Putin

That same sense of humiliation, which Thomas Friedman has called “the single most underestimated force in international relations,” was present in President Yeltsin’s voice when he exclaimed to President Clinton: “Russia isn’t Haiti!” The Russia Hand by Clinton’s Russian adviser Strobe Talbott records Russian foreign minister Andrey Kozyrev saying in regard to the U.S. bombing of Serbia: “You know, it’s bad enough having you people tell us what you’re going to do whether we like it or not. Don’t add insult to injury by also telling us that it’s in our interests to obey your orders!”

After the pain and humiliation of losing Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, after the pain and humiliation of losing all the Soviet republics, it would seem that the hideous course had been run, that there was no more loss that could occur, no further humiliation that could be inflicted.

But in fact the greatest dangers lay ahead. Russia itself was at risk. The cracks that started in the Eastern Bloc and broke the USSR into fifteen separate countries were now threatening the new Russian Federation itself. The centrifugal demon wasn’t done yet.

The epicenter of schism was Chechnya. It was hardly a new problem. The fierce mountaineers of the Caucasus—Chechens, Ingush, Dagestanis—had been resisting the Russians since the eighteenth century. That resistance flared into war in the mid-nineteenth century when a great leader arose. The Imam Shamil, a Dagestani, was able to unite the various tribes and nations of the Caucasus, becoming both their spiritual and military leader. Handsome in a fierce, severe way (to this day his picture, along with that of Jean-Claude Van Damme or Rambo, adorns the bedroom walls of many teenage boys in the Caucasus), he was a cunning and valiant leader, able to resist the tsar’s armies for nearly thirty years until he was taken prisoner in 1859. The Russians treated him with honor and he died a white-bearded patriarch in the holy city of Medina in 1871.

But his fighting spirit lives on, especially among the Chechens, the Comanches of Islam. And Shamil’s hometown of Gimry is kept under strict government control so that it does not become a sacred place and rallying point—all residents have a five-digit number that they must recite to police at checkpoints when entering or leaving town.

The outbreak of war in 1994 between Chechnya and Russia sent existential shock waves to the north. This wasn’t just another tiny republic seeking vainglorious independence; this could be the beginning of Russia’s unraveling, the secret sweet dream of the United States and NATO. That same year NATO launched airstrikes against the Bosnian Serbs. Strobe Talbott describes the reaction of the Russian hawks: “NATO’s war against Belgrade over Kosovo was a warm-up for the one it would someday unleash against Moscow over Chechnya.”

NATO bombing or invasion aside, the parallels with Yugoslavia were ominous. Putin was obsessed by what he called “the Yugoslavization of Russia,” the breaking apart into ever smaller fragments. Chechnya, said Putin, “is a continuation of the collapse of the USSR.” And it wasn’t just Chechnya. “The entire Caucasus would have followed … and then up along the Volga River … reaching deep into the country.” Putin was very clear about his “mission”: “If we don’t put an immediate end to this Russia will cease to exist.”

America from time to time is troubled by the prospect of decline. But for all-or-nothing Russia decline is not an issue. Its very existence is always at stake. It is the default position of the Russian mind. A former legislator, Vladimir Ryzhkov, says: “Under Putin’s police state we are headed for another Time of Troubles in the best case scenario, if not a total collapse of the Russian state.” A museum director says that unless Russia creates a harmonious society within five generations “Russia will perish. Only the Duchy of Moscow will be left.” A columnist wonders—Will Russia survive until 2024?

Very prevalent today, the idea of Russia ceasing to exist is nothing new. In 1836 Peter Chaadayev published the first of his Philosophical Letters. Like a good Russian aristocrat, he wrote them in French, and later on they had to be translated into Russian. In those Philosophical Letters Chaadayev despaired of Russia, which he said belongs to neither Europe nor Asia. It neither partakes of the dynamic of those great civilizations nor possesses a dynamic of its own. “We belong to that number of nations which do not seem to make up an integral part of the human race, but which exist only to teach the world some great lesson. The lesson which we are destined to give will, naturally, not be lost; but who knows when we shall find ourselves once again in the midst of humanity, and what affliction we shall experience before we accomplish our destiny?”