Putin’s War in Ukraine has Not Restored ‘Crimean Consensus’ but Rather Deepened Divides in Russian Society, Andreychuk Says

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 1 – Stanislav Andreychuk, a leader of the Golos Voting Rights group in Russia, says that Vladimir Putin clearly hoped to restore the so-called “Crimean consensus” he achieved after seizing the Ukrainian peninsula in 2014 but instead has exacerbated the divide in Russia between his regime and the population.

            “Oddly enough,” he says, the government’s own propaganda has contributed to what one could call this “transformation of an ‘imperialist war’ into ‘a civil war.’” As happened at the end of Soviet times, Moscow’s mixed messages on Ukraine over the past decade have undermined the Kremlin’s goals (ridl.io/vtorzheniem-v-ukrainu-putin-usugubil-raskol-rossijskogo-obshhestva/).

            As Aleksey Yurchak showed in his book, Everything was Forever Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2005), Andreychuk continues, Soviet ideologists “condemned ‘cosmopolitanism’ but backed ‘internationalism,’ criticizing ‘bourgeois music’ but supported the music of ‘oppressed classes’ in the West.” As a result, even the Komsomol held jazz concerts.

            “Something similar appears to be taking place now,” the voting rights activist says. Officially, Moscow has called the Ukrainian people “fraternal” and has not until denied that it is a separate state. Consequently, Russians who oppose the war view this war “as an invasion of an independent state and simultaneously desire the defeat of the Russian army.”

 

            To the extent that is true, such people “view this war not as one between the armies of two states but as one against the regime of Vladimir Putin who is viewed by them as occupying and infringing their sovereignty as Russian citizens.” But the problem is that the opposition in Russia is divided on almost everything, including the war.

 

            If the opposition is to unite and thus become powerful, its members will have to negotiate and make compromises on the basis of some “larger consensus” based on “dissatisfaction with the authorities in Russia today. Opposition leaders will also have to calm some of their followers and even be willing to talk to some in the administration.

 

            “Russians face a number of very hard years ahead,” Andreychuk says. “A civil war at the start of the 20^th century ended exactly a century ago. Russia emerged from it with heavy losses in territory and population not to mention the economic damage and historical consequences” that it is still trying to cope with.

 

            According to Andreychuk, “the current conflict has the potential to develop in equally tragic ways. There are fewer and fewer chances of preventing that from happening.”