Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 25 – Vladimir Putin
had been remarkably even amazingly successful in foreign affairs for the first
14 years of his rule in Russia, but his decision to set up Hamas-style regimes
in southeastern Ukraine, the result of domestic imperatives, is going to
condemn him to isolation and failure, according to Yevgeny Ikhlov.
Indeed, the Moscow commentator says,
Putin’s violation of the rules of the game under which powerful countries do
not seize the territories of others puts him on a course in which “not one of
his undertakings from now on will be successful” and in which he will be
increasingly isolated abroad and at home (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=53FA153E4DFA6).
That this should
be the case is suggested by what happened to two of his historical predecessors
who were remarkably successful at one point in their careers and then, having
suffered a major defeat, went on to their final ones almost without
interruption, according to Ikhlov.
“Napoleon,” he
writes, “fell because having discredited and destroyed the medieval orders, he
liberated European nationalism -- German, Spanish, and Russian which turned out
to be no less powerful than the French a force whose awakening he so
successfully based his operations.”
And the obvious evil
represented by Hitler united both heirs of the Great French Revolution,
liberalism and communism which did not allow any chances for a medieval order to be reestablished by the Nazis.”
Everything was working for
Putin as long as he was seeking to resolve “the historic tasks which
objectively stood before Yeltsin but remained unresolved by him.” The current
Russian president converted himself into a much desired “velvet Pinochet,” and
he learned that he could have “the greatest success” with “a totalitarian
restoration” based on “market Stalinism.”
But since
Stalinism itself was “a restoration of Russian archaism” in and of itself,
Putin’s “market Stalinism rapidly began to be transformed into a Chekist
oprichnik operation,” with the FSB turning out to be a more reliable “party of
power” although rapidly degenerating into “a corrupt police machine of the South
Asian or South American type.”
According to
Ikhlov, “Putin instinctively went along the path of least historical resistance
– and developed consumer totalitarianism.”
That worked for much of his time in office because it condemned protest
against him to failure much as the dissident movement had failed in the times
of Brezhnev and Andropov.
“But
totalitarianism by definition is a society in the state of mobilization,” the
Moscow analyst points out. And having “finally demobilized society” by his
suppression of protests against him and clearly setting “the limits of the permissible,”
Putin faced the challenge of coming up with a new means of mobilizing people.
That was war, and
his “appeal to xenophobia, anti-Americanism, anti-Westernism, and imperial
nationalism almost doubled his social base,” Ikhlov says. But it led him to promote the formation of what
can only be called “a ‘Russian HAMAS’” on the eastern portion of Ukraine which
has been “just as uncompromising in its relation to the population which it
supposedly is defending as is the Palestinian” origin.
Putin’s “Hamas in
this case is a designation of a kind for a local, aggressive religiously
motivated pseudo-state formation of a totalitarian (political-gangster style)
type, which sets for itself utopian goals, uses violence against liberal values
and global processes and does not have internal resources for its existence.”
While some
Russians may find that attractive for a time, “the civilized world will
sanction practically any abortion of the Donbas HAMAS,” Ikhlov says, and that
in turn will limit Putin’s freedom of action and success in the future. In
fact, Ikhlov argues, it may prove to be what Moscow was for Napoleon and El
Alamein was for Hitler, the turning point to defeat.
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