At least once a year, if not more, somebody publishes a book or article trying to determine the nature of the Russian state or political power there. Invariably they conclude that Russia is an authoritarian state, not a totalitarian one. A sub-group debates whether Russia is a Fascist state, for there is little doubt that Moscow has appropriated some of the repertoire of Fascist states. Since Western – and especially American – political science emphasizes comparative political science at the expense of any other explanatory modes, the consensus inevitably embraces the authoritarian perspective and excludes other concepts.
Unfortunately, this explanatory approach is not very illuminating. Saying that Russia is authoritarian is akin to saying the sun rose in the East and will set in the West. Neither does it explain the recrudescence of phenomena associated with Stalinism or Russian foreign policy, not just the war against Ukraine. To understand the currents of both Russian domestic and foreign policy, we need to turn to earlier theories by one of the founders of modern social science, Max Weber, and the tendencies of Russian history, not Western theory.
Patrimonial Autocracy
Russia today has reverted to the model of patrimonial autocracy, a model of governance that has lasted throughout Russian history with brief exceptions, and remains its default option. Today, Putin functions as Tsar in actuality if not in name. This model, not a Western one, is highly protean and can embrace Communist or Fascist attributes without shedding its basic nature. “Patrimonial” means the Tsar or the state owns the national economy, hence neither property nor civil rights, not to mention human rights, exist. Meanwhile the Tsar and the state are unbound by any law or institution. The Tsar can thus bequeath the state to anyone like a father giving it to his son. Vladimir Putin can do so if he wants, but if he fails to do so, the oligarch-bureaucrats or men of force (Siloviki) will do so after him, just as Russian Boyars tried to do when the original dynasty expired.
In this state, not only does the Tsar own the state and national economy, but possession of all property is also conditional upon service to the state and can be expropriated at any time by the state if it so wills. We have seen this phenomenon innumerable times and it is still occurring. The nature of the state therefore precludes the emergence of an independent propertied class, middle class or bourgeoisie, and any genuine civil society or intelligentsia.
Putin’s state and his circle own the economy, have suppressed the rule of law and talk of rights, and killed or suppressed dissidents and opposition at home and abroad as did medieval Tsars. The state also absorbed the Church, which had promulgated an idea of Russia as a uniquely predestined Christian nation historically empowered to lead the world to the triumph of the true faith.
Consequently, since the 16th century, Russian Tsars, or their spokesmen, have also been religious-ideological leaders. And given the inevitable paranoia surrounding autocrats (as Shakespeare wrote, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”), dangerous foreign ideas and ideologies and foreigners were always suspect, if not repressed. However, those foreign ideas that were deemed useful were welcomed, albeit often in greatly altered form and certainly under circumstances far removed from those where these ideas originated.
Empire
Consequently, a homegrown ideology evolved over the centuries, combining the providential Christianity cited above with the belief that the Tsar’s task was to regather supposedly lost Russian lands, diverted from the true faith by enemies, and restore them to Russia, which must perforce be an unbounded great power, i.e. empire.
This idea that Russia, under all circumstances, must be accepted as an empire, lies at the basis of Russia’s efforts to restore the empire in Georgia, Ukraine, and throughout the Soviet inheritance. Russia, whatever the reality is, believes it must play a Great Power or Imperial role in world politics because the continuity of the empire and of autocracy depends upon acknowledgment of it as such by both its subjects and foreign governments. Indeed, that is the autocracy’s primary mission. Thus, autocracy and empire are joined at the hip and are mutually reinforcing.
If that nexus is broken, then autocracy’s future is gravely undermined.
Hence the continuing obsession in foreign policy with Russia’s Imperial status, as acceptance of that status endows the autocracy with legitimacy and vice versa. Russia’s objective, therefore, is to recover the status claimed by Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko at the XXIV Party Congress in 1971, where he stated that no question in world politics could be decided without the participation of the Soviet Union. Similarly, in 1997, when the economy and state were prostrate, Sergei Rogov, director of the prestigious USA Institute, stated that, as its first priority, Moscow should seek to preserve the special character of Russian-American relations. Washington, he said, should recognize the exceptional status of the Russian Federation in the formation of a new system of international relations – a role different from that which Germany, Japan, or China or any other center of power plays in the global arena.
Dmitri Trenin, Director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Moscow office, similarly observed that Russian analysts argue that current difficulties are transient, but Russia is entitled to this “presidium seat” on global issues in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. As one official told the journalist Edward Lucas in 2000, the aim is, “Nothing happens that we don’t know about, and nothing happens that we don’t like – apart from that, it is up to them.” Or, as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says, quoting Catherine the Great’s advisors, “Not a cannon can be fired in Europe without our consent.”
Putin’s speeches too are filled with such mantras.
Permanent War
Unfortunately, today empire entails the diminished sovereignty of Russia’s subjects and neighbors, i.e. permanent war. Putin’s Russia cannot survive absent an unceasing program of forcing a state of siege in world politics to force onlookers to accept it as an empire. Beyond all the polemics on Ukraine, it is this obsession with empire and status that lies behind the war there. Moscow’s Imperial thrusts throughout the former Soviet Union emerge from the same ideological-political framework, for it is widely believed that if Russia is not a Great Power, i.e. an empire, then it is nothing, a mere object of other powers’ intrigues. This prescription entails permanent war and the preservation of this permanent state of siege at home as well. This mentality characterized pre-Gorbachevian Soviet politics, and Putin has restored it along with the institutionalized paranoia that is the logical outcome of state-controlled media.
These attributes of autocracy, providential religious ideology, and empire – both as embodied social structures and intellectual frameworks – that pervade “Putinism” may well survive him, especially if Russia prevails in Ukraine. Indeed, as Eastern European governments that have an all-too-clear awareness of Russian ambitions know, anything that can be billed as a Russian victory there will merely encourage further efforts to undermine international security. Catherine the Great famously observed that she had no way to defend her frontiers other than to expand them. The same holds true for Putin and any subsequent autocrat. Therefore, for the West to have any kind of European security – for which we fought two World Wars and a Cold War – Russia must be defeated in Ukraine. Ukraine’s borders must be restored, and its sovereignty defended. Also, to ensure its security, Ukraine must join NATO and the EU as soon as possible.
The ideological-political makeup of Putin’s Russia also drives its other global foreign policies. Russian political culture, deriving from its historical experience, asserts that its enemies, now led by the United States, aim to thwart Russia’s achievements and status as an empire. Moreover, since this regime fully grasps its illegitimacy abroad, it believes its domestic enemies who advocate for reform are merely tools of the West that seek to deny Russia its status and reduce it to an object of other powers.
The Axis
By the same token, Moscow’s global offensive to insert itself in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Africa is part of its obsession with forcing domestic and foreign audiences to accept it at its own valuation. Russia is fully prepared to exploit every possible cleavage and source of political tensions within or among states to insert itself as an indispensable interlocutor in world politics. Its alliance with countries including China, Iran, and North Korea, grows out of its elective affinity with these states. They, like Russia, are not just autocracies, they are states that wish to be seen and see themselves as empires or unjustly thwarted (by the US and its allies) empires who wish to recover their alleged place in the sun.
Therefore, Russia and its allies and partners are seriously cooperating against the West globally by inciting and instigating persistent, sustained attacks across multiple socio-political domains, including nuclear threats. The purpose of these attacks is, frankly, coercive and aims to destroy international order as such, returning world politics to a jungle of pure Machtpolitik where unfettered power rules and they each possess unchallenged spheres of influence.
Consequently, their warfare exemplifies what Dmitry Adamsky called in 2015 “multi-domain coercion,” with warfare occurring simultaneously in multiple theaters across multiple socio-political domains. Tactically their operations comprise limited but targeted and unceasing attacks below the level of full-scale war – so called “gray area or gray zone” attacks that are backed up by the threat of conventional and nuclear strikes.
Indeed, all four of these actors appear to have fully incorporated nuclear threats into their strategic doctrines and repertoires.
The Consequences of Failure
For these reasons, failure to defeat Russia in Ukraine or, for that matter, Iran’s proxy strategy in the Middle East that Moscow now supports, ensures a permanent attempt to undermine any pretense of order in world politics in the belief that multipolarity is supplanting Western hegemony and that it entails spheres of influence.
In this theory, regional orders along with global order must be reorganized to Russia and its allies’ benefit along the lines of multipolarity, i.e. regional spheres of influence, e.g., Eurasia. But given the dynamics of its autocratic, Imperial, and ideological drivers, Russian politics cannot remain content with the status quo or even with Ukraine. Catherine the Great’s dictum, cited above, remains the mantra of the Russian state.
Thus, this multipolarity cannot assure smaller states or the Great Powers any semblance of security. Instead, Russia, not unlike its Soviet predecessor, can only flourish in a condition of permanent warfare in world politics, albeit a level of strife that does not reach Superpower war. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are thus ultimately two manifestations of the shared impulse of Russia and its partners, China which finances Iran, and Iran which employs its proxies to subvert Israel and any basis for a regional order, to undermine that order. Indeed, Russia flirted with providing the Houthis in Yemen with anti-ship missiles only to be deterred by American diplomacy.
Although Putin’s personal obsession with restoring the empire now drives Russian policy, removing him from the equation is not a strategic response. Defeating him in Ukraine and foreclosing any renewal of the Russian Empire which is incompatible with any concept of European or international security is the sole response to his challenge. And in the Middle East, deterring if not defeating Iran and its strategy is the precondition for regional security there. Sadly, there are no other ways to induce Russia to realize that the autocracy-empire nexus must be broken for its peoples’ own sake.
Otherwise, we and Russia will face permanent strife as Moscow, not unlike the Habsburg Empire in 1914, recklessly tries to force the world and its own people that it is the great power it so desperately craves to be.
Stephen Blank, Ph.D., is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
