The Soviet inheritance remains strong throughout the old Russian lands, while the image of the West has suffered from financial overstretch, leadership decline, and waning US power. In all this, Russia has two options for modernization. One looking to Eurasia, the other looking West, to Europe in general and Germany in particular, to forge a long term balanced relationship.
The great seminal catastrophe of our century, this is how diplomat-historian George F. Kennan, whose knowledge of both Germany and Russia was second to none, described what happened between June 28, when the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated in Sarajevo and August 4, 1914 by which time the major powers of Europe were at war.
The showdown, though by no means inevitable, had long been coming. But each and every power had a rationale for, sooner or later, accepting what appeared inevitable. The Great War, which contemporaries called a sinister shadow overhanging the pre-1914 world, became a world war when Lenin famously declaimed “war to the palaces, peace to the huts,” and US President Woodrow Wilson set out his Fourteen Points “to make the world safe for democracy” against the looming Soviet threat. Both sides in this soon-to-be global conflict had pronounced their vision of world peace – they were mutually incompatible.
Briefly, in the immediate aftermath of World War I, the frontlines of 1945 made a ghostly appearance, with the United States as the leading power on the one side, and on the other – Bolshevik Russia, striving to extend its control far beyond old Tsarist borders. But after the war ended, the US Senate refused to endorse the Franco-British order of Europe, while Russia after Lenin had little choice but to resign itself to “socialism in one country.”
Germany, down but not out, assumed a key role between East and West, playing one side off against the other. In military terms, various German governments of the Weimar period sided with Russia, from military-to-military cooperation to the Rapallo-Treaty of 1922 which helped both pariah states acquire negotiating power. In economic and financial terms, however, Germany cooperated with the United States, especially Wall Street, to alleviate the burden of Versailles, to consolidate the currency and to become a member of the first Atlantic club: The League of Nations.
This promise of prosperity and cooperation, however, did not last. After “Black Friday” in 1929, Germany began a fateful slide that, at times, came close to civil war and ended in Nazi dictatorship. It looked like the Kremlin master and the Berlin dictator would be enemies forever. But not only did they copy each other in their brutal methodology of total control and suppression, each had, on his own terms, a revisionist, revolutionary conceptualization of Europe and the world.
As a result of mutually incompatible hidden motives, both viewed the existence of post-war-Poland as an insult and a geopolitical barrier to further expansion: East in the case of Germany, West in the case of Soviet Russia. It was this strange tactical alliance that, after the Munich conference of September 29, 1938 – to which Stalin had not been invited and which he suspected of being a capitalist conspiracy – led to the surprising non-aggression pact between the two protagonists. It included the secret protocol, carving up Poland the placing the Baltic states under Soviet control. Once Hitler was safely in possession of this guarantee against a war on two fronts, he felt free to disregard the British-French guarantees over Poland, and attack. After the Wehrmacht attacked from the West, the Red Army attacked from the East to put an end to Poland and the Polish elites. But less than two years later this friendly relationship between the dictators had turned into the most brutal war the modern world has seen, as the Wehrmacht continued its eastward march.
After unconditional surrender, Germany was down and out. It had been reduced to being merely a geographical term, as Stalin remarked at the Potsdam Conference in 1945. The Soviet Union was on its way to world power. In this, however, German territory and industrial-cum-strategic potential would play an important role, one that Stalin would not leave to the Western powers. But did the master of the Kremlin have a German policy? In fact he had two, and they were mutually incompatible: one was to destroy Germany forever, irrespective of the sympathies or loyalties of the inhabitants. The other one was to build Germany into a moral and strategic bridgehead of Communism in Central Europe and to proceed from there, the rest of Europe being nothing but low hanging fruit.
At Yalta, President Roosevelt assured the Soviet dictator that US troops would not remain in Europe, which only whetted Stalin’s appetite. It did not take the Berlin blockade to alarm the West to what Churchill famously called the “Iron Curtain.” Civil war in Greece and Soviet pressure on Turkey and the Dardanelles had persuaded President Harry S. Truman that the time had come for “containment” – to use Gorge F. Kennan’s concept. The Truman doctrine was born in defense of the Eastern Mediterranean, but confrontation over Berlin in 1948/49 moved the Central Front into the heart of continental Europe, where it was to remain for the next forty years.
The Cold War had started over Poland, Greece, and Yugoslavia many months before the War in Europe ended. But Germany, or what remained of the Third Reich, was too important to leave to the competing global powers. It was the chief prize, but also the chessboard of the ensuing conflict. According to Raymond Aron, the post World War II system was global, bipolar, and nuclear. But its focus was on a divided Germany, more specifically on Berlin under Four Power Control. The Second Berlin crisis, resulting in the building of the Wall on August 13, 1961, did not ratify, as Khrushchev had hoped, the new nuclear equilibrium between the powers and translate it into territorial and strategic gain. Instead, it forced the four powers into a constant mode of compromise and conflict, deterrence and détente. Germany, while divided, was the catalyst of the emerging Cold War system.
Two decades on, and the Soviet Union began to implode under the weight of imperial overstretch and old age, IT-backwardness and falling oil prices. The question was looming as to the Soviet succession, its legacy, and, last but by no means least, Germany’s future. Soviet power had kept East European countries in that camp. When empires fall, they usually do so with a bang, and not with a whimper. Not so the Soviet Union. With the Soviet Union in decline, that camp was bound to fall apart. But unlike 1953 Germany, 1956 Hungary, 1968 Prague, the process was a peaceful one: diplomacy triumphed over brute force. It remains one of the great achievements of modern statecraft and in fact nuclear wisdom that this most dangerous of dramas ended reasonably and peacefully. This was thanks to realism in the Kremlin, restraint and wisdom in the White House, with German unification taking center stage. Tectonic changes were managed with instinct and flair, what Germans know as Fingerspitzengefuhl. “Two plus Four” was a masterpiece. There was good news and bad news. Russia did not exploit its vast military veto potential. Nor did the new Russia define its place among the other nations on the international scene. The West failed to invite Russia, Vienna Congress-style, to take an active part in the shaping of the post-Cold War order – which to this present day defies any existing concept of order.
Twenty years after this sea-change, the world has turned toward China, India, the Greater Middle East. The leitmotifs are no longer the nuclear standoff and all that comes with military power but IT, energy, environmental concerns, the rise of Asia and Latin America. The Soviet inheritance remains strong throughout the old Russian lands, while the image of the West has suffered from financial overstretch, leadership decline, and waning US power. In all this, Russia has two options for modernization. One looking to Eurasia, with its vast mineral resources that could fund an indigenous process, the other looking West, to Europe in general and Germany in particular, to forge a long term balanced relationship. This process of coalescence, so promising during and after the revolutionary changes of 1990, still has a long way to go.
