Paul Goble
Staunton, Nov. 7 – Ukrainians and the world must face up to a most unpleasant truth, Valery Pekar says. If Ukraine wins the war but Russia remains in one piece and then somehow honest elections take place there, “the party of resentment, revanchism and revenge” will win and Ukraine will face a renewed threat.
The instructor at Kyiv’s Mohyla Business School puts it this way: “even if Martians occupy Russia with the intention of carrying out honest and transparent elections” and manage to do so, democrats prepared to accept a Russian loss and live in peace with Ukraine won’t win them (gordonua.com/blogs/valeriy-pekar/dazhe-esli-marsiane-okkupirujut-rossiju-s-tselju-provedenija-chestnyh-prozrachnyh-vyborov-pobedit-partija-resentimenta-revanshizma-obidy-i-mesti-1634823.html).
That isn’t what “Western intellectuals but even part of Ukrainian ones believe.” Instead, “they think that after Putin democracy is possible in Russia.” But “I have a simple question: how can the democrats come to power?” Seizing power by violent means would subvert what they seek, and seeking power by democratic ones if they could even be created won’t work either.
Instead, in any elections in the Russian Federation as a whole, no matter how “democratic” they might be formally, “the party of resentment, revanchism and revenge will win, a party of very leftwing economic approaches combined with very right-wing political ones – or to put it plainly, the national socialists.”
“If Russia has any democrats,” Pekar continues, “let them try to establish a small democratic country, for example, Ingria with a capital in St. Petersburg and then let all the enslaved peoples have their freedom.”
There is an important reason for pointing this out, he argues. “The closer our victory and with each day it is becoming closer, the greater is the threat that it could be lost” unless conditions are created so that the empire won’t strike back against Ukraine once again after some decent or not so decent interval.
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