Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 15 – Vladimir Putin,
in his effort to save his rule by intervening militarily in Ukraine, is pushing
the world not toward a new cold war as many say but rather to something far
worse and more dangerous, one in which one or another side may in fact view the
use of force as a reasonable alternative, according to Andrey Piontkovsky.
In a blog post on Ekho Moskvy today,
the Russian commentator says that Putin has “simplified” the task of those who
seek to understand Russia. Now, such people only need to understand what is
motivating the behavior of a single individual – in this case, Putin – and the
fact that his actions are guided by “a single criterion – the preservation of
his power for life” (echo.msk.ru/blog/piontkovsky_a/1300664-echo/).
Putin’s concern is not a “pathological”
one but rather “a completely natural worry about personal physical security”
because he “understands perfectly the laws of the functioning of the system he
has helped to build.” And in that system, those who lose will suffer the fate
of Muammar Qaddafi.
Putin’s
approach to Ukraine has been both “consistent and logical at every stage,”
Piontkovsky continues. He saw what was
happening in the Maidan as representing the possibility that Ukraine would
escape “the chains of the post-communist thieving regimes ... and move toward
the European model of economic and political competition.”
In Putin’s view, such a development
could eventually infect Russia as well and consequently it had to be “liquidated
in its cradle” through the defeat of the Ukrainian revolution and the
discrediting of that revolution in the eyes of the Russian people. Those goals
were clearly in evidence in the Kremlin leader’s March 18 speech.
That speech, apparently “unexpectedly”
for Putin himself, became something more because it included a new Russian myth
on which he could keep himself in power for life: a myth intended to replace
the one he created at the time of his rise when he and his handlers presented
him as the vigorous young officer who could stop the disintegration of the
Russian Federation by “drowning” the Chechens in “an outhouse.”
But that myth has worn thin with time,
and Putin knows from the Soviet case what happens when the myth dissolved. The USSR kept going until people ceased to
believe in its supposed commitment to the formation of a just society. When they
no longer believed, the Soviet leaders were finished.
They did not adopt a new myth in time,
but Putin, recognizing the threat to himself and his kind of rule, is doing
just that and deploying the Russian media to “zombify” the population in such a
way that it will conclude it has no choice but to support his military plans in
Ukraine and his continuation in office forever.
Putin’s
call for an in-gathering of the Russian lands on the basis of ethnic Russians
abroad, of course, entails the same risks that were highlighted by Hitler’s
call for uniting all ethnic Germans on the basis of a claim that ethnicity was
more important than citizenship. Such an inversion challenges the entire international
system, but Putin thinks it may save him by recasting him as “the Messiah of
the Russian World.”
Many have suggested that such a program “will
lead to a new cold war,” but Piontkovsky says he “categorically” disagrees.
Instead, what Putin is doing “will lead to a situation of relations between
Russia and the West that will be much more dangerous than those in the Cold War.”
During that conflict, US and Soviet
leaders, at least after 1962, both “considered nuclear weapons exclusively as a
means of preventing military conflict between them and as an instrument
supporting strategic stability,” and consequently, they did not use such
horrific weapons to threaten one another in the pursuit of their goals.
But now, “a politician who has taken
upon himself the mission of restoring the Russian World by redrawing state
borders and having an enormous nuclear arsenal and a relatively weak
conventional army simply is condemned to proclaim” that he has “a free hand on
the entire post-Soviet space” and threaten the West with “mutual suicide” if it
interferes in any way.
This “nuclear bluff is working today in
the war with Ukraine,” Piontkovsky says.
The very first words from Washington and Brussels about that conflict were
that “military intervention by the US and NATO was absolutely excluded since
Ukraine is not a member of NATO.”
But what might happen “if tomorrow the
residents of [the Estonian city of] Narva have a referendum about joining
Russia? Will tens of millions of people in the US and Europe take the risk of
war with a nuclear super-power and die for Narva? Putin,” at the very least, “is convinced that
no, they are not ready.” And Piontkovsky
says he has to agree with him on that.
But the consequence of that Putin
conviction is that “international relations are entering a stage of instability
and volatility greater than at any time in the last 60 some years.” Indeed, the
Russian commentator suggests, the last time they were this great were during
the last months of the life and rule of Stalin.
At that time, Stalin “was concerned and
not without reason abot the problem of the preservation of his power and life.
And he came up with a three-part reset” to change that: “ forced march
preparation for a third world war, the liquidation of the party hierarchs, and
a radical solution of the Jewish question.”
In March 1953, “the Russian God
interfered” and saved Russia and the world from that outcome. It remains an open question whether that will
happen again, Piontkovsky implies.
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