Russia presents two opposing faces to the world: one menacing, the other benign. Both have now combined, somewhat unexpectedly, to break the momentum carrying the United States, and possibly other Western powers, toward a disastrous military intervention in Syria.
Russia’s domestic situation remains deplorable. With the collapse of the planned economy in 1991, Russia proved to be not so much a developed as a misdeveloped country, unable to sell most of its products in non-captive markets.
So Russia regressed into a commodity-based economy, mainly selling energy, while its talented scientists and technicians sought jobs abroad and its intellectual life decayed. Russia is also, no surprise, blighted by corruption, which drives away foreign investment and costs the country billions of dollars annually.
This underlying debility has been masked by high energy prices, which, over the 14 years of President Vladimir Putin’s rule, have allowed Russia to combine the features of a kleptocracy with per capita income growth sufficient to quell dissent and create a shopping-mad middle class. The accumulation of reserves from the oil and gas industries can be used to develop much-needed infrastructure. But, for all the Kremlin’s talk of diversification, Russia remains an economy with a Latin American, rather than a Western profile.
Russia’s politics are equally dispiriting. If Western foreign policy has a guiding principle, it is the promotion of human rights. This has not influenced the Russian government’s domestic or foreign policies in the slightest. Instead, under the credo of “managed democracy,” Putin has established a soft dictatorship, in which the law is flagrantly used for political ends; and, when the law is insufficient, the state resorts to assassination.
As for human rights that are particularly valued in the contemporary West – those of dissenters and minorities, including sexual minorities – Russia seems to be on a completely different wavelength. Independent NGOs are harassed and dubbed “foreign agents.” Putin has appealed to Russia’s most reactionary forces by restricting gay people’s rights with legislation that Western countries abandoned years ago.
The decision to allow opposition leader Alexei Navalny to stand in Moscow’s recent mayoral election was a welcome move toward a more open system, but the political calculation behind it and the likelihood of vote rigging to prevent a runoff against his victorious opponent hardly suggest a Pauline conversion to democracy. The Putin regime occupies a space between dictatorship and democracy for which Western political science has yet to find a proper word.
But perhaps Russia’s indifference to human rights is a source of strength, not weakness. The trouble with the human-rights agenda is that its advocates become trigger-happy, whereas Russia’s foreign policy displays the virtues of conservative prudence. Its realism, which is shared by China, is thus an important counterbalance to the West’s intemperate urge to meddle in the domestic affairs of countries that do not live up to its proclaimed standards.