Russia. A History

The new prominence of the Orthodox Church, including the demonstrative display of ties to the country’s leaders and government, aroused deep concern among secularists and adherents of other confessions. Most controversial of all were the attempts by the Church to reclaim a role in education, including demands for ‘religious education’ and even instruction in the ‘foundations of Orthodox culture’. That provoked vehement opposition from secularists, including academicians; even state officials spoke in favour of allowing only generic instruction in ‘world religions’, not a specifically Orthodox curricular requirement. The government’s caution derived from the fact that Russia remains, despite the renaissance of Orthodoxy, a multi-confessional state. Of the total registered local religious communities (22,523), the remaining 10,309 (45.8 per cent) belong to a variety of Christian and non-Christian groups. By far the largest was Islam, with 3,668 communities (16 per cent of the registered religious groups), which represent a Muslim population estimated at 20 to 24 million, with strong concentrations in the north Caucasus, Tatarstan, and Bashkortostan. Muslims constituted the fastest growing segment of the population, increasing 40 per cent since 1989, with 2.5 million in Moscow itself. Muslims also used the religious freedom in post-Soviet Russia to reclaim property and reopen mosques, which increased from 150 in 1991 to approximately 6,000 in 2006.

Russia and the World

The economic boom and state-building encouraged the Putin leadership to reclaim Russia’s former status as a major power. In talks with the Italian prime minister in 2007, Putin bluntly asserted his country’s claim to global power: ‘As Russia’s economic, political and military capabilities grow in the world, it is emerging as a competitor—a competitor that has already been written off. The West wants to put Russia in some pre-defined place, but Russia will find its place in the world all by itself.’ From the very outset, Putin embraced an ambitious foreign policy that would eventually be called the ‘new realism’. Its basic premiss was that Russia should foreground its economic and business interests, yet continue to seek integration into the global economy. Putin showed some sensitivity to ‘soft power’ as an alternative to military force. He also demonstrated a willingness to cooperate with the West in the wake of 11 September 2001, agreeing to open Russian air space for the NATO campaign in Afghanistan and acquiescing in the creation of temporary US airbases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

However, Moscow’s response to 9/11 did not presage better relations with Washington, which steadily worsened thereafter. To be sure, Putin famously charmed the American president George W. Bush, who, after a summit in June 2001, gushed: ‘I looked into that man’s eyes and saw that he is direct and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. And I saw his soul.’ But others in his administration saw something else—a former KGB officer, a challenge to American dominance, an obstacle to the onward march of ‘democracy’. At the very outset of the Bush presidency, his then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, declared that ‘Russia is a threat to the West in general and to our European allies in particular’. Six years later Vice-President Richard Cheney, in a meeting of East European leaders, accused Moscow of using energy as a political weapon and demanded that it ‘return to democratic reform’.

The challenge from Washington did not go unanswered. Shortly after the Cheney speech (which ignited an uproar in Russia), Putin bristled that ‘we are categorically against such intervention into our affairs’, and a high-ranking official (and regime ideologue), Viacheslav Surkov, declared that Russia must defend its rights as a ‘sovereign democracy’. The minister of foreign affairs, Sergei Lavrov, castigated America’s arrogant ‘transformational diplomacy’ (codeword for the promotion of democracy), neo-containment rhetoric, and unipolarity. Putin himself responded in kind to what he saw as American hypocrisy and provocations. Thus, after Bush unveiled a memorial to the ‘victims of communism’ (accompanied by a wave of anti-Soviet declarations), Putin recommended that the United States—which was so generous in exposing the dark sides of Russian history—look back at its own sorry record: ‘We have not used nuclear weapons against a civilian population [as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki]. We have not sprayed thousands of kilometres with chemicals [an allusion to agent orange], or dropped seven times more bombs [in Vietnam]’ than in all of the Second World War. In early 2007 Putin fumed that Russia is ‘constantly being taught about democracy, but for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn it themselves’.