Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 31 – In the wake of
the mass public demonstrations in Russian cities last Sunday, Vladimir Putin
has made it clear that he is not afraid of a color revolution breaking out in
his country but rather a repetition of what took place in the Middle East that
has come to be known as the Arab Spring, Vitaly Portnikov says.
The Ukrainian analyst argues that
this becomes clear if one follows “the course of [Putin’s] though as expressed
in his comments on the anti-corruption protests. For the kremlin leader, “the Ukrainian Maidan
is only a logical continuation of this same spring, an instrument that became ‘the
occasion for a coup’ in Ukraine” (graniru.org/opinion/portnikov/m.259890.html).
In his remarks,
Portnikov continues, Putin made no reference to “the rose revolution in Georgia”
or “’the orange revolution in Ukraine,’” both of which took place “before ‘the
Arab spring.’” He did “not say that the State Department “began with the destabilization
of the post-Soviet space, then shifted to making revolutions” in what he sees
as his own backyard.
Why did he follow
that logic? the commentator asks. “Because
‘the Arab spring’ is his own diagnosis: It is his illness and he knows
perfectly well that it is incurable. But he is not in a position to understand
the reasons behind this illness.” And that both reflects and says a great deal
about how Putin sees the world and his place in it.
For the Kremlin leader, Portnikov
argues, the color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine were “an internal
nomenklatura struggle” that led to the departure from office of leaders but not
to their destruction. The Arab Spring,
on the other hand, led to the executions of those who had held supreme power.
In the case of Egypt, Putin “saw
that it was possible to be a true ally of the West but that no one will defend
you. He understood that it is possible to reach agreements with the West like
Qaddafi” but nonetheless be destroyed by one’s own people in the end. When he saw the pictures of Qaddafi’s
execution, Putin “lost any trust in the West.”
And because he did, he “decided to
defend his power down to the last Russian.”
As a result, he viewed the Maidan “through the prism of ‘the Arab Spring’”
and he sent forces into Ukraine in order not to suffer the fate of Qaddafi.
Putin’s “main mistake is that he
doesn’t believe in the free will of people.” Junior KGB officers don’t. “He is convinced that any mass action always was
arranged by someone and paid for, that people cannot decide to act on their
own. That everything is matter of the State Department and invisible forces.”
The reason Putin was so pleased with
the rise of Donald Trump in the US was “not that he expected to be able to
reach agreement with him but that the Trumpian State Department would not
organize ‘an Arab spring’ inside Russia” and that he, Putin, would thus be
safe.
Putin really “does not understand
that the West was totally uninterested in the collapse of Mubarak or Qaddafi, just
as at one time, it was not interested in the disintegration of the USSR. He
doesn’t believe in historical inevitably and in the will of people to rise up”
or that the outside world only then has to deal with the results.
“There is nothing new in this
approach,” Portnikov says. “Russian emperors wanted to be ‘the gendarmes of
Europe,’” but that didn’t save them or their country. Putin wants to be the
gendarme not only of the former Union but also of the Middle East,” but he does
not understand why that is impossible and so continues to believe “in his own
lie” which he tells to himself.
According to Portnikov, “Qaddafi had the very
same problem: he subordinated to himself a conglomerate of clans but believed
that he led a state of like-minded people,” people who in fact hated him not
only politically but physiologically. “He thought he was fighting with
conspirators: in fact, he was battling with an entire country.”
Vladimir Putin, “the Russian
Qaddafi,” will make “all these discoveries” in time.
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