9 Vladimir Putin, “Being strong: National security guarantees for Russia,” Rossiiskaya Gazeta, February 20, 2012.
B. YELTSIN ERA
Vladimir Putin would witness firsthand the collapse of first the Warsaw Pact, and then the Soviet Union itself. A turbulent decade followed the surprisingly bloodless birth of the new Russian Federation. Though Putin would remain estranged from the key levers of national power and prestige until the end of the 1990s, he would, nevertheless, bear witness to a series of events internal and external to the Russian state, events in which the United States and West remained active participants. Such events would only further frustrate a Russian already so intrinsically suspicious of America and further ossify Putin’s Soviet-era anti-American disposition.
1. Putin in the Aftermath of Collapse
Vladimir Putin, upon leaving East Germany as the Berlin Wall collapsed, and the Cold War with it, returned to Leningrad. He accepted a KGB posting within the University after refusing a higher-level position at KGB headquarters in Moscow. He claimed to have recognized the futility of working in Moscow as the Soviet system slowly disintegrated and desired no part in it.1 In the aftermath of the 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev, Putin resigned from the KGB and further attached himself to a former friend and now mayor of Leningrad, Anatoly Sobchak, eventually rising to the position of deputy mayor of (renamed) St. Petersburg.2 Upon Sobchak’s defeat in the elections of 1996, Putin accepted a series of positions within Russian President Yeltsin’s administration in Moscow, where he quickly caught the respectful eye of the aging president. Putin eventually rose to a position within the Presidential Staff, followed shortly thereafter by an appointment in July 1998 to head the Federal Security Service (FSB), the primary successor organization to the KGB, a job that Putin had recently told his wife he would never take even if offered.3 Merely one year later Putin would be named acting Prime Minister of the Russian Federation and Boris Yeltsin’s designated successor. But events involving the United States and Russia that occurred in the timeframe between Putin’s return from Germany and his sudden placement into power at the close of the decade would permanently affect the eventual second President of the Russian Federation. These events would seem to confirm the pre-conceived notion of an inherent hostility by America toward Russia.
1 Gevorkyan, First Person, 68.
2 Ibid., 80.
3 Ibid., 106.
2. Russia and the West in the 1990s: U.S. as an Inadvertent Contributor to Putinist Anti-Americanism
While working for most of the 1990s in behind-the-scenes positions in St. Petersburg city government or within the Yeltsin bureaucracy in Moscow, Putin could observe from afar the nature of post-Cold War Russian relations around the globe. Too often, the weakened Soviet successor state that became Russia was incapable of influencing global events like its superpower predecessor. The United States and West, operating in a new environment lacking any geostrategic bipolarity, engaged in actions that could only further alienate Russia and its current and future leaders. Though Putin could not directly affect the repeated snubbing that Yeltsin incurred from the West, the memories of how the United States and West treated a weakened Russia would affect how the next generation of Russian leaders viewed their former Cold War opponents. Of the many events in Russian-Western relations during the 1990s, several critical issues shall be examined more thoroughly, issues in which the United States and its allies inadvertently contributed to fomenting anti-Americanism in Russia and justifying anti-Americanism in the eyes of eventual President Putin.
a. NATO
Vladimir Putin has never hidden his general disdain for Cold War era security institutions, especially the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was organized as a counter to Stalinist Soviet aggression. Vladimir Putin has continually affirmed that NATO’s time of relevance should have died when the Red Flag came down over the Kremlin. The institution’s continued existence, therefore, remains a root of contention between Russia and the West, especially the United States, given the observation that America remains the dominant motivator within NATO. Though not officially an antagonist to Russia, the dominant Soviet successor state, NATO’s declared positions and actions during the decade immediately after the end of the Cold War helped exacerbated Putin’s and Russia’s apprehensions, apprehensions which also stem from a Cold War/KGB cognitive predisposition as discussed previously.
The 1990s would proceed and result in a legacy of tension and downright slighting of Russia at the hands of NATO. Perceived snubbing of Russia did not help in calming tensions. NATO routinely voiced support for NATO-Russian cooperation and coordination under Yeltsin, but equally consistently negated any Russian moves for true equal-partner status in settling issues pertinent to both parties. With the signing of the Founding Act in 1997 between NATO and then Russian President Yeltsin, Russian participation in NATO decision making through the new Permanent Joint Council failed to live up to the expectations many had envisioned. Though Russia had been granted a seat at the table, that table was not always in the same room where the substantive discussions were occurring. The Russian delegation to NATO, though granted ambassadorial status, was not allowed to reside at NATO headquarters, nor given universal access to NATO meetings, nor vote or veto any NATO decision making.1 A senior State Department official summed up the PJC relationship well: “…the PJC is a consultative mechanism…It does not mean a situation in which you are obliged to negotiate.”2 With America, the dominant NATO member, allegedly dismissing the PJC as a venue only for semantic exercise and Russia denied any real power within it, this first attempt at improved NATO-Russian relations could, therefore, be easily witnessed as an affront by NATO and the United States against Russia.
Intertwined within the issue of prospective NATO-Russian partnership were tensions over the proposed expansion of NATO into Central and Eastern Europe. In the fledgling years of Yeltsin’s Russia, a pleasant relationship developed between the new Russian president and U.S. President Clinton. Yeltsin, rightly or wrongly, interpreted signals from the Clinton Administration in 1993 that implied an American willingness to accede to Russian involvement in Russia’s “near abroad” just like U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. America allegedly granted the Russian Federation a sphere of influence within the former Soviet space. Such an unofficial agreement between the two leaders, with Yeltsin easing his opposition to NATO expansion in exchange for America’s, and thereby NATO’s, acceptance of Russian designs in Eurasia failed to materialize. By 1995, the United States had reverted from a conciliatory Russian foreign policy and called for NATO expansion regardless of Yeltsin’s protests.3 NATO and the