Alexander Perepechko. Force, crime, and strategy.
by Alexander Perepechko
Published on November 27, 2018
Geography and strategy. Why the Eastern Europe-2?
In a series of papers (parts 1, part 2 and part 3) in Russian for the leading Belarusian newspaper Naviny, I analyzed in detail the current geostrategic situation in the Eastern Europe-2 (Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine), a large macro-region located between the NATO and Russian Federation (RF). I was delighted that these publications were followed by a discussion, often heated, in which a variety of opinions – including my own – were expressed. I assumed at that time that my modest contribution to the geostrategic analysis of the Eastern Europe-2 was over.
While keeping an eye on that part of the world, I started a project on health care, a top issue for American voters in the 2018 intermediate elections. The comparative analysis of American and other developed countries health care systems appeared at www.geostrategy.info.
But soon it became clear that the Eastern European topic required special attention again. Hostile-aggressive actions of the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin against the West escalated. He even threatened to use modernized nuclear weapons and new missiles in the future war.
Definitely, new technology has challenges and can alter the meaning of geography. It matters critically that today decision-making time to enable nuclear missiles to be launched is truncated to few minutes. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think that geography does not matter any longer.
Karl Haushofer (1986: 103), one of the founding fathers of the German school of geopolitics, estimated in 1931 that the explanatory power of geography in the human political action is about 25%. The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes (see Pareto, 1897). Assuming that this rule works, the enduring geographical settings and a historical feeling of greater or lesser insecurity remain the principle factors which impact the choice of the national security strategy and provide the necessary explanation of this choice (see Gray, 2017: 80-97).
Even in this era of fast-moving trans-oceanic air transport, global IT, and intercontinental missiles that may carry nuclear warheads, the geography of post-Soviet Russia’s dramatic moves to re-acquire significant territories in Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine and to keep and expand the military presence in Belarus reminds us that strategy is about power projection (Gray, 2017: 89; see also Grigas, 2017). If military power cannot be projected into the Black Sea or the coastal waters of the Baltic States, the political scope for practical strategic options must be severely limited.
For example, the NATO-Russian contest for hegemony on-, offshore and the coastal Baltic Sea is dominated strategically by the asymmetrical facts that NATO is itself politically present there, while Russia is almost absent. Keep in mind that Nord Stream – a natural gas pipeline through the Baltic Sea – is owned by Russia’s state-run Gazprom (figure 51). Nord Stream II would become operational in a year and would double natural gas supplies to Germany (Foy, 2018). The geostrategic fact is that in addition to the Kronshtadt military base in the Gulf of Finland, Russia requires military bases and fortified facilities in Kaliningrad, its Baltic Sea exclave (Woody, 2018).
However, this asymmetry is fragile. If Russia moves Iskander-M missiles and military aircraft to its borders with Estonia and Latvia and to the west border of Belarus, the situation can change. Figure 51 depicts the crucial role of the landlocked Belarus in this scenario. Say, following a missile barrage, Russian troops from Kaliningrad advance towards Belarus through the Suwalki Gap and cut the Baltic States off from the rest of the NATO countries. The landward hegemon Russia would receive land access to its Baltic Sea exclave and the Baltic States would turn into NATO’s “exclave.” The old asymmetry would turn into the new asymmetry. Now in terms of geostrategy the Collective Security Treaty Organization led by Russia would challenge the political presence of NATO in the coastal waters of the Baltic States!
In this scenario, is Russia’s military ally Belarus a beneficiary or a benefactor?
Some states without nuclear weapons formed a close alliance with the nuclear powers, and thus have become subject to the rules of the nuclear game (see Creveld, 1991, p. 263). To a greatly varying extent, those rules make their effect felt first on the superpowers’ clients and allies, and then on many of the world’s remaining states. Is the dictator of Belarus aware of these rules of the nuclear game?
Belarus participates in the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) led by Russia. The integration of Belarus and Russia includes military assistance in the event of an attack and even joint air defense (Zogg, 2018). Courted by pro-Russian military and intelligence generals, does the Belarusian ruler know Russia’s real goals? Cadets at the western military colleges appreciate the following precept of the great Chinese general and military strategist Sun Tzǔ: “We cannot enter into alliance with neighbouring princes until we are acquainted with their designs” (2005, p. 85).
A new paradox was established after the Gulf War of 1990-1991. Martin van Creveld (1991, p. 264), one of the world’s leading strategists described it as follows. If a state (or other political organization) is capable of being easily engaged in the unconstrained total war, this state is relatively unimportant in world politics. Did the Marshal of Belarus hear about this paradox?
In October 2015, American General Frederick Benjamin Hodges described the borderland of Poland and Lithuania as well as the Donbas region as the most endangered areas in Europe (see Prawdziwe, 2016).
Figure 51. Russia and NATO: The projection of power into the Baltic Sea (Generated by the author based on Freedberg, 2018, Jacobs, 2009, and The Center of Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) graphic).
These days NATO moves more troops and firepower into the region in hopes of deterring Russia from attempting to control the Suwalki “isthmus.” To secure the Suwalki gap, NATO generals (Parafianowicz, 2017; Vandiver, 2018) suggest that a new strategic category, which combines preventive and anticipatory-deterrence approaches, should be introduced in military practice. Within this new framework, actions such as deterring an opponent, overtaking an opponent, information domination, domination in space and cyber space, and the ability to fight separatist movements may be applied.
Therefore, technologies change but geographical conditions remain.
Evidently, the Eastern Europe-2 became the dangerously explosive macro-region where the new world war might begin. New information and research findings on the subject matter are now available and therefore today I look at what I wrote a few months ago in a somewhat different light…
How do Putin and his circle explain Russia’s expansion in the Eastern Europe-2 to the Russian people? Why?
Russian irredentism in the Eastern Europe-2 after the end of the Cold War
After the end of the Cold War, Russia’s elites could not, or perhaps did not, want to transform the Russian Federation into a western type of market economy and political democracy. Russia – a declining superpower – became a country with a relatively small economy, a medium sized population, and the second largest nuclear arsenal. It is still the largest country in the world by area – slightly over 3/4 of the size of the Soviet Union.
At the same time, NATO has grown from 15 members in 1991 to 28 members in 2018, including some that are situated within Russia’s former sphere of influence. NATO has stated intentions to expand further (NATO, 2010) and to increase cooperation with Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.
Moreover, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine started changing their civilization identification, political and military loyalty, and economic system. The ruler of Belarus remains faithful to his Kremlin masters. But these days even Europe’s last dictator from time to time looks confused about what the primary geostrategic orientation of Belarus needs to be. For example, on the eve of the Independence Day of Belarus he declared: “Belarus will not choose between the West and the East” (Torzhestvennoie sobranie, 2018). This is a category of fragile “in-between states”; they are at risk to be partitioned between more strong neighbors.
In these circumstances the Russian Federation (RF) has utilized the geopolitical concept of the “Russian world.” The Russian world represents, in fact, the neo-Eurasian form of irredentism (from Italian irredento for “unredeemed”) – politics that seek to reunite Russians and other people “gravitating towards Russians” in one Great Russian state. Ethnic Russians make up sizable and often compactly residing minorities in the countries of the Eastern Europe-2. These minorities are well organized and play an important role in politics, military and security forces, culture, and the economy.
Russian theoreticians, like Aleksandr Dugin and Aleksandr Prokhanov, and propagandists, like propaganda-primadonna Dmitriy Kiselev, declared that Transnistria in Moldova, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, Crimea and the eastern parts of Donetsk and the Luhansk oblasts (so-called “Donetsk people’s republic” and “Luhansk people’s republic”) in Ukraine, and the entire Belarus are frontiers of the Russian world gravitating towards the “core” of the Russian civilization and the Russian Federation state (figure 52). Interestingly that Aleksandr Svechin (1992: 83), the Russian and Soviet “Clausewitz” of strategy (purged and executed by Stalin regime in 1938) more than 90 years ago anticipated this surge of the Russian irredentism. In his classic book Strategy he wrote: “In every corner of Central [and Eastern] Europe there are irredentas, that is, conquered territories which have not been returned to their rightful owners and contradict the desires of nations for self-determination” (1992: 83). According to Svechin (1919), an integral Russian nationalism, which links together the past accomplishments of Russian arms and national military valor, is “a cement uniting Russians into one whole.”
Figure 52. Russia’s irredentism in the Eastern Europe-2 (Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine). Generated by the author.
Note that Russian irredentist politics became operational immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. At the beginning of Yeltsin’s first term as the president of the RF, pro-Russian separatists on the left bank of Dniester in east Moldova received support from the Russian 14th Guards Army under general Aleksandr Lebed and split this region from Moldova. Moldova lost de facto control of Transnistria in 1992.
Under the new “tsar” Putin, the historical Russian irredentism has crystallized into the politics of regaining the traditional sphere of influence in the Eastern Europe-2. This politics apparently determines a policy (the ends) that the Russian president and his power apparatus struggle to achieve. Under the Putin regime, the RF has enabled irredentist goals on the large scale in a violent Russian manner. Under the pretext of protecting Russian minorities from nationalists in the Eastern Europe-2, the Russian Federation is pushing back vigorously against the reduction of its territorial power base that led to its effective demotion from superpower status at the end of the Cold War (see Gray, 2017: 57).
Policy is a result of competition and negotiation. And members of the Putin court, who dominate Russia’s highly personalized and weak institutions, make every effort to determine the policy in the Eastern Europe-2. The ruler’s close-knit cabal consists of his Ozero friends (Ozero Cooperative is a gated compound of businessmen, including Putin), St. Petersburg coworkers, and siloviki colleagues.
What particular circumstances set the stage for the play in which these people use the Russian irredentism and implement the recent geostrategy in the Eastern Europe-2? Do Putin and his group have personal interests to wage wars in this part of the world? Does their political behavior have geo-historical antecedents?
From the tsarist patrimonialism to Putin’s kleptocracy and adhocracy
Unlike in the West, where corruption sees big money buying power, in Russia power itself is the source of big money. In his Strategy, Svechin (1992: 81-82) prophetically pointed at this fact: “The ruling class in a state is inclined to regard its own interests as state interests and resorts to the aid of the state apparatus to defend them.”
In their famous investigation The Panama Papers, Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier (2016: 18-25) from Germany uncovered how Putin induces major Russian companies to allocate him shares, how he holds them under names of people he trusts and hides them using shell companies. In this book, the authors explained why the United States announced a sanctions list of Putin’s innermost circle after he annexed parts of Ukraine and how American authorities can freeze these hidden assets.
Indeed the corrupted system of government is not a new phenomenon in Russia. It is, in fact, a variety of the patrimonial system of government that had prevailed through much of the Russian history. Patrimonial systems recognize no distinction between sovereignty and property, allowing a tyrant to act as both the ruler and the owner of his realm.
According to Polish American historian Richard Pipes (2000: xi-xiii), this system had reigned through much of the Russian history because of the weak development of property. In the West, property includes both the ownership (dominus in the sense of master) and the possession or use/control (possessio in the sense of usufruct). In Russia, property is understood only as the possession because the sovereign distributes properties and privileges to his vassals and can take those away at any moment (see Wittfogel, 1967: 260-263).
Founding father of European sociology Max Weber (1978: 1064-1069) called Russia’s political economic system the tsarist patrimonialism. The status of a person in this system is based on two principles: 1) social rank is obtained primarily through the civilian or military service and 2) privileges lapse if a holder leaves an office. Therefore, political power and social prestige depend exclusively upon office holding or court connections and all opportunities for economic advancement derive from the exercise of political power.
In the tsarist patrimonial system, a ruler’s power is rooted in the solidarity of interest with him of individual office-holders who run civilian administration, army, and security services. Equally important is that the status based solidarity of interest among these office-holders is absent. They view each another as competitors for the position and opportunities for enrichment available through the ruler’s favor. If one falls out of favor with the ruler, one can easily lose the position, the property (real estate, money, and other possessions), and even life.
The fear of expropriation has been sitting on the back of every bureaucrat, every military and security officer, and every well-off person for centuries. The legal infrastructure of private property rights and the security of a person do not have sufficient basis in Russia.
Under such conditions men of means in tsarist Russia preferred immediate satisfaction to long-range planning. “This makes the people (though otherwise hardened to bear any toil) to give themselves much to idleness and drinking: as passing for no more than from hand to mouth,” wrote English diplomat Giles Fletcher (1856: 62f), who was sent a long time ago by Queen Elizabeth I to conclude an alliance between the two countries.
The Soviet state did not eliminate this paternalism. In my research (see Perepechko, 2017) I found that, in fact, the Soviets replaced the paternal rule of the manor-house with the paternal rule of the corporate-state bureaucracy. Moreover, for over 70 years private property in the Soviet Union was illegal…
Already under the Yeltsin regime some observers rightfully recognized that these factors can lead to unforeseeable dangers. Really, it would take decades, but more likely generations, to develop in Russia the institution of private property and to move from patrimonialism to some form of democracy.
The worst happened: Putin and his circle restored Russia’s historical patrimonialist system and adjusted it to the era of globalization. Under the Putin regime a new breed of globally minded criminal businessmen and politicians emerged and took the central stage in the Russian Federation. Under this regime businessmen and politicians alike use many methods that owe more to the underworld than legal domestic and international practice.
Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty, and Gabriel Zucman (2018; see also Piketty, 2018 and Guilford, 2018), an international team of economists from France and the United States, investigated some important mechanisms of this exotic system.
According to this research, between 1993 and 2018, Russia had massive trade surpluses: approximately 10% of GDP per annum on average for 25 years, or a total in the range of 250% of GDP (that does not include the return earned on the gains of those investments) – more than two and a half years of national production. If one takes into account stable annual returns that would likely have been earned on those investments, the economists estimate the total missing foreign wealth on the order of 300% of Russia’s current national income.
In principle that should have enabled the accumulation of the equivalent in financial reserves. Yet that wealth does not appear in Russia’s official balance sheet. Russia’s reserves are ten times lower – only about 25% of GDP. In other words, a share of those accumulated surpluses worth about 250% of Russia’s current national income has disappeared!
Where has the money gone?
Novokmet and his colleagues (2018) reckon that much of the missing money has been massively transferred abroad through opaque transactions out of official statistical view. In 2016, offshore wealth was about three times larger than Russia’s net holdings of foreign assets. The offshore assets held by wealthy Russians in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Cyprus, and offshore centers exceed the equivalent of the entirety of the official financial assets held by Russian households.
If this is true, then the misappropriation of funds has no equal in history. In terms of the wellbeing of the Russian people, this means that wealth distribution policies of Putin’s comprador cabal (Volchek, 2018) have been disastrous. With regard to political corruption, Putin’s regime can hardly find an equivalent in the modern world.
Nevertheless a few scholars have tried to look at Putin’s regime through a new lens.
American political scientist Karen Dawisha (2014) named Putin’s regime the kleptocracy, or the rule by thieves. Globalization allows Russia’s elites “to maximize their gains by keeping domestic markets open for their predation while minimizing their own personal risk by depositing profits in secure offshore accounts” (Ibid: 9). In this kleptocracy, the state nationalizes the risk but privatizes the reward (Ibid: 331-332). Access to Putin’s closed group requires 1) loyalty, discipline, and silence and 2) the willingness to allow Putin to be the ultimate arbiter above the written law.
Sergey Kurginyan (2017), the elitologist from Russia, called Putin’s state the pirate kingdom. Kurginyan borrows some arguments from neo-Marxists. According to this view, the initial capital accumulation is a creation of a “criminal class.” However, eventually the capital accumulation by criminal methods stops and criminal owners accept legal principles and turn into capitalists. This change happened in Germany, the United States, and other western countries.
Kurginyan (2013) argues that in post-Soviet Russia such a transformation fails over and over again. Like a hamster on a treadmill, Russia cannot stop the initial capital accumulation and export by criminal methods. In doing so, Russia has become the pirate state.
In my view, Kurginyan’s approach is plausible and should be considered in analzing Putin’s regime. Elitologist’s arguments line up well with the Russian vision of property as the possession and with Russia’s patrimonialism.
Mark Galeotti (2017), an international studies scholar from the United Kingdom, delicately labels Putin’s state the adhocracy. In this type of the state, the de facto elite is defined by service to the needs of the Kremlin rather than by any specific institutional or social identity. These range from independent businesses (who nevertheless may depend on state contracts or simply want to avoid adverse pressure) through engaging organized crime (criminal organizations and mafiosi). These people may be millionaires, politicians, journalists, diplomats, intelligence or military officers, and others. But all of them are political entrepreneurs who want or have to serve the Kremlin. In Russia’s hyper-presidential, de-institutionalized political system, this personal, transactional relationship to Putin and his court is managed through a variety of organs which will be discussed later…
Figure 53. Income inequality in Russia, 1905-2015. Generated by the author based on the World Inequality Database at https://wid.world/
In Russia, inequalities have risen much more rapidly than the official statistics claim (figure 53). In terms of income, Russia under Putin is more polarized that right before the Bolshevik coup d’état in 1917. Nevertheless, extreme inequality seems to be acceptable in Russia as long as the powerful and rich appear to be loyal to the Russian state and perceived national interests. And here there is a problem.
In the era of globalization, such patriotism cannot be guaranteed. It is not national interests but money – to be precise, the criminal acquisition of money by governmental officials – that guides Russia’s actions. The adhocratic state and the kleptocratic government were created by Putin and his comprador cabal for their personal enrichment and serve this enrichment. These unfortunate developments are aggravated by the poor legal infrastructure of private property rights and the inadequate security of the person.
Consequently, in terms of personal interests, the problem may be briefly formulated as follows: 1) wealth can be acquired but cannot be securely held and passed to heirs inside Russia, and 2) Putin and his court neither can lose the power nor can use their assets abroad.
I doubt that tricks like becoming members of the Federation Council or the Duma or honorary consuls for a foreign government in Russia can help Putin’s inner circle to solve this problem. To the point, the United States withdrew the credentials of 5 out of Russia’s 6 honorary consuls (U.S. strips, 2016). Dozens of state awards received by all of Putin’s cronies also might not provide leniency in sentencing. Loss of political power would result in loss of wealth and freedom.
Theoretically, high treason might be a solution for Putin’s cabal. To use offshore accounts, Putin and his circle might decide to “betray” Russia’s national interests. Elitologists who discuss this option wonder whether Putin and his diverse group have already been “intercepted” by the West in proceeding with this task.
With regard to ethnicity, religion, race, and gender, Putin’s circle is highly heterogeneous. Some members of his elite have double citizenship and many have families living all around the world. These factors can lead and do lead to dual or even multiple loyalties.
A long time ago, French social scientists Emile Durkheim (2010) and Alexis de Tocqueville (2000) described another important feature of loyalty. In nations like Russia, the ruler is regarded as a personification of the country and the fervor of patriotism converts into the fervor of loyalty. Thus, identifying with Putin when things go well, Putin’s inner circle may turn swiftly against him when things go poorly.
In a nutshell, these days in Russia only loyalties which are based on real interests can acquire a major significance. Pure patriotism is wet powder capable of igniting neither the elites nor the masses…
I will continue in my next post.
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