Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 5, Number 1, Spring / Summer 2020 | Page 81

A New Russian Realpolitik: Putin’s Operationalization of Psychology and Propaganda
The collective Russian people lost
the authoritarian sources of direction
and stability to which they had become
accustomed. Russian society neither
witnessed nor felt the great Western
economic downfall that many citizens
were expecting. For its part, the West
was neither fully open and accommodating
in embracing its former foe nor
willing to fully incorporate them with
the same liberalized respect and values
they had now taken for granted. The
West projected a collective “fear that
the former communist world represented
a ‘Wild East’; an area populated by
violent people who, given half a chance,
would love to tear each other apart”
(Whitehall Papers 2008, 43). Russian
elites and governing bodies were subjugated
to being lectured and preached
to by their perceived culturally inferior,
more recently established countries
throughout the West.
In 1991, Russians lost [their]
buffer, the legacy of their greatest
generation. With their country
falling apart, Russian leaders
had no choice but to accept this
loss for as long as Russia would
remain weak. The 1990s were a
terrible decade for Russia, what
a great decade for the West. For
the Russian leaders and many
regular Russians, the dominance
of the West came at the expense
of Russia’s loss in the Cold War.
(Senate Rept. 115–40)
Despite being uncertain, vulnerable,
and alone, Russian leaders thought
that they had collective assurances
from NATO decision-makers that the
former foe would not exploit the new
international realities and power dynamics.
However, the Western security
institution was quick and aggressive in
capitalizing on its perceived final victory
against a vanquished Cold War foe.
NATO leaders rapidly developed policy
and action sets to incorporate new
countries that had exited the Soviet’s
physical and conceptual sphere of influence.
Former Warsaw Pact strongholds,
such as Poland, Hungary, and the
Czech Republic, were quickly integrated
and allowed to reap the institutional
(security) and cognitive (stabilization)
benefits of joining the matured Western
defense alliance. NATO’s “enlargement
apparently broke a promise given
to Moscow when the Warsaw Pact dissolved,
in undertaking that the West
would not seek to benefit from Russia’s
weakness” (Whitehall Papers 2008, 42).
This deliberate encroachment
happened again with the incorporation
of countries such as Bulgaria, Romania,
and Slovakia, and later, in 2009,
Croatia and Albania, into the growing
Western defense alliance. However, in
2004, the admittance of countries such
as Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia into
the European Union and NATO inflicted
a perceived national trauma on the
fragile Russian psyche. The “absorption
of the Baltic republics into the European
Union and NATO have been a bitter
pill and, for people continue to think
in all fashioned military terms, a strategic
dagger pointed at Russia’s throat”
(Daniels 2007, 8). The West’s welcoming
of these three countries at the Russian
Federation’s doorstep, with large
populations of ethnic Russians, was
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