“The Soviet Union didn’t die in 1991,” Robert Nalbandov announces at the onset—and then proceeds to complicate his declaration by examining the more nuanced reality of facts on the ground. Nalbandov’s Not by Bread Alone: Russian Foreign Policy Under Putin (Potomac Books) is a tome as large and wide reaching as its subject. Rightly, Nalbandov, a political science professor at Utah State University, concludes that Russia’s foreign policy is closely linked to domestic issues and represents the projection of the country’s anxieties and aspirations onto the world stage.
At root, the author maintains, fathoming the dangerous brinkmanship of Vladimir Putin is to understand Russia’s political culture. And as it stands in the early 21st century, even the country’s political symbolism, an odd mix and match of Romanov and Soviet imagery, is a recipe of apparent contradictions. Russian politics is motivated by the loss of grandeur that occurred when the Soviet Union dissolved and the hapless Boris Yeltsin delivered Russia into the hands of free market fanatics and oligarchs eager to capitalize on the collapse of the USSR’s rickety Communist economy. The results of an online competition to “name the greatest Russian in history” are fascinating. First place: Alexander Nevsky, a medieval ruler and Eastern Orthodox saint who crushed a Roman Catholic crusade against Russia. Second place: Pyotr Stolypin, Tsar Nicholas II’s liberal prime minister who tried to reform the autocracy. Third place: Josef Stalin, a mass murderer who ruled the USSR by fear.
That Stalin wasn’t even Russian but an ethnic Georgian is only a small piece of the puzzle. Nalbandov addresses Russia’s historical conundrum as a vast, continent-straddling empire lacking defensible borders and always in search of buffer zones, as well as the psychological need of its people to be recognized as citizens of a great power despite its backward location form a Western perspective. The Soviet Union may have been a terrifying place to live, especially under Stalin, but the Soviet Union also terrified its neighbors and the wider world. The rosy glow of nostalgia began to shine in the 1990s, a time of poverty for the 99 percent in a nation that no longer gave its citizens the satisfaction of being able to face down the U.S. and Europe.
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Nalbandov’s polemical analysis draws heavily from sociology to explain the behavior of Putin and Russia, and makes extensive use of sources unknown to most Western observers. His dry and sometimes unwieldy prose does the reader no service, yet anyone seeking to understand Putin’s behavior will benefit from considering the author’s in depth study of a nation the mainstream media finds inexplicable.
