A NEW RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR

Nearly two decades ago, Russian civic icon Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lamented his country’s status as a “torn state” on account of the territorial divisions that took place with the USSR’s collapse. ²²Today, Solzhenitsyn’s description is more apt than ever, but for a different reason. Russia is more divided socially than at any time in its modern history. The rise of Islamic radicalism, the influx of Muslim migrants from Central Asia, the rise of rampant xenophobia and racism, and the expanding power of the Russian Orthodox Church cumulatively have the potential to transform Russia into a latter-day Yugoslavia, a nation riven by ethnic violence and sectarian strife. The Russian military provides a snapshot of this phenomenon. Even as the country has become more ethnically diverse (and divided), the Russian armed forces have headed in the opposite direction—becoming more homogenous and rigid. They have also become increasingly ideological, with Russia’s armed forces seeing themselves more and more as “protectors of the state” against threats to the nation’s character and core values. ²³The groundwork for a future civil war in Russia, a violent contest for the soul of the Russian state that will be fought along religious and ethnic lines, is thus being laid.

None of these alternative futures is assured. But all are plausible, given the trend lines now visible within the Russian state and society. Each, moreover, holds significant implications for the West.

A Russia engulfed in civil or sectarian warfare could quickly become a threat to its neighbors and to the international community at large. So could an increasingly aggressive Russia bent upon fresh territorial conquests in Slavic parts of the former Soviet Union. Prospects for a Russo-Chinese conflict over the Far East should likewise not be taken lightly, since such a war would inevitably draw in neighboring Asian powers (and, quite possibly, the United States as well). The safety and security of Russia’s strategic arsenal, meanwhile, could be affected by the emergence of organized Islamic separatism within the Russian heartland—or by the country’s descent into protracted civil unrest. And if current demographic trends hold, decades hence Russia could become the world’s first majority-Muslim nuclear superpower with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, fundamentally reconfiguring the nature of the global order in the process.

THE KREMLIN AT THE CROSSROADS

“Russia,” British prime minister Winston Churchill famously remarked in October 1939, during the opening days of the Second World War, “is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” The British leader was commenting on Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s surprising August 1939 decision to sign a non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. That move helped keep the USSR on the sidelines of the unfolding global conflict, much to the chagrin of the Allied powers—until Germany’s grand betrayal in June 1941 dragged the Soviet Union into what is still known in Russia as the “Great Patriotic War.”

Fast forward seven decades, and little has changed. More often than not, Western policymakers are at a loss to properly explain Russia’s behavior and correctly characterize its relationship with the world. In large measure, official Washington still clings to the conception of post-Soviet Russia as a force that must be accommodated in order to achieve foreign policy success on the world stage. This vision has underpinned the Obama administration’s unfortunate “reset” policy, which seeks to forge a new, less adversarial relationship by acknowledging—and nurturing—Russia’s status as a great power.

All of this, of course, has been music to the ears of elites in Moscow, reinforcing their conception of their country’s global status. Far less understood is the fact that the Russian Federation is a country fast approaching a strategic crossroads. The Kremlin now finds itself a prisoner of demographic and societal trends that will profoundly reshape the nature and workings of the Russian state.

Author and columnist Mark Steyn perhaps said it best. “What will happen in Russia?” Steyn asked wryly in the pages of National Reviewseveral years ago, upon grasping the extent of the country’s coming upheaval. “None of us knows, but we should know enough to know we don’t know.” ²⁴

Indeed, we do not know which direction Russia will take in the years ahead, or whether it will manage to survive at all. What is clear, however, is that Russia’s future is not one of global dominance, as the current occupants of the Kremlin (and their interlocutors in the West) seem to believe. Rather, it is one of ethnic, demographic, and societal turmoil—and, quite possibly, the end of the Russia that we know.

NOTES

CHAPTER ONE

1.See, for example, Louis Charbonneau, “Russian Arms Shipment En Route to Syria: Report,” Reuters, May 25, 2012, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-05-25/news/sns-rt-us-syria-arms-russiabre84p00b-20120525_1_syrian-president-bashar-al-assad-cargo-ship-russian-firm.

2.For a good overview, see George L. Simpson Jr., “Russian and Chinese Support for Tehran,” Middle East QuarterlyXVII, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 63–72.

3.Keith C. Smith, “A Bear at the Door,” Journal of International Security Affairs, no. 13 (Fall 2007): http://www.securityaffairs.org/issues/2007/13/smith.php.

4.See, for example, Ilan Berman, “Russia Shows the US the Central Asia Door,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, July 11, 2007, http://www.ilanberman.com/5923/russia-shows-the-us-the-central-asia-door.

5.Paul Klebnikov, “Gangster-Free Capitalism?” Forbes, November 26, 2001, http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2001/1126/107.html.

6.CSIS Global Organized Crime Project, Russian Organized Crime(Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic & International Studies, 1997).

7.See, for example, Oleg Bukharin and William Potter, “Potatoes Were Guarded Better,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 1995, http://books.google.com/books?id=PgwAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA46&lpg=PA46&dq=potatoes+were+guarded+better&source=bl&ots=2QAjY7_Ru4&sig=lwOPzIX54pA4CxnRzn0f1vt0C2Y&hl=en&sa=X&ei=1WpPUfuYD5T_qQHQp4GwCw&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=potatoes%20were%20guarded%20better&f=false.

8.See “Pravila Dvizheniya [Rules of the Road],” Rossiiskaya Gazeta, no. 5804, June 9, 2012, http://www.rg.ru/2012/06/09/miting.html.

9.Brad Thayer and Thomas Skypek, “The Perilous Future of U.S. Strategic Forces,” Journal of International Security Affairs, no. 16 (Spring 2009), http://www.securityaffairs.org/issues/2009/16/thayer&skypek.php; Mark Schneider, “New START’s Dangerous Legacy,” AFPC Defense Dossier, no. 1 (December 2011): http://www.afpc.org/files/december2011.pdf.

10.Ibid.; author’s interviews, Moscow, Russia, March 2013.

11.David E. Sanger, “Obama to Renew Drive for Cuts in Nuclear Arms,” New York Times, February 10, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/11/us/politics/obama-to-renew-drive-for-cuts-in-nuclear-arms.html?_r=0.

12.“Putin: Soviet Collapse A ‘Genuine Tragedy,’” Associated Press, April 25, 2005, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7632057/ns/world_news/t/putin-soviet-collapse-genuine-tragedy/#.UGZYqqPaKSo.

13.Thomas de Waal et al., “The Stalin Puzzle: Deciphering Post-Soviet Public Opinion,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 1, 2013, http://www.carnegieendowment.org/2013/03/01/stalin-puzzle-deciphering-post-soviet-public-opinion/fmz8#.

14.In the words of former Russian Duma Deputy Sergei Kovalev, derzhavnostis a neo-Soviet ideology in which the state “is deified, placed above society, outside society, over society.” Sergei Kovalev, “On The New Russia,” New York Review of Books, April 18, 1996, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1996/apr/18/on-the-new-russia/?pagination=false.