Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 15 – That Vladimir
Putin lives in a different reality than do other world leaders is now more or
less common ground. Now, two commentators have described respectively what the
Kremlin leader dreams about and what his worst nightmare might turn out to be.
In a commentary of Kyiv’s “Novoye
vremya, Yury Felshtinsky, a Russian historian who now lives in the US, says
that Putin’s dream is that the world will treat his Russia as having a status
equal to that of the United States, something the writer says is beyond his
capacity to achieve (nv.ua/opinion/felshtinsky/o-chem-mechtaet-putin-53752.html).
For Putin, Felshtinsky says, “the US
is the main problem. Not Chechnya, not Georgia and not Ukraine.” But he has a
problem: “Perhaps America would be glad to recognize Russia as an equal partner
but Russia has nothing besides Gazprom, and the earnings of Gazprom are less
than those of the American company Apple.”
“America has no ideology regarding
Russia. It wants to see Russia as it wants to see everyone else as a peaceful
and reliable partner in politics and business,” he continues. However, “there
cannot be relations of parity between the two because Russia in the literal
sense is not a great power. It exports raw materials and imports everything
else.”
“Over the course of the last
century,” he writes, Russia “has destroyed its peasantry and its own
intelligentsia, carried out the terror famine in Ukraine, and conducted a
global purge of its own Soviet communist nomenklatura and army. And the Soviet
Union fought with Hitler only because the latter attacked it.”
In contrast, “Washington dreams only
about one thing” – that Russia will stop causing problems. “No one ever
expected anything good from Russia, only something bad,” although when periods
of a warming of the relationship happen, “all are ready to accept this as a
long-term strategic change and look with hope into the eyes of Putin, a KGB guy
who, as President Bush said, one could believe.”
“Unfortunately,” he writes, “ordinary
Americans on the whole do not think or know anything about the Russian-Ukrainian
conflict: if you turn on the main American television channels, you won’t hear
about Crimea, Luhansk or the Donbas.”
And when Putin annexed Crimea, “almost
all world leaders indicated to Putin that they were ready to recognize the
annexation if Putin would declare an end to his plans for seizingthe territory
of the former Soviet republics.” Putin spat in their faces, declaring the
existence of a Russian world that he would defend and denying that Ukraine was
a state at all.
But now it is clear that Putin’s Russia
doesn’t have the resources to carry out his threats. “There is a lot of
boldness, bluffing, and even more bad behavior, but the bad behavior of
Zhirinovsky and Rogozin won’t allow you to take on America.” What you can do
and what Putin has done is harm Russia.”
“One can intimidate the entire world
with nuclear weapons; one can help Iran and North Korea; one can kill Nemtsov;
one can make Kara-Murza sick; and one can ban the import of sprats from the
Baltics,” Felshtinsky says. But those who will suffer as a result of this ban
are not the Balts but the Russians.
Putin, of course, “is thinking in
other categories. This is already not about money; it is about eternity, empire
and glory. Putn has to prepare Russia for global isolation from the West in the
case of the beginning of a major war. Sprats are a serious test of Russians’
firmness, because if they are not ready to live without sprats, they won’t
fight for Putin. But if they will, then they will be able to do everything else.”
“The time for talks with Russia,
unfortunately, has passed,” Felshtinsky concludes. “Russia does not plan to
reach agreement with the West, but the West sincerely does not understand how
one can reach an agreement with a
negotiating partner if he does not plan to agree on anything.”
If Putin’s dream is to have his
country be treated as the equal of the United States, his nightmare is that he
is on course to become a second Gorbachev and preside over the disintegration
of his country into a plethora of smaller states with himself ousted from the stage
of big politics and history.
In a comment on Ekho Moskvy,
Aleksandr Goldfarb, the head of the Litvinenko Foundation in London, says that
there are some good reasons why Putin may have such fears. The Soviet Union fell apart “quickly and
unexpectedly” because of the coming together of five factors (echo.msk.ru/blog/a_goldfarb/1566714-echo/).
There was a war in Afghanistan, a
collapse in oil prices, the non-existence of the Soviet economy, corruption and
cynicism among the elite, and pressure from the West. Now, all five of these
have been recreated: there is a war in Ukraine, a collapse in oil prices, a systemic
economic crisis, corruption and “colossal income differentiation,” and Western
sanctions and “a course directed at isolating Russia.”
“Economists predict,” Goldfarb says,
“that the stabilization fund will run out of money within a year, that then inflation
will reach 25 percent and social dissatisfaction will rise. Oil apparently isn’t
going to become more expensive. The Ukrainian fiasco will be no less than the
Afghan, and the West will not weaken sanctions.”
Moreover, he continues, “whatever
anyone says, [the West] has clearly adopted a course directed at regime change”
in Russia.
“In this situation, Putin has three
options.” First, he can leave office and transfer power to one of his slightly
less corrupt comrades in arms, hoping against hope that they won’t turn him
over to the international court even as they reverse his policies and his
support disappears “like smoke.”
Second, Putin can “tighten the screws, extend the war,
completely break with the West and build a mobilization economy.” That could
extend his rule for “many years,” but he could achieve these things only by
instituting the kind of purges of his colleagues that Stalin used to maintain
his power.
And
“finally” there is “the third path: do nothing and await the collapse of the
economy, an uncontrolled disintegration with an unpredictable outcome” as the
situation spins “out of control.”
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