect to its social obligations. Finally, 90 percent
of draft-eligible males manage to evade the draft while 40 percent of actual draftees
are declared unfit to serve on account of physical or mental disabilities, thereby posing
significant constraints on Russia’s ability to field an army that is either large enough or
advanced enough to sustain its claim to great power status.19
60
Domestic Political Constraints and Foreign Policy with the West
A few domestic political facts also impinge upon Russia’s post-Putin path in foreign affairs. Russia’s elites continue to resist liberal politics or liberal economics. The confluence
in the 1990s of economic and social collapse following U.S.-guided “reforms,” NATO
expansion to Russia’s borders, as well as NATO’s war against Russia’s client-state Serbia
in spring 1999, have worked to discredit and undermine pro-Western options in Russia.
As Nikolai Zlobin recently observed, “Russia does not have an influential . . . political
or economic group . . . interested in upgrading [Russo–U.S.] relations.”20
Elites, especially in the energy industry, do not require special access to the international market: high energy prices and the fungibility of oil in the global marketplace
mean that even high-cost Russian energy producers can turn a handsome profit on
global exchanges. Russia’s energy elites thus have little to gain by Russian accession to
the WTO and remain little affected by the prospect of Western sticks in the form of
trade sanctions, especially as the bulk of the European Union’s trade in Russian natural
gas is tied up in long-term delivery contracts. Likewise, the enormous profits to be
won from energy export receipts at current world prices make both these elites and the
Russian state, whose fiscal balance depends on them, much less receptive to domestic
social pressures than would be the case in a more balanced Russian economy. The logic
of the energy industry thus tends to make Russia relatively insensitive to the logic of
liberal economics abroad and liberal politics at home.
The bulk of Russia’s non-military industrial base is unlikely be competitive in a
liberal international marketplace. High costs of production and patterns of economic
geography that still reflect Soviet central planning, combined with the absence of true
structural reform of the Russian economy since the Soviet collapse, continue to render
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the bulk of Russia’s economy non-viable under global market conditions.21 Russia’s accession to the WTO threatens the bulk of the Russian working population with lifetime
unemployment. For these reasons, a strict free-market economic regime could only be
enforced by draconian repression.
Russia’s liberal parties were seriously damaged by their association with the “shock
therapy” attempted in the 1990s and the subsequent hyperinflation (2,600 percent in
the first post-Soviet year of 1992, 900 percent in 1993), depression (a reduction of
some 50 percent of GDP), and impoverishment of the vast majority of the population—as well as the disappearance, virtually overnight, of the majority’s life savings.22
NATO expansion completed the discrediting of these natural allies of the Western
world; indeed, by the mid-1990s, these parties had to join the anti-NATO camp.23 It
is doubtful whether these parties (Yabloko and the Union of Right-Wing Forces) can
survive the new barrier of 7 percent of the vote now needed to enter the Duma in the
December 2007 parliamentary elections.24
Russia’s national security elites harbor enormous resentment against the Western
world, and especially the United States, for the betrayal of promises given by George
H.W. Bush and German Chancellor Kohl to Gorbachev in 1990 that there would be
no further NATO expansion eastward after the rapid unification of Germany in NATO.
Instead, Russia now finds itself contending with NATO for geopolitical influence inside
the boundaries of the former Soviet Union, with the three Baltic states now in NATO;
Ukraine and Georgia still candidates for eventual inclusion; and the United States
deploying anti-missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. While the military
will not have the possibility of reconstituting anything like the old Soviet machine in
the foreseeable future, the sympathy of the early 1990s for a Russo–Western strategic
relationship has long since evaporated. The Russian military and intelligence communities, which are well represented at the apex of Putin’s political machine, are only more
anti-Western by degrees than the majority of their civilian counterparts.25
Economic ties also place Russia at odds with U.S. interests: the Russian arms
business has seen a small renaissance in recent years, attaining the scale of $5 billion
or more per year, while Russia’s civilian nuclear exports are destined to assume greater
importance over the next two decades. Arms sales tend to orient Russia to China,
whose military modernization has been fueled by Russian arms imports; nuclear exports
help frame Russia’s relations with Iran, which is scrupulously neutral in Russia’s war
in Chechnya. Russia will thus continue to be involved in profitable relationships that
complicate U.S. foreign policy purposes.
All of these antagonisms seem to be in line with the allegedly anti-U.S. statements
made by Putin at a high-level international security conference in Munich in February
2007, as well as on Victory Day (9 May) 2007, where he made Stalinesque allusions to
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62
the Third Reich and those today who display “the same contempt for human life and
the same claims of exceptionality and diktat in the world.”26 These statements express
Russian frustration with the extent of U.S. power in the contemporary world that,
however intense, is hardly unique in a unipolar world dominated by what the French
call the U.S. “hyperpower” and the Germans call the U.S. “Überpower.”27
In practice, Russian foreign policy has been guided under Putin by the clear understanding that none of Russia’s main purposes at home and abroad can be met in the
face of the active hostility of the United States. A Russia that faced a U.S. government
systematically determined, as during the cold war, to contest Russian power wherever
it could, would compel Russia to commit resources it can ill afford to maintain its influence in central Eurasia. For instance, if the Chechen separatists were backed by the
United States as fully as it backed the Afghan resistance in the 1980s, Moscow would
find itself in an increasingly precarious domestic as well as international position. At
the same time, Putin’s disciplined pragmatism—reflected in his surprise offer to base
components of a U.S. ABM system in Azerbaijan at the G-8 summit in June 2007—is
not reflected in the emotional anti-U.S. sentiment predominant among Russia’s national
security elites. Channeling that unrest and overseeing Russia’s economic interest in ways
that do not cause serious harm to Russo–U.S. relations or Russia’s own interests will
be a major challenge for Putin’s successor.
Across all of Russia’s political elites—including the marginal liberal parties—there
is a strong consensus that Russia must work to consolidate its position as the geopolitical fulcrum of central Eurasia, defined at a minimum by the boundaries of the former
Soviet Union.28 This represents a kind of post-Soviet Russian Monroe Doctrine fully
comparable to and indeed self-consciously justified by the United States’ historical
sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere.
Conclusion
The default response in Russian politics is thus now reflexively anti-U.S., a novel
accomplishment in a country whose people during the cold war were hopelessly proU.S.29 A Russia whose political system displayed true democratic accountability to the
public, governmental institutions, and elites would be much more actively anti-U.S.
than Russia has in fact been under both Yeltsin and Putin, given the depth of current
anti-U.S. sentiment. It has only been the tight centralization of executive power in the
office of the president that has allowed Putin to impose a disciplined realism upon a
political system predisposed to lash back at the West, NATO, and the United States
in particular. Whether Putin’s successor can maintain that measure of internal control
will be a major determinant of Russia’s future relations with the outside world and with
the United States in particular. While the conditions for a radical reversal of Russia’s
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The Putin Succession and Russian Foreign Policy
foreign policy course do not appear to be present, the decomposition of Putin’s foreign
policy course cannot be ruled out in the event of an unruly succession. In that case,
the costs of integrating a still fragile post-Soviet Russia into the international system
will be much higher, for Russia as well as for the outside world, than they ever needed
to have been. W
A
Notes
1. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968);
Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (New York: The Free Press, 1988), 87−96.
2. On 26 April 2007, Putin stated explicitly in his annual “State of the Nation” address that he would
not be a candidate for a third presidential term. This is noteworthy since there is no question but that
Putin could easily win a national referendum on the subject or induce the necessary change to the Russian
constitution to revise the current two-term limit. For text of the speech, see “Annual Address to the Federal
Assembly,” Johnson’s Russia List, http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/2007-97-2.cfm.
3. Dmitri Donskoy (1359−1389) through Vasily I and II (1389−1425, 1425−1462), Ivan III
(1462−1505), Vasily III (1505−1533) and Ivan IV (1533/47−1584).
4. See the series of “State of the Nation” addresses made every April since 2000 by Putin, culminating
in his last such on 26 April 2007.
5. For example, the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment prohibiting the extension of normal trading
relations status—to the USSR—is still on the U.S. legislative books.
6. V.A. Kolosov, ed., Mir Glazami Rossiyan: Mify i Vneshnyaya Politika [The World through Russian Eyes:
Myths and Foreign Policy] (Moscow: Institut fonda obshchestvennaya mneniye, 2003), 263–265.
7. Nezavisimaya gazeta (Moscow), 26 July 2005.
8. Johnson’s Russia List 9121, 15 April 2005, item no.1; “Dix Eclairages sur la Societe Russe,” Le Monde
Diplomatique, November 2005, www.lemondediplomatique.fr; Tim Wood, “Contours of the Putin Era,”
New Left Review 44 (March/April 2007): 53–68.
9. Leonid Mlechin, Prezidenty Rossii: Strategiya Vlasti ot B.N. El’tsina do V.V. Putina [Russian Presidents
from Yeltsin to Putin: Strategies of Power] (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2003), 662–687.
10. Russia has more than $300 billion in currency reserves which only trails China and Japan for most
in the world.
11. Vladimir Popov, “Russia Redux?” New Left Review 44 (March–April 2007): 37–52.
12. O.M. Smolin, Politicheskiy Protsess v Sovremennom Rossii [The Political Process in Contemporary
Russia] (Moscow: Prospekt, 2006), 184–206, 220–23.
13. “Russia’s Defense Minister Questions Reality of Strategic Partnership with NATO,” Johnson’s Russia
List 8154, 7 April 2004, item no.1, http://www.cdi.org.
14. As cited in Marissa Payne, “Putin: The Sun that Never Sets,” World Political Review, 27 March 2007,
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?id=658.
15. The fact that Russian natural gas pipelines to Western Europe currently transect Poland and Ukraine
has tended to give the latter leverage vis-à-vis Moscow: for instance, when Russia shut off gas deliveries to
Ukraine in January 2006, Ukraine diverted supplies that would otherwise have gone to Western Europe,
thus bringing in the European Union to counter Russian pressure. A Russian-German pipeline that bypassed Ukraine and Poland would thereby reinforce Russian energy influence over those countries; they
would remain dependent on Russian gas while Russia would no longer need them for transit of gas to
Germany, its largest customer in the EU.
16. Johnson’s Russia List 114, 19 May 2007, item no. 27, http://www.cdi.org.
17. CIA World Factbook; World Trade Organization, “World Trade 2005, Prospects for 2006.”
18. “The World Factbook,” http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/The-World-Factbook. Russia
also lagged behind Iraq, at 68.7 years.
19. Rajan Menon and Alexander J. Motyl, “The Myth of Russian Resurgence,” American Interest 2,
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no. 4 (2007): 1–7.
20. Johnson’s Russia List 117, 19 May 2007, item no. 4, http://www.cdi.org.
21. Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2003) and Allen C. Lynch, “Dilemmas of Russian Economic
Reform: Liberal Economics versus Illiberal Geography,” Europe-Asia Studies, January 2002, 31–49.
22. Smolin, Politicheskiy, 51–61. To give just one more dramatic index, between 1990 and 2002, heads
of cattle dropped by half, to the level of 1946!
23. Ibid., 61–64; Kolosova, Mir Glazami Rossiyan, 263–265; Mlechin, Prezidenty Rossii, 654–659.
24. A May 2007 poll conducted by the independent Levada Center showed that all of the plausible liberal
candidates combined garnered no more than 6 percent support among Russians polled. Statist hopefuls
Medvedev and Ivanov received 34 percent and 31 percent respectively while the two anti-liberal candidates,
national-chauvinist Vladimir Zhirinovsky and communist Gennady Zyuganov, received 13 percent and 12
percent, respectively. Summing up: statist candidates—65 percent; anti-liberals—25 percent; liberals—6
percent. Johnson’s Russia List 114, 19 May 2007, item no. 7, http://www.cdi.org.
25. Kolosova, Mir Glazami Rossiyan, 243, 257–258.
26. As cited in Peter Finn, “Putin, Rice Resolve to Tone Down Harsh Rhetoric,” Washington Post, 16
May 2007.
27. French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine coined the term “hyperpuissance” in the late 1990’s while
Germany’s Josef Joffe, editor in chief of the prestigious weekly Die Zeit, has published a bestselling book
on U.S. foreign policy entitled, in its English translation, Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America
(New York: Norton, 2006).
28. William Zimmerman, The Russian People and Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2002).
29. Kolosova, Mir Glazami Rossiyan, appendix 4: in 2003, 32 percent of Russians polled believed the
United States to be friendly to Russia, versus 83 percent who thought India was friendly, 67 percent for
China, 61 percent for Germany, and even 57 percent for Poland.
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