Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 11 – The new cold
war that has begun in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine does not have
the formal ideological shape of its predecessor, but Vladimir Putin very much
has an ideological vision, Igor Eidman says, and it is one that tragically
makes it more likely that this cold war will turn into a hot one.
Underlying the first cold war was an
ideological competition between “Soviet pseud-communist totalitarianism and the
market democracy of Western countries,” Eidman writes, with each side convinced
that it would be able to convert the other and each thus having an interest in avoiding
a hot war that could destroy both (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=54FEBE546ABF0).
When Nikita Khrushchev backed down
over the Cuban missile crisis, he did so because he believed that it would be a
mistake to fight with the Americans who, according to his lights, “they would
sooner or later become communists.”
Other Soviet leaders made much the same calculation. Unfortunately,
Vladimir Putin thinks very differently.
“The ideological roots of ‘the
Second Cold War’ are more dangerous,” Eidman argues. Putin sees a zero-sum game
in which the victory of one side represents the total defeat of the other. He
does not share “the native communist dreams” but instead bases himself on “a
mix of archaic geopolitical, imperial and clerical myths.”
And what is especially interesting
and even striking about these myths is how much they resemble those held by
Hitler and the Nazi leadership. That is perhaps why, Eidman says, Putin and his
ideologues have gone to such lengths not to put them out in any formal way
because then this would be obvious to everyone.
But the content of Putin’s vision is
clear if one looks close enough, he continues. One of the former advisors to
Putin’s chief ideologist Vladislav Surkov said not long ago that Surkov “always
was and remains a supporter of the doctrine of ‘Moscow as the Third Rome’ and
considers that if a state does not expand its sphere of influence, it will
begin to degrade.”
From that, V.Rapoport said, Surkov
is convinced that “expansion is the natural condition of a healthy state.”
“For Putin as for his ideologue,”
Eidman says, “development is above all foreign expansion” and expansion by any
means necessary. And such expansion is necessary as well because of what Putin
believes is “the eternal conflict of Russia and the West,” one in which “the
West is always seeking to enslave Russia” and thus must be pushed back and
destroyed.
Putin’s “ideology is based on
conspiracy theories, a paranoid attitude toward what is taking place, ideological
archaism, and a Mannichean map of the world where there is a struggle taking
place between the forces of good (Russia) and the forces of evil (the West),” all
of which is also characteristic “for the mythology of Nazism and Islamis.”
Behind everything threatening Russia
is the United States, a vision of the world which “very much recalls the Nazi
theory of the world Jewish conspiracy, only instead of the Jews, here figure the
Americans.” Putin and his regime “demonize the US just as Hitler demonized the
Jews” and view this struggle as one in which there can be only victory or
death.
Putin’s “pan-Russian nationalism and
[his] theory of ‘the Russian world’ … is distinguished both from pan-Slavism
and fro Russian ethnic nationalism.” It defines as the Russian world “all those
lands where people speak Russian,” including parts of neighboring countries
like Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Kazakhstan which Putin believes must be
absorbed.
All this, of course, is part and
parcel of his view of the need to “take revenge” for Russia’s defeat in the
earlier cold war and of his conviction that doing so is impossible “without a
victory in the new.” That is behind his
aggression in Ukraine and his insistence that the West give “complete carte
blanche to the spread of fascism and terror against the opposition inside
Russia,” something the West cannot do without betraying its own values.
Putin’s Russia, of course, “is not
in a position to win either a cold or a ‘hot’ war with the West,” Eidman says.
It doesn’t’ have the resources that the USSR did, and “its economic and
military possibilities are incomparably less than those which the Western
countries have.” And that dictates his current tactic of seeking Western
concessions by acting in an intimidating way.
What the Kremlin leader seeks is to
lead the West to make “concession after concession” to him lest there be a
bigger war and to “achieve recognition if not de jure then at least de facto of
the results of his continuing expansion.”
Such a policy is extremely dangerous,
Eidman points out, “because the Russian president apparently still does not
understand how weak his position is and consequently may cross the line
separating the world from catastrophe. To stop him” before that happens” can
only be achieved by the collapse of the Russian economy.
If the Russian economy collapses,
the Moscow commentator concludes, “the Kremlin will not be able physically to
continue the realization of its ideological goals.” Everyone should remember
that the collapse of the USSR led to the end of the earlier cold war. To end
the second will be possible only with “the collapse of the Putin regime.”
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