Paul Goble
Staunton, Dec. 10 – Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speech writer, points to what he says is the primary cause of the Kremlin’s hatred of Ukrainians: it isn’t as many suppose that Ukrainians want to be independent but rather that Ukraine by having chosen to follow the Western model will soon live better and thereby devalue Russian choices and Russian suffering.
“Deep down,” he argues, such people “have long suspected that all attempts by the Russian powers that be to build a life according to standards different than Western ones are doomed to failure” and they can’t tolerate Ukraine succeeding by adopting those standards (publizist.ru/blogs/112974/44627/-).
Such Russian hurrah patriots “are very afraid of any Ukrainian success. For them, it appears that such successes will devalue their own ordeals” and reveal Russians to have been fools who could have achieved great success in establishing “a normal life” but decided against it, Gallyamov continues.
In his view, “Russian ‘patriots’ aren’t worried by the fact that the Ukrainians wanted to secede and life separately.” That’s not a problem, and “God bless them.” But these Russians “very much fear that Ukrainians might start to live better” than Russians do, something completely unacceptable.
That is because the cultural and historical “closeness” of Russians and Ukrainians makes this situation very different than what has happened with the Baltic countries. “To hell with them,” Russians think, because “it remains unclear whether they were ever ours or just pretended to be.”
But “how dare the Ukrainians imagine that they are smarter than we are” and then prove it?
Because this is the real underlying explanation for Putin’s obsession about Ukraine, Gallyamov argues, he hasn’t been able to make Russians view the Ukrainians as an existential threat to Russia. Instead, the Kremlin leader faces a situation in which ever more Russians have given up not only on Ukraine but on Putin as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment