Title: The Primakov (Not Gerasimov) Doctrine in Action - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Headings: The Primakov (Not Gerasimov) Doctrine in Action
The Primakov (Not Gerasimov) Doctrine in Action
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Summary
Eugene Rumer
Introduction
The Continuation of Politics
Hard Power Rules
A Pattern of Calculated Risk-Taking
Nuclear Weapons: The Ultimate Insurance
2014: A New Chapter
Russia and the INF Treaty
Map 1
Range of Select and Prospective Russian Missiles
Map 2
Range of Select and Prospective U.S. Missiles
The Syrian Deployment
What Next?
Notes

Content: On those rare occasions when senior military leaders appeared to pose a challenge to the political leadership of the country—Marshal Georgy Zhukov in 1946 and 1957 and Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov in 1984—they were removed from their posts. The same pattern of civil-military relations has persisted in post-Soviet Russia. While some senior military figures attempted to play a more prominent role in the country’s domestic politics during the chaotic tenure of president Boris Yeltsin, they were never able to gain the upper hand in their dealings with the Kremlin. General Alexander Lebed was brought into Yeltsin’s inner circle when the political circumstances required it, but he was quickly shunted aside to a provincial post once his services were no longer needed. General Gerasimov is no different in this respect from his predecessors. His so-called doctrine is hardly a driver of Russian national security policy. Rather, it is an effort to develop an operational concept for the Russian national security establishment to support its ongoing confrontation with the West. Instead of a new doctrine, Gerasimov offers a strategy to implement the actual doctrine that has guided Russian foreign and defense policies for over two decades: the Primakov doctrine. The Primakov doctrine, named after former foreign and prime minister Yevgeny Primakov, which Russia’s current Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov extolled as a concept that will be studied closely by future historians, posits that a unipolar world organized by a single global center of power (the United States) is unacceptable to Russia.