Is Putin All-Powerful or an Ever Weaker Marginal Player? Both West and Russia Divided on That

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 31 – Some in the West and in Russia view Vladimir Putin as all-powerful and invariably successful, while others view him as increasingly weak and a failure, perspectives that in many cases define how those who hold them interpret one and the same things, Karina Orlova says.

            In an Ekho Moskvy post today, the Russian journalist points out that Washington experts and political figures are very much divided on this question and that “two generally accepted” but “mutually exclusive” positions have emerged and define the way people there interpret all of Putin’s actions (echo.msk.ru/blog/karina_orlova/1775248-echo/).

                The first “conventional wisdom” in Washington about Putin, she writes, is that “whatever he does, he always outplays the West in general and Barack Obama in particular.” Every one of the Kremlin leader’s moves is part of “some great plan” that brings him victory and the West defeat be it at the UN general assembly, Syria or the release of Nadezhda Savchenko.

                The second “conventional wisdom” in the US capital holds exactly the reverse.  From its perspective, “Putin is a regional player who is dangerous only because he possesses nuclear weapons,” that he has no overarching plan but rather is improvising all the time, and that all the triumphs the other perspective suggests are in fact failures or making the best of a bad situation.

            The first point of view – Putin as all-powerful and ever-victorious, Orlova says, is held by those who oppose Obama, those older people still living in the paradigm of the Cold War “and … Russian liberals.”  The second by younger intellectuals and by people around the current American president.

            This disagreement in the US reflects its domestic divisions and thus is not all that surprising, she writes, but what she says is quite shocking is that the mistaken view about the greatness and power of Putin has found a market in Moscow and not just among the broad population but among the country’s liberals.

            Russian liberals, she says, whether they live in Russia or in the west, are the most inclined to spread the notion of Putin’s supposed all-powerful nature.  They accept the most outlandish predictions of what Putin can and will do and they ascribe to his actions the actions of others that have other sources, such as the Brexit position in Britain.

            It is of course possible, Orlova says, that there are deep agents in Britain and elsewhere, but Russian liberals more than almost anyone else are inclined to explain what happens by suggesting these Putin agents are as all-powerful as their boss and to fail to see the reasons that things may be moving in a particular direction.

            Many Russian liberals are quite well-educated and quite critical of Putin’s policies, but they nonetheless view him as capable of doing anything he wants, something that itself probably has many sources but at least one of which is “a hidden even unconscious” belief that they too, if somehow installed in the Kremlin, could do anything they wanted.

            The influence of these Russian liberals on Western opinion cannot be ignored, but at least for the next eight months, while Obama remains US president, one need not worry too much about that.  But after his departure, the view of Putin as all-powerful could matter a lot and in anything but positive ways.

Putin Regime has Long had an Ideology – Great Power Imperialism -- Pavlova Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 30 – Far too many people in Russia and the West are prepared to accept the notion that Moscow does not have an ideology because it has not promulgated a written doctrine, but in Russia, Irina Pavlova argues, it is actions not words that matter – and the former show that Vladimir Putin’s regime has had an ideology for a long time.

            That ideology, the US-based Russian historian says, is best encapsulated in the Russian word “velikoderzhaviye,” which one can translate into English as “great power chauvinist imperialism” and has broad popular support among Russian elites and the Russian people (ivpavlova.blogspot.com/2016/05/28-2016.html#more).

            This ideological position is “traditional Great Russian chauvinism cleansed from communism and clothed in Orthodox dress.” In this form, Pavlova says, “it unites the powers that be, the elite, including the liberal wing … the people of Russia and even a significant portion of progressive society” beyond the borders of Russia.

            According to this ideology, she continues, “Russia is surrounded by enemies and must assert its status in the world as a great power.”  That is a position an overwhelming portion of the Russian population supports and hence backs the regime. It is why one can say, “’scratch’ a Russian and you’ll find a great power chauvinist.”

            This concept has its roots in the notion of “Moscow as the third Rome,” which was invented by the monk Philophey in the early 16^th century.  “Over the course of centuries, this idea was transformed into an ideology, and today it is completely justified to speak already about Russian fundamentalism.”

            According to Pavlova, the idea has four main aspects: the view that “the Russian people is the bearer of a special morality and a special feeling of justice, the denial of the spiritless West as a model of social development, the vision of the future of Russia as an empire, and certainty about its special historical mission.”

            As in Soviet times, she points out, “the Russian authorities today are ready to carry the values of their civilization to the rest of the world. Whether the world needs these values, [of course], is another question entirely.”

            And while Pavlova does not mention it, the bombastic quality in which this ideology is expressed is the flip side of a fundamental insecurity among Russians about their place in the world. One indication of that is the obsession of the Russian media with what the rest of the world is saying about Russia.

            Every week “Kommersant-Vlast” publishes statistics on how many media outlets beyond the borders of Russia have mentioned Russia during the previous seven days.  Last week, this figure was 1.24 percent (kommersant.ru/doc/2999411). To gain some perspective on the insecurity this highlights, imagine the New York Times or the Washington Post doing the same on a regular basis about mentions of the US in foreign media.

Putin Invaded Ukraine to Deflect Russian Nationalist Threat to Himself, Demushkin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 30 – Vladimir Putin launched his “Russian world” project and invaded Ukraine in the hopes that radical Russian nationalists who represented a threat to his rule would go there and die, thus “killing two birds with one stone,” according to Dmitry Demushkin, the leader of the ethno-political movement “The Russians.”

            In an interview with Svetlana Sheremetyeva of the Ukrainian portal Apostrophe, the embattled Russian nationalist says that sometime in 2010, Putin decided on the destruction of “all Russian nationalist organizations” including his own because of the threat they posed to the Kremlin (apostrophe.com.ua/article/society/2016-05-30/dmitriy-dmushkin-putin-pomog-postroit-samostiynuyu-ukrainu-i-nauchil-nenavidet-rusnyu/5290).

            The Russian government arrested some and drove others into exile, but it “very much wanted” to get radical Russian nationalists to go and fight in Ukraine on behalf of “the Russian world,” Demushkin says. That would conveniently get them out of the way in the Russian Federation itself.

            Shortly after the Maidan began in Kyiv and the concept of “the Russian world” was dreamed up in Moscow, the Russian nationalist says, he personally “read an analytic note which was then presented to Putin” in which there was a section devoted to Russian nationalists and their use against Ukraine. The Kremlin hoped that 30,000 would go, but far fewer did.

            Demushkin says he immediately understood what was going on and refused to cooperate because if Russian nationalists went to the Donbass and Crimea, the Russian authorities would not let them back into their own country alive, something that could be the death knell of Russian nationalism for the present.

            Partly because of his opposition, few radical Russian nationalists accepted the Kremlin’s proposal; and also because of his stand, the Russian state has persecuted him with a number of made-up cases and even threatened indirectly to kill him unless he emigrated or kept quiet about his views, the nationalist says.

            Told that many Ukrainian nationalists believe that Demushkin has been allowed to continue to function because of his “marginal” nature, the Russian nationalist said that the reverse was true. Moscow is upset not by those who wear swastikas or shout slogans but by those who give interviews to the media about what Putin is really doing.

            Demushkin concluded this part of his interview – a follow-on will be published in the coming days – by saying that “it is not in the interests of Russians to fight with the 40 million population of Ukraine.” Rather the reverse: “The Kremlin threatens to build ‘a Russian world,’ but in fact it is completely destroying it.”

            “In the place of Ukrainian radicals,” Demushkin says, he “would secretly thank Putin for helping build at last ‘an independent Ukraine’ and teaching its people to really hate all things Russian.”