Putin's Russia: From Post-Soviet Humiliation to Western Confrontation

As the 21st century dawned, a newly elected Vladmir Putin was making friends on the world stage. He smiled for photo ops at G8 meetings, and was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush after the attacks of 9/11, offering his support against terrorism.

So what changed? To understand Russia’s view of the world now – and its continued aggression towards Ukraine – it helps to know more about the psyche of the country and its leader.

In today’s episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we talk to James Rodgers, a reader in international journalism at City St George’s, University of London, about how a festering sense of national humiliation after the collapse of the Soviet Union hardened Putin’s tough man regime and led Russia to turn its back on the west.

In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, many in the west believed liberal democracy and free markets had won in Russia. The cold war was over and Russia would join the community of democratic nations. But that’s not what happened. Instead, Russians experienced economic freefall, large-scale poverty and a sense of national humiliation.

“People felt this great loss of status,” says Rodgers, who has just written a new book called The Return of Russia about why it came into confrontation with the west.

“With the coming of new western ideas of the free market, a lot of people lost their jobs and the status that went with them,” says Rodgers. “Russia also lost the standing on the world stage that the Soviet Union had enjoyed.”

Putin became president on the eve of the new millennium. Rodgers says, Putin had not forgotten the economic pain and humiliation of the 1990s, and understood its importance to his constituency in Russia. “He understood the political potential of that humiliation in a way that I think some western policymakers did not understand the possible political consequences of it.”

Soon after, the 9/11 attacks in 2001 pushed the US to war in the Middle East. Whatever support Putin had pledged western governments began to crumble, particularly over the invasion of Iraq. Through interviews with former top western officials, Rodgers pinpoints that Russian foreign intelligence knew Iraq’s leader Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, and they were certain that the CIA and other western intelligence agencies knew that.

“Russia determined that the west was acting in bad faith about the reason that they’d given for going to war in Iraq, and this was actually about regime change and not at all about weapons of mass destruction,” says Rodgers. He says the invasion made Putin deeply suspicious of western motives in foreign relations, who began to think: “If they can do this to Saddam Hussein, then maybe one day the west will try to decide to do it for me.”