Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 27 – By bullying Kyiv
to put off signing an EU association agreement, Russian President Vladimir
Putin may have won a battle but he has lost the war, commentators say, because
his actions now will make it far less likely that other former Soviet republics
will be attracted to one or another of his neo-imperial projects.
At the same time, however, as Putin’s
approach to Kyiv shows, some of these countries or at least their political
elites can be bullied effectively, and that means that the Kremlin is likely to
engage in more such efforts in the future even though that will further alienate
these nations from Russia and undermine their governments in the eyes of their
own populations.
Three Russian commentaries this week are
especially noteworthy in this regard. In an essay on the “Osobaya bukva”site on
Mondy, Roman Popkov argues that “empires, federations, coalitions and other
large geopolitical spaces are not built as Mister Putin is trying to build them”
(specletter.com/politika/2013-11-25/za-derzhavu-obilno.html).
Long ago, under conditions of late
feudalism, Popkov continues, it was possible to build empires by force and
bribes, “but now successful geopolitical projects are not established in this
way.” One can always bribe elites or use
economic or military pressure if one has them, but they do not work for very
long because they destabilize and alienate those one hopes to attract.
The elites in these countries
inevitably “change. Purchased elites can give way to those that are not and
that are not corrupt.” What is necessary to build an empire is an attractive
system, one that others want to emulate and be a part of. The Americans have
understood that, and even the Soviets recognized until near the end the same.
But at the end of the Soviet
period, they forgot that or could not exploit an attractive model because it
was obvious they didn’t have one. All
that was left was force economic or military.
As Popkov points out, Putin is very much “a man of the late USSR” and
acts accordingly with all “the mutations, genetic defects and shortcomings” of
that time.
Had Russia spent the last decade
making itself an attractive alternative to the European Union, it might have attracted
Ukraine and the others to its side, Popkov continues, but instead, Moscow
focused on enriching its elites and assumed that it could get its way by
threats, force, and bribes alone.
That may delay Ukraine’s entrance
into Europe a year or eighteen months, but it won’t prevent it, whatever Putin
thinks. Indeed, by re-igniting the
Maidan spirit, Putin and his collaborator Yanukovich have made it more likely
that Ukraine and other countries will move in that direction quickly. Don’t KGB officers understand that? Popkov
asks rhetorically.
In a second commentary, this one on
the Kasparov.ru portal, Yevgeny Ikhlov says that the Euro-Maidan in Kyiv and
other Ukrainian cities is “the main indicator of the collapse of the Russian great-power
idea,” a collapse which he suggests reflects tectonic shifts and one with
far-reaching consequences (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5294958CEDA26).
Despite
Yanukovich’s about face as a result of Putin’s pressure, “European integration
and independence from Moscow” reman “the foundation of the Ukrainian national
idea,” and that in turn is “the gravedigger of Russian great power-ness”
because “Moscow cannot oppose it with anything excep vulgar economic blackmail.”
Ikhlov
notes that 70 years ago, the Nazis used anti-Semitism as their last defense of
opposition to Western democracy and that today, Moscow is shouting “gay, gay,
gay” in much the same way. It didn’t
have to be this way, he suggests. Russia could have made itself more attractive
and even presented itself as having a special link with Ukraine.
But
in recent weeks, Moscow said nothing about the spiritual ties between Russians
and Ukrainians and did not speak “intelligentsia to intelligentsia” or even “worker
to worker” as it might have earlier. Instead, it behaved like a wealthy lord
dealing with “a half-naked provincial lass.”
That is “the complete bankruptcy of ‘Great Russia.’”
Moreover,
this shortcoming reflects a broader problem: “the complete exhaustion of the
adaptive potential of Russian culture,” of its current inability to absorb
others or even attract them. Instead,
the Russian powers that be “have shown that they are capable of restraining
peoples only by fear and to attract them only by bribery.”
Finally,
on the Rufabula.com portal and on his own webpage, Aleksey Shiropayev, a
leading Russian regionalist, argues that the recent events between Russia and
Ukraine and within the Russian Federation show that Russia remains imperial, a “diminished”
edition of the USSR organizationally and intellectually (rufabula.com/articles/2013/11/26/russia-clearly-stuck and shiropaev.livejournal.com/306475.html).
Although Boris Yeltsin initially
tried to change that, Shiropayev says, the events of 1993 and the Russian
Constitution that emerged then confirmed that “Russia had remained in its
former imperial historical paradigm.” Unlike many former Soviet republics,
Russia did not become “a new country,” one that could attract its own people
and those of its neighbors.
As a result, it is alienating not
only the latter as Ukrainian events show but the former as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment