The Marshall Center Papers, No. 6

Rethinking the National

Interest: Putin’s Turn in

Russian Foreign Policy

By Sergei Medvedev

EUROPEAN CENTER FOR SECURITY STUDIES

GEORGE C. MARSHALL
The George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies

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ISBN 1-930831-12-9
Rethinking the National

Interest: Putin’s Turn in

Russian Foreign Policy

By Sergei Medvedev

Sergei Medvedev is a professor in the College of International and Security

Studies, George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies,

Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.
Table of Contents

Foreword v

Executive Summary ix

Introduction. Moscow, Red Square, 1555 1

Part I. Modernity at Large 9

The national-security state 9

The fruits of Enlightenment 15

Territorial overstretch 21

The millennium bug 25

Part II. The Changing Landmarks 

of Foreign Policy 31

Imperatives of globalization 31

a. Resource imperative 31

b. Domestic imperative 34

c. Economic imperative 36

d. Institutional imperative 38

The 1990s: A catastrophe that wasn't 40

Putin's new course 45

Which West to join? 50

Conclusion. Moscow, Red Square, 2003 55

Endnotes 59

Rethinking The National Interest

iii
Rethinking The National Interest

v

Foreword

September 11, 2001 dramatically transformed the international landscape and highlighted the interdependence that

binds us together by a common threat. The terrorist attacks

make us reappraise global challenges, security doctrines and

strategic partnerships. 

In this new strategic environment, Russia’s singular global

role has once again come to the fore and the state aligned itself

closer to the Western security community. Russian President

Vladimir Putin was the first foreign leader to express his

condolences to President George W. Bush. This symbolic act

forged a new strategic partnership that has endured over the

past two years. Despite disagreements over the Iraqi war, the

value of strategic partnership was reconfirmed at the PutinBush summit in May 2003. 

In a wider sense, President Putin has used the Global War on

Terrorism (GWOT) as an opportunity to realign Russia with

the West, pursuing the policy of Westernization both at home

and abroad. This appears to be a deliberate, long-term

policy–but what stands behind this transformation? What are

the roots, philosophy and the practical reasoning behind

Russia’s new course? Marshall Center Paper No. 6, by Dr.

Sergei Medvedev, seeks to answer these questions. 

Medvedev posits that the realignment in Russian foreign

and security policy is revolutionary and enduring. It is a

profound reappraisal of Russia’s national interests, reversing

centuries-old imperial paradigms. In order to illustrate the
magnitude of this change, Medvedev looks at the historical

roots of Russian statehood and foreign policy. 

In a compressed historical review beginning with Ivan the

Terrible, the author focuses on Russia’s development into a

“national-security state,” a state that sacrificed individual and

public life to all-encompassing goals of national security and

territorial expansion.

However, by the 1980s this territorial imperative had proven

unsustainable, and the USSR began a historical decline.

Medvedev explores how Russia’s leaders responded to the

challenge of transforming an obsolescent system and adapting

Russia to new global rules of engagement in a post-industrial

world. According to Medvedev, Mikhail Gorbachev’s

perestroika was essentially an evolutionary project that

attempted to adapt the socialist organism to a changed

environment but did not question the regime’s fundamentals,

while Boris Yeltsin attempted to transform Russia by means of

an anti-communist revolution and “shock therapy.” Although

both reform plans ran into problems, their impact has been

quite dramatic. Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s projects initiated a

critical reassessment of Russia’s role in world affairs and set

the stage for Putin.

Medvedev examines Putin’s foreign policy and the “silent

revolution” in Russian security thinking. Despite crises in

relations with the West, Russia remained in a framework of

cooperation with the West. Medvedev argues that Putin’s bid

to anchor Russia in the West after the terrorist attacks of 9/11

concludes and consolidates Russia’s foreign policy

transformation of the past fifteen years and reverses the

traditional, imperial paradigm.

Sergei Medvedev

vi
In a wider sense, Medvedev suggests that a larger, systemic

change concerning the relation between domestic and foreign

policy has occurred in Russia. For the past several hundred

years, geopolitical reasoning dominated domestic politics and

dictated the mobilization of internal resources. Today, it is

precisely the opposite: foreign policy caters to domestic

reform.

Concealed behind routine politics and diplomatic gambits,

many policy-makers have not yet grasped this fundamental

change. Medvedev’s paper makes sense of this transformation

and illuminates the nature and the sheer magnitude of Putin’s

foreign policy revolution–undertaken as his personal crusade,

against the background of a skeptical foreign and security

policy elite and reform-fatigue among the electorate. 

The paper helps put Russia in perspective. Too often,

interpretations of Russian foreign policy are driven by shortterm thinking, and Moscow’s occasional disagreements with

the West are magnified into strategic ruptures. Medvedev

reminds us that Russia is departing from a centuries-old

imperial tradition deeply embedded in the national psyche–and

post-imperial departures have never been easy. In fact, one has

to look back five hundred years to fully appreciate the scope of

the political, psychological and conceptual transformation that

has occurred in Russian foreign policy over the past fifteen

years and was consolidated in Putin’s strategic post-9/11

choice. 

John P. Rose, Ph.D.

Director,

George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies

Rethinking The National Interest

vii
Executive Summary

The paper examines the historical and political roots behind

a transformation in Russian foreign policy undertaken by

President Vladimir Putin in the wake of the terrorist acts of

September 11, 2001. Putin, the first foreign leader to voice

support for the United States, proceeded to forge a new

strategic relationship with the US and embarked on a wider

policy of rapprochement with the West.

Since then, Russia’s initial, unequivocal support for the US

has been compromised by disagreements over the war in Iraq.

Yet, current Russian foreign policy is vastly different from the

previous decade’s in that, using the opportunity and the

rhetoric of the war on terrorism, it has made a normative

choice in favor of Westernization and in favor of a strategic

partnership with the United States and Europe. 

The paper posits that the realignment in Russian foreign and

security policy is revolutionary and has lasting value. This is

neither an ad hoc marriage of convenience nor a policy of

playing a weaker hand, but a profound reappraisal of Russia’s

national interests and place in the world, defying centuries-old

imperial paradigms. In order to appreciate the magnitude of

this change, one has to look beyond the Putin presidency and

transformations of the past decade into the historical roots of

Russian statehood and foreign policy. 

This is the focus of Part One, “Modernity at Large.” Ever

since the Moscow principality began to expand in the sixteenth

century, the Russian state had to take on an increasingly

Rethinking The National Interest

ix
strategic role–it built roads and outposts, extended and

defended borders, fought mounted horsemen of the Great

Steppe in the East and opposed regular armies that invaded

from the West. By virtue of geography and nature, the state

played the central role in Russian history, suppressing political

and civil society as well as the market economy, and stressing

strategic, territorial and mobilization priorities. This

phenomenon, called the “national-security state,” included the

pursuit of total control, territorial expansion and messianic

goals in different parts of the world, from the “Third Rome” to

the Third International.

Built on foundations laid by the Russian Empire in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the logic of the “nationalsecurity state” culminated in the Soviet Union, a quintessential

product of the twentieth century. The USSR was the ultimate

modern experiment in history: secular, urban, rationally

planned, militarized, and industrial. The entire country catered

to its imperial ambition–aiming for the world proletarian

revolution in the 1920s and 1930s and for strategic parity with

the West during the Cold War. However, by the 1970s and

1980s, the Soviet state and its foreign policy had proven to be

unsustainable. The economy was distorted in favor of heavy

industry and military production, and growth stalled. The vast

territory proved too costly to populate and maintain. The

cumbersome bureaucracy could not cope with the challenge of

the information revolution, relegating the USSR to the

technological periphery. 

Finally, dwindling domestic resources could no longer

sustain Soviet global commitments, including competing in an

arms race with the West, supporting Soviet satellites, and

encouraging the world revolutionary movement. In the ideological arena, the Soviet model had lost its attractiveness

Sergei Medvedev

x
worldwide. The ailing Soviet Union, a textbook case of

“imperial overstretch,” entered a phase of historical decline. 

The paper goes on to explore the response of the country’s

leaders to this secular decline in the past fifteen years. They

faced the challenge of transforming an obsolescent modern

system and adapting Russia to new global rules of engagement

in a post-industrial, postmodern world. Mikhail Gorbachev’s

perestroika was essentially a project of socialist evolution that

did not question the regime’s fundamentals. With perestroika’s

failure and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Boris

Yeltsin attempted to change Russia by means of an anticommunist revolution and “shock therapy.” However, largely

due to mismanagement of reform and the “stealing of the

state” by powerful lobbies and oligarchs, his transformation

project stalled as well. Still, both Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s

policies questioned Russia’s self-perception as a superpower

and initiated a critical reassessment of Russia’s role in world

affairs: by the late 1990s, Russia had come to realize that she

should turn from shaping the world to adapting to the external

environment.

Confronted with this situation, President Putin embarked on

a new reform effort. His agenda is to adapt Russia to globalization. For this task, one of his key tools is a new foreign

policy. Part Two, “The Changing Landmarks of Foreign

Policy,” examines the “silent revolution” in Russian foreign

and security policy. It analyzes the policy setting by outlining

four imperatives shaping Russian foreign policy. These are: 

The resource imperative. For the first time in her modern

history, Russia lacks the resources to fulfill her traditional

global role, while her residual global levers, such as nuclear

Rethinking The National Interest

xi
weapons and her seat on the UN Security Council, are

becoming increasingly inadequate.

The domestic imperative. The necessity of internal reform

plays a major role in formulating foreign policy. Previously,

geopolitical reasoning dominated domestic politics, and dictated the mobilization of internal resources; formerly Russia

was a country that catered to her external mission. Today, it is

the opposite: foreign policy is seen as catering to the domestic

reform agenda.

The economic imperative. Russia is gradually becoming

integrated into global markets at the levels of the state, the

economic elites, the middle class and the mass consumer. 

The institutional imperative. Russia is increasingly compelled to shape her foreign policy in terms of international institutions, such as NATO, the EU, the Council of Europe or the

World Trade Organization. 

Next, the paper analyzes policy outputs, observing the continuity of Russian foreign policy from Gorbachev to Yeltsin

and Putin. Despite the many crises in relations with the West,

such as the first wave of NATO expansion in 1997, the Russian

financial crisis in 1998, and the wars in Kosovo in 1999 and in

Iraq in 2003, Russia never turned to policies of isolationism

and confrontation and remained in a framework of cooperation

with the West. The paper argues that Putin’s bid to anchor

Russia in the West after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 concludes

and consolidates Russia’s foreign policy transformation of the

past fifteen years and reverses the traditional (imperial)

paradigm.

Sergei Medvedev

xii
Rethinking The National Interest

xiii

According to traditional thinking (which still characterizes

most of the Russian foreign policy and security elite), territory

was sacrosanct and therefore strategic, while alliances, treaties

and norms were shifting and tactical. Putin seeks to reverse

this paradigm, treating territory as a tactical resource and an

alliance with the West as a strategic goal. What his critics at

home bemoan as the “encirclement of Russia” and a

geopolitical catastrophe–NATO expansion into the Baltic

states, separation of Kaliningrad by a visa barrier, deployment

of US troops in Afghanistan, US bases in Central Asia and

special forces in Georgia, war in Iraq, and a possible wider,

long-term US presence in the Persian Gulf–Putin regards as

mere tactical concessions, pawns in a larger, strategic design.

In this sense, he reformulates national interest from a spatial

to functional definition. For the first time in Russian history,

national interest is not linked to sheer power and territorial

control, but rather to domestic reform, prosperity and

efficiency of governance. Putin still envisions Russia as a

world power: his policy is not pro-Western, but pro-Russian,

and of a pragmatic variety. His policy is driven by enlightened

self-interest; he needs the West for Russia to succeed in a

global world. A black belt in judo, he applies its philosophy:

do not counter an overwhelming opponent, but use his force to

your own advantage.

The pragmatic nature of Putin’s Westernization is underscored by the fact that he pursues different agendas with

different parts of the West–Europe and the US–and tries to

gain tactical advantages on both sides (as seen, for example, in

Russian maneuvers before and during the Iraq war). In issues

of terrorism and homeland security, Russian polity and society

seem to be closer to the US than to Europe. One can see the

emerging “arch of national interest” extending from the US to
Russia. Russia tries to emulate the global posture of the US on

a smaller scale, at least in the eastern and southern areas of the

former Soviet space, accepting a role as the junior partner of

the US in the war on terrorism. Meanwhile, in Europe, Russia

places her emphasis on trade, investment, institutional

dialogue and cooperative regionalism (as illustrated by

Kaliningrad). 

“Hard-security” affinity and partnership with the US and

“soft-security” dialogue and institution-building with Europe–

such are the two faces of Putin’s Westernization.

Sergei Medvedev

xiv
Rethinking The National Interest

1

Introduction

Moscow, Red Square, 1555

The terrorist acts of September 11, 2001 have had an effect on

the international system similar to the fall of the Berlin Wall. While

the end of the Cold War had inaugurated the 1990s, a decade of

transition and internationalism, 9/11 and the war on terrorism that

followed have introduced a new condition of international

relations characterized by emphasis on security and national

interest.

The change of the strategic landscape has re-defined the roles

not only of global players, the United States, Britain, Russia,

France and Germany, but also those of key institutions such as the

United Nations, European Union and NATO. One of the major

changes in the post-9/11 world has been Russia’s new role, with

President Vladimir Putin voicing support for the United States in

the immediate wake of the terrorist acts, forging a strategic

relationship with the Bush administration, and embarking on a

wider policy of rapprochement with the West. 

Like Gorbachev’s “New Thinking” 15 years ago, Putin’s

foreign policy turn came as a surprise for the world and lacked

support from Russian foreign policy and security elites. In the two

years since Putin’s bold move, Russia’s policy has become more

diversified, and initial unequivocal support for the US has been

compromised by disagreements over war in Iraq in March and

April 2003. 
Sergei Medvedev

2

What stands behind Putin’s turn? A demand for Westernization

among domestic elites? A scheme by anonymous planners from

Putin’s inner circle of security agencies, or Boris Yeltsin’s

powerful “family” clan? Was it a secret condition laid down by

Yeltsin when he appointed Putin as his successor? Or maybe,

according to one observer’s facetious remark, “Putin has been

secretly reading the Economist all these years?”

The following essay seeks to answer these questions by looking

not so much at personalities, but rather at systemic forces at play.

The hypothesis is that Putin’s foreign policy turn–like

Gorbachev’s before him–was not simply a bold design by one

man, or by certain lobbies, but a representation of a wider systemic

change that had taken place in Russia in the last decades. Flawed

as it may appear, Putin’s Westernization is a project aimed at

adapting Russia to globalization, matching national ambitions

with national resources, and finding Russia’s place in the emerging

new world order. 

In a search for the roots of Putin’s strategic realignment, this

essay turns to history. To gain a better understanding of the sources

and logic of Russian foreign policy, one has to examine the

traditional models of Russian statehood and the ways in which

Russians viewed and sought to change the world. Russia today,

Russia exposed to globalization, has to be measured against

traditional Russia, Russia as it became known to the world in the

past 500 years. In short, this is an essay about foreign policy as

explained by history, culture and geography, and as manifested in

Putin’s Westernization and a strategic alliance with the West in the

wake of 9/11.

One can hardly think of a better representation of Russian

history than St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square. Its

dominating appearance embodies Russia’s “otherness” for the

Western eye. Generations of bemused foreigners likened it to a
mosque (Napoleon in 1812), a giant plant, a cake, or a cloud bank.

Gracing the covers of tourist guides and textbooks of Russian, St.

Basil’s testifies not only to Russia’s acclaimed spirituality

(dukhovnost’), but also to the peculiar taste and iron fist of the

Tsars.1

Architecture, like geopolitics, is spatial art, shaped by the

intentions of the ruler. Buildings often convey political meanings

far beyond their original purpose. The architectural extravaganza

of St. Basil’s carries a geopolitical message. The Cathedral, built

between 1555-1561, commemorated a key event in Russian

history, the capture of Kazan, the capital of Tatar Khanate on the

Volga, by Ivan the Terrible in 1552. The nine chapels of St. Basil’s

were consecrated to the nine stages of the siege of Kazan, turning

the whole edifice into a symbolic map of action.2

The capture of Kazan was a key event in the rise of the Russian

state. Two hundred and fifty years of the Tatar yoke (from the midthirteenth to the late fifteenth centuries) had effectively excluded

Russia from the mainstream of European history and culture. She

had been relegated to the continental periphery, squeezed between

Lithuania and the Horde. A religious and national revival started in

the fifteenth century, followed by the assembly of the Russian

lands during the reigns of the Moscow Princes Ivan III (1462-

1505), his son Vassily III (1505-1533), and grandson Ivan IV, “the

Terrible” (1533-1584). It was during this period that the messianic,

geopolitical idea of “Moscow, the Third Rome” took shape, that

the Metropolitan of Moscow became the Patriarch of Moscow,

thus rising from a local to an ecumenical rank, and that the

Moscow Princes conferred upon themselves the title of Tsar. In

doing so, they borrowed symbols of the heavenly authority from

the Byzantine Empire, including the ultimate geopolitical icon, the

double-headed eagle, with one head looking west and the other,

east, which still remains Russia’s coat of arms. 

Rethinking the National Interest

3
Sergei Medvedev

4

In Russia’s eastward movement, crossing the Volga in Kazan

was a symbolic act, certainly an emancipation from the past, but

also an outline of the future territorial spread. Even today, the

Volga remains a Russian frontier. Crossing the river, one moves

from a developed west bank, home to old merchant towns like

Samara and Syzran’, to the sparsely populated Transvolga steppe

on the east bank, part of the Great Eurasian Steppe. Indeed, the

psychological border between Europe and Asia is not the Urals,

but rather the Volga. Crossing that border in the sixteenth century,

Russia embarked upon a 450-year cycle of spatial and statal

expansion. In this sense, St. Basil’s Cathedral opens up the entire

Russian space and Russian history, standing as a geopolitical

landmark and a monument to Russian modernity. 

Modernity is a key concept of this essay, which examines the

evolution of Russia’s security thinking, and specifically, the

foreign policy of President Vladimir Putin. The essay identifies the

modern origins and features of the Russian state and explores the

crisis of modernity in Russian domestic and foreign policy. In

brief, the essay argues that Russia, especially in her Soviet

incarnation, was a product of European modernity and the

Enlightenment. The crisis that befell her in the last decades of the

twentieth century was not an isolated national misfortune, but a

manifestation of a major historical force, the global crisis of

modernity. Against that background, Putin’s foreign policy

constitutes a major departure from modern discourses of

territoriality and security, and amounts to no less than a revolution

in the formulation of Russia’s national interest. 

Modernity is an ambiguous concept, underscored by the fact

that it does not have an exact Russian equivalent. The closest

translation is novoye vremya, “the new time.” “Modernity”

becomes even vaguer on the treacherous ground of Russian

history. Compared to Western nations, Russia has the least

established and most interpretative history, especially for pre-
Rethinking the National Interest

5

Petrine times. Before the 1700s, Russian history had been narrated

by foreign travelers, like the Scot, Patrick Gordon, usually from the

words of the courtiers and often re-written according to the tastes

of the ruler of the day. As they say, Russia is a country with an

unpredictable past. This raises the questions: what is modernity

and how does it apply to Russia?

The label “modern,” first articulated in nineteenth century

sociology, was meant to distinguish the “present” era from the

previous one, which was labeled “antiquity” or “tradition.” The

beginning of modernity is a contested issue among pundits: it

seems as if the modern period starts earlier and earlier every time

historians look at it. Some trace it to the Industrial Revolution in

England and the Enlightenment, and that means eighteenth

century; some go back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and

some to the Reformation and Renaissance, the fifteenth or

sixteenth century, or even earlier. 

It is generally agreed that in a philosophical sense, modernity

includes the ideas of the Enlightenment and Renaissance, stressing

the individual self (which is able to position itself in history, thus

distinguishing “modern” from “old”), humanism, rationality

(Descartes’ cogito ergo sum) and secularism. In practical terms,

modernity included the great geographic discoveries, the

Copernican revolution, the emergence of science (especially

Newton’s physics) and early industrialization. Finally, in political

terms, modernity stands for the centralization of governance and

the monopolization of violence by rulers that led to the emergence

of the classical Westphalian nation-state. What distinguishes a

modern state from its earlier version is the idea of domestic

sovereignty (as described by Thomas Hobbes and Jean Bodin): the

legitimate monopoly of violence enjoyed by the state and confined

by state borders. In this sense, the modern nation-state is reified as

a geographical, indeed, geometrical unit, and modernity is about

the territorial dimension of power, as it developed in the West from
Sergei Medvedev

6

the Italian city-states of the Renaissance through the Westphalian

nation-state to the European empires of the past three centuries.3

It is especially the latter aspect of modernity–centralization of

political power, the ascendance of the state that instrumentalized

violence, and the idea of territorial control–that allows us to trace

the origins of Russian modernity to five hundred years ago, to Ivan

the Terrible. Although Russia lacked modern philosophical

foundation (indeed, there has been no tradition of rational, nonreligious philosophy in Russia), and was introduced to science and

industrialization later than most European nations, as far as

political modernity is concerned, Russia has experienced it in full. 

In particular, the idea of modernity is crucial to understand

Russian statehood, imperial format, security thinking, and foreign

policy. In Part One, “Modernity at Large,” the argument is

presented chronologically, examining major features of Russian

modernity as they emerged in history, from the early territorial

spread in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through the

Petrine modernization and industrialization and emergence of the

Russian Empire, to the culmination of modernity and the

Enlightenment in the grandiose Soviet experiment. The essay

explores the essential features of Russian modernity–statism (the

idea and political practice of state dominance), industrialization,

militarization and imperialism–that in the Soviet Union were

magnified to the extent of becoming unsustainable. The essay also

explains the systemic reasons behind the decline and collapse of

the Soviet Union.

This historical exposé is necessary to understand the challenges

faced by the Soviet/Russian leaders of the past fifteen years:

transformation of the obsolescent modern system and adaptation

of Russia to the new global rules of engagement in the postindustrial, postmodern world. Where Gorbachev’s project of

socialist evolution and Yeltsin’s project of anti-communist
Rethinking The National Interest

7

revolution failed, President Putin has undertaken a new attempt at

reform. In his agenda, foreign policy is a key area of

transformation and the instrument of adapting Russia to

globalization.

Part Two, “The Changing Landmarks of Foreign Policy,”

examines the ongoing “silent revolution” in Russian foreign

policy, as it departs from the key principles of Russian modernity.

Firstly, it analyzes the policy setting by outlining four imperatives

shaping Russian foreign policy: availability of resources; domestic

imperatives; economic imperatives; and the institutional

imperative compelling Russia to shape her foreign policy in terms

of international institutions. Secondly, it analyzes the policy

outputs, observing the continuity of Russian foreign policy from

Gorbachev to Yeltsin and Putin. Despite the many crises in

relations with the West, e.g. NATO enlargement in 1997, Russian

financial crisis in 1998, or war in Kosovo in 1999, Russia never

turned to isolationism and confrontation and stayed in the

framework of cooperation with the West. The essay argues that

Putin’s bid to anchor Russia in the West after the terrorist attacks

of 9/11 concludes and consolidates Russia’s foreign policy

revolution of the past fifteen years, signifies the end of Russia’s

post-Communist transition, and represents a break with the

modern paradigm.

Finally, the essay attempts a policy forecast, suggesting that the

future of Russian foreign policy is now largely contingent on

developments in the West. After 9/11, two distinct polities took

shape in the West: the world of hard security, military force and

pursuit of national interest represented by the United States, and

the world of norms, multilateralism and “soft security” represented

by the European Union. The perennial dilemma of Russia and the

West has been reformulated: in order to answer the traditional

“whither Russia,” one has first to decide “whither the West”— or

rather, which West is Russia going to join. As Russia exits the
Sergei Medvedev

8

protracted period of modernity, she carries into the new

millennium the same old ambiguity of identity characteristic of the

past centuries, and her relations with the West remain an openended story. 
Rethinking The National Interest

9

PART I. Modernity at Large

The national-security state

Russia is a belated European: she missed out on the major

projects of modern European history, including the Renaissance

and the Reformation, or joined them belatedly and incompletely, as

was the case with the Enlightenment, atheism, liberalism and

democracy. In spite of this historical asynchronicity, Russia still

enjoyed political modernity in roughly the same period as Europe,

from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. 

The view held by a majority of historians maintains that the

father of modern, “European” Russia was Peter the Great (1672-

1725). However, more researchers are tracing the roots of

modernization in Russia to pre-Petrine times, interpreting the rise

of the Muscovite state as an essentially modern phenomenon, the

“well-ordered police state” in the words of Marc Raeff (“police”

meaning administration in the broadest sense).4 Jarmo Kotilaine

and Marshall Poe have pointed out that starting in the sixteenth

century, Russia was increasingly drawn into international conflicts

where she was forced to fight “modern” wars with a new kind of

adversary that was fundamentally different from the mounted

horsemen of the Eurasian steppe. Russia faced the challenge of

standing armies and the latest arms that the gunpowder revolution

had to offer.5

The need to look back into the early period of the history was

reflected in a request from the US Department of State in the mid1980s to a specialist at Harvard University, aiming to trace the

mainsprings of Soviet security thinking to the Muscovite period. In

his “Muscovite Political Folkways,” Edward Keenan argues that
Soviet political culture was an update of what had developed in

medieval Russia and was shaped by the natural conditions of life

in the Eastern European forest:

The most significant autonomous actor in peasant life was

not the individual (who could not survive alone in this

environment), and not even the nuclear family (which, in its

extended form, was marginally viable, but still too

vulnerable in disease and sudden calamity), but the village,

to whose interests all others were in the end subordinated.6

These features were to be found not only in the village but also,

writ large, in the emergent Muscovite state. And since for it, too,

the major aim was survival, the state

gave its prime attention to policies

directed at avoiding chaos, to safety

first, while the major guarantor of

such policies was a strict principle of

centralization.7 The central authority,

increasingly assembling around the

“divinely anointed Grand Prince of

Moscow,” had therefore emerged as a key player in Russia’s

transition from medieval to modern times. 

The main modernizer in Russia had always been the state,

embarked upon a developmental mission that entailed territorial

expansion, spatial control and social order. Indeed, what started in

Russia some 500 years ago was a great modern experiment in

territoriality, the principle of territorial expansion taken ad

infinitum. Russia as a phenomenon emerged in space, and was

created by extensive means. Land had always been in abundance;

in the east and south, borders were non-existent, and for the last

five centuries, the state and its people had been expanding across

the continent, largely uninhibited by adversaries or major natural

obstacles. The speed of this expansion was spectacular: having

captured Kazan in 1552, in 1598 Russia annexed the Siberian

Sergei Medvedev

10

The main modernizer

in Russia had always

been the state,

embarked upon

territorial expansion,

spatial control and

social order.
khanate on the Irtysh, more than 1,000 miles to the east. As

Richard Pipes has calculated, between the mid-sixteenth and late

seventeenth centuries Russia had been expanding at a rate of

42,000 square kilometers per year.8

The Russian spread covered entire northern Eurasia, including

Mongolia and Manchuria, and part of the northwestern American

continent, including Alaska and going as far south as Fort Ross

near San Francisco. In the twentieth century, it spilled into outer

space, in yet another manifestation of Russia’s territorial pursuit:

there is a cultural determinism in the fact that the USSR was the

first to launch Sputnik in 1957 and to put the first man, Yuri

Gagarin, in orbit in 1961. 

In the phenomenon of Russian modernity, statehood came to be

manifested first and foremost in spatial format, the state’s primary

functions being the expansion, control, development and defense

of territory. Over the centuries, the territorial imperative had

become the foreign policy of Russian, and later Soviet, leaders; as

Vyacheslav Molotov has reportedly conceded, “I saw my task as a

foreign minister in expanding the borders of my fatherland as far

as possible.”9 In Soviet urban folklore, the territorial imperative

was typified by a joke in which a schoolboy coming into a school

supply shop asked for a globe of the Soviet Union.

The territorial imperative gave birth to a specific type of

governance, defined by strategic, territorial and mobilization

priorities. A Russian historian, Vassily Klyuchevsky, called this a

“combatant order of the state” (boyevoi stroi gosudarstva).10

Richard Hellie has labeled this a “garrison state,”11 while Laurent

Murawiec spoke of a “national-security state” driven by two

imperatives:

Rethinking The National Interest

11
The pursuit at all and any cost of “national greatness”

defined as a messianic, religious mission (the Third Rome,

the Third International) and a territorial imperative (Siberia,

the South towards Constantinople and the Mediterranean,

Central Europe, and, why not? Western Europe, the Warm

Seas, and twentieth century “Great Game” geopolitics), the

two merging in the form of Empire.12

Russia had been an empire par excellence, a space in which

national statehood had been subordinated to imperial expansion

and nationalism to imperialism. “I do not know Russia; I know

only Russian Empire,” a maxim attributed to Count Witte, a

prominent Russian statesman at the turn of the twentieth century,

was meant to be the epitome of national pride. It can also be

interpreted as a script of national tragedy. Indeed, Russia proper,

Russia as a nation, had never really existed outside an imperial

format. As succinctly formulated by Geoffrey Hosking: “Britain

had an empire, but Russia was an empire–and perhaps still is.”13

The state with its imperial drive, permanently expanding,

assimilating new lands, peoples and religions, had precluded the

emergence of stable patterns of settlement and of societal spaces

where ethnicity could develop into nationality; in the end, the

Russian Empire had prevented the formation of the Russian nation.

A nation is local and exclusive, based on mythologies and rituals

of collectivity, whereas the Russian state, embarked upon a

strategic, developmental and civilizing mission, was expanding

and inclusive, failing to provide anchors of national identity. 

Russia had always been a state without a nation, and rather than

nationalism, its modernizing forces were statism and imperialism.

The modernizing power of nationalism, as it had occurred in

Western Europe, turning “peasants into Frenchmen,”14 had never

taken place in Russia. The construction of Russian national selfconsciousness, to the extent that it had happened in the nineteenth

century, was a project of the educated class, and an “imagined

Sergei Medvedev

12
community” of the nation had never been broadcast into the wider

population in a way comparable with nation-states of the West.

The construction of the new, non-ethnic identities in the twentieth

century–the “proletarian internationalism” and the “Soviet

people”–had suppressed Russianness for yet another several

decades. Observing the phenomenon of Russia’s “inarticulate

nationhood,” Igor Zevelev has concluded that “Russians emerged

from the USSR as an incomplete nation with a surprisingly low

level of national consciousness and lack of a mass-based national

movement.”15

Much as it had prevented the development of the Russian

nation, the state had prevented the emergence of a proper economy

in Russia. Obliged to defend its long borders, to combat numerous

neighbors, and to develop and sustain a vast territory, the Russian

state had to withdraw a large portion of the national product from

the turnover for the purpose of controlling the space. Driven by the

Empire’s increasing military appetite, the state acted as a main

customer of agricultural and industrial output.16 It was through the

Treasury (kazna) acting as the main buyer that the state, in fact,

directly controlled production without any necessity whatsoever of

worrying about the circulation sphere. For example, in 1913, the

peak year of Russia’s pre-revolutionary capitalism, the Treasury

functioned as a customer, financier and purchaser of nearly 60% of

total industrial output.17

The national economic model had favored the figure of the

producer to the detriment of the merchant, and relations of distribution to the detriment of exchange. The overwhelming role of

the Russian state had thus impeded the emergence of a proper

economy as the mechanism of exchange. Rather, the national

economic model had been something called narodnoe khozyaistvo,

which has no English equivalent, but is roughly translated into

German as Volkswirtschaft. The difference between economy and

khozyaistvo is that the latter is built like a household. Members of

Rethinking The National Interest

13
the household do not engage in relations of exchange; the goods

are distributed by a master–a German Wirt or the Russian state. 

Another corollary had been the weakness of an independent

merchant, an urban economic agent that, in Western history,

formed the tiers état (the Third Estate), demanded civil rights and

a parliament, and eventually became the driving force of the

bourgeois revolutions. Stadtluft macht frei (“City air makes you

free”), as the Germans say; “no bourgeoisie, no democracy,” as put

by Barrington Moore. The overwhelming role of the state in

Russian history had effectively impeded the formation of a

Bürgergesellschaft, a civil society, and of an independent public

and political sphere. 

In this peculiar pattern of governance, the Russian state had

almost completely sacrificed societal security for the needs of state

security. This model, too, was set forth by Ivan the Terrible. Ivan

inaugurated a paradoxical type of state: weak in rendering services

to society, and strong in

controlling and terrorizing

society–“predator-state and preynation,” as put by Murawiec.18

Later modernizations in Russia,

like the Petrine one, provide

further examples of enhancing

state security by destroying

societal security, indeed the entire

social fabric. In Stalin’s period, when no segment of the

population, including the state apparatus, was immune from

repression, the gap between state and societal security had reached

grotesque proportions. (Ironically, the repressive bodies

themselves were the primary target of purges). The Great Terror of

the late 1930s was the epitome of absolute security for the

sovereign and absolute insecurity for the country; in fact the total

purges of the higher echelons of the Red Army on the eve of World

Sergei Medvedev

14

The Russian “nationalsecurity state”

supplanted nationality,

identity, civility, economy,

and individual and

societal security. 
War II had resulted in a deficit of mid-rank and flag officers, and

in devastating Soviet losses in the first year of the War. 

The most expansive territory of modern history had therefore

produced the most centralized state, along with its insurmountable

strategic commitments, its army, its rigid bureaucracy, and the

subservient Orthodox Church. The entire Russian modernity had

been about the phenomenon of the “national-security state,” which

driven by the territorial and strategic imperatives, had supplanted

nationality, identity, civility, economy, and individual and societal

security. The genes of Russian statehood are modern and

European. The model of a “well-ordered police state” was

borrowed from the West, but operating in the wider Eurasian

expanse, the Russian state had carried European ideas of

territoriality, sovereignty and total administration to an extent

incomprehensible in Europe proper. 

The fruits of Enlightenment 

Russian modernity had culminated in Bolshevism and in Soviet

Communism. The Soviet Union was not exactly a deviation from

the mainstream of European history, nor was it an isolated,

indigenous development. As Igor Shafarevich has argued, western

liberalism and Soviet Communism were two guises of the same

“inorganic civilization,” originating in the ideology of the

Renaissance and the Enlightenment, that emphasized progress,

technology, the Weberian “disenchantment of nature,” and

improvement of the human race. These were two versions of the

same modernity, “two roads to one precipice,” i.e, to the crisis of

modern civilization that had become evident by the late twentieth

century.19

This goes some way in explaining a well-known sympathy of

leading Western intellectuals, not only of the left persuasion, to the

Rethinking The National Interest

15
Soviet regime in the 1920s and even at the peak of Stalinism. H.G.

Wells and Albert Einstein, Romain Rolland and Bernard Shaw

acclaimed the Soviet experiment, and like Voltaire before them,

imagined Russia as a promised land of modernization. The aura of

bold modernizers attributed to many Russian leaders, from Peter

the Great and Catherine the Great to Lenin and Stalin, had helped

the West to put up with the human cost of their policies. 

Another interesting fact was the wide-spread popularity of the

USSR in the 1920s and 1930s with Western artists and architects

of modernism. Among those submitting plans for Stalin’s

grandiose construction of the Palace of the Soviets in the early

1930s were two of the most prominent architects of the past

century: the Swiss Le Corbusier and the German Walter Gropius,

leader of the Bauhaus. The modernists saw a natural affinity

between their constructivist designs for society and the urban

environment, and the political modernity of Bolshevism.20 Lenin’s

famous formula that “Communism is Soviet power plus the

electrification of the whole country” was an essentially modernist

plan, combining unlimited political power with the promise of

technology. 

The Soviet Union was, in the words of Ted Hopf, “the ultimate

modern experiment: secular, urban, rational, supra-national and

industrial,”21 all the elements that Horkheimer and Adorno

identified as the modern Enlightenment.22 The unique Soviet

civilization, with its unrivalled mobilization capacity, social

experimentation and industrial abandon, stood as an ultimate

achievement of, and an awkward monument to, the

Enlightenment. Simon Kordonsky has compared the Soviet Union

with technically advanced civilizations of the mythological past

which left behind perplexing artifacts like the Egyptian pyramids,

columns made of chemically pure iron, and incomprehensible

mural images:

Sergei Medvedev

16
Our far distant archaeologist-descendants are likely to be

amazed as they explore the ruined launch silos for Soviet

strategic missiles, huge radiation and chemical dumps and

the remains of other great five-year-plan projects. They will

be guessing as to which unknown civilization created them

and why. We know only too well (although we try to forget)

that these were made by convicts and army construction

units equipped with spades, pickaxes and wheelbarrows for

the majestic and senseless purpose of equitable distribution.23

In his trilogy The Information Age, Manuel Castells starts the

analysis of the crisis of industrial statism and collapse of the Soviet

Union with a question: Why, in the 1980s, did Soviet leaders feel

the urgency to engage in a process of restructuring so radical that

it ultimately led to the disintegration of the Soviet state? After all,

the USSR was not only a military superpower, but the third largest

industrial economy in the world, and the only state that was selfreliant in energy resources and raw materials. Soviet power was

not seriously challenged either internationally or domestically: The

world had entered an era of relative stability in the acknowledged

spheres of influence between the superpowers. The war in

Afghanistan was taking its toll in human suffering, in political

image, and in military pride, but not to a greater extent than that of

the damage inflicted on France by the Algerian War or on the

United States by the Vietnam War. Political dissidence was limited

to small intellectual circles, as respected as isolated; to Jewish

people wanting to emigrate; and to kitchen gossip, a deeply rooted

Russian tradition. “The second Russian revolution, which

dismantled the Soviet empire, so ending one of the most daring and

costly human experiments, may be the only historical change

brought about without the intervention of social movements and/or

without a major war.”24 Why, then, such a sudden, precipitous

breakup?

The answer to this question lies beyond the confines of the

Soviet empire; it was the end of the entire paradigm of modernity,

of which the USSR had been the staunchest follower, that spelled

Rethinking The National Interest

17
the collapse of the Soviet state. Gorbachev’s risky, and eventually

uncontrollable, reforms were a manifestation of a historical force,

the structural inability of statism and of the Soviet variant of

industrialism to ensure the transition to postmodern, postindustrial, information society.25

The failure of the last great empire of modernity had been

predetermined by its very successes, a permanent quest for industrialization, linear growth, territorial expansion, and

quantitative achievement. For most of the existence of the Soviet

Union, its economic growth was faster than that of the West, and

its pace of industrialization one of the fastest in world history. The

price of such growth had been considerable. Apart from the

immense human and environmental costs, forced labor, and the

creation of a distorted, uprooted society, the hyperindustrialized

economy had resulted in incurable structural imbalances.

Agriculture was squeezed of its products to subsidize industry and

feed cities and emptied of its labor to provide industrial workers.

Consumer goods, housing, and services gave priority to capital

goods and to the extraction of raw materials, in order to make

socialism self-sufficient in all key production lines. As in the age

of Peter the Great, industry itself was put at the service of militaryindustrial production.26

At the same time, in order to sustain the extensive model of

growth and to fulfill the social obligations undertaken by the

regime in the 1960s and 1970s, the Soviet Union had to resort to

ever increasing exports of oil, gas, materials and precious metals,

which by the 1980s represented 90% of Soviet exports to the

capitalist world. Apart from diverting energy and resources from

investment in the national economy, this external trade structure,

typical of underdeveloped economies, was susceptible to the

secular deterioration of commodity prices vis à vis the prices of

manufactured goods. The trade structure proved to be excessively

vulnerable to fluctuations in the prices of oil on the world market.27

Sergei Medvedev

18
The oil crisis of the mid-1970s filled the coffers of the decaying

Soviet regime, protracting its stagnation, zastoi, for yet another

decade. The fall in oil prices in the mid-1980s exacerbated the

imbalances of the Soviet economy and was partly responsible for

Gorbachev’s perestroika. High oil prices in the mid-1990s had

inflated the bubble of Russia’s speculative capitalism, which burst

in August 1998, when oil prices fell to $12 per barrel. Today,

Putin’s liberal economic reforms, along with the exhausting war in

Chechnya, are again financed by high oil prices. Trying to enter the

post-industrial economy, Russia is still suffering from a modern

phenomenon, called the “Dutch disease”–an addiction to oil

exports.

The greatest imbalance of Soviet industrial modernity was

deeply rooted in the core of Soviet power, in a hypertrophied

military-industrial complex (MIC) and an unsustainable defense

budget. The Soviet Union was aiming for military and strategic

parity with the United States at a time when the absolute size of the

US economy was two to three times bigger. From the 1950s to the

late 1980s, the Soviet Union had to stand up to three separate arms

races: the strategic arms race with the West and China to sustain

nuclear parity; the conventional arms race to sustain the Warsaw

Pact-NATO standoff in Central Europe and to support the

Communist movement in the Third World; and finally, the arms

race in space opened by President Reagan’s Strategic Defense

Initiative. 

These military requirements meant that in the 1980s, Soviet

defense expenditures stood at 15% of its GNP, more than twice the

equivalent proportion in the US at the peak of Reagan’s defense

buildup. The production of enterprises that were engaged in the

MIC reached about 70% of all industrial production.29 The MIC

absorbed the best of Soviet industrial, human and technological

resources, concentrating them in closed “numbered towns” (secret

townships built around MIC facilities and designated by numbers

Rethinking The National Interest

19
like Arzamas-16, Chelyabinsk-70, etc.) and pochtovye yashiki,

“post-office boxes” (closed research facilities known only by their

post office box number).

The military-industrial complex operated, in the words of

Castells, as a “black hole in the Soviet economy.”30 It was a virtual

oligopoly of advanced know-how in the Soviet economy and

society, and yet, due to its inherent

conservatism and its uncompetitive nature, it stifled indigenous technological development in

the USSR. Thus, once the Soviet

programming and computer

industry (still on the cutting edge

in the 1940s and 1950s) was

totally subordinated to the defense

sector and exempted from the open economy, the military

considered it strategically “safe” not to pursue indigenous

computer development, but instead to copy Western platforms and

programs. Rather than developing their own design and production

lines, Soviet electronic R&D centers, all under the Ministry of

Defense, engaged in smuggling computers from the West,

proceeding to reverse engineering, and reproducing each model,

adapting it to Soviet military specifications.31 Thus the groundwork

was laid for the Soviet technological retardation that became, in the

1990s, a 20-year difference in design and manufacturing

capability, a “micro-chip deficiency disease,” as Thomas Friedman

called it.32

In other words, pursuing essentially modern goals (state power,

territorial control, imperial ambition) by modern means

(hierarchical organization, central planning), building a society and

economy based on mobilization, industrialization and

militarization, the Soviet Union had actually exempted itself from

the key development of late modernity, the information revolution.

Sergei Medvedev

20

The Soviet Union of the

1980s could be compared

to the Titanic: metallic,

gigantic, smoking and

navigated by selfconfidence into a deadly

field of ice. 
Soviet industrial statism was too heavy, burdened by an

unsustainable territory and unrealistic global commitments, to

survive in the post-industrial Information Age. The highly

educated population of the USSR found itself trapped in an

obsolete technological system. The Soviet Union of the 1980s

could be compared to a metaphor of industrial civilization, the

Titanic: metallic, gigantic, smoking and navigated by selfconfidence into a deadly field of ice. 

Territorial overstretch

Apart from statism and industrialism, the third pillar of Russian

and Soviet modernity was a specific territorial mentality resulting

in internal colonization of the country by the state and in the

external expansion of the state–the extrapolation of domestic

practices and ideology into the world. Internally, the Russian

Empire, as well as the Soviet state, sought to quell the natural

diversity of its territory, with its ethnic, cultural and religious

differences, in a rigid, institutional structure. Imperial Russia used

a system of gubernias, administrative regions planned in such a

way that a military garrison in the capital could reach any corner

within the region in three days to quell a possible peasant uprising. 

This principle was further institutionalized in the Soviet period

within a unique Soviet system of “administrative-territorial

division.”33 This was a rigid hierarchical structure designed to

control the Soviet space with all its “contents,” to organize the

operation of state institutions as well as people’s everyday life. The

whole spectrum of state activities (law enforcement, military draft,

ideology, education, health care, housing, day-to-day management

of local industry and agriculture, etc.) were carried out almost

entirely on the regional level. All state functions were concentrated

in the oblasts, which became focal points, vital centers, and de

facto principal institutions of the state. Ethnicity, religion, and

Rethinking The National Interest

21
group identity could only be sanctioned by the state within the

system of administrative-territorial division. The rational logic of

administrative subordination contradicted the natural logic of territorial relations. In this sense, the centralization imposed on Soviet

territory contained seeds of disunity, and the precipitous

regionalization of Russia in the 1990s was a “revenge of the

territory.”34

By the same token, the very territorial format of modern Russia

as “geopolitical heartland,” a “Eurasian bridge,” had become

problematic. Its territorial stretch had a security logic but little

economic rationale. Remote regions had an exclusively strategic

value in the Soviet period. Planners moved tens of millions of

people into Siberia and the Far East for reasons only partly related

to the exploitation of strategic resources, such as oil, gas, gold,

diamonds, and uranium. More important were considerations of

state security–industrial and military facilities were placed as far

away as possible from threats emanating from the West and

China–and the idea that territory had to be populated to be

controlled. In Siberia the Soviet Union built cities with populations

over a million. In contrast, Canada, with its similar vast northern

stretches, constructed only small outposts or temporary bases.

A recent Brookings Institution study using a “temperature per

capita” (TPC) index (an economic rationality comparison of

change in a country’s population-weighted average temperature as

a result of economic location decisions) showed that Russia’s TPC

declined dramatically between 1926 and 1990, while, for example,

Canada’s rose over the same period. As a result, according to

Clifford Gaddy and Fiona Hill, “Russia today is economically a

colder and more remote country than it was a hundred years ago.”35

Some 30% of Russia’s population lives east of the Urals in regions

where average January temperatures range from -15 to -40 degrees

centigrade. 

Sergei Medvedev

22
Today, having largely lost their strategic significance, many of

these regions have become unsustainable. A typical case is the

Maritime Territory (Primorsky krai), that has been enduring a deep

economic, social and energy crisis for the past decade. At some

points, the city of Vladivostok had its electricity supplied from the

engines of nuclear submarines at Pacific Fleet bases. According to

Gaddy and Hill, if Russia is to be globally competitive, it will have

to “come in from the cold” by divesting itself of “dinosaur”

industries and downsizing its large cities in regions east of the

Urals.36

A similar crisis of territoriality struck the Soviet Union on the

international scene. The Soviet empire was organized along strict

hierarchical lines. Starting with the rise of Moscow as the nucleus

of a modern state, Russia has been expanding in concentric circles.

This can be clearly seen in the spatial structure of Moscow: the

Kremlin, as the citadel, is surrounded by concentric defensive

rings: Kitai-Gorod; Bely Gorod (now the Boulevard Ring);

Zemlyanoy Gorod (now the Garden Ring); the Moscow beltway

confining the present-day city limits; and finally, the ring of missile

defenses built 50-70 kilometers around Moscow, linked by a

concrete beltway, betonka, now mostly used by the ubiquitous

suburbanites, the dachniki. 

Like Moscow, the Soviet Union had several defensive rings. In

the geopolitical model proposed by Alexei Salmin, five concentric

circles were designed as the security perimeters of the Soviet state.

The first circle was Russia proper and its autonomous republics

organized in the RSFSR, not contiguous with the capitalist world,

save a small stretch of the boundary with Norway in the High

North. The second circle was formed by the Union Republics,

having boundaries in direct contact with the outside world. The

third circle was formed by the “people’s democracies” outside the

USSR but under direct Soviet control (essentially Eastern Europe,

where the Brezhnev Doctrine had ruled supreme since the Soviet

Rethinking The National Interest

23
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968). The fourth circle was

constituted by vassal states of pro-Soviet orientation (e.g., Cuba,

Vietnam, North Korea, Nicaragua, Angola, South Yemen) and

Soviet geopolitical allies (e.g. Libya and Iraq); and the fifth circle

was formed by the international Communist movement and its

allies around the world.37

Running this enormous empire “over which the sun never set”

required both power and ideology. On the one hand, the MarxistLeninist ideology had mobilizing and legitimizing functions in

Soviet foreign policy and the construction of empire. On the other

hand, the Soviet Union relied on sheer display of power, as the

modern rituals of Realism became the core of Soviet foreign

policy, as illustrated by Stalin’s famous quip about the Pope: “How

many divisions does he have?”

The two pillars, power and ideology, started to crumble in the

late 1970s. On the ideological front, the failed promise of

Marxism-Leninism and the decline in the effectiveness of the

Soviet system led to a diminution of the attractiveness of the Soviet

model worldwide. “Eurocommunism” in Western Europe,

“goulash socialism” in Eastern Europe, and the stagnation of

Soviet allies in the Third World all undermined this model.38 On

the military front, Soviet failures in Afghanistan and in Poland (the

imposition of martial law by General Jaruzelski in 1980, a proxy

of Soviet military intervention, did not end the internal ferment

there), Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup, and, once again, the

Strategic Defense Initiative, made Soviet military power look

increasingly inadequate and insecure. As Hannes Adomeit has

observed, 

Incapable of or unwilling to embark on fundamental change,

the leaders in Moscow adopted the attitude of ‘insulted giant’.

They broke off arms control negotiations on strategic and

medium-range nuclear weapons and conventional arms. They

removed the last vestiges of selective détente from the West

Sergei Medvedev

24
European diplomatic agenda. . . . The Imperial and Ideological

paradigm, in short, had finally relegated the Soviet Union to

the role of mere irritant in international politics. Moscow still

had sufficient power to obstruct and threaten, but no longer

actively and constructively to shape world affairs.39

The imperial overstretch–a malaise diagnosed by Paul

Kennedy40–together with the crisis of ideology and leadership, had

made the USSR hostage to its own territorial format and ambition.

It was the reluctant decision in 1979 to intervene in

Afghanistan–the last Soviet move in the “Great Game”–that broke

the camel’s back. Eight months after the completion of the Soviet

withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and with

it, the Empire crumbled. 

The millennium bug

In a quote attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, the great Indian

observed that his home country is “not a third world nation, but a

highly developed civilization in an advanced state of decay.” This

comment aptly describes the Russian/Soviet state at the end of the

twentieth century. The fall of Soviet civilization was part of a

greater historical force, the decline of the modernist script. The

demise of the Warsaw Pact, the USSR, and eventually Russia as a

superpower, was dictated by the breakup of the very infrastructure

of Russian/Soviet modernity, including the obsolete industry, the

paternalistic social security system, the unwieldy Army and

disproportionate defense sector, the unsustainable administrativeterritorial format, and the imperial foreign policy. As Robert

Cooper has put it, 

the Soviet Union seemed in 1989 rather old-fashioned: an

empire after other empires were gone, a state-centered system

which had once seemed progressive but no longer was–and a

state orientated for defense and war long after the threat had

gone and others had changed their focus.41

Rethinking The National Interest

25
The 500-year period of modernity in Russia, along with

concomitant institutions of territoriality, industrialism and

imperialism, had totally exhausted itself by the end of the twentieth

century. The infrastructure of modernity is falling apart, from

decommissioned nuclear submarines rotting at piers near

Murmansk to the Mir space station dumped into the Pacific near

Fiji; from defeats of the once-mighty Russian hockey team to the

dilapidated classical facades of St. Petersburg as the city celebrated

its 300th anniversary in 2003. For Russia, the “millennium bug”

was not just the obsolete computer code–in fact, many computers

in Russian industry were pre-DOS mainframes, put into operation

before 1980 and therefore not affected by the Y2K problem–but

the systemic incompatibility of the country with the new

millennium.

The last two decades of Soviet and Russian politics are best

understood in the context of this gap. Yuri Andropov’s 1982

reformist attempt, informed by increasing awareness of the crisis

within the KGB leadership, was carried out in the typical Soviet

style: tightening of Party control, discipline at the workplace, and

an increase in internal repression. Like the terminally-ill, reformist

gensek, this attempt was short-lived. Following the brief,

inarticulate and almost caricature interregnum of Konstantin

Chernenko in 1983-1984, another attempt at reform was

undertaken by Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985. 

Gorbachev, from the younger generation of regional leaders and

a contrast to the Kremlin’s ailing gerontocracy, was well aware of

the crisis. Still, he probably never realized its proportions nor its

structural character. A loyal Communist, his original reformist

project was one of a facelift–“socialism with a human face.”42 Only

in 1987 was Gorbachev’s initial phraseology, uskorenie

(acceleration) of socialism, replaced by the more fundamental

notion of perestroika (restructuring).

Sergei Medvedev

26
Perestroika was an attempt at a conservative evolution of the

Soviet regime without a change in the basics of the political and

social order; at preserving socialism

by a partial introduction of market

mechanisms, limited political freedoms, and considerable freedom of

speech (glasnost). Gorbachev never

intended to overhaul the foundations

of Russian/Soviet modernity: the big

state, the role of the Party and the

military, and a centralized federation.

His evolutionary approach to reform could be likened to the

“Chinese model” of gradual economic change along with the

preservation of the political control–but the big difference lay in

the fact that late Soviet society was principally different from the

Chinese one: it was urbanized, industrialized, fully literate, much

more open and informed, and in its urban segments, generally

sharing Western values and consumer behavior.43

Soviet modernization, especially the social contract of the

Brezhnev years, had produced a Soviet “middle class” of sorts–30

to 40 million urban professionals, educated and relatively well-todo, constrained by a hierarchical sociopolitical system. These

people were the original supporters of perestroika and glasnost,

but by the late 1980s they had realized they wanted more than

Gorbachev’s modest reforms could offer. The irony of the situation

was that the very forces evoked by perestroika–the liberal wing of

the establishment, the educated urban class, the national elites in

the Soviet Republics–had outgrown Gorbachev’s project, and

demanded greater social, political and economic freedom and, in

some cases, national sovereignty.

If Gorbachev had followed the “Chinese model,” he could have

attempted a “Soviet Tiananmen,” a demonstrative use of force that

would have guaranteed the continuity of power and delineated the

Rethinking The National Interest

27

For Russia, the

“millennium bug” was

not just the obsolete

computer code, but the

systemic

incompatibility of the

country with the new

millennium.
borders of political liberalization. But the last Soviet gensek lived

up to his proclaimed moral ground and refrained from using force,

eventually opening the floodgates for the Soviet breakup and

securing his place in history as a utopian reformer, not a

modernizing tyrant. Indeed, armed force was used not by

Gorbachev, but against him, in the August 1991 coup, and failed

spectacularly. 

The failure of perestroika and collapse of the Soviet Union

brought to power Gorbachev’s nemesis, Boris Yeltsin. His

nickname, “Bulldozer,” earned during his years as Party secretary

in the Sverdlovsk oblast, reflected his tendency to dismantle all

obstacles in his way–a trait that also characterized his reformist

project in the early 1990s. Following Soviet modernity’s failure to

evolve, Yeltsin’s way forward (and the way to power) was

revolutionary destruction. The dismantlement started in 1989

under Gorbachev, with the elimination of the branch ministries in

the Soviet economy; it continued with the collapse of the Soviet

imperial structures in Eastern Europe in 1989-1990; and was

followed by Yeltsin’s abolition of the USSR, the Communist Party

and the KGB in 1991, his destruction of the socialist economy with

“shock therapy” in 1992, and his outlawing of the Soviets in his

war with the Supreme Soviet in 1993. Not just the economy, but

the entire Russian/Soviet modernity was treated with “shock

therapy.” Yeltsin’s anti-communist revolution of the early 1990s

was a demolition of the structures of Russian/Soviet modernity, a

perpetual crisis management in which Yeltsin himself excelled and

survived against all odds. 

The attempted revolution ended with an Eliotian “whimper” and

dissolved in an inherent Russian entropy. The end of Yeltsin’s first

presidential term (1994-1996) and his entire second term (1996-

1999) were plagued by incompetence: a mismanaged and

eventually lost war in Chechnya and the emergence of a corrupt

oligarchic regime. The nation faced an atomized, but still

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28
paternalistic society; a ruined, partly de-industrialized but largely

unreformed economy; a decentralized but unsustainable

federation; and a pluralistic but illiberal polity. In the end, Yeltsin

had failed to address the key problem of Russian modernity: the

big, corrupted state. 

Still, two unsuccessful exit strategies attempted from the mid1980s to the mid-1990s, Gorbachev’s evolution and Yeltsin’s

revolution, instilled awareness of a systemic crisis and of the

necessity for structural change. The strategies had questioned the

tenets of Russia’s modern self-perception as a superpower and a

territorial giant, and initiated a critical reassessment of Russia’s

role in world affairs. Various intellectual parties had provided

different responses, from integration to isolationism, from

liberalism to Eurasianism, but there had been a shared sentiment

that from shaping the world, Russia should turn to adapting to the

external environment. At modernity’s end, Russia faced the

challenge of adapting to globalization. 

This was the agenda of Vladimir Putin, the new leader who was

symbolically anointed president by the outgoing Boris Yeltsin on

the last day of the past millennium, 31 December 1999. Analyzing

Putin’s agenda, Peter Rutland observed that his task was

to adapt the Russian state to the challenges of the global

environment: to “customize” global practices and

requirements to suit Russian conditions. . . . All around the

world, national leaders have been struggling to protect

vulnerable social groups and preserve national cultures

while adapting to the competitive pressures of the global

marketplace. In the East, it led to the opening of China and

sparked the “Asian values” debate. In the West, it caused

liberals and socialists to embrace free trade and fiscal

conservatism. The “Putin enigma” can be understood as part

of an arc of political transformation that stretches from

Mohammed Mohatir and Deng Xiaoping to Tony Blair and

Bill Clinton.44

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29
Strategies of adaptation are crucial for understanding the Putin

project and the attendant change in Russian foreign policy. Foreign

policy emerges as the key area of transformation, positioned

between the modern, statist background and the postmodern global

setting. Part Two of the essay is devoted to the analysis of Russian

foreign policy at the point of exit from modernity.

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30
PART II. The Changing Landmarks 

of Foreign Policy

Imperatives of globalization

The complexity of Russia’s transformation blurs the

methodological border between domestic and foreign policy, the

inside and the outside. Internal actors, challenges and constraints

increasingly set the foreign policy agenda, while the external

environment increasingly shapes domestic identities and

responses. In this fluid environment, the meaning of security is

changing in Russia, moving from its modern, statist understanding

to new pluralistic discourses, stressing individual and group

security and global interdependence. Globalization has arrived in

Russia in unpredictable, and at times uncomfortable ways,

defining new imperatives for Russia’s world view, national

interest, security strategy and foreign policy. 

a. Resource imperative

Much of Russia’s modern history has been about the

acquisition, control and maintenance of resources, including the

landmass (which also meant strategic depth), size of the

population, natural resources, and industrial and technological

potential. The rituals of national security were rooted in the

mythology of “inexhaustible” resources, as demonstrated by

defeat of the Poles in the seventeenth century, the Swedes in the

eighteenth, the French in the nineteenth, and the Germans in the

twentieth centuries. Especially in the latter two instances, key

factors were territorial depth, severity of the climate, and

mobilization of large masses of the population, including local

resistance to invaders in the case of Napoleon in the nineteenth

century and Germany in the twentieth century. The strategic

Rethinking The National Interest

31
standoff during the Cold War, too, was to a large extent a contest

in resources.

At the end of modernity, Russia faces a double challenge.

Firstly, resources turned out to be finite. The linear growth of

quantitative factors–size of territory, industry, military expenditure, etc.–had natural limits, and had become unsustainable by

the late Soviet period. With the breakup of the USSR, the Russian

Federation retained about 60% of its territory and a little over 50%

of its population. In the years since the breakup, the Russian armed

forces have been reduced to less than a third of the former Soviet

Army, and Russia’s share in the world GDP has fallen from 8 to

1.5%.45 Even if Russia manages to sustain the current annual

economic growth of 4 to 5%, increasing her share to 2% of the

world GDP is the best to be hoped for over the next 10 to 15 years.

In military terms, Russia not only spends less on defense than any

major NATO nation, but also less than China, India or Japan.

Russian foreign and security policy is experiencing an

environmental crisis of sorts; it is not sustainable given the limits

of growth and the scarcity of physical resources. 

Secondly, the meaning of resources has changed in today’s

world, and many of Russia’s traditional assets have lost

significance. One example is Russia’s strategic nuclear forces

(SNF). Theoretically, Russia is still able to maintain her nuclear

arsenal, but with each passing year, it is becoming more costly.

Today, the SNF account for about 15% of the defense budget, but

in just a decade they may consume up to 50% of the defense

expenditure, to the detriment of the conventional forces.46

Meanwhile, the mere possession of nuclear arms by Russia, be it

1,500, 3,500 or 5,000 warheads, did not prevent NATO’s war in

Yugoslavia in 1999, a Chechen incursion into Daghestan later the

same year, or the taking of 800 hostages in Moscow by Chechen

terrorists in October, 2002. This, in turn, raises the issue of the

quality and adequacy of Russia’s resources in world politics. Too

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32
many of them are based in traditional “hard power” and too few, in

“soft power” (economic leverage, political alliances, or diplomatic

activity).

As a matter of fact, as traditional power resources fail to

successfully address challenges, Russia’s major foreign policy

asset turns out to be of a virtual,

psychological nature. There is a

certain Russia-archetype, Russiamythology, in the West, a profoundly

geopolitical imagination of Russia.

Occupying vast, unimaginable expanses on the eastern fringes of

Europe, over the centuries Russia has turned into a psychological

problem for the West. The unpredictable Russian space, with

steppes and Tartars, Tsars and the GULAG, has always been off

limits for Western rationalism. Brewing chaos and trouble, Russia

aroused an anxiety complex in the Western psyche that eventually

buried Russia deep into the subconsciousness of the West.47 In

redressing the perennial opposition between Us and Them, the Ego

and the Id, West and East, Europe and Asia, the West makes a

symbolic investment of its fear of the Other in the mythical space

of Russia, imagining Russia as a geopolitical rival even as this

country is experiencing economic and military decline. 

One example is a story of a small Russian reconnaissance ship

Liman–a 30-year-old, 60-man electronic spying vessel from the

Black Sea Fleet, a converted fishing boat, carrying eavesdropping

gear but no rockets, that was dispatched to the Adriatic with an

intelligence mission in the early days of the 1999 NATO war in

Kosovo. For several days, a small ship was making big waves,

staying in the limelight of the global media as a token of “Russia’s

response” to NATO attacks. One could not fail to notice the stark

contrast between the inflated geopolitical expectations and images

of Russia’s traditional military power and the modest size and

Rethinking The National Interest

33

For the first time in

modern history,

Russia does not have

the resources to

match her traditional

global role. 
mission of the ship, which disappeared from the front pages soon

after its passage through the Bosporus and Dardanelles. 

Other than the residual psychological levers, for the first time in

her modern history, Russia does not have the resources to match

her traditional global role. However, the change in foreign policy

has been too profound to explain it by the simple reasons of

resource scarcity; even if, hypothetically, Russia reclaimed the

resources comparable to those controlled by the Soviet Union at

the peak of its power, her foreign policy would have fundamentally

differed from the Soviet one. The transformation concerns the deep

grammar of Russian foreign policy, and is primarily driven by

domestic concerns. 

b. Domestic imperative 

Geopolitical reasoning had always been the central part of

Russia’s internal regime, subordinating domestic politics and

dictating the mobilization of domestic resources. Very often,

foreign policy goals would dictate a softening or a hardening of the

internal regime. In short, this was a country catering to its external

mission.

The situation started to change in the late 1980s, and especially

after the breakup of the Soviet Union, as domestic concerns

became prevalent and foreign policy, ancillary. The changing

attitude was formulated by Alexander Solzhenitsyn who, in his

1990 “tentative proposal,” Rebuilding Russia, spoke of the

necessity to “concentrate” the nation, abandoning far-reaching

foreign policy designs for the sake of internal development.48

There are two main factors underlying the “domestication” of

Russian foreign policy: a mental change and a regime change.

Psychologically, there has been a partial deterritorialization of the

post-Soviet mind. Before, the average Soviet citizen took special

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34
pride in the fact that the USSR’s territory constituted “one sixth of

the world’s landmass,” as official propaganda put it, and identified

him/herself with the territorial grandeur and integrity. As a series

of crises unfolded in the 1980s and 1990s, the territory began to

lose its sacred meaning and started to be looked upon in functional

terms: is it useful, cost-effective and sustainable? 

Obviously, this is still a trend going against the grain of 500

years of territorial thinking, but some observations from the 1990s

are indicative. For instance, public sentiment showed an

overwhelming equanimity with respect to the loss of “traditionally

Russian” territories like Crimea or North Kazakhstan with the

breakup of the USSR in 1991. Likewise, the electorate was

generally willing to “give up” Chechnya in exchange for peace

during the first Chechen war in 1994-1996. Finally, the elites and

the wider public have been unwilling to bear the economic cost of

reunification with the “brother people” of Belarus in the past

years. 

Secondly, the past decade’s transformation entailed the

emergence of a specific national capitalism, permeated by

economic interests and pressure groups, and largely integrated into

the global market. Russia’s entire

transition, including privatization,

democratization and social change, was

“appropriated” by powerful economic

groups like the oil and gas industry, the

banking and financial elite, the metal

industry, the defense sector, the

industrial-nuclear complex and a few

others. These groups, along with the security agencies (siloviki)

and the state bureaucracy, are setting the new rules of the game. In

this sense, Russian foreign policy is mostly “objective,” defined by

internal economic variables and a pronounced domestic interest in

preserving the new rules of the game. Even if economic interests

Rethinking The National Interest

35

The backbone of

Russia’s integration

into the world

economy is truba

(“the pipe”), making

her essentially a

“petro-state.”
are not always directly translated into foreign policy acts (e.g., in

Russian foreign policy towards the Caspian region or towards

Iraq), they create a de-ideologized, pragmatic context of policymaking, rendering Russian foreign policy more predictable.

Gazprom’s strategic interests in Western markets may not directly

shape Russian foreign policy, but paraphrasing the old adage about

General Motors, “what is good for Gazprom is good for Russia.”

c. Economic imperative 

Parallel to the “domestication,” Russian foreign policy has been

substantially “economized” in the past decade. This is not an

entirely new phenomenon. Ever since the decision to export oil to

the West in 1958 and gas in the early 1970s, the Soviet Union had

been a prime exporter of oil and other raw materials on the world

market. The production of nuclear and chemical weapons, the

precarious functioning of the late Soviet economy, Brezhnev’s

“social contract” and stagnant domestic stability were purchased

with petrodollars, some $200 billion earned from oil exports

between 1973 and 1985 alone.49 At the same time, the Soviet

Union had long been an exporter of capital. Soviet support of the

communist regimes or trade between COMECON countries based

on distorted prices can be seen as an indirect form of capital

outflow.50 In this sense, Soviet foreign policy had been at least

partially guided by external trade patterns, if not contingent on the

economic imperatives (certainly not at home!)

After the Soviet collapse, the economic variable became

prominent in foreign policy. The Russian economy has been much

more closely integrated into the global market through various

interfaces from the state level to increasingly the private level,

from the trade in oil and raw materials to the mass consumption of

imported goods, capital flight or the export of human capital. The

difference from the Soviet period is the extent of domestic political

commitment to external trade; at stake are not just the interests of

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36
the constitutive elites of the regime, such as the oil and banking

sectors, but the new social contract involving the mass consumer,

the shuttle trader (chelnok) making shopping runs across the

border, the travel agent and his clients–in short, a new post-Soviet

vibrant class that has made the transition and the economic

recovery possible and that can only operate in the open economy. 

The backbone of Russia’s integration into the world economy is

truba (“the pipe”), making her essentially a “petro-state.”51 The

broadly understood petro-sector accounts for about 40% of federal

government revenues and 25% of the GDP.52 Russia is the world’s

third largest oil producer and second largest exporter. She has 33%

of the world’s natural gas reserves and provides 40% of Europe’s

natural gas needs.53 Since September 2001, Russia has been

regularly invited to attend OPEC meetings, as that organization

struggles to coordinate a global reduction in production. Among

those nations not belonging to OPEC, Russia is considered a key

force in influencing world prices for oil.

Other forms of interdependence include the return of Western

investors to the rejuvenated Russian stock market (RTS), which

has fully recovered from the shock of August 1998 and performed

impressively in 2002 and 2003 against the backdrop of global

recession; capital export from Russia at the rate of $15-$20 billion

per year (in 2002-2003 the rate is estimated to have declined to

under $1 billion per month); and export of human capital. One

should mention a crucial social role played by the import of fastmoving consumer goods (20 major regions import about 40% of

all goods)54 and unique models of cross-border trade providing

employment and daily subsistence for millions of people in border

territories, particularly in the Far East and Northwestern Russia. 

Rethinking The National Interest

37
d. Institutional imperative

The new Russian foreign policy is staged against a backdrop of

increasing global and regional integration and the emergence of

international institutions as key actors in world affairs. Russian

identity politics differ from post-Communist transitions in most of

Eastern and Central Europe where policies of integration are

driven by an identity deficit, fear of the East and aspirations for the

West. By contrast, in Russia there is no perceived necessity of, or

indeed a domestic consensus about, the integration of the country.

Rather, Russia has to position herself with respect to the integration

outside her borders. In the past decade, Russian foreign policy has

been increasingly conceived and executed in terms of international

organizations, resulting in the institutionalization of Russian

foreign policy thinking.

This situation is new, compared to modern Russian and Soviet

history. Russia, a quintessential sovereign, had never pursued

integration; politics ranged from conquest and incorporation (into

the Russian Empire or into the USSR) to imperial domination

(within the Warsaw Pact and/or COMECON). The integration in

the post-World War II world was happening beyond, in spite of,

and often against the Soviet Union. 

In a major policy change, in the first years after the collapse of

the USSR, Russia sought to join various international institutions.

In May 1992 Russia joined the IMF and in June 1992, the World

Bank. At that time, the ideas of EU and NATO membership for

Russia were aired in the highest echelons of power in Russia. In

February 1996 Russia joined the Council of Europe, and in May

1997 the Russia-NATO Founding Act was signed in Paris,

producing a unique formula of 16+1 (19+1 as three new members

joined NATO in March 1999), which at the Rome summit in May

2002 was replaced by the formula “at 20.” In December 1997,

following three years of disputes over the war in Chechnya, the EU

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38
and Russia enacted the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement

(PCA). Russia is currently in the final stage of accession talks to

WTO, after which she is planning to apply for OECD

membership. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001 and her

response to the global war on terrorism, Russia, with support from

President Bush, has improved her standing within the G8. 

Post-Soviet institutions offer additional examples. Although the

Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was initially

conceived as merely an “instrument of civilized divorce” of the

former Soviet republics, it inaugurated a multilateral framework,

along with the 1992 Tashkent Treaty on Collective Security. Albeit

loose and non-binding, this framework has become an important

vehicle for Russian foreign policy. Even before the terrorist attacks

of 9/11, Russia started using the CIS for promoting her role as a

Eurasian regional leader in the fight against terrorism. For

example, Russia inaugurated the CIS Anti-Terrorist Center.55

Even when external integration and institutions were perceived

to be against Russia’s interest, Russia maintained an institutional

dialogue under the most adverse circumstances, as was the case

with NATO. On the one hand, the two waves of NATO

enlargement and the war in Kosovo have largely alienated Russian

public opinion from the West. But on the other hand, these

contentious issues have created a unique NATO-Russia

institutional framework, which, paradoxically, became one of

Russia’s key interfaces with the West. Despite multiple

differences, Russia was engaged in North Atlantic Cooperation

Council (NACC) and Partnership for Peace (PfP); in the

Implementation Force (IFOR) and Stabilization Force (SFOR) in

Bosnia, and in Kosovo Force (KFOR); in the Permanent Joint

Council (PJC) and currently in the NATO-Russia Council.

Through the 1990s, there was a continuous NATO-Russia

institutional buildup; in fact, much of Russia’s relations with the

West were conceived within, and channeled into, multilateral

Rethinking The National Interest

39
structures. The NATO-Russia interaction illustrated a paradigm

shift in Russian security thinking: while in the old (modern)

pattern, Russia deplored her alleged strategic losses, in the new

institutional pattern she experienced the policy of multilateral

partnership, even without the prospect of membership. 

The institutional imperative is also a normative imperative,

since most of the integration to which Russia is exposed occurs

within the West, and is part of the Western moral hegemony, a new

normative discourse of power. Russia’s stated adherence to the

values of democracy has little to do with her liberal idealism of the

early 1990s, but rather is a pragmatic approach in which accepting

dominant Western norms has a long-term strategic value, a means

of advancing the national interest. 

The 1990s: A catastrophe that wasn’t 

There are many ways to look at Russian foreign policy of the

past decade. Realist die-hards in the West and traditional Russiacritics in countries of the former Soviet empire see Russia’s policy

as a strategic retreat, a regrouping of forces during a period of

decline, just to re-emerge later in her habitual, imperial self.

Among other things, they cite two wars in Chechnya, assertiveness

in the “near abroad,” and Russia’s opposition to NATO

enlargement. A new school of Russia-skeptics emerged in the late

1990s, partly in response to the August 1998 financial crisis, and

the Bank of New York scandal later the same year. This initiated a

“who lost Russia” debate (especially aimed against the Russiapolicy of the outgoing Clinton administration–see e.g. the Cox

Commission Report to the US Congress in September 2000).

Some even contemplated the possibility of a “world without

Russia.”56

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40
Still, much depends on the perspective of the beholder. A series

of crises at the turn of the century may have been bad news, but

change in Russia in the past eleven years should also be judged in

comparison with 50 years of the Cold War, 70 years of Soviet

Communism, 300 years of the Russian Empire, and 500 years of

Russian modernity. In this metahistorical perspective, the

transformation in Russian foreign policy amounts to no less than a

revolution, one that occurred without war, occupation, or

incorporation into a dominant international regime, as happened in

Germany or Japan after World War II. The “silent revolution” was

not quite intended by most internal actors, nor has it yet been

conceptualized by professional Russia-watchers. 

The intellectual precursor of this revolution was Gorbachev’s

“New Thinking.” It came too early; it came laden with neoCommunist rhetoric; and it was not matched by adequate domestic

reform. Gorbachev’s project failed, but despite a series of domestic

crises and diplomatic collisions with the West which followed,

Russia has never veered off the course chosen in the late

Gorbachev and early Yeltsin periods; she has stayed within the

broad framework of cooperation with the West. Major adjustments

of foreign policy have certainly taken place, especially with regard

to the national-interest discourse, and to the ideas of derzhavnost’

(a “great power” stance), but the outlines of foreign and security

policy have remained unchanged through the 1990s, as Russia

increasingly opened up to various forms of dialogue, norms and

institutions. 

Painful as it was, Russia’s post-imperial transformation has been

surprisingly stable, especially compared to what had been

predicted in the early and mid-1990s.57 Recalling these doomsday

scenarios, it is interesting to define Russian foreign policy through

what it was not. Isolation from the West and revision of arms

control agreements, obstruction of international institutions and

neo-imperialism in the CIS, power projection in the Baltic states

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41
and East Central Europe, risky schemes in the Third World (like

proliferation of WMD) and other calamities forecasted and

anticipated in the West were actually never entertained in Moscow

as feasible policy options. From a Realist point of view, Russia’s

policy of the 1990s had been truly disappointing. Russia pursued

no “grand strategies,” no Gromyko-type power brokering, no

nuclear escapades: nothing but retrenchment, adaptation and

pragmatism. A surprise night rush of 200 Russian paratroopers

from SFOR in Bosnia to the Pristina airport in Kosovo ahead of

NATO forces in June 1999 was probably the high point of Russia’s

defiance of the West. 

In other words, there had been a discrepancy between the West’s

expectations of trouble on the Russia front (exacerbated by a series

of disputes, e.g. over NATO enlargement and the war in Kosovo)

that conceivably could have prompted Russia’s hostility and a

much more innocuous reality, perpetually returning to the

mundane business of negotiating IMF loans and Russia’s debt

rollover. 

In the 1990s, relations between Russia and the West had

withstood several demanding tests, each of which had inadvertently added positive value, reaffirming the mechanisms of

cooperation. The longest of these tests was the first wave of NATO

enlargement, designed and debated between 1993 and 1997. The

long and painful bargaining with Russia and within the Atlantic

Alliance, resulting in Russia’s grudging consent and in the May

1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, was often interpreted as a

geopolitical zero-sum game which Russia had “lost.” However, in

the terms of institutional politics, the outcome was not so simple.

In spite of Russia’s protests and unenthusiastic consent to the

enlargement, the whole debate had created a unique institutional

framework allowing Russia a bigger place and voice in European

affairs. With the cooperation of leading NATO actors, Russia had

become a major variable in the enlargement story–indeed, in

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42
European security at large. What mattered here was not the result

(enlargement in spite of Russia), but the process through which

Russia became engaged. 

Further into the decade, relations between Russia and the West

took further “crash tests,” including the August 1998 financial

crisis in Russia and the 1999 NATO war in Kosovo. As far as the

1998 crisis is concerned, the financial collapse highlighted the

overall systemic crisis in Russia and indicated the limited domestic

resources for the projection of “national interests” in foreign

policy. The crisis was precipitated by the “Asian flu” (the escape

of portfolio investors from the emerging markets) and a dramatic

fall in the world oil prices to levels

below Russia’s production costs.

Thus it not only defined the

parameters of decreasing state

capacity in Russia, but also

underscored Russia’s growing

dependence on the global financial

and raw materials markets. Russia

found herself integrated into the

world economy to a greater, and

riskier, extent than had been envisaged by the masterminds of the

Soviet oil policy in the 1970s and 1980s and by the architects of

the Russian financial markets in the 1990s. The 1998 crisis

emphasized the fact that Russian foreign policy is staged under the

conditions of limited economic sovereignty of the nation. 

It is remarkable that despite the early fears and serious fallout for

the Western investors, the 1998 crisis did not derail the entire

framework of Russia’s relations with the West, nor did it seriously

destabilize Russian domestic politics. On the contrary, the crisis

accelerated structural reform of the Russian economy, ridding it of

a large part of parasitical financial institutions, giving the ruble a

realistic valuation, stimulating import substitution and supporting

Rethinking The National Interest

43

The transformation in

Russian foreign policy

amounts to no less

than a revolution, one

that occurred without

war, occupation, or

incorporation into a

dominant international

regime.
domestic industry. By spring 1999, the economy had been

showing early signs of recovery and cooperation with the

International Financial Institutions had resumed. 

While the 1998 crisis had shown the limits of Russia’s economic sovereignty, the 1999 war in Kosovo marked the limits of

Russian foreign policy, which now had to be positioned within a

dominant global discourse, the “New World Order.” On the one

hand, the Kosovo war had caused some immediate damage in

Russia’s relationship with the West. It provided a basis for the

consolidation of the Russian political class and a large part of the

population on an anti-Western platform, playing directly into the

hands of the Communists and nationalists. Acts of protest in March

and April 1999 included spontaneous mass demonstrations at the

US embassy in Moscow, recruiting volunteers to fight in Serbia,

and threats (voiced mainly in the State Duma) to supply arms to

Milosevic and to re-target Russian tactical nuclear missiles to

NATO countries. 

However, by May 1999 the nationalist fever had all but calmed

down. Admitting to the impossibility of opposing the West or

halting NATO bombing, Russia had taken a sensible wait-and-see

approach, criticizing NATO’s action, and gradually resuming

cooperation with the West–both in brokering the Kosovo peace

deal and in financial matters. At the end of the day, Russia proved

disinclined to neo-imperialist temptations and remained unlikely to

slide into isolationism and confrontation with the West even under

the most adverse circumstances. Russia was disturbed but not

displaced. An ailing giant was certainly irritated, but did not care

to move.

The events of the 1990s showed the limited role of the Russian

state with regard to transnational forces, be they the global

financial markets or an expanding NATO. The 1998 financial

crisis highlighted Russia’s economic dependence, while NATO

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44
enlargement and the 1999 Kosovo war showed Russia’s

geopolitical predicament. In other words, the 1998 crisis

demonstrated that Russia is irresistibly drawn (or “seduced”) into

the world of geo-economy, and NATO enlargement and the

Kosovo war illustrated that Russia is losing her traditional role in

the world of geopolitics. Taken together, these developments

mapped Russia’s gradual drift from geopolitics to geo-economy.

This move is far from complete but it has already progressed far

enough to keep Russia anchored in a cooperative framework at the

margin of Western institutions and to guarantee against the

temptations of isolationism and confrontation.58

Putin’s new course 

In the new millennium, two major factors have shaped relations

between Russia and the West. First was Vladimir Putin’s accession

to power in Russia. (He served as prime minister beginning in

August 1999, as acting president beginning in January 2000, and

as elected president since May 2000). He has pursued radical

economic and administrative reform at home and rapprochement

with the West in foreign policy. The second factor was the

September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States and

the onset of the global war on terrorism, which so far has been

defining the presidency of George W. Bush. 

At the beginning, Putin appeared by no means a likely candidate to pursue the policies of rapprochement. A KGB veteran

whose sky-rocketing popularity at home was boosted by the

second war in Chechnya, his accession to power was met with

wide skepticism in the West, especially as far as foreign policy was

concerned. But as months went by, much to the surprise of

observers, Putin started pursuing a vigorous policy of cooperation

with Europe and the United States. 

Rethinking The National Interest

45
Putin’s foreign policy agenda has been dictated by domestic

concerns, an awareness of the systemic crisis (after all, the default

of August 1998 was only one year in the past), and a sense of the

competitive pressures of globalization. His approach was based on

a link between domestic and foreign policy: Putin needed to ensure

Western support for domestic reforms, creating a friendly and

predictable external environment and showing Russia to be a

trustworthy actor in world affairs. 

By this, he could follow up on Russian foreign policy’s “silent

revolution” of the 1990s. Ambiguous and incomplete as it was, this

revolution provided a set of institutional and psychological bonds

between Russia and the West. Overcoming ambiguity, Putin aimed

at anchoring Russia firmly within the West and abandoning the

rhetoric of a “multipolar world,” an official Russian foreign policy

discourse in previous years. Putin’s course crystallized the

evolution of Russia’s foreign policy since 1992 towards a

pragmatic centrist consensus–with ’Russia-First’ as the objective

and active engagement as the means.59

Putin’s policy of opening up towards the West extended over a

broad range of issues, crossing all lines in the sand and making

concessions that were hitherto

unimaginable–from dismissing

the US withdrawal from the

ABM Treaty in late 2001 as

“no threat to Russian security”

to taking a reserved attitude

towards the second wave of

NATO enlargement in 2004. In

sensitive areas of the “near abroad,” Putin did not raise

objections to US troops stationed in Central Asia to wage war in

Afghanistan in 2001 or to the dispatch of US special forces to

Georgia in 2002 to train and equip local troops for counterterrorism operations. In further areas of former geopolitical

Sergei Medvedev

46

The events of the 1990s

showed the limited role of

the Russian state with

regard to transnational

forces, be they the global

financial markets or an

expanding NATO.
rivalry, Russia withdrew from strategically insignificant but

symbolically important military bases in Cam Rahn, Vietnam, and

Lourdes, Cuba, in 2001. 

Relations with the European Union and especially Russian

views on European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP), initially

somewhat suspicious, have been improving since the Paris

Summit of October 2000. A compromise solution on Kaliningrad,

which Russia and EU reached at the Copenhagen Summit in

November 2002, signaled Russia’s readiness to abandon a purely

geopolitical interpretation of Kaliningrad, a key security area, for

the sake of wider dialogue with the EU. (According to the

agreement, Russian citizens will need transit visas to travel from

the “mainland” into the exclave through the territory of the future

EU member, Lithuania).

An even more significant change has taken place in NATORussia relations during Putin’s presidency, as symbolized by

Russia’s consent to the second wave of NATO enlargement, which

included the Baltic states. After restoring full dialogue with NATO

in February 2000, during the Russian-Finnish summit in Helsinki

in April 2001, Putin stated that although integration of the Baltic

states into NATO would not increase regional stability, such a

decision was a sovereign right of each individual nation. Later the

same year, he indicated to NATO Secretary General Lord

Robertson that, while disapproving of NATO enlargement into the

Baltic states, he would not invest any political capital into

opposing this move.60 In 2002, NATO-Russia rapprochement was

further enhanced at the Reykjavik summit of May 14-15, while the

creation of the NATO-Russia Council in Rome on May 28, 2002

integrated Russia into NATO structures and decision-making as

fully as possible short of actual membership.61 The first meeting of

the Council “at 20” between Russia and 19 NATO nations took

place in Moscow in May 2003. 

Rethinking The National Interest

47
A more formidable challenge for Putin’s new course had been

presented by the Iraq conundrum: the buildup to the war; the

diplomacy at the UN Security Council in late 2002 and early 2003;

and the war itself in late March and April 2003. On the surface, it

seemed that Russia had given up the post-9/11 strategic partnership

with the United States (and ruined a newly discovered friendship

between Putin and Britain’s Tony Blair in the process) by joining

forces with France and Germany in staunch opposition to use of

military force in Iraq. However, Putin was performing a much

more complex balancing act. On the one hand, he was trying to

appeal to an overwhelmingly anti-war and anti-American Russian

electorate, to appease Russia’s security elite which had become

outright hostile to the US, and to appear to be in solidarity with

Germany and France. On the other hand, he strove to preserve the

basics of the strategic relationship with the US. 

Indeed, Putin has succeeded in walking a fine line. He saved

face at home and in Europe by opposing the war, but also stayed

within limits of what the US seemed ready to tolerate. Despite all

the brouhaha around the expected Franco-Russian veto in the

Security Council, Russia was never really going to spearhead the

veto motion and indicated so to the United States. On the contrary,

much less publicized visits by foreign policy masterminds

Alexander Voloshin to Washington and Condoleezza Rice to

Moscow during the peak of the war in Iraq served to patch up the

torn fabric of the relationship. A symbolic “reconciliation”

occurred at the Putin-Bush summit in St. Petersburg in May 2003

where both leaders reconfirmed the long-term value of USRussian partnership. 

The turning points of Putin’s new course were the terrorist

attacks of 9/11 and the US-led war on terrorism. These events

opened new, as yet unforeseen, avenues for cooperation between

Russia and the West. Putin’s support for the United States in the

past two years ranged from the telephone call to President Bush in

Sergei Medvedev

48
the first hours after the attack to express Russia’s solidarity with

the United States to diplomatic support of the US war in

Afghanistan; from non-interference in a security relationship of the

United States with Central Asia (until recently considered Russia’s

“soft underbelly”) to US-Russian reconciliation after the war in

Iraq. The terrorist attack in Moscow in late October 2002, when a

group of Chechen suicide bombers held about 800 people hostage

at the Nord-Ost musical, has further strengthened Russia’s

alignment with the war on terrorism and strategic partnership with

the US. (Europe’s reaction to Russia’s hostage rescue operation in

which over 120 hostages as well as all terrorists were killed was

much more mixed). 

As a matter of fact, Putin’s policy of rapprochement started

before September 11th and accelerated in response to the terrorist

attacks in the United States. Having been through two wars in

Chechnya and having opposed Islamic extremism on the TajikAfghan border for a decade, 9/11 hardly changed anything in

Russia’s appreciation of security threats and desired partners;

rather, it became a “moment of truth” for the West, which came to

realize the change that had been incrementally taking place in

Russia over the past decade. As Dov Lynch has put it,

On 11 September, Western interests changed; Russia’s

didn’t. Putin’s bid to anchor Russia into the EuroAtlantic community started before the terrorist attacks.

11 September served, first, to accelerate the pace of

Russian movement and, second, to ease the West’s

receptivity to Russian advances. . . . The global war on

terrorism has represented an opportunity for Moscow to

ally itself with the Euro-Atlantic community around a

common, and thankfully vague, threat. Russian

differences with the West have not gone away; simply,

Putin has decided that they are best resolved with Russia

comfortably inside the tent rather than with one foot

jammed in the doorway.62

Rethinking The National Interest

49
Which West to join?

The current policy of rapprochement reopens the perennial

question of Russia’s relationship to the West. A key problem

between Russia and the West has always been the incongruity and

asynchronicity of development on both sides. For most of her

modern history, at least since Peter the Great, Russia has been

trailing and emulating the West. The Russian periphery of Europe,

remote yet engaged, jealous of the West yet proud of itself, has

always embarked upon belated modernization: trying to catch up,

but arriving too late.

Putin’s westward movement is yet another in a series of reforms undertaken every several decades in an attempt to close the

gap between civilizations. The effects of

reform have been particularly noticeable

in Russia’s foreign and security policy.

As a result of the “silent revolution” in

foreign policy over the past fifteen years,

and of Putin’s strategic realignment,

Russia is evolving towards a Western

security community which Robert Cooper has called a postmodern

system, “the post-imperial, postmodern states who no longer think

of security primarily in terms of conquest.” 63 Is there a possibility

of a rare moment of convergence between Russia and the West,

based on a common understanding of security?

Such optimism may be premature. As Russia is shedding the

institutional and psychological structures of imperialism and

modernity in an attempt to align with the “postmodern West,” the

West has unexpectedly turned out to be not quite so postmodern

after all and no longer a monolithic whole. This became evident at

the beginning of the new millennium, largely in response to the

terrorist attacks of 9/11, as two vastly different security polities

have taken shape in Europe and the United States. 

Sergei Medvedev

50

Today, the question

is, which West does

Russia want to be:

the West of Hobbes

or the West of

Kant?
Russia is suddenly facing a transatlantic divide, created by

different political cultures and diverging social paths in Europe and

the United States. According to an often quoted line by Robert

Kagan, “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus:”

Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little

differently, it is moving beyond power into a selfcontained world of laws and rules and transnational

negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a posthistorical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the

realization of Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace.’ The United

States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising

power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where

international laws and rules are unreliable and where

true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal

order still depend on the possession and use of

military might.64

The divide in strategic cultures, accentuated by 9/11 and

different approaches to war on terrorism, can be

conceptualized in terms of modern and postmodern. US

security discourses are still firmly based on the modern

understanding of state sovereignty, borders, and foreign policy

as the projection of force. The epitome of the US belief in

sovereignty and physical impenetrability of the national body

is the plan for the National Missile Defense, an essentially

modern project of resistance against challenges from a

globalizing world. 

While United States is at war, Europe remains largely at peace:

across the ocean, the EU polity is predominantly post-modern,

post-sovereign and post-heroic–based on the “rejection of force,”65

and indeed on a rejection of indigenous foreign policy as such.

With the exception of France and Britain, European states are

increasingly displaying the propensity to “outsource” their foreign

and security policy to the US. The European criticisms of the

excesses of US power are therefore largely misguided, as

Rethinking The National Interest

51
Europeans seem to miss the paradox: that their passage into posthistory has depended on the United States not making the same

passage. Meanwhile, “Americans apparently feel no resentment at

not being able to enter a ‘postmodern’ utopia.”66

This difference was put in even starker relief by the failure of the

idealistic project of the 1990s in the United States symbolized by

President Bill Clinton and by the politics of informationalism,

globalization, democratization and Wilsonian liberalism. As the

“New Economy” bubble burst on Wall Street and the towers of the

World Trade Center came tumbling down a few blocks away, the

US was left with the naked truth of national interest, and with

power politics as the immediate means. 

The transatlantic rift may not run as deep as some alarmists

suggest (see e.g. Charles Kupchan’s “End of the West” 67),

especially considering the existential unity of the Western

civilization rooted in the common values and beliefs that will

probably never allow for a “continental drift” of irreversible,

tectonic proportions–but there is no denying the global bifurcation

into a Hobbesian world of modernity and a Kantian world of

postmodernity. This leaves Russia, seeking her own exits from

modernity and a common ground with the West, with an

uncomfortable dilemma. More than a century ago, in a poetic

comment on Russia’s quest of the East, the Russian poet and

philosopher Vladimir Soloviev asked Russia, 

O Rus’! In lofty premonition

You ponder a proud idea;

Which East do you want to be:

The East of Xerxes or of Christ?68

Soloviev referred to the choice between two faces of the East:

Asian despotism represented by Xerxes and Oriental spirituality

Sergei Medvedev

52
symbolized by Jesus. Today, however, the question is, which West

does Russia want to be: the West of Hobbes or the West of Kant?

The answer is ambiguous. Russia does not seem prepared–nor

is she willing–to make a final choice, and prefers playing on both

chessboards. As Graeme Herd and Ella Akerman have observed,

the fractures within the Euro-Atlantic community allow President

Putin, “the most consistent Westernizer since Catherine the Great,”

to choose which of the core values of a divided transatlantic

community Russia shares.69

Indeed, Russia interacts with both polities simultaneously,

speaking two different languages. In relations with Europe, the

name of the game is multilateralism, economics, and

desecuritization, as recent compromises with the EU over

Kaliningrad and with NATO over the second wave of enlargement

indicate. For all the talk of war in Kosovo and concern about the

NATO enlargement, no major threats are identified on the

European front where Russia evolves towards postmodern “soft

security,” normative discourses (e.g. in the Council of Europe), and

institution-building.

Relations with the United States are different. The evolution of

US security thinking after 9/11 has presented Russia with a

challenge of US unilateralism, but also allowed Moscow greater

flexibility in the formulation and conduct of its own foreign policy

and in recourse to traditional “hard security” instruments. As

Lynch has put it,

All the while since 11 September, Russia’s eyes, half

fascinated and half fearful with the dramatic US turn

towards unilateralism, have been fixed on Washington:

half fearful of the meaning of this surge for Russia, but

half fascinated also with the opportunities this opens for

Russia to pursue more openly, even more unilaterally, its

own interests.70

Rethinking The National Interest

53
The Nord-Ost hostage crisis in October 2002 and the subsequent

proposed changes in Russian security doctrine have revealed a

similarity between Russia and the United States in performing the

rituals of national security. On the day following the resolution of

the hostage crisis, President Putin issued a directive to Russia’s

Defense Minister, Sergei Ivanov, to draft amendments to the

January 2000 National Security Concept to adapt the armed forces

for counter-terrorist missions. 

Inside Russia, the planned changes provide for army units and

airborne troops to assist units of the Federal Security Service

(FSB) and Interior Ministry in interdicting terrorist groups.

Abroad, Russia tries to emulate the US model by justifying its right

to make preemptive strikes against terrorists and to engage in

extraterritorial law enforcement, first of all having in mind the

Pankisi gorge in Georgia, reportedly a hideout of the Chechen

terrorists.71 However, as the Romans said, Quod licet Jovi, non licet

bovi (“All that is allowed to Jupiter is not allowed to an ox”), and

further out-of-the-area strikes are highly problematic for Russia, so

the new security posture is likely to be “preemption lite.”

The Nord-Ost crisis has highlighted significant shifts in Russian

public consciousness similar to those in the US. Since 9/11 the US

has turned into a nation at war, preoccupied with homeland

defense and with the war on terrorism much more than with any

other issue, including the economic recession, as indicated by the

electorate agenda at the November 2002 mid-term elections. The

creation of the Department of Homeland Security in the US in

January 2003 was mirrored in the merger of several security

agencies in Russia in March 2003 under the auspices of the

powerful FSB. In both cases, the authorities cited the need to

consolidate and streamline the counter-terrorism campaign in

strikingly similar language. 

Sergei Medvedev

54
Conclusion. 

Moscow, Red Square, 2003

Putin’s foreign policy completes a cycle of the past 15 years and

challenges the entire strategic paradigm of Russian modernity.

According to modern thinking (which most of the Russian foreign

policy and security elite still harbor), territory was sacrosanct and

therefore strategic, while alliances, treaties and norms were

shifting and tactical. Putin seeks to reverse this paradigm,

regarding territory as a tactical resource and an alliance with the

security community of the West as a strategic goal. What his critics

at home bemoan as the “encirclement of Russia” and a geopolitical

catastrophe (NATO enlargement into the Baltic states; separation

from Kaliningrad by a visa barrier; deployment of US troops in

Afghanistan; US bases in Central Asia and special forces in

Georgia; a US war in Iraq and a possible wider, long-term US

presence in the Middle East), Putin regards as mere tactical

concessions, pawns in a larger strategic design. 

In doing so, he challenges the entire territorial paradigm, the

cornerstone of Russian modern history. In the past decade and a

half, Russia has been evolving towards a postmodern condition

that Paul Virilio called deterritorialization.

72 According to Gearóid

Ó Tuathail, it concerns

the rearranging and restructuring of spatial relations as a

consequence of the technological, material and

geopolitical transformations of the late twentieth

century. Deterritorialisation is the name given to the

problematic of territory losing its significance and power

in everyday life.73

Putin’s foreign policy can be interpreted as a move in this

direction. He attempts a reformulation of the national interest from

a spatial definition to a functional definition. For the first time in

Rethinking The National Interest

55
Russian history, national interest is not linked to sheer power and

territorial control, but rather to domestic reform, prosperity and

efficiency of governance. Putin still envisions Russia as a “power,”

but in a different sense; his policy is not pro-Western (as was

former Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Kozyrev’s, for example)

but pro-Russian, of a pragmatic variety. For Kozyrev, joining the

West was an ideological leap of faith; Putin’s policy of anchoring

is driven by enlightened self-interest: he needs the West for Russia

to succeed in a globalizing world. A black belt in judo, Putin

applies its philosophy: do not counter an overwhelming opponent,

but use his force to your own advantage. 

The pragmatic nature of Putin’s Westernization is underscored

by the fact that he pursues different agendas with different parts of

the West–Europe and the US–

trying to obtain maximum tactical

advantages on either side (as seen

in Russian maneuvers in the runup to, and during, the war in Iraq).

In issues of terrorism and

homeland security, Russian polity

and society seem to be closer to

the United States than to Europe.

One can see the emerging “arch of national interest” extending

from the United States to Russia, over the heads of disconcerted

Europeans. Russia tries to emulate the global posture of the US on

a smaller scale, at least in the east and south of the post-Soviet

space, accepting the role of United States’ junior partner in the war

on terrorism. Meanwhile, in Europe, Russia makes an emphasis on

trade, investment, institutional dialogue and cooperative

regionalism (e.g. on the issue of Kaliningrad). 

“Hard-security” affinity and partnership with the United States

and “soft-security” dialogue and institution-building with Europe–

such are the two faces of Putin’s Westernization. Like the West

Sergei Medvedev

56

For the first time in

Russian history, national

interest is not linked to

sheer power and

territorial control, but

rather to domestic

reform, prosperity and

efficiency of governance.
itself, Russia, too, is schizophrenically split between modernity

and post-modernity, national myths and globalization. Russian

space is vast and indiscriminate. It can accommodate a postmodern

Moscow, an odd mixture of Las Vegas and a European cultural

capital, and grim industrial towns built around (and decaying with)

Soviet-era factories. This dualism is discernible in Putin’s

approach: pursuing an essentially postmodern agenda (adaptation

to globalization), he often resorts to modern means (rebuilding the

state, resurrecting the narratives of national greatness). Russia is

preparing for entry into the WTO and at the same time reinstating

the old Soviet anthem; she is abandoning the death penalty while

pursuing a ruthless war in Chechnya. 

Time and again, the paradox of Russia’s evolution, caught

between geopolitics and geo-economy, national interest and

globalization, is represented by a universal Russian icon, St.

Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square. St. Basil’s, too, defies historical

categorizations and architectural styles, simultaneously appearing

Muscovite and Asiatic, sacred and ironic, traditional and

postmodern. 

The coeval of Russian modernity, St. Basil’s was built by the

precursor of the Russian Empire, Ivan the Terrible, and was

preserved by a curator of the Soviet Empire, Josef Stalin.

According to an anecdote, it was earmarked for demolition in the

mid-1930s to allow for easier passage of armored units through

Red Square during military parades, but at a planning meeting over

the renovation of Red Square, Stalin placed a model of the

Cathedral back into its original position, thus cutting short any

further discussion on the subject. 

Over the centuries, St. Basil’s stood witness to a tumultuous

history. It was desecrated by the Poles in 1611, by the French in

1812 (they turned it into a stable), and stripped of its crosses and

bells by the Bolsheviks in 1920. Apparitions of the Tsar, and

Rethinking The National Interest

57
executions of the prisoners of state (like the executions of the

streltsy, an elite military corps that staged a mutiny against Peter

the Great) in front of its walls in the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries gave way to a lively marketplace in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, and to May Day parades in the twentieth

century. On August 25, 1968 eight Soviet citizens protested against

the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in front of St. Basil’s.

In 1987, a German amateur pilot, Mathias Rust, flew undetected

all the way from Hamburg and landed his Cessna outside the

Cathedral, much to the joy of tourists and to the confusion of

Soviet air defenses. 

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, pro-democracy rallies

convened behind St. Basil’s, and in October 2002, during the

Nord-Ost hostage crisis, relatives of the hostages demonstrated

there, calling to meet the demands of the terrorists and to end the

war in Chechnya. 

Today St. Basil’s serves as a backdrop for rock concerts, like the

one by Paul McCartney in May 2003, for festivals of street

basketball, and for occasional performances by radical artists that

are promptly intercepted by the Red Square police. Layers of

history have built up like fanciful decorations on its walls, each

century adding a new chapel and a new look, turning St. Basil’s

into a palimpsest, a postmodern pastiche, rather than a symbol of

modernity. Having lost its sacral power over the Russian space, St.

Basil’s has turned into a working model of Russian time, a quote

from itself, a representation of a modern Russia, which has

probably ended, and of a postmodern Russia that is waiting to

happen. ■

Sergei Medvedev

58
Endnotes

Special thanks to Gary Guertner, Paul Holman, Pavel Baev,

Peter Rutland, Andrey Ryabov, Pertti Joenniemi, Graeme Herd

and Robin Milner-Gulland for comments and suggestions on the

draft of this essay.

1

According to an apocryphal story, Ivan the Terrible ordered the

architects to be blinded on completion of the construction, so that

the perfection of their work could never be repeated.

2

Milner-Gulland, Robin, “Symbolic Landscapes in Muscovite

Russia”, in R.Reid et al. (eds) Structure and Tradition in Russian

Society–a Festschrift for Yuriy Lotman, Slavica Helsingiana 14,

Helsinki, 1994. Of today’s eleven chapels of the Cathedral, the

tenth and eleventh were added in the late sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries.

3

A comprehensive definition of modernity was suggested by the

sociologist Zygmunt Bauman who argued that modernity is a

constant struggle to eliminate blank spaces–in one’s world view, or

on the political map: “The typically modern practice, the substance

of modern politics, of modern intellect, of modern life, is the effort

to exterminate ambivalence: an effort to define precisely–and to

suppress or eliminate everything that could not or would not be

precisely defined. Modern practice is not aimed at the conquest of

foreign lands, but at the filling of the blank spots in the compleat

mappa mundi.” (Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and Ambivalence.

Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, pp. 7-8). From Kant’s answer to

the question “What is Enlightenment?” through Adorno and

Horkheimer’s re-definition of “modern Enlightenment” to

Lyotard’s deconstruction of, and Habermas’ passionate defense of

modernity, vast literature exists on the political dimension of

modernity. See: Kant, Immanuel. “Beantwortung der Frage: was

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59
ist Aufklärung?,” in Werke in sechs Bänden, ed. by Wilhelm

Weischedel, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellshaft, 1966,

Vol. VI: Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtphilosophie und

Pädogogik, pp. 53-61; Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno.

Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente.

Amsterdam: Querido, 1947 (first published 1944); Lyotard, JeanFrançois. La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savior. Paris:

Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979; Habermas, Jürgen. “Die Moderne–

ein unvollendetes Projekt,” in Kleine politische Schriften (I-IV).

Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981, pp. 444-64; Gellner, Ernest.

Nations and Nationalisms. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988; Frisby,

David. Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the

Work of Simmel, Kacauer and Benjamin. Cambridge: Polity Press,

1985; Berman, Marshall. All that is Solid Melts into Air: The

Experience of Modernity. London: Verso, 1983. 

4

Raeff, Marc. The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and

Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia,

1600-1800. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983.

5

Kotilaine, Jarmo and Marshall Poe, “Modernization in the Early

Modern Context: The Case of Muscovy,” in Kotilaine and Poe,

eds., Modernizing Muscovy: Reform and Social Change in

Seventeenth-Century Russia. London: Routledge, 2003.

6

Keenan, Edward. “Muscovite Political Folkways,” The Russian

Review, Vol. 45, no. 2, 1986, p. 118.

7

Dukes, Paul. The Superpowers. A Short History. London and New

York: Routledge, 2000, p. 5.

8

As quoted in Trenin, Dmitry. The End of Eurasia: Russia on the

Border between Geopolitics and Globalization. Moscow:

Carnegie Moscow Center, 2001, p. 43.

Sergei Medvedev

60
9

Chuev, Felix. Sto sorok besed s Molotovym [One hundred forty

talks with Molotov], Moscow: Terra, 1991, p. 14, quoted in Trenin,

p. 75.

10Klyuchevsky, Vassily. Kurs rossiiskoi istorii [A Course of

Russian History], Vol. 2, Lecture XL, Moscow: Mysl Publishers,

1987, p. 372.

11Hellie, Richard. “The Structure of Modern Russian History:

Towards a Dynamic Model,” Russian History, Vol. 4, no. 1, 1977,

pp. 1-22.

12Murawiec, Laurent. “Is Russia fated to derzhavnost’? Or: Small

is beautiful,” Paper presented at the Marshall Center Conference

“Russia and the West at the Millennium,” Moscow, October 2001.

For fuller analysis, see Murawiec. L’Esprit de Nations. Cultures et

Géopolitique. Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 2002, pp. 236-282.

13Hosking, Geoffrey. “The Freudian Frontier,” Times Literary

Supplement, 10 March 1995, p. 27. 

14Weber, Eugene. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of

Rural France. London: Chatto & Windus, 1979.

15Zevelev, Igor. Russia and its New Diasporas, Washington, DC:

United States Institute of Peace, 2001, p. 34.

16Chervyakov, Vladimir. “The Russian National Economic Elite in

the Political Arena,” in Klaus Segbers, Stephan de Spiegeleire

(eds.) Post-Soviet Puzzles: Mapping the Political Economy of the

Former Soviet Union, Vol. I: Against the Background of the

Former Soviet Union. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1995, pp. 205-282.

17Chervyakov, p. 208.

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61
18Murawiec, L’Esprit de Nations, p. 250.

19Shafarevich, Igor, “Dve dorogi – k odnomu obryvu” [Two roads

to one precipice], Novyi mir (Moscow), No. 7, July 1989, pp. 147-

165.

20One could see a similar affinity between modernism and Italian

Fascism: Mussolini was for some time a follower of the Italian

Futurists, while the leader of the Futurists, Filippo Marinetti,

argued that fascism was futurism’s natural extension.

21Hopf, Ted. Social Construction of International Politics: Identities

and Foreign Policies, Moscow 1955 and 1999, Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 2002, Chapter 2. See also Francis Fukuyama,

“The Modernizing Imperative. The USSR as an Ordinary

Country,” National Interest, Vol. 20, Spring 1993, pp. 10-18.

22Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of

Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 2002. 

23Kordonsky, Simon. “The Structure of Economic Space in PostPerestroika Society and the Transformation of the Administrative

Market,” in Klaus Segbers and Stephan De Spiegeleire (eds.) PostSoviet Puzzles: Mapping the Political Economy of the Former

Soviet Union, Vol. I: Against the Background of the Former Soviet

Union. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1995, p. 164. 

24Castells, Manuel. The Information Age. Economy, Society

and Culture. Vol. III, End of Millennium, 2nd ed. Oxford:

Blackwell Publishers, 2000, pp. 6-7.

25Ibid.

26Castells, The End of Millennium, pp. 10, 15.

27Castells, The End of Millennium, p. 21.

Sergei Medvedev

62
28Ibid., p. 22.

29Ibid.

30Ibid. 

31Ibid., pp. 29-30.

32“It is no accident that the Soviet Union, General Motors, IBM

and centrally directed Asian capitalism all were forced to

restructure in the same decade. They could not deal with the

new dynamic created by the microchip and the personal

computer–which made dispersed systems of business,

production, information gathering and governance much more

efficient than centrally commanded ones.” (Friedman, Thomas

L. “Russia is Modernizing Better than Indonesia,” International Herald Tribune, 27 July 1998).

33For an analysis of the administrative/territorial structure and

phenomenology of the Soviet space, see: Kagansky, Vladimir,

“Sovetskoye prostranstvo: konstruktsiya i destruktsiya” [“The

Soviet Space: Construction and Destruction,”] in Sergei

Chernyshov (ed.) Inoe. Khrestomatiya novogo rossiiskogo

samosoznaniya [The Different. Anthology of the New Russia's

Self-Consciousness.] Moscow: Argus, 1995, Vol. 1, pp. 89-

127.

34Kagansky, p. 92.

35Gaddy, Clifford and Fiona Hill, “Putin's Agenda, America's

Choice: Russia's Search for Strategic Stability,” Brookings

Institution Policy Brief, no. 99, May 2002, Available at

www.brook.edu/comm/policybriefs/pb99.htm, accessed 4

November 2002.

36Ibid.

Rethinking The National Interest

63
37Salmin, Alexei. SNG: Sostoyanie i perspektivy razvitiya [The

CIS: The Current State and Prospects.] Moscow: Gorbachev

Foundation, 1992.

38Adomeit, Hannes. “Russia as a ‘great power’ in world affairs:

images and reality,” International Affairs (London), Vol. 71,

no. 1 (January 1995), pp. 38-39.

39Adomeit, p. 41.

40The term was pioneered by Paul Kennedy. (Kennedy, Paul.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and

Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, New York: Random

House, 1987; on the USSR see pp. 488-514.) 

41Cooper, Robert. “Russia, the West and Global Civilization,”

in Sergei Medvedev, Alexander Konovalov and Sergei

Oznobishchev (eds.) Russia and the West at the Millennium.

Hamburg: LIT-Verlag, 2003).

42During his postgraduate study at the Law School of the

Moscow University in the late 1950s, Mikhail Gorbachev had

been a roommate and friend of the Czech student Zdenek

Mlynár, who later became one of the architects of the “Prague

Spring.” In his memoirs, Mlynár notes that “Gorbachev's

policies are a historic rehabilitation of the Czechoslovak

attempt at reform in 1968.” (Mlynár, Zdenek. Kholodom veyet

ot Kremlya [Cold wind blows from the Kremlin; English

edition titled Nightfrost in Prague,] Maspeth, NY: Problems of

Eastern Europe, 1988, p. iii).

43Fadin, Andrei, “Modernizatsiya cherez katastrofu”

[Modernization through a Catastrophe?,] in Sergei

Chernyshov (ed.) Inoe. Khrestomatiya novogo rossiiskogo

samosoznaniya [The Different. Reader of the New Russia's

Self-Consciousness,] Moscow: Argus, 1995, Vol. I, p. 325.

Sergei Medvedev

64
44Rutland, Peter. “Putin's Path to Power,” Post-Soviet Affairs,

Vol. 16, no. 4 (December 2000), p. 316.

45Calculated after Bolotin, B. “Sotsial'no-ekonomicheskie

pokazateli Zapada i Rossii” [Socioeconomic figures for the

West and Russia,] Mirovaya ekonomika i mezhdunarodnye

otnosheniya, 1999, no. 8 (August), pp. 114-28.

46Arbatov, Alexei, 'Bezopasnost' Rossii v mnogopolyusnom

mire' [Russia's security in a multipolar world,] Paper presented

at the Marshall Center conference “Russia and the West at the

Millennium,” Moscow, October 2001.

47Groys, Boris, “Rossija kak podsoznanie Zapada” [Russia as

the subconsciousness of the West], in Utopia i obmen [Utopia

and exchange], Moscow: Znak, 1993. See also: Medvedev,

Sergei, “Russia as the Subconsciousness of Finland,” Security

Dialogue, Vol. 30, no. 1, March 1999, pp. 95-109.

48Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Isayevich. Kak nam obustroit'

Rossiyu: posil'nye soobrazeniya [Rebuilding Russia: Tentative

Proposals,] Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1990; English

edition titled Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative

Proposals, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991.

49“Narkotik neft” [The Oil Drug], Expert (Moscow), no. 42, 9

November 1998, p. 41. As former USSR Minister of Foreign

Trade Konstantin Katushev confided about the Soviet petrodollars, “. . . we, the government, were not quite effective in

using them. . . this big money had relaxed and maybe

corrupted our leadership and ourselves.” (Quoted in Denchev,

K. “Neftegazovyi factor v mezhdunarodnykh otnosheniyakh”

[Oil and gas factor in international relations,] Politia

(Moscow), no. 3 (Autumn 1999), p. 133).

Rethinking The National Interest

65
50Gavrilenkov, Yevgeny and Wolfram Schrettl. “Integration

into the World Economy: The Case of Russia,” in Sergei

Medvedev, Alexander Konovalov and Sergei Oznobishchev

(eds.) Russia and the West at the Millennium. Hamburg: LITVerlag, 2003.

51Rutland, Peter. “Shifting Sands. Russia’s Economic

Development and Its Relations with the West,” in Sergei

Medvedev, Alexander Konovalov and Sergei Oznobishchev

(eds.) Russia and the West at the Millennium. Hamburg: LITVerlag, 2003.

52Ignatova, Maria. “Russia is still living off natural resources,”

interview with Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko,

Izvestiya, 8 June 2001. 

53Rutland, “Shifting Sands. . .”

54Salmin, Alexei. “Vnutripoliticheskie aktory i vneshnyaya

politika Rossiskoi Federatsii” [Domestic actors and foreign

policy of the Russian Federation], in Sergei Medvedev,

Alexander Konovalov and Sergei Oznobishchev (eds.) Russia

and the West at the Millennium. Hamburg: LIT-Verlag, 2003.

55For a recent analysis of the CIS, see Baev, Pavel, “The CIS:

Refusing to Fade Away,” The Jamestown Foundation Russia

and Eurasia Review, Vol. 1, no. 10, 22 October 2002, article

available online at http://russia.jamestown.org/pubs/view/

rer_001_010_001.htm Accessed 7 November 2002.

56Graham, Thomas, “A world without Russia?,” Jamestown

Foundation Conference, Washington, DC, 9 June 1999, article

available online http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/3336.html,

accessed 2 August 2002.

57As Brzezinski has put it, “the disintegration late in 1991 of

the world's territorially largest state created a black hole in the

Sergei Medvedev

66
very center of Eurasia. It was as if the geopoliticians'

‘heartland’ had been suddenly yanked from the global map.”

(Brzezinski, Zbignew. The Grand Chessboard: American

Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: Basic

Books, 1997, p. 87.) See also Jervis, Robert and Seweryn

Bialer (eds), Soviet-American Relations after the Cold War,

Durham: Duke University Press, 1991; Jervis, Robert & Jack

Snyder (eds.), Dominoes and Bandwagons: Strategic Beliefs

and Great Power Competition in the Eurasian Rimland. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

58Medvedev, Sergei. Russia's Futures: Implications for the EU,

the North and the Baltic Region, Programme on the Northern

Dimension of the CFSP, Vol. 8. Helsinki: UPI and Bonn: IEP,

2000, p. 19.

59Lynch, Dov, “Anchoring in Troubled Seas,” Paper presented

at the conference on “Reassessing the Transatlantic

Partnership,” Istituto Affari Internazionali, Rome, 19-20 July

2002.

60Quoted in Herd, Graeme and Ella Akerman, “Russian

Strategic Realignment and the Post-Post-Cold War Era?,”

Security Dialogue, Vol. 33, no. 3, September 2002, p. 365.

61“NATO-Russia Relations: A New Quality,” Declaration by

heads of state and government of NATO member-states and

the Russian Federation, Rome, 28 May 2002; available at

http://www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/b020528e.htm, accessed 11

November 2002.

62Lynch, Dov, “Anchoring in Troubled Seas.”

63Cooper, Robert, “The new liberal imperialism,” Observer, 7

April 2002, article available online http://www.observer.co.uk/

comment/story/0,6903,680093,00.html, accessed 30 July

2002.

Rethinking The National Interest

67
64Kagan, Robert, “Power and Weakness,” Policy Review, June

2002, article available online http://www.policyreview.org/

JUN02/kagan.html, accessed 30 July 2002.

65Cooper, “The new liberal imperialism.”

66Kagan, Op. cit.

67Kupchan, Charles, “The end of the West,” Atlantic Monthly,

November 2002, article online http://www.theatlantic.com/

issues/2002/11/kupchan.htm, accessed 12 November 2002.

68For the parallel Russian and English text, see

http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/texts/ex_

oriente_lux.html, accessed 12 November 2002.

69Herd and Akerman, p. 370.

70Lynch, Dov, “Russia: Anchoring in Troubled Seas,” EU ISS

Newsletter, No. 3-4, September 2002; article available online

http://www.iss-eu.org/newslttr/n3-4e.pdf, accessed 13 November 2002.

71Saradzhyan, Simon, “Military Gets OK to Strike Abroad,”

Moscow Times, 6 November 2002. 

72Virilio, Paul and Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War, New York:

Semiotext(e), 1983.

73Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Gerard Toal), “Borderless Worlds?

Problematising discourses of deterritorialisation,” Geopolitics,

Vol. 4, no. 2, Autumn 1999, p. 139.

Sergei Medvedev

68
The George C. Marshall 

European Center for Security Studies

Dr. John P. Rose

Director

MG (Ret.) Michael J. McCarthy, USAF

Deputy Director

MG (Ret), Dr. Horst Schmalfeld, GEAF

Deputy Director

Ambassador Mary Ann Peters

Associate Director for International Liaison

College of International and Security Studies

Dr. John Reppert

Dean

Ms Margie Gibson

Editor, Marshall Center Papers

Rethinking The National Interest
The Marshall Center Papers

Editorial Advisory Board

Prof. Evgeniy Bazhanov

Vice President, Russian Diplomatic Academy

Prof. Dr. Wilfried von Bredow

Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Universität Marburg

Dr. Paul Cornish

Centre for Defence Studies, King’s College London

Dr. Christopher Dandeker

Head, Department of War Studies, King’s College London

Dr. Robert H. Dorff

Chairman, Dept. of National Security and Strategy, US Army War

College

Prof. Dr. Heinz Gaertner

Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Universität Wien

Prof. Dr. Ferenc Gazdag

Director, Institute for Strategic and Defence Studies, Budapest

Dr. Thomas B. Grassey

Director, US Naval War College Press

Prof. Dr. Ali M. Karaosmanoglu

Chairman, Dept. of International Relations, Bilkent University

Dr. Jacob Kipp

Senior Analyst, Foreign Military Studies Office

US Army Combined Arms Center

Dr. Charles A. Kupchan

Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, Washington

Dr. Friedemann Müller

Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Berlin

Dr. Frances Pilch

Political Science Department, US Air Force Academy

Dr. Andrew L. Ross

Strategic Research Department, US Naval War College

Dr. Dmitri Trenin

Deputy Director, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,

Moscow Center

Sergei Medvedev

70
Dr. Thanos Veremis

Constantine Karamanlis Professor in Hellenic and Southeastern

European Studies, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy,

Tufts University

Prof. Dr. Peter M. E. Volten

Director, Centre for European Security Studies, University of

Groningen

Dr. Stephen L. White

Department of Politics, University of Glasgow

Rethinking The National Interest

71
The Marshall Center Papers

No. 1 – Europe’s New Defense Ambitions:

Implications for NATO, the US, and Russia

by Peter van Ham

April 2000

No. 2 – The Transformations of Russian Military

Doctrine: Lessons Learned from Kosovo and

Chechnya 

by Alexei G. Arbatov

July 2000

No. 3 – Cooperative Security: New Horizons for

International Order

by Richard Cohen and Michael Mihalka

April 2001

No. 4 – Western Unity and the Transatlantic

Security Challenge

by Peter van Ham and Richard L. Kugler

June 2002

No. 5 – Counter-Terrorism and the Use of Force in

International Law

by Michael N. Schmitt

November 2002
Rethinking the National Interest: 

Putin’s Turn in Russian Foreign Policy

By Dr. Sergei Medvedev, Professor at the George C. Marshall

Center in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.

The paper examines the historical and political roots behind a turn

in Russian foreign policy undertaken by President Vladimir Putin in

the wake of the terrorist acts of 9/11. Current Russian foreign policy

vastly differs from the previous decade in that, using the

opportunity and the rhetoric of the war on terrorism, Putin made a

normative choice in favor of Westernization and strategic

partnership with the United States and Europe. 

The paper posits that the realignment in Russian foreign and

security policy is of a long-term revolutionary nature. This is not an

ad hoc marriage of convenience, nor a policy of playing a weaker

hand, but a profound reappraisal of Russia’s national interests and

place in the world, defying the centuries-old imperial paradigms. In

order to appreciate the magnitude of this change, the paper looks

beyond the Putin presidency and transformations of the past

decade, into the historical roots of Russian statehood and foreign

policy. This Marshall Center Paper is an essay about foreign policy

as explained by history, culture and geography.

The Marshall Center Web Site:

http://www.marshallcenter.org