Ikegami's Book Distills The Logic Behind Russia's View Of The World

Here’s the edited version:

I read the following book by Akira Ikegami, my colleague at Tokyo Institute of Technology (just kidding — needless to say, our positions are nothing alike). I want to organize the key points here as notes to myself.

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

Akira Ikegami’s View of the World: Russia — Ambitions Toward a New Imperialism

Russia stretches long from east to west and shares borders with many countries. This means it always carries the risk of invasion from many directions. The Soviet Union suffered the largest number of dead of any country in World War II, and that experience must have burned into its bones the lesson of “how terrifying it is to have an outrageous lawless actor (Nazi Germany, at the time) as a neighbor connected to you by land.” At the same time, Russia is a land of bitter cold, and it always feels the pull to extend its territory southward into warmer regions. In other words, this is a country in which the phrase “war of invasion” is always present in mind, whether in the sense of attacking or of being attacked.

After East and West Germany split, the Soviet Union, entrusted with managing Eastern Europe, immediately focused its energy on creating “pro-Soviet states.” The original promise had supposedly been to “build independent, democratic nations.” Building this kind of “buffer zone” against the West is Russia’s specialty. The very founding of the Soviet Union followed the same logic. The Russian Empire was its base, and the other countries incorporated 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 was what truly mattered; everything else was an afterthought. In that sense, it would not be strange if, from Russia’s point of view, 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 the nationalization of farmland carried out as part of agricultural policy. Ukraine has long been famous as a major wheat-producing region, but the center seized that wheat and consumed it without concern for how many people died as a result. Many people, whether they know their history firsthand or are Ukrainians who heard the stories passed down from their fathers and grandfathers, remember the center behaving as though the deaths of local people were simply an opportunity to move in people from elsewhere. This is undoubtedly one reason why Ukraine maintains, no matter what, a stance of never siding with Russia, and why that stance wins the support of its people. It happened nearly 90 years ago, 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. In other words, both Russia and the Soviet Union originated in Kyiv. Somewhere in the Russian mind, there is a desire to reclaim it.

<Did Putin’s rising approval within Russia owe itself to capitalism?> After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s economy was overwhelmingly bad. The partial adoption of capitalism drove prices up, but without technological strength or capital, the country was heading toward becoming overwhelmingly weak. That is also why Gorbachev ended the Cold War. However, the growth of capitalism increased energy demand, and at a certain point crude oil prices, and with them natural gas prices, 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 and rebuilt its economy in one stroke. In recent years, however, the shale revolution has increased America’s presence as an oil-producing nation, and Russia has weakened by comparison. The recent trend toward decarbonization has also driven an energy shift, and as a result Russia’s current position could be described as “it still has some strength, but the outlook is quite grim.” In other words, this was, in a sense, a very fitting moment to make a move.

<A theory about the limits of 20th-century spies?> It is 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 that held 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 internment, executions, and so on). Does that still work in an era when the internet has developed this far? It ought to be the global consensus that arbitrarily controlling public speech through agitation is no longer possible. Yet judging from how the invasion of Ukraine has unfolded, it turns out that this “still works quite 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.