Paul Goble
Staunton,
March 30 – Many are taking comfort in the notion that just as
Russians appear to have reduced their hatred of immigrants
when encouraged by the Kremlin to hate Ukrainians instead so too their hatred against
the latter could be ended relatively easily if Moscow changed course -- and in
any case won’t expand to include others.
But in
fact, as a panel discussion organized by Radio Liberty points out, there are
two problems with the optimistic vision. On the one hand, it ignores that there
was a reservoir of hatred among many Russians ready to be whipped up by the
government for its own purposes. Moscow did not create it; it exploited it (svoboda.org/content/transcript/26926308.html).
And on
the other, such a view also downplays the danger that while Moscow may be able
to exploit such hatreds, it could quickly lose control over them and not be
able either to restrain them once they are unleashed or to prevent them from
being extended to other groups that the regime either wants to protect or does
not want to offend.
Indeed,
to deal with this situation, the panel suggested, the regime will either have
to offer new objects of hatred in the hopes of diverting Russians from one
enemy to another or employ massive amounts of repression in order to limit the
expression of that hatred. In either case, the problems involved with such
feelings and their use are not limited or short term.
Thus,
for example, any lessening of official anti-Ukrainian hysteria in the absence of any new target group almost
immediately threatens to provoke new outburst of hostility toward migrants or
toward other groups, including Chinese workers and industrialists in the
Russian Far East whom Moscow has every reason to protect lest it offend
Beijing.
(Indeed,
that issue is so sensitive that the authorities have taken down an entire
website after it featured an article showing that xenophobic attitudes and
actions against the Chinese are in the rise there. The article was it sibpower.com/novosti-regionov/kitaiskaja-migracija-na-rosiiskom-dalnem-vostoke.html,
but now even the site has been shut off. A cached version is available at
Consequently,
thanks to Putin’s actions in unleashing and exacerbating Russian hatreds in the
current crisis, Russia and the world are entering a Martin Niemöller moment, one in which just
because they hate someone else now, there are no guarantees that they will not
hate others, including ourselves, later.
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