By Alexander Perepechko
Published on March 16, 2019
In part 1 of this research essay we discussed how geography, irredentism, and patrimonialism may elucidate Russia’s aggressive behavior in Eastern Europe-2 (Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine).
The political asymmetry in the Black Sea, where the maritime NATO has been present while continental Russia is almost absent, has been the important geostrategic rationale behind Russia’s military power projection in Transnistria (Moldova), Abkhazia and South Ossetia (Georgia), and Crimea and eastern Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (Ukraine).
Similar political asymmetry takes place in the Baltic Sea. To break this asymmetry, Russia keeps and expands its military presence in the Kaliningrad exclave and in landlocked Belarus. And here is what might happen in the future. 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. As a result, the landward hegemon Russia receives land access to its Baltic Sea exclave and the Baltic States turn into NATO’s exclave!
No doubt, NATO will fight back. If Russia then uses small nuclear weapons, its closest ally Belarus will be at risk to absorb NATO’s nuclear retaliation.
To sell Russia’s aggression against the countries of Eastern Europe-2 to the general public, Putin’s propaganda appeals to the old Russian irredentism – “Russian world” politics – that seeks to reunite Russians in one Great Russian state. This doctrine has a variety of forms and shades: the Union State of Russia and Belarus, the Ukrainian “federation,” the “ORDLO” (certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of Ukraine “administered” by Russia), and others.
In Russia, TV stations show Putin and his comates working day and night to defend Russian compatriots from “nationalists” and “fascists” of all stripes in Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Belarus and elsewhere! Sure thing, Russians (Ukrainians, Belarusians, and others “gravitating towards Russians”) have to be reunited in one Great Russian state!
Irredentism and other manifestations of the Russian world is, above all, the façade of personal interests of Vladimir Putin and his group. Since the legal infrastructure of private property rights and security of a person do not have sufficient basis in Russia, this cabal managed to restore Russia’s historical patrimonialist system and adjust it to the era of globalization. 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.
Under the Putin regime a new breed of globally minded criminal businessmen and politicians emerged and took center stage in the Russian Federation. This regime is about the kleptocracy where thieves rule. It is also about the adhocracy because in reality the elite is defined by its service to the needs of the Kremlin rather than by any specific institutional or social identity. In terms of personal interests, the problem can be formulated as follows: 1) rulers can acquire wealth but cannot securely hold and pass it to heirs inside Russia, and 2) Putin and his court can neither lose power nor use their assets abroad.
What are relations between strategy, policy, and personal interests of Putin’s siloviki – politicians from the security and military services who came into power – in Eastern Europe-2 and elsewhere?
Personal enrichment, strategy, and politics
Karl von Clausewitz (1943: 605-610) learned from experience early in his career the importance of the correct political basis for any nation at war. The absence of the correct political goal goes against the conventional definition of the strategy: “The strategy is the direction and use made of force and threat of force (or the enabler) for the purpose of policy (or the ends)” (for example, Clausewitz, 1943; Schelling, 1980).
In states that represent the organized dominance of an obsolete class, corrupt elite, or renegade social group, political regimes tend to evolve towards authoritarianism. These regimes sacrifice the interests of the whole to maintain the domination of those who de facto usurped power. In these cases, unsound politics is unavoidably followed by unsound strategy. It is natural for national strategy to try to gain emancipation from bad politics. However, strategy can hardly exist in a void without politics and is doomed to pay for transgressions of politics (Svechin, 1992, p. 85).
Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder and General Erich Ludendorff from Germany and prominent politician Pierre Laval from France are among the most well-known authorities who refused to acknowledge that strategy is subordinated to politics. Svechin (1992, p. 84f) explains the emancipation of strategy from political directives in Germany during the first two decades of the 20th century by the key role of Junkers (aristocratic landholders, especially in East Prussia, from among whom the German military recruited large numbers of its officers) in the life of the German state.
Like any historical military empire, the Soviet Union was well-known for its hypertrophic security services and military forces. According to British economist Mark Harrison (2008), at the end of 1980s military forces consumed at least 15% of the USSR’s GDP. Most likely, the percentage was even higher.
Unlike the United States, which allows civilians a greater role in formulating military policy, post-soviet Russian military policy tends to be made by the military and security elites (Creveld, 1991, p. 255, 261). Emulating the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire, following a different logic, and reflecting a different institutional setup, the Russian Federation has a propensity to concentrate on constructing an offensive war-fighting capability.
Indeed, soon after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia’s military and security services had to endure a precarious existence. But after Boris Yeltsin’s retirement in 1999, Vladimir Putin rebuilt and to some degree modernized the Russian security services and military forces. For Putin and his siloviki controlling the political and economic development of the country is a greater goal than building a democracy. Any democracy requires a rotation of elites and would inevitably force Putin and his security cabal to surrender power at some point (Dawisha, 2014, p. 8). This is why they have used all possible means, including criminal ones, to reduce the role of democratic institutions to a mere symbolic role. Russia has mutated into a hybrid regime, where weak institutions are at the mercy of Putin and his silovili. This kind of transformation in politics is well studied in the sociology of the state (for example, Badie & Birnbaum, 1982; Birnbaum, 1975).
The security clan forms the core of Putin’s comprador security-bureaucratic power apparatus. These people operate based on the following assumptions. Siloviki are convinced that the national security of the Russian Federation is drastically threatened because of 1) the growth of NATO within Russia’s former sphere of influence — with expansion in Central and Eastern Europe and increased cooperation with Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus, and 2) U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) that it signed with the Soviet Union in 1972 and from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed in 1987. Crucially, following the Soviet military tradition Putin and his siloviki tend to consider nuclear weapons as fundamentally similar to, if much more powerful than, all previous weapons.
Putin and siloviki connect NATO’s military activities to Color Revolutions. They assume, sometimes not without reason, that the 2000s and 2010s revolutions against corrupt and undemocratic regimes were set up by western intelligence services: the 2000 Bulldozer Revolution in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004 Orange Revolution and 2014 Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine, the 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan and the failed “revolutions” in Azerbaijan in 2005 and Belarus in 2006.
The 2012 Bolotnaya Square protests in Moscow, where tens of thousands of Russians protested the election results that gave Putin a third term as president, scared him and his siloviki. These protests marked the beginning of the harshest crackdowns on civil society since the end of the Soviet Union.
In the East, political power gives direct access to enrichment. Putin and his security clan regard the NATO expansion and Color Revolutions within Russia’s former sphere of influence as the threat both to their political power and to their wealth, illegally acquired and transferred abroad. They see their personal interests as state interests and they routinely resort to the aid of the state apparatus to defend these interests.
Military force is the major, if not the only, tool of Putin and his siloviki. As we know, military force requires strategy. We therefore have the unfortunate case in which 1) military strategy is intended to defend the personal interests of Putin and his group as state interests and 2) politics, including the politics of the Russian world or irredentism in Eastern Europe-2, is subordinated to this strategy. To put it briefly, policy is subordinated to strategy and strategy serves the personal interests of Putin and his group.
Only very special and unique circumstances and developments could lead to this regrettable situation. What is the genesis of Putin’s siloviki?
Genesis of the security services and military
In the late 1980s and early 1990s many military and KGB officers, Vladimir Putin among them, quit their jobs for new opportunities opened by Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost.
At that time, the only people who could do business were black marketeers. Facilitated by corrupted communist party officials, this informal economy was run by tsekhoviki – illegal entrepreneurs (or teneviki, “shadow men”) – and gangsters. Criminals were in the best position to exploit new opportunities and were willing to work with self-interested elements of the elite.
Many officers, especially the more young and nimble, became apprentices of the vorovskoi mir (“criminal world”) and barons of the black market and thus learned and adopted many ponyatiia – informal “understandings” (unwritten codes) defining underworld life. KGB and GRU (Glavnoe razvedyvatelnoe upravlenie, or Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces) veterans found themselves running security units of new business structures, tycoon empires (Soldatov & Borogan, 2010, p. 27), and nouveaux riches.
It would be naïve to assume that KGB and military professionals en masse willingly moved into business. In 1990, a secret decree of the Central Committee of the Communist party ordered the KGB to start building businesses and accounts covertly connected to the Communist Party (Dawisha, 2014). Billions of dollars were transferred from state funds into hundreds of these new accounts.
Among others, this author observed this process in the Republic of Belarus. KGB collaborator and then-Prime Minister Vyacheslav Kebich was most likely the key executor of this shady scheme in the republic (Shakhnovich, 2013). Up to the 1994 presidential election in Belarus, KGB officers, communist officials, communist youth cheerleaders, and criminals boldly used state funds to build businesses and accounts…
In the 1990s, Russia’s GRU was reformed and the KGB was reorganized into the FSB (Federal Security Service) and the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service). Under Vladimir Putin, the intelligence services and military quickly reestablished their close connection with power and regained status and influence. Many officers were called back. They brought the criminal subculture and incorporated it into their agencies’ operational codes and subcultures. In his famed book “Red Notice” Bill Browder discerns: “Russian business culture is closer to that of prison yard than anything else” (2015, p. 125).
These alterations had far reaching, dreadful consequences for Russia’s secret operations at home and abroad.
Mark Galeotti, an international studies scholar from the United Kingdom, asserts that owing to the chaos in 1990s, organized crime has been weaponised and access to information has been monetized in Russia (2018, p. 5, 113, 240-241, 254). These days, Russia’s intelligence services and military hire hackers and arm gangsters to fight wars in Eastern Europe-2, Syria and other parts of the world. Politicians and criminal businessmen use intelligence services and military to illegally acquire wealth and transfer it abroad.
In doing so, Putin and his siloviki violate the clear boundaries axiom: “When intelligence agencies work with or through criminals, they have to maintain clear boundaries.” This means that in an ideal world, criminals should never know with whom they may be working. And in Russia’s case, these boundaries are indistinct and porous and often criminals come to be the ultimate beneficiaries.
Putin and his power apparatus
The new “tsar”
For his siloviki, Vladimir Putin is the ultimate source of authority and control, the key active player who has enormous influence in intelligence and military activities and whose involvement is vital to the success of these activities. If we understand his political profile, we would better understand Russia’s recent strategy …if such a strategy exists at all.
For this paper, three facets of Putin’s political profile seem important.
1) Henry Kissinger met with Putin many times and knows him fairly well. I found Kissinger’s opinion to be most useful. “I do not think Putin is a character like Hitler. He comes out of Dostoyevsky,” ponders Kissinger in an interview (cited by Luce, 2018). We can only speculate what literary hero of Dostoyevsky the patriarch of American diplomacy had in mind.
We can speculate that Kissinger recognizes in Vladimir Putin the split personality of Rodion Raskolnikov from Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” Recall the argument of Raskolnikov that the exceptional human being, like Napoleon, can be above the law and murder “louses” for the net benefit to society (Campbell, 2016). In a similar vein, Putin might be seen as a confused hybrid, both rebelling against economic liberalism and craving the western bourgeois life…
After committing his crime, in the end, Raskolnikov goes through a crucial transformation. Does Putin still have a chance to go through similar transformation? Or do hatred and revenge blind him such that he has completely lost touch with reality?
2) The American social scientists Stephen Dyson and Mathew Parent (2018) applied the “operational code method” to more than a million words spoken by Putin during his time in office. The results were used to adjudicate between competing portraits of Putin in the literature.
Their finding about the political profile of Putin is stunning. His operational code reveals mainstream beliefs about international politics, qualified by hyper-aggressiveness toward terrorism and a startling preoccupation with political control. But especially remarkable is this: Putin’s approach is that of an opportunist rather than a strategist.
This last finding sounds alarming. According to A. Wess Mitchell, American expert of continental empires, policy makers in any era react to crises as they emerge (2018, p. 11). However, states will die without a strategy, especially if they do not have well defined national goals and ends.
Indeed, several days ago the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation informed us about “vectors of the development of military strategy” (Nachalnik, 2019). But how does this correlate with the opportunistic commander in chief, who has made a habit of using salami tactics, the game of “chicken,” and the tactics of brinkmanship in the international arena? Is Putin’s behavior cool-headed and rational? Is his opportunism well balanced by his more rational generals and advisors?
3) Very few commentators take into consideration the following. In 1998-1999, Putin worked as the director of the FSB. According to the FSB statute, this position requires the rank of four-star general. In post-Soviet Russia all directors of the FSB – before and after Putin – were and are generals. Putin resigned from the KGB with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in 1991 and Yeltsin did not promote him to the rank of general in 1998 (Vladimir Putin, 1998). Did that happen by chance? Did Yeltsin receive advice?
I do not have answers to these questions but I can make several conjectures.
According to “The Professional Soldier,” a seminal book by leading expert on American military sociology Morris Janowitz, of the officers who entered the top half of one percent of the military hierarchy, one group can be classified as heroic leaders and the other as military managers (1964, chapter viii, p. 125, 160). Heroic leaders reflect service connected backgrounds. Military managers tend to come from highly trained technical specialists. Top posts should be assigned to the graduates of military academies. Thus entrance into the military and security elite comes only after many years of professional education, training, and experience.
Putin’s career path in no way satisfies these requirements. Most likely, Lieutenant Colonel Putin is a protégé of the powerful “caste of the Colonel Generals” and a creature of the world of criminal businessmen and politicians. We cannot exclude that this caste looks at him as a “custodian” of their offshore banking accounts, real estate, and businesses in the West and elsewhere. Perhaps this is why the National Intelligence of the United States might soon start searching for assets of Putin and his associates [DW, 2019].
I will continue in my next post.
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