To Join Or Not To Join?
NATO and Russia’s Ruling Class
by Dmitri Glinski Vassiliev
Special to Antiwar.com
3/29/00

Odi et amo: qua re id faciam, fortasse requiris:
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and I love: you may inquire, why am I doing it:
I don’t know, but so I feel, and it’s excruciating.

~ Catullus

For more than half a century of NATO’s existence, the Kremlin has been anything but indifferent to the Western alliance. In 1949, at its inception, none other than Joseph Stalin privately conveyed his interest in joining the club. His failed bid was followed by the flare-up of the Cold War with intense anti-NATO rhetoric in Moscow and, soon, the expansion of the Alliance into Turkey and Greece. In March 1954, a year after Stalin’s death, the new Soviet leaders gave the idea another try. In their official response, Britain, France, and the United States dismissed Soviet request for membership as "completely unreal." The following year saw the birth of the Warsaw Pact and the accession of West Germany to the North Atlantic Treaty.

In the subsequent three and a half decades, Soviet ability to launch similar trial balloons was constrained in theory, if not by the intensity of the Cold War then at least by its obligations to East European allies. Yet in the event this did not become an unsurmountable obstacle: in 1989, Eduard Shevardnadze discussed the USSR’s potential integration with NATO in Brussels, well before any East European government openly contemplated the idea of leaving the Warsaw Pact. While, in 1990, the Kremlin virtually disregarded Vaclav Havel’s early musings about simultaneous disbanding of the two blocs, a year later, the Warsaw Pact was unconditionally dissolved at Moscow’s initiative, and the Soviet Union itself followed next.

In December 1991, Boris Yeltsin, whose government was not yet even universally recognized, dispatched a message to the session of the North Atlantic Council in which he bluntly raised the issue of Russia’s membership in the Alliance. After the request was met with silence, the foreign ministry explained in private that one of its clerks had missed the word "not" in the final text, and that Russia, in fact, was "not raising today the question" of its NATO membership. Following that, for almost a decade both sides agonized over the problem of NATO’s (yet another) eastward enlargement, and then over the Alliance’s military action in Kosovo. Although at least until 1997 the option of the Alliance’s membership for Russia was openly debated by Russia’s senior experts and politicians, the appearance of an unshakable consensus (driven by the grass-roots anti-NATO sentiment that was also directed against the Washington-oriented Moscow elite) emerged with the start of "Operation Allied Force." Now virtually everybody, including former proponents of Russia’s integration with the Alliance, predicted a long-term freeze in NATO-Russia relations. But yet another jolt was soon to come.

In February 2000, NATO’s Secretary-General, Lord Robertson, was welcomed as a guest in Moscow; then, on March 5, 2000, the anniversary of Stalin’s death (of whom Russia’s Acting President is known to be a zealous admirer), Vladimir Putin told his BBC interviewer that he could not see why Russia would not join NATO—under certain conditions, of course. Brussels’ predictable response was that Russian membership was "not on the agenda." In a couple of days, with considerable help from other Russian officials, Mr. Putin retreated—not unlike his predecessor—by explaining his statement to the Russian public as entirely hypothetical.

The cyclical pattern of this saga is only familiar to the growing number of Russians who believe that history—their history, at least—repeats itself, and yet its lessons are rarely if ever learnt. It is more difficult to figure out the purpose and timing of Putin’s remarks, from the point of view of Russia’s interests and even his own political considerations. For proponents of a real NATO expansion, in the West as well as in the East, Putin’s knock at the door of the Alliance was certainly a boost for their cause. Russia’s remaining military allies in the CIS will see this as another sign of the Kremlin’s inconsistency and will feel themselves less bound by the Tashkent Treaty. At home, Putin’s initiative came under attack from both of his closest electoral rivals—not only the communist Gennady Zyuganov, but also the leading democratic reformer in the race, Grigory Yavlinsky. (The latter observed that one of the negative consequences of Putin’s statement would be that if NATO expands to the Baltic states and Ukraine, Russia would now be compelled to absorb this in silence.) Of course, from the towering height of his popularity rating, Putin did not feel particularly bothered by their critique. But cooing with a British correspondent about NATO membership was also hardly a way to attract new voters, less than a year after a nationwide upsurge of solidarity with the bombarded Serbs and mass demonstrations in front of the US embassy. Besides, the fact that Putin represents the fifth generation of Russian leaders contemplating the idea of joining the bloc that was created with the purpose of defending its members from the Red Army prods us to look beyond short-term rational calculations. Putin’s signal of interest in the NATO military machine came from his heart, if it can be put this way.

What is different in comparison with 1991 and even 1954 is that Putin’s dovish stance on NATO is markedly at odds with his draconian domestic profile. And likewise, in this latter respect, he is not merely calculating but also sincere (which helps explain the extent of his public approval). He does believe that all Chechen fighters that resist the Russian army after three years of de-facto independence are gangsters that deserve to be "rubbed out in the loo"; simultaneously, he does believe, judging by his interview with Kommersant Daily, that it is acceptable for a Russian government agency to bargain with gangsters over exchanging a Russian citizen employed by a foreign radio station for Russian soldiers. He does believe that the Russian party system should consist of his own bloc created overnight by government officials and of the domesticated communist party, while all other organizations and societal forces can be dispensed with.

This combination of repressive moves at home with a pro-NATO stance in foreign policy would have been hard to imagine some ten or seven years ago, in the rosy period of Russia’s democratic aspirations. For Putin’s predecessor, democracy and the West were closely related. Yeltsin’s retreat from the principles of the democratic movement that had brought him to power went hand in hand with his anti-Western evolution – and this was only a natural linkage for the entire Gorbachev-Yeltsin generation. In this regard, the worldview of Putin and his cohorts represents a sea change. It says as much about Russia’s own development as about its changing perceptions of the West.

It would be premature praise for this policy to call it pragmatic and rational, as opposed to ideological. First of all, "pragmatism" is also a distinct ideology in its own right. Secondly, Putin’s stance is based on a very special type of pragmatic ideology – the belief, informed by recent evidence, that public opinion, not just domestic but also international, is easily manipulable and does not really matter, at least at the present stage in history. The Kremlin is confident that "the West" will close its eyes to whatever Russia’s ruling oligarchy does with its citizens, because of "the West’s" interest in arms control, IMF-style economic policies and debt repayment, and because in the light of its Kosovo record the West itself is hardly a moral exemplar.

This brings us to the third feature of this strategy: the Putin detente resembles in certain key elements the policy of the Nixon-Brezhnev era (which, coincidentally, was the formative period of Mr. Putin’s career). The new Russia’s ruler is a quintessential detente politician – a global horse trader. In his worldview, and using his own jargon, the Caucasus is our "loo" and the Balkans is yours. It was also not by chance that, of all Western leaders, Putin chose to stage a royal reception for none other but Tony Blair, the principal Kosovo hawk. This was the era when the gap between Western values and the behavior of Western elites became wider than usual – and the Soviet nomenklatura, in alliance with intelligence networks, filled this gap with their ideology and practices.

In choosing NATO as the focal point for his diplomatic offensive, Putin steps right into the middle of a controversy that has been at the center of the Russian foreign policy debate for the past ten years. In this debate, he is certainly not alone in his belief that NATO and Russia (reshaped by its oligarchs in line with the IMF prescriptions) would fit each other well. Indeed, an array of prominent politicians and top security experts, some of them just recently converted Cold War hawks, promoted at different points Russia’s accession to the Alliance. As late as in 1997, the most vocal and insistent lobbyist for this idea was the financial mogul Boris Berezovsky, acting in person as well as through his media empire and political allies. The Berezovsky case is indicative for all those who believe that even in sheer power politics, psychology always matters. In one of his programmatic articles, Berezovsky opined that the West’s denial of Russia’s integration into its security alliance would be no less than "totally aggressive" with regard to Moscow.¹ Soon afterwards, the Berezovsky media outlets turned most unabashedly to anti-Western rhetoric.

(It is worth noting that not only most Russian democrats, but also committed Westernizers among them, such as Sergei Kovalyov or Ella Pamfilova, never spoke in favor of Russia’s NATO membership. For his part, Aleksei Arbatov, top security expert of Russia’s democratic camp, as early as in 1992 analysed the idea from a strategic point of view and concluded that it was senseless and counterproductive for both NATO and Russia.²)

Thus, Putin’s overtures to the Alliance did not come out of the blue. They reflect a broader policy outlook, a sort of operational code, characteristic of the dominant element of the new Russian nomenklatura. This elite group (which can be described as hard-line, or authoritarian Westernizers) is craving for the admission to the "trans-atlantic" establishment mainstream—viewed as a single entity, standing in opposition to the "Asiatic" and "underdeveloped" world and to Russia’s own unbearable "backwardness" (a product of its unfortunate location at the frontier of the "civilized" universe) that must be eliminated through comprehensive Westernization of society. Given Russia’s diversity, even within the ethnic Russian majority (not to speak of other ethnicities, especially in the Caucasus), significant strata of society, while not necessarily anti-Western, will never fit into such a monolithic, homogenized, indeed fundamentally intolerant vision of a Westernized Russia. Which means that authoritarian methods, social engineering, manipulation and coercion, especially against "backward" social and ethnic groups, are seen as a legitimate way to remove these obstacles. Russia’s steely Westernizers are technocratic, well-dressed and polished, speaking foreign languages, but fundamentally illiberal and disdainful of democratic procedures. In fact, for these individuals, the goal of such a Westernization is not human progress nor the improvement in the lot of the Russian people: rather, it is a way to confirm by force their own superior, "vanguard" status in society and politics, along the lines of Lenin’s famous dictum: kto kogo?

These hard-line Westernizers are based primarily in the commercialized part of Russia’s security services as well as in the narrow group of financial and raw materials corporations that have benefited from Yeltsin’s authoritarian reforms while most of the nation was brought to misery. In the spring of 1999, these elites’ predominance was endangered by the coalescence of the right and left wings of anti-oligarchical opposition in and around the previous parliament (driven, among other things, by the grass-roots movement of protest against NATO war in Yugoslavia). This opposition had pinned its hopes on the popularity of the former Prime Minister Yevgenii Primakov and thus represented a serious threat to the corrupt "reformers"’ monopoly on power and Yeltsin’s determination to set up his own political dynasty (so as to avoid persecution for those actions for which he barely escaped impeachment by the Duma in May 1999). Hard-liners and Yeltsin’s political "Family" reacted to these dangers by starting the second Chechnya war, together with the skillful media campaign that re-directed the mass public’s largely powerless rage away from domestic oligarchy and its Western allies toward an easier target (that is, Caucasians). Riding the crest of this ethnic nationalist wave, authoritarian Westernizers re-established their monopoly position in Russian politics that they had lost after the August 1998 rouble crash and the rise of the anti-NATO movement.

Today, of all the many faces of the contemporary West, they are inclined to choose NATO as their privileged partner and alter ego. This is a rather selective view of integration with the West. Why not integrate by starting to observe the norms and regulations of the Council of Europe, or by signing the European Social Charter, as advocated by Russian liberals? A rhetorical question: these are obviously not the priorities of Putin and his team.

Still, why NATO? What is in it for Russia’s hard-line Westernizers? Given the material and moral condition to which Russia’s political leadership has driven its military under the IMF guidance, present-day Russia could only be a net consumer, not a net provider of Alliance security. Does the Kremlin expect NATO to serve as a guarantor of its borders with smaller nations? Or, perhaps, .Putin and like-minded members of the elite would eventually welcome NATO’s help to keep peace at home, starting with the Caucasus? But this does not really require NATO membership.

The understanding of the pro-NATO attitudes of Russia’s oligarchy is a fundamental issue that is important not only for Russia’s foreign policy debate, but also for NATO and other Western actors as well to reflect upon. Over the past decade, a lot has been written and said on this score by Russian experts and politicians favoring some form of Russia’s integration with the Alliance. Below is an attempt to systematize these writings from the point of view of their underlying images of what a NATO expanded to include Russia would represent and what would be its mission from the Kremlin’s standpoint.

1. Balance of power view: NATO as the European Concert. This nostalgic vision, shared by some in Russia’s security establishment, sees Russia’s military integration with the West essentially as a restoration of the 19-century European "Concert of Powers," each with its respective sphere of influence, and NATO as a gateway to this balance of power system. This approach has been fairly obvious in the Kremlin’s haughtiness and reluctance to deal with small European countries, its belief that everything can be arranged in Washington and Bonn and its addiction to such old-style gatherings as the European "troika" (Russia-Germany-France). No wonder that small European countries, including former Soviet allies, were put off by this approach and some reinforced in their desire to join NATO.
2. Ideological view: NATO as an anti-communist Holy Alliance. This image is often projected in the Moscow elites’ recurrent talk about the desirability of NATO’s transformation into a "political" rather than a military bloc. It was certainly a factor behind Yeltsin’s failed attempt to join. The problem with this approach in the 1990s was that among the old and the aspiring members of the alliance some have communists in the parliament as well as in the government. In Moscow, promoting integration with the alliance for "political" reasons was a virtually undisguised attempt to recruit ever more foreigners, starting with the US interventionist allies of the new Russian oligarchy, in the cold civil war between the Kremlin and the leftward-leaning parliament.
3. The global government view: NATO as a club of world rulers. Another variation of the Great Power syndrome, this approach was most evident in the linkage that Russian experts and diplomats made, from 1994 on, between NATO expansion and Russia’s ceremonial seat at G-7. Yeltsin finally acceded to NATO expansion by signing on to the NATO-Russia Founding Act in May 1997, conditional on the G-7 extension into the G-8.
4. Developmental view: NATO membership as a reward for political and economic development. This is from the repertoire of the classical "vanguard" mentality of Russia’s modernizers. In 1990s, a number of advocates of NATO integration with Russia opined in public that Russia would have already joined the Alliance if not for certain social strata that were "still unprepared for it."³ This instilled in some a genuine hope that Russia would be welcome in the Alliance once it achieves "maturity." However stimulating for some, the idea was fraught with dangerous misunderstanding. NATO is clearly neither a tool of nor a reward for economic or political development, whatever is meant by this term, otherwise Switzerland would be a member while Portugal would probably not.
5. Containment view: NATO as a protection against Muslim and/or Chinese pressure. The objects of containment are the Kremlin’s traditional fears—the "Yellow" and the "Green" peril. Sometimes it implies the threat of a war on Russia’s southern borders, sometimes just the inability to contain migration and commercial penetration from the East. In this perspective, aside from regular security concerns, there has been a distinctly racial undercurrent. It is not by coincidence that some of the new Duma leaders who welcomed Putin’s overture to NATO have been known for their rabidly anti-Muslim and anti-Caucasian animus. Given a profound rift between those who believe that Russia is a squarely European power (some of them ethnic Russian nationalists) and those who see Russia as a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Eurasian community, some of the former would welcome NATO as another voice in Russia’s internal debate over its civilizational identity.
6. Crusader’s view: NATO as the pillar and the battering ram of Western civilization. Another, a more aggressive variation of the same, this belief harks back to Russia’s Byzantine legacy and, as other views outlined above, implies a profound opposition between "Western" and "Asiatic" identities. Thus, Russia’s ex-foreign minister Andrey Kozyrev, when arguing for Russia’s integration with the NATO, spoke of "the need to ‘advance eastwards’ the lines of ‘common defence’...of the values of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe," and reminded his Western audience that on the Asian borders of this zone "the main burden is ... shouldered by Russia..."⁴ In other words, Atlanticists at the helm of Russian foreign policy had no problem in principle with the idea of an "eastward expansion" of "European values," that is, the West, against the Asiatic "Rest." The only disagreement between them and some Western proponents of NATO expansion was whether Russia was entitled to be a part of the West’s neo-colonial drive, or whether it should be relegated to the Rest.
7. Neo-mercantilist view: NATO as a market for Russia’s weapons. In this author’s opinion, this was perhaps the only rational and sound argument in favor of Russia’s integration into the Alliance, at least in the early 1990s, that grew not just out of ideological whims and private interests of the new oligarchy but also out of national economic needs. Entering Western arms’ markets with Russia’s military products, if it were possible, would help rescue Russia’s high-tech industries, reduce the brain drain and the current spread of weapons and military technologies from Russia to countries potentially hostile to both Russia and the West.⁵ But this was a very complicated foreign policy task that required, inter alia, a substantially different scenario of economic reforms than the one dictated from the IMF headquarters. In any event, it was an argument for internal use. Arms markets in all NATO countries are an area of strategic concern and government protection, and Russia’s attempts to enter these markets would mean a tough game against foreign military-industrial lobbies, as long as Russia’s production remained competitive by NATO standards. By now, the idea has become largely obsolete, given that Russia’s arms traders have to struggle hard to preserve their markets in such countries as India. But Russia’s recent predictably failed attempt to sell military aircraft to Turkey (an attempt backed by Putin’s personal phone call to the Turkish Prime Minister’s office, which virtually coincided with his NATO remarks) underscores the link between Russia’s belated effort to rescue its high-tech industries and the Kremlin’s recurrent interest in the possibility of admission to NATO.

These are the perspectives that were advanced at different times by advocates of Russian NATO membership. Some of them are more defensible than others, but none conforms to NATO’s official mission for which it was created – nor, at least on surface, to those new tasks with which it has been unwisely saddled. From a mainstream Western point of view, the Alliance is not, and was not intended to be a balance of power mechanism in the 19^th century style, much less a global directorate, a vehicle for an international Westernizing crusade or a Judeo-Christian bastion against hostile civilizations. It is hard to deny that it does represent a closed weaponry trading cartel, though it was not so by design. But the whole point of this analysis is that NATO is consistently viewed as such in Russia, and specifically by NATO-friendly sectors of the elite, that would be delighted to join. And as we all know, in politics perception and reality are not that far apart. Besides, Russia is NATO’s key outside interlocutor on a strategic scale, and Russia’s perceptions supposedly have more impact than anyone else’s assessment upon the evolution of the NATO identity. There are serious reasons, not only in Russia but also in NATO, why Russia’s security and financial establishment is inclined to see the Alliance in this peculiar light, why they aspire for membership in this kind of NATO, and why they believe that an integration into the West via NATO is not incompatible with authoritarianism. To put it another way, there is a growing likelihood that NATO actions, as they have evolved since 1994, will finally confirm the views of the Alliance that are held by the nomenklatura in the Kremlin.

It may be open to debate whether the Moscow elites’ bouts of love and hate toward their recent strategic adversary was a major catalyst for NATO resurgence in the 1990s and for the disproportionate role that it assumed in regional and global politics. Whatever the case, if the theory of vicious cycles has any value, one would expect another burst of self-confidence by interventionists in the West, NATO’s new expansion and involvement in poorly thought-out ventures which will make it again a scarecrow in the Kremlin garden, new resentment in Moscow—and quite possibly its shift from pro-Western to anti-Western authoritarianism.

Before following the Kremlin’s lead in initiating this vicious circle, the governments and opinion makers of the NATO countries would be well advised to re-examine its policies. If gentlemen with Putin’s and Berezovsky’s outlook and background are eager to join, while Russia’s progressive democratic forces are not happy with this idea, something is clearly wrong. It turns out that today’s NATO stands very far from those values that its members were supposed to uphold. As shown by historical evidence, the aggressive projection of power for power’s sake ends up by subverting those principles on which this power was built in the first place and which it was designed to protect.

1. B.Berezovsky, "Litsom k litsu [Vtoroi geopoliticheskii vybor Zapada v XX veke], Nezavisimaya gazeta, 20 Febr. 1997, p. 1.
2. A.Arbatov, "Rossiya i NATO: nuzhny li my drug drugu?," Nezavisimaya gazeta, 11 March 1992, p. 2.
3. E.g. "Rossiya i NATO [Tezisy Soveta po vneshnei i oboronnoi politike]," Nezavisimaya gazeta, June 21, 1995.
4. Andrei Kozyrev, "What are we supposed to do with NATO?," Moscow News, Sept. 24, 1993, p. 5.
5. For this approach, see S.Glazyev and D.L’vov, "Mozhet li Rossiya vstupit’ v NATO? S tochki zreniya ekonomiki, oborony i politiki," Nezavisimaya gazeta, 1 Oct. 1991, p. 4, and Kortunov, A.V., "SNG I Zapad: modeli integratsii [Statya pervaya]," SshA: ekonomicheskie I politicheskie issledovaniya, 1994, pp. 4-15. By irony of history, a co-author of the former, Sergei Glazyev, is now a prominent member of the communist Duma faction.

Dmitri Glinski Vassiliev is Senior Research Associate at the Institute for World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and lives in Moscow. His past articles in English have been published in the Los Angeles Times and the Journal of Democracy. He is the co-author (with P.Reddaway) of Tragedy of Russia's Reforms : Market Bolshevism Against Democracy (forthcoming July 2000).