Abroad, that meant fulfilling the duties of derzhavnost’: Russia would continue to act as one of the Great Powers it had been since the eighteenth century. footnote 13 The contradiction between this vocabulary of the past and the normative discourse of an ‘international community’ in which any mention of hierarchy is banished, the better to enforce the hegemony of its overlord in reality, could hardly escape notice. In due course, as the United States appeared little moved by Putin’s overtures towards it, a doctrine designed to bridge the gap between the two was developed. What Russia stood for was a ‘sovereign democracy’, the noun reiterating adherence to the standard package, the adjective its index of deviation from it. The country would not be merely mimetic, either at home or abroad. The West would have to get used to that.

For us, the state and its institutions and structures have always played an exceptionally important role in the life of the country and the people. For Russians, a strong state is not an anomaly to fight against. Quite the contrary, it is the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and the main driving force of any change. footnote 12

But from the start there was always a caveat. Moscow had abandoned any pretension to offer an alternative to the civilization of capital and its political forms. But it had not relinquished its right to autonomy within it. Russia would continue to uphold traditions of its own, stretching far back in its history. In his ‘Millennium Message’ on the threshold of his presidency, Putin explained the central theme of these:

So much for the internal bases of the regime. The standard package, however, by progress towards which it stood to be measured by the West, includes one further element that scarcely needed to be spelt out, since it was written into its definition as such: ideological commitment to the international community that embodies it, as a certificate of the requisite mimesis. For Washington and Brussels, construction of a modern democracy is inseparable from alignment with the Euro-American ecumene. How far did Russia meet this condition? At the outset of his rule, Putin insisted not only that the country belonged historically to Europe, but that it shared an identity with its most advanced region—‘We are West Europeans’. He even suggested it might join nato. If subsequent declarations were more tempered, the regime and its media never ceased to invoke the common values of Western civilization, defended by Russia alongside the us and eu, in its battle against contemporary terrorism. Diplomatically, Putin was the first to express solidarity with Bush after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon; closed down Soviet bases in Cuba and Vietnam; opened Russian airspace for American supply-lines to Afghanistan; made little case of nato expansion to the Baltics; ran down, rather than building up, his country’s military establishment—so many pointed demonstrations that Russia was a reliable partner of the West, and staunch member of the international community.

Buttressing the machinery of stretched or fictive representation is an updated and expanded machinery of coercion. Since Yeltsin the size of the federal and local bureaucracy has more than doubled, to some 1.7 million. Under Putin the security apparatus has kept in step, expenditure on it increasing over twelve-fold. The fsb has grown to a corps of 350,000, forming a denser grid across society than the kgb of old, and supplying much of the top layer of regional administration. footnote 10 The war zones of the North Caucasus aside, direct repression is handled by omon squads of the mvd, riot police deployed against unauthorized protests or demonstrations. Contract killings, persisting from the time of Yeltsin and the oligarchs, are rarely clarified. Binding administrative, representative and repressive institutions into a common system is the glue of corruption, ubiquitous at all levels of government. Bribes and back-handers are reckoned by one authority to run into twelve figures a year: footnote 11 cash sealing and subsuming force and consent in the stabilization of power.

Enclosing them, however, is another, supervenient order. The constitution itself is the fruit of fraud—the faking of votes in a referendum that Yeltsin’s own control commission exposed, around which Western scholars and reporters have taken care to cast a mantle of silence. No election free of forgery or coercion has ever taken place since the fall of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin’s victory in 1996, greeted with special applause in the White House and Downing Street, was the most notorious confiscation of the popular will: sixteen years later Medvedev, a President elected under the same system, openly admitted that it was the sub-communist Zyuganov who had actually won the 1996 contest. footnote 8 Putin, unlike Yeltsin, would have achieved his presidential victories, if not the scale of them, even without distortion of the results; but the votes for his parliamentary décor, United Russia, have never corresponded to any real support for it. footnote 9 Under the constitution, substantive division of powers scarcely exists. At higher levels, the judiciary enacts the will of the Kremlin. Since Yeltsin shelled the Duma, the legislature has been a largely token body. Even the government is less than a genuine executive, since not only is the Prime Minister appointed by the President (save where Putin appointed himself) and can be dismissed by him, but the presidency enjoys sweeping powers above the government as such. The nub of the political system is a ‘super-presidentialism’ without constitutional equivalent in any major state of the contemporary world.

What of the political ingredients of the standard package? Putin has always insisted that the society over which he rules is a democracy. Few dispute that it is not a police or military dictatorship. Freedom of expression as such, in print or online, is not much less than in the West. Opportunities to exercise it in television or the press are far fewer, but little trammelled on the web, where Russia now boasts the largest internet public in Europe. Freedom of travel is well established. There is more electronic surveillance of citizens in the United States. Opposition parties, however nominal, are regularly elected to parliament. A constitution whose passage was hailed by the West remains untouched. International jurisdiction by the European Court of Human Rights is accepted. In domestic law, most civil jurisprudence proceeds without interference. Lineaments of a Rechtsstaat are not all imaginary.

The oligarchs created under Yeltsin had not understood their ultima ratio, and with Yukos had to be taught it. But there was no question of the need for their species. Vladislav Surkov, a flashier consigliere, told a reporter in 2011 that Putin realized any general dispossession of the oligarchs was impossible because there were not enough capable entrepreneurs to replace them. The pool of businessmen was ‘very thin and very precious . . . they are the bearers of capital, of intellect, of technologies’. So it followed that ‘the oil men are no less important than the oil; the state has to make the most of both’. footnote 7 In this economic syntax, the higher subject is the last.

Within this constellation, where personal fortunes have been made by all, no clear line of demarcation has ever separated economic liberals from statist siloviki: private accumulation of assets is politically constituted on every side. But forming a congeries rather than a clan, personal conflicts and shifting alignments are endemic to it, allowing Putin to shuffle positions and balance interests at will, as arbiter of the interflexion of state and capital at large. The most intelligent of his ‘political technicians’—advisers in the management of opinion—has offered a vivid account of the outlook behind such statecraft. In early 2012 Gleb Pavlovsky explained: ‘Putin is a Soviet figure who understood the coming of capitalism in a Soviet way. We were all taught that capitalism is a kingdom of demagogues, behind whom stands big money, and a military machine which aspires to control the world. It’s a very clear, simple picture and I think that Putin had this in his head, not as an official ideology but as a form of common sense. That is, of course, we were idiots; we tried to build a fair society when we should have been making money. For if we had made more money than the western capitalists then we could have bought them up. Or we could have created a weapon which they didn’t possess. So that’s it. It was a game we lost because we didn’t do several simple things: we didn’t create our own class of capitalists, we didn’t give the kind of predators described to us a chance to appear and devour their predators. These were Putin’s thoughts and I don’t think they’ve changed significantly since.’ footnote 6

The origins of this hallmark of Putin’s system lay in his formative experience in the landscape of post-Soviet society. After making the October Revolution in the capital city of imperial Russia, the Bolsheviks moved the seat of power from Petrograd to Moscow, as more defensible during the Civil War. Thereafter, across the lifespan of the ussr, what became Leningrad was gradually reduced to a political dead-end, the career of local leaders all but invariably cut short by death or disgrace. With the opening of the Russian economy in the nineties, making a renamed St Petersburg once again the city most oriented geographically and culturally to the West, as its founder had intended it to be, its possibilities altered. Arriving back from service with the kgb in Dresden, Putin became in no time assistant to its new mayor Sobchak, a liberal hero of the hour in 1991, who put him in charge of the city’s foreign economic relations. There he was at the centre of criss-crossing networks of political influence and business manoeuvre, bonding neo-entrepreneurs and veteran security personnel with legal and financial fixers of every sort, who in due course would supply the core of his regime. Towards the end of the decade Sobchak himself, under investigation for massive corruption, fled to Paris with the help of Putin, by then working in the Kremlin. Otherwise, most of the leading ornaments of the system that emerged after 2000 came from the web of pitertsy: among others, the neo-liberal hawks Chubais, Kudrin and Gref, the intelligence operatives Sechin, Ivanov and Yakunin, the security chiefs Patrushev and Bortnikov, the legal guns Medvedev and Kozak, and the billionaire personal cronies of the President, Timchenko and the Rotenberg brothers. footnote 5

In the energy sector, however, which in 2011 accounted for 52 per cent of the value of Russian exports and 49 per cent of federal revenues, gas remains a state monopoly and the share of the oil industry in the hands of the state has increased from close to zero to some 45 per cent under Putin. That private capital still controls a majority of the petroleum resources of the country makes Russia an outlier in the contemporary world, along with such bastions of free-market principles as the us, Canada and the uk—virtually everywhere else, from Brazil to Norway, Arabia to Angola, Indonesia to Venezuela, public ownership is the rule. But the distribution of titles matters less than the change in them. Putin, though well aware of the overwhelming popularity with which any general reversal of the booty-privatizations—prikhvatizatsiya—of the nineties would have been greeted, rejected any such notion. Nonetheless, in breaking the power of the single most ambitious and ruthless oligarch of the Yeltsin era with the expropriation of the Yukos empire, he altered the landscape of wealth and privilege in one fell blow. The fate of Khodorkovsky, glamorized in local and overseas media as a titan of New Russian entrepreneurship, sent an unequivocal message to his fellow plunderers. They could keep their billions, but on sufferance. Henceforward, no oligarch should think of challenging the power of the state, and when required, all should be ready to do its bidding. Where it mattered, at the heights of the economy, private property was not unconditional. It was concessionary—or, as some would have it, in a vocabulary deriving not so much from nineteenth-century colonialism as sixteenth-century absolutism—not unlike a modern version of the pomestie, the revocable lands granted his servitors by Ivan iv. footnote 4

Such antithetical judgements were not, as typically in the thirties or during the Cold War, a product of differing ideological outlooks. All shared the same political standpoint, commitment to the ‘standard package’ of Western values as defined by Sakwa, whose mimesis is the gauge of Russian progress. What in their fashion the contrasts between them reflect are rather objective ambiguities of the system they depict. These run through the whole gamut of its economic, political and ideological forms. For the better part of the period since Yeltsin, of greatest concern to Western commentary at large have been the litmus-tests of any self-respecting capitalism—freedom of markets and security of property rights. How have these essential attributes of a liberal economy fared under Putin? By many a conventional indicator, this has been a business-friendly regime. Flat corporation and income taxes of 13 per cent would be the envy of Western ceos. After entry into the wto, the tariff ceiling on manufactured goods was under 8 per cent. Public debt, even after the global financial crisis of 2008, hovered around 10 per cent of gdp, with reserves of $500 billion—a position of which the us or eu states could only dream. The current account has been in virtually continuous surplus since the turn of the century. Since Putin came to power the private sector has increased from 45 to 60 per cent of the economy; as he has repeatedly assured investors: ‘We are not building state capitalism.’

For his part, Richard Sakwa—the most prolific scholar writing on Russia in the new century: four major works, and a plethora of articles—argued that while Putin had taken advantage of the powers afforded him by the constitution he inherited, he has always acted within its framework, whose liberal norms have never been repudiated. What had emerged under his rule was neither a modern autocracy—there was no state of emergency, no mass imprisonment, no literary or visual censorship—nor a softer version of the Soviet regime, but a ‘dual state’, composed of a legal-constitutional order and a discretionary-administrative system, held in tension with each other by Putin’s centrism. ‘The essence of the Putin system’, Sakwa wrote in The Crisis of Russian Democracy (2011), ‘was to keep the two pillars in parity’. The rough balance between them allowed for a hopeful evolution towards full arrival at what he called ‘the “standard package” of constitutionalism, liberal democracy and free markets’ in the West, as ‘the powerful latent potential in the formal institutions of post-communist Russian democracy’ was activated: ‘At that point, the mimetic institutions of the standard package will gradually gain an autonomous life of their own, and the constitutional state will overcome the arbitrariness of the administrative regime.’ footnote 3

The opposite camp had greater weight in the academy, where works by the two leading authorities on the politics of post-communist Russia delivered—without failing to note its darker sides—substantially favourable verdicts on Putin’s record in office. Daniel Treisman’s study of the country in the first two decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, The Return (2011), expanded on his earlier claim that Russia had become a normal middle-income country, with all the typical shortcomings of these—crony capitalism, corruption, income inequality, media bias, electoral manipulation—but one that was incomparably freer than the petro-states of the Gulf with which it was often compared; less violent than such a respectable member of the oecd as Mexico; less statist in its control of energy than Brazil. Most Russians felt their freedom had increased since 1997, and their happiness too. ‘Does it really serve the West’s long-run interests’, he asked, ‘to assume some unproven imperial agenda, to exaggerate the authoritarian features of the current regime, to demonize those in the Kremlin and romanticize its liberal opponents?’ footnote 2

This view prevailed principally among reporters, though it was not confined to them: a representative sample could be found in Economist editor Edward Lucas’s The New Cold War (2009), Guardian journalist Luke Harding’s Mafia State (2012), Standpoint contributor Ben Judah’s Fragile Empire (2013), but expressed no less pungently by a jurist like Stephen Holmes. For Lucas, Putin, having seized power with a ‘cynical putsch’, and maintained it with the ‘methods of terrorists and gangsters’, had ‘cast a dark shadow over the eastern half of the continent’. For Harding, under Putin’s tutelage, ‘Russia has become bullying, violent, cruel and—above all—inhuman’. For Judah, Russia was ‘an anguished, broken society’ that is one of ‘history’s great failures’, in the grip of an apocalyptic system in which, since ‘Putin cannot leave power without fear of arrest’, the West ‘should ask itself whether it will offer him exile to avert blood’. For Holmes, ‘behind the mask of an authoritarian restoration’ there was no more than the ‘lawless feeding frenzy’ of ‘an internally warring, socially detached and rapacious oligarchy’, whose ‘various groups fight to grab their portion of massive cash flows’. footnote 1

It will soon be a quarter of a century since Russia left communism behind. Its present ruler has been in power for fifteen years, and by the end of his current term in office will have all but equalled the tenure of Brezhnev. From early on, Western opinion of his regime divided sharply. That under Putin—after a period of widespread misery and dislocation, culminating in near state bankruptcy—the country had returned to economic growth and political stability, was evident by the end of his first term; so too the popularity he enjoyed because of these. But beyond such bare data, there was no consensus. For one camp, increasingly vocal as time went on, the pivots of Putin’s system of power were corruption and repression: a neo-authoritarian state fundamentally inimical to the West, with a wrapping of legal proprieties around a ramshackle pyramid of kleptocracy and thuggery.

1. SHOCKS

So matters stood as Putin’s second presidency came to an end in the spring of 2008, after an unbroken run of rapid economic growth, rising living standards, political stability and nation-wide popularity. As an apotheosis, it was short-lived. Since then four successive crises have shaken the regime, affecting one after another of its bases. The first struck within a few months, when the shock-waves of the Western financial crisis reached Russia. With its consistently high export surplus, the state had paid down the foreign debt accumulated under Yeltsin and built up ample reserves. But private firms and public banks had borrowed recklessly abroad, against security of state guarantees, in a credit bubble that nearly tripled their overseas liabilities in 2006–07.footnote14 When short-term loans were called in by Western creditors caught by the Wall Street crash, and oil prices plummeted from $147 to $34 a barrel, the Russian stock market lost a third of its value virtually overnight. Massive injection of reserve funds into the banking system prevented a general collapse, but the ensuing recession was the deepest of any major economy in the world—gdp dropping by 7.9 per cent in 2008. By 2010 the economy had pulled out of the crisis, but the time of budgets in the black was over. To preserve its popular support, the regime had to sustain consumption with increased public expenditure of the kind that its neo-liberal hawks had always resisted: oil surpluses traditionally parked by the Finance Ministry in sovereign funds and deposits abroad now had to be spent on increasing pensions and other social benefits. Deficits would henceforward be the norm. But the boom was gone, growth slowing towards stalling speed in its aftermath. Concessionary capitalism had failed to renew the country’s physical stock or expand its technological frontier. The windfall profits of the energy sector had been put to little productive use, its plutocrats continuing to acquire real estate and financial assets abroad rather than modernize the industry at home. By 2007, investment had fallen 40 per cent below the last year of the Soviet Union, and at a current average of 20 per cent of gdp remains less than half that of China and two-thirds that of India—both countries possessing more globally competitive firms than Russia.footnote15 In the oil industry that remains decisive for the future of the country, yields have been steadily falling, as readily exploitable fields start to run out—a four-fold increase of investment between 2006–10 generating only an extra 5 per cent of output. Across the economy, where manufactures account for less than a fifth of production, performance was little better: labour productivity is stuck at just over two-fifths of the levels of Western Europe or the us.footnote16 The revenue horizon of the regime was narrowing. Reduced economic circumstances were followed by political troubles. Careful to preserve the constitutional legitimism that acted in part as a shield of his standing abroad, Putin passed the presidency to his aide Medvedev, picked as the figure in his entourage best calculated to reassure the West and liberal opinion of the progressive trajectory of the regime. But rather than withdrawing from the stage, even for an interim, he moved to the White House as Prime Minister. The effect was to suggest a personalized embodiment of the dual state as theorized by Sakwa. Mocked by its critics as a ‘tandemocracy’, the arrangement backfired. Medvedev, wishing to create a constituency of his own for a second term in the Kremlin, spoke out against fraud, corruption, lawlessness—‘legal nihilism’—and technological stagnation, wooed the independent media, and declared there could be no trade-off between welfare and freedom. But to these pronouncements corresponded no significant changes in the political system: rather, in one pointed respect intensification of its cast, with an extension of future presidencies from four to six years. The result was to raise hopes of reform in liberal circles, only to stoke their frustration when these were disappointed. Meanwhile, Putin for his part became increasingly edgy at the pretensions of his place-holder, frictions coming to the surface over Russian support for nato bombardment of Libya, justified as a salutary blow against barbarism by Medvedev, but a misuse of a Security Council resolution for Putin. By the autumn of 2011, leading political technicians—both Pavlovsky and Surkov—had defected to the camp of those more or less openly calling for a second term for Medvedev, and expectations were high in Moscow that with it, emancipated from his mentor, he would introduce an overdue liberalization of the regime. Dispelling the illusion, Putin announced in September, a crestfallen Medvedev at his side, that by ‘long-standing agreement’—manifestly untrue—the two would now swap jobs, and he would return to the presidency. This castling of positions, making too tactlessly clear who was grandmaster, was a miscalculation, provoking indignation rather than indifference or resignation in le tout Moscou. Worse followed, when in December more blatant fraud than ever was employed to cover a sharp drop in support for United Russia. This time reaction in the capital was explosive, up to 100,000 demonstrating against the regime—more than democrats could ever muster in the days of perestroika and its end. For the first time, Putin faced widespread opposition in the centre of the country, with weaker ripple effects in quite a number of outlying towns. But in society at large, some way off a critical mass. Drawn from the professional middle class of a metropolis set apart from the rest of Russia’s cities by an exceptional concentration of rents and services, most of the protesters in Moscow came from a privileged minority of the population, in which the old-style intelligentsia is being overtaken by a younger stratum of ‘creatives’, in the admiring Western term, from the worlds of advertising, fashion, public relations, programming, consultancy and the like. Though predominantly liberal in outlook, the range of demonstrators extended to nationalist groups on one side and leftist currents on the other—an ideological heterogeneity reflected in the unstable public symbol of the opposition, the xenophobe blogger Alexei Navalny, hammer not only of millionaire crooks but penniless migrants. Beyond calls for clean elections and honest officials, the gamut of dissent lacked any unifying programme capable of broadening its appeal to the majority of the population that does not enjoy its advantages, for whom material hardship—inequality, insecurity, poverty, inefficiency—matters more than juridical rectitude. As things stand, rejection of the formal structure of the regime without criticism of its social substance is unlikely to produce a popular awakening.footnote17 Navalny’s recipe for liberation—ten brave businessmen and the government will fall—speaks for itself. To counter the challenge in the centre of Moscow, Putin bussed in public employees, workers and young toughs from the suburbs for noisy demonstrations of support, and mustered the full weight of the administration and state media for his re-election as President in March. Victory came without difficulty—the best the liberal opposition could put up against him was the billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, an oligarch famously arrested by the French police for pimping at an Alpine ski-resort—if with a reduced margin, on figures as usual inflated for effect, and an altered appeal. With the disintegration of the consensus which his first two presidencies had enjoyed, retention of power now required polarization—rallying the less well-off and well-educated against a pampered beau monde and its offshoots. In this strategy, the same constraints held as for the opposition. Public expenditure could help numb the plight of the lower depths, but the socio-economic substance of the regime was off-limits. Ideologically, support could not be mobilized on a class-political, only on a culture-war basis, pitting patriotic morals against deracinate license, the icons of an upright land and its faith against the viruses of a foreign-infected decadence. At national level, where it is explicitly pitched, the rhetoric of a clash of values could be of some political effect. At provincial level, necessarily much less so. There the gap between Putin’s personal standing as President and the credibility of his local stewards, already plain in the elections to the Duma, has only widened. In 2013, after a good deal of indecision by the regime, tacking between repression and concessions, Navalny was allowed to run for mayor of Moscow, and with 27 per cent of the vote—less than a tenth of the electorate, on a dismal turn-out of 33 per cent—declared moral victory, amid expectations of foregone victory for the Kremlin’s incumbent. Outside the capital, regional identities have always been relatively weak on Russia’s vast, undifferentiated plains, while in post-communist conditions social fragmentation has become exceptionally strong, splitting communities by the accident of resource endowments and their rents, or lack of them. If both features work to the advantage of central power, local issues also give national bluster little leverage. After earlier establishment upsets in Kaliningrad and Yaroslavl, by 2014 mavericks had won mayoralties in Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg, the third and fourth largest cities in the country. The cohesion of the regime was visibly fraying. Yet the loosening that permitted such electoral upsets could also be represented as the sign of a course correction. Surveying the scene, Sakwa could end on a hopeful note. Since ‘the essence of Putinism is the constant absorption by the centre of policy, personnel and power’, he opined, so now ‘Putin sought to incorporate elements of the insurgency into a rebalanced power system’ with a ‘potential for change and development’. Russia needed the rule of law, fair elections and firm property rights, but it is ‘far from clear that a Russia without Putin could resolve these tasks better than one with a chastened Putin constrained by the revived institutions of the constitutional state and the pressure of a mature and mobilized political nation’.footnote18 It was too early to write off the logic of mimesis.

Borderlands But a more critical test lay just ahead. After economic and political, arrived diplomatic crisis. Across his first two presidencies, the tone of Putin’s foreign policy changed, but its direction scarcely altered. Partnership with the West remained the over-riding objective. That meant recognition and respect for Russia as the largest state in Europe, fellow bulwark against Islamic terrorism, ally of isaf in Afghanistan, member and host of the G8, participant in the Quartet on the Middle East, on cordial terms with Israel, and—last but not least—a thriving economy integrated into global capital markets. Points of friction with the us and eu there were: scrapping of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, forward basing of radar systems in Central Europe, retention of the Jackson–Vanik amendment. But a glance at Security Council resolutions of the period is enough to see that Russia fell in with the wishes of the West virtually across the board, with the solitary exception of the Annan Plan to dismantle the Republic of Cyprus for a deal with Turkey, which it vetoed on an appeal for help from the government in Nicosia.footnote19 All told, Russia was more than a reliable and collegial force within the international community. It was the bearer of ‘a civilizing mission on the Eurasian continent’.footnote20 Under Medvedev, Russian foreign policy bent even further to the West. In compliance with Washington, Moscow cancelled delivery of S-300 missile systems to Tehran that would have complicated Israeli or us air-strikes against the country; voted time and again in the un for sanctions against Iran required by the us; gave a green light to Western bombardment of Libya; and even supplied a transport hub on Russian soil at Ulyanovsk for nato operations in Afghanistan. There was one cloud, however, that from early on drifted across the pursuit of good relations with the West. Russia had special interests in the belt of former Soviet states to the south of it, which in the eyes of Moscow its Euro-American partners should recognize. These were neighbours that belonged, in the local formula, to the country’s ‘Near Abroad’, territories which had once been part of the Tsarist empire. Politically speaking, the Baltic states had been absorbed by nato and the eu, and ceased to come under this heading. For practical purposes, if for different reasons, the Central Asian republics too were of lesser concern, under regimes sufficiently similar to the Russian for comfortable relations, even if dotted with American bases for the common needs of the War on Terror. The sensitive zone lay between these two detachments from the ussr, in the region stretching from the western shores of the Caspian to the lower Danube, comprising the three republics of the Trans-Caucasus, Ukraine and Moldova. There, trouble began in Georgia, whose frontier with Russia covers about three-quarters of its borderlands in the Caucasus. In 1992 the Shevardnadze regime had attacked Abkhazia, originally a constituent republic of the ussr at a time when its core population was Sunni Circassian, subsequently annexed to Georgia by Stalin and Beria in 1935, which had finally broken away from it when the Soviet Union dissolved. Rallying volunteer Muslim fighters from across the North Caucasus—including Shamil Basayev, the later Chechen insurgent—Abkhaz resistance routed the Georgian invasion force, Shevardnadze narrowly escaping with his life.footnote21 This first outbreak of fighting was followed by Yeltsin’s attack on Chechnya, routed by 1996. Three years later a second Russian onslaught under Putin crushed Chechen resistance, installing the Kadyrov regime in Grozny. A decade further on, far from being pacified, virtually the whole of the North Caucasus below Stavropol krai is effectively a war zone: rebellion—now under the banner of a radicalized Islam—against Russian power and its local surrogates extending from Daghestan to Karachay-Cherkessia. Amid mass unemployment, poverty and inequality, emptied by flight of its Russian population, with dwindling use even of the Russian language, Chechnya under its brutal warlord has achieved a kind of de facto independence without secession, while elsewhere Moscow’s troops and money prop up local rulers with whom it otherwise scarcely interferes.footnote22 In Russia itself, so disabused with the region is public opinion that polls show half the population is willing to let it go. But whatever the savagery of Russian actions, the West has never uttered a word of reproof for them, from the time of Clinton and Blair to that of Obama and Merkel. The sanctity of borders affirmed by Yeltsin protects them. Beyond these, matters were otherwise. In 2003 Shevardnadze, once a toast of the West for his part in bringing down the Soviet Union, by then a decrepit fossil of corruption, was overthrown after rigging yet another election in Georgia. The succeeding regime, led by Saakashvili, a former member of his entourage, radicalized the pro-Western posture of Tbilisi still further. Himself a New York-educated lawyer, his chief adviser an American on the payroll of usaid, his lobbyist an aide to McCain, Saakashvili forged strong ties with Bush, welcoming military trainers and equipment from Washington, and dispatching Georgian troops to help with the occupation of Iraq. At home, he proceeded to suppress opposition and rig elections as his predecessor had done. Abroad, his leading objective, as it had been of Shevardnadze, was the extension of nato to Georgia. In 2008, rendered over-confident by his backing in the West, he launched an attack on South Ossetia, another allogenous territory allocated to Georgia in the wake of the First World War, which had declared its independence when the ussr came to an end. At this, Russia riposted with a counter-attack through the tunnel connecting South with North Ossetia, one of its Caucasian possessions on the other side of the mountains, shattering the Georgian army in short order, with an open road to Tbilisi. After securing South Ossetia, however, Moscow withdrew its troops. Western capitals and media at first vehemently denounced Russian aggression, then without retraction, as the origin of the conflict became plain, cooled down. Four years later Saakashvili was ousted at the polls, exiting back to the us with criminal charges following him. On the Russian side, priming the conflict were two preoccupations: resolve that nato should not encircle Russia from the south by making Georgia a trampoline of the West, as successive regimes in Tbilisi had wished, and concern to seal off its security system in North Caucasus, in the face of continuing armed insurgency, from trouble further south. In the West, on the other hand, counsels were divided on the wisdom of expanding nato to Georgia, but united in condemnation of Russian pressure on it, and insistence that its borders, no matter how they were arrived at or corresponded to realities on the ground, were and must remain inviolate. For both sides, however, if asymmetrically—much more so for the West than for Russia—the area in contention was secondary, the stakes in it not all that high. When the same collision of outlooks moved to Ukraine, the upshot was bound to be much more explosive.

Ukraine’s unravelling There, no stark cultural or historical differences of the kind that separated Georgia—with its Ibero-Caucasian language, mkhedruli script and mediaeval kingdoms—from Russia, divided two Slav populations across the frontiers of their respective republics in Soviet times. With ten times the population of Georgia, and a territory nearly as much larger, Ukraine is incomparably more important as an adjacent state. Not only are its economic and cultural ties with Russia far closer, but in political memory this was a central battlefield of what Russians continue to call the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45, the front where the Red Army launched its first major counter-offensives against the Wehrmacht. When Yeltsin took power in Russia, bringing down the ussr, the local communist leadership in Ukraine, as elsewhere, followed suit, abandoning the party to seize the opportunity to become masters of an independent state. Ukrainian nationalism had always been strong in the Galician west of the country, annexed by Stalin from Poland only in 1945. But in a referendum of late 1991 a pan-regional majority of over 90 per cent voted for independence. In the event the landslide, influenced by the belief that with a superior climate and soil Ukraine would be more prosperous than Russia if it split away from it, proved out of scale with the degree of national identity behind it. Independence brought the opposite, a collapse of the economy more dire than that of Russia under Yeltsin.footnote23 Per capita income dropped from $1,570 in 1990 to $635 in 2000. In these conditions, buyer remorse in the worst-affected industrial regions soon set in. By 1994, 47 per cent of the population in the South-East of the country said they would now vote against independence, only 24 per cent for it.footnote24 Over time, such feelings subsided, as adaptation to the status quo set in, even as painful economic realities remained. At independence, Russian living standards were double that of Ukrainian. Today they are around three times higher. Even Belarus is twice as well-off. Compounding such strains, it became ever clearer, were the deep cultural divisions of the country, in which Ukrainian was the official language while a majority of the population still spoke Russian, a Polonized west looked back to the far-right Ukrainian nationalism of Dontsov and Bandera, the rust-belt east harboured nostalgia for a Soviet past, and the sympathies of the plains between them divided down the Dnieper. From the start the political system was more open than in Russia, not only because of these divisions, but also because no super-presidentialism took hold, parliament retaining real legislative and executive-controlling powers. Looting of public assets, massive corruption and contract killings matched anything in Russia. But since the central state was so much weaker, with no deep roots or historical traditions from Tsarist or Soviet times, it fell prey to direct appropriation by rival oligarchic clans, where Berezovsky or Khodorkovsky could never themselves take over the Kremlin. To competing billionaires, contrasting regions and conflicting cultures were added geopolitical tensions, the lure of the eu stronger west of the Dnieper, of Russia east of it: Brussels and Washington manoeuvring to pull the country in one direction, Moscow in the other. Along the riverine division of the country, electorates were more or less evenly balanced, power in Kiev swinging this way and that in the first decade after independence.

Defeat and retrenchment In 2004, as the corrupt and brutal rule of Leonid Kuchma—purulent even by local standards—drew to an end, competition for the presidency lay between his current Prime Minister from the east, Yanukovych, in his youth convicted of criminal assault, whom he had picked as his successor, and one of his former Prime Ministers, central banker Yushchenko, operating in alliance with Yulia Timoshenko, the most flamboyant of the country’s oligarchs, on a platform calling among other demands for Ukrainian entry into nato. Alarmed at the prospect of Yushchenko winning, Putin dispatched his political technicans to help his opponent, and descended on Kiev for a barrage of talks and interviews. Yanukovych was declared victor in the second round of voting only after blatant fraud by the Kuchma regime, triggering a civic uprising in Kiev—the ‘Orange Revolution’—that forced a re-vote in which Yushchenko won by a wide margin. For Putin, this was the most severe setback of the decade: an episode not only blotting his copybook to no good end with the West, which had poured in support for the demonstrators, but setting a dangerous example of successful urban protest for home consumption. But the blow passed. A brief suspension of gas supplies, to bring home Ukrainian dependence on Russian energy, was resolved with an opaque inter-oligarchic pact, and the Orange leaders soon fell out with each other, their popularity plummeting amid continuing scandals. In another swing of the regional pendulum, five years later Yanukovych took the presidency without much need for fraud. Like every Ukrainian politician since Kuchma, once in office Yanukovych tacked between Brussels and Moscow, seeking the best deal from each without ruffling the other. In 2009, when gdp dropped no less than 15 per cent under the impact of the global financial crisis, a life-line for the economy became urgent. In 2012 the eu drew up an Association Agreement for a free-trade area with Ukraine, the imf a $15 billion loan with austerity conditions. To block signature of these Putin made a better short-term offer in November 2013, which at the last minute Yanukovych accepted. Indignant, if still quite small, protests at rejection of the hand proffered by Europe broke out in Kiev. Deaths from sniper fire by riot police transformed them into a siege of the regime in the centre of the city, while insurgents dismantled it in the west of the country. Panicking, Yanukovych fled into oblivion. On hand to supervise the construction of a replacement regime of his foes in parliament and in the streets, was the United States. In Washington, the country had never been far out of sight: under Clinton, Ukraine was the third largest recipient of American aid in the world, after Israel and Egypt; under Bush, it furnished the fourth largest contingent of troops for the American occupation of Iraq.footnote25 For Putin, the upshot was a stinging double defeat. Not only was—loud and clear—the motivation of the upheaval in Kiev rejection of a Russian design, but still worse, Ukraine was now for the first time under the direct outreach of American diplomacy and intelligence—what one of its recent Ambassadors to the un famously called ‘adult supervision’ by the us, flanked by the eu: just what Russia had always sought to avert. To recoup what he could from the humiliation, Putin retaliated by annexing the Crimea. The peninsula was two-thirds Russian-speaking, and had been transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954, naturally without any popular consultation, but also little material alteration within the common jurisdiction of the Soviet Union. Under Gorbachev, a referendum voted for the creation of an autonomous republic of Crimea, conceded by Kiev a year later, whose first President was then elected on a platform of union with Russia and called for a second referendum on it, whereupon Kuchma put the peninsula under direct presidential rule until safe locums were in place. In the nineties, economic decline was steeper in the Crimea than elsewhere in Ukraine, with little investment. But by the end of the century there was no longer any active mobilization for reunion with Russia, of which there seemed little prospect, if also no sentimental attachment to Ukraine, other than among the Ukrainian minority. Acceptance of rule by Kiev did not mean embrace of it. Too much prevented that. Historically, the Crimea had not only been Russian territory since the mid-eighteenth century, but formed a lieu de mémoire of particular intensity, scene not only of many an episode in its high literature, from Pushkin to Tolstoy, Chekhov to Nabokov, but of the two epic sieges of Sevastopol in the Crimean and Second World Wars, which together claimed 1.2 million lives: more than all us losses in both World Wars combined.footnote26 Its allocation to Ukraine, arbitrary but little more than symbolic in 1954 under Khrushchev, became a material separation from its past in 1992—essentially because Yeltsin was determined to dismantle the ussr at top speed to gain power for himself in the rsfsr, and wanted no complications with Kravchuk, the former party boss at the head of Ukraine, as an ally in this project. Politically, the assignment of the peninsula to Kiev had no more legitimacy than that. If agitation in the Crimea for reunification with Russia petered out after Yeltsin signed it away, this was not only because Moscow discouraged any such movement as an embarrassment to the ruler who had so cavalierly disposed of it, but in particular because the movement for reunion peaked just as Yeltsin was preparing his assault on Chechnya, in the name of the territorial integrity of Russia—not a moment for inconvenient questioning of the same prerogatives by Ukraine. As Solzhenitsyn bitterly complained at the time: ‘Without the bloody scheme of the war in Chechnya, Moscow could (perhaps . . .?) have found the courage and weight to support the lawful demands of the Crimeans, in the years of acute crisis in the peninsula (when 80 per cent of its population voted for independence). Instead because of Chechnya, the hopes of Crimea were struck dumb and betrayed.’footnote27 Twenty years later, as the crisis of late 2013 approached, no great popular pressure was building up for reunification: rather, as elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, the principal mood of the population in the peninsula appeared a depoliticized passivity, if tinged with resentment at its neglect by the warring oligarchs in Kiev, none of whose clans had either roots or major interests in the Crimea. Once Yanukovych—who three years earlier had taken 78 per cent of the vote in Crimea—was toppled, however, turbulence quickly followed. In March, under semi-siege from irredentist bands, the Crimean Parliament rushed through a resolution on reunion, and within days Russian troops, many already stationed locally, had taken control. Ukrainian garrisons put up no resistance. A referendum duly delivered a trumped-up 95 per cent vote for reunification, on an 83 per cent turn-out, transforming the undoubted support of the Russian two-thirds of the population into an imaginary landslide. Two months later, Putin descended from Moscow to celebrate the return of the peninsula to its motherland. In Western capitals, the outcry was unanimous: such an annexation was an unprecedented violation of international law, tearing up the map of Europe as if the world was still living in the nineteenth century, or the time of modern dictators. It would never be condoned. In Russia, enthusiasm was equally unanimous: what patriot could not applaud the restitution of such a symbol of the nation to its rightful home? Putin’s popularity, which had dropped to a nadir—still a substantial 61 per cent—by December 2013, rebounded to 83 per cent in the spring. Strategically, the Crimean operation was a clean severance without a fight, to local acclaim. But ideologically it could not be contained. In the Russian-speaking eastern belt of Ukraine, incorporated only since Soviet times, its effect was to fan secessionist agitation neither plainly controlled nor publicly disavowed by Moscow, but inflamed by the lurid diatribes of Russian television against the new authorities in Kiev, caricatured as a fascist junta. In April most of the region from Donetsk to Lugansk was taken over by armed, typically camouflaged militia, local police standing by. In May scratch referendums—repudiated by Moscow—were staged for unification with Russia, while in the rest of Ukraine campaigning for the presidency vacated by Yanukovych was under way, resulting in the easy victory of another oligarch, the billionaire confectionery magnate Poroshenko, a former ornament of both the Yushchenko and Yanukovych regimes.footnote28 Once Poroshenko was installed in Kiev, a military offensive was launched against the Donbas rebels, labelled terrorists for purposes of Western support. Under the guidance of us military and intelligence emissaries, the Ukrainian army and paramilitaries, backed by heavy artillery, advanced against ragtag irregulars, buffed up by weapons and warriors dispatched across the border from Russia, until stand-off ensued. But before this low-level civil war ground to a halt, a Russian-supplied missile in the hands of the irregulars had shot down a civilian airliner flying over the conflict zone. Denouncing this ‘unspeakable outrage’, Obama called the West to joint action against Russia. Economic sanctions targeting its financial and defence sectors were intensified. That the United States had itself shot down a civilian airliner, with a virtually identical toll of deaths, without ever so much as apologizing for a virtually identical blunder, was naturally in a different sense unspeakable—the airline was Iranian, the captain of the Vincennes acted in good faith, so why should anyone in the ‘international community’ remember, let alone mention it? So too was the annexation of the Crimea unheard of: why should anyone have heard of the seizures of East Jerusalem, North Cyprus, Western Sahara, or East Timor, conducted without reproof by friendly governments fêted in Washington?footnote29 What matter if in all these cases, annexation crushed the self-determination of the inhabitants in blood, rather than reflecting it without loss of life? Such considerations are beside the point, as if the power that administers international law could be subject to it.