Misha reacts to my earlier post on Russia's attitude toward the West, in very thoughtful ways - so, with his permission, I am sharing his email with the class:
"Your post raises a good question and of course one very important to me. I haven't studied it rigorously myself, but I'd share a few materials with you and throw in a few more explanations to your list: cultural anti-Americanism, Soviet nostalgia, autocratic media policies.
Of course, most Russians are culturally Western and European. However, the ~40 years of antagonism, high power soviet propaganda, and closure created a persistent anti-American and anti-Western sentiment (for example here is wiki article with polls). Sergei Guriev points out that there was an opportunity to mend it by helping Russia during the crises of the 1990s, but the end of the Cold War was not handled well. All this means that "standing up to the US" sells even better In Russia then "being tough on China" does in the US.
Similarly, the 1990s left many people very nostalgic of the Soviet past due to economic decline and the sharp increase in inequality — think the Rust belt magnified by orders of magnitude. I am pretty sure one could instrument economic decline by Soviet industry composition and get effects on Communist party support and later Putinism similar to what Autor, Dorn and Hanson find for Trumpism (which ties the issue to past course materials). The demand for returning to the USSR has obvious consequences for relationships with the US as well as Ukraine and Belarus.
As for autocracy, there are a bunch of mechanisms. Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman call regimes such as Putin's "informational autocracies": they survive by using the control of the media and information flows (they have a new general-audience book about that coming out in a month). I guess one could make a theoretical argument that if you control the media, you would take riskier projects (wars, annexations), since you can show only the good stuff and censor the bad. Then, you also try to prevent democratic neighbor "role models". There was a paper on that a few years ago and, for example, anecdotally some anti-Putin politicians would not mention the success story of Georgia's war on corruption since mentioning Georgia positively was toxic after 2008. Of course, Ukraine is similar to Georgia in this way. Finally, wars create a blanket rationale for prosecuting dissent and creates a "rally to the flag" effect. Putin's ratings skyrocketed after the Crimean affair and the anti-opposition rhetoric has become way more combative."
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