CARL BILDT
STOCKHOLM – Many gasped when Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov landed in Anchorage, Alaska, for the Trump-Putin summit wearing a sweater with the letters CCCP – the Cyrillic acronym for the Soviet Union. Obviously, this was no accident. But what was Lavrov hoping to convey?
His intended message, presumably, was that today’s Russia is as great and powerful as the USSR once was; that Vladimir Putin has restored his country’s status as a superpower deserving of global respect. Nostalgia for the Cold War era – when the Soviet Union and the United States were the world’s only two superpowers – has consumed the Kremlin ever since the Soviet empire crumbled.
Lavrov himself is very much a creature of the past. Though he is fluent in the language of multilateral diplomacy (owing to a previous posting at the United Nations in New York), his penchant for bullying has distinct Soviet roots. He seems sincere in his belief that things were better when the USSR existed. His frequent trips to Pyongyang (North Korea) in recent years cannot have been enjoyable. When a summit with the US president on what was once Russian territory presented itself, he made sure to pack his old sweater.
The message will not have been well received in countries that were once locked behind the Iron Curtain. The Russian foreign minister has confirmed the worst fears of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians about Putin’s true endgame, as well as causing disquiet across the Southern Caucasus and Central Asia. These countries remember the Soviet Union not as a splendid empire, but as a prison.
In fact, it was discontent among non-Russians that finally triggered the USSR’s collapse. As political repression eased following Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to reform the decaying Soviet system in the 1980s, it became impossible to reconcile these nationalities’ aspirations with the Kremlin-centric system. The Soviet Union had to end for its peoples to be free.
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