Paul Goble
Staunton,
August 16 – Those who think Vladimir Putin is afraid because of the problems he
now faces are profoundly mistaken because regimes of his kind, which “act as
the administration of occupied territories,” need not fear the kind of
challenges other forms of government do, according to Irina Pavlova.
And that reality is something Putin’s
opponents in the West need to understand because otherwise they are likely to
equate his survival in the face of difficulties as a measure of his legitimacy
rather than seeing his longevity as an indication of why he and the regime he
has created must be replaced (ivpavlova.blogspot.com/2015/08/blog-post_12.html).
Unfortunately, those who want to view
Putin as a ruler like any other fail to understand this; and their lack of
comprehension, the US-based Russian analyst says, is fed by the drumbeat of
commentaries by Russian writers that Putin’s government is in trouble because
of its failed policy in Ukraine or Western sanctions.
“It is time to recognize,” she
continues, “that to a regime of this type, which acts like the administration on
an occupied territory, disorders, thefts and corruption are not frightening.
They of course can interfere with its operation, but they represent for it an
incomparable lesser evil than organized resistance.”
As long as these various adverse
phenomena are kept within “definite limits,” they do not represent a challenge.
And the Putin regime has done everything it can so that there will not be any “organized
resistance to it” inside the country by means of its “mastery of political
manipulations, propaganda and populist measures” and its strengthening of law
enforcement.
“More than that,”
Pavlova continues, the Putin regime “has learned to use the dissatisfaction of
society in its own favor by more sophisticated measures than were done under
Stalin, when it was necessary to ‘raise the anger of the masses’” in order to
generate support for the repressive regime.
“Today,” she argues, “progressive
society in many cases does not even recognize that it is playing into the hands
of the authorities and by its rules” and strengthening the authorities by its
actions rather than weakening them as it imagines. A clear example of that, Pavlova suggests, is
Aleksey Navalny and his struggle with corruption.
The reason is this: the Putin regime
is happy to have the population focus on other issues rather than on itself
because that gives the Kremlin time “not only to successfully solve its own
tasks but also to position the country under its control in the world arena
guided by the traditional ideas of the pursuit of great power status.”
Such a power, Putin and his
entourage are convinced, is one that “no one yet can oppose not in the country
or in the world,” Pavlova says. “Moreover, one can see with a naked eye how the
leaders of Western countries step by step make concessions not recognizing to
what such a policy may lead.”
Pavlova’s brief comment calls
attention to something few people want to acknowledge: the West has pursued a
policy designed to restrain Putin that is based on the assumption that he is
animated by a concern for his own people and thus will change course if he sees
that they are suffering because of what he is doing.
That assumption is wrong: Putin
doesn’t care about the Russian people. He cares only about his own power. And
consequently, until Western actions strike at the basis of that power – the
elites around him with their wealth and children in the West – the Kremlin
leader will not only remain in power but will not change his course.
In the years preceding World War II,
the British elites experienced exactly the same problem in analyzing
Hitler. Many around Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain believed that Hitler and other dictators were despite
everything like themselves, leaders who wanted to do in Chamberlain’s words “the
best for their peoples.”
Winston Churchill and those around
him recognized that Hitler did not care about the Germans but only about his
own power and that as a result, the only effective way to oppose him was by
building up sufficient force not only to counter his actions but ultimately to
defeat and remove him.
There have been some hopeful signs
in recent months that in the wake of the Anschluss of Crimea, the shooting down
of the Malaysian airliner, and the continuing Russian aggression in the Donbas
that many in the West are coming to recognize that Putin is not a leader just like
their own but something far worse and that what would dissuade their leaders
won’t work with him.
But at the same time, many in the West
appear trapped not only by the inertia of continuing to do what they have been
doing lest they have to take more dramatic and expensive steps but also by the
desire to use their personal diplomatic skills to reach a settlement that will
solve the problems they see.
That strategy didn’t work in Munich;
it won’t work at Minsk either.
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