ACIR Presents Dr. Polina Sinovets: Russian Strategic Culture and Nuclear Weapons

According to Fritz Ermarth, “Traditional Russian strategic culture – that of Imperial Russia from its emergence as a state in the middle of the last millennium through most of the existence of the Soviet Union into the late 1980s – has been one of the most martial and militarized such cultures in history, rivaling, if not exceeding, those of Prussia, Imperial and Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan in this respect. Starting sometime in the 1970s, accelerating in the 1980s, dramatically so in the years after the collapse of the USSR, conditions have arisen which open the possibility of changing this nature—significantly “demilitarizing Russian strategic culture—while also leaving open the possibility of a revival or reassertion of traditional, highly militarized, Russian strategic culture.” Are we seeing in Putin’s Russia a return to traditional Russian strategic cultural as Russia reasserts itself in Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and modernizes it nuclear forces?

Join the Atlanta Council on International Relations for the luncheon and discussion with Dr. Polina Sinovets, an associate professor in the international relations department at Odessa I. Mechnikov National University, Ukraine.