Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 8 – There are few place
names more disturbing to those who live between Europe and Moscow and to those
who care about human freedom more generally than Yalta, the site where near the
end of World War II, Western leaders agreed with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin
on the division of post-war division of Europe.
That makes it all the more worrisome
that a Russian analyst has concluded that what just took place in Normandy on the
occasion of the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings was a “silent”
Yalta, one in which whatever spin is placed on it once again divided the
continent between Europe and where Russia rules.
In an essay on
Slon.ru, Aleksandr Baunov argues that European anger Russia over Ukraine are
not as great as many have suggested. “If
Putin were the Hitler of today, and Ukraine the ally [of the West] in the
struggle with him,” Western leaders wouldn’t have had him there. They cared
only where Putin stood (http://slon.ru/world/putin_v_normandii-1110141.xhtml).
As Baunov points out, “Putin came to
Europe, sat, spoke a little, said hello, met, and was photographed. This means that there won’t be anything more.
Everything has ended. If everything remains approximately the way it is now,
there will not be a third world war or a second cold one.”
“A New Yalta – albeit again in an
incomplete form – took place in Normandy: A silent one in case it has to be
denied.”
Putin, of course, viewed the whole
thing “with condescension.” At a
ceremony commemorating a time when countries were prepared to oppose evil with
tanks, everything had been “degraded to the level of a ballet,” one in which “the
difficulties of protocol,” of determining who stood or sat next to whom took
precedence over substance.
In an important respect, the
Normandy commemorations highlighted “the paradox of our time.” Europe today is quite comfortable and feels
close to the country that caused World War II but still feels apart from a
country that was on the side of those who defeated the Axis, a division far
deeper than about communism or about Ukraine.
Indeed, Baunov continues, “the
problem of the contemporary world lies in the fact that we did not have a new
Yalta after the cold war. Not in the sense of again dividing Europe but rather
in that Russia was a victor country against communism along with England,
America, France, and at the same time with Czechoslovakia, Poland and so on.”
That might have offered an opportunity for the
integration of post-communist Russia into the world, but it didn’t happen. As a result and largely as a result of a
great deal of “inertia,” “the West decided that having defeated communism it
need not stop” and Russia, despite also winning from the fall of communism, fell
as well.
As a
result, he says, “it has been at times difficult for us to distinguish where
one ends and the other begins, where Russian authoritarianism ends and where
Russia begins.” And that is made still more difficult by the insistence of some
in the West that Moscow is turning back to communism.
The
problem is not just communism, he argues, because “Russia had problems with
Europe even before” its communist period. “Europe’s big psychological problem
is that in the depth of its soul, it feels closer to onetime fascist Germany,
with its cafes, clean cars, and flowers in the windows, than it does to Russia,
fascist with iron doors but no flowers.”
For Europeans, “Nazi Germany was a
prodigal son of its own civilization, while Russia is simply an alien one. That has made it much easier for Europe “to
distinguish Germany Nazism than to distinguish Russia from communism.”
The current international situation
reflects in Moscow’s behavior at home and in Ukraine. “But even [Russia’s]
internal policy is quite strongly conditioned by [its] international position,”
and both are affected by a deep sense among many Russians that it is condemned
for doing what others have received praise for.
What happened in Normandy, Baunov
suggests, shows both the continuing importance of the deeper suspicions on both
sides and a move toward some kind of new Yalta in which Europe may again be divided,
where the question of where the line will be is still open but where the
question of where the various leaders can sit when they meet has been resolved.
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