The collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 was greeted with euphoria on both sides of the Iron Curtain but this soon gave way to concern over more pragmatic issues such as the transition to democracy in the old Soviet Union, the creation of peaceful relationships between its former constituent members, and their survival. Another crucial question was how they would relate to their former ideological enemy, the West, and, in particular, to NATO.
The Soviet Union's demise took the West by surprise but it was not caught wrong-footed. The Western leaders had already responded positively to Gorbachev's overtures of peace. After their London Summit meeting in July 1990, the NATO Heads of State and Government affirmed in their 'Declaration on a Transformed North Atlantic Alliance' that the Cold War was over. That should, in the opinion of some Western commentators, have led immediately to the disbanding of NATO, a quid pro quo for the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact which followed the dismemberment of the former Soviet empire. Manfred Wörner, the late Secretary-General of NATO (1988&endash;94), engaged in a campaign to save the Alliance and especially to keep the USA's participation in it, for the American inclination to the isolationist policy of the 1930s looked like being resurrected. It would indeed have been the supreme irony if the overthrow of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union had brought about what all its diplomatic efforts over the forty-five years of NATO's existence had failed to achieve. Wörner therefore continually warned his Western audiences about the East's superiority in the number of troops and in certain types of military equipment, especially tanks and submarines, and about its continued modernisation of its weaponry. Nevertheless, in May 1991, the US House of Representatives called for a reduction of US troops in Europe from 250,000 to 100,000.
Simultaneously, Wörner attempted to reassure the Warsaw Pact countries of the West's good intentions and promised Western support for Gorbachev's reforms in the USSR in return for progress on human rights, including self-determination, 'responsible behaviour in foreign policy, and a reduction of military potential'. [1] However, NATO's anti-Soviet observations in such statements as 'We will continue to live next door to an unruly and over-armed superpower' [2] left the Soviet leaders unconvinced. The Soviet government also resented NATO interference in its domestic affairs. In January 1991, NATO, disappointed that Gorbachev was not prepared to set the Baltic Soviet Republics free from the Soviet Union as he had the Soviet satellites, urged him not to use force and intimidation against them. The Soviet Foreign Minister, Edvard Shevardnadze, responded to NATO's assurances by accusing the West of revanchism. Yet despite the perceived anti-Soviet developments in its former satellites in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister visited NATO in October 1991 for discussions on joining the Alliance and the Russian Federation continued the negotiation process from early in 1992.
NATO's decision in the autumn of 1993 against any immediate expansion was designed to help Yeltsin save face. However, President Clinton's concept of a Partnership For Peace programme (hereafter, PFP), proposed in October 1993 and adopted by the sixteen NATO Heads of State and Government at the Brussels Summit in January 1994, received a mixed reception in Russia. The three Baltic states signed the PFP Framework Document (the first stage in the process) by the midddle of February 1994. By the end of March all the remaining states of the former Eastern Bloc, except those in the former Yugoslavia, had joined them. Ukraine signed the Framework Document on 8 February and the Presentation Document (the second stage) on 25 May. The other CIS members were rather slower to sign. Russia itself delayed signing the Framework Document until 22 June. It resented not being consulted over NATO airstrikes against the Bosnian Serbs and over sanctions against North Korea (with which Russia inherited a Soviet Friendship Treaty) and held out for a closer degree of cooperation 'commensurate with its weight and responsibility as a major European, international and nuclear power'. [3] NATO finally agreed to 'an enhanced relationship or dialogue' but without a veto and automatic consultation for Russia.
Some Russian democratic groups hailed PFP as a triumph for Russian diplomacy but they either favoured the continuation of NATO or accepted the inevitable in preference to Russia being isolated on the periphery of Europe. They chose to interpret the haste of the Central European and Baltic states to join NATO as an action motivated by legitimate fear of adverse developments in Russia, or even as a necessary precursor to those states' acceptance in the European Union. The opposition groups attacked PFP as further evidence of Yeltsin's incompetence. Zhirinovsky's Liberal-Democratic Party condemned Russian participation in PFP as treachery and the Russian press was generally hostile. Gorbachev too added his voice against PFP although his criticisms were probably the first salvo in his campaign to win the presidency from Yeltsin in 1996. Despite Gorbachev's unpopularity with the Russian electorate he and the opposition parties echo, no doubt intentionally, the Russian people's dissatisfaction with Yeltsin. For ordinary Russians blame Yeltsin not just for the failure of his economic and social policies but also for a disastrous foreign policy; 40 per cent of the Russian electorate expressed dissatisfaction with it in the December 1993 elections.
The primary theme in the post-Soviet press since the announcement of PFP is bitter antagonism towards NATO. The intense dislike of NATO is not restricted to the Opposition and Russian military commentators. The Russian government made NATO its target of attack in its negotiations over joining PFP. Russia would obviously prefer the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) to assume a dominant role in maintaining stability in Eurasia. Even after signing the PFP Framework Document, Andrei Kozyrev, the Russsian Federation's Minister of Foreign Affairs, repeated the proposal in less strident form: 'the CSCE should aim at coordinating the activities of NATO, the European Union, the Council of Europe, the WEU and the CIS' even though he insisted that he did not want the CSCE to become 'a hierarchical leader or 'commander''. [4]
The antipathy to NATO on the part of both the Russian government and the Russian press undoubtedly reflects Russian popular feeling. For the almost 75 years of Communist rule the Soviet peoples were indoctrinated with the dogma of so-called 'capitalist encirclement'. The Large Soviet Encyclopaedia of 1954 branded NATO as 'an aggressive military union ... closely connected with a series of other military blocs'; the Encyclopaedia's 1974 edition continued to define the Alliance as 'a military-political union directed against Socialist countries'. In that same edition the dour Andrei Gromyko, who served as Soviet Foreign Minister for over thirty years until his removal by Gorbachev in July 1988, described NATO as 'aggressive in its nature and directed against the USSR as well as against other peace-loving countries'. He particularly attacked the remilitarisation of West Germany. [5]
Soviet fears of NATO were not entirely unfounded. From the very creation of Soviet Russia in November 1917 the Bolsheviks regarded the West as a hostile force. Moreover, history furnished abundant proof that Russia is vulnerable to attack from the west. The East European Plain is an extension of the North German Plain, offering no natural impediment to a potential foe. The Poles took Moscow in 1610; the Central Powers occupied a large tract of the Ukraine and Belorussia between 1914&endash;18; the Allies in World War I intervened in the Civil War in the former Russian Empire (1918&endash;20), sending American, British, French and Japanese troops; and the Germans advanced as far as Leningrad and Stalingrad in World War II. Russian instinct therefore favoured the formation of a protective shield on its western border. Indeed Belorussian and Ukrainian Communists had been informed by their Russian comrades in 1918 that the primary function of their countries was to protect the fledgling Soviet Russia. The Soviet seizure of the three Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) in 1940 under the secret protocol of Soviet Union's pact with Germany and their subsequent retention within the Soviet Union, made good strategic, as well as economic, sense.
Against the background of three invasions from the West in under fifty years, the consternation in Moscow over the efforts to form what eventually became NATO is hardly surprising, even if Western fears of Soviet expansionism were justified. Judged from the Kremlin, an organisation calling itself 'North Atlantic' and including Italy must have seemed disingenuous to say the least. The USSR's request to join NATO in 1949 may not have been entirely cynical. Moreover, the Soviet Union was not the only country then (or now) to fear a resurgence of German militarism and it already had evidence of the hostility from the Americans and the other former interventionist countries to the USSR. Stalin's appeal to the Soviet peoples to resist the threat of 'capitalist encirclement', which was regularly invoked throughout the 1930s to justify his economic reforms and the purges, was now realised. The perceived threat grew steadily worse with the enlargement of NATO. It could control Soviet shipping exiting from the Baltic through the Dardanelles and the Skagerrak, and could, from its bases in Greenland, Iceland and Norway, monitor the USSR's access to the North Atlantic from Murmansk. North America lay only 1600 miles across the North Pole and a mere 100 miles across the Bering Sea. Japan was considered an American base for controlling the whole west Pacific coast. The admission to NATO of Greece and Turkey (from 1952) and Spain (from 1982) effectively neutralised the strategic value of the Mediterranean for the USSR.
Several writers, civilian as well as military and including Gorbachev, cite the military threat to Russia's western border from NATO's encroachment eastwards. Some recent commentators in the Russian press hark back to jargon of the Soviet era in their denunciation of NATO. The two bêtes noires for them in NATO were, and still are, the USA and Germany.
Another theme in the Russian press campaign against NATO and PFP has been Russia's loss of prestige. Gorbachev was judged guilty of agreeing too readily to German reunification and to the abandonment of the 'Brezhnev doctrine'. But such criticism ignores the facts. The 'Brezhnev doctrine', the Soviet refusal to countenance Western interference in its empire, required the combined forces of the Warsaw Pact to give Soviet control of Central Europe some semblance of legality. In any case the former satellite states of the USSR entered consultations to join NATO after the announcement to dissolve the Warsaw Pact in February 1991. The revolts in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras should have convinced such critics that continued Soviet hegemony over Central Europe would have resulted in bloodshed. NATO rejected out of hand Yeltsin's proposal that NATO and Russia should jointly guarantee the security of Central Europe. Moreover, the Russian public felt that until the middle of 1993 Yeltsin had neglected the plight of the 25 million Russians living outside their native Republic, especially in the Baltic states and Moldova; they felt that he had presided over the withdrawal of Russian troops out of East Germany and the Baltic states by August 1994 without any guarantees for Russian expatriates. Yeltsin failed to link the military withdrawal to the granting of citizenship by Latvia or Estonia to ethnic Russians there.
In a penetratingly frank article in the February 1994 issue of the Nato Review, the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the influential Moscow News, Aleksei Pushkov, maintained that Russia's demotion from being one of the world's two Superpowers gave a 'shock to the Russian psyche'. He argued that overnight Russia lost its influence worldwide and became reduced to playing second fiddle at the UN to the USA, the UK and France. Russians, he added, regarded Western aid as inadequate because their living standards were not improved. Moreover, the conditions imposed were considered too stringent, which led to doubts about the West's true intentions. Russia expected immediate acceptance by the West as an equal partner whereas the West seemed intent on keeping its former enemy weak, at least until Russia had coped with the problems of transition to democracy. Most Russian commentators consider NATO a US tool to dominate Western Europe. Gorbachev accused the USA of ulterior motives in introducing PFP, regarding it as a delaying tactic to retain that influence while gradually extending it over Eastern Europe. Gorbachev openly accused the US of wanting 'to exclude Russia from the ranks of great powers [and] to isolate it'. [6]
The Russian government conceded this point too. After signing the PFP Document in June, Kozyrev hinted at 'paternalism' in NATO's attitude towards Russia rather than 'respect for the interests of the other side' and clearly objected to Western claims that NATO had caused the collapse of the USSR. US observers boasted that the USSR had been bankrupted by the arms race and that President Reagan's proposal in March 1983 to develop a sophisticated technology ('Star Wars') capable of eliminating the danger posed by strategic nuclear missiles proved the last straw for the Soviet economy and the USSR's very survival. The Opposition was less restrained. By general consensus, Russia was being humiliated by being forced to join PFP's three-stage process with the other countries in Eastern Europe. In effect most Russian commentators refuse to accept at face value the NATO Heads' support for Russia's political and economic reform and for its 'reformist' foreign policy in their Brussels Summit Declaration of January 1994.
Before the demise of the Soviet Union Russians could at least console themselves for their material privations with their country's prestige as a nuclear Superpower. For Russians the USSR and the Russian Empire were virtually synonymous; they were roughly comparable in size (after 1945) and from the middle of the 1930s Russians enjoyed glorification of their nation in Soviet ethnic policy. In another revealing statement Pushkov describes the dismemberment of the former USSR for Russians as 'the loss of lands that ... millions of Russians had considered as their own'. [7] The opposition parties even accused Yeltsin and Kozyrev of intending to sell back to Japan the four Kuril Islands occupied by the Red Army only in 1945. Russians have an almost mystical relationship with their motherland; the first chronicle of the East Slavs (11th century AD) from which the Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian nations were to emerge, is entitled not the history of those tribes but of the 'Russian Land'. It is hardly surprising therefore that in a national referendum on the future of the USSR on 17 March 1991 an absolute majority of Russians opted for the continuation of the USSR as a single, federated state.
In July 1991 Gorbachev agreed to the secession of the three Baltic republics from the USSR and after the abortive coup against him in the August of that same year EC countries immediately established diplomatic relations with those three Baltic states which joined the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) and the UN within a month. The Baltic states began negotiations for joining NATO to guarantee the withdrawal of Soviet troops from their territories and as an insurance against any adverse development in the government of Russia. When Ukraine followed suit in December 1991 with a massive 90 per cent favouring independence, the USSR was plainly doomed.
Yeltsin and Kozyrev are also blamed for setting up, in December 1991, the Commonwealth of Independent States (hereafter, CIS) by which eleven of the fifteen former Republics of the USSR became linked economically and militarily but politically independent as 'a sort of new Common Market' (Aleksei Pushkov's term). Pushkov records the general feeling among Russians that 'Yeltsin was unable to control or direct this loose community'. [8] Certainly the other CIS members and the CSCE Council of Ministers recognised the Russian Federation as the continuation of the legal personality of the former USSR but Ukraine particularly has subsequently refused to acknowledge Russian leadership in the CIS. Friction developed between the two states over the Soviet nuclear legacy, the Black Sea fleet, and Sebastopol, the chief military port in Crimea, a predominantly Russian area handed over to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic by Khrushchev only in 1954. Trouble brewed with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, too, over nuclear and economic issues.
A recurring theme in the Russian press is that Russia's destiny lies with the CIS rather than with Europe. Within this scenario PFP is a NATO plot to woo Ukraine and Kazakhstan away from Russia and thus prevent the CIS from succeeding. Some commentators stress the economic risk: that cooperation between CIS members is doomed if they are attracted to Europe for their salvation; and that Russia would lose its lucrative weapons market, as PFP forces standardise on NATO equipment. Other critics point to the political and military risks in Russia's joining NATO: that a conglomerate comprising NATO, Eastern Europe and the CIS would create a rival to the UN and generate fear in the rest of the world; that China especially must view such a development as a potential threat. Commentators point to the spectre of Chinese overpopulation, its present rapid economic development, and the overhauling of its army and calls for Russia to act as 'a unifying bridge between Europe and Asia'.
Criticism of NATO policy towards Russia is not restricted to Russian observers. Some Western Kremlinologists object that that policy rests on Yeltsin's survival. They have expressed the opinion that Yeltsin is unpredictable [9] but after Gorbachev had been in power for over four years Wörner commented that 'we are really none the wiser regarding long-term Soviet plans'. [10] Yeltsin's poor health or alleged alcoholism still give cause for concern. Equally disturbing is the possibility that he might be overthrown by Communist or ultra-nationalist factions which emerged in the Russian Federation's political process and gained popular support. Communist Parties are making a comeback also in Central and Eastern Europe: Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and in former East Germany, as well as in Ukraine. Those parties can claim that Soviet Marxism had been an aberration and that they wish to return to marxist basics. Some Western commentators resent total appeasement of Russia on such predicates and dismiss Russian insistence on some voice in the handling of the Bosnian crisis as a ploy to sow discord among NATO members. The recent admission by Sergei Karaganov, an important adviser to the Russian government on foreign affairs, that Russian diplomacy is primarily aimed at preventing, or at least postponing, the enlargement of NATO, is cited as proof.
Initially Western procrastination in welcoming Russia into the NATO fold and the resulting Russian suspicions were attributed to vested military interests on both sides, striving to maintain their power and raison d'être. Stalin purged the Soviet armed forces of all perceived opposition and ruled alone. It is commonly believed among Western Kremlinologists that the civilian leaders of the Soviet Union after Stalin were 'doves' but were pressurised by their military 'hawks'. Certainly those leaders had to make concessions to the military hierarchy. Khrushchev was saved by Marshal Zhukov from being ousted from power in 1957 and was finally retired from office in 1964 because he had removed Zhukov and lost the support of the Red Army. Brezhnev appointed a Defence Council of military and political personnel to advise him separately from the Politburo on military matters. The more strained relations with the West until Gorbachev assumed power ensured that the voice of the Soviet military leaders continued to be heard under Andropov and Chernenko. Finally, the army saved both Gorbachev and Yeltsin from putsches.
It is true that the Russian armed forces are generally disgruntled and suffering from low morale. Zhirinovsky was able to tap the humiliation felt by ordinary Russians and especially among the military electorate, over what Pushkov calls 'the lost empire syndrome'. [11] Loss of the western buffer zone has repercussions also for Russia's defence but the Russian military Command genuinely has other causes for concern. Some generals were undoubtedly unhappy about peace-keeping exercises held in Poland in September 1994 for six NATO countries, including Germany, and seven former Warsaw Pact countries but excluding Russia, allegedly to avoid offending the former Soviet satellites. Young Russians' wholesale avoidance of conscription means that the army is unlikely to obtain the 10 per cent of the 1.75 million men eligible this year. In addition, 75 per cent of officers' families are existing below the poverty line and troops withdrawn from Europe have to be assimilated, notwithstanding generous financial assistance from Germany. [12] Finally, from a total of 5 millions in 1988, the Russian army fell to under 2.2 millions before being further reduced by 300,000 to 1.9 million by 1 October 1994. The military budget will also be cut, despite the protests of its generals, including Grachev himself.
These anti-army measures do not suggest that Yeltsin is being manipulated by the Russian military Command. Lieutenant-General Leonid Ivashkov, the Secretary of the Council of Defence Ministers of the CIS, made public his opposition to the presence of US troops for joint exercises in Russia in early September 1994 but Grachev seemingly ignored his objection and General Mikhail Kolesnikov, the Chief of the Russian Federation's General Staff, supported the government policy. The democrats in the Russian parliament were also opposed to the exercises while Sergei Yushenkov, Chairman of the Defence Committee of the Russian parliament, argued that participation in PFP would result in a loss for the CIS's collective security. He also repeated a frequent argument in the Russian press against joining PFP: that Russia would suffer economically once Central Europe and the CIS standardised its weapons and communications equipment on NATO.
Yeltsin seems also to have weathered the challenge from the political opposition, at least temporarily. Russian ultra-nationalists and communists reacted hysterically to joint Russian-US exercises on Russia soil and on 21 September 1994 held demonstrations to mark the previous year's anti-Yeltsin uprising. However, apart from deploying some troops around Moscow as a precaution, Yeltsin ignored them and travelled abroad for meetings before his Summit meeting with President Clinton. On 23 September Kozyrev backed the latest NATO airstrike against the Bosnian Serbs. The isolation of the hardliners among the opposition is attributed to Yeltsin's success in the gradual stabilisation of the Russian economy. Just one week before the Russian-US Summit, the Russian foreign intelligence service issued a public report warning Yeltsin against anti-Russian 'influential forces in the West [that] want to stop Russia becoming a great power'. [13] Yevgenii Primakov, the head of that service, observed that those enemies are counting on isolationist forces in Russia and in the other CIS republics. Primakov may be a hardline opponent of Yeltsin who is merely fomenting trouble but the timing of the report suggest that this was a retaliation for criticism in the UN Security Council early in September about Russian peacekeeping troops sent to Georgia. Some members had complained that only Russia was involved and that it has vested interests. The USA would prefer the CSCE to mediate in the Georgian-Armenian dispute. Although the USA endorsed Russia's involvement in Georgia in return for Russia's support for its invasion of Haiti, its support for Russia was not unqualified; its ambassador at the UN reminded Russia that its actions must comply with international rules. As Russian troops in Georgia are subject to UN monitoring, Russia insisted that US military action in Haiti should be similarly kept under observation. A third reason for leaking the report could well have been to strengthen Yeltsin's hand in his negotiations with Clinton.
Problems remain with PFP. The Central European states are still perturbed at the thought of joint Russian-German military manoeuvres while Latvia has categorically refused to cooperate militarily with Russia and there are still 600 Russian troops at Skrunda radar station. The impetus to cooperation between Russia and NATO will be that they need each other. NATO must anchor a maverick which has a large army and a huge stockpile of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and a potential exporter of enriched plutonium and uranium, nuclear knowhow or scientists to Third World countries. Russia requires a defence against Germany and China.
I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the NATO Office of Information and Press in the provision of docu ments and other literature for the writing of this article.
1.Change
and Continuity in the North Atlantic Alliance , November 1988 to
November 1990 (hereafter, Speeches), 28.
2.
Manfred Wörner (1989). ibid., 78.
3.
A. Kozyrev (August, 1994). NATO Review , 4. 5.
4.
ibid., 4.
5.
See the entry on Soviet Foreign Policy, 24, p. 166.
6.
Cited from Nezavisimaia gazeta, December 1993, by Current
Digest of the Post-Soviet Press.
7.
NATO Review, 4. 20.
8.
op.cit., 21.
9.
See S. White (1993). After Gorbachev, 262. Cambridge.
10.
NATO Review, 4. 36.
11.
ibid. 19.
12.
Six billion sterling, of which 3.5 billions were specially earmarked
for housing.