It may be counterintuitive, but the longer Vladimir Putin continues to bleed Russia dry and deprive it of a prosperous, modern future, the better it will be for Ukraine — provided the country remains united, continues to build its armed forces and work closely with NATO and the European Union. On the other hand, a change in the Kremlin, even if Putin is replaced by a democratic politician, may not change much in terms of Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Alexey Navalny remains a controversial figure among many opponents of the Putin regime. In the past, he made common cause with Russian nationalists and ridiculed Georgians during the 2008 Russian invasion of their country. After the annexation of Crimea, he stated that the Ukrainian peninsula “is not a salami sandwich to be passed back and forth” between the two countries.
On the other hand, Navalny’s supporters point out that he has been learning to be a Western-style politician in a country where politics hardly ever existed. That he has grown in stature and has expressed regret about some of his past statements and alliances. That in particular, he has been highly critical of Putin’s aggressive foreign policy and violations of international law. Finally, he now repeatedly states that he wants Russia to rejoin the community of nations, which presupposes renouncing aggression against other countries and revision of international borders by force of arms.
In fact, pro-Putin internet resources present Navalny’s nationalist statements as proof that he is a fake opposition leader and that if he came to power he would be no better than Putin. In a similar vein, a Georgian pro-Moscow organization accuses Navalny of siding with the Russian aggressor against their country.
But the truth is that whether or not Navalny is a closet Russian nationalist or a budding Western-style democratic politician may be beside the point. If there is one thing to know about Russia, it is that imperialism remains its fundamental national idea. In this respect, it may not matter who is at the helm in the Kremlin as long as the country itself remains unchanged..
Consider more than five centuries of Russian history. Someone calculated that between the time it shook off the Mongol domination in the mid-15th century and the start of World War I the Duchy of Muscovy was expanding at a rate of three square miles an hour. In the waning years of their dynasty the Romanovs entered the war with the sole purpose of gaining even more territory: the Slav-populated northern Austria-Hungary, Istanbul along with the Bosphorus and the large Greek and Armenian-populated territories of the Ottoman Empire and chunks of Persia. Even the Provisional government wanted to get those territories and continued to prosecute the war.
There have been only two periods when Russia tried to renounce territorial expansion. Both were extremely brief.
The Bolsheviks viewed the Russian Empire as a “prison of nations” which had to be totally destroyed. National self-determination was an important part of the communist ideology and the reason why many Poles, Latvians, Jews and others supported the overthrow of the Romanovs and then the Bolshevik takeover.
However, only Poland, Finland, and the three Baltic states were able to gain their freedom at the time. The window of opportunity closed almost as soon as it opened. The Soviet government promptly reversed course, reverting to traditional Russian imperialism, albeit under the guise of proletarian solidarity. It used military force to bring Ukrainians, Georgians and other independence-minded nations back into Moscow’s fold.
In this regard, Stalin’s transformation was especially remarkable. As a Georgian, he came of age in a colonized nation where revolutionary activity and general resentment were fed at least in part by Georgian nationalism. Yet, soon after becoming the top man in the Soviet Union he turned into an old-school Russian imperialist even though he continued to mouth internationalist slogans he inherited from Marxism. He made a point of regaining most of the lost imperial lands in alliance with Hitler, and after World War II he turned into an ardent Russian nationalist.
British historian Simon Sebag Montefiori cites Vasily Stalin’s remark to his sister Svetlana, to the effect that before the war their father was a Georgian — meaning that after the war he began to consider himself an ethnic Russian.
The collapse of communism allowed 14 nations to be formed once the Soviet Union disintegrated. For many of them, it was the first experience of freedom in centuries. However, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was decreed by three-party apparatchiks from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, and in Russia the impulse to divest itself from a land empire was short-lived. By the mid-1990s Moscow was already fighting a new colonial war in the Caucasus.
Then came President Vladimir Putin, a kleptocrat pure and simple. He has built a regime that is robbing the country blind and condemns its people to poverty and ignorance by pilfering the nation’s resources or squandering them on a variety of useless projects, by gutting its government and social institutions, and by pushing the best and the brightest to emigrate.
Of course, keeping the Russian population poor and ignorant didn’t disqualify past Russian and Soviet elites from being ardent nationalists, but the truth about the Putin regime is that its greatest beneficiaries seem to use Russia as a source of their ill-gotten fortunes while keeping their assets and relocating their families abroad. They do have dynastic aspirations, but they seem to want to join the international super-rich set, not remain in Russia.
Putin and his thieving entourage would’ve made their lives a lot easier if Russia stayed away from international misadventures. And indeed in his early years, Putin tried to stay on the good side of the West and even talked about joining NATO.
On the other hand, the annexation of Crimea gave Putin a spike in popularity, but it also made him an international pariah. His foray into Syria seemed to have been driven by the Crimea issue, as well. If he made himself a key player in that hot spot, he thought he could exchange his support for Bashar al-Assad and ability to regulate the flow of Syrian refugees to Europe for the international recognition of Russian control over Crimea.
That bargain failed, and Russia and Putin’s entourage are finding themselves in a tightening vise of sanctions. The sanctions will likely extend to Putin’s own foreign assets as well as to the assets and family members of his close associates. This may or may not lead to a palace coup, but in any event, aggression against Ukraine has created a massive headache for Putin with very few if any tangible gains.
The point is that Russian leaders seem to be pushed toward imperial expansion often to their own detriment and almost against their will. That refers both to nationalist leaders and to those who had a different agenda. Moreover, Ukraine remains a key target of Russia’s expansion and a cornerstone of its empire. As an indication of Ukraine’s importance for Russia’s self-image, note that Russian history books still put Kyiv, and not Moscow, as the birthplace of the Russian state.
It probably doesn’t matter who replaces Putin as Russia’s president, one of his cronies as a result of some backroom deal or an opposition leader such as Navalny in a free and fair nationwide election. The way the Russian state is currently constituted, the new president and the new government will eventually find themselves trapped by territorial expansion.
Whereas the longer the Putin regime survives, the more surely it will undermine the imperial Russian state. The protests in Khabarovsk have petered out without any fundamental change, but they revealed the regional discontent that is spreading around the country. It is unclear how the Russian Federation will end, but Putin’s kleptocratic misrule is surely pushing it in that direction.
