Putin’s Brezhnev Doctrine

David Aikman

Forty years ago this August, all of Europe and the U.S. watched with horror as the Soviet army, in conjunction with units from four of its Warsaw Pact allies, rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the “Prague Spring.” The “Spring” had been a dramatic movement for reform and liberalization of Czechoslovakia’s Communist system that had been introduced by Czech Communist leader Alexander Dubcek and some others.

The 200,000 invading troops met only token resistance, because Dubcek had ordered Czech citizens not to oppose the invasion. But in a singular act of brutal humiliation, Dubcek and his associates were transported to Moscow in chains in the belly of a Soviet cargo plane, then made to face the bullying shouts of the assembled Soviet Politburo. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s rationale for the invasion became known as the “Brezhnev doctrine,” a principle that Communist Party control of the countries of Eastern Europe should never have to submit to reforms that might bring capitalism and democracy to them.

It took almost exactly twenty years for the Brezhnev Doctrine to be discarded by Moscow, and this happened only because Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev visited his brother-socialist leaders throughout the Eastern bloc in 1988 and told them bluntly that the Soviet army would no longer be willing to guarantee their hold on power if the people of their countries turned against them. The following year, the peoples of Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and even finally Romania, did just that. Communism fell in Eastern Europe in 1989, and in the Soviet Union two years later.

The collapse of the Soviet Union into fifteen independent republics meant the end of a decades-long, Moscow-imposed tyranny on citizens and ethnic groups as varied as the Lithuanians in the far West and the Tajiks of Central Asia. It meant, to be sure, discomfort and even suffering for millions of Russian citizens who had lived all their lives scattered among the Soviet republics and who now no longer had Brezhnev and his ilk to keep the surrounding natives in order. Most of the world applauded the dissolution of a multi-ethnic, unitary superpower that had controlled, often with immense cruelty, the daily lives of millions of its citizens. But among the cheering throng, Vladimir Putin was conspicuously absent. After serving as a KGB foreign espionage agent in East Germany for five years, he had deftly resigned from the KGB at the time of the August 1991 attempted coup against Gorbachev and Yeltsin, then jumped on the rolling capitalist bandwagon as a foreign policy advisor in newly non-Communist St. Petersburg.

Putin was an ardent champion of a strong, even imperial Russia. That became frighteningly clear in April 2005, when he told an audience of Russian parliamentarians at the Kremlin that the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union had been “the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the twentieth century.” Many observers thought this a shocking statement, but few realized what it might mean for Russian foreign policy in the future.

Putin is in fact a resurgent Russian imperialist, nostalgic for the power and control once wielded by Moscow over eleven time zones, both when it was the empire of the tsar and when it was the mighty Soviet Union. His methodical suppression of opposition politicians and media sources in Russia has been well reported. But Putin has in fact fiercely opposed genuine democracies anywhere in the former Soviet space. In 2003 he was offended by the “Rose Revolution” that brought Mikhail Saakashvili to power in Georgia. When arch-democrat Viktor Yushchenko ran for the presidency of Ukraine the following year against pro-Russian politician Viktor Yanukovych, Putin twice visited Ukraine to support Yanokovych and congratulated him on his “win” before the final election results were even in. After clamorous street protests, the election was invalidated and Yushchenko was declared the official winner.

What has really annoyed Putin is the expansion of NATO, not only into Eastern Europe but also into the heartland of the former Soviet Union itself. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Bulgaria had all joined in the early years of the twenty-first century, and the three Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia had joined NATO in 2004. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev insists to this day that he was assured, when the East German regime joined West Germany, that NATO would not expand beyond Germany proper into Eastern Europe. That claim is disputed by American officials.

Ukraine had become badly worried by a resurgent Russia as a result of having its gas supply cut off for four days in the winter of 2006. Georgia, meanwhile, was chafing at the way Russia was handing out Russian passports to citizens of its two separatist provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Both countries clamored to join NATO at a meeting in Bucharest in April this year, but although warmly supported in their efforts by the U.S., were told to wait by fellow-NATO members France and Germany.

Almost certainly, it was the combination of the Kosovo declaration of independence and Georgia’s NATO bid that prompted Russia to invade the country early this month. It may well be true that Georgia inadvertently provided the tipping point by allowing a clash with South Ossetian forces to develop into a full-scale conflict with South Ossetia. But the fact is, Russian combined forces had conducted a military exercise in the Caucasus in July 2008, which was transparently a rehearsal for this month’s actual invasion.

Russia’s immediate goal in Georgia seems clear: to replace Mikhail Saakashvili with a puppet and dismember Georgia by having Abkhazia and South Ossetia absorbed into the Russian Federation. With Saakashvili out of the way, Georgian NATO membership can be put indefinitely on hold. But Putin’s next move may well be against Ukraine. Putin’s Brezhnev doctrine cannot permit such a large European state—adjacent to Russia itself, and which used to be part of the Soviet Union—to join NATO. The Crimea, which Nikita Khrushchev in a spasm of generosity donated to Ukraine in the 1950s, is also a tempting target for reabsorption into Russia proper.

Then there are the Baltic republics, whose restive Russian minorities would like nothing so much as to be part of mother Russia again. The Putin/Brezhnev Doctrine, in the wake of the Georgian operation, has said that Russia will act anywhere in “the near abroad”—jargon for former Soviet territory—to protect “the dignity” of Russian citizens living outside Russian borders. That provides Russia with a pretext for intervention wide enough to drive a tank through.

It’s clear now that the U.S. should have thought through more carefully its vociferous support for Saakashvili when he visited the U.S. early in 2008 and when he applied for NATO membership for Georgia in April. Did anyone at State or Defense figure out what the U.S. would do if Russia invaded Georgia? Apparently not.

The Putin/Brezhnev doctrine is based on Russia’s surging sense of self-confidence, fueled itself by the startling turnaround of the Russian economy on Putin’s watch. Annualized growth rates have reached 7 percent several years in a row. But Putin seems to share a commonly held Russian nationalist paranoia that the West has nothing better to do than to “get” Russia, to suppress it and “encircle” it. Russian soldiers in Georgia were heard by reporters as saying they were “sticking it” to the Americans.

How to respond to the Putin/Brezhnev Doctrine? The U.S. must realize that the Russian national game, at which they excel, is chess, not poker, the American game. American diplomacy has to be far more skillful in thinking ahead about Putin’s next likely moves, and preparing to counter them. Even today, we should be thinking through what are options will be if the next Russian pressure point is Ukraine, or the Baltic republics. Do we even have any options? Are there some people in the American intelligence and government foreign policy community who are not asleep? All Americans need to hope so.  

Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.

1 Responses (comments are closed) • Columns, David Aikman, Provocations, Leadership, War and Peace, Wed 20 Aug 2008