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    Power in modern Russia: Strategy and mobilisation
    Power in modern Russia: Strategy and mobilisation
    Power in modern Russia: Strategy and mobilisation
    Ebook148 pages1 hour

    Power in modern Russia: Strategy and mobilisation

    By Andrew Monaghan

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    The book explores the Russian leadership’s strategic agenda and illuminates the range of problems it faces in implementing it. Given these difficulties and the Russian leadership’s concerns about an unstable and increasingly competitive world, the Russian official and expert community often use the term 'mobilisation' to describe the measures that Moscow is increasingly resorting to in order to implement its agenda. The book explores what this means, and concludes that many of the terms used in the Western debate about Russia both misdiagnose the nature of the challenge and misrepresent the situation in Russia. At a time when many of the books about Russia are focused specifically on the war in Ukraine and the deterioration in relations between the Euro-Atlantic community and Russia, or are biographies of Vladimir Putin, it offers a new and unique lens through which to understand how Russia works and how Russian domestic and foreign politics are intimately linked.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherManchester University Press
    Release dateSep 20, 2017
    ISBN9781526126429
    Power in modern Russia: Strategy and mobilisation
    Author

    Andrew Monaghan

    Andrew Monaghan is Academic Visitor at St Antony’s College, Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Programme at The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House

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      Book preview

      Power in modern Russia - Andrew Monaghan

      Power in modern Russia

      Image:logo is missingImage:logo is missing

      POCKET POLITICS

      SERIES EDITOR: BILL JONES

      Pocket politics presents short, pithy summaries of complex topics on socio-political issues both in Britain and overseas. Academically sound, accessible and aimed at the interested general reader, the series will address a subject range including political ideas, economics, society, the machinery of government and international issues. Unusually, perhaps, authors are encouraged, should they choose, to offer their own conclusions rather than strive for mere academic objectivity. The series will provide stimulating intellectual access to the problems of the modern world in a user-friendly format.

      Previously published

      The Trump revolt Edward Ashbee

      Reform of the House of Lords Philip Norton

      Power in modern Russia

      Strategy and mobilisation

      Andrew Monaghan

      Manchester University Press

      Copyright © Andrew Monaghan 2017

      The right of Andrew Monaghan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

      Published by Manchester University Press

      Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

      www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 5261 2641 2 paperback

      First published 2017

      The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

      Typeset by Out of House Publishing

      Contents

      Acknowledgements

      List of abbreviations

      Introduction: strategy in a time of crisis

      1Setting a strategic agenda

      2The problems of power in Russia

      3Making Russia work

      4Defending Russia

      Conclusions: mobilising power in Russia

      Further reading

      Index

      Acknowledgements

      Many debts of thanks have accrued during the preparation and writing of this book. The origins of the idea took shape while I was at the NATO Defence College in Rome, and I would like to thank Dieter Löser, Grant Hammond, Rich Hooker and participants in the Roman Baths Advisory Group for their friendship and support. I also had the pleasure of developing the ideas as an Academic Visitor at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and particular thanks go to Alex Pravda and Roy Allison for their support.

      Much of the research work was carried out while I was Senior Research Fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs. I greatly appreciate the generosity of the Gerda Henkel Foundation’s Special Programme for Security, Society and the State for the financial support for the project ‘Towards Mobilisation: From a Nation in Arms to a Nation Armed’ (2015–17). This support facilitated my own research, travel, and a number of workshops and seminars, and I am grateful both to the participants of these sessions for their active contributions and to Lubica Pollakova and Anna Morgan for all their help and support organising the events.

      The book itself was written during my time as a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War at Pembroke College, and I very much appreciate the support and encouragement of Rob Johnson, Ruth Murray and the many others I have met through the programme.

      Many thanks are due to Amanda Moss at Chatham House, and the editors of the journal International Affairs for kind permission to revisit, sew together and develop material already published, including the articles ‘The Russian Vertikal: The Tandem, Power and the Elections’ (2011), ‘Defibrillating the Vertical: Putin and Russian Grand Strategy’ (2014), and ‘Russian State Mobilisation: Moving the Country onto a War Footing’ (2016).

      I have also been lucky to enjoy the support of numerous librarians. Thanks to Simon Blundell, Richard Ramage at St Antony’s, David Bates and his team at Chatham House and the library team in the NATO Defence College for all their courteous help. I am also grateful to my publishers at Manchester University Press, and particularly the series editor, Bill Jones, for their support for the idea of the book and seeing it through to publication.

      Many other individuals have influenced the thinking that underpins the book, including discussions with numerous officials in the UK, USA, NATO and in Russia. Others, including David Glantz, Dov Lynch, Nazrin Mehdiyeva, Julian Cooper, Silvana Malle and Henry Plater-Zyberk, have been kind enough to read parts or all of the draft. I am grateful to all for taking the time to discuss these themes with me, and their firm but always gentle corrections. The book is much the better for their advice and wisdom, but where I have failed satisfactorily to incorporate it, and for any remaining errors, I alone am to blame.

      In Russia, I have enjoyed many discussions – and much kindness and patience in instructing me – about how to attempt to understand Russia’s complexities and nuances. I’m grateful to all those who have taken the time to talk to me. In particular, Ekaterina Vladimirovna’s ability to cross cultural divides is exemplary, and Boris Mikhailovich and Mikhail Borisovich have always shown me a warmth and generosity that mentioning here barely acknowledges. They realise, I hope, the extent of my appreciation, and their influence can also be felt throughout this book.

      Finally, and as always, my thanks and love go to my family, Charles and Dorothy Monaghan, and to Yulia. Their patience, love and support mean the world to me. I could not have written the book without it. Lara Andreevna’s happy presence remains, as always, a bright light in life.

      Abbreviations

      Introduction: strategy in a time of crisis

      Does the Russian leadership have a grand strategy? Is there a coherent and consistent strategic agenda? If so, what is it? What does President Putin have in mind? Is he, indeed, a strategic genius – or is he making it up day-to-day? What will Russia do next? And what are Putin’s intentions regarding the West? As French journalists inquired of Putin himself, is Russian strategy ‘on a path of dialogue, or expansion and conquest?’¹ Since the sharp deterioration in relations between the Euro-Atlantic community and Russia following the eruption of war in Ukraine in 2014 and Russia’s intervention in Syria in 2015, these questions have troubled senior politicians and officials in Western capitals.

      Some doubt the idea of a Russian grand strategy. Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia, is among those who argue that Putin does not know what he wants from the Ukraine crisis, has no grand plan and makes policy up as he goes. Others see him as a tactician, but no strategist. The prominent strategic thinker Lawrence Freedman has argued that although Putin is good at making early moves he has not thought through subsequent developments, and that it is difficult to evaluate what Russian strategy is beyond the most general lines. Indeed, Putin is already failing, according to Freedman, since he is caught in a web in Syria.

      Still others have suggested that Putin is a bad strategist, since he does not understand the relationship between military violence and political objectives, and is pursuing a self-defeating strategy that is reducing Russian power and leaving it isolated, all but ruining his ambition to return Russia to the ranks of great powers. The UK’s House of Foreign Affairs Committee concluded, for instance, that Moscow’s approach to foreign policy is opportunistic and tactical, meaning that Russia has been making strategic mistakes and pursuing short-term advantages rather than advancing a long-term, coherent, sustainable vision for its role in the world.²

      Such sceptics draw on a tradition that doubts Moscow’s ability to create strategy, and emphasises the role of contingency, even a tradition of anti-strategy: a Tolstoyan rejection of strategy in which strategic planning is futile because luck plays too great a role and the Russian leadership has too little control over events. Other problems include decision-making processes beset by informality, dysfunction and political infighting. These flaws lead to inconsistent and uncoordinated policies which undermine or even prevent the ability of the Russian leadership to shape a coherent strategy. Celeste Wallander, a prominent US observer who has held senior policy and academic positions, memorably suggested in 2007 that Russian grand strategy is ‘neither grand, nor strategic, nor sustainable’.³

      Nevertheless, the view that Moscow has a strategy, even of Putin as a strategic genius, has become an orthodoxy across the Euro-Atlantic community, and a broad consensus has taken shape around the notions of Putin’s complete authority within Russia, his ability to make rapid decisions because of the centralised nature of authority in Russia, and his creation of a ‘vertical of power unlike any we have seen in other great nations’.⁴

      General Adrian Bradshaw, then NATO’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, illustrated this view in March 2017 when he emphasised that NATO was ‘grappling with a spectrum of Russian aggression towards the West, from provocative military measures on Europe’s borders to subversion alongside a tide of digital propaganda and efforts to manipulate the US presidential election’.⁵ Bradshaw’s view that Putin ‘has his hands on all the levers of power’ is widespread among

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