Paul
Goble
Staunton, December 31 – Mikhail
Leontyev, a leading Moscow television commentator and someone whose ideas,
while flamboyantly expressed, reflect the views of many Russians, says he
personally is “a convinced anti-Soviet” but is convinced that Russia must take
steps to rebuild the Russian Empire within borders similar to but not the same
as those of the USSR.
Leontyev’s attitudes on this point –
and the specifics are both more intriguing and more disturbing for Russia’s
neighbors, Russia’s competitors, and Russia itself, than is his overall point –
came in an interview he gave to Elena Krivyakin in the studios of KP-TV last
week (www.kp.ru/daily/26008/2932748/).
US Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton’s recent statement that Moscow wants to restore the Soviet Union,
Leontyev says, reflects American fears of the rise of a rival power. “But American diplomacy recently, especially
in such hysterical Macfaul-Clinton forms, very much helps us” by stripping away
“political correctness.”
What the American diplomats are
saying is simply a new version of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s observation that “with
Ukraine Russia will always be a power, but without Ukraine, it won’t be.” Leontyev suggests that that alone should be
enough to show Russians what they need to do because “we need Russia as a
power, and they do not.”
According to Leontyev, Russia has
the capacity to do so because it “is a state” while the countries around it
like Ukraine are not. Like them, he continues, Russia has “oligarchic clans but
they are forced somehow to position themselves relative to the state.” But in
Ukraine, “there is no state except a coalition of semi-criminal clans, neither
in a geopolitical nor in an ideological nor in a moral sense.”
Asked about Western Ukraine,
Leontyev says that the Western oblasts “which never were Russia” and whose
inclusion within Russia “was a mistake,” something that as a tsarist official
warned “could destroy Russia, should either be russified or allowed to go their
own separate way. Ukraine can simply be split apart as it is reintegrated with
Russia.
According to Leontyev, “all
post-Soviet elites” are interested in integration, and everyone should
recognize that this integration like all other examples in history will “not
begin with economics” but rather “with a military-political union.” Even the EU would never have existed without
NATO as “a roof over its head.”
At present and inevitably, Leontyev
continues, “the national elites of the post-Soviet countries position
themselves only relative to Russia and against Russia; otherwise their
existence would be senseless. This is the foundation of their identity.” But in
dealing with those opposed to Moscow, Russia must “appeal to [these] peoples
over the heads of the leaders.”
All of these peoples “must
understand that the idea of a European choice for Ukraine, for Georgia or for
Azerbaijan is simply funny. There is no
such choice! Europe is closed off and
more than that is disintegrating from within.
There no one is waiting for anyone else.”
And Russians need to understand that
they need such an empire not only to recover their status as a world power but
to ensure that they are protected from threats emanating from further abroad.
As one Soviet diplomat put it, Leontyev recalls, “It is better to struggle with
fundamentalism near Jelalabad than near Ashkhabad.”
Many people thought at the time that
this observation was silly, “but where is Ashkhabad now? Now, we will be
struggling with fundamentalism near Orenburg, near Kazan and near Rostov.” By retreating, “we inevitably will surrender
them to the enemy and this means we will retreat further from other positions.”
But perhaps Leontyev’s most
interesting if inflammatory comments concern Georgia and Moscow’s ability to
draw it into a new relationship with Moscow. According to the commentator,
“Georgia in fact cannot exist without Russia, outside of Russia or in any place
not under Russia.”
How is NATO going to guarantee the
unity of Georgia including Abkhazia, South Osetia, Adjaria and Javakhetia …
unity in a country where Osetins, Abkhazes, Azerbaijanis, Armenian, and Adjars
live in compact communities? There is no
way! Georgia interests NATO as a place
des armes either against Russia or against Iran.” Otherwise, it has no need for it or for other
post-Soviet states.
When his interviewer says she finds
it difficult to believe that Georgia could ever reunite with Russia, Leontyev
makes the following declaration: “The leadership of Georgia has been shifted to
Boris Ivanishvili who grew up in Russia, is connected with Russia and who can
do nothing without Russia”
“Power in Russia was shifted by a
democratic means among other reasons because the American masters allowed
Ivanishvili to win and prohibited Saakashvili from putting physical pressure on
him. Because the Americans wanted to
have an agreement with Russia. By the way, about NATO.”
“The United States,” Leontyev
continues, “wants to remain a powerful power in the world. And for this it has
to cast off excessive, unnecessary and second-order obligations. Georgia already is not a first-order task;
this is a subject for agreement with Russia. Ivanishvili is a compromise. Not
among Georgians but between America and Russia.”
And the same logic, the Moscow
commentator suggests, applies even to the Baltic countries, despite their
membership in NATO and the EU.
Given the problems in the world
economy, Russians need “a Big Russia,” one with sufficient purchasing power and
industrial production to “guarantee [its] autonomous development.” He adds that
“at a minimum [Russians] need Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus and that it
would not be a bad thing to draw in the Central Asian republics.”
“Integration,” according to
Leontyev, “is a question of our common physical survival. But we must guarantee
it because we are the historical Russia.” Those who speak about “a small
comfortable democratic national state” do not understand what is at stake. And
they do not realize that “such a Russia will never exist.”
That is because “in the process of
forming” such a state, “Russia itself would destroy itself as a nation, as a state,
as an historical sybject, as a culture.
The idea of the nation state is failing everywhere.” But “happily,”
Leontyev concludes, “the future belongs to Empires … organic multi-cultural
societies like Russia and the United States.”
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