In her new book The Lonely Power: Why Russia Has Not Become the West and Why the West Is Difficult for Russia, Lilia Shevtsova, senior associate and chair of the Carnegie Moscow Center’s Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program, engages in a running polemic on Russia’s behavior on the world stage, its relations with the West, and traditional views on relations between Russia and Western civilization.
“By the end of Putin’s presidency, probably more distrust had built up between Russia and the West than existed during the Soviet Union’s final years,” Shevtsova notes. Various political and social movements and groups within Russian society view the West with skepticism or even rejection: “Russia and the West are further apart from each other today than at any point since Gorbachev’s perestroika.”
Russia approaches its relationship with the West with what Lilia Shevtsova calls “situational pragmatism”: Russia, she writes, is “simultaneously with the West and against the West,” a fraught balancing act that masks a deeply troubled relationship. Focusing particularly on Russia’s relations with NATO, she argues that despite Russian military officials’ statements that NATO is not a threat for Russia, the Russian elite continues to target NATO as its main adversary, primarily in order to tighten control over the domestic political scene under the pretext of a “foreign threat.”
What role has the West played in Russia’s transformation? How does Russia’s internal evolution affect its relations with the West? How do Russian and Western observers view Russia and the West? These are several of the questions that Shevtsova seeks to answer in her book. Breaking down Russia’s recent history into several stages, Shevtsova examines the foreign policy actions taken by the Russian authorities from the angle of “whether they serve the demands of the country’s modernization, or whether their purpose is to preserve the status quo, which in today’s circumstances means stagnation.” Shevtsova reflects on how the civilizational factor–how government and society are ordered, the prevailing principles and norms–affect relations between the two sides, and how these relations either facilitate or complicate Russia’s reforms.
Full text of the book is available in Russian.