Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 7 – The mass
expulsion of Russian diplomats from Western countries shows that the world is
mono-polar and that “in spite of our Russian fantasies,” it is going to remain
so in the coming decades, Aleksandr Tsipko says; and it also shows that the West
views Russia as a threat” and as “an unpredictable country.”
“To a great extent,” the Moscow social
theorist and commentator says, “today we are not needed or the object of interest
by many even among those countries which survive on the basis of our oil and
gas.” Instead of becoming part of a
common European home, “Russia has been transformed into ‘a wild field’ which
the countries of the West go around on their way home” (ng.ru/ideas/2018-04-05/5_7205_civilization.html).
According to Tsipko, “never have we
been so alone as now. With no friends and no allies, we live as in a besieged fortress.
As Ivan Ilin predicted more than half a century ago, the East European
countries Stalin imposed communism on now “form around us a ring of enemies.” And by its actions, Moscow has added Ukraine
to their number.
The West shares some of the blame
for Russia’s self-isolation, the commentator says. Its failure to treat Putin
as an equal is something he cannot bear But his response, directed toward
restoring Russia’s great power status “has given birth to a new version of the cold
war,” albeit one based not on ideology but on “the special features of Russian national
character.”
But a large part of the blame
belongs to the response of Putin and Russians to “the chaos and anarchy of the
1990s,” a response which involved the construction of “the power vertical.” But Russians, including himself, Tsipko
acknowledges, “forget that Russia is threatened not only by anarchy and chaos
but by the willfulness of an autocrat.”
“The problem is that we today live
in a Russia where there is no politics but one where the will and impulses of a
single individual decide the fate of a multi-million population. But none must recognize that when only one
person defines the fate of a country with nuclear weapons, this involves a
potential danger not only for Russia but for all humanity.”
Tsipko says he has ever more doubts
that there was a way in the past to prevent Russians from fleeing from chaos
and anarchy back into support of autocracy.
“As a result,” in any case, “we have what we have:” sincere joy about the
return of Crimea and an expanding conflict between Russia and “the leader of
present-day Western civilization, the US.”
But the most terrible thing is that “we
will never return to March 2014, to Russia without Crimea and the US will never
reconcile itself with a Russia” that insists it can act on the basis of its own
interests without regard to anyone else’s.
That is clearly “a deadend situation,” the Moscow analyst says.
According to Tsipko, “Russia has
found it very difficult to reconcile itself with the logic of the new global
world where leadership belongs only to economically developed countries.”
Indeed, he says, “behind our current feverish great power ambitions stands an
inability to recognize the extend of Russia’s lag behind the developed West.”
And it is certainly the case, he
argues, that Russians “are not in a position to follow the necessary path of
hard work which China did in the time of Deng Xiaoping.”
Tragically, Tsipko continues, there is an
even more serious danger. It isn’t just a cold war that has returned. Instead,
Putin has begun talking about a nuclear war that would destroy all of humanity.
No leader at the end of Soviet times or afterwards until Putin has been so
casual about referring to the kind of war that would end civilization.
That is unfortunate, but even more unfortunate
is the fact that “a significant portion of the population of present-day Russia
is reacting completely calmly to this talk about the inevitable end of
humanity. Such indifference to the problems of the death of humanity Russian
people did not have in Soviet times,” Tsipko says.
Over the last four years, talk about
Russia being a besieged fortress has undermined the already weak Russian
instinct for self-preservation. Lenin,
Trotsky said, was “not a Russian national type.” But Putin, Tsipko says, “really
is the embodiment of genuine Russianness in all its depths and contradictions.”
The current Kremlin leader “very
exactly reflects the attitudes of many Russian people who cannot reconcile
themselves to the dominant position of the US in the present-day world. In
these attitudes there is a lot from the deep Russianness and from the
philosophy of the man ‘from the underground’ about whom Fyodor Dostoyevsky
wrote.”
Since his Munich speech, Putin has
insisted that Russia can and will act without regard to others; “but the tragedy
is that the West and the US have the real privilege to deprive us of the source
of economic development, but we unfortunately have only the privilege to expel their
diplomats or test another inter-continental rocket which can reach Florida.”
Russians today, whatever Putin and
they think, “in fact do not have serious economic, social, and civilizational
bases for any power privileges” of the kind Putin and Russians now insist upon because
Russia does not have the resources on which real power in the world today rests.
“Beginning with the spring of 2014,”
Tsipko says, “we have lived and continue to live by the joys of one day without
reflecting on what we will pay for these joys tomorrow or what Russia we will
leave to our children or whether we will even leave them their own country.”
That is what Russians should be reflecting upon.
At the present time, no one
threatens the territorial integrity of Russia even with the addition of Crimea;
and so Russians have time to begin to think about where they are and what they
must do in order to ensure that their millennium of statehood will not come to
an end and that the Russian people will be able to have a genuinely dignified
life.
There have been occasions in history
“when the leader of Russia has had to sacrifice a very great deal and above all
his personal dignity in order to preserve his people, his faith, and his right
to live in the future.” One of those may have come again, and he will have to
work hard to overcome Russian poverty and income differentiation rather than
talk about nuclear war.
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