Think back to when Boris Yeltsin proclaimed that Russia wanted to be ”a normal civilized country”. It must have been the point at which consensus was greatest between the Western world and Russia on the notion of what was normal and accepted.

But the Russian dream has changed. Russia now wants to be one of the world’s leaders, one that shapes policy, as President Dmitry Medvedev declared in the new foreign policy statement he presented to the public on 12 July in a speech to Russia’s ambassadors. At the same time, like other Russian statements in recent years, it made it clear that Russia has its own path and own policy to pursue and that no one should think they can tell Russia how to run its affairs.

There would be nothing strange about this if one did not sense the undertone of an inferiority complex, disguised as aggressiveness. You shouldn’t think we’re worse than you are. Russia has been singing that tune for most of the 21st century.  

Those of us who experienced the Soviet Union and then returned as correspondents to Yeltsin’s Russia – where one revolutionary political event unfolded after another – may have had a hard time realizing that many Russians experienced the 1990s as a time of humiliation, ”the nightmare nineties”, given our delight with what had happened. Yeltsin, like Gorbachev, had grown up in the superpower Soviet Union. Their self-esteem was not as fragile (although they no doubt noted small protocol indignities in international dealings – it often showed in their facial expressions). For these two men, the Soviet Union and Russia were still great leading powers – announcing that they would now embark on the road to reform and democracy was not seen primarily as having bowed down before someone.

In the initial delirium of perestroika in the 1980s, Russian newspapers could even write that ”the foreign correspondents were right when they criticized us”. Imagine being right about the great Soviet Union! But when I told this to Moscow’s mayor, Gavriil Popov (who sat beside me at an embassy dinner), he grew sullen. It was not funny any more. And I suddenly realized that what I said contained an insult.

Perhaps we were never on the same wavelength, although it seemed so under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Gorbachev had in fact argued that socialism would be strong and would develop into what one thought it could be through perestroika. (Many intellectuals in the West hoped so as well, albeit somewhat earlier, during the Prague Spring and the era of Eurocommunism). But already with the parliamentary structure that developed under Yeltsin, differences came to light on what we and they meant by democracy. The democrats who supported Yeltsin wanted him to carry out his reforms using dictatorial means. His opponents, with Ruslan Khasbulatov in the lead, were impeccably democratic in form, but their message became increasingly exaggerated and xenophobic.

So in the end, despite all the good efforts, the 1990s for the average Russian meant chaos and fear of disaster. Workplaces could not pay wages; government-run companies could not supply electricity and hot water. Savings vanished in bank pyramid schemes. It did not matter much that everyone received a credit for their share of socialist assets when they saw financial titans grab Russia’s most important companies for a song. (People did not care that they developed these often insolvent companies into well-run profit-making machines.) The economic crash of 1998 was thought to be completely logical.

Under Putin, fiscal austerity was introduced and people were reimbursed for unpaid wages. The good times that followed were considered Putin’s doing. (Nor was he ever seen intoxicated on the TV screen – no wonder his popularity soared.) People saw the end of ”democracy” as something positive. It had only brought poverty and humiliation.

From there, it was not far to what were cherished as truths in Soviet times: an eternal Russia, wanting to subject itself to a strong leader; Russia’s path as totally special and not comparable with the rest of Europe; Russia as something one can not understand simply with one’s intellect, one can only believe in her (the words of the poet Tyutchev, which have become a political cliché).

But is that really true?

During the Engelsberg Seminar, which is arranged each year by the foundation Axel och Margaret Ax:son Johnsons Stiftelse and whose theme this year was Russia, a Russian professor, Andrei Melville, shared a surprising observation. In a survey of different focus groups that were asked their views on four future scenarios – one with rigid governance from above; one with chaos and splintering as a result of a repeat of the 1990s program; one with ”fortress Russia”, an isolated Russia in response to threats from the rest of the world (imagined or real) and, the fourth, a liberal and democratic version with a market economy – it was not a complete surprise that the focus groups considered the first two as ”most likely”. But when they were asked which ones they saw as desirable, the democratic, liberal one came first! This was true of all the focus groups, including those consisting of Communists and members of the president’s party, United Russia.

Does Western society (which Russians are getting to know better with every holiday abroad) still seem so attractive that it has become the clichéd image of the good life? Or is it in fact the case – which is what I usually say when I give a lecture about Russia – that Russians have TWO souls: one has the compulsion to submit – but the other cherishes a desire for justice and fairness.

Why should democracy be so unbelievably foreign to Russians, a people that established the ting (popular assembly) in medieval Novgorod and had farmers making decisions in a collective society? Isn’t it simply something they have been fooled about?

That is the view, for instance, of the political scientist Emil Pain in Moscow, who in a sparkling polemical article in the spring issue of Russia in Global Affairs destroys the myth of Russia as a special country with special experience. What measurements is this based on? And compared with what other countries and what other experiences?, he wonders. What is really the basis for Russians being so special, and compared to whom?

Pain argues that the Russian nation has not really managed to build itself up. From the open society that prevailed under empresses Elisabeth and Catherine, where any stranger could become a citizen and be accepted and where the aristocracy absorbed both Tatars and Germans (during the War of 1812 against Napoleon, a third of the officers had foreign names), Russia has now become a country where people grope for ”national values” and think this means narrow-minded nationalism.

Russians are not really nationalists or racists, Pain thinks. But they are forced into such positions. Certainly, in the 19th century, the Slavophiles (the precursors to today’s nationalists) actually competed with their friends in the West. Furthermore, could it not be the case that part of this inferiority complex we now hear Russian leaders and politicians giving vent to is due to a lack of education?

They may not have read enough literature to understand the greatness of Russian literature. They may not have any perspective that allows them to see what an enormous creative force Russia, freed from the straightjacket of Communism, has managed to develop in the 1990s – both economically (among its oligarchs) and, for instance, in the development of free and critical mass media (although, unfortunately, these have now been gagged). The politicians may not have anything to compare this with and thus sound dumber than they actually are – and embarrassingly self-absorbed.

But the fact is that the world looks different from Moscow than from the West. And from Moscow’s perspective, the US mission to save the world is not defensible. When Moscow learned from NATO that enlargement would only include East Germany – and then saw this promise broken – it naturally perceived this as a betrayal, the diplomat Rodric Braithwaite reminded participants at the Engelsberg Seminar. In the same way, the Serbs’ demand for sovereignty over Kosovo (because it is seen as Serbia’s original homeland) reminds Russians in an uncomfortable way that THEIR original homeland, Kiev, the site of the first Russian state, is now outside their borders.

But only now, in 2008, does Russia face a real choice of paths, the Russian political scientist Dmitry Furman argues in an article in the same issue of Russia in Global Affairs. That is the first time since 1991, when Boris Yeltsin governed the country in an imitation of democracy. He had to, in Furman’s view, because Yeltsin was doing the exact opposite of what Russia’s citizens had just said they wanted in a referendum: to preserve the Soviet Union. Instead, Yeltsin (together with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus) broke it apart. In 1991, the Russians were in fact more prepared for democracy than in 1917, even though they had been living under Communism for more than sixty years. But Yeltsin needed a constitution that allowed him to do as he pleased and a successor who would not make him stand trial for having in fact committed high treason by dissolving the Soviet Union. However, when he dissolved Parliament in 1993 – which Furman thinks was necessary for Yeltsin – citizens punished him by not giving him the electoral victory he had counted on.

The difference between Yeltsin and Putin is not as great as one in the West might think, Furman argues, even though it was only under Putin that Russians seriously began to rebel against the West, unloose internal propaganda against the US and claim that Russia could not ”stay down on its knees” any longer. But what then is their choice of paths today? For the first time, says Furman, a Russian president stepped down of his own accord and made reference to the constitution – and did not change it to remain in power, which is probably what Russians and indeed the West had expected. Now it will be virtually impossible for a successor to manipulate the constitution for this purpose. So Russia can move toward real democracy, Furman believes. And now its citizens are even more prepared for democracy because the country is more enlightened and modernized. The more one turns to a community founded on law and makes room for freedom, the greater the chance that it will become a stable democracy.

One question remains for us: is Russia then as powerful as it wants to seem? Can Russia really claim to be one of the world’s great powers? (After all, its place in the G8 does not seem defensible, given that Russia is not among the leading industrial countries, but then that was before both China and India eased the individual European countries from out of their top positions). 

Russia, of course, is no long so powerful that it can a priori be taken for granted that the country should take part in major decisions. But then where should Russia be? It is certainly of no use to have Russia, insulted, form a bloc with China and upset the apple cart for the US and Europe. Russia should obviously try to address the main global issues together with the EU: terrorism, the threat to the environment.

Translated by Susan Long