over its level just after the Cold War ended. Not only the rise in oil revenues but also Vladimir Putin’s will account for the quadrupling of the military budget in thirteen years. Falling energy prices have battered Russia’s rearmament, but Moscow’s rulers have persisted in their effort to modernize the nation’s military forces, despite economic setbacks.
RUSSIAN NAVAL MODERNIZATION
In the United States, we take for granted the necessity of openness to ideas from afar, technological innovation, and a vigorous economy able to supply revenue for national defense. This combination is one of our virtues. Not all countries share it. Peter the Great’s construction of a Russian navy required an efficient taxation system where none existed as well as a defense industry that met or exceeded the standard of the times. During Peter’s reign as czar—from 1682 to 1721—some ships were built with green wood and fastened together with wooden pegs. They would sink in the absence of any external force.22
One hundred seventy-seven years after Peter died, Leo Tolstoy published an essay titled “Famine or Not Famine” in the Russian Gazette. Tolstoy was responding to a private letter he had received from a Mrs. Sokolóv, who described the impoverishment and hunger of peasants in the Vorónezh district, the northern border of which is 200 miles south of Moscow. Vorónezh is known for the richness of its black soil and its exceptional ability to produce sugar beets, grain, potatoes, sunflowers, and livestock. Tolstoy listed several causes for the region’s hunger: indifference to spiritual matters, dejection of spirit, contempt for agricultural labor, and inertia. In particular, he wrote about the peasants’
unwillingness to change their habits and their condition. During all these years, when in the other governments [i.e., districts] of Russia, European plows, iron harrows, new methods of sowing seeds, improved horticulture, and even mineral manures were coming into use, in the center, everything remained the same—the wooden sokha [a primitive plow that cuts the earth but does not turn it over], and all the habits and customs of Rurik’s time [the ninth century].23
In many respects Russia remains a technologically backward state. Even today, the technology for extracting hydrocarbons from Russian oil fields comes from the West. Modernization, where it exists in Russia, demands firm resolve, uninterrupted purposefulness, and iron commitment. Notwithstanding the general population’s backwardness, the Soviets demonstrated that these qualities could be mustered.
A revival of this applied determination is under way again. Russia’s navy has now awakened from the state-imposed hibernation of the years that immediately followed the end of the Cold War. Russian nuclear-powered submarines were deployed for 1,500 days in 2015, a 50 percent increase over the preceding year, according to a Russian navy spokesman.24 One of the several classes of nuclear-powered subs that saw more deployments was the Oscar-class guided-missile submarine Smolensk.25 With twenty-four anti-ship cruise missiles each, the eight Oscar-class boats are particularly well-suited to attack U.S. aircraft carriers and their accompanying surface escorts.
Russian naval planning calls for these boats to be modernized with updated sonar, electronic intercept capabilities, and fire control. Without modifying the hull, the modernized boat will triple its missile-carrying ability. The changes substantially augment Russia’s ability to threaten the access of American surface ships to such places as the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas and the approaches from the Atlantic to the North Sea between Greenland and Iceland and northern Great Britain.
In May 2016, the Russian navy launched the sixth and final modernized Kilo-class submarine. Kolpino, named for a municipality of St. Petersburg, was built for service in the Black Sea. This inland sea is the center of festering conflicts and tensions from Turkey to Transnistria to the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine to Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and large swaths of Georgia that have been the source of tension and bloodshed between Georgia and Russia. Naval control of the Black Sea advances Russia’s interest in reasserting control over the region. Kolpino and the modernized members of its class are longer than the Kilo boats after which they were modeled. They can launch torpedoes as well as cruise missiles aimed at land and sea targets. One boat of the class, Rostov-na-Donu, named for the city of Rostov-on-Don near the Sea of Azov in south Russia, fired cruise missiles at Syrian targets from the Mediterranean in December 2015.
The improvements have allowed Russian submarine operations in the Atlantic to return to Cold War levels. The Russian navy’s submarine activity is matched by its advanced technology. Royal Navy Vice Admiral Clive Johnstone, commander of NATO’s Maritime Command, says that “through an extraordinary investment path not mirrored by the West,” Russia has made “technology leaps that are remarkable.” He adds that Russian submarines possess “longer ranges, they have better systems, [and] they’re freer to operate,” and notes “a rise in professionalism and ability to operate their boats that we haven’t seen before.”26
The Royal Navy’s views are shared on this side of the Atlantic. Rear Admiral David Johnson, former director of the Navy’s submarine design programs, told a Naval Submarine League symposium in 2014 that “We’ll be facing tough potential opponents. One has only to look at the Severodvinsk [a nuclear-powered attack submarine that entered service in 2014]. I am so impressed with this ship,” said Admiral Johnson, “that I had . . . a model [built] from unclassified data.”27 The boat’s submerged displacement is greater than that of the Virginia-class U.S. attack submarine; it has been tested with the Kalibr land-attack supersonic-capable cruise missile as well as the same missile system’s anti-ship and anti-submarine missiles. The Kalibr is the missile that Russia says its submarines in the Eastern Mediterranean and Caspian Sea launched respectively in 2015 and 2016 at Syrian targets.
The commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet, Vice Admiral James Foggo III, wrote in June 2016 that, “Combined with extensive and frequent submarine patrols throughout the North Atlantic and Norwegian Sea, and forward-deployed forces in Syria, Russia has the capability to hold nearly all NATO maritime forces at risk. No longer is the maritime space uncontested. For the first time in almost 30 years, Russia is a significant and aggressive maritime power. . . . The clear advantage that we enjoyed in anti-submarine warfare during the Cold War is waning.”28 Just as in both World Wars, the cat-and-mouse maneuvers of the Cold War’s great maritime confrontation contested the control of the sea lines of communication between democracies on both shores of the Atlantic. Although there is no doubt that the United States controls the Atlantic’s vast expanses today, Russia’s reemergence as a naval power raises troubling and important questions about the future.
WHAT IS PUTIN UP TO?
When the Soviet Union ceased to exist in December 1991, the so-called republics that girdled Russia to its south and west had already declared independence and become sovereign nations. These states had not been republics; they were run by communist parties controlled from Moscow. The dissolution of the empire ended in the creation of fifteen states that reached from the Baltic Sea, southeast to include Ukraine, and continuing along the Black Sea’s eastern coast to the Caspian and beyond, deep into the eastern frontier of Kazakhstan, which touches Mongolia.
The results of the breach were large. Before December 1991, the USSR’s population stood at about 290 million. Moscow controlled more than 22 million square kilometers, approximately one-sixth of the earth’s land surface. Dissolution cost the Soviet Union 139 million citizens. Russia was left with a total population of 151 million. Its land area had been reduced by nearly one-fourth.
In his 2005 state of the nation address to Russia’s parliament, Vladimir Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union and the attendant diminution of Russia “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century.”29 If Russia’s shrunken borders lead toward a more stable region, Putin is wrong. So far, however, his efforts suggest that the catastrophe lies not in the Soviets’ loss but rather in their successors’ attempt to reconstruct the shattered pedestal from
