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Steven Rosenberg has been the BBC’s Moscow correspondent for nearly three decades and for years has watched the Russia of Putin has lived in longing for his Soviet past. In 2020 he made a documentary for television on this matter that, due to its validity during the current invasion of Ukraine, we are now adapting.
Stretching from the Pacific Ocean to Western Europe, the Soviet empire seemed invincible.
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But in 1989 the Iron Curtain collapsed. And the vast might of Moscow began to crumble.
“Today’s Russia wants to forget about that year,” says Lilia Shetsova, an expert at the Chatam House think tank.
But more than 30 years later, Russia is reasserting itself and showing military might outside its borders.
How did you get here?
What Moscow teaches
To understand the historical aspirations of Russia, it is enough to look at Moscow.
This immense city, with the skyscrapers of Joseph Stalin and the magnificence of its Kremlin send an unmistakable message: this is a country with ambition.
The eagles, the golden arches and the huge buildings show that it is a nation that has believed for centuries in its own greatness.
By the 19th century, the Russian Empire covered a sixth of the world’s surface.
It was controlled by the tsar, a word that derives from “caesar” and to this day there are many Russians who still believe that the Moscow government is the natural successor to the great empires of Rome and Constantinople.
“The Russians do not know how to live in a normal country. Russia was built as an empire. Russia has existed as an empire. The essence is that they believe that they are big, that they must have areas of influence and that there must be a space of contention between them. and the outside world,” says Shetsova.
It was Communist Russia that achieved a huge buffer zone when, in World War II, the Red Army pushed back Nazi troops and Central and Eastern Europe fell under Moscow’s control.
On paper, most of these countries were independent.
In practice, the Kremlin was the one who made all the important decisions.
This not only gave Moscow a sense of security, but made it a superpower until 1989.
The fall
It was that year in which popular power brought down the Iron Curtain and one after another, the communist regimes in the world collapsed like dominoes.
“In 1989, I was a student in Moscow, studying Russian, and I remember sitting every night watching the news on TV and what I saw was remarkable: the Soviet empire was crumbling,” says Steve Rosenberg.
Decades have passed, but Russia is still a country that continues to mourn the loss of its empire.
“People often ask me, why does modern Russia do what it does? Why does it meddle in other countries’ elections or launch cyberattacks against the West? Why does Moscow seem so keen to play the role of geopolitical saboteur? ?” Rosenberg says.
“I think the key to deciphering Vladimir Putin’s Russia is in 1989. To understand Russia today you first need to understand what Moscow lost 30 years ago, what it lost in terms of power and prestige, in terms of empire,” he says. .
The losses
The Soviet Union lost 27 million people in World War II and the Moscow government felt that this gave it justification to go and conquer even the territories where the war had originated.
This is how they came to control part of Berlin, where there are still testimonies of that time.
In fact, the largest base of the Soviet Army outside the USSR was located there.
Soldiers called it “little Moscow” and East Germans dubbed it “the Forbidden City.”
The scale of the Soviet military presence in East Germany was staggering: there were 800 garrisons and half a million Soviet troops.
For Moscow, this was its key outpost in Europe, and its East German comrades were happy to host it.
“Regardless of whether they were occupying us or not, Soviet troops were always friends to me,” says Egon Krenz, the last leader of East Germany.
“I loved the Soviets, I loved the Soviet Union. The Soviets helped create East Germany and the Soviets also helped destroy it,” he adds.
The fall
When the Berlin Wall fell, everything changed.
Before long, Russian troops withdrew from their strategic enclave in Europe.
“We left with the feeling of a historical injusticesays Anton Terentyev, the last Soviet commander in Berlin.
“We and our Western allies arrived in Germany at the same time, but we were the only ones to withdraw. The country that contributed the most to the fall of fascism was withdrawing and the others stayed,” he adds.
According to the former commander, when the Soviets left, Western leaders wept with emotion and promised that NATO would not extend to the east, that there would be peace and calm.
“And today we have NATO on our doorstep,” says Terentyev.
Putin’s entrance
The end of the Cold War had consequences not only for the Soviet soldiers, but also for the spies of the USSR.
In the archives of the German city of Dresden the file of several of them is still preserved.
“In Dresden, in this archive, the records of the East German secret police, the Stasi, are kept. And the documents of the KGB officers who operated here, such as Vladimir Putin,” says Cornelia Herold, chief archivist of the institution. .
It was here that the future of the now Russian leader began to take shape.
In December 1989, the popular masses stormed the KGB headquarters in Dresden. Putin was there.
The current Russian president would say that he then telephoned the commander of the local Soviet tank to request urgent reinforcements.
But the Kremlin was silent.
“That was the moment when Vladimir Putin realized that his homeland had abandoned him,” says Rosenberg.
Egon Krenz, the last leader of East Germany, says that the USSR also abandoned him.
“In November 1989, (Soviet leader Mikhail) Gorbachev sent me a message saying that he intended to declare the end of the Cold War. And he did so in a meeting with the president of the United States, George Bush, over to which he replied: yes, the Cold War is over and we won it,” he recalls.
“That is why for the Russians, Gorbachev’s statement was a humiliation. The end of the Cold War turned into a defeat for the Russians“Krenz thinks.
The return
It took four years for Moscow to bring all its soldiers back, but the country they returned to was not the same one from which they had left.
The Soviet Union had fallen, Russia was in crisis, and returning soldiers were not a priority for the government.
Vyacheslav Buslaev, a returning veteran at the time, says he served for years in an elite tank unit and returned to Russia to have nothing.
“There were no military installations, no housing, no place for families to live,” he recalls.
His story, he believes, sums up what happened to his country after 1989, when the Soviet Union, this giant superpower, was suddenly thrown to the fringes of history, and Russia felt lost and humiliated as a result.
“Maybe if the end of the Cold War had brought instant prosperity to people, maybe this loss of status, this loss of empire, would have been easier to digest. But it didn’t. The 1990s brought economic chaos and widespread poverty,” says Rosenberg.
“So what they had, in effect, was fertile ground for believing any promise to make Russia great again. And that’s where Vladimir Putin comes in,” he adds.
Putin’s arrival
Putin, according to Rosenberg, has been trying to use the memory of Russia’s humiliation and memories of its past power for his political aspirations.
For his government, the victory of 1945 is part of the present and that is why he has made an effort to recover the symbols of that past.
But Putin’s Russia does not seem to want to restore the USSR as it existed 30 years ago. His methods are different, according to experts.
“These people in the Kremlin know that this idea of restoring the Soviet empire is impossible. But they have another idea: to be the tough guys, to be the producers of distrust, to be the big spoilers of the world, to be the nightmare for neighboring countries and for others who oppose him. This is the new idea for them of superpower and empire,” says Shetsova.
It is something that Russia demonstrated very close to its borders, when it annexed Crimea and, since then, began to consolidate its power there and increase its presence in the Black Sea.
“He’s using that as a springboard to project power beyond this region into the Mediterranean, the Balkans and the Middle East,” says Stoltenberg.
“At the end of the Cold War, a partnership of Russia with the Alliance seemed feasible. There was even talk that Russia might one day join. That idea seems very far away now,” he says.
“What we see is a pattern of behavior where Russia is responsible for aggressive actions against neighbors, that reflects that Russia’s main problem is that they still believe in the idea of a sphere of influence,” he adds.
Of the 29 NATO countries, nine of them used to be in Moscow’s zone of influence.
“It is this change in the balance of power that bothers Russia,” says the secretary of the Alliance.
The NATO leader says a frequent argument by Russian leaders is an alleged promise that the Alliance would not get bigger or closer to Russia’s borders and that the Kremlin believes the West misled Moscow.
“Such a promise was never made,” says Stoltenberg, while recalling that it has always been a NATO policy to keep the “doors open” for nations that wish to join them.
A couple of years ago, when preparing his documentary, Rosenberg once asked Putin if he saw his country as a superpower.
“We are not looking for that status. We do not want to go back to how we were when the USSR imposed a way of life and a political system on its neighbors in Eastern Europe,” the president replied.
It is unclear what the response would be three years later, when Russian tanks invade Ukraine.
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Source: Elcomercio
