For obvious reasons, the relationship between Russia and the West is in the headlines again this weekend - see, for example, Jerome's excellent diary on the competing moral and political claims in the Caucasus or, if you're so inclined, the current front page of The New York Times.
The common history of Russia and the West is marked by a series of mutual misapprehensions, misunderstandings, and the careful cultivation, over centuries, both in that country and here of simple explanatory narratives that seek to explain the one to the other. Over the course of a thousand years, neither Russia nor the West have developed a relationship that would equally satisfy either.
History is formed, not dictated, by several variables, chief among them space and culture. In Russia's case, the location in which its story unfolded was and remains the vast continental plain that stretches from the Carpathians to the Urals, one of the largest open spaces on earth, unbroken by any natural obstacles to conquest or expansion. On that vast plain, over a thousand years ago, Slavic tribes settled, some moving West and South towards the crumbling borders of what remained of the Roman Empire, some staying in place. This Slavic expansion was made possible by the migration of Germanic tribes into Roman territory, the Völkerwanderung, which created a largely unsettled space from the Elbe to the Dnieper and beyond.
In the territory of what became Russia itself, in the ninth and tenth centuries, nascent Slavic polities came under the dominion of Viking invaders, led by a probably mythical chieftain, Rurik. The name Rus, referring to the people of Rurik, first appears in chronicles around the year 900. The first cities of the Rus, notably Novgorod and Kiev, emerge in this indistinct timeframe, as do the first recognizably Russian states, the Kievan Rus and the Republic of Novgorod. In roughly the same historic time period, the Western nations of France, England, Spain, Poland and Germany appear in embryonic form, separated from eastern events by a gulf in space unimaginable in today's hyper-networked world.
Maybe the most momentous event in Russian history took place somewhere around the year 987 in the Church of the Holy Wisdom, Ἁγία Σοφία, in Constantinople. A dazzling mass held there for the benefit of emissaries of the Prince Vladimir of Kiev so awed them that the following year, 988, the leading young Russian state adopted Orthodox Christianity as its state religion. There is more to the story, of course, including some very tangible benefits for the Kievan ruler in the shape of a new bride from the Byzantine dynasty, but the key history-altering fact of 988 is Russia's final absorption into the Byzantine cultural, political and religious orbit. Russia was now sundered from the West in its cultic language (Greek, later Church Slavonic), its Cyrillic script, in its very understanding of the state and its proper relationship to the individual and the church. In contrast to the autonomous church of the West, Byzantium had evolved a system known as Caesaropapism,which stipulated state control over the temporal affairs of the church. The image of the state determinative to the role of the individual, as practiced in Byzantium and then appropriated in Russia, was of an earthly representation of the kingdom of heaven, ordered, divinely ordained, and beyond questioning or failure.
This orientation had profound consequences as history continued to unfold. The universal church was sundered in the Great Schism of 1054, dividing Greek East from Latin West. The enmity caused between East and West by the schism of 1054 was exacerbated by the Fourth Crusade's genocidal Sack of Constantinople in 1204 and the profound shock to both East and West of the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. However, that shock was felt more deeply and woundingly in the Eastern Church, which saw its metropolitan See placed under the tutelage of an ascendant Muslim power.
The era from the Fourth Crusade to the Fall of Constantinople coincided with a shift within Russia itself; under the threat of Mongol invasion and the actual imposition of Mongol rule, the center of gravity of emerging Russia moved north, centering on the new city of Moscow and led by Grand Dukes ruling from the Kremlin. In the fifteenth century, aided by another fortuitous marriage - the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, Sophia Palaiologa, was married to Moscow's Grand Duke - Moscow claimed the vacant headship of the Eastern Orthodox Church and a corresponding role as the protector of the Orthodox Slavic world, commonly summed up in the phrase Third Rome. It is around this time that the rulers of Moscow first begin using the title Tsar and displaying the double eagle of Byzantium in their coat of arms. The mandate of the Third Rome is easily overstated, as was commonly done in the West in the 19th Century, but it does imply a special civilizational and political mission comparable in some ways to America's Manifest Destiny.
In Western Europe in the same period, the new monarchies of England, France and Spain are consolidating themselves into coherent nation-states, centralizing power, evolving legal codes and new, limited forms of governance, while a new intellectual and artistic movement in Italy, the Renaissance, sends out tendrils along the great trans-national trade routes centered on the Rhine Valley.
The following centuries establish a basic dynamic that to some extent continues to characterize the relationship and mutual perception between Russia and the West. Russia's first real experiences with Western powers are as the victim of imperialism; Russia's national epic, the story of Alexander Nevsky, recounts that prince of Novgorod's defeat of Sweidsh and German invaders. Aggressive neighbors, chief among them Sweden and Poland, eat away at Russia's border provinces, taking huge pieces of territory including Ukraine; the latter's development into a separate nation can be traced to its absorption into the kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. Russia was seen as so weak, so distant and so barbaric that it was not extended an invitation to the negotiations that concluded Europe's first real world war, the Thirty Years War, at the Peace of Westphalia of 1648.
Within the space of two generations, Tsar Peter the Great defeated both Sweden and Poland, extending Russia's frontiers in the process to the periphery of Europe and founding a new capital, Saint Petersburg, deliberately planned as a window to the West. Peter initiated the two complementary and dueling views of Russia and the West that obtain in either: in Russia, an alternation between fear of a predatory West and a desire to emulate the civilizational achievements created there, and in the West, equally alternating views of Russia as either hopelessly weak and rife for exploitation or, inversely, as a brooding menace at the borders, unimaginably vast and filled with teeming armies ready to march at the whim of a despotic ruler. These two views have been on full display during the recent past as Russia evolved from the center of the worldwide Communist empire to the pitiable and starving fief of Boris Yeltsin and, in the present, to an energy superpower overawing its neighbors.
Arguably the most important document for the shaping of the West's view of Russia in the Twentieth Century was George Kennan's Long Telegram. It fully reflects the old Western tradition of treating Russia, sometimes simultaneously, as too strong and too weak, as close kin and utterly foreign.
At bottom of Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.
Western policy responses to Russia's aspirations have fallen between two poles, containment and engagement. In the international system established by the Congress of Vienna, Russia was fully integrated into the European order as a pillar of collective security. Under the Vienna system, the Russian ruling class was fully integrated into the wider aristocracy of Europe, as the classic examples of Russian literature can attest. One hundred years later, by contrast, at the Paris Peace conference of 1919 that ended the First World War, Russia was entirely absent. A generation later, at Tehran, Yalta, Potsdam and San Francisco, Russia was pivotal to the forging of peace. In the decade preceding our own, the West again alternated fitfully between containment and engagement, alternately expanding the frontiers of NATO to within a few miles of Saint Petersburg, bombing Russia's closest ally Serbia (over which Russia had entered the First World War), and forcing a radical overhaul of Russia's economy, while at the same time including Russia in the G-8, establishing a NATO-Russia council and fully integrating Russia into the organizations that govern the world economy. The United States in particular has been enthusiastic in exploiting Russia's temporary weakness, abrogating the ABM treaty and establishing military bases on former Soviet territory. To Russian observers, this mirrors the experiences after the country's defeats in 1905 and 1917, by Japan and Germany respectively, both of which caused massive civil unrest, when Western powers snatched up large chunks of Russian territory and intervened in Russia's civil war.
In turn, Russia since 1993 has embraced the Western international order, accepting, for example, Soviet-era debt, but with several important provisos. Chief among these is that Russia expects to be treated by its neighbors, many of which contain large Russian minorities, as a friendly and powerful neighbor whose interests are kept in mind by the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. It's worth noting that the United States has similar expectations in our own backyard.
It's probably too much to expect that Western and Russian views of each other, shaped as they are by centuries of interaction, conflict and cooperation, can move far beyond the parameters established by our common legacy. But it's worth realizing that Russia has legitimate interests, that Russia is not going away, and that the country has significant abilities to shape its own destiny and the fate of its neighbors (many of which have their own grievances with a Russian power too often focused only on its own desires). A candid assessment of United States interests vis-a-vis Russia needs to start with the realization by an incoming Obama administration that its three predecessors failed to ever develop a coherent framework for relations with Russia - see, for example, this essay written in 2000 by Condoleeza Rice in Foreign Affairs, which is stupefying in its shallow analysis.
United States policy towards Russia needs to start with several simple assumptions. Russia is and will continue to be a great power with interests beyond its borders. Russia will continue to take an active interest in the fate of ethnic Russian or cultural Orthodox minorities in what it calls the Near Abroad. It will continue to seek advantageous security and economic arrangements, just like every other great power in history. Above all, it has the capacity, if it so chooses, to demonstrate the limits of U.S. power, as it's currently doing in Georgia. Engagement with Russia does not mean acceptance of every one of Russia's foreign policy goals; Russia itself has shown a keen understanding of which Western interests it is well-advised to accept, and which to reject. Russia's invasion of Georgia, for example, represents a serious challenge to American influence in the former Soviet Union and, more broadly, to the sovereignty of other former Soviet republics. At the same time, the cost of effective opposition to Russia's incursion is too high for Washington to pay; much as the price of opposing the West's move into Kosovo was too steep for Russia.
The next administration will need to work to resolve American policy incoherence on Russian questions. What's clear is that the arrogant Bush-Clinton-Bush-McCain approach has failed, and that a new assessment of the bilateral relationship is urgently needed. This emphatically does not mean that Washington should (or even needs to) acquiesce in the imposition of a new Greater Russian imperium on states that do not wish to be part of such an enterprise. But it does mean, at a minimum, that Washington needs to understand that its own actions are not viewed in Moscow with anything like the starry-eyed optimism that American policymakers seem to think greets their every move.