Paul Goble
Staunton, November 3 – Anatoly Nemiyan, who blogs under the screen name El Myurid, says that the results of the first round of the presidential vote in Moldova which have gave the lead to a pro-NATO politician shows that the Putin regime has managed to alienate even Chisinau, the last republic on the post-Soviet space to turn away from Moscow.
Assuming the pro-Western politician wins in the second round, he says, that will mark the departure of “four relatively pro-Russian republics” from the Russian zone, which reminds one of the end of the 1980s when the same thing happened in Eastern Europe (glavred.info/opinions/ot-moskvy-ubegaet-poslednyaya-postsovetskaya-respublika-novosti-ukrainy-i-mira-10217753.html).
Of course, “Russia is not the USSR, the smoke is thinner and the chimney is closer,” and the onetime allies are right on Russia’s borders this time around. “But the outcome is practically the same: the final collapse of the zone of Russian influence. There is no place to retreat even within our own borders. And that is coming.”
What is most important in this situation is to recognize why it is happening, El Myurid says. “Russia could not have a worse enemy than its current regime. There isn’t one on the planet. It is precisely it which has step by step drive the country into a catastrophe and the collapse of the Russian zone of influence is yet another mark of this process.”
The Kremlin, he says, “can export gas and corruption, but it doesn’t have an image of the future and can’t. It doesn’t even understand what that is. Criminals live in the present; for them, the future is always marked only by midnight today.” As a result, it can’t attract anyone, and others are entering its former zone not because they are clever but because the Kremlin isn’t.
As a result, “’after Putin,’” the country will be forced to “assemble all that it has lost, not by force of arms but by an attractive and understandable idea. And to be in a position to do so for others, it will first have to do so for itself.” Russia must come up with such an idea, incorporate it, and “only then export it,” thereby recovering from its regime of “bandits and villains.”
El Myurid may be expressing himself more dramatically than most, but others are saying much the same thing. Andrey Ivanov of Svobodnaya pressa, for example, wrote today that what has happened in Moldova and elsewhere reflects not as the Kremlin imagines the work of foreign intelligence services but a shift among their populations (svpressa.ru/politic/article/280358/).
They are responding to what is happening in Russia, and thus the various forms their march away from Moscow has taken bear “a completely logical and explicable character.” The question now, Ivanov says, is “will this be understood in the Kremlin?” If not as seems likely, Moscow will be ever more isolated than even now.
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