Sonderzug nach Moskau: Geschichte der deutschen Russlandpolitik seit 1990, Bastian Matteo Scianna, C.H. Beck, Euros 34

Die Moskau-Connection: Das Schröder-Netzwerk und Deutschlands Weg in die Abhängigkeit. Markus Wehner and Reinhard Bingener, C.H. Beck, £14.60

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought a remarkable period in German-Russian relations to a close. Commerce, foreign investment, cultural ties and personal connections between the two countries had all grown rapidly in the three decades since the Cold War. Trade with the Russian Federation was up by 600 per cent vis-à-vis 1991, and Germany received more than half its gas imports from Russia.

As trade and cultural exchange were expanding, however, the two countries’ visions of international order remained diametrically opposed: Russia vied to have the final word in Ukraine and the South Caucasus, while Germany sought to integrate these states into the European community. This tension is at the heart of two recent books on German-Russian relations, both fiercely critical of the German government’s failure to confront Russia and the corresponding neglect of securing Europe’s Eastern borders.

From the wreckage of 30 years of deep mutual involvement, these two books ask how this extraordinary era in German-Russian relations came about. The answer to this question will preoccupy policymakers and historians for years to come; the authors break new ground by examining the political and intellectual conditions in Germany that enabled and sustained this relationship. They show how Berlin became blind to the possibility of war, and, in doing so, they help to explain why the West was unable to contain Moscow in the run-up to the invasion of 2022.

Bastian Scianna, a historian at the University of Potsdam in Germany, identifies three ‘cardinal mistakes’ of Germany’s Russia policy since 1991: excessive dependence on Russian energy, the rejection of military support for Ukraine, and a reluctance to increase deterrence through NATO. Underpinning these mistakes, as Scianna argues in his meticulously researched monograph, was the notion that European security could only be achieved by co-operating with, rather than confronting Russia. Accordingly, the expansion of commercial and political exchange would foster peace. Within this basic framework, there was considerable variation in German foreign policy, as he reveals based on an impressive body of sources, including recently declassified material from the German Foreign Office and the archives of the Christian Democratic Party. 

The Christian Democrats Helmut Kohl and his mentee Angela Merkel were both clear-eyed about the challenge of a resurgent Russia, but nonetheless supported the expansion of ties with Germany’s erstwhile foe. Kohl, on his part, promoted German investment and financial aid for Russia, grateful for Gorbachev’s ‘gift’ of reunification and guided by the conviction that generosity towards the defeated power of the Cold War was the only path to lasting stability. His inspiration, Scianna writes, was Harry S. Truman’s approach to postwar West Germany and the Marshall Plan; Kohl was looking to integrate Russia into the American-led world order in which he firmly believed (while discounting the fact that the Soviet threat had been the principal argument for the Marshall Plan).

Unlike West Germany after the Second World War, however, Yeltsin and Putin had no interest in joining an international order that was dominated by the US. Early on, as Scianna reveals, it became clear that Russia was looking to challenge the post-Cold War settlement: already in 1991, Yeltsin told Kohl that Crimea eventually needed to reunite with the Russian Federation, and throughout the 1990s, German diplomats in Moscow warned that Russia was not ready to accept a Western orientation of Ukraine. Yet, Germany’s rapprochement with Russia continued undeterred.

The Kohl era’s Atlanticist foreign policy soon transformed with Gerhard Schröder’s ascent to power in 1998. In the wake of 9/11, Chancellor Schröder looked to Russia as an ally opposing the Iraq war, now consciously emancipating itself from the Transatlantic Alliance and pursuing what Scianna terms a German variant of ‘Gaullism’ (albeit one that – crucially – lacked the military wherewithal of De Gaulle’s France). Schröder’s pivot to Russia laid the groundwork for the growth in economic, cultural, and personal ties, which lasted until 2022. 

According to the two journalists Markus Wehner and Reinhard Bingener, none of this would have happened without the participation of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in all except one German government since 1998. Grounded in more than a decade of reporting for the renowned Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, their book reveals the personal stakes that many members of the German elite had in expanding ties with Russia. At the centre of their account lies a network of influential businessmen and party cadres from Schröder’s hometown of Hanover, counting among its members the future economy minister Sigmar Gabriel and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, now Germany’s president. 

Moscow knew that the sympathies it enjoyed within the SPD were perhaps its biggest trump card in European politics, no doubt more consequential than its support of the European far right at the time (that may no longer hold true – the SPD is now trailing the far-right, pro-Russian AfD in elections and polls). Over time, the SPD’s Hanover network became, as per the book’s title, the ‘Moscow Connection’ – the willing target of a Russian charm campaign to win the sympathies of the political and economic elites of Europe’s largest economy, which soon enough became the largest destination market for its gas and the most important provider of foreign technology.

Wehner and Bingener rightly emphasise that Germany’s economic policy fuelled Russia’s war machine – something that Germany’s foreign policy elites (and Scianna, who tends to be sympathetic to their account) are less inclined to acknowledge. If the expansion of trade with Germany was a cornerstone of Putin’s strategy of authoritarian modernisation, Schröder and his entourage were its enablers.

Under Putin, the Russian regime courted sympathies among the German elite not primarily through outright bribery and clandestine operations (although these were most likely a part of it) but through a gilded friendship of peoples.

The opening gesture of Putin’s bid to win Germany came in January 2001, when Putin invited Schröder and his then-wife Doris Schröder Köpf to Moscow for a ‘private’ visit over Orthodox Christmas, a horse-drawn sleigh carrying the two couples from the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour to the Kremlin. Soon afterwards, the Schröders adopted two children from an orphanage in St Petersburg – an exceedingly rare case for someone their age.

Most notoriously, Schröder accepted a number of handsomely paid board positions in the Russian energy sector, one of which he is said to have accepted while still chancellor. In 2014, he celebrated his 70th birthday in the Yusupov Palace in St Petersburg, with Vladimir Putin as the star guest.

For all the mounting differences over the post-Cold War order, the two decades after Schröder’s first visit to Moscow were jolly years. At parties of the ‘Neue Generation’ (‘New Generation’), German aristocrats mingled with the jeunesse dorée of the New Russia. It was one of many taxpayer- and industry-funded platforms to foster ‘dialogue’ between the two societies, bringing together political, economic, scientific and cultural elites.

The Muscovite proclivities of the Social Democrats had deep roots in the Cold War. Wehner and Bingener document how in the early 1980s, Schröder and his generation of young Social Democrats had fervently opposed the stationing of ballistic missiles on German soil and Reagan’s bid for rearmament, and pressured Chancellor Schmidt to balance American influence in Europe through closer cooperation with Moscow. Guided by a vague anti-capitalist and anti-American sentiment, they saw Moscow as the natural alternative to the US alliance system. In 2021, in a book co-authored with the historian Gregor Schöllgen, Schröder called for the dissolution of NATO in its current form, which would ‘free Europe from American tutelage’.

In Social Democratic Circles, Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik (‘Eastern Policy’) of the 1970s was considered a template for relations with Russia in the 2000s. According to the myth prevailing in the SPD, Brandt’s mantra of ‘change through trade’ (Wandel durch Handel) had laid the foundation for Germany’s peaceful reunification and ended the Cold War (never mind that Schröder had initially been critical of Kohl’s push for reunification, and that under Brandt, Germany got only 30 per cent of gas imports from the Soviet Union while spending between four and five per cent of GDP on defence).

For all their skewed understanding of the Cold War, the Social Democrats regarded Ostpolitik as a convenient precedent for seeking closer economic cooperation with Russia. With the Social Democrats’ neglect of defence, their disdain for the American security umbrella, and their blind trust in doux commerce, Germany had no strategy for confronting an increasingly aggressive Russia.

From Moscow’s perspective, ‘Operation Schröder’, as Wehner and Bingener dub the campaign to win over the Social Democrats, was a brilliant success. The ‘Moscow Connection’ thus remained powerful after Schröder’s departure, and his old allies Steinmeier and Sigmar Gabriel continued to pull the strings in the Foreign Office and the Ministry of the Economy, overseeing the fateful dependency on Russian gas.

Russia got what it needed most – German investment and technology – and, until 2022, even earned Germany’s tacit acquiescence to Russia’s encroachment on its near abroad.

Even after Schröder left office in 2004 and the Christian Democrat Angela Merkel – who was more clear-eyed about Putin’s intentions – became chancellor, commercial ties expanded while Germany continued to neglect its military. Merkel, for all her personal apprehensions about Putin, did nothing to change the status quo vis-à-vis Russia, providing export credits to Russia and insisting on ‘dialogue’ in response to every political crisis. Like German leaders before her, Scianna shows, Merkel clung to the vision that expanding economic and civil-society cooperation with Russia would ultimately make Russia more amenable to compromise on its geopolitical ambitions – an approach Scianna rightly calls ‘utopian’.

The invasion of Georgia in 2008, when Russia sent troops towards the capital (but stopped short of toppling then President Mikheil Saakashvili), was soon followed by a German-Russian ‘Modernisation Partnership’, hatched out by industrial lobby groups under the auspices of foreign minister Steinmeier. Its avowed goal was to provide technology to the Russian Federation while helping to strengthen the rule of law, academic exchange and civil society. As a senior German diplomat told the American ambassador in 2009, the scheme was supposed to turn ‘Russia into a reliable international partner.’

Meanwhile, German politicians remained blissfully oblivious of the fact – noted by many with regional expertise at the time – that Russia under Putin and Medvedev was primarily interested in technology and investment, and didn’t have the slightest interest in an independent judiciary.

In detailing the German response to the crises of the 2010s, Scianna’s book illuminates the central paradox of Germany’s Russia policy: seeking closer co-operation with Russia while refusing to contend with the military and political threat that a revisionist Russia had posed since at least the 2008 invasion of Georgia. He shies away, however, from fully spelling out the implications of this insight. Although Germany was part of the western coalition that supported the self-determination of the post-Soviet states, it gave Russia most of what it wanted economically: foreign direct investment, long-term gas contracts (including pipeline infrastructure that bypassed Poland and Ukraine), and technology (albeit controlling, after 2014, more strictly for dual-use tech). Meanwhile, abetted by the openness to trade of countries like Germany, Russia’s military and economic wherewithal increased, while its foreign policy became ever more aggressive.

The capstone of German-Russian realignment was the pipeline projects Nord Stream 1 and 2 (blown up in September 2022 by a Ukrainian team, according to German investigators). Both books devote ample space to the debates surrounding the choice for Russian gas. Proponents of the projects invoked Russia’s role as a reliable supplier since the 1960s and the relatively higher cost of LNG from overseas.

The trouble with the pipelines was geopolitical: connecting Russian gas fields directly to Germany via the Baltic, the pipelines effectively removed the leverage of Central European states (including Ukraine) through which the gas had previously been transported – although they, too, stood to benefit potentially from larger capacities and potentially lower prices. However, Kyiv and Warsaw were understandably apprehensive of seeing the power over Europe’s energy security concentrated in the hands of Moscow and Berlin.

With the construction of Nord Stream 1 and 2 (and the failure of alternative routes that would link Azerbaijani gas fields to Germany), Germany abandoned the diversification of energy supplies that it had pursued during the Cold War. The share of Russian gas supplies to Germany reached 55 per cent in 2021 and would have been even higher had the Nord Stream 2 pipeline come online (its certification was halted with the onset of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine). Sigmar Gabriel, then Minister of the Economy and another of Schröder’s men, had even approved the sale of Germany’s gas storage infrastructure to Gazprom. As a result, in 2022, when Russia attacked and gas stopped flowing through the North Sea, gas storage facilities were empty, and Europe was forced to replace Russian capacity with LNG.

As for Berlin’s blindness to hard power, documented by Scianna – it is remarkable that the Russian invasion of Crimea and the creation of the sham ‘people’s republics’ in the Donbas in 2014 did not lead to any substantial readjustment of Germany’s strategy, whether in the realm of military spending or export controls.

In a rare show of German foreign policy initiative, and with the US staying in the background, Merkel and her Foreign Minister Steinmeier tried to stabilise the status quo in Ukraine through the Minsk agreements. Germany’s oblivion to hard power was on full display, as Merkel and her Social Democratic coalition partners considered deterrence either unnecessary or too unpopular. Merkel bluntly told Ukrainian president Poroshenko in 2015 that ‘the conflict [for Ukraine] cannot be won militarily’. Germany would refuse to rearm Ukraine in the years after – leaving this task to the UK and, above all, the US.

Berlin saw the Minsk ceasefire agreements as an attempt to freeze the conflict and a prerequisite for its diplomatic resolution. As Scianna makes clear, however, the conflict was barely frozen (some 14,000 people died on both sides between 2014 and the invasion of 2022), while the Merkel government continued to pursue ‘dialogue’ over deterrence. At home, the Minsk agreements allowed the ruling coalition to sideline the fraught issue of rearmament and military support for Ukraine. As if borrowing his talking points from his Russian colleague, the German Foreign Minister Steinmeier criticised a NATO exercise in Poland in 2016 as ‘sabre-rattling and warmongering’. That same year, Minister of the Economy Gabriel declared that it was ‘completely unrealistic’ to spend two per cent of GDP on the military.

In the run-up to the war of 2022, Germany had thus failed to prepare its defence industry and military for the eventuality of a major conflict, which US intelligence had warned about five months in advance. Such were the symptoms of the eschewal of military reasoning from the highest levels of government: diplomacy, the German logic went for 30 years after 1991, would replace military power rather than be supported by it.

Scianna astutely lists the misguided assumptions underpinning Germany’s foreign policy for 30 years. He cautions, however, that Germany’s Russia policy enjoyed widespread public support (citing polls, which Scianna could have discussed more critically) and was largely in sync with the foreign policy of France and, during the Obama years, that of the US. But Scianna admits that ‘given its political and economic weight, Germany was the only country in Europe that could have led the charge to change course’ vis-à-vis Russia.

For all their empirical qualities, the story told in these books invites deeper questions about the nature of post-Cold War geopolitics than their authors are willing to contend with. In Scianna’s book, one looks in vain for an explanation (rather than a mere description) of Germany’s failure to confront Russia. Why was the German political elite unwilling, perhaps even unable, to conceive of energy, technology, and military power as core elements of national security? In other words: how come the country that invented modern strategy in the 19th century had lost its ability to think strategically at the cusp of the 21st?

Wehner and Bingener rightly highlight the enduring influence of Schröder and his Social Democrats as the biggest obstacle to a more assertive stance toward Russia (some within the party to this day cling to the notion that Germany must prioritise ‘negotiations’ with Russia over military support for Ukraine, and have emerged as the staunchest critics of the rearmament effort underway since Trump’s reelection in 2024). Yet, the emphasis on the shortcomings of Schröder’s Social Democrats obscures as much as it reveals. After all, every major strategic decision was approved by ministers and parliamentarians of the Christian Democrats. It is worth noting that it was conservative ministers of defence – Carl Theodor von und zu Guttenberg, Ursula von der Leyen and Thomas de Maizière – who presided over Germany’s military self-diminution by abolishing the draft and slashing military budgets.

Evidently, Germany’s Russia policy was the product of a collective failure to think of the world in adversarial terms (something the Russians never unlearned). In dealing with Russia since 1991, Germany had replaced the logic of hard power with doux commerce and spent prodigious sums on civil society initiatives across the post-Soviet sphere.

Yet, a reckoning with Germany’s moral preference for soft power is missing from both books. The shadow of the Nazi past surely needs to be part of any explanation of how German leaders came to reject military power after 1991. Invariably, the relationship with Russia and the question of rearmament were shaped by half a century of soul-searching over what had led Germany onto the path of world war and genocide. This was, one might add, a particularly burning concern for the architects of rapprochement with Russia, who had lived their formative years in the aftermath of the 1968 student movement that sparked a reckoning with Germany’s war guilt and the legacy of Prussian militarism. Only against this background does the convenient fiction that conflicts of interest could be resolved ‘together with, not against Russia’, as Steinmeier put it, become intelligible. 

Finally, one cannot help but wonder if Germany’s Russia policy reflected the peculiar political and economic model of post-Cold War Germany, a country where business interests routinely trump national security – with Russia as much as with China. It is striking, therefore, that an explicit discussion of the relationship between foreign policy and political economy is almost entirely absent from both accounts. After all, Germany’s economy thrives on exports, and Germany’s peculiar industrial structure (machine tools, capital goods and cars) fit the needs of Russia’s booming economy of the early 2000s uniquely well.

If Germany’s neo-mercantilist economic strategy allowed large corporations to make big profits abroad, the reduction of defence spending funded the welfare state at home. In this sense, the blindness to the security challenge Russia posed allowed Germany to maintain and even expand the country’s expensive healthcare and pension systems. By spending merely 1.1-1.5 per cent of GDP (as opposed to Cold War levels of 4.5 per cent) on defence and relying on cheap gas from Russia, the German state could stem the fiscal burden of an ageing society and a pandemic without raising taxes or issuing new debt. The reluctance to confront the Russian threat thus mirrored the reluctance to adjust domestic social spending and commit to a balanced budget.

Germany’s flawed security policy helped stabilise its economic model, which the political elite was too afraid to question. Wandel durch Handel had worked, only not as the Social Democrats had imagined: the relationship had changed Germany, not Russia. It would take the double shock of the second invasion in 2022 and the election of Trump in 2024 for Germany to change course. 

After close to four years of all-out war between Russia and Ukraine, German-Russian cooperation is virtually non-existent. To be sure, the ‘Moscow Connection’ hasn’t been displaced altogether and Steinmeier remains Germany’s president. On the upside, the Foreign Office today is in the hands of a Christian Democrat, for the first time since the 1990s.

From Germany’s perspective, the economic case for rapprochement with Russia is much less clear-cut in the face of financial sanctions, the confiscations of foreign investors’ assets in Russia, and growing Chinese competition in the Russian market. Many pacifists of yesteryear have embraced rearmament, at once as a stimulus against Germany’s economic woes and in preparation for future confrontations with Russia.

Trump’s 2024 election has taught German leaders the lesson they had long resisted: that security requires real material sacrifices, and that foreign policy must emancipate itself from business interests and polling numbers. The relaxation of fiscal rules has helped, but resurrecting the Bundeswehr after 30 years of neglect has also brought the possibility of welfare cuts on the agenda, without, so far, tangible results.

Increased spending on security alone will not easily translate into increased effectiveness after 30 years of neglect. Today, the key test of Germany’s ability to address its security deficits lies in effectively supporting Ukraine without American help. After 30 years of enabling Russia’s rise, Germany and its European allies will need to prove that they are able – politically, economically, technologically – to successfully prevent Russia’s expansion.