How Russia is trying hard to resurrect its lost empire

COLD PEACE: RUSSIA’S NEW IMPERIALISM

By Janusz Bugajski

Praeger/CSIS, $49.95, 302 pages

REVIEWED BY WOODFORD MCCLELLAN

The historian J. R. Seeley noted in 1883 that Britain acquired her empire “in a fit of absence of mind.” Russia’s generally peaceful incorporation of Siberia and Central Asia came about in much the same way, but the tsars shed a great deal of blood in the west and south, and after the Second World War Stalin brought Eastern Europe into an “evil empire” that endured for several decades.

The potential resurrection of the Stalinist empire is the subject of an informative new study by Janusz Bugajski of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Foreign Service Institute. Moscow, he maintains, is exploiting “Eastern Europe’s overwhelming dependence on Russian energy supplies and economic investment” to revive its domination of the area. Heading Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy priorities are restoration of “Russia’s ’global presence’” and the “undermining the United States as the sole superpower.”

The “new imperialism’s” weapons of choice are “energy, armaments, banking, and trade.” Gazprom, the Russian natural gas monopoly, “has taken an active part in Russian diplomacy,” particularly in Poland and Bulgaria, where it has resorted to “energy blackmail.” After decades of Communist misrule, the East European states can ill afford to buy natural gas from Norway, which charges considerably higher rates.

Although NATO is “weakening as a coherent institution as Washington … increasingly … [acts] with ’willing coalitions’ during international crises,” its expansion into Eastern Europe is a “challenge to Russia’s exertion of predominant influence in the post-Communist states.” Mr. Bugajski, however, would like something even more provocative. Scoffing at the notion of Russian “national interests” by encasing the term in quotation marks, he writes that Washington “must consistently demonstrate that the security of any part of Europe will not be sacrificed to Russia’s expansive ’national interests,’” and that the “opening of any U.S. bases in any East European state must be a bilateral decision in which Moscow exercises no influence … [because] U.S. troops pose no threat to Russia’s security.”

Convincing Mr. Putin, or any future Russian leader, will not be easy. Having given Serbia moral support, if little else, in the terrible regional conflicts of the 1990s, the Russians clearly merit a share of the blame for the Milosevic regime’s atrocities. But the Serbs did not enjoy a monopoly. Several Croatian war criminals are now in prison, and in March 2005 — after Mr. Bugajski’s book was published — the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal indicted Ramush Haradinaj, the former Kosovo Liberation Army leader and prime minister of Kosovo, for crimes against humanity.

Mr. Bugajski calls attention to the Russian Orthodox Church’s “long tradition of serving as an instrument of Russian foreign policy.” By preaching “collectivism, anti-materialism, pan-Slavism, and Russian nationalism,” the Church “helps maintain Russian influence within the former USSR among Orthodox believers and promotes anti-Western, anti-capitalist, and anti-democratic values.” Fair enough. But to berate Russian Patriarch Aleksey for proclaiming Kosovo “Serbian and Orthodox Christian holy ground” is to deny history. As in the Holy Land itself, the influx of Muslims can change the province’s character and obviously its future, but not its past.

Mr. Bugajski advises Washington policy-makers to beware the “naive and simplistic supposition that the United States and Russia share a common enemy of ’international terrorism’ and that Moscow has substantial experience in combating ’Islamic extremism.’” The internal quotation marks signaling skepticism make it difficult to fathom just what this means. Though the conflict in Chechnya, for example, is at bottom the revolt of an oppressed people against their brutal colonial masters, “international terrorism” and “Islamic extremism” are hardly absent.

The prospect of a resurrected Russian empire will remain threatening, Mr. Bugajski believes, because of Russia’s resistance to democratization. “If the Russian Federation … [were] a mirror image or understudy [sic] of the United States or other Western powers,” he writes, Eastern Europe would have nothing to worry about and might even welcome Russian “influences.” But the Stalinist past continues to exercise a hypnotic spell on the men in the Kremlin, and Mr. Bugajski is right to call for vigilance.

Woodford McClellan, emeritus professor at the University of Virginia, is working on a book about the Communist International (Comintern) 1919-1943.