Читаем Putin's Wars полностью

Reactions in the West were more than positive. In an article with the title “From Empire to Nation State,” Chrystia Freeland wrote in the Financial Times: “After devoting five centuries to imperial expansion, Russia seems abruptly to have reconciled itself to a diminished global role.”^[7] She quoted Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the Moscow-based Center for Strategic Studies, who said: “This spring was a turning point in Russia’s choice between being an imperial power and a nation state. It marked a strong decision to reject empire.”^[8] And he added: “The really surprising thing is that the negative reaction to the loss has not been stronger.”^[9] However, the Russian advance toward a democratic, post-imperial state during Boris Yeltsin’s second presidential term was not as straightforward as these enthusiastic comments seemed to suggest. Russia’s progress resembled rather the dancing procession of Echternach, in which three steps forward are preceded and followed by two steps backward. This is because, in the same year—on April 2, 1997—Yeltsin signed with the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko a Union Treaty leading to a Union State of Russia and Belarus. The signing of the treaty, wrote the Financial Times, “drew rare praise for Mr. Yeltsin from his Communist and nationalist opponents.”^[10] This praise was no surprise, because the initiative put Russia on a quite different track: that of a neoimperial state. The French paper Le Monde referred to a debate in the Russian government between “occidentalists,” wanting to join the European democratic mainstream, and “Slavophiles,” wanting to build a Slavic Union under the aegis of Russia. The first group included two deputy prime ministers: Boris Nemtsov and Anatoly Chubais, and the leader of the liberal Yabloko fraction, Grigory Yavlinsky.^[11] The second group included not only ultranationalists, such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the communist Gennady Zyuganov, but also Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov.^[12] Primakov, who would shortly afterward become prime minister, was the former head of the SVR, the external intelligence service, a follow-up organization to the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. Primakov was described by Ronald Asmus as someone, who “had made his career by standing up to the West—‘the man who could say Nyet.’”^[13] He “saw his job as masking Russian weakness while rebuilding Moscow’s strength. By his desk, he kept a small bust of Prince Alexandr Gorchakov, a 19th-century Russian Foreign Minister under Czar Alexander II who had presided over Russia’s recovery from its total defeat in the Crimean war. Partnership with the U.S. was not part of his lexicon.”^[14]