How do Russians envisage their country’s place in the world fifteen or twenty years from now?

State of Mind: A Future Russia

by Walter Laqueur


Author’s note: This article deals with the purely political aspects of the present strategic debate in Russia. The economic crisis caused by the sanctions, the sharp decline of the value of the ruble, and above all the fall of the price of oil and gas have only added to the acuteness of the feeling of crisis. But these aspects have been analyzed and commented upon at great length elsewhere.

How do Russians envisage their country’s place in the world fifteen or twenty years from now? In the afterglow of the seizure of Crimea and the intimidation of Ukraine, there has been of late a significant change in the mood of the country. According to public opinion polls, most Russians are in a triumphalist mood and now think of their country as a superpower and the West as isolated and in retreat. The rules of the game, formerly dictated by the EU and Washington, have changed. The expansion of NATO and the EU to the Russian periphery has been halted. Mainstream moderate Russian commentators such as Sergei Karaganov, Alexander Lukin, and others have helped popularize a narrative which holds that until recently Russian dignity and interests were trampled and the country was subjected to systematic deceit, hypocrisy, and broken promises on the international scene. But Russia has now been liberated from false illusions, having given up attempts to become part of the West.

The West tried to take advantage of, rather than partner with, Russia after the end of the Cold War. It tried to expand its spheres of influence. Russia’s interests and objections were ignored. In a Russian version of this “stab in the back” narrative, Vladimir Putin and the other Kremlin spokesmen have repeatedly declared that the West promised Russia that NATO would not move eastward, a promise that was hypocritically broken. And it was, moreover, an effort to camouflage the crisis of the European “project” itself, a crisis that has revealed the EU to be a paper tiger.

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