Matthew Orr is a Eurasia analyst at RANE, a risk intelligence company that provides geopolitical information and consultation to consumers and corporate clients with business interests around the globe. Prior to starting at RANE, Orr received dual Master’s degrees in Global Policy Studies and Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He received his B.A. in Russian language and literature from George Washington University and lived in Russia for three years before graduate school, including a year teaching English through the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Program. He is fluent in English, Russian and Ukrainian. You can follow him on Twitter at @More_Orr
Before you entered the Master’s program at UT Austin, you spent three years in Russia. What were you doing there?
When I was a junior, I studied abroad in St. Petersburg for two semesters. I got there in 2014, not long after the annexation of Crimea and the start of conflict in the Donbas. It was a fascinating time to be there. After graduating college I did some internships in Moscow, at a bank and business skills center. Then I was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA), teaching English in Izhevsk.
What’s a business skills center?
It was created after the fall of the Soviet Union, when businesses in Russia were integrating much more into the global economy, and people needed to be taught a lot of the basics of western style workplace etiquette and business management practices. By the time I was there, it was just more of a general business school environment.
What was the Fulbright like?
There were about 20 of us teaching English in various parts of Russia. I taught in Izhevsk, which is the site of the Kalashnikov factory, where they make the AK-47. I taught at the local university, Udmurt State University. Izhevk had been a closed Soviet city, so compared to Moscow or St. Petersburg, it was much more isolated from the west, and that was true even when I was there. A lot of the time I was the first American people had ever met.
What drew you to Russia and Eastern Europe in the first place?
Growing up I was always interested in culture from other parts of the world, and I got fascinated by the former Soviet Union because it seemed like such a black box. The mystery drew me in. In college, I got really interested in the idea of dramatic transitions in societies, of how, for instance, a place like the Soviet Union could function under one ideology for many decades and then, after its collapse, transition to a new, totally different ideology in a very short period of time. I think what we’re seeing now, in Ukraine and Russia, is a continuation of forces that were set loose when the Soviet Union collapsed. Ruling circles in Russia failed to accept liberal democracy, while Ukraine ultimately moved toward accepting this idea of democratic citizenship.
I’m curious what it’s like to live in an authoritarian society like Russia. Could you feel it? Or was it invisible most of the time, people just going about their lives?
You could feel it. Or at least I could. The thing that most struck me was how many of the Soviet monuments and iconography were still up. The Lenin statues were still up all over the place. How can you start to build a democratic society when you haven’t really disavowed the symbols of the previous ideology? There’s a cognitive dissonance that I think forms in Russians at a very young age. They’re told that communist era was bad in certain ways, but then all the monuments to it are still up. On media it is still celebrated in some respects, as a time when Russia was a superpower, but then it’s also depicted as a time when material life wasn’t very good, and isn’t Putin great by comparison. It’s very contradictory.
Another thing I noticed over there is that there is much less of a sense of civil society or political efficacy. I spent a lot of time with students in Russia, including graduate students and political science students. These are very intellectually sophisticated people, but when I asked them basics about their political system or their interaction with it, such as ‘Who are your representatives at the Duma?’ they had no idea. At the same time, some could go on at great length and with great subtlety about Hegel. There was just no point in knowing the details of electoral democracy in Russia and your place in it because no one cares about being an efficacious citizen. It has no relevance to your life or wellbeing, so they believe, or the personal risks are too high.
When you came to graduate school at UT Austin, you already had this background with Russia, but you very consciously wanted to study Ukraine as well. Why?
Because it was immediately clear to me that what was taking place in Ukrainian-Russian relations was going to determine the future of the region, and, as we’re seeing, really the future of global geopolitical processes. Those were things I’d already started to feel going back to my undergraduate studies.
My undergrad thesis was about civic education and democracy in Russia, basically arguing that a lot of the reason that Russia was going down this undemocratic path was that despite having this very modern, democratic constitution, the civic education in Russia was not democratic but rather authoritarian and anti-democratic, maintaining many of the flaws of Soviet civic education.
Where does Ukraine fit in, in terms of civic education and how that relates to its broader political ideals?
That was the big question I asked in graduate school. Ukraine was obviously going in this very different direction, politically and geopolitically, and so the question that naturally arose for me was: What’s going on in Ukrainian civic education? My Master’s thesis was a comparative study. I looked at both countries, described these differences in civic education, and made the argument that they made a difference in the political development of the countries. Ukraine’s people are educated into a very different perception of their democratic future.
This becomes enormously important not just for Ukraine, but for Russia as well. One of the primary reasons this invasion is taking place is that the Russian leadership was so scared and concerned about Ukraine’s democratic future and about Ukraine becoming a successful, normal, democratic part of the West and the example that would set for Russia, which they view as a threat.
Why did Russia and Ukraine go down these very different paths, in terms of their embrace or rejection of democratic ideals, given that they were both emerging from 70+ years of authoritarian Soviet rule? Was it inevitable?
One answer for Russia is that as soon as Putin came to power, there was a concerted effort to roll back the pro-democracy efforts of the 1990s, and the pro-democratic elements of civic education. In its place came a more authoritarian political conception and a celebration of the Tsarist, pre-democratic and often anti-democratic elements of Russia’s history, including through figures such as Ivan Ilyin. Democratic ideas, which got some airing in Russia in the ‘90s, were steadily re-cast as already existing in Russia or as otherwise part of a plot to undermine Russia.
The more complicated answer for Russia, and the reason that Putin had a lot of political and public support for this shift, was that the 1990s were a disaster for Russia. The country was economically in shambles. People began to associate these economic troubles with all the talk about democracy and human rights, and there was a broad feeling that if what was around them then was where democracy led, then maybe it’s a sham and won’t work in Russia. It created a comfortable niche for Putin to step into. There were a lot of people ready to go back to a more conservative, not so grassroots, top-down framework for how society should be, and for what the education system should be.
I don’t think this turn away from democracy was inevitable, but there were a lot of large structural forces in play.
What about Ukraine? The 1990s weren’t great for them either.
They weren’t. But the economic troubles weren’t seen in Ukraine as so closely tied to democratization. In fact, Ukraine was the last of the former Soviet republics to enact its post-Soviet constitution due to debates over national identity. As a result, for many years the civic education there was chaotic. You can’t begin to teach kids about the new state, about the value of democracy, when you don’t even have an answer about what your society is or should be. Over time more of a consensus took shape around democratic structures and ideals, and then as that happened it was reflected in the civic education, which improved with every passing year.
In examining why Ukraine has developed as it has, you also can’t underestimate the role of the ongoing threat of Russia. When Russia started becoming more imperial and expansionist again, under Putin, Ukrainians knew that their autonomy was at risk. They’re the crown jewel of any Russian expansion. Then you had these important events in recent Ukrainian history. The 2004 Orange revolution, when the Russia-backed president lost the election, and then again in 2014 with the Maidan Revolution, when that same Russia-backed president was forced out after promising for years to realize an association agreement with the EU, before instead suddenly rejecting it in favor of reliance from Russia. So the legitimate fear of Russia, and of Russian authoritarianism, has played a huge role in cementing the commitment to democratic ideals in Ukraine, and in creating a coherent Ukrainian identity around those commitments.
I went to Ukraine in 2019, on a research trip, and one of the women we interviewed was a Russian speaker from Odessa. She told us that only after 2014 she realized that her civic identity had become fully Ukrainian. All of these tendencies are strengthening Ukrainian identity. The source of a lot of civic Ukrainian identity had been Russian aggression or attempts to dominate Ukraine.
Do you think that the likely outcome of the current war is a further strengthening of Ukraine’s democratic identity? I can see that happening, but then again war is not always such an ally of the democratic ethos.
It can cut both ways. The Ukrainian people right now are feeling like they are putting their lives on the line for democratic values, to get into the institutions of NATO and the EU, and they’re still not being let in. It is leading to a lot of disenchantment, even among the people who are most invested in these ideals and institutions. One outcome of the war could be that many Ukrainians conclude that these ideas aren’t actually worth fighting and dying for. It would be tragic.
What I’m worried is that we are going to see a split in the previously pro-western camp between people who say we have to persist and another camp that is more nationalistic, which argues that those values and ideals are not worth risking the Ukrainian nation for. Losing historic territory can wreak havoc on democratic norms. We don’t know how it’s going to work out in net.
You now work as a Eurasia analyst at RANE. What is RANE? And what does it mean to be a Eurasia analyst for them?
RANE is a “risk intelligence” company. That means we provide information to our clients, typically corporations, about what’s really going on in various parts of the world, with an eye to the risks or potential benefits of doing business in those places. I just started a few months ago, and my beat is Eurasia. I do two main things. I write for Stratfor, which is our more public, consumer facing site. We provide geopolitical analysis to any readers who want to get it from us. And then I also provide more detailed analyses as a consultant for corporate clients who have very specific questions.
Can you give me an example of the type of thing you’d write for the general site?
One of the most recent pieces I wrote for our readers was about scenarios for the outcome of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I described and did a rough ranking of the scenarios. Now we’re publishing different scenarios updating how the invasion could play out.
Did you think Putin was going to invade?
No. Not at first. I certainly knew it was a possibility at the very beginning of the renewed buildup in the first week of November. But a lot of our analysis kept coming back to the conclusion that a full-scale invasion didn’t seem like a good idea strategically from Russia’s perspective, particularly in light of the military, economic, and diplomatic difficulties Russia is facing now.
Russia sacrificed dialogue with NATO and the U.S. about European security questions, about the re-writing of several European treaties, and in general sacrificed the potential for a more sincere attempt to have Russia’s interests taken into account by the West. The military analysts were telling those of us on the geopolitical side that a full-scale invasion was coming and we echoed those arguments, but strategic logic was pushing us away from that conclusion. Ultimately, the way Russia’s invasion has played out suggests it was largely driven by ideology and faulty internal and external political calculations.
About three days before the invasion, Russia formally recognized the separatist regions as independent. That is when I came into work and said, ‘This is going to happen,’ because the Kremlin did what it had been telling its people and the world, for the past 8 years, it would not do and would represent a failure. For me, that was when I became convinced that it was merely the start of something much bigger.
Once you believed there was going to be an invasion, did you think it would go well for Russia?
I thought it would go better than it’s gone so far. I thought that if Putin is deciding to go to this step, he must be extremely certain of the calculations and assumptions presented to him by the military and others, because it’s so high-risk. I thought they must be pretty sure of themselves, because Ukrainian military analysts had been saying the Ukrainian government and armed forces were well aware of the danger and were as ready as they could be, given the circumstances. I think the Kremlin really overestimated the likelihood that resistance would collapse and Zelensky would cave to Russian demands or flee.
In retrospect, why do you think Putin decided to invade, given the risk?
It was never about NATO. It is about ideology. Ukraine was on a path to becoming a relatively successful, normal European democracy, with political integration with the West. That was so threatening to Putin’s regime that it made the invasion worth it. The fear is if Ukraine becomes part of the west, the Russian people will wonder why they are sacrificing so much, and will demand that they should be living at least as well as the Ukrainians. That scared the Russian leadership. We should do this because our grandiose imperial vision of Russia, and our security, power and wealth within it, cannot co-exist with this democratic, prosperous Ukrainian state right next door.
So how does it end?
That’s the big question now. What is Putin’s political endgame in Ukraine? What does this mean for Russia in the long term? I think this has cemented an authoritarian, autocratic Russia for an extended, extended period. I also think it’s moving us toward a new geopolitical reality in which Russia and China come together more and the U.S. and the West come together much more.