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Author : L. Klepatsky
Professor, Diplomatic Academy, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation
THE FIRST EDITION of A Great Future: Germans in
Russia's Economy is a hardcover volume of nearly 400 pages.
It describes nearly 800 years of commercial and economic
contacts between Russia and Germany. The introduction de-
scribes those centuries as "an uninterrupted line of develop-
ment with its ups and downs".
The inception of trade relations between Russia and Ger-
many came in the Middle Ages, roughly, in the middle of the
eighth century. They were interrupted only during the world
wars. The first German trade missions were established in
Novgorod and expanded after Archangelsk, Moscow, and Petersburg joined in. The pres-
ence of German merchants gradually extended to include the Volga Region, the Urals,
Siberia, and the Russian Far East.
Appropriately, the period between the 1990s and 2014 saw an appreciable increase in the
presence of German business people in Russia's economy both in terms of their number
and quality.
In addition to an extensive background of bilateral cooperation, the book looks at the
areas of cooperation. These areas vary widely from the light and food industries to heavy
industry, railway infrastructure, transportation, telecommunications, automotive industry,
medicine, mass media, film industry, construction, agriculture, banking, and so on. Coop-
eration in these areas is based on modern technology. Cooperation in investment is an im-
portant factor.
The book is replete with facts of history and events while it also describes the political
context of the ups and downs of economic relations between Russia and Germany. Its
compilers come up with their own views of the different periods.
The compilers of the volume think that the future of German business interests in Russia
mainly depends on the state and development of Russia's economy probably in the belief
that the Cold War era and its rules are now things of the past.
Berlin's policy in the context of the Ukraine crisis, which the FRG helped to broaden, set
the Russian public wondering: "What that could mean?" To their credit, German entre-
preneurs grew gradually desperate with Angela Merkel's policy that was harming their own
interests and those of the entire nation. This policy on the part of Angela Merkel could
amount to a factor destabilizing both German-Russian relations and European security.
This prompts the question of whether Germans' "great future" in the Russian economy
is likely to materialize.
Do Germans Have a "Grope Zukunft" in the Russian Economy?