Moscow’s Use of Soft Power in Post-Soviet Space has Failed for 11 Reasons, Trukhachyov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 15 – Moscow leaders talk ever more often about the use of soft power in the former Soviet space, Vadim Trukhachyov says; but they have not succeeded in any one of the countries on that space for 11 all too obvious reasons. Unless the Russian government addresses these shortcomings, it is unlikely to have any more success in the future.

            According to the instructor on international relations at the Russian State University of the Humanities, these 11 failures (eurasiatoday.ru/pochemu-myagkaya-sila-rossii-ne-udalas-ni-v-odnoj-strane-postsovetskogo-prostranstva/) include the following:

1.     Moscow started trying to use soft power longer after other countries had done so and has not caught up.

2.     Russian officials typically have not understood why Moscow needs to use soft power and argue that economic strength and a common past are sufficient bases for Russia to achieve its aims.

3.     “For all the post-Soviet countries, Russia was the past from which they were moving away, and Russia never offered any idea about a common future.”

4.     “For Russians remaining in these countries to become instruments of soft power, Russia had to become a Russian nation state but that did not happen.

5.     Moscow failed to target the educated and wealthy segments of the population in these countries, and so those people looked elsewhere.

6.     “Russia had nothing to offer that others could not offer” and often offer more abundantly.

7.     Officials in these countries were not impressed by thieves and criminals coming from Russia.

8.     Russia was insufficiently demanding as far as local elites were concerned.

9.     Russia failed to carry out educational work in which it would discuss the advantages of working with Moscow. It thus lost an entire generation.

10.  Russia failed to recognize all the external sources with which it had to compete, focusing narrowly on the US, the UK and the EU and thus failed to see dangers emanating from others.

11.  Russia doesn’t have a sufficient number of NGOs that Moscow could use to promote its soft power, a shortcoming that the Kremlin has not remedied because it fears that such groups could turn on itself.