Berman weaves these patterns together with the corruption of the current regime and its impact on capital and foreign investment fleeing the country. The gap between the authoritarian, criminally penetrated, decaying Russia and the Russia that might have evolved is tragic and has consequences both for individual Russians and for American policy.

I remember visiting the collapsing Soviet Union and early post-Soviet Russia in the early 1990s. Again and again everyday people would say to us, “we just want to become a normal country.” By that they meant a country with the rule of law, opportunity for everyday folks, and a chance to do better economically over time.

As Berman makes clear, that “normal country” was killed off by the oligarchs, organized crime, and the KGB holdovers. The consequences of that failure will limit Russia’s future. That reality should be the baseline for American thinking about strategic planning dealing with Russia.

—Newt Gingrich

Former Speaker of the House

July 7, 2013

PREFACE

RUSSIA’S DISORDER COMES WEST

On April 15, 2013, two bombs went off on Boylston Street, near the finish line of the famous Boston Marathon. The improvised explosive devices, seemingly timed to go off during peak crowd numbers, ripped through the spectators, killing three and injuring more than 250 others in the largest terrorist incident to take place on U.S. soil since the attacks of 9/11.

In the days that followed, a massive dragnet by law enforcement authorities netted two perpetrators of Chechen extraction: twenty-six-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his nineteen-year-old brother, Dzhokhar. The resulting showdown left the former dead and the latter hospitalized and awaiting justice in the U.S. legal system.

Speculation has abounded about the motivations that led the two brothers to carry out their brazen act of terror. By all accounts, both were homegrown radicals, albeit ones who had received inspiration, and perhaps even dangerous instruction, from ideologues abroad. But at least in some measure, the roots of the Tsarnaevs’ militancy can be traced back to Russia’s long-running struggle against radical Islam—a phenomenon that, two decades after the collapse of the USSR, has begun to emerge as a threat to the West.

It is also a foretaste of things to come. Today, the once-mighty Russian state is crumbling under the weight of its own internal contradictions. A rising tide of Islamic radicalism is only one sign of this disorder. Others include population decline on a catastrophic scale, as well as growing strategic competition with neighboring China. As these trends consume Russia, the reverberations will be felt far beyond its borders, including here in the West.

But we should start with a word of caution. History teaches us that nothing is inevitable. Prognosticating about the future is a seductive pastime, and more than a few foreign policy analysts have tried their hands at it over the years. Their track records, however, suggest that such prophesying is an occupation better left to fortune-tellers and clairvoyants.

This book, then, isn’t about the certain collapse of Russia. It’s easy to imagine that the country might indeed be able to muddle through the coming decades, despite the mounting pressures now taking shape within its borders.

Rather, it’s about the end of Russia as we know it. Today, the Russian state is on the cusp of a monumental transformation, brought about by demographic decline, radical (and rapid) ethnic and sectarian change, and a profound shift in the geopolitical balance of power between it and its sometime ally, China. Left unaddressed, these trends will transform the very nature of the Russian state and will do so in ways that will have global implications—including for the United States, which still dominates the Russian imagination as a measure of their own worth and as a strategic adversary.

The changes outlined in the pages that follow could well lead to Russia’s outright collapse. However, they might not. One thing is for certain: the Russia that America will have to contend with tomorrow will look very different than the one we see today. Today’s Russia is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

CHAPTER ONE

MISREADING RUSSIA

The year is 2040, and Russia is virtually unrecognizable. Decades of population decline and societal malaise have eaten away at the once-mighty Russian state, leaving it a shadow of its former self. Domestically, the country is undergoing a massive social upheaval, as the country’s dwindling and increasingly nationalistic Slavic population wages what amounts to a civil “cold war” with an expanding, and radicalizing, Muslim underclass. Separatist tendencies are on the rise in the country’s majority-Muslim republics. Some have had to be forcibly prevented from breaking away from the Russian state, while others are planning for just such an exit, despite threats (and payoffs) from Moscow. Violent attacks by domestic Islamist extremists and foreign jihadistshave become commonplace—scaring away tourists and discouraging foreign investment. Desperate to maintain order, the Russian government has resorted to widespread, sustained repression of a sort not seen since the days of the Soviet Union, further radicalizing the government’s political opponents and isolating Russia from the West.

Meanwhile, the territory of the Russian Federation looks dramatically different than it did just twenty years before. Decades of Slavic depopulation and stealthy Chinese immigration have made Beijing the de factooverlord of Russia’s resource-rich Far East. Russia no longer has any hope of emerging as an Asian political and economic power. China has displaced it, and Russia has tried to compensate with territorial conquest in the post-Soviet space, absorbing Belarus and embarking on a series of costly (and unresolved) military conflicts with Ukraine and other countries on its immediate periphery.

In Washington, officials have begun to raise a number of grim questions: Could jihadistforces seize control of Russia’s nuclear weapons? Might Russia try to buy off Islamists by selling nuclear weapons to Muslim countries? How should the United States and other Western powers react if Moscow overtly threatens Eastern Europe and the Caucasus? If Russia and China go to war in the Far East, should the United States intervene? And if Russia collapses into internal chaos, will Washington be forced to come to its rescue, economically or militarily, or both?

The year 2040 is only some twenty-five years away, and while the scenarios outlined above are by no means inevitable, they are, as we will see, quite plausible.

THE BEAR IS BACK . . . FOR NOW

For the moment, the unraveling of Russia is still far from the minds of most observers. In fact, Russia’s future looks comparatively bright. While the decade that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 saw a Russia that was humbled and diminished, over the past dozen years it has roared back onto the international stage under the guidance of its current president, Vladimir Putin.

In the Middle East, Moscow has reverted to familiar Soviet-style balance-of-power politics. It has played a key role in propping up the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, prolonging the brutal war that is being waged by Syria’s dictator against his own people. ¹Russia likewise remains an enabler of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, providing political cover and crucial know-how to the Islamic Republic’s atomic effort despite deepening international concerns. ²