Paul Goble
Staunton, March 15 – What Vladimir
Putin is doing in Crimea has less to do with the defense of Russia’s foreign
policy interests there than with the defense of the Kremlin leader’s own
position in the face of what is becoming “the Great Ukrainian-Russian
Revolution,” according to Gleb Pavlovsky.
In an article posted on Gefter.ru
yesterday, the Moscow commentator argues that Putin’s statements and moves all
ostensibly about “stopping the Ukrainian revolution” are unintentionally having
the effect of spreading it into Russia and that the Kremlin leader is seeking
to come up with a defense that serves his own interests (gefter.ru/archive/11640).
Putin has a pathological hatred
and fear of revolutions, Pavlovsky says, but he “does not see” how he has been
drawn into the revolution that began in Kyiv and is now spreading. Indeed, he
continues, “Putin is already half a Ukrainian politician” and in spite of
himself one of the leaders of the Great
Ukrainian-Russian Revolution.”
Whenever a revolution breaks out,
Putin’s first impulse is to “stop it.” But in the case of Ukraine, this
revolution is “not simply an external enemy; it is a confirmation of the fact
that the danger is in his own zone of power. That is, Putin has united the two
countries in a single field, into a
single ‘UkrRuss’ space of danger.”
When Putin “speaks about Ukrainian
elites, who have provoked all this,” Pavlovsky continues, “he is in fact speaking
about Moscow elites.” And that fact explains why Putin has been doing what he
has in the case of Crimea. Without a clear understanding of it, the Kremlin
leader’s passions make no sense.
Revolutions by definition “destroy
the state,” the Moscow analyst continues, and the state is what Putin lives by “But
the main thing here is [the Russian leader’s] total antipathy to revolution”
and his fear of that happening to him. “However strange it may be, although the
revolution is in Ukraine, Putin already feels himself surrounded by it.”
“And when you are surrounded,”
Pavlovsky says, the only thing you can do is try to defend yourself. This is what is behind Putin’s main ideological
theme: “the threat of war.” It is
certainly true that “Putin does not want to fight.” But he is using the language
of war rather than that of a limited conflict in Crimea because of his domestic
goals.
But in using this vocabulary, Putin
may have miscalculated in a serious way. Talk of war is so disturbing that the
Europeans are more concerned about restraining him than of restraining the
revolution. And a major reason
for that is that “no one in the world except for Putin feels himself surrounded
by ‘a revolution.’”
For
everyone else, the revolution in Ukraine is simply the latest of a string of
disorders. Consequently, they are “not in Putin’s world! They are in another
reality.” Indeed, one can say that these
realities have now diverged. But that very divergence carries with it some real
risks, Pavlovsky continues.
Except
in Putin’s imagination, he says, the West “does not intend” to fan the flames
of revolution in Ukraine. But by working
to “restrain Putin,” the West has, whether it intends it or not, become “a
participant in domestic Ukrainian politics.” And thus in Putin’s eyes, the West
is doing what he fears; and he is responding with talk of war.
But
it is critically important to understand why Putin is doing this. According to
Pavlovsky, Putin does not think that he can “stop the revolution in Ukraine by
the threat of war.” Instead, his words are “a preamble” or “prelude” about what
he intends to do “inside and not outside” of the Russian Federation.
What Putin needs is “another Russia,”
a Russia in which the spectre of a foreign threat or threat of war will “force
the country to ideologize itself by itself” and thus open the way for actions
by the Kremlin to defend the Kremlin and its interests, Pavlovsky says.
In Putin’s schema, “Ukraine is being
transformed into the most radicalized part of Russia” as part of “an export-import
operation.” First, Moscow gets involved in Crimea and resolves the situation
there in a way to its liking and then turns back to the Russian Federation with
the same goals.
As a result, “the Ukrainian
revolution is being transformed into a prelude or the Russian
counter-revolution.” It is thus an occasion for rather than the primary cause
of Putin’s approach. “The phantom of ‘Banderite
Ukraine’ thus will serve as the basis for the search for internal ‘Banderites’”
just as similar ideological schemas did in 1949 and 1993.
This entails many dangers but
perhaps the most immediate one is that using the threat of war in this way
requires that there be something that plausibly looks like one or that can be
presented to the Russian population as one.
Otherwise, Putin’s words are likely to be dismissed as entirely
overwrought.
In short, by talking about the threat
of war, Putin “is forced by the laws of the theater to form a new image of
Russia,” one capable of acting unilaterally.
And that “undoubtedly,” Pavlovsky says, “will led to the review of old
and the appearance of new defensive strategies in the West.”
“In front of our eyes,” he writes, “a
very powerful generator is being built. Its constituent parts are the Ukrainian
revolution and the threat of war from Russia and the split and polarization
between Russia and the West,” which is then coming home to Russia as a struggle
between “the overwhelming majority against ‘the fifth column.’”
“Putin did not and does not have
goals outside of Russia; his goals are internal,” Pavlovsky says, “and the next
military action [of the Kremlin] will be in Moscow and in Russia.” But the
Kremlin leader has trapped himself by his language and must back away from it
or face a world far more threatening to his interests than anything that has
yet happened in Ukraine.
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