Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 3 – Many in
Moscow and the West are suggesting that Vladimir Putin has made a fundamental
mistake in turning away from the West toward the East given the economic
problems China is currently suffering from. But that is short-term thinking,
Aleksandr Razuvayev says, and fails to recognize how much more is involved.
In a commentary in yesterday’s “Vglyad,”
the Moscow financial analyst says that Putin’s turn to Asia is “a geopolitical
choice comparable with the one made by St. Prince Aleksandr Nevsky. Having
concluded a union with Batu Khan, he preferred the Horde to the Catholic West
and an Asian market from the Volga to China to trade with Europe.”
And because these two leaders made
this choice, Razuvayev argues, Nevsky eight centuries ago and Putin at the
present time have preserved “Russian national identity and Orthodoxy” against what
he suggests are the West’s nefarious plans for weakening and ultimately
deracinating Russia (vz.ru/columns/2015/9/2/764659.html).
“Even
moderate contemporary Western politicians prefer the integration of Russia into
the Western world,” the Moscow analyst says, because in their view, “Russia must
gradually be dissolved in Western civilization and thus become a big Poland offering
them a big market and supplying them with raw materials.”
Putin’s
“Asiatic choice,” he continues, leaves the West without the levers it has used against
Russia and prevents it from blocking “the future economic and political integration
of part of the post-Soviet republics on the new principles of the 21st
century.” According to Razuvayev, “the rebirth of the Empire is the worst
nightmare of the West and especially the US.”
“The 21st century is the
century of Asia,” he insists, and Russia will be part of it. It will benefit
from Asia’s demographic and economic growth, and it will escape from what have
been its longstanding difficulties with the West which has never been friendly
to Russia and its aspirations.
Given that Nevsky is Russia’s patron
saint and that his choice to ally with the Mongol Horde against Catholic Europe
gave Muscovy not only its authoritarian state system but also its hostility to
Western values including democracy and the rule of law, Putin and his
supporters are likely to be pleased by this comparison to Nevsky.
But many other Russians will not be.
Not only do they want a different and freer future than a regime celebrating
Asiatic despotism will ever be able to offer, but they have good reason to fear
the growing population and power of China -- especially given their own decline
demographically and economically.
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