Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 25 – The Anschluss
of Crimea could have become the occasion for the formation of a new nation in
Russia, just as Moscow’s attacks on Ukraine have contributed to nation building
in Ukraine. But Vladimir Putin has not been willing or perhaps even able to
take that step, Aleksandr Morozov says.
The reason, Russian commentator argues,
is that “from the very beginning” those who supported the annexation of Crimea
were not a single whole but three distinct groups: “a party of war,” “’non-aggressive
anti-Westerners,’” and “’hostages of the Crimea is Ours’” campaign (russ.ru/Mirovaya-povestka/Postkrymskij-konsensus).
The post-Crimea “party of war,” he
says, includes “a broad spectrum of social groups and personages from the
military and journalists to ordinary young men who are psychologically read to
enter into a real war with the West.”
The “’non-aggressive anti-Westerners’”
are an even larger social group consisting of those who are convinced that the
West has always mistreated Russia and always will. “They understand” that Russia isn’t strong
enough to take on the West, but that understanding, Morozov says, “only
strengthens their solidarity with Putin.”
And “’the hostages of Crimea is Ours’”
as an idea are also numerous and include many who may not initially have backed
the annexation of Crimea but who have been for 15 years “active participants of
the Putin consensus.” Under current conditions, they find it impossible to
leave it.
According to Morozov, “all three of
these fractions are developing ‘in their own ways,’” and that presents real
problems for Putin who is seeking to link them together in order to have the
broadest support possible for his policies.
The “non-aggressive”
group sees what is happening as confirmation of their views about the West and
is reinforcing their old resentments with new ones. They do not necessarily
support new acts of aggression, but there is growing sense that “if the West hates
us so much, then one can expect anything from it, even war.”
From that perspective,
Morozov says, Putin appears to be “an extraordinarily restrained and wise
politician” who is avoiding war, and its adepts conclude that “we must be
prepared for victims if only to save ourselves from the aggression of the West
which wants to ‘dismember’ us.”
The “party of
war,” in contrast, is strengthening in an uncontrolled fashion: “it wants not
victims but victory” and includes veterans groups, military personnel, and some
politicians like Sergey Mironov. And “the
hostages” are simply playing a game of wait and see.
Collectively,
these groups form the 84-87 percent support Putin garners in in the polls, and
they would seem to provide the basis for the formation of a new Russian nation.
But that hasn’t happened because within this group, “’the party of war’ is
undoubtedly moving toward a left-nationalist consensus, but this is not a Putin
but a post-Putin consensus.”
This has led many
analysts in Russia and elsewhere to conclude that “after Putin can be only ‘a
still worse Putin,’” a conclusion that many of the Crimea is Ours “hostages”
share. But all three of the groups in Russia are in constant motion, awaiting “some
sort of ‘resolution of the situation.”
“Some are waiting
for the shift to the stage of a victorious war;” Morozov says. “Others are
waiting for ‘Putin’ or ‘a new Putin to end ‘the policy of indeterminacy,’ and
still a third are waiting for a declaration calling for them to ‘sacrifice’
themselves.” These different positions are producing “a colossal number of
words,” reflecting the fact that Russia has public discussions but no real
institutions.
That has the
effect, Morozov argues, of converting all of this talk into “a daily production
of political populism” in which different people strike different poses but in
which no one sees any particular version as the only possible one. Instead, they
read into what is said what they believe rather than take from it that which is
intended.
In this
situation, he continues, “Putin is not in a position to administer this ‘post-Crimea
consensus.’” He can’t rely completely on the party of war or the party or
hostages. Instead, he is trying to balance among them while counting on “the
party of victims.” But that has put him
in a difficult position.
“Having left the
stable waters of ‘administered democracy’ and launched the Crimean adventure,
Putin has not only changed the consensus [on which he had operated] but also
his function in it. He is no longer ‘an effective manager at the head of a
state, but rather ‘someone ‘who reigns but does not rule,’ to use the terms of
absolutism.”
The Kremlin
leader is seeking to maintain himself by riding “on a crest of populism” in
order to “surf on all three boards” at once. That matters, Morozov says, and is
why “it is impossible to serious compare Putin’s regime either with the Soviet
one of the 1930s of the corporate states of Italy, Germany or Spain of the
interwar period.”
Instead, the
Russian commentator argues, the most fitting comparison of Putin’s current
situation is with that of Slobodan Milosevic and the Yugoslavia of the
mid-1990s. Most people can’t see this
because they view that situation from today’s perspective rather than how
things appeared before the Dayton accords.
At that time, “no
one knew either the further strategy of Milosevic or the future position of the
West.” No one should say that “Putin is
Milosevic,” but it is increasingly obvious that “there is a deep typological resemblance
between Serbian society of the mid-1990s and Russian society ‘post-Crimean.’”
“Russian society,”
Morozov says, “being divided into three fractions is beginning to discuss the
problem of Ukraine with various ideological patterns approximately in the same
way as in the early phase of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Serbian
politicians made use of the theme of Croatia.”
Indeed, he
continues, “in a paradoxical way, fur Russia, ‘the inclusion of Crimea’ is
heating up society in the same way that ‘the exclusion of Kosovo’ played for
Yugoslavia.”
Such parallels,
Morozov concludes, that those around Putin or those who “intend to participate
in the reorganization of Russian politics after Putin must now be analyzing not
the experience of classical totalitarianism or corporate states but he
political history of Milosevic and Serbian society of the 1990s.”
And those
parallels, although Morozov does not say so, also have some obvious and
important implications for Western countries whose leaders hope to prevent the
current situation from getting any further out of hand.
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