Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 5 – The best way to
understand what Vladimir Putin is doing, most recently in his speech to Russian
diplomats, Aleksandr Golts says in a commentary in “Yezhednevny zhurnal”
yesterday is to imagine a similar speech by Putin to the members of the Russian
Academy of Sciences (ej.ru/?a=note&id=25495).
In such an imaginary situation, the
Moscow commentator says, the president of the country would say: “’As is well
known to all those present, the Earth rests on three wales, which in turn stand
on a gigantic turtle...’” What would one expect after this? “Those present would hardly call for
emergency psychiatric help.”
“On the contrary,” Golts says, in
such a situation, “one honored academy would immediately propose deeper
investigations into the right backside of the second elephant ... and another
no less distinguished academic would declare that the future of the country
directly depends on the shell of the turtle.”
Then, “already in the evening
federal television channels will already be savaging the national traitors who
have the effrontery to assert in spite of the obvious andofnational pride that
the Earth goes around the Sun. The next
day, leading sociological services will say that 85 percent of the residents of
the country demand that there be a globe of Russia in school classes.”
This may seem to some like an
exaggeration, Golts acknowledges. But he continues, “the arguments which Vladimir
Putin advanced have exactly the same relationship to reality as do the notions
of ancient astronomers.” That becomes obvious if one considers what Putin told
the diplomats about Russia’s “right” to seize Crimea and “defend” ethnic
Russians abroad.
The absurdity of the Kremlin leader’s
arguments about Crimea become obvious if one imagines that a Greek prime
minister might at some point demand the “re-unification” of Crimea with his
country because “in the course of many centuries the peninsula was a distant
provinc of Athens” where “dozens of generations of Greeks” had labored.
And the wrong-headedness of Putin’s
argument about the need to defend Russianness and compatriots abroad should be
clear to anyone who remembers what happened when another government 70 plus
years ago asserted its right to defend “compatriots abroad” up to and including
by the use of military force.
Until the middle of the 20th
century, many leaders measured “the power, wealth and security of the state” by
its “size, access to the sea,” and other geographic characteristics. On the
basis of that, the tsars divided up Poland in the 18th century, and
Stalin occupied the three Baltic countries in the 20th.
But such assumptions “do not have
any relationship to the current world order,” Golts continues. “Today, the security of the state is defined
by its economic situation, the presence or absence of allies, and the military
readiness of its armed forces.” Countries don’t become stronger by annexing the
territory of others, as Crimea has shown.
Despite what Putin says, “NATO never
intends to put its forces in Crimea. Not because it trusts Russi but simply
because there is no sense in doing so: it can launch its rockets from the Black
Sea or even the Mediterranean.” Thus, annexing Crimea “does not add anything to
the security of Russia.” Instead, it
hurts it by causing NATO to increase its activities.
Putin and his entourage are living
in another world but one in which they have nuclear weapons. And increasingly,
despite denials in the West, that world is in ideological opposition to the
rest of the world. “How is the Putin
demand to ‘recognize the right of one another to be different, the right of
each country to build its own life according to its own ideas not an ideology?”
Golts asks.
It certainly is an ideology, the
Moscow commentator says, when it is in fact “a demand to recognize his right to
live in an imagined world that does not exist in the real world” and more than
that a call for the recognition of his right “to organize not only his own life
but yours and mine according to Putin’s views.”
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