Sunday, September 7, 2014

Window on Eurasia: Karelian Head Betrays His Own Democratic Past, Shtepa Says


Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, September 7 – Sergey Katanandov, the head of the Republic of Karelia, was an active supporter of Russian democracy and Boris Yeltsin against the August 1991 coup but now has reversed himself on democracy and the goals of the coup itself, a “historic” reversal that says much about where Russia is heading, according to Vadim Shtepa.

 

            In an article that was posted on “Vesti Karelii,” then taken down, but now has been reposted on the Free Karelia site, the Petrozavodsk regionalist notes that the local paper there had, as part of its coverage of the anniversary of the August 1991 coup attempt, talked extensively about Katanandov’s opposition to it.

 

            His opposition, Shtepa says, “undoubtedly had an impact on his subsequent career and his popularity among the citizens” of Karelia who elected him as head of the republic in 1998 (free-karelia.info/index.php/ru/nastoyashchee/respublika/173-trudno-zhit-bez-vragov.html). But subsequently, the Karelia head betrayed his own past.

 

            In an interview given to “Vedomosti Karelii,” Katanandov reversed all the positions he took earlier, including support for integration with Europe – he helped create the Euroregion of Karelia – and opposition to the Soviet empire in the name of democracy (vedkar.ru/slider/sergej-katanandov-poteri-budut-v-tom-chisle-druzhestvennye/).

 

            Did someone attack Russia and force him to change “his worldview?” Shtepa asks. Katanandov in his interview calls Crimea “‘our land from immemorial.’” One would be interested to learn “how he would react if neighboring Finland suddenly declared analogous claims on Sortavalu or Pitkarantu,” places to which they have “no less basis” to consider its.

 

            “Might it not have been better for him to reflect that by its attempt of such territorial transfers, Russia has opened a dangerous Pandora’s box?”  Shtepa continues. But that is not the direction things are moving in the Russian Federation now.

 

            “Of course,” the regionalist continues, “no one has the right to ask a current member of [Russia’s] Federation Council such questions.” The latter can only “translate the official position that ‘Crimea is Ours’ and that support for the Donbas militants is not intereference in the affairs of another country but the noble ‘defense of the Russian world.’”

 

It is also “interesting,” Shtepa says, that Katanandov, while “cursing America for its expansionist policy fails to notice that he himself has fallen into aggressive imperialism.” And thus it is also strange that 23 years ago, the Karelian head “did not speak in support of the putschists who sought to revive the USSR and against the ‘pro-Western’  Yeltsin.”

 

            Of course, Katanandov’s evolution is no different than that of many politicians in Russia, Shtepa says. They not only now disown what they used to support with regard to the borders of their country but also and in an equally worrisome fashion with regard to how things should be organized within those borders.

 

Today, the Karelian head calls on the population to raise fruits and vegetables to feed themselves in order to “overcome the difficult times.” Perhaps he now opposes the existence of supermarkets because they were “thought up” by the “hostile West,’” Shtepa reflects, a conclusion suggested by Katanandov’s Soviet-style rhetoric.

 

Such “propaganda,” he points out, “is inevitably accompanied by the forgotten and empty Soviet slogans like ‘mobilize … consolidate and by common efforts solve those problems which today stand before” the country.”

 

As a result, Shtepa says, one has “the very strange impression” that “today [the coup plotters] have taken their revenge,” and those helping them to do so “are precisely those who 23 years ago spoke out against” them.  In the end, the latter, he says with regret, “simply are not able to live without enemies…”

  

 

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