Russia: The West’s Prodigal Sibling

Peter the Great Statue by Zurab Tsereteli ‍ ‍Dark_Side / Shutterstock.com

In May 1905, when the Russian fleet was nearly destroyed by Japan’s navy at Tsushima, the decisive battle of the Russo-Japanese War, the global perception was unmistakable. For the first time since the Middle Ages, a non-European nation had defeated a European power in a major war. To the non-Western world, the victory was nothing short of revolutionary. Japan, an Asian country, had humbled one of the “white” empires, as Pankaj Mishra writes in From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia. At the time, Russia was seen unambiguously as part of the West, a European power both in appearance and ambition.

In official narratives, Russian thinkers and politicians stressed Muscovy’s Byzantine inheritance, a continuation of the Eastern Roman Empire, and downplayed its long experience as the western flank of the Golden Horde. Russia’s many modernization drives were patterned on Western models. It could justly be called a nation of modernization. Russia’s sheer number of catch-up attempts is unrivaled: Peter the Great’s Europeanization, Catherine’s Enlightenment borrowings, Alexander II’s reforms, late-imperial industrialization under Witte and Stolypin, Stalin’s crash industrialization with imported Western technology and expertise, the adoption of Western-style capitalism or at least some of it in the 1990s.

For centuries, Russia had fought some Western powers and allied with others. It jealously watched the West’s technological progress and cultural change, while resisting some of it while seeking to emulate other aspects. It styled itself a protector of Christian monarchs and the scourge of social revolutions. Through the Holy Alliance, it sought to restrain secular liberalism; through the later Franco-Russian Alliance, it sought balance against German might. Always peripheral yet inseparable, Russia moved within the Western system.

Russian cultural figures gravitated toward the West, lived there, studied there, borrowed from there and increasingly contributed to the West from within. Unlike other “catching-up” cultures, such as Japan or Turkey, Russia showed little eagerness to preserve its pre-Westernization heritage, whether in its music, cuisine, or dress. What the Russian elites did care to preserve, however, and this was paramount, were their autocratic political culture and the Eastern Orthodox faith.

In many cases, Russians became celebrated European literary, musical, theatrical, and artistic personalities. Russian novelists, composers and dancers helped define European modernity itself, blurring the line between Russia as a student of Europe and as one of Europe’s creators. Some, like Ivan Turgenev, were European cultural figures in their own right, shaping the West’s cosmopolitan artistic sphere.

Drawing on one of the major currents of European thought, twentieth-century Russia embarked on a radical social transformation. The goal was to abolish injustice and inequality in one revolutionary leap. It was less a rupture with the Enlightenment than an extension of its most radical impulse. Following its victory over Nazi Germany – again in alliance with the West – Moscow emerged as the West’s geopolitical rival, still learning from it while striving to surpass it. Meanwhile, Russian culture, now split between domestic and émigré communities, continued both to learn from and to compete with the West.

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None of these fundamental ties between Russia and the West have truly disappeared, even after nearly four years of Russia’s war of full-scale aggression against Ukraine. The war has taken hostility to an extreme. The barbarity Moscow commits daily in Ukraine is so profound that its wounds will not heal for generations. There can be no return to an antebellum Russia, nor to the standing Moscow once held vis-à-vis the West.

Yet even this irrevocable crime has not severed the underlying connections of culture and aspiration that have bound Russia to Europe for centuries. Russia’s economy still depends on Western technologies; its elites continue to measure themselves against Western standards of power and consumption; and its intellectual and artistic traditions remain rooted in the European soil. The current tragedy lies precisely in this entanglement, in the reality of a country waging war against the very world that shaped it.

Pivoting from the West, Moscow has moved toward a country skilled at exploiting the dire straits of its “big brother.” China’s leadership understands fundamental principle in this relationship. Historically, Moscow would stick with Europe and only reach out to China only when in need. China has little desire to invest in Russia’s future beyond what serves its own strategic needs. Chinese banks and companies tread carefully to avoid Western sanctions, and their involvement in Russia’s economy remains shallow and transactional. Trade is substantial but it follows a pattern unpropitious for Moscow. Raw materials and energy flow south and eastward, while finished goods are sent to the north. China is content to buy discounted Russia’s oil, to sell its cars and electronics at a premium, and to let the asymmetry deepen.

Despite all proudly advertised military exercises, there is no military alliance. The two countries’ respective militaries do not trust one another. Security agencies mistrust each other too. Most of Russia’s treason cases, those that are not related to the war against Ukraine, concern Russian scientists accused of transferring military technology to China. There is no Chinese, or Russian, vision of a shared modernization. Moscow’s goal is to break through the sanctions and continue to fund its war. Beijing’s goal is to leverage Moscow’s war as much as possible and not to integrate the two countries.

China is not trying to draw Russia into its cultural or civilizational orbit. Its soft power outreach skips over Russia entirely. No Confucius Institutes flourish there, no surge of language study or popular fascination with Chinese culture. For Beijing, Russia’s value lies in its diminished state – a nuclear-armed but dependent neighbor, a supplier of resources, and a noisy geopolitical partner that deflects Western attention. Russia works with China to escape accountability. China’s long game is to neutralize Russia and to ensure that the northern frontier remains quiet, while Moscow plays the part of a loyal, vocal sidekick in a world increasingly shaped by Beijing’s interests.

The more Moscow’s current leadership tries to distinguish itself from the West, the more clearly it reveals Russia’s European belonging, even as the Kremlin discards the Western values its elites once aspired to adopt. If the West is, as historian Stephen Kotkin puts it, an “institutional package” rather than a geographic place, then Russia has retained the geography but abandoned the institutional design, without discovering any alternative “package.” Russia is an unfinished project, almost a country without a project. There is no long-term plan.

Russia has a tendency to amplify the political and social battles of Western modernity (without the institutional safeguards). A class of professional politicians dominates the Russian polity. They act with the same impunity seen in many Western countries, although they have deprived society of the ability to vote them out of office.

The level of inequality in Russia is among the highest in the world. According to the World Inequality Database, the top one percent of Russians have captured roughly forty-five percent of the nation’s wealth, a concentration comparable to or exceeding that of the United States. Contrary to the widespread impression of a Kremlin eager to rebuild the Soviet Union, Vladimir Putin and his circle have dismantled the old Soviet social safety net: accessible healthcare, high-quality mass education, and affordable housing. The Soviet system, for all its flaws, had managed to provide these goods to its citizens.

Russia has a Western-patterned demography. Russian society is an aging society with small nuclear families, women deeply integrated into the workforce, falling birth rates, and a growing share of foreign migrants in its urban centers. In this respect, Russia mirrors the demographic modalities of Europe rather than those of its non-Western partners. Its social fabric, shaped by urbanization, secularization, and individualism, remains unmistakably Western, even as its political leaders oppose and fight the institutional norms of the West.

Russia is an ongoing historical experiment. It is a modernized society that tolerates a political class freed from the constraints of law, accountability, and renewal. This state approaches its own population with a ruthlessness that can spill outward, as the Russian physicist and human rights advocate Andrei Sakharov had once warned about the Soviet Union. The brutality that Russia’s leadership and army have displayed in Ukraine channel a violence long cultivated at home, validating Sakharov’s point about a regimes built on repression and their penchant to export aggression.

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Russia’s current leaders repeatedly invoke the United States as both model and adversary. Russia can mirror the United States, the West’s opposite extreme, just as the United States can mirror Russia. Vast countries in territory and population, Russia and the United States stand at the outer edges of the same civilizational core. Both prize sovereignty above binding alliances and nurture deeply held beliefs in their own exceptionalism. Both have been and are inclined to use force. In an oddity of the post-Cold War period, the United States under successive administrations has sought to disentangle itself from protracted foreign wars, whereas Russia’s leadership is waging a war of choice in Ukraine. At the same time, some commentators believe that the United States is coming to resemble Russia in its domestic politics. The commonalities and contrasts of the U.S.-Russian relationship are never linear.

Russia is not elsewhere. To look at Russia is to look into a mirror of the modern world. Without institutions and law, modernization inclines toward predation and without constraint sovereignty becomes a license to destroy. Russia’s long history of imitation, its repeated attempts to catch up and its recurring falls, has produced a perplexing modernization, a cycle of borrowed advances followed by violent regressions. This lag is once again accumulating. Russia seems wedded to its tradition of convulsive evolution. Its history suggests that within stagnation (whatever the cause) gathers the energy for another sudden and unpredictable leap.

Maxim Trudolyubov is Editor of The Russia File