‘Terrorism Direct Result of Destruction of Soviet Union,’ KPRF Deputy Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 21 – Analysts and commentators have pointed to a variety of factors that they suggest are behind the growth of terrorism in the world in recent decades, but a KPRF Duma deputy has identified one few have talked much about. Sergey Gavrilov says that “terrorism is the result of the destruction of the Soviet Union.”

            But this is not an indirect tip of the hat to Samuel Huntington’s ideas about “the clash of civilizations” but rather an adumbration of a world many in Moscow and some in the West would like restored: a world of blocs in which the leader of each would have a vested interest in maintaining stability in its clients, regardless of how authoritarian such regimes might be.

            Such a world might again purchase a temporary stability as it did in parts of the world during the Cold War, but it would do so only at the cost of depriving millions of the possibility of freedom and of creating the seedbeds of terrorism that such brittle authoritarian regimes would inevitably once again become.

            The coordinator of the Duma deputies’ group for defense of Christian values tells the Russian nationalist portal, “Russkaya liniya,” that “the USSR contained all these trends and guaranteed peace in the Middle East.” Its demise created “a vacuum” terrorists have filled

(ruskline.ru/news_rl/2015/11/21/terrorizm_eto_sledstvie_razrusheniya_sovetskogo_soyuza/).

            Such groups, and ISIS is only one of them, and the weak authoritarian regimes in which they have emerged, including Syria and Iraq, Gavrilov continues, are “the products of American colonial policy which destroys states, undermines traditional values, violates human rights, and supports terrorists.”

            Citing a recent declaration by the presidium of the KPRF Central Committee, the Duma deputy says that “for the destruction of the world terrorist threat, one must recognize that an international anti-terrorist coalition is necessary but it is not a panacea.” Other steps are needed as well, he argues.

            “Any political steps in this direction,” Gavrilov says, “will not be effective without a real struggle for the future of the entire world in Syria because ISIS today is the chief force antagonistic to society. And [Russia] over a quite short time has achieved greater success in the struggle with terrorists than the US has over a longer time despite its coalition.”

            According to the KPRF deputy, “it should not be forgotten that namely the West often supports terrorism as it did with the overthrow of power in Ukraine in 2014, an action carried out by the hands of pro-fascist groups.” The world “closed its eyes two the bestial actions of the militants in the Maidan and also to the fact of the murders of dozens of people in Odessa.”

                “The struggle with terrorism is both correct and necessary,” he says. “And the unification of the world against the terrorist threat is something every healthy-minded person supports. But for this tumor to be destroyed, everything that promotes its growth must be rooted out –in particular, the dividing of terrorists into ‘good’ and ‘bad,’” something the West practices.

            Having devoted most of his interview to the idea that the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War division of the world lies behind the rise of terrorism, Gavrilov says at the end that “besides this,” poverty, which he insists is the product of capitalism, also plays a role and must be overcome if terrorism is to be defeated.