Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 25 – The Kremlin’s
anti-Western mythology is now so widespread that many in Moscow and some in the
West accept it as a given and fail to understand how it reflects a specific
political program and how dangerous and self-destructive it is for those who
are putting it about, according to Vladimir Milov.
In an extended blog post on Ekho
Moskvy today, Milov, a former deputy energy minister and now president of the
Moscow Institute for Energy Policy, argues that there are two reasons for that
conclusion (echo.msk.ru/blog/milov/1286428-echo/).
The
first reason is that this mythology is “based on serious exaggerations and
often on open lies which disorient Russia in its foreign policy actions and
open the way to incorrect steps.” Using it is like attempting to fly with a map
not based on reality but on one’s own imagination. That can lead to crashes.
And the second, Milov says is that
Russia will only suffer if it turns away from the West as a strategic partner
and transforms itself into the enemy of the rest of the world. “When our problems with our real and natural
competitors, China and the Islamic world, intensify, the gap between Russia and
the West can play a very evil joke on [Russia].”
Consequently, “it is time to begin a
serious de-mythologization” of the West and its relations with Russia. Among the myths that need to be dispelled is
that the West “terribly insulted and injured Russia in the 1990s” and now is
the time for Russia to take “its ‘just’ revenge.’”
Consider the facts, Milov says. The West provided credits to Gorbachev to
help him “preserve the Soviet system.” It forced three former Soviet republics
to return nuclear weapons to Russia. And it provided direct aid and credits which
prevented an even greater economic and humanitarian debacle.
Many in Russia now complain that the
West didn’t write off the Soviet debt, but they forget that Russia “assumed
them in exchange” for agreements by the other former Soviet republics not to
make claims on Soviet property abroad and that as a result of oil and gas price
rises, Moscow was easily able to carry them.
A second myth put about by the
Kremlin with its anti-Western rhetoric is that “the West and NATO bombed and
dismembered Yugoslavia and want to do the same thing with Russia.” People should remember that the West
intervened in Yugoslavia only three years after the bloodletting began.
One can disagree with NATO’s
strategy – according to Milov, its involvement in Kosovo in 1999 was more
questionable than its earlier actions elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia, but
one fact is clear, Milov says: NATO “did not unleash the Yugoslav wars: it
intervened in order to end them.”
A third myth in the Kremlin’s
propaganda campaign is that the expansion of NATO “threatens Russia.” There is no evidence for this, he argues,
although he does suggest that US President George W. Bush made a “colossal”
mistake in 2002 when he unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty. That gave Putin some winning “propaganda cards.”
Focusing on an imaginary Western
threat, the Moscow analyst argues, is creating a situation in which the Russian
authorities and the Russian people are ignoring very real threats and driving away
those who could and may in many cases even want to be Moscow’s allies in
countering them.
The most obvious is China whose
leaders talk about the “injustices” of the 1858 and 1860 treaties and sometimes
suggest that it will at some point be necessary to “take Siberia and the Far
East” away from Russia. “Just now China
is taking a moderate line toward Russia, but who knows who will be in power [in
Beijing] in the years to come?”
Because of his occupation of Crimea
and his antagonism to the West, Vladimir Putin has made Russia more dependent
on Chinese good will, Milov suggests, and it is virtually certain that China
will make use of that dependence “against us.” But no one is talking about that
risk, the result of being blinded by the Kremlin’s anti-Western mythology.
Meanwhile, there is another “potential
source of threat” that the anti-Western
rhetoric obscures: the Islamic world.
Moscow was terrified by the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, but
interestingly enough, “the Americans have done the dirty work” for Russia by
overthrowing that Islamist regime. What happens when they leave Afghanistan,
especially if the US is viewed as an enemy in Moscow?
Iran is another problem for Russia in
the Islamic world, Milov continues.
Moscow tries to be friends with Tehran, ignoring the reality that “Iran
is our largest prospective competitor for supplying gas to Europe and Asia,”
the only country with more natural gas reserves than Russia. And what has
Moscow been doing? Helping Iran with its nuclear program.
A fourth myth on which the Kremlin’s
anti-Western mythology rests is that the West attacks everybody: Iraq, Libya
and Yugoslavia and now plans to “attack” Russia. There is no question that many
of these earlier Western decisions were not wise or carried out. But there is
no evidence that the West is about to “attack Russia.”
How can anyone believe that the West
will do so when he or she sees how difficult it has been for the West even to
agree on targeted sanctions in the wake of Crimea? It is absurd to think that is has any
intention to take a more radical step.
And there is yet another fifth myth
in the Kremlin’s arsenal: the myth that the West is using NGOs as “a ‘fifth
column’” to subvert Russia and the other post-Soviet states in order to install
governments loyal to itself.
It is true that “the democratic
model of organizing society as the most successful the world has known open
threatens the future of the most varied dictatorships, including the Russian one,”
but it does not threaten “the future of the countries of peoples,” only that of
those who want to control them in an authoritarian way.
Of course, Milov says, the West has
its own interests and it is “stupid to count on altruism toward Russia on the
part of Western countries.” But if one compares Western policies toward Moscow
with those of other centers of power, like China and the Islamic world, the
former are far better and more suitable for Russians if not the Kremlin than
the latter.
The West has helped Russia, perhaps
not as much as it could have, but it has helped. “The others? Not so much.” China
hasn’t done much. And the help of the Islamists was limited to “only part of
its residents, those who declared themselves ‘Ichkeria’” as Chechens called
their country before and during the Russian attacks against it.
If one thinks about this, the
mythology offered by the Kremlin about the West dispels itself, the Moscow
analyst concludes; but if one doesn’t – and in Moscow today, that is the case
of far too many people -- then that very mythology carries with it the risk
that the Russian leadership may make some “fatal strategic errors.”
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