Organizing the Key Points from Ikegami's Book on Russia

I read the following book by Akira Ikegami, a colleague of mine at Tokyo Institute of Technology (in name only, of course — our positions are nothing alike). I want to organize the key points here as a memo to myself.

ttps://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B07KW144RJ/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_X8YYDC0ZHJB4W9R5X3FJ

池上彰の世界の見方 ロシア～新帝国主義への野望～

<Russia’s underlying geopolitical habits> Russia stretches long from east to west and borders many countries. This means it always faces the risk of invasion from multiple directions. Even in World War II, the Soviet Union suffered more deaths than any other country, and that must have driven home, in its very bones, just how terrifying it is to share a land border with an outrageous lawless actor (Nazi Germany, at the time). At the same time, Russia is a land of extreme cold, and the temptation to push its territory southward into warmer regions never goes away. In other words, this is a country for which the phrase “war of aggression” is always on its mind, in both the offensive and defensive sense.

After the division of East and West Germany, the Soviet Union, entrusted with managing Eastern Europe, immediately set about creating “pro-Soviet nations.” The original promise had supposedly been to build “independent democratic states.” Creating this kind of “buffer zone” against the West is Russia’s signature move. The same thinking was present from the very founding of the Soviet Union. Its base was the Russian Empire, and the other countries folded into the union were, in the end, nothing more than buffer zones for Russia. Indeed, when the Soviet Union dissolved, most of the weapons, military forces, funds, and resources ended up belonging to Russia. Russia itself was what mattered; everything else was an afterthought. In that sense, it would not be strange at all if, from Russia’s perspective, Ukraine looks like “a country we gave far too much to.”

One expression of this “Russia comes first” thinking is the Holodomor, the great famine that struck Ukraine as the end result of asset confiscation and farmland seizure carried out as part of agricultural policy, in the name of nationalization. Ukraine had long been famous as a major wheat-producing region, but Russia stripped it of its grain and consumed it without regard for how many people died as a result. Many Ukrainians, whether they know the history firsthand or heard it from their fathers’ and grandfathers’ generation, remember Russia treating the deaths of local people as simply an opportunity to move in people from the center. This is undoubtedly one reason Ukraine maintains its stance of never siding with Russia no matter what happens, and why that stance wins the support of its people. It happened nearly 90 years ago now, but it is exactly the kind of grudge that gets carried down for generations.

The Russian Empire began in Kyiv (Kiev) and gradually expanded eastward from there. In other words, both Russia and the Soviet Union originated in Kyiv. Somewhere in there is a desire to reclaim it.

<Did Putin’s standing rise inside Russia thanks to capitalism?> After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s economy was overwhelmingly bad. Adopting capitalism drove prices up, and without technological strength or capital, the country was heading toward becoming overwhelmingly weak. That is part of why Gorbachev ended the Cold War. But the growth of capitalism worldwide increased energy demand, and at a certain point crude oil prices, and the natural gas prices tied to them, began to rise. Russia profited enormously from this. At the time, many countries were hesitant to procure crude oil from the Middle East because of the Middle East wars, and Russia did business with those countries instead, rebuilding its economy in one stroke. In recent years, though, the shale revolution has increased America’s presence as an oil-producing nation, and Russia has weakened by comparison. The shift toward decarbonization has also been driving an energy transition, and as a result, Russia’s current situation could be described as “still having some strength left, but in a very precarious position when you consider the future.” In other words, in a sense, the timing was “very appropriate” for making some kind of move.

<The limits-of-20th-century-spies theory?> It’s well known that President Putin was originally a KGB spy, and his inner circle is likewise full of former spies. The Soviet Union was a “socialist” state holding up “communism” as its ideal, but it suppressed its various policy failures, including the Holodomor, through propaganda-driven control of speech and harsh authoritarian management (informants, forced deportations, executions, and so on). Does that kind of approach still work in an age when the internet has developed this much? By rights, it should be the global consensus that arbitrarily controlling public speech through agitation is no longer possible. But judging from how the invasion of Ukraine has unfolded, it turns out that it still works fairly well “on the elderly and on people in rural areas.”

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/04/876/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.