Richard Pipes is a Baird Professor of History, Emeritus at Harvard University.  Formerly, he served as President Reagan's National Security Council adviser on Soviet and East European affairs and later was an expert witness in the Russian Constitutional Court's trial against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He is the author of many books. 

Question: In your recent article you write that there is a great deal of contradiction coming from the public statements of Russia’s leaders. Do you believe that Russia today lacks a coherent national strategy?

Pipes: I think it does, yes. They don’t quite know where they belong. They’re not East, they’re not West.  Racially, they consider themselves European, but culturally and politically they don’t belong to Western culture. And of course, they don’t belong to the Eastern one either.  They don’t have much in common with Islam or with China, so they are bewildered and they don’t quite know where Russia fits and I think it is one of their problems.

Question: Russia is not accustomed to having two leaders. How do you view what’s been called the Putin-Medvedev tandem?

Pipes: You’re quite right. They are not accustomed to this. They want one person in charge. I think inevitably, one of them is going to triumph. I strongly suspect it will be Putin. It may well become, as is the case in many countries like Germany, Israel and others, where the president becomes a ceremonial figure, and the actual power is in the hands of the prime minister.

Question: Some in the West are feeling quite positive about Medvedev, saying that he has some fresh ideas and that he’s going to support more openness, small businesses, etc.  Your thoughts?

Pipes: He definitely makes good statements on the subject of civil rights, rule of law, freedom and so on. Whether he will be able to do something about this in practice is another question. I’m quite skeptical, because the notion somehow that the government is subject to law is not really rooted in Russia.  I always remember the statement given by Count Benckendorff, who was the head of the police under Nicholas I in the 1830s and 1840s. He was once confronted by the editor of a journal who came to complain to him that the journal was unlawfully closed by the censors. He replied: "Законы пишутся для подданных, а не для государства." [Laws are written for subordinates, not for the authorities.]

I think that is A very prevalent view. The notion in Russia is that law should regulate relations between citizens and not between the government and citizens.  I remember once I was in Moscow, I bought a book about the legal rights of citizens and it dealt entirely with ways you can cope if somebody steals from you, or libels you, but nothing at all about how you can protect yourself from the government. So the idea that the government should be restrained by law is very alien in Russia. It would take a revolution for Medvedev to introduce this notion into the country.

Question: Speaking of Russian history, you argue that Russia has been unable to take the middle road, and that its story has been a series of missed opportunities.  Today, the United States are often blamed for Russia’s problems, whereas Americans point their finger at Putin.  Do you have anyone to blame?

Pipes: We don’t tell the Russians what to do. We may advise them occasionally or criticize them, but we don’t run Russia, so if anything is wrong with Russia it is entirely the fault of Russians. I think it goes deeper than Putin. It is the whole political culture in Russia. Judging by public opinion polls, the great majority of Russians don’t really care about politics. They care about their personal lives and the personal lives of their families and friends, and they don’t see that the government matters much in their lives. The notion somehow that they can influence government, or, for that matter, that anybody can influence government, is just strange to them. They think all governments are run by crooks who look out for their own interests and don’t care for the people.  Therefore what you do is look out for your own interests and don’t bother about the government. Putin nominated Medvedev as his successor and they voted for him. If he had nominated Ivan Ivanov, they would have voted for Ivan Ivanov. It just doesn’t matter to them. It is the intelligentsia that cares, but they represent a tiny minority, maybe five percent, maybe at most 10 percent of the country, and so that’s the real problem, and therefore the majority doesn’t exert pressure on the government. They want to be left alone, and who runs the government is a matter of indifference to them. The result is that they get a government that disobeys the law and acts lawlessly and aggressively very often.

Question: According to a certain expert view, considering how long it took Britain to democratize – 350 years – we’re expecting too much too soon from Russia…

Pipes: Oh, that’s nonsense. Britain, like the rest of Europe, always respected law; it always respected private property. You had a British House of Commons being consulted on taxes and so on as early as the 14th century. There was nothing like it in Russia. You had urban communities in Western Europe, in Italy and the Low Countries, that had rights of self-government. No Russian city has these rights. It is just an illusion. Russia totally lacks these traditions. It doesn’t mean it can’t acquire them, but to compare Russia to the West is very wrong. 

Question: Is there an example somewhere in world history of a country that lacked this tradition, but was able to build it?

Pipes: Well, I think Japan is an example of a country that was very autocratically run, with autocratic rulers and assisted by an aristocracy, but the difference is that Japan was defeated in war and occupied by the United States which imposed democratic institutions, and they seem to be working reasonably well. Russia won the war and was never occupied, and therefore has not had this experience. They have not even repudiated the communist tradition. The majority of Russians feel nostalgia for the Soviet Union. They think the Soviet Union was great. They admire Lenin. They admire Stalin. They did not have that kind of change that they had in Japan.

Question: Your critics often accuse you of not being culturally sensitive to the fact that Russians may have their own preferences about state and society, and may not want to choose the, and I quote, “individualistic and materialistic” way of the Western system. How do you respond to those critics?

Pipes: That they don’t want to be materialistic? Russians are ten times more materialistic than we are. The moment the Soviet Union collapsed they threw themselves on the wealth of the state and began to grab it and partition it among themselves. You had, within a year or two, the creation of dozens of billionaires. I am told there are more billionaires in Moscow now than there are in New York. They are very materialistic, and I don’t blame them. I don’t criticize them for that. They have had to live in very poor conditions. They want to improve them and there is nothing wrong with that. But to think of Russians as being spiritual in contrast to us is utterly wrong. Marxism, under which they lived for 70 years, is an absolutely materialistic system. We have never had anything like it.

Question: You served in the National Security Council under the Reagan administration, and you pursued a hard line policy towards the Soviet Union. How do you feel about the current administration is dealing with Russia?

Pipes: I think it is on the whole less critical of Russia than I would be, but I think the reason for this is that they are really concentrating on the Middle East. It is very hard for a government like ours, which is global, to concentrate on more than one area. During the Cold War, it was the Soviet Union. Now it is the Middle East [and] Islam. Washington doesn’t want to alienate Russia. On the whole, it is very gentle with Russia because they don’t want to make another enemy: it can’t handle two enemies at the same time. I would be a little more severe with Russia or critical of Russia.

Question: Do you see the approach changing with the change in administration?

Pipes: McCain may be tougher if he wins the election. Obama, I doubt it.

Question: So you are not one of those who believe that a new Cold War is on the way?

Pipes: I don’t think so because even though today’s Russia is in many ways very aggressive towards the West, it is not subversive in the same way that the Soviet Union was. The Soviet Union wanted to conquer the entire world and it had and used its partisans in every country in the world: Communist parties that were dedicated to subverting local regimes, and worked on the behalf of the Soviet Union. You have nothing like that today. Today’s Russia is a nation-state that is aggressive, but it is not out to dominate the world, so I don’t think a cold war is in the making. I do think there will be a lot of tension between the West and [Russia].

Incidentally, I just saw a poll reported today in Izvestia, which asks Russians how they feel about the foreign policy of their country.

A large number of Russians today feel that Russia should not have a confrontational policy towards the West. About 36 percent of Russians believe that their foreign policy should be more balanced and less confrontational. That is quite a change.

Question: How do you see Russia developing under its new president? 

Pipes: I think there are two possibilities for Russia. One is a good one, and one a bad one. The good one would be if you had still an autocratic government but one that obeyed the law. Medvedev has said, and I have quotations from him, that Russia can not have a parliamentary democracy, because that would be the end of Russia. He repeats something that actually Alexander II had said 150 years ago. But Medvedev believes in the rule of law. So you can have an autocratic regime that can decide what laws to pass, but that will obey its own laws and will act in a lawful way. That would be the good alternative.

The bad alternative would be that not only does it act autocratically but also lawlessly.  Which way it will go; we will see. 

Question: And in foreign policy?

Pipes: In foreign policy, I hope it will be less confrontational than it has been. The confrontational policy is very popular with many Russians, but as I just cited you the figures, at least a third of Russians would like it to be less confrontational. So it depends. The confrontational policies are popular with Russians who want Russia to be a great power. They are really not a great power, either militarily or economically, but they try to prove to themselves that they are by contradicting the West. Every time they say "no" to the United States, many Russians feel that they are a great power, they don’t have to obey the United States, or listen to the United States or agree with it.

So, which will prevail? The most sensible policy or the least sensible policy? It is hard to guess at this point.

Question: You mentioned the tension in Russia between East and West.  Do you think this will be an eternal struggle for Russia?

Pipes: It’s going to go for a long time, because it has deep roots in religion. That hostility to the West which prevails in Russia dates back to the Middle Ages when the Orthodox Church declared the Catholic Church and then the Protestant churches to be heretical and Russia to have the only true church. That hostility to the West, in my opinion, is rooted in this religious tradition, and how to overcome it is something I don’t know… It’s going to be very hard.

Question: Assuming things continue on their present course, what kind of Russia will we have in 20 years?

Pipes: What I hope it will look like is that it will be a country that is run reasonably democratically, by which I mean a country with a government that at least listens to its public opinion and shapes it in a way that is not hostile to the outside world. Secondly, a country that develops its economy and does not rely, as it does today, almost entirely on the sale of raw materials, particularly energy, but develops an economy that manufactures industrial objects, food and so on, and exports them, and becomes a truly developed economy. Last, but not least, that it obeys international law and domestic law and is a peaceful neighbor. That’s what I would like [Russia] to be 20 years from now.