West Wants Russia to Westernize but Won’t Accept It Even if It Did, Zhuravlyev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 29 – The West “will not accept in its ranks a Westernized Russia,” Dmitry Zhuravlyev says, because no matter how many concessions Moscow makes and how much Russia changes, accepting Russia as part of the West would “contradict the chief postulate of the Western religion – namely, that the West is always right.”

            Russians who think that they can win the West’s approval by changing are profoundly mistaken because no matter what Russia does, the head of the Moscow Institute of Regional Problems says, the West will view it as its opponent. The only sensible strategy is thus to ignore what the West wants (realtribune.ru/zapad-ne-prinimaet-v-svoi-ryady-vesternizirovannuju-rossiju).

            Zhuravlyev’s words are a gloss on Foreign Minster Sergey Lavrov’s recent article (kommersant.ru/doc/4877702; cf. windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/07/putin-and-lavrov-have-left-russia.html) and are important because they are a clear indication of how many in Moscow are interpreting what Russia’s chief diplomat has saying.

            According to Zhuravlyev, “the West is certain that it has the right to dictate to other countries, including Russia, how to act and where to go. This certainty has existed in the West for so long that it cannot be ascribed to accident of hypertrophied vanity.” Instead, it is an axiom of a religious faith in the rightness of the West in all things.

            On the one hand, of course, he continues, every country thinks its way is best; but on the other, not all who consider their ways best believe that they have the right to view all others as inferior and thus demand that the latter change to make themselves more like and more agreeable to themselves.

            But the United States and the West more generally “sincerely believes” that in all questions there are only two opinions, its own and one that is deeply mistaken and only one system of values, the Western one. And it feels this way and acts on it not rationally but as a form of “a religious faith” that must not be questioned by anyone.

            This poses serious, indeed almost impossible limits on Russian diplomacy, Zhuravlyev says. “All are proposals except those without which the West cannot get along won’t be taken seriously since they contract the chief postulate of the Western religion – that the West is always right.” That makes the compromises diplomacy requires impossible or at least unthinkable.