Russia between the Old West and Greater Asia: Alternative Paths and Competing Modernities

When George Orwell coined the term ‘cold war’ in an article inTribune in October 1945, he could hardly have imagined that 70 years later one of the most active debates would be whether the term ‘new cold war’ was the right one to describe the renewed period of confrontation between Russia and the West. The intervening period saw the 45-year Cold War until around 1989, followed by the 25 years of the ‘cold peace’. The nuclear balance helped prolong indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’, as Orwell put it. In 2014 the European security system established in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall collapsed in a spectacular manner. It turned out that for a quarter of a century Europe had been living in an extended period of indeterminacy, caught between the continuation of old institutions and practices while new structures and ideas failed to flourish. In those years none of the fundamental problems of European security were resolved, giving rise to the 25 years of the ‘cold peace’. The failure to create a genuinely inclusive and comprehensive peace order encompassing the whole continent gave way to a new period of confrontation and contestation and a new division of Europe. The first part of the lecture traces the crisis in world order up to 2014, and the second part examines the theoretical and empirical dynamics of the crisis today.

Richard Sakwa is Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent at Canterbury and an Associate Fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House. After graduating in History from the London School of Economics, he took a PhD from the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham. He held lectureships at the Universities of Essex and California, Santa Cruz, before joining the University of Kent in 1987. He has published widely on Soviet, Russian and post-communist affairs. Books include Communism in Russia: An Interpretative Essay, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010 (with a Russian version published by Rosspen in 2011), The Crisis of Russian Democracy: The Dual State, Factionalism and the Medvedev Succession (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Putin and the Oligarch: The Khodorkovsky — Yukos Affair (London and New York, I. B. Tauris, 2014) and Putin Redux: Power and Contradiction in Contemporary Russia (London and New York, Routledge, 2014). His latest book is Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands, an extended paperback version of which was published by I. B. Tauris in 2016. He is currently working onRussia against the Rest: Problematising the Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order (contracted for Cambridge University Press).