Putin Doesn’t Want to Restore Yalta World; He Wants to Destroy It, Skobov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 19 – It has become a commonplace that Vladimir Putin wants to restore the world of Yalta, one where the great powers divide the world into spheres of influence. But that is to misread both Yalta and Putin, Aleksandr Skobov says. Yalta was not about spheres of influence; and Putin’s goal is to restore a pre-Yalta world where that was the focus.

            Yalta was not at least in the first instance about dividing the world into spheres of influence, the Moscow commentator says. Instead, it was animated by the liberal project of Woodrow Wilson and the Atlantic Charter (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=61C1C3B7466FF and m.kasparov.ru/material.php?id=61C2EEC354864).

            Indeed, Skobov argues, the essential feature of Yalta concerned “limiting the right of states to use force both in relation to their own citizens and toward other states.” These principles were not immediately implemented because of Soviet actions in Eastern Europe, but they animated the West and they ultimately led to the demise of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union.

            According to the Moscow commentator, the leaders who met in Yalta agreed that “the new regimes of Easgtern Europe must be ‘friendly’” toward the USSR. “But no one said that they must be totalitarian. Apparently, the allies imagined the future of Eastern Europe as something like that of the later Finland.” The Cold War began when Moscow used force to prevent that goal from being realized.

            But with the rarest of exceptions, “no one disputed at that time the fundamental values of ‘the Yalta project,’” Skobov says. “The democratic impulse of the anti-fascist war made these values ‘mainstream’ for the entire world, and despite the global conflict, they were codified and extended by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

            As a result, the real values of Yalta eventually won out. “Unexpectedly for many, the Cold War ended with ‘the geopolitical capitulation’ of the USSR. A capitulation on quite honorable and ‘velvet’ conditions. But the main thing was that the USSR subordinated itself to the principles of the Yalta system.”

            This happened not because the USSR was exhausted but because “the Free World” continued to struggle for the principles of Yalta; and it did so both in periods of deepest conflict and in period of détente. It never accepted the idea of spheres of influence in principle, although it sometimes appeared to do so in practice.

            That commitment defined the essence of the West, he continues; and it was that and “not military or economic power which guaranteed the civilizational leadership of ‘the West’ in the middle of the 20^th century. Rejecting that would mean the end of the civilizational leadership of ‘the West,’” but that is exactly what Putin is now seeking.

            The Kremlin leader has reason to think he has a chance to succeed. After 1989 and 1991, the West fell into the trap of thinking that “the end of history” had arrived, that it no longer had serious opponents, and that it did not need to remain strong and continue the struggle. But now, modernized autocracies like Putin’s, are set on revenge.

            These states, with Putin’s Russia in the vanguard, are “again challenging the Free World under the banner of the rebirth of state sovereignty. They have begun a crusade against the principle which first became part of international law in the Yalta-Potsdam system that human rights are not the internal affair of individual states. They concern everyone.”

            What his means is this, “the assertion that Putin invades neighboring countries so as not to allow the appearance on their territories of hostile military forces is radically mistaken. Everything is exactly the reverse. He seeks not to allow the appearance of hostile military forces there to preserve for himself the opportunity to invade.” (stress supplied).

            Putin wants the West to accept this, even though he almost certainly knows that today’s West is not ready to commit the suicide such an acceptance would entail. He wants to create conflicts with the West because he knows that whatever the West does if it gives up this principle, Russia not only won’t be fully isolated but can continue its game.

            Fighting against this will not be easy or quick. Indeed, the Free World now has not developed effective measures for combatting the new autocracies. “Democracies again are carrying out ‘business as usual’ with cannibals, closing their eyes to their misdeeds, and in the best case expressing deep concern International institutions again aren’t working.”

            This situation recalls what happened when Stalin rejected Yalta or more precisely gave his own reading to it and triggered the first Cold War. The West which was much better positioned to resist then than now preserved and won. The question before the world now is whether the West will do so again or not.

            What it needs to remember is that if it does not win, the new autocracies will set the rules for the coming decades, rules that will work not only against the principles of Yalta but the principles of human rights and human dignity, Skobov suggests.