Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 5 – “Russians don’t
want war and don’t want to prepare for one,’ Valery Solovey says. But the Kremlin
both believes that the West is threatening it, feels compelled to prepare in
response, and is convinced that war or at least the threat of war is in Russia’s
and its own best interests as the country heads into a leadership transition.
The MGIMO professor and frequent
commentator on the Moscow political scene says that there is no question that “Russia
is preparing for war,” in response to what the country’s leadership believes
are a growing even existential military threat from the West both to Russia and
to Vladimir Putin personally (republic.ru/posts/93460).
It is irrelevant as to how real or
how fantastic these notions are, Solovey says. “For the Kremlin mind, they are incontrovertible
reality” and as such they are the basis on which “real strategy” is
designed. “This is a classic illustration
of the Thomas theorem in sociology: if people accept a situation as real, then
it is real as far as their behavior is concerned.”
Given that this is how the Kremlin
views the world, its policies are “logical, consistent and purposeful.” If war
is increasingly likely and the world is becoming more dangerous, then preparing
on a forced basis for conflict and seeking to occupy the best initial positions
in advance of it makes perfect sense.
Moscow’s policy of using or
threatening to use force is “still not war,” the MGIMO analyst says; “but rather
a public demonstration of readiness for it,” something that the Kremlin
believes will lead the effete and hedonistic West to back down “in the face of
unceasing Russian decisiveness.” It even expects to win victories this way at “a
small price.”
“However,” Solovey continues, such
use of a force strategy is effective “only for the short term” and may not
always be effective then. The Kremlin expected the West to surrender Ukraine after
Moscow unexpectedly seized Crimea, but instead, the West responded with a new
toughness and imposed serious costs on Russia.
It turned out, to Moscow’s surprise,
that “hybrid war led to the mobilization of the West and not its
discouragement.”
“Nevertheless, from the Kremlin’s
point of view, the potential of this playing at sharpening conflict is far from
exhausted,” a strategy designed to irritate the West but not to provoke a major
conflict. Thus, the American and Russian military have learned how to avoid
having things spin out of control, while some political leaders make radical
pronouncements.
That reflects the fact that at present, there is a
generation of politicians in office “who have not had any personal experience
with the horrors of war and therefore are all the more interested in turning to
military methods of conducting policy,” Solovey argues. They are encouraged in that by the new
weapons which promise to avoid mass deaths.
For
them, but not for those in the military who do have experience with war, all of
this is “something like a computer game.”
Since
2014, the commentator says, Moscow has pursued a policy of military
mobilization, involving among other things building up its gold reserves, extracting
more resources from the population, intensifying government control of the economy,
engaging in import substitution, working to ensure the loyalty of the
bureaucracy, and using propaganda to promote militarism and patriotism.
“In
general,” Solovey continues, “this is a quite systematic and consistent strategy
of semi-autarchy,” one that looks out to the 2030s and that is “semi” rather
than total. And what is especially
important to understand is that there is “a very important domestic goal” behind
this strategy as well.
And
that is this: it is intended to ensure that the upcoming transition at the top
will allow the beneficiaries of the Putin regime to benefit, something the Kremlin
is convinced will be easier to do “under conditions of controlled isolation.”
That isolation will only increase if Moscow is able to shut off the Runet from
the world wide web in 20221-2022 as many expect.
Such
a policy line, however, will hurt many and annoy still more in the broader
population, Solovey says. Judging from recent polls and protests, “the limits
of social patience have practically been reached. Propaganda is ever less capable of compensating
for the growth of tension.”
The
MGIMO scholar points to the findings of sociology Sergey Belanovsky in
particular. (On them, see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/04/tired-of-strong-hand-ever-more-russians.html
and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/07/can-putin-or-anyone-else-govern-russia.html.)
Belanovsky
reports, Solovey says, that “a year ago, people in the major cities ahd a
positive attitude toward Putin’s foreign policy … but people in the provinces
and especially women were negative. Now, however, negative ratings … dominate
everywhere. Moreover, militarist propaganda is one of the factors provoking
this anger.”
This
growing divide between the Kremlin and the population is likely to provoke a
clash, the only question being when, where and in what forms. In two other
comments this week, Solovey suggests that Ingushetia events may be a harbinger
of broader popular unhappiness (mk.ru/politics/2019/04/04/politolog-valeriy-solovey-predskazal-rossii-potryaseniya.html
and
No comments:
Post a Comment