Russian Strategic Culture in Retrospect

The article analyzes the transformation of Russian strategic culture over the past 100 years. The authors believe that, during this period, Russia veered away from the strategic goal-setting practices that its elite had implemented previously. Since the end of the 18th century, Russia was an integral part of the Concert of Europe, and its ruling circles absorbed the European ideas of peace, language of diplomacy, and approaches to military planning. The 1917 revolution brought to power people who had a fundamentally different political experience and pursued other goals in the international arena. Soviet power essentially “reinvented” the strategic culture of the Russian state, adopting (but on a completely different basis) some Realpolitik aspects of foreign policy thinking. The Second World War became the central event that imbued Soviet strategic culture with a great-power attitude. The crisis of Soviet ideology in the second half of the 20th century seriously affected the strategic thinking of the elites, provoking its decline. The article concludes that some key categories of Soviet strategic culture still affect the strategic culture of modern Russian elites.