Paul Goble
Staunton,
April 30 – Those who study the post-Soviet world and especially its non-Russian
parts are often struck by the fact that many who do so show an understanding or
even sympathetic deference to Russia and Russian feelings while ignoring those
of the peoples of living in countries near Russia and a tendency to forget or
downplay the crimes of communism.
There
are many reasons for this pattern, of course; but two articles which have appeared
this past week provide an important part of the answer for approaches that have
distorted the world’s understanding of what is going on and has been going on
in the former Soviet bloc and allowed some of the crimes of the past to
continue into the present.
In
an article on the Euromaidanpress portal, Fabio Belafatti, an Italian
specialist on Central Asia who now teaches at the University of Vilnius and
earlier worked in Latvia and Tajikistan, argues that such sympathy and
deference to Russia reflects a rebirth of Orientalism (euromaidanpress.com/2014/10/27/western-commentators-should-rid-themselves-of-old-prejudices-dating-back-from-the-age-of-colonialism-before-commenting-on-eastern-european-affairs/#arvlbdata).
He says “pro-Russian commentators in many
Western countries have been portraying the Ukrainian events using a mix of
stereotypes that scarily resemble the rhetoric once typical of racist and
imperialist ways of thinking [and]as a result … [they along with] Georgians,
Moldovans, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians have fallen victim to a
new form of Orientalism.”
That term was introduced and
popularized by Edward W. Said in his 1978 book of that title, Belafatti
continues, in which the Columbia University scholar argued that “Western
commentators consistently looked (and look) at the Orient as an entity
incapable of evolving, stuck in an endless past of decadence and backwardness.”
Said, Belafatti points out, argued
that those who follow this approach “constantly portray” the East “as an
invariably passive subject, unable and unworthy of being an active subject in
its own way,” with the West in contrast being presented as “the one and only
entity worth the dignity of an active subject.”
“The Ukrainian crisis is revealing the
existence of a strikingly similar prejudice” both among Moscow commentators and
pro-Russian ones in the West, the Vilnius scholar argues. There are two basic kinds of pro-Russian narratives,
he suggests. One argues that Russia should be excused for its actions because
the West has done something similar or worse elsewhere.
The other, which Belafatti calls the geopolitical, “defends Russia’s
actions by accusing the West of ‘interfering’ in the business of a region where
it does not have any right to operate, or expresses understanding for
Moscow’s preoccupation about the enlargement of NATO, the erosion of its sphere
of influence, the actions of EU and NATO in its ‘near abroad,’ and so on.”
It is around this second theme that Orientalism
is playing a role. Indeed, Belafatti
suggests, “practically all those who defend Russia in this debate
fell into this trap [with] many of the articles [accusing] the West of
“causing” the Ukrainian chaos by “provoking” Russia in its strategic interests
and wounding its pride of great power.”
Such an
argument demonstrates, the Vilnius specialist says that “the authors write from
a distorted, hierarchical and, ultimately, orientalist (if not outright racist)
perspective on the small countries of Eastern Europe,” one that takes as a
given that Russia has “inalienable” rights to run this region and that “Eastern
Europe [is] nothing but a tool to compensate Russia’s unresolved inferiority
complexes.”
“The idea
that Russian actions are legitimate reactions to the interference of
“outsiders” in a region seen as “Russian” is nothing but a 2.0 expression of
the same imperialist mentality with which Europeans empires split the Middle
East. This is all the more surprising as it often comes from people who embrace
ostensibly anti-imperialist positions in any other context,” Belafatti
observes.
And this
perspective spawns other “appalling ideas” such as the one that “Russia is
right in interfering in Ukraine because it already ‘had to give up’ the Baltic
States in the past and ‘the West’ really shouldn’t ‘deprive’ it of other
countries,” regardless of what the peoples of these countries have experienced
in the past and what they want for the future.
“For
far too many Western experts what really matters is the Russian feelings,”
Belafatti says. “What Ukrainians, Poles, Moldovans, Balts, Georgians, Armenians
may think, is much less significant, because it’s just the feeling of
“others,” subaltern subjects, unworthy of the dignity of actors,
at best reacting victims of an orientalist interpretation of history that
Westerners apply far too often to their Eastern European neighbors.”
“Pro-Russian
commentators’ orientalist thinking emerges in the way they portray Ukraine as a
country incapable of action on its own initiative. They invariably see
Eastern European countries as objects manipulated by the West. [And] Former
communist countries are seen as victims of an inclusion in Western security
structures carried out against their will.”
“This
is of course nonsense: the integration of Eastern Europe in Euro-Atlantic
security structures happened” because the East Europeans campaigned for it,
often in ways Western actors have often found far too pressing.” To write
otherwise is “not just post-Soviet nostalgic thinking: it is outright racism”
because it’s actually Russia who should be held responsible for
destabilizing the region with its opposition to the desires” of its
neighbors.”
“It
is therefore racist to think that nobody east of the EU may want an order of
things in which Russia doesn’t dominate, as if we “Westerners” were the only
ones worth of, or capable of fighting for, things like rule of law, human
rights and so on.” The peoples of the region are actors and should be
recognized as such.
The
second article by Christopher Szabo, a Hungarian commentator, explicitly asks “Why
are we so understanding toward the crimes of Communism?” (mercatornet.com/articles/view/why-are-we-so-understanding-towards-the-crimes-of-communism/16545).
Part of the reason for this, Szabo says, is that what the
West likes to call “the collapse of Communism” in fact was largely peaceful
because those who had been in power became “the new political elite and the
wealthiest stratum of society.” In short, the nomenklatura took advantage of
the changes with the lesson being “’crime pays.’”
But another part and one that helps explain “the lack of
justice for victims of communism” is “Western apathy toward [its] victims,”
something “hard to understand for those … whose families were affected and very
hurtful” and the product of the spread of “cultural Marxism and simple
ignorance.”
Few in the West today talk about the crimes of communism,
even when information about their horrors have become available and even when
these horrors continue in places where communists are still in power, Szabo
points out. One of these is mass rape.
The Red Army raped from three to four million East European women at the end of
World War II. Today, the Chinese communist forces engage in similar actions in
Tibet.
“One cannot help wondering,” Szabo says, “where the feminists
are in all this” and what can be done. Obviously, more attention must be given
to the crimes of communism via memorials and mass media. Unfortunately, the
trend is going in the other direction at the present time.
Thus, the Hungarian journalist writes, “there are some memorials to the
victims of the Gulag in Ukraine and Russia, but since the rise of Vladimir
Putin, some have been taken down and some have been ‘re-scripted’ to whitewash
history.”
All too often, he says, “the liberal West and Putin’s
regime are in agreement: all memory of communism’s crimes must be carefully
edited out of all books, films and other media and quickly forgotten.” That
needs to change because many of these crimes continue or at least continue to
cast a shadow on the world.
