Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 13 – Vladimir Putin’s
war in Ukraine which to so many appears only as an act of aggression is in back
“profoundly defensive,” an effort to stop the disintegration of the Russian
empire by injecting “patriotic morphine” into the veins of Russians, according
to Vladimir Pastukhov.
But like the use of any drug for
that purpose, the St. Antony’s scholar says, Moscow will have to administer it
in ever greater doses, “moving from one war to another” and possibly dying from
“an overdose of patriotism” or face the next round of collapse of the Russian
imperial project (novayagazeta.ru/comments/63532.html).
In an article in yesterday’s “Novaya
gazeta,” the Russian scholar argues that “the longer the imperial ream of the
Russian people lasts, the more difficult will be its awakening” and that it is
even possible that the Russian people “will not wake up at all.” The
consequences of that will be truly terrifying.
Pastukhov approaches this issue
historically. After reaching its apogee
in the 19th century, he suggests, Russia has been in imperial
decline for more than a century, with periods of near total collapse
alternating with massive and self-defeating efforts to save the empire in one
form or another.
After the collapse of the empire in
1917, the Russian Empire was restored under “the brand name ‘USSR’ by the
application of total ideological, political and economic mobilization of the
resources of society.” But “unfortunately,
this could not stop the process of disintegration but only slow it down.”
By the end of the 1980s, the
collapse began again in earnest, and this time around, “practically the entire
periphery where the titular ethnoses had their own state infrastructure fell
away from the center.” But because this
process was peaceful, “Russia by a miracle succeeded in stabilizing its empire.”
“Many of those who today condemn
Gorbachev for the collapse of the country,” Pastukhov says, fail to appreciate that
if things had gone in 1991 as far as they are going now, “then the very subject
of discussion would long ago have ceased to exist.”
But the post-Soviet leaders were not
able to ensure the stability of the system with “the old methods” or by “a
total mobilization of society.” “Stepping
into one and the same ideological water turns out to be impossible.” Imported liberalization didn’t fit the needs
of empire, and Russia lacked the forces to do it itself.
Consequently, Pastukhov continues, “Russia
was transformed at the beginning of the 21st century into a ‘political
technology’ empire,” one that continued less because of real resources than
through “cheap tricks.” It rests on three foundations: “the manipulation of
mass consciousness, the use of the criminal world as the ‘fourth power,’ and
the suppression of social protest by the redistribution of ‘natural rents’ to
the population.”
This “rickety stability” supported
by Putin’s personalist rule, “exhausted itself already at the end” of his
second term, Pastukhov says. Now, the
third phase of the collapse of the empire has begun with the appearance of “a
series of local military conflicts which have arisen practically out of nowhere
like the horsemen of the Apocalypse.”
The Russian-Ukrainian war arose so
quickly, he continues, that “the majority in Russia (but not in Ukraine) even
has not been able to recognize that this is really a war.” In large measure,
that is because it is not an act of aggression as much as an act of defense, an
effort to preserve the empire by appearing to be capable of extending it.
Russians have been encouraged to
fall into a dreamlike state in which they imagine that they are back in the
USSR. But “in fact, contemporary Russia is like the Soviet Union in the same
way that the Moon is like the Sun – it is lit [only] by reflected light,” and “the
source of this light” no longer exists.
As a result, the historian says, “Russia
has been converted into a land of eternal twilights, the future of which is in
the past and it lives by the illusion that it can stop the hands of the clock
of history.”
The supporters of the empire are
building “a Soviet period park” in Russia, but however superficially justified
the parallels are, Russia is not the USSR in the first instance because “the
ideology of communism and that eclectic combination of partially communistic
and partially black hundreds ideas” which make up “the Putin doctrine” have
little in common.
For all its shortcomings, Pastukhov
points out, “’Russian communism’” had a
creative component and was “in ‘the mainstream’ of the development of
international spiritual culture of its times.” The current ideological hash has
“no creative basis” and only has reproduced “the external attributes of Soviet
ideology.”
It is an imitation rather than something
real, he argues, and “Russia has been converted into an enormous show room
where politics, economics and administration are reduced to the level of
spectacle.” Even the propaganda effort
is pathetic at least with regard to quality, and it works only “because it is
easy to deceive those who are glad to be.”
“People in Russia for a long time
have not been looking for truth; they want instead to be told stories,”
Pastukhov says, because they implicitly fear reality and “do not believe in any
miraculous salvation either.” These
fears of the end of empire were only deepened by the Ukrainian revolution,
which led to hysteria among Russians.
Hysteria, of course, is “a form of
psychological defense: people use it to push away from themselves a frightening
reality,” Pastukhov continues. And it is
easier to live with myths than to face up to harsh reality.
The situation is only going to get
worse, he suggests. “The spasms of the empire are like epileptic fits: each new
on can be stronger than its predecessor,”
[and] the probability is very great that after the next episode, Russia
already will never more ‘rise from its knees,’” as Putin promises and many want
to believe.
The dividing up of the empire among
the Great Russians, the Russians, and in the near term the Belarusians is
perhaps manageable psychologically, but the splitting of the internal empire
between the Russians and the Tatars will be something else. And Moscow has
brought that day closer by annexing Crimea and thus bringing “a Trojan horse”
into its house.
That is because “the Crimean Tatar
movement may become the catalyst of conflict between Moscow and Kazan,”
Pastukhov says. “If things reach that point, then it will be too late to cure
Russia.”
Trying to save the empire “at any
price” is a dead end because “those who do not develop cannot survive by
definition either in nature or in history.” And Russia now finds itself caught
between “dynamically developing civilizational platforms” in all directions: in
Europe, in China, and in the south with Turkey and Iran.
“Today,” Pastukhov argues, “Russia
like a poor chess player, has sacrificed Siberia for Crimea at the very
beginning of the game. The withdrawaI l from Europe to Asia may end with the
country’s disappearance altogether.”
If Russia is to preserve “its
statehood,” he concludes, “it must escape from its imperial illusions and
ambitions by concentrating on the resolution of its own internal problems,
including constitutional arrangements and the modernization of the economy.”
What Putin is offering will not do that.
Today, Pastukhov says, “Russia needs
a surgeon, not an anesthesiologist. [Its]
illness must be cured rather having the victim drugged and deceived.” Russians “must
find in themselves the strength to look truth in the eye” and to recognize that
they can only prosper if they stop thinking that they can restore what they
imagine to be a glorious past.
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